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Signs of the Times Australia / NZ edition — lifestyle, health, relationships, culture, spirituality, people — published since 1886 |
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Signs of the Times Australia / NZ edition — lifestyle, health, relationships, culture, spirituality, people — published since 1886 |
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You can’t start a fire with logs; you need kindling. Paper, matches and all the sparks in the world won’t get a log going. Shavings, dry twigs and small branches are what’s necessary to start the job. Then the larger branches and, finally, once the fire is roaring and the coals thick and constant in their glow, a heavy, slow-burning trunk.
Stoking fires is a matter of graduation by degree. Timing is essential: wait too long and your kindling will be wasted; impatience, on the other hand, will kill off the kindling’s preparatory work. The satisfaction of seeing a fire start from little nothings to something warming and functional is its own reward.
Life is no different. “Kindling” experiences get us to the logs. All those seemingly unimportant events, incidents, accidents, coincidences and wasted moments aren’t wasted at all. They’re what life needs in order to get fired up about the things that matter. Without these residual experiences, the substantial ones wouldn’t be worth as much. Life’s perspective is gained by the disposables required for generating life’s heat and meaning.
Sitting at my desk, I’m conscious of the accretion of prior historical moments that have served as “kindling” just to produce one simple thought, such as, “I think, therefore I am.” The facility of language, the availability of literature of the past 5000 years, the significance of René Descartes and those who elevated his philosophy to my view . . . I reflect on the tracks of my past that brought me from a childhood in the Pacific to maturation in Melbourne. What I call “my life” required many kindling moments to understand just one piece of Western philosophy. Without all of that, I couldn’t have grasped it, not one log of Cartesian thought would have combusted in my brain.
And this is just one thought in consciousness. Repeat that reflection for every byte of knowledge known in your own mind and in everyone else’s. Pause and think not merely about what you know and experience and the sense you can make of your experience, but of the varied, creative and imaginative explanations you can also give to the same. Life is forested with meaning and multidimensional in scope, and not subject merely to one sense or interpretation. It is full of possibility.
To get to this level of mental sophistication, you and I needed to play cowboys and Indians, with our dolls and trucks, and with our plasticine and playdough. To fire up the log of our lives, we needed to sit staring into space for hours, we needed to dribble over our food, we needed to begin somewhere. None of us arrived full-blown in the world; we needed to find our first steps.
We are “fearfully and wonderfully made” by the hand of God, the Bible says. And we’re still working out just how so. It’s an exciting self-discovery. And anything that has gone before is not wasted; it was all necessary to unzipping the gene code. Every useful discovery, every dead end, every hypothesis nulled, every speculative assumption—they were all needed. I cannot conceive of the original human couple coming into self-consciousness without undergoing the same process of graduation by degrees.
Somewhere along the line (I like to think), they had to learn to light and keep fires going just as we do. Somewhere in their growing, they had to work out exactly the same physics that we have: fires begin with kindling, not with logs—that nurturing a fire requires patience and timing, that it is a precarious venture requiring mastery.
But this evolving journey from kindling to fires affected the person of Jesus too. He who was God and knew humankind’s free will from the outside in, became human and learned what it was like from the inside out, so that we who are human and know God from the outside in, can have a chance of learning godliness from the inside out. This is the mystery of life, its purpose. It is a process that begins now and our choices can either be kindling for our own destruction or the sparks that can bring eternal life and unfathomable light. Like lighting a fire, it takes patience, timing and graduation.
Extract from Signs of the Times, June 2004.
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