Brian’s Reflection: Friday, August 5, 2011

A human being - what is a human being? Everything
and nothing. Through the power of thought it can
mirror everything it experiences. Through memory
and knowledge it becomes a microcosm, carrying the
world within itself. A mirror of things, a mirror of facts.
Each human being becomes a little universe within
the universe!

Guy de Maupassant, novelist, short-story writer; he was
born on this date, 1850, at the château de Miromesnil,
near Dieppe.


That is the Big Question, isn’t it? Who am I? Who are we? What are we here for? I used to think about this when I was a child (in the way of a child, of course!), lying in our rowboat out on the lake in Montfort in the dark of a mountain country night, watching the Milky Way above. I think that this is the Question that most motivates us on all levels. It is the fountainhead of art, inquiry, religion, emotional maturity, relationships. It is the Mother of God ….. where the idea of “God” is born.

It has been proposed by scientists (some very ancient) and philosophers and psychiatrists and theologians that all things are connected: all part of a One; all part of The One Reality of Being; part of the One Universe. St. Paul was to use this idea in speaking of the nature of the Christian Community and, by extension, of the nature of the human race: we are the parts making up one Body. In my life, I have come to see that “Christ”, as the manifestation of God, is Being - the Universe. And that we human beings are not only a “part”, but that we are the fullness of Being ….. as de Maupassant says, “a little universe within the universe”. When St. Paul talks about “putting on the mind of Christ”, I understand him to be trying to get us to see that we are God in some mystical way. There is no separation.

I think that so much of the trouble in the human community these days - as it has been so often throughout Time - is that we have such a diminished perception of Who we Are. We hold a “low doctrine” of our self and of each other. But what of we were taught to think of ourselves as one Universe encountering another Universe, with all the vast beauty and majesty and wonder and power that one sees from the bottom of a rowboat on a clear Laurentian night! Soon we would not be able to look into each others’ eyes without Love.

I can hope, can’t I? And try to live the vision.

Brian+