Origins
The other night at bedtime my daughter asked how people started having babies. She is only six, but her mom is a midwife, so she did not mean the obvious mechanical question. No, she wanted to know how anyone had the first baby if no parents had been born. I'll admit, I ducked the question. It was bedtime and was trying to get her to sleep. But you would think that two years of seminary might give me a better answer.
Either something came from nothing or something has always existed. I'm sure I will give her an appropriately vague UU sounding answer. She really likes The Everything Seed. Apparently six year olds are comfortable with a vocabulary of reverence.
posted by jfield @ 8:15 PM
1 comments
1 Comments:
There is one disadvantage to that approach. (And keep in mind that I was a rather literal-minded child.)
I can have a great reverence for how life came to be, for just how flat-out amazing it is - but when it comes to the Why, there's just a big unknown. It's the Creator question, broadly constructed - as a kid, raised Christian, I just sorta accepted that God made the world and so forth. Then, later, as I entered into the theological questioning and awakening that eventually led me into UUism, I realized that there was rationally nothing to support that belief. Nor is there any other belief about Creation that has rational backing for it.
I suppose I'm just supposed to venerate the question itself or something. Doesn't work for me. The only way I've been able to avoid the crushingly depressing nature of that question is to not think about it, ever. Basing reverence on known fundamentals, which is what we're discussing here, leads inevitably into the question of Mysteries. As much as I envy those mystery traditions that are able to in some way imbue an impression that the Mystery has been explained and communicated, I just can't reconcile that with empiricism.
A reverence of the fundamentals is certainly important. It's just that, at least for me, it hits a dead end after a while.
Post a Comment
<< Home