Doors

It is said of L.A. that there is no there there. Is the same true of the soul?

Consider the Catholic conception of the Eucharist, best as I understand it. The Creator of the universe who stands outside of time, place and matter entered into creation about two thousand years ago in the form, first, as a zygote, then, with time, as a fully developed human being. While in material form He also maintains the attributes of the Creator who exists outside of the material world. He dies and ascends to heaven. Later he reenters the material world but this time with the physical attributes of bread and wine. God in his entire being and glory is then eaten by human beings. God, however, does not lose any essence or unity of his being while being digested by discrete pieces of creation.

All that is interesting and really attractive to my way of thinking though I am not officially a Catholic. I especially love what it implies about human beings. It implies that we are at some level made for eternity and infinity, and in fact some part of us is already eternal and infinite. Otherwise how else could God enter into us, spiritually speaking? I believe most people really know this in their guts even if they’ve never heard of the Eucharist. That’s why part of our reaction to hearing that someone has died, even before grief kicks in, is surprise and denial. But this is a revealing reaction. Why in the world should we be surprised when someone dies, when dying is the only obvious thing in the world that binds human beings together?

We are always surprised by death because our metaphysical default expectation is biased in favor of the continuation of life. That anyone is born alive, or born at all, is a far greater surprise than death given the inhospitality of the universe toward life. Vast expanses of vacuum-empty coldness studded with dots of nuclear-fusion seems pretty much to be the order of the universe. Not exactly a cosmic petri-dish for the incubation of life. And yet the miraculous introduction of life into an overwhelmingly inert universe never surprises us.

Death secretly strikes us as unnatural, despite the lies we tell one another. We know that death is a reflection of metaphysical disorder and in violation of our intuitive connection with eternity.

But I digress. The Eucharist indicates that human beings are infinite and eternal (at least in some ways) and this bodes poorly for our self-understanding. The mind (or my mind at least) is far from infinite, and so its task of understanding the self is beyond its capacity. But this lack of self-understanding dignifies us because it means we cannot be reduced to social forces, or chemicals, or as products of our rearing. We are always bigger than these things. In a very real sense, one human being is in an important sense larger than the rest of the material universe. And the fact we are also made to attempt to discover who we really are means we live in continuous frustration. Or at least I do.

This frustration ultimately redeems us, however, precisely because to understand who we are we must seek the One who is infinite and eternal through and through. There is a there there in the soul but we cannot find it ourselves.