uncanny objects

Objects to claim having seen in the sky or in space. From my years living in Roswell NM, where the economy depends on Billy the Kid and UFOs having landed and having been witnessed, I encountered this mindset - that there is an other existing outside of us, whose interest in us is cursory at best, and moves around us distinct but only slightly interested in communicating. This offends our sensibilities that we're interesting: of course super beings who travel across the emptiness of space would do so expressly to speak with us. We are afraid that we have nothing to tell them. Someone piloting a ship between Star x and Stay y, what reason would they have to interact with semiadvanced primates on our obscure planet? 

Belief in God is concomitant with the notion that we humans are worth knowing: our creations, our social constructions, our fights and agreements. And once we believed in a hermetically sealed universe: earth at the center surrounded by increasingly distant but concrete spheres of the celestial order - with God (the largest sphere) the largest and most external sphere (also the center, paradoxically, who though unmoved, moves as he is loved) - the object that swallows the whole universe.

Now we live in a cosmos that is not fixed, no spheres are nested inside each other. There is no longer a limit - except maybe the background radioactive residue of the Big Bang. But we do not suppose that the Big Bang operates or moves through love. We do not assume a scale of quality where earth and matter are lodged at the bottom and the more things rise, the more aetherial and holy they become. 

Pascal said this emptiness filled him with dread. Even in his time it was apparent where human thought was heading, that the conceptual framework that had sustained the ancient world was falling apart. Most people read the Bible now in terms of the present cosmology - even as they manage a world in scripture that is closed and non-entropic. It takes a great effort of will to continue privileging the old cosmology. Creationists are very selective- consistency would require them to deny the Sun in the center or to affirm that matter becomes more pure the farther from earth. The corker   would be to affirm that the spirit is a more-refined matter.  Apparently the ancients believed that the spirit was a thing, the remainder when all the mortal and impure is taken away - but a thing none the less.

I find the Bible to be much richer when I assume the modern cosmological concept. As CS Lewis pointed out, at some point this old model collapsed under its own weight - too much needed to be assumed to sustain the appearances. So we read two creation stories to begin with and there's a third (Noah is a story of a beginning pushed back in the narrative. It would have been a stretch to begin with three stories). Even then there was disagreement on how to start. It began like a "to do" list; it began in media res with a test; with Noah it begins like a judgment. And that's the way people operate. We make lists. We test things. We make judgments and start over.The import of the Noah story is that no judgment is final. We may have to pack things up and move, but we can start over. And the caveat is that we can start over but still have not escaped our limitations. What to do:  make a list, test things out, start over with this new knowledge. 

I'm a small part. None of us is significant. Even people ostensibly succeeding  are bound to have their matter recycled into other peoples, other animals, other things. Whitman concludes this in Song of Myself, but does so in a good, affirming way. And that's the way it helps to take it. Rumi is good for this too in his long winding poetic output. You're insignificant, but you're a unique expression of the human - don't let the Other rule you. That's good stuff. Don't judge your life and keep your agency.

We are wholly given over to marketing in our culture today. On the news and in other places, people seem to be understood only in terms of their bottom line. And so, people seem encouraged to seek fame - even as they defame themselves. Or else people seek to hoard as big a sum of money as they can. What my professor Walter Brueggemann called the myth of scarcity informs our culture. He helped me see that the narrative of scripture is one of abundance. In places like Isaiah 55 the prophet questions why people spend money on what doesn't feed the soul. Other places attest to God's generosity. If human beings take any solace from being in God's image, you would think that they would try to imitate God in terms of such positive things as love and generosity.

I see where other people are and what they're doing, and that feeling I had in 2nd grade, that I'm slipping, that I"m losing ground, gnaws at me. The feeling in 3rd grade, when I'd be kept in from recess and faced with a sheet of math problems and punished for drawing - that I couldn't stop it. It's odd that I still feel that. That I've never just, or rarely just, relaxed and lived in who and what I am. 

I am insignificant and so are you, but our work is valuable and beautiful in its own presence.