Blog
15.December 2000 - 00:00
Astounding joy
Twice at Christmas time I have been blessed with a new baby. With my firstborn I was a young philosophy student and Christmas was spent wondering at what had happened. I had to move FROM the world of the intellect to the world of the body, because someone needed my warmth and my milk. I realised how thoroughly physical a human being is. It was awesome.
Just as staggering was the realisation that the physical is not all. When the baby was able to direct her gaze, it was awesome to realise the amount of joy the experience of beauty gave her. I understand if her mother's milk, or the anticipation prompted by being on her lap or seeing her face makes the baby fling her arms about and blow and smile. But when something not directly connected with her basic needs, say a cheerful colour, can cause an explosion of joy, it awakens sheer wonder even in a philosopher engrossed in motherhood. This is an experience that is almost impossible to EXPLAIN satisfactorily in words. Yet it speaks to me about how joy is, in some mysterious way, true. It's not just the result of learning. It simply is, but sometimes hidden, as if it were waiting around the corner for the child of man. It's a surprising, undeserved gift.
I believe that the existence of joy should be a challenge for the philosopher, alongside the existence of suffering. I have begun to believe that inside a human being is a path that leads straight out FROM himself; somewhere which is not connected with our biological or social needs. At the end of the road is Someone Else, undefined, unknown, longed for.
The Christian faith states that this Unknown became a human being. The Creator of the Universe was born as a baby to pain, poverty and exclusion so that what he wants to say could get through to the people he created. Totally vulnerable, he yields himself to the hands of the people he loves and says: take me in your arms or kill me. In almost all cultures people have understood the need to worship the majesty, the glory and the unreachableness of the Creator. But the nights at Bethlehem and Gethsemane saw the omnipotent choosing powerlessness. There is nothing so insignificant and lowly that it doesn't concern him.
And what kind of a world would we have if a man like that had never been born in Palestine?
I don't know. Perhaps such a man or woman would have had to be invented. While I don't in any way feel a need to polish the history of the Christian faith or to save its reputation, I still think that with this man something indispensable came to the world.
Something happened to the worth of a human being, of a child, of the poor, of the sick. Instead of a child being one who gets in the way, he became the pattern. The sick and the disabled didn't deserve their fate; they didn't suffer because of the sins of their previous life, nor for the crimes of their forefathers or parents or for their own vileness. Therefore it was permissible to help them – without fear of disturbing life's ORDER or interfering with fate. It was a radical thought that has left permanent marks on Western culture and left the world's humanists in debt to this man.
We are told that he amazed his contemporaries by healing the sick. Just as great a gift as health was the restoration of human worth to the one rejected by his community. Thank God its marks still SHOW in our culture.
Twice at Christmas time I have been blessed with a new baby. With my firstborn I was a young philosophy student and Christmas was spent wondering at what had happened. I had to move FROM the world of the intellect to the world of the body, because someone needed my warmth and my milk. I realised how thoroughly physical a human being is. It was awesome.
Just as staggering was the realisation that the physical is not all. When the baby was able to direct her gaze, it was awesome to realise the amount of joy the experience of beauty gave her. I understand if her mother's milk, or the anticipation prompted by being on her lap or seeing her face makes the baby fling her arms about and blow and smile. But when something not directly connected with her basic needs, say a cheerful colour, can cause an explosion of joy, it awakens sheer wonder even in a philosopher engrossed in motherhood. This is an experience that is almost impossible to EXPLAIN satisfactorily in words. Yet it speaks to me about how joy is, in some mysterious way, true. It's not just the result of learning. It simply is, but sometimes hidden, as if it were waiting around the corner for the child of man. It's a surprising, undeserved gift.
I believe that the existence of joy should be a challenge for the philosopher, alongside the existence of suffering. I have begun to believe that inside a human being is a path that leads straight out FROM himself; somewhere which is not connected with our biological or social needs. At the end of the road is Someone Else, undefined, unknown, longed for.
The Christian faith states that this Unknown became a human being. The Creator of the Universe was born as a baby to pain, poverty and exclusion so that what he wants to say could get through to the people he created. Totally vulnerable, he yields himself to the hands of the people he loves and says: take me in your arms or kill me. In almost all cultures people have understood the need to worship the majesty, the glory and the unreachableness of the Creator. But the nights at Bethlehem and Gethsemane saw the omnipotent choosing powerlessness. There is nothing so insignificant and lowly that it doesn't concern him.
And what kind of a world would we have if a man like that had never been born in Palestine?
I don't know. Perhaps such a man or woman would have had to be invented. While I don't in any way feel a need to polish the history of the Christian faith or to save its reputation, I still think that with this man something indispensable came to the world.
Something happened to the worth of a human being, of a child, of the poor, of the sick. Instead of a child being one who gets in the way, he became the pattern. The sick and the disabled didn't deserve their fate; they didn't suffer because of the sins of their previous life, nor for the crimes of their forefathers or parents or for their own vileness. Therefore it was permissible to help them – without fear of disturbing life's ORDER or interfering with fate. It was a radical thought that has left permanent marks on Western culture and left the world's humanists in debt to this man.
We are told that he amazed his contemporaries by healing the sick. Just as great a gift as health was the restoration of human worth to the one rejected by his community. Thank God its marks still SHOW in our culture.