I Haven't Got a Prayer

Dream, September 2016: I am strolling through the woods, when I happen upon a man who is fiddling with equipment, equipment that looks like it might be used to take scientific measurements of some kind. He has headphones over his ears and he is bent over, fine tuning one of the dials. I can’t help but pass near him as he has placed his equipment adjacent to the path I am following. He looks up and smiles, then quickly motions with his hand for me to approach. 

I take a better look at him as I cautiously near. He isn’t very tall for an adult man, about my height which is 5 foot 4 inches, and he's a bit on the lean side. He is wearing a pressed tan collared shirt, neatly tucked into army green slacks, giving him the look of a forest ranger or such. He closes his eyes for a moment as he presses the headset to his ears, and his face beams a beatific smile. I pause and watch him in his rapture. After a time he seems to remember my presence and even more earnestly motions for me to come closer. 

I take a hesitant step or two, he takes off the headset, carefully puts it away and turns off the equipment. He pulls out a notepad and jots something, then he begins to excitedly explain that he’s been recording the sounds of birds and small animals at ultrasonic and infrasonic frequencies and that while playing back and deciphering the sounds he’s discovered that insects have been meaningfully adding sounds to his animal recordings. So he takes some more recordings, and finds that the trees and plants are adding sound as well. Then he tells me that his findings indicate that if one were to filter out some of the “noise” that doesn’t belong, the remainder is actually all in harmony, "musically in harmony."  

“Do you realize what this means!?” he asks and before I can even fathom a response, he excitedly continues, “The whole universe is a symphonic composition! If we can temporarily highlight the anti-noise and, you know, filter out the noise, what remains is all a heavenly symphony!”

***

Beloved Husband and I were golfing with a couple. At some point the four of us were on the green. All four balls seemed about 10 feet from the pin in four different directions. The usual banter in this situation begins with “Well we’ve got it surrounded.” Golf etiquette dictates that the player farthest from the cup will putt first, but we were all about the same distance away. The other woman in our foursome asked if I was ready to putt. “No,” I smiled, “I need to pray over this a bit more.” It’s an expression I lifted from a favorite Jesuit professor. When grading papers he claimed, "The A’s and the failures are easy to discern. It's the pile in the middle that I have to pray over.” She countered, “Tsk tsk now, God isn’t to be bothered with prayers for golf.” 

She couldn’t, surely not after watching me golf all summer, think that I was serious? That in the midst of a round of casual golf, I would suddenly be praying for heavenly intervention? Or perhaps, she was implying that she had such a relationship with God that she knew for certain which human maladies, conditions, disorders, desires, wishes, requests were prayer-worthy? Is such a list available for sharing, you know, for those of us less informed?  

***

Raised and schooled a Roman Catholic in the mid-50s to late-60s, I was taught that one should never even think about listening to or attending a service in any religion other than Catholicism, because to think about such a sin would be as sinful as actually doing it. If you allowed the thought to even flit briefly across your mind, well you might as well…

In the mid-1980s I attended a talk at a Episcopalian, or maybe a Presbyterian church in Glenview, Illinois. At the behest of a friend, I came to hear a prominent rabbi in  Conservative Judaism give a talk. At the time Rabbi Harold Kushner had written a book entitled, “When Bad Things Happen to Good People.” 

Having lost a young son to a rare genetic disorder, Rabbi Kushner had dared to question the G*d about whom he’d been taught, (and I paraphrase here as it was 30 years ago) “How could an all-powerful, benevolent, all-knowing God allow such to happen to an innocent child?” He went through the attribute list and he decided that God could be all-knowing and he could be benevolent, but he couldn’t be all-powerful, because an “all-powerful” God would not allow such suffering. 

Smack! His words hit me. I, too, had wondered the same thing. Maybe, perhaps, possibly, suggested Rabbi Kushner, there were parameters, formulae, criterion or matter with which even God’s power was limited.

Which brings to mind a recent article about CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats). It is a fascinating subject chock-full of moral consequences, but complicated and I won’t get into it here, but you may google it on your own. Basically CRISPR is a tool to speed up gene editing, mostly for the purpose of making “advances” in eliminating disease. However, often something else immediately “pops up” to take its place. So like, if you remove or block the DNA that causes Sickle Cell Anemia you now have made the person vulnerable to some other, possibly worse, malady or weakness.

Anyway, Rabbi Kushner feels that God is with us during suffering, but not able to prevent it.

(Nota Bene: This next portion contains my thought solely, not Rabbi Kushner’s) Maybe, perhaps, possibly God had set our universe in motion, and being a benevolent and all-knowing God, knew that it would be imperfect. Maybe, perhaps, possibly God’s gift is simply the gift of life. Be it one second or be it one hundred-plus years. It is up to us to make the best of it, while God delights with us in our joys and comforts us in our sorrows.

***

Beloved Husband and I visited an out-of-state friend in late October. She works for an American multi-national conglomerate. She travels the world, and her job title actually includes the word “global.” She has been on business trips to numerous countries. Someone gave her a large world map that allows her to “scratch-off” the many portions of the world she’s visited. She asked us to scratch off the portion that related to us meeting her for the first time. We gratefully obliged. As I scratched it off a tiny portion of the all-gold map it revealed a brighter, different color for the corresponding city metropolis in the midwest of the U.S.A. Looking at the large map I commented that the U.S. represented such a small portion of the world. We stood there silently, looking at the map and thinking… 

***

It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.— Neil Armstrong, Gemini 8 and Apollo 11 astronaut

Oddly enough the overriding sensation I got looking at the earth was, my god that little thing is so fragile out there.— Mike Collins, Apollo 11 astronaut

This planet is not terra firma. It is a delicate flower and it must be cared for. It's lonely. It's small. It's isolated, and there is no resupply. And we are mistreating it. Clearly, the highest loyalty we should have is not to our own country or our own religion or our hometown or even to ourselves. It should be to, number two, the family of man, and number one, the planet at large. This is our home, and this is all we've got.— Scott Carpenter, Mecury 7 astronaut

I really believe that if the political leaders of the world could see their planet from a distance of 100,000 miles their outlook could be fundamentally changed. That all-important border would be invisible, that noisy argument silenced. The tiny globe would continue to turn, serenely ignoring its subdivisions, presenting a unified facade that would cry out for unified understanding, for homogeneous treatment. The earth must become as it appears: blue and white, not capitalist or Communist; blue and white, not rich or poor; blue and white, not envious or envied.— Michael Collins, Gemini 10 & Apollo 11 astronaut

You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch’.  -Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut

***

God(s)/Creator(s), 

Please comfort me. I am disappointed, but I will hope for the optimal success of our new President-Elect in January of 2017. May he benevolently use his intelligence and the talents inherent in his genetic composition for the good of all, not only in our country but in the whole of our tiny pea of a planet, we call Earth. If he does well for the greater good, I will applaud his effort.

I will do my best to continue to avoid adding unnecessary “noise” and may, one day, the beauty of the universe’s heavenly symphony be heard by all...

photo courtesy of NASA

On a visit to Chicago I passed an elementary school that had painted both a
U.S. and a world map on its blacktop play lot  :)