Archive: Opinions

In certain theological circles, there's a loose theory (or hypothesis, I guess), that goes like this: approximately every five-hundred years or so, organized Christianity seems to experience an intense internal turmoil, leaving a lot of human and theological detritus behind as it progresses into a new cycle. It's a convenient and curious thought, apropos to today's arguments and divisions, though not quite exact, either mathematically or historically, but still interesting.

Thinking of this led me to a memory of being told by a friend that the Dalai Lama has supposedly laughed at the belief that cosmic reality, space, or time could be divided by the precise lines of the human clock: sixty minutes, seven days, one-hundred years, etc. A true example of hubris.

It was then I thought about the phenomenon of what is simply known as 'lake turnover'. This is the time of year when bodies of water such as Cayuga Lake swap the bottom layer of colder water (hypolimnion) with the water top layer (epilimnion). I thought it was an interesting idea in conjunction with the overwhelming conviction that we are in a politically turbulent time, with much concern about what is happening 'this year' in the political and personal world. Trust me, I can tie this all together.

Politicians and historians frequently use claptrap to further their own political concepts, and such idioms as 'changing times', 'new generation', 'new paradigm', and 'old fashioned' are terms that merely indicate hubris, arrogance, or inflated ideas of our ability to recognize change.

What I'm getting at is this: I've begun to suspect that our angst and upset, the sturm und drang of America in this year of 2020 may be what is known as a tempest in a teapot. The idea that something much bigger is happening may be confusing to our small brains. Phrases like 'new normal' and 'perfect storm' are not new, but seem to have renewed cachet in these troubling times.

Surely the political maelstrom between Biden and Trump, right and left, nationalism and globalism, white and black, tolerance and intolerance, and all these extremes are real, but I question their relevance in the larger context.

What I'm thinking is that our current situation, though seemingly desperate, even do or die, may be a small cog in the huge context of a cosmic 'lake turnover'. Maybe we're looking through the wrong end of the telescope.

Possibly we can't see the larger picture, since our own lens is constantly fogged by headlines, 24/7 news coverage, political falderol. Something huge is going on in the human story that has been slowly growing since… when? We can't say a year, like 1968, or an event, say, like Hiroshima.

The idea that something beyond our narrow human comprehension worldwide, even bigger than the idea of climate change, is baffling and frightening. So, let's try this. Are we in the midst of Earth-changing events, even larger than the slow-motion death of the Roman Empire, the Age of Enlightenment, or the collapse of the Soviet Union? Are we witness to something that could shatter what we know of civilization, but has been happening like the five-hundred-year epochs of Christianity or the million-year epochs of paleontological proportion?

Are we watching the end of something? The beginning of something? Or are the beginnings and ends beyond our typical three decades and ten? Churchill said of the Battle of Britain that it was only "the end of the beginning". In this context, I wonder if we are witnessing events that might be characterized as mere grains of sand in the midst of the mother of all windstorms.

I'm not trying to be apocryphal, as some right-wing evangelists might sound. Garner Ted Armstrong and other end-time prophets don't generally earn my attention. I'm merely wondering if we are oblivious to things we may not be able to comprehend from the vantage point of a naked ape who stood on two legs just a few millennia ago. We are witnessing political violence, but so have the generations before us. Holocaust follows holocaust in our demented past and continues unabated today. I hear rumbles deep inside my heart that tell me that something huge is going on, and we don't have a name for it.

Humankind seems to be on the cusp of something much more serious than just the Doomsday Clock, and my feeling is that we as a species are at a cosmic crossroad. We are tasked with devising much larger questions than we are currently asking, as well as much larger answers which we have not yet even begun to grasp.

You know what's so surprising about this musing? My Baby Boomer cynicism and my dystopic nature want to go right down the proverbial rat hole, but something deeper tells me that we may already have the answer buried somewhere in our human core. Very few in human history have discovered a way out of this deepening morass we call current events, but those few had an answer.

Perhaps our way can be lit by witnessing individuals reaching out to make a tough situation more tolerable. We've seen examples in the last six months of one person touching another's life, giving hope to a troubled fellow human, establishing the idea of community.

I'm convinced we need to determine the salient question, and we also need to find those who may have found a universal answer. Can we rediscover a positive path and devise an optimistic outcome to this troubling epoch?

Take care of each other. Thanks for listening.