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.
This was a summer of reunions for me. The family reunion was my first in years, and it was perfectly pleasant. I enjoyed catching up with cousins with whom I hadn’t spoken in years, and it was fun introducing my children to relatives who already loved them for no other reason than that they share the same blood. Sadder, however, was witnessing the real and marked decline of my older aunts and uncles. I remind myself that I should be so fortunate to have younger nieces and nephews looking at me with pity someday for being so old.
I also went to my twentieth high school reunion, which was not surprisingly far more anxiety producing. High school seems secondarily about education and far more about finding a place in the social universe and working through powerful emotions, most notably love and envy and sometimes envy on account of love.
One change all for the better from the ten year reunion is that most folks were far more relaxed and less anxious about impressing their classmates. Most of the guys had more-or-less let themselves go in appearance, while the females were still perfectly presentable. There might be a selection process at work here, with females insecure about their appearances more likely than the males to forgo the reunion altogether.
For me the reunion was like an emotional depth-charge detonated in psychic waters more shallow than I might have guessed. My own sense is that most people’s “emotional memories” are fairly short. Once out of sight and out of one’s life, emotions linked to persons and events naturally begin to fade. Their memories are like afterimages of the sun burned in the eye that fade quickly with time. In contrast to that, as long as I can remember the past has held a kind of tyrannical grip on my mental well-being. I remember at the age of twelve thinking about events that happened at age six with vivid freshness and intensity, and I remember wondering why the “now” has emotional privilege over past events. Surely at some level the past has as much Being or perhaps more so that the present, which is of course radically incomplete. I continue to remember with intense vividness past social blunders I committed as well as occasions I slighted people, whether intentionally or otherwise. My ego has taken a whipping from these memories. These memories, over time, become the equivalent of well-traveled ruts in my mind.
As a result, my impulse at the reunion was confessional, and I had to fight the desire to apologize for words and deeds that I’m almost perfectly certain have been long-ago forgotten by everyone but me.
One of my favorite portraits; one of my favorite guys. I flatter myself to think the picture captures a glimpse of Harvey's depth and compassion.
Look carefully at the picture for about 5-10 seconds. You should see a girl's face.
Taken at Deana Rose Children's Farmstead, Overland Park, KS
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower 
And all shall be well and
It is said of L.A. that there is no there there. Is the same true of the soul? 
This was a summer of reunions for me. The family reunion was my first in years, and it was perfectly pleasant. I enjoyed catching up with cousins with whom I hadn’t spoken in years, and it was fun introducing my children to relatives who already loved them for no other reason than that they share the same blood. Sadder, however, was witnessing the real and marked decline of my older aunts and uncles. I remind myself that I should be so fortunate to have younger nieces and nephews looking at me with pity someday for being so old. 
A picture from the bakery in Chicago we went to with our families. This colorful confectionary display is as close to a "birthday card" as I can conjure up. I really appreciate you and your whole clan, Technoprairie.
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