Missing Links, Light Privilege, & the Cosmic Catechism

It's the end of the month: time to clear the desk -- in particular, of all the books I've recently read but which failed rise to the lofty threshold of blogworthiness. That is, they may have contained a good point or two, but not enough of them to justify an entire post.   

Month. Say it quietly to yourself. It's a funny word: month. It just occurred to me that it must come from "moon." Cap'n Bobvious!

Speaking of astronomy, let's begin with this one called The Destiny of the Universe: In Pursuit of the Great Unknown, by a prolific fellow who calls himself Gerald Verschuuren. I probably bought it on the strength of that insolent title alone. Sounds veryschuuren himself.

Did it deliver on that bodacious promise? If it had, you'd have already read about it in this space. 

I see that it did prompt some interesting notes to myself, even a kind of poem on the inside front flap:

Humanness: a window, a door, a ladder, an escape hatch;

 a maze, a snare, a greased pole, a booby trap; 

an illusion, a nul de slack.

Now, if I could only get William Shatner to read it.

More noetry:

We cannot be "from" DNA unless we are "to" something.

Yes, go on, Cap'n Kirk.

Man is a message addressed to God. 

We all know that natural selection involves descent with modification. Well, spiritual growth must be... ascent with modification, or something. After all, we are ultimately descended from God. I read something about this just yesterday.... what was it?

Here it is: it's from another one that didn't make the cut, this one by Fulton Sheen. The particular passage is a riff on the missing link between man and our immediate descendent, whomever he might be. But even supposing we could locate him, it wouldn't do anything to resolve the mystery.

Well, I have good news: the real missing link has been identified, a "link suspensed from Heaven, which binds us unto God":

Christ is the link between the finite and the infinite, between God and man, because finite in His human nature, infinite in His Divine, and one in the unity of His Person; missing, because men have lost Him...

In yesterday's post we spoke of the bi-directional vertical arrow, and one might say that Christ is the very Incarnation of it:

His mission is to do two things: to bring God to man by the infusion of Divine Life [↓]; and to bring man to God [↑].... This Our Lord declared was the double purpose [↕] of His coming into the world.

Back to the Destiny of the Universe. Here's another note, although I'm not sure what triggered it:

If you don't know language can be abused, you're probably abusing it. Language has rights!

To say that language -- which is an emanation or prolongation of the Logos -- has rights is to say that man has verbal and even transverbal responsibilities, am I right?

But you only have to spend a few minutes listening to politicians, professors, and pundits, oh my, to realize that most of our societal problems are aggravated if not caused by language abuse. Which in turn is another instance of crucifixion, AKA the logicide of which we spoke just last Thursday.

Man has rights, obviously, and the source of these rights is our Creator. But no one -- least of all the Creator -- is stupid enough to give unalienable rights to a fundamentally irresponsible creature. Therefore, our rights don't just co-arise with the responsibilities, but rather, our duties, obligations, and responsibilities are ontologically prior to the rights.

If only people understood this, it would clear up so many problems! It needn't even be taught in a Christian context, because it can be conveyed in terms of pure metaphysics -- as an aspect of the Cosmic Catechism, which is the owner's manual of Homo sapiens. 

My son, for example, is so well grounded in the Cosmic Catechism that I've literally never caught him in a lie. He knows that language has rights that confer responsibilities on those who are privileged to use it. I want to say light privilege.... Hmm, I read something alluding to this yesterday.

Here it is, from Schuon: 

A noble animal or a lovely flower is "intellectually superior" to a base man.

God reveals himself to the plant in the form of the light of the sun. The plant irresistibly turns itself toward the light; it could not be atheistical or impious.

The infallible "instinct" of animals is a lesser "intellect," and man's intellect may be called a higher "instinct."

One reason we could never be a Calvinist is because of the manmade and cosmically heretical concept of "irrestible grace." I have it on personal authority that grace can indeed be resisted; or lost, stolen, and strayed from.

Oh, and speaking of Schuon, in the previous post we mentioned the jazzy nature of vertical and horizontal inneraction, and later in the day we ran into this confirmatory passage by Norris Clarke, one of our favorite theologians. I'll just let it speak for itself, because I have to make my weekly run to Trader Joe's:

But the future as future does not yet have any real existence in itself. So Thomas does not hesitate to say that no mind, not even the divine, can know with certainty the future as future, since there is nothing there yet to know. God, and we, too, can know the future actions of a non-free cause, because they are already determined as flowing necessarily from its own nature.

But this is not the case with free agents, like ourselves. As free, the action is not yet determined until it is actually decided on by a real agent; but it is then no longer future but present.

In fact, God

might be said -- in an at first perhaps shocking, but to me illuminating meaphor -- to be the Great Jazz Player, improvising creatively as history unfolds....

The complete script of our lives is not written anywhere ahead of time, before it happens, but only as it actually happens, by God and ourselves working it out together in our ongoing now's.

Kind of blue, really. No, really:

Miles conceived these settings only hours before the recording dates and arrived with sketches which indicated to the group what was to be played. Therefore, you will hear something close to pure spontaneity in these performances. The group had never played these pieces prior to the recordings and I think without exception the first complete performance of each was a "take" (Bill Evans).

First take last take. Like this post.