Definition of Faith Part 2

Yann Martel has the Narrator of Life of Pi relate how despair was ready to pounce when the terrors of abandonment on the open sea - with the hungry tiger as his only companion - gripped his whole being. Though turning to God gave comfort, the Narrator is forced to recall: "But it was hard, oh, it was hard". Then comes another carefully considered definition of faith:

    "Faith in God is an opening up, a letting go, a deep trust, a free act of love [...]".

But it is often no easy matter committing to any of those elements of faith:

"[B]ut sometimes it was so hard to love. Sometimes my heart was sinking so fast with anger, desolation and weariness, I was afraid it would sink to the very bottom of the Pacific, and I would not be able to lift it back up."

I enjoyed the next passage, which reflects how in valid religions a certain child-like outlook, and the admirable ability to submit to what is a truly higher authority, are essential to step beyond what imposes itself upon us:

At such moments I tried to elevate myself. I would touch the turban I had made with the remnants of my shirt and would say aloud: "THIS IS GOD'S HAT!"
I would pat my pants and say aloud: "THIS IS GOD'S ATTIRE!'
I would point to Richard Parker and say aloud: "THIS IS GOD'S CAT!'
I would point to the lifeboat and say aloud:"THIS IS GOD'S ARK!'
I would spread my hands wide and say aloud:"THESE ARE GOD'S WIDE ACRES!"
I would point to the sky and say aloud: "THIS IS GOD'S EAR!"
And in this way I would remind myself of creation and my place in it.

Martel also has the Narrator delve into the struggle of the person who commits through the deliberate exercise of faith to what is an evolving relationship with God :

"But God's hat was always unravelling. God's pants were falling apart. God's cat was a constant danger. God's ark was a jail. God's wide acres were slowly killing me. God's ear didn't seem to be listening."

Now comes an insightful outcome. For those willing to commit to this relationship with God through a previous choice, there is the possibility of the defeat of "blackness" and "despair" by "light" and "loving":

"Despair was a heavy blackness that let no light in or out. It was a hell beyond expression. I thank God it always passed. A school of fish appeared around the net or a knot cried out to be reknotted. Or I thought of my family, of how they were spared this terrible agony. The blackness would stir and eventually go away, and God would remain, a shining point of light in my heart. I would go on loving."

Life of Pi is a good yarn, but also quality literature in that it reveals the nature of the human heart and, as a bonus, the way what is in our heart shapes our personal decisions, and how these go on to determine our relationships and the boundaries of our spirit.

Definition of Faith Part 1

"A story to make you believe in the soul-sustaining power of fiction" - Los Angeles Times Book Review of Life of Pi by Yann Martel.

A sequence of thoughts from that story that saves the reader from "dry, yeastless factuality"...

The Writer asks himself after one of many sessions with the Narrator: "What of God's silence?", and continues with the answer: "An intellect confounded yet a trusting sense of presence and of ultimate purpose." Is that not a definition of faith?

The Writer speaks of the effect on him of the encounters with the Narrator:

"Words of divine consciousness: moral exaltation; lasting feelings of elevation, elation, joy; a quickening of the moral sense, which strikes one as more important than an intellectual understanding of things; an alignment of the universe along moral lines, not intellectual ones; a realization that the founding principle of existence is what we call love, which works itself out sometimes not clearly, not cleanly, not immediately, nonetheless ineluctably."

Ineluctable means: Unable to be resisted or avoided; inescapable.

God the creator is our friend

The wonder of it all!  We see from human history that the creator of the billions of galaxies and the smallest particle of matter, or even of anti-matter, wants to be my friend - my friend!  This month I watched a reflection on that theme from Jem Sullivan. This is what she said in the video:

I have called you friends," says Jesus to his disciples in today's gospel [John 15:12-17]. Do we really believe the words of Jesus, or do these words go by us so quickly that we don't hear the divine invitation extended to us? God wants your friendship. God wants [everyone's] friendship! In fact,  the whole point of the history of salvation...from creation to redemption [Jesus' dying for us on the cross] is about God coming in search of humanity, that we might live in union, in friendship with God, and in union with one another.
God comes in search of humanity in the person of his son Jesus Christ, who reconciles us to God. When we reflect on this reality of faith, we are invited to respond to his divine invitation of friend ship in our daily lives. Today's gospel ends with Jesus' words to his disciples: "This I command you, love one another". To open our hearts to the love of God revealed in Jesus is to experience friendship with God. In the power of that divine love we are strengthened to love one another with the love that comes from God.

Il n'est pas de plus grand amour. This is the point of wonder: That the being who is creator is concerned with the fate and actions of each person, and comes in search of us individually and all of us together!

The scourge of lying and cheating in science

The trouble with science is the amount of lying and cheating of scientists, especially in reporting their work. Revelations and expressions of ethical concern are becoming frequent. A second hurdle for good science is the conceit scientists can embody with regards the importance of what they believe they know. These words are written with regret because I respect the profession, its general dedication to finding the truth, to its sense of service to humanity. Unfortunately those qualities are not universal to the extent that truth suffers, and people's welfare, even lives, are endangered.

