A Sabbatical

It should be evident to those of you who have been following this blog that I have taken a sabbatical. Several other projects have garnered my attention, including work with the Chicago Memory Bridge Initiative and the 2009-2010 Common Reading Program at the University of Arizona. Both are related to my book on autobiographical memory, White Gloves. I hope to get back to the Saturday Morning blogs as time permits.

For those of you who are new to this blog, here are links to all the articles, in the order in which they appeared. This is the 50th, a nice round number at which to take a break.

1. "The Whole Story of the Whole Cosmos for the Whole Person"
2. Is the Bible a Story of Everything?
3. The Shortest Story of Everything

4. "Let There Be Light!" When Was That?
5. "Let There Be Darkness!" In Just One Story

6. Matter, Life, Spirit: It's the Order
7. The Trouble With Matter
8. Life: So Simple a Beginning?
9. What is Spirit?

10. Impossibly Beautiful
11. A Blog Is a Gumball

12. Pluto and the Pea
13. The Other "E" Word
14. It Slumbers

15. A Solitary Ray

16. Goldilocks Comes to Cosmology
17. The WHO Outside the Universe
18. The WHAT Outside
19. You Call This Friendly?
20. The Three Bears Return
21. N = 1
22. The Pearl of Great Price

23. Impossibly Beautiful II
24. Lilies
25. The Ornament of the World

26. The Journey
27. Reason? Or the Whole Life Experience?
28. Jesus and the New Story

29. What Happened in the Meadow
30. The Universe is the Word

31. The Pastor and the Atheist
32. The Gospel According to Evolution
33. Resurrection

34. Evening Thoughts

35. Memo to Matter
36. St. Augustine, Meet the LHC

37. So the Christian Said to the Atheist . . .
38. Tua Culpa?

39. Killing For a Story
40. Killing For the Written Word

41. More Than Any Creed
42. A Bridge to Somewhere Else
43. When Genesis is a Story

44. What's IT Got To Do With It?
45. Print IT
46. You Cannot Go Back
47. The Revelation Test

48. How a Story Found Its Soul
49. How the Story Found a Speaker
50. A Sabbatical


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How the Story Found a Speaker

Dear Story,

I wonder if I triggered some memories last week. Maybe you got thinking about a time when words like "religion" and "science" didn't exist, when "cosmology" was more than a subfield of physics, when you got that first look at the universe. And when you had that spirit.

The Story of Everything I was telling you about recovered his spirit. He got in touch with an ancient part of his being, with a soul that loved mystery and bowed before it. Once he felt it (her) again, he closed the door on books forever. They were too fixed, too orthodox, too . . . dead. He wanted to take a fresh look at the universe.

Who could have guessed what happened next? The Story took off on a second exploration of the cosmos. Not surprisingly, he found more than he had the first time around, more than he could have imagined. Not surprisingly, he was astounded by what he found, even exhilarated. What he hadn't counted on was the fatigue, the sheer exhaustion. The Story could never get to the edges of the universe. They were just too fast for him. He couldn't cover everything. There was just too much of it.

Then a strange thing happened. Call it coincidence, call it providence, leave it at "synchronicity." The Story ended up on an airplane next to a guy who was making calculations on a notepad. Once the flight got going, the Story slipped into his mind to check it out.

Things seemed oddly familiar in there. The man started talking to the Story like he was just another thought. Only it wasn't what the Story wanted to hear. How you--the man was pointing at the Story--lived on a little planet out in the boondocks of space. How you were the center of nothing. How the universe was 13, 700,000,000 years old and you were a mere 25,000. The man looked at his calculations. "If the universe is a year old, you're a minute old."

Whack! Not the way you'd expect a conversation to start with someone fated to be your Speaker. It got worse. The man didn't like the Story the way it was. He wanted to tell it backwards, to put Spirit at the end, not the beginning, to make Spirit something that emerged, not something that created. Not exactly a minor revision.

They got into an argument. As it wore on, the Story started having flashbacks. He recalled a boy who once loved the Story, who was abandoned by it, who grew angry at it, and . . . . suddenly, the Story realized where he was. He had felt a longing and a love.

Once they got off the plane, the Story left the man's mind and spent many days walking by the sea. He needed time to think. He knew his fatigue would not pass and that it was a sign of something more. He had to find a place to breathe his last, which meant he had to find a Speaker. The man on the plane? No . . . the Story could never become what that man wanted. He could not betray all those who had believed in him for so long, and believed in him just as he was, with Spirit at the beginning, in the place of honor.

