Into the Essence
The word ‘interest’ is a reminder that you have the intellectual faculty of placing your mind ‘into the essence’ of things. Your capacity to wonder, to be caught, to interest yourself in reality is an aspect of the child-likeness you’ll need to get to Heaven. Here are a few things my interest has caught:
The Brain
Oliver Sacks’ books are fascinating. He was a neurologist who wrote up many of his cases for a lay public. My favorite is Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, where his cases illustrate the amazing power of music to provide a coherent context of personhood, even when the brain seems to have lost that power. I loved his own autobiography, Uncle Tungsten, as well, and wish we all could see the museum display of every element in a huge periodic table that so fascinated him as a child. Dr. Sacks’ experience ‘waking up’ long-term patients with sleeping sickness became an Academy Award-winning movie, Awakenings (with Robert De Niro and Robin Williams). I wish I could recall the exact book where a couple of autistic boys are described in the midst of their delightful play with prime numbers. Dr. Sacks never diverges to say ‘glory to God,’ but such stories inspire me to!
The Tongue
PoNS is the Portable Neuromodulation Stimulator that is out to change the world. Norman Doidge, in his book The Brain’s Way of Healing, described the university research then being done to get this miracle worker into common use. Its developers hypothesized that the brain might be nudged into reorganizing itself through electrical stimulation of the tongue. I don’t know how the news that MS patients who can barely walk are now hiking mountains with renewed strength isn’t on every front page! Such is the pace of medical research, I suppose. I had no idea the tongue’s