All those general readers who enjoy reading about science, whether the likes of Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, or detailed articles in the press on the latest scientific work, are left with a deep sense of gratitude for the efforts of the scientists. But that history of science also laid bare the human weaknesses scientists show in what has always been a very competitive field. Now to the present.

The Economist

From Science has lost its way, at a big cost to humanity (Los Angeles Times, October 27, 2013): "The demand for sexy results, combined with indifferent follow-up, means that billions of dollars in worldwide resources devoted to finding and developing remedies for the diseases that afflict us all is being thrown down a rat hole. National Institutes of Health and the rest of the scientific community are just now waking up to the realization that science has lost its way, and it may take years to get back on the right path."

From a follow-up column: More on the crisis in research: Feynman on 'cargo cult science' (Los Angeles Times, October 28, 2013):  "One suspects that [Caltech theoretical physicist Richard] Feynman, who died in 1988, would be appalled by the current standards of research publication, which critics say favor audacious claims instead of the painstaking, judicious marshaling of evidence he advocated. It's even more striking today to ponder his confidence in science's ability to weed out factitious or mistaken findings.

"We've learned from experience that the truth will come out," he told students. "Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right.... And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven't tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it's this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in cargo cult science."

And from the most exhaustive account of what's rotten in the scientific enterprise, Scientists like to think of science as self-correcting - To an alarming degree, it is not (The Economist,  October 18, 2013):
"The governments of the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, spent $59 billion on biomedical research in 2012, nearly double the figure in 2000. One of the justifications for this is that basic-science results provided by governments form the basis for private drug-development work. If companies cannot rely on academic research, that reasoning breaks down. When an official at America’s National Institutes of Health reckons, despairingly, that researchers would find it hard to reproduce at least three-quarters of all published biomedical findings, the public part of the process seems to have failed."

With headlines like these, the general public will be disappointed given the prestige in which they hold the scientific community. People are also increasingly fearful of scientific manipulations, and so the multiplying calls for detailed labelling of food products. For sure, prestige is based on integrity.

Who am I to judge another person?

Pope Francis in July talking to journalists on his return
from Brazil: "If a person is gay and seeks God and has
good will, who am I to judge?"

Must we tolerate everything another person throws at us? Matthew 7:1-6 is a good place to go for an answer. There we can see from the examples Jesus offers that, first, "Do not judge" means "Do not condemn", in other words, don't be self-righteous or hypocritical, reacting to others as if we ourselves never do anything wrong. "First remove the plank from your own eye and then the speck in the other person's eye."

The second feature of Jesus' teaching is that judging, in its improper form, is a failure to be encouraging. "It does not look for or appreciate the good that a person may do. When we judge [improperly] we refuse to understand the difficulties of a situation or the struggles a person may face", as one biblical commentator put it. Often we notice a different attitude if the wrong-doer is someone we love; we are more sympathetic.

"When we have a judging spirit, we are powerless to see others change. We cannot even accurately see the problem. Criticism and self-righteousness always cloud spiritual vision. When you notice another's sin, is your goal to restore or to condemn?" 

Therefore, withholding judgement does not mean agreeing with everyone and about everything people do, but it means responding to people and actions after striving to gain the necessary insight, and in the spirit of a God who is merciful and forgiving - all the while knowing the way we judge is the way God will judge us.

Mapping the myth of over-population

Source: redditor valeriepieris

The stunning information given in the picture becomes more amazing when it is recognised that the circle contains more water than land, and within it is the world's most sparsely populated country, Mongolia. Comments on the significance of this graphic's information are made here and here.

Then at Treehugger, we have a series of illustrations with the article 'At NY City's Density, the World's Population Could Live in Texas'.

The figures in the chart are for the area of land in the state of Texas. Another 2.5 per cent of the state is water

Source: By Tim De Chant as found here

Whether the world has enough space for everyone has aroused many imaginations as to the prospect of over-population. However, we can see for ourselves that this fear should be quelled. On the other hand, though it is well recognised that the world has the ability to feed all of humanity and adequately care for all, the latent willingness to attend to the difficulties of the poorest has not been converted into worldwide action. That is the next human project, one where everyone can play a part, especially in those buying habits where cheapest equals best or high profit margins means justice has been done.

Dali and the beauty of science

Salvador Dali was thrust deep into scientific mysteries. For instance, with regards this Crucifixion, he stated:

In the first place, in 1950, I had a ‘cosmic dream’ in which I saw this image in color and which in my dream represented the ‘nucleus of the atom’. This nucleus later took on a metaphysical sense; I considered it ‘the very unity of the universe’, the Christ! In the second place, when thanks to the instructions of Father Bruno, a Carmelite, I saw the Christ drawn by Saint John of the Cross, I worked out geometrically a triangle and a circle, which ‘aesthetically’ summarized all my previous experiments, and I inscribed my Christ in this triangle.

