About Face to Face

Paul: Midway upon the journey of life (give or take), a space appeared in my etherverse.  In that moment between dreams and waking, I have a strange little place where, being a visually minded person, I work out ideas that I am interacting with.  I would argue that this place seems to be more on the sleep side than waking because of the oddness of the atmosphere. However, I seem to work through complex ideas with the focus of waking life in this place.  For example:

It is a chemistry lab like one would find in a high school or college with bust-level counters with gas nozzles and so forth.  It is in a run down strip mall, around the back where trucks make deliveries and there are dumpsters and broken pallets laying about.  Next door to the abandoned chemistry lab is a Chinese restaurant, and the cooks bring food over every once in a while when there are left-overs.

I live in this chemistry lab and people come to visit me.  The people who come to visit me are usually the people I am reading at the time.  Sir Thomas Browne has been by, as has John Milton, Benjamin Franklin, and Dante.  We talk through ideas that I am thinking about from reading their work and that seems to be the bulk of the function of the place.  I work out ideas there.  But my most often recurring guest is Socrates.

Socrates talks to me more broadly about my life and issues that I am working through.  Over the past several months, I've been gripped with an almost maniacal hypochondria, manifesting in being constantly convinced that I am catching a raging head cold which will preclude my getting done the quotidian tasks required to keep our economic balloon in the air.

So, the other day I was talking to Socrates about this and asked him what I could do about it.  He said, "Your focus is all wrong.  The soul is of infinite more importance than the body.  All of this temporal nonsense is so fleeting and impermanent.  Focus on truth and on living a virutuous life."  I think in an odd twist he gave a paraphrase of Eleanor Roosevelt saying that great people think about ideas while small people thought about things.

I asked him, "So, I'm going to get sick then?"

He said, "Oh yes.  You're going to get rip-roaring sick just like everyone around you.  But focus on truth and virtue when you are well and when you are sick and none of that will matter."

And that mission statement is where I find myself at this crossroads in my life.  Laurie and I have decided to reboot this blog, which I think we've settled on "topical" as an "About" although in our household that may mean current events or it may mean something one of us has just read about the effects of tithing on medieval agrarian practices.  I had thought about writing a "testimony" to kick off my portion of the reboot, but I look back on what I just wrote and precisely where I am in my walk, and I rather think that's exactly what I've just done.

Laurie:  As it happens in life, so it goes here.  From the first time you told me about your dream laboratory, which, by the way, was only a few days ago and over four years into our marriage, I've been speechless in the face of it.  My silence, however, is by no means an indicator of disinterest.  In fact it's the opposite.  I am profoundly stupefied.  I'm not frightened or shocked, as though this were somewhat out of character or revealing of something dangerous or unhealthy.  On the contrary, it makes stunning sense. Of course you have such a place. It explains a lot - your particular genius for instance. 

And then I'm annoyed.  I could really use such a place and visitations by masters.  But perhaps I should be looking at it differently.  In you, I have them all. And so I will talk with you, as I have for as long as I've known you.

Your friendship to me has transformed my life.  I value your intelligence of course, but it is not so much that as it is the genuine respect you've always shown me which has led me to respect you, and to be willing to hear you out in matters on which I would normally be inclined to disagree or shut you out entirely.  Because of this, I've come to believe that respect (and the love it springs from) must be the foundation of any healthy relationship.

I also believe that such mutual respect is the only real hope for growth and instruction in wisdom. We can be coerced, intimidated, or indoctrinated through various pressures to assent to just about any ideology. But a true change of heart is another matter entirely.

Jesus Christ, as case in point, did not enter into his ministry merely telling people all the ways in which they were wrong.  His teaching was accompanied by genuine care and compassion, concern for physical needs, and respect. Even though by virtue of his own Godhood he was deserving of all respect, he set about "earning" the respect and service He that was His due by modeling it.  This is the kind of relationship that led a former prostitute to weep in helpless adoration and gratitude at his feet. This is the kind of love and teaching that brings about changed heart.

Though not a great deal of weeping at feet goes on in our house, a whole lot of life-changing and peace-making discussion, respectful disagreement, teaching, cooperation, confession, adjustment, humor, and learning do.  This is what we are hoping to bring to this blog.