One Head Is Better

But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind.  For that person must not suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord; he is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways. – James 1:6-8

I know double-minded.  I am all too often of two minds, not just about boxers or briefs – besides that issue has been settled by the greatest development since the loin-cloth, the boxer-brief.  I am of a mind to do the right thing, but it never seems to get done.  Who’s running this show? 

I fear for the status of my sainthood application because I like to dabble in the fleshly mind.  Whenever I had to teach or speak, I would try to “get holy” beforehand, confess all my sins, and pray fervently.  I can relax into double-mind mode.  Being single-minded requires some vigilance, hence the call to watch and pray.  Most non-believers seem to find it fairly easy to stay in single-mind mode on the other side of the divide, though some of the more militant atheists seem to be working harder at it.  Or drinking harder.

With all the benefits of being single-minded, the decision ought to be easy enough.  A person can have wisdom (the context in James), other spiritual gifts, and all the fruit of the Spirit, move mountains and be free of worry and fear.  Life must be better and fuller when there is only one mind and that the mind of Christ. 

In A Canticle for Leibowitz, mutants became known as the Pope’s Children.  The Church which survived the nuclear devastation became again the repository of civilization and the source of order in the long Dark Age that followed.  In mercy and reverence for all human life, there was a papal prohibition against euthanizing the deformed.  Even two-headed monstrosities occurred and were allowed to live.  At the end of the novel, after civilization has been rebuilt, complete with nuclear armaments once again, such a person known as Mrs. Grales wishes to have her other, apparently vestigial head, called Rachel, baptized by the prior.  When humanity once again unleashes destruction upon itself, the head that has been associated with Mrs. Grales goes silent and ‘Rachel’ awakens with an angelic presence.

Being double-minded is equivalent to having two heads.  If we could see it for what it is, we would be repulsed by our malformation.  Many of us wait for crises or difficulties to let the “new” head take over.  We think that day to day cares and concerns have to be handled by the “old” head which seems more pragmatic and sensible and is more acceptable, in many cases, to the people we encounter. 

As an aside, it occurs to me in writing that last statement that one of the reasons for attending church regularly is to encourage, enable, and empower the “new” head by being among other like-minded. 

The old head, like Fred, is dead.  Its time has passed.  The crucial event is not a nuclear holocaust but a cross.  No matter how many other dead heads we must deal with in the world, this is the age of the new, living head.  There is no need to cut it off; just let it go to sleep.  Watch and pray.

New and Improved

What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.  -- Ecclesiastes 1:9

I’ve got nothing today.  I’m still recovering from the weekend.  I took the bike out Saturday and bombarded the back roads.  The Enterprise is surprisingly “nimble” for something that weighs 900 pounds – 1100 with me in the saddle.  The last big wreck I had on my old street bike back in the ‘80s was because the bike went off the edge of the road on a left-hand turn.  I can take hard, fast right-hand turns all day while even a sweeping left makes me tense up.  I’m getting better, but it’s still a fight. 

My wife did not go along.  She’s not feeling all that great.  She had another episode that put her in the hospital again that last week of June, and she re-started a steroid regime -- which seems to help, apart from some of the adverse effects.  I locked up all the guns.  The current course will be finished up next Monday, and we are trying to schedule a clinic visit at an academic hospital where there are more diverse specialists and additional testing possibilities.  We’ll see how it goes. 

So instead of having a big family gathering for the 4^th, we stayed home and did yard work.  I did manage to finish A Canticle for Leibowitz, and it certainly struck me differently from when I read it back in the ‘70s.  The verse above is related.  Humanity keeps making the same mistakes, despite our advances.  Of course, we didn’t start a big atomic war – at least we haven’t yet.  Currently, financial disaster seems a more imminent threat than an all-out nuclear devastation.  Still, I would not entirely dismiss the possibility of an EMP attack or an American city going up in a “flame deluge” like Sodom and Gomorrah. 

In the last section of the book, there is an exchange about utopian thinking that is close to something we have been kicking around at OC.  The idea of a “better” world can be unifying and constructive when everything is a mess and people are struggling just to get by.  For the person living in very primitive conditions, any technological improvement or advancement is a boon to the quality of life and productivity.  However, as we get more advanced and things really do get much better, the utopian ideal becomes more divisive and destructive. 

When much of the common goal becomes a present reality rather than a vague future promise, we realize that we were not at all in agreement about what we meant by “better”.  That’s more or less the problem we are facing in 21^st Century America.  We have achieved so much and moved so far into our future dream that some of us have decided it is not what we had in mind at all.  We sometimes find that technology now hampers and shackles about as much as it frees and empowers.  As “Hotel California” says, perhaps prophetically:  “We are all just prisoners here of our own device.”

Technology isn’t going to make us better people.  We can be barbarians with iPhones.  We could compare technology to Pandora’s Box.  Perhaps it is like those nested Russian dolls, boxes within boxes within boxes where each one opens the next whether we are ready for it or not.  Each one unleashes new challenges and raises new questions we may not yet be equipped to answer. 

Without giving away the ending for those who might not have read or recall it, I would say Canticle concludes in some hope.  Though we seem destined to wreck nation and kingdom and empire because it is not Eden, Miller, perhaps intentionally, echoes that quote from St. Francis of Assisi that we ought to give up trying to change the world and change worlds instead.