Friends and Faith

A close friend recently sent be a book he'd like to me to read, and the for us to meet and discuss it. He very generously said he knew I'd do it "because you're a scholar". But beyond the generous (and unjustified) compliment, I have finished it during a day of waiting for my loved one while recovering.

The book is C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity. I am familiar with Lewis' fiction, I once read that his Narnia was inspired by Nairn Scotland , and so I soldiered on through the book.

My friend has endured some very difficult and saddening life events. I knew that he was attending a support group of men who had similar experiences and thought this might be part of their healing process.  have always found that "I was raised catholic" is a polite way of saying "I am no longer catholic". I fall into that category. Falling far enough that I now say "I am unchurched" which does not create the discomfort people have when dealing with an apostate like me.

I could go on about my decision to leave the church, and indeed organized religion behind, however that is another entry here as I clean my pockets. As I consider the various reasons for my current state of mind I am reminded of the statement attributed to Einstein "I worship the god of Spinoza", or that of Frank Lloyd Wright, that  "I believe in god, only I spell it nature". That perspective places me in the position of pantheism, or possibly humanism. I have chosen to believe in physics, particularly that per the Law of the conservation that energy cannot be destroyed, only transformed. Or, the first law of thermodynamics.   as I have read Lewis and also other works such as the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads. I have also read about more fundamentalist christian faiths and offshoots such as Mormonism and the Jehovah's Witnesses

All of my reading in these various arenas has lead me to believe in one thing, we are all energy and therefore stardust. What form that energy takes upon death, I do not know. I do not know when matter became conscious, nor do I know how reality came from"nothingness" to "somethingness". I do know that our time is an artificial construct. Our time is based on the orbit of one small rock circling a small star. When we calculate the age of a fossil or some other "discovery" how much confidence can we have?

All of this said, at the core of all religions is a creation myth, and a recognition that our physical being, our consciousness is gone, but our energy, however determined cannot be destroyed. Pantheism gets at that belief for me as everything that ever was, is sow, and everything that will be is now. Call it Nairn's Law, I won't mind.

Words. Loved and Loathed.

 Anyone who knows me well knows that I like words. I always have. In adulthood I received the wisdom that, "never judge someone for mispronouncing a word, they probably learned it through reading" and that was very much the case for me. I mispronounced so many words because I had not heard them spoken, but only read them. Years of "cally ope" and "ah ree" "fack ade" and so on. I've since learned the correct pronunciation for calliope, awry, and facade, among others.

But this is not about uncommon or less used words. In fact this is about overused words, or words that have been made nearly meaningless by their ubiquity. My special irritation right now is Journey.

Whether it is the current Olympiad, professional sports, or (yuck) reality TV, everyone is on a "journey", "I'm so glad to have you on this journey", "his journey from an impoverished background to the NFL/NBA/MLB has been a long and challenging one" "her journey has taken her from a frozen pond to the world stage". A quote from my days as a competitive lifter, attributed to Arnold Schwarzenegger (also to Arthur Ashe) was "success is a journey, not a destination". And the inspirational Olympic success stories of triumph over heartbreak and despair get a bit old after a while.

Why must we mythologize success? Journey is travel. As a noun it is the physical act of going from one place to another. As a verb, it is that act of traveling. I suppose that the overuse of this word is due to the "trip" one takes from one state of mind or being to another. But it seems to be a convenient way to collapse the effort of working from one state, mental or physical, to another. It cheapens the effort required to work toward a goal. The journeys taken in these other contexts often have no goal, or an uncertain goal based on chance. The athlete who does not make it to the next level has a goal, but has the journey been in vain? We all grow from our efforts, but not all efforts are "journeys", many are internal acts of seeking improvement. Physical, intellectual, personal, spiritual.

There are far too many words to limit them to a few. And far too many acts of self improvement and grow that do not, in my mind, constitute a journey.