The answer came in a dream. Just a few images. A river flowed into a desert and became a trickle. A wind lifted it up. A cloud carried it beyond the desert. It rained. The Story had to surrender, had to be lifted up, had to be carried to another side, had to acknowledge that a story served its speaker and not the other way around.

So the Story left the seashore and entered the man's thoughts for the very last time. The man lifted it up, carried it across, and spoke: a New Story for a new time, a new beginning, a new end.

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COPYRIGHT (C) 2009 JOHN N. KOTRE

How a Story Found Its Soul

Hey, Story,

I'm guessing you pitch most of the letters you get but you'll want to put this one under your pillow. I'm going to tell you how a Story of Everything found its soul. Which implies, in case I have to spell it out for you, that you have lost yours. Interested?

This Story had been collecting books for centuries, and he spent most of his time in his library, just staring at them. (Sound familiar?) Just staring. All the books happened to be The Story of Everything. Different languages, different editions, same story--his. Those books were a thousand mirrors and he was absorbed in them. We're talking Narcissus here, big-time.

Then someone saw a star die. Hardly relevant to an earthly creature, except this Story had always told himself that he'd live as long as the stars. He figured it meant forever. Poor choice of metaphor. A few centuries later some guys walked in with a bag of bones and laid them out on the floor. "See the pattern?" they said. "Evolution."

These guys were brutal. The Story had never heard the word "evolution," but they didn't care. They just looked him in the eye and said, "You're dead." I could tell you the Story was upset, but the truth is he was terrified. Dead? Dead? He looked at the mirrors. They had nothing to tell him now.

But he didn't die. He actually got a little curious. An odd question occurred to him and--get this--he asked it out loud. "Have I evolved?" Can you believe it? A story asking if it had evolved! A few weeks later he was opening a trunk in the attic and, wow, the stuff that was there! Scrolls, written by hand. Bamboo strips with strange characters. Papyrus, pressed from the stem of plants. Beautiful pictures, designs. Everything created by hand, nothing by machine. The Story realized he had once been a written thing.

He began having flashbacks. Sounds. They took him back to an even earlier life, one before writing. One night he was sitting in his basement in total darkness, drinking wine, trying to hear a memory. Suddenly he felt. A hand reached out and touched him. He knew in an instant who it was, and then he really remembered.

It was her. Silence. Back in the beginning she had lain with him and breathed with him and then they'd set off on a journey through the cosmos. A Story and a Silence, hand in hand. He had searched for absolutes, for centers, but she had sought the edge of every mystery, never stopping till she got there. Not to the edge before the edge but to the very edge, the one before the things you couldn't know. And then she'd simply bow.

At least that's the way I heard it. I don't know what really happened back then, but I do know that after that night in the basement the Story was changed. His library began to feel like a museum, like death itself. One day he got up from his chair and closed the door on it forever.

It was a l-o-n-g trek after that. Maybe I'll fill you in sometime. Suffice it to say the Story now saw the universe very differently. He realized that he was part of it and that he would die like everything else in it and that something new would grow from his remains. Strange, it was only when he found his soul--his soulmate, actually, his other half--that he lost his fear of dying. I wonder if there's someone like that in your past. If there is, I'd love to hear about her. Or it. Whatever. Just click here.

Be well,
John Kotre

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The Revelation Test

In centuries past, artists would sometimes cover an old painting with a new one. The practice was called pentimento because the artists were said to "repent" of their earlier work. When they were done, the new portrait looked like an original. It looked like it had always been there, the only one on the canvas.

When I look at a Biblical text these days, I think of pentimento. I'm seeing the last of many layers. These are the stories that survived, the ones that were remembered and made the final canonical cut. Beneath them are other layers. Layers of translation: the King James English, the Latin, the Greek, the Hebrew or Aramaic in which the stories were first spoken. Layers of information technology: printing, writing, speaking. Layers of interpretation: stories as infallible or even inerrant; stories as history, science, or creed; stories simply as stories. But the old layers are inaccessible to me. What I see looks like an original.

