July, 2016
It’s warm today and I’m sitting on our patio beside my sleeping three year old grandson, wondering about the meaning to life and contemplating the concept of eternity, an exercise that a friend of mine finds particularly problematic.
In front of me a series of little brown birds, Sparrows, I think they are, keep flying in and out of the nest they’ve built in our downstairs bathroom vent. They don’t seem overly concerned with the prospects of living some sort of life in eternity, only in doing what comes naturally to them and their species. (Including defecating all over our patio)
Does it come naturally to us to be concerned with what happens to us when we die? We’re blessed… or cursed with the power of reason. Unfortunately that God-given power has limits and it can only take us so far before it’s boxed in… corralled… limited.
This “gift” of reason ultimately leads us down a dead end trail when it presents us with questions without answers. Syllogisms, verbal constructs of all nature… math tricks… word tricks, all designed to tempt us to lead us on to the edge, to the fence… but not beyond.
But wait… Is there no exit out of this spiritual and intellectual trap? Is this the same phenomenon we each faced prior to birth in utero? In utero we grew to escape the limitations of our existence through birth, physically breaching the corral that kept us limited in form similar to how our reason and our mortality box us in and limit us in this phase of our existence.
As we pass from life… escape beyond reason… is it likely that death is the portal, similar to birth, that takes us to yet another manifestation of our existence? Maybe my limited powers of reasoning that posit this scenario will outgrow the limitations of this life in similar manner as I eventually outgrew the bounds of living in utero.
Will there be another iteration of my existence along a never ending road that might be called eternity.
The Sparrows just do their thing, continually searching for food, building a nest and bringing up their young.
Oh… to be a Sparrow, devoid of this trap we call reason, concerned only with the continuation of our species, ignorant and unconcerned about eternity.