The Dance of the Spheres

    It is an exhilarating feature of the internet age that one is able to listen to the media of one’s own choice, and  jump about the voices coming from opposing opinions and camps. There are even commentators who themselves clearly try to see things from different points of view, and have more or less managed to emancipate themselves from the constraints that come with bosses who tell them ‘they can’t say that’, not that the system even requires as much to be said most of the time,- conditioning reaches back into education and indeed whole cultures. C’est la vie!

    One should not try to pretend that one is devoid of convictions, preconceptions and perspectives of one’s own; this could only be achieved by a disembodied spirit. Rather we should strive to be aware of these basic preconceptions and limitations, and make every effort to hear what others are saying, whatever reservations we may have about it. The sounder our own convictions, the better we shall be at doing this,- nihil humanum alienum me est! 

    I like to think of life as a dance through various spheres, many but few in what are essential to each of us,- and they narrow down as we ‘come home’. We each have our personal story,- our family, our home and community, our country, our church - yet if they narrow down too much, trying to live as a closed system, they suffocate and die. Sooner or later, every attempt to love, to dance the dance of the spheres, comes up against the spanner in the works, the mysterious problem of evil and sin, of falling away and decadence. This may be seen as precisely the result of some one sphere trying to be a self-sufficient entity, shutting itself off from the other spheres which it rubs up against and indeed to some extent overlaps and depends on, thus setting up a chain-reaction of such blockages. 

    There is the grave temptation to try to set up a system that suits ourselves, and attempts to justify this by demonising others; nations and religions demonise each other, Marxists demonise property owners, feminists even tend to demonise men, etc. Whenever we find anyone demonising the Other, we may well ask ourselves, what's wrong with them? But don’t we have to do this, to some extent, just in order to survive? Do we not, in the nature of things, have to define ourselves in relation to what we are not?

    My favourite image for all this is a ship sailing the sea,- that image of the Infinite, beyond all human set-ups, upon which we try to make our way in our various little crafts. The sea is also of course the stuff of frontiers. It's hardly surprising that the most magnificent of ships have tended to be warships, and as such held a grim facination for me as a boy, but we can get over that. Ships sail from land to land, are made from materials of the land, depend on the land for their sustenance and destination, but they are built for the sea and must respect its every whim. If they get stuck on land, they are finished. Meanwhile, for we who man them, we must above all strive to maintain them in their integrity, even if it is sometimes a losing battle.

    By virtue of the Blessed Trinity, we are able to navigate the dichotomy,- to sail our finite ships upon the infinite sea, to live life passionately though we know we must die, to integrate Jesus, crucified and risen, as the heart and centre of all the spheres with the Father who is beyond them all, and the Spirit who leads the dance between them. But we get caught up, we think our little ship is all that counts, and we panic when it gets stuck or sinks. The sailor who finds himself paddling on a stormy sea in a life-raft, the soldier whose army and country have been defeated, the many people today who find that their spheres of meaning, the terms of reference upon which they have built their identity, have disintegrated, may even wish to join those who have apparently perished utterly. Thus the unholy death-wishes that may be observed so commonly today, in this time of multi-faceted disintegration!

    Those who love life cannot hope to perceive the Glory all at once. Yet we have to believe that all the set-backs, great and small, are there to nudge us to the great and ultimate Revelation. The grinding together of conflicting spheres, however, becomes more and more loud and painful, as they are squeezed inexorably tighter together. It must be so! Meanwhile, we just have to keep on tending and manning such craft as we are given!

    So I’m still doing my best with the Anna M. I have not been able to do much so far this year, for one reason or another, but I have been clearing the decks at home and getting ready for the big push to get her afloat again, hopefully now, in August or September.