Font Rants on Many Subjects

Happy New Year

A long time ago the new year was celebrated October 31 when we brought in the harvest; near the fall equinox when the darkness took over from the day. The day started at sundown; as the Sabbath still does. At some point we shifted the new year to begin right after the winter solstice, and began to start our days at dawn. In the early days of the Christian church; the ascension on the mount of olives was set in a cave. Later on it was moved to the hilltops and given what one of my teachers called the 'NASA' treatment. I wonder how these paradigm shifts in the social construction of history affect our world view. I meditate on this change to our collective notions of time and space. A thousand years ago; the world was but 4000 years old; today it is 4 billion (well in western European eyes anyway). We were once created from the dust of the earth; but as a child Carl Sagan said to me via endless PBS viewings of Cosmos we are made of the dust of stars.

I believe that how we construct time and space through language has a profound effect on the possibilities of our lives and how we can connect with the divine. I once spent a whole summer immersed in another language; to the point that it was even the language of my dreams. Yet I realized later that with my limited vocabulary; my dreams became small dreams; my thoughts and actions regressed to simpler things. I didn't notice in the moment; because my mind lacked the ability to express it. It was only later when I returned to my native tongue and my dreams reverted to English; that I realized just what I'd lost. On the other hand I went to review my journals from that summer a few days back; and I discovered I could no longer read many of them as my grasp of that other language had faded.

We now have science transforming our notions of time and space almost daily. The collective sense of time and space is out of balance as we struggle to keep up. As the population ages it wants stability. This has lead to the backlash we see in the world today. We can no longer read the old time religion; so we reinvent it into a simple kind of fundamentalism. We reduce our great religious tradition into a collection of rules; and worship these rules instead of our God.

God is love; not law. We must integrate our old traditions into chaos, complexity and game theories. 2000 years ago we built churches on top of temples to Saturn; and made new years into all hallows eve. We must follow this path to reconnect with divinity and truth based on our ever evolvign understanding of time and space. The church exists to connect community with God. I go back to that lovely passage from I Corrinthians:

"When I was a child I spoke as a child I understood as a child I thought as a child; but when I became a man I put away childish things." I Cor. xiii. 11.