After 80 summers, one sees life in hindsight, often sauntering through the sub-cellars of the mind, seeking memories of times long gone.
My thoughts are old but memory returns as clear as yesterday, leaving me questioning both the stability and reality of the fast-changing world in which we now find ourselves living.
I have never been a churchgoer. My Little Lady was. Following in my father’s footsteps, I found satisfying solace while strolling along overgrown logging trails through the swaying, leafy galleries of the tall second-growth forest that flanked the rear of our property. In the younger years, we could often be found there on almost any Sunday morning.
My Little Lady, brought up Baptist, was a churchgoer. She taught Sunday school for years unnumbered, and her faith in God was unencumbered. She was a firm believer that the Ten Commandments were definitely not multiple choice.
Three of our four children had ten-year attendance pins; the first lacking the pin because our residence move, from city to urban, changed church convenience from Baptist to United. The ill-lit caverns of the Baptist minister’s mind, refusing to sign the four-year credited accomplishment of our musically-inclined daughter, shook the foundation of the Little Lady’s faith, easing the tension of change to United.
I am too unschooled in the profession of religion to understand the nit-picking differences why one should feel superior to the other. Common sense indicates strongly that the basic principles of the Ten Commandments, whether handed down on a tablet of stone or scrawled by a shaky hand on a crumpled, wind-tossed leaf of paper, are excellent guidelines by which to live, seven days each week, not just on the Sabbath. Without them democracies only subsist.
With all religion aside, should not the Ten Commandments be an integral, integrated part of the current curriculum, taught in each and every school? By doing so, would it not give all children, regardless of creed, colour and orientation, a level playing field on which to lean while their developing minds decipher what is right and that which is wrong?
I could never understand the apparent worldwide religious discomfort during the period when Darwin’s discoveries coined the principles of evolution. Is not evolution part and parcel of creation? Spell it whichever way you want – are they not one and the same? Give that some thought!
There is no doubt in my mind that the world, and all life on it, was created by some super, supreme power. Miracles are the prerogative of God. Watch a seed sprout, an egg hatch, a baby of either man, animal or creature born, a pollywog wiggle, and then tell me that I’m wrong.
Whether it was created by your God or my God, He or She, or the Big Bang Theory, leaves little need for argument. No conscious hand was ever visible, today or on any collection of yesterdays, that witnessed the mystery of the web of life and how its beginning came into being.
Is it not true that we live in a world that is ever changing? Whether creation was mastered in six days, resting on the seventh leaves little verification that the Creator did not arise and once again return to work on the eighth. What difference does it make? We are here, thriving, on the series of new discoveries by a diverse, thinking, widespread mixture of people, are we not?
Humans, blessed with the largest proportionate brain, allowing dominion over all, often bragging to the contrary, have actually created nothing. We have just discovered, similar to the invention of the wheel, the possibilities already placed by the Master’s hand, long, long eons ago. Is the electromagnetic field that carries the World Wide Web and cordless phones not modern-day proof of that?
The world is designed to be self sustaining if managed properly. Is it not time that we rethink our thoughts, abort the pandemic throw-away syndrome, which overburdens both natural resources and garbage disposal, and stop demanding more and more and more?
Take care, ’cause we care.
barrie@barriehopkins.ca
519-986-4105