In the case of pentimento, we know the other layers exist because their lines and colors sometimes bleed through to the surface. (See it in a Picasso.) X-Rays and infra-red help as well. In the case of sacred stories, ancient fragments bleed through, and scholarship provides the X-Rays. But though we know the older versions exist, we cannot see or hear them. We cannot recover the original revelation of God.

So maybe it's time to revisit "revelation."

The word appears in many of the world's religions and it's been debated by many of its theologians. (Try Wikipedia for a quick sample of opinions.) Understandings differ as to who, what, where, and how. Does revelation come to a single person or a group? Is it law, poetry, wisdom, philosophy, narrative, what? Does it come on a mountain, in a cave, under a tree? Must it find its way into writing or can nature itself be a text? Can simple facts be "God's native tongue"?

My question is when. Did revelation happen back then, and only then--so that Mohammed, for example, becomes the seal of the prophets? Or is the canon still open, as it is for Latter Day Saints? When it comes to sacred stories, I believe the door's still open. Revelation was then. Revelation is now. The bottom layer was the Word. So is the top.

And so is one thing more, and it comes in the hearing of the story. The Word is what the story creates in you. And the test of that creation is both simple and classic. It's about the fruits.

If a story inflates, if it makes you self-righteous, self-important, and self-serving, if it leaves you brooding over the past and seeing enemies everywhere, if it calls you to (holy, cultural) war, it is not the Word of God.

But if the story inspires, if it creates hope, joy, goodness, peace, kindness, tolerance, patience, endurance, and humility, it is indeed the Word. And it's the Word if it leads you to a truth, however hard to take, and gives you the grace to rejoice in it.

If you're curious about the source of these two lists, check out I Corinthians 13: 4-7 and Galatians 5:19-23. These Christians texts are no different from those of other faiths. The Revelation Test has nothing to do with infallibility and inerrancy, with history, science, or creed, nor with decisions made by bodies of men. It has everything to do with you. A story is "revealed" if it helps you lose yourself, accept the truth, find compassion, and carry on.

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You Cannot Go Back

The "conservation" experiments of Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget are tried-and-true classics. Show a child of five a short, fat glass of juice; pour the juice into a tall, skinny glass; and suddenly there's more of it. Lay out a row of quarters, then spread the row out. Suddenly . . . more quarters.

It's not magic, it's just the way children that age see and think. (Watch them.) In a few short years they'll be thinking differently. They'll be able to see quantities, and "conserve" them, the way adults do. And--something Piaget never addressed--they won't be able to remember how they used to think.

I became aware of this curious amnesia when I'd describe Piaget's experiments to college freshmen. I was amazed at their amazement. This was a surprise! Yet why should it be? Weren't the students thinking this way just a dozen years before? How could they have forgotten? How could you and I?

It seems that when thoughts are encoded in a new, more complex structure--as they are around the age of six or seven--it becomes impossible to remember the older, simpler one. It's like water from a stream that's absorbed in a river. It cannot go back.

And yet some insist it can. There's a "child within," they say, and you can recover it. If you take a microscope to what they recover, however, you'll find evidence--in their speech or writing, for example--of an adult perspective. Psychiatrist George Vaillant said it best: once a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, it doesn't remember being a caterpillar. It remembers being a little butterfly.

Several weeks ago I listed some of the transitions experienced by sacred stories in the West. They started out being spoken; then they were written, codexed, printed, and placed before a camera. They started out as simple narrative, and then became creed, science, and "objective" history. Knowing of these transformations, one wonders: can we go back? Can we hear the stories the way they were heard the first time, millennia ago, with all the creed, science, and history squeezed out of them?

The answer is clear: not any more than we can recover the eyes of a child. (Try a conservation experiment: can you get yourself to believe there's really more juice in that tall, skinny glass?) You can describe a child's perspective. You can analyze it. You might even explain it. But you can't re-experience it.

When it comes to sacred stories, fundamentalists will say they can. They believe you can get to the "originals within," and they believe they have. But if you look at the history behind the stories, you'll see that what is "fundamental" is often far from what's "original." It's another case of anachronism--of remembering a butterfly when there was only a caterpillar.

You can preserve a tradition's stories but not its earliest eyes and ears. Where, then, is "inspiration"? More important, when is it? At the time of the original speaking? The original hearing? In whatever the stories meant to an ancient mind that is foreign to our own? If that's the case, we're in something of a pickle. We cannot recover those ancient eyes and ears, so we're cut off from inspired text. How, then, do we hear the Word of God?

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