Dali named his 1951 work Christ of Saint John of the Cross. The sketch below is that by St John of the Cross from the 1570s made after a mystical experience.

The effect of the bowed Christ that Dali conceptualised in a optical or scientific manner continues to have an impact on those who visit the Glasgow Art Gallery to see it. When the gallery bought the work in 1952:

It was met with considerable criticism from the art press for its price (£8,200 was considered exorbitant) as well as its quality.  It was derided as ‘skilled sensationalist trickery’ and ‘calculated melodrama’, but despite this, the people of Glasgow flocked to see the picture.  Fifty thousand visitors saw it in the first two months, and it was reported that ‘Men entering the room where the picture is hung instinctively take off their hats.  Crowds of chattering, high-spirited school children are hushed into awed silence when they see it.’  Even now, it is still the most celebrated painting in the gallery’s collection.

When it was painted, Dali explained, ‘My aesthetic ambition… was completely the opposite of all the Christs painted by most of the modern painters, who have all interpreted him in the expressionistic and contortionistic sense, thus obtaining emotion through ugliness. My principal preoccupation was that my Christ would be beautiful as the God that he is.’ 

The comment continues:

The power of the picture rests in part in the paradoxes it presents to the viewer.  The monumental figure of the crucified Christ hovers above the world, yet we look down on him.  In the detail of Christ’s body and his closeness to the picture surface – he really does appear to project beyond it – Christ is immediately and physically present and yet he is distant, above the clouds, his face hidden.

The scientific element in Dali's work is particularly clear in another striking crucifixion. Here are some worthwhile comments on this point:

By the 1950s, Dali had abandoned his atheism in favor of the religion of his birth and baptism, Catholicism. Combining this with his beliefs in so-called "nuclear mysticism" he created paintings such as the Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus) [see below]. Christ is suspended on an eight sided dodecahedron - an octahedral hypercube or a cube in the fourth dimension. Dali's critics often stated that his use of these mathematical symbols as "visual opportunism" and that the artist knew nothing of the meanings and mathematical principles behind them.

However, Thomas Banchoff, a Brown University professor who did pioneering work using computer graphics to illustrate geometry beyond the third dimension in the 1970s, insists that this assumption about Dali is untrue. "Dali wanted to be treated seriously by scientists," Banchoff said of the artist. "He knew what he was talking about he was not just using the symbols." Banchoff and Dali became friends after a 1975 article in the Washington Post about Banchoff's work caught Dali's eye. Banchoff stated that Dali had specific mathematical questions and sought the professor's help to solve optical problems in some of his more extreme works.

We can't leave this topic of Dali's struggle to make us aware of beauty through science without delving into his work, Cena or The Sacrament of the Last Supper.

One commentator makes these important observations:

 Believing that the number “12” was “paranoiacly sublime,” Dali painted the backdrop as a dodecahedron – a 12-sided figure. The number 12 figures in as Christ’s 12 apostles, the 12 signs of the zodiac, the 12 months of the year, etc. Dali believed that the Communion must be symmetrical, thus giving rise to the strict symmetry of the work, with each apostle on the left a virtual mirror image of his counterpart on the right.

The overall feeling of spirituality and mysticism is achieved through the transparency of the Christ figure, appearing as if he could be rising from the sea, and of the dodecahedron. Dali’s blond, beardless and otherwise unconventional depiction of Jesus set skeptical fingers wagging when the large painting was unveiled on Easter, 1955. Some presumed – in shock, but erroneously – that Gala (his wife) posed for Christ! In fact, a male model sat for the artist.

The large male torso at the top of this canvas may be interpreted at least three ways: as the Holy Spirit; the ascension of Christ; or perhaps God the Father, watching over all, his face not to be seen.

In like manner, enjoy this last work - The Ascension. That same commentator wonders here if we are witnessing the splitting of an atom or activity of a human cell:

Dali – master of illusion and of manipulating space and time – throws us off some by the oddly juxtaposed perspectives and points of view in Ascension. The Christ figure is seen emerging either backwards or upwards – we don’t know. Meanwhile, it’s less than clear just what [the woman, perhaps mother] would be standing on in relation to the angle of the rising Christ. What’s more, we have a more normal and natural field of vision in the landscape shown at the bottom, below the large yellow circle, further confounding our perspective here.

And just what is that brilliant golden sphere? Is it a splitting atom or human cell? Is it the sun? Does it represent the circle of life? Could it be a sea urchin? What we do know is that directly behind the ascending Christ figure are the florets of a sunflower – a natural design by which Dali was intrigued, because its continuous circular pattern follows the laws of a logarithmic spiral – a naturally occurring phenomenon he also found in the horn of a rhinoceros and the morphology of a cauliflower.