More Black on Grey
Light on the surface of the moon
Cari Brackett asks about the Black on Grey post,
I’m struggling mightily to hear and understand the message. What do you mean by “There’s no escape when you’ve touched the black hole’s event horizon. But you can convert.”?
It’s so helpful to get feedback like this, and I intend no sarcasm. I agree; that was unclear. Let me try to improve, in the daylight, what I wrote on a sleepless night.
A black hole’s event horizon is the spherical boundary that marks the point of no return as gravity pulls you toward it. Anything that falls within the event horizon, including light, will not escape. So, as you fall down the well of depression, there may be a point from which you will not return. Or at least it feels that way.
The same metaphor applies, with greater force, to the end of life. If the oncologists are correct, and my case is incurable, I am already touching the event horizon. We are just waiting until matters play out. On that dark night — notice that the sky has no stars in Rothko’s painting or the moon lander photograph — I’m the dead man walking.
But that man has remarkable freedom; soon, he will have nothing to lose. St Thomas Aquinas wrote that
the end of all human actions and affections is the love of God, whereby principally we attain to our last end.
Conversion means going all in on this.
An expanded version of the Cancer in Advent post has just appeared at Mockingbird, a magazine and community devoted to writing about religion and culture.
It's Kierkegaard's leap of faith. It's not until you've been trapped in that black hole with no possibility of escape that you even have the option of actually making that leap. Prior to your own ultimate catastrophe, your faith is merely an opinion in your mind based on fantasy. Your faith might reassure you regarding the everyday ups and downs of life and the unfortunate results of the trauma you've faced, perhaps before you were old enough to defend yourself. But it's a rare person who makes that true leap of faith before they face their own death. Only then have you passed the event horizon.
Thanks for explaining Bill, I didn’t understand either.
A group of us have been meeting for lunch at Tokoro, we’ve become attached to our Korean waitress, Joy. One week she was sad, a man at a Church she recently joined had died of cancer. That was a month ago. Today I asked her what she would say to him, she had only been able to say ‘Hi!’ when she briefly met him. Joy said she would say that she lives her life like a sphere, there is no front and no back, her journey is not linear, she tries to complete the sphere every day, each day a day of purpose and no regrets…. that she was sad, he hadn’t done anything wrong.
All in.
Chris