that and a little of this

Life is odd. (Congregation: "All the time!") Mmm yes, all the time. (Congregation: "Life is odd.")

So, I've been informed lately that God is pursuing me. And, should I reign in the ruthless analyst who roams around in my own head, I'm starting to believe it. . . . Now that's not really anything new. There have been scores of people over the last 5 years who have informed me of God's persuit of me. I have promptly dismissed all of them. Maybe now I'm finding light by which to accept that statement on terms that I find reasonable. I might explain that. If you're lucky. hmmm

Tangent: recently I have had many thoughts on the idea of healing. Yes, i'm serious. My thinking has been this: the medical profession has never healed anyone, ever. And, the greatest part of that statement is that any sane doctor, nurse, therapist or pharmacist would agree if they thought it out to its logical conclusion. Take surgery for example; surgeons don't heal people. In fact, they do quite the opposite: the inflict strategic wounds on people. But, were it placed in their hands to see to it that a person was healed, the outcome would be dismal. Physicians? In regard to internal medicine at least, there is essentially nothing an M.D. does that "heals" a person. Instead, M.D.'s prescribe various chemical substances which generally serve the purpose of fulfilling something lacking that is otherwise naturally present in the body, or which fight off malevolent factors. Should someone come down with an infection, the M.D. gives antibiotics which kill off the harmful bacteria. But, if the body should at that point get lazy and prefer not to repair the damage done by the now subjugated disease, the person would most likely still die. My point is that "healing" is something our body does on its own. It is an internal force. I've heard a couple of speakers at churches recently talk about sickness of loved ones, and then speak out triumphantly against those medical workers who gave some negative diagnosis. This "faith vs. medicine" attitude that so many churches parrot is rather assinine in my opinion. I think ultimately we're all on the same side people.

I think medical people and church people would do well to remember that health and healing are not products of our actions. Our bodies heal on their own. Healing is a grace that is intrinsic to our nature as humans, and as such is a gift from God. But even where doctors don't believe in God, they still believe and faithfully trust in this glorious force within each of us to heal. The entire industry would cease to exist were it not for that.

Here's a funny thing about science: not too long ago I was discussing with a friend the mythology of science. It's funny how for all the superiority of the scientific worldview, it is fairly common to see that scientists act on myth and superstition just like any layman. My friend who is a chemist had serious reservations about the idea, but said he could at least partially see what I was saying. Since then I've reformulated what I was saying. I think science is generally not mythological, but that humans are, and so therefore even the most scientific of us end up thinking mythologically. I think that somehow myth is a form of thought that humans just simply live in. It is a way that we experience the world. So, even if myths don't hold any water by scientific standards, they still "work". I could go off on another long tangent related to paradigm theory here, but I won't. Instead I would point out that myth seems to somehow be an inherited form of thinking that basically every human has. So, even when we do our best to eliminate it from our thought, we still have this mental void that even where we fill it with science manages to sound very superstitious and mythological.

We could raise a kid on Newton and Einstein and in the end the kid ends up talking of the two as gods or saints, and speaks of their theories in a way that parallels any religious metaphysical force in any of the major world religions. I'm not saying it IS the same, only that it is VERY similar.

Recently this has brought me back to the idea of the "second naivete". I've spoken about this before, but for a refresher there was a French philosopher who said that all academics eventually took one down a winding and perilous road that simply dumped you back out into the mainstream of human society where you, like everyone else, just stood in wide-eyed wonder at it all. In other words, we can boil everything down to the most minute of systems, but in the end if we look at the big picture we don't know a damn thing. We can quote the most perplexing theories of the greatest modern minds, but still find ourselves baffled by the blunt and profound questions of six year olds everywhere.

I watched a Bible study last night at a coffee shop. It was a white girl about 30 years old sharing the gospel with two Chinese girls who were still struggling to speak English well. It was funny to me. The evangelist was carefully delineating the same stale ideas of how Jesus was God and God was Jesus to these girls and I realized something - she was speaking the language of science. She spoke of these great abstract ontologies as though they were empirical data that could be tested in a laboratory.

There the great paradox of the modern age was laid out before my eyes: religion masquerading as science while science wanders off into the mired territory of religious mythology. It's as though we live in an age of mental imperialism where the entire population of France invades England, while the whole of England simultaneously crusades into France. Both scatch their heads wondering how it could happen so easily, and still are haunted by the horrible realization that they aren't at home and have no idea what they are doing, or how they will survive.

I notice this in the language of religious healing, people stumble into idiotic formulae as though the scientific method were applicable to an event where God rids a person of cancer. Conversely scientists are fighting back nausea and exasperation trying to offer compelling proofs for the advantageous quality of spiritual depth and "positive thinking" in the realm of medical outcomes.

I have long avoided mythological thinking as I would rather not be deceived by anybody. But, lately I've started realizing how to reject that part of human thinking is to suffer a huge loss in terms of being fully human. I'm not saying I want to forget all the 'scientific' doubt and skepticism I've grown so used to thinking in, but that if that is the only way I experience the world I have become more of a machine than a man. I know how myth engages the whole of the human person in a way that science can't, though that's not to say it doesn't engage more than people give it credit for. In shoving myths to the side I felt liberated from those using religion as ideology, but in excluding myself from mythic thinking I also find that I have lost a relational aspect of my own humanity. I have lost part of what it is to be fully myself, and part of what helped me connect fully with God.

So, bringing it back around . . . people have come into my life recently and have spoken to the mythic part of my soul (wherever that might be). A friend of mine this last weekend informed me of knowing that God is pursuing me. And, as I said, there was part of me that wanted to hold that statement under a microscope, but that would be seeking a formula when my friend only intended to tell me a story. A story which, should I let it, can engage me fully; comprehensively. A story that fits perfectly into that part of my being that science will only settle into awkwardly. I'm hoping now, that grasping one and not releasing the other, maybe I'll recenter . . . closer to that wholeness I desire so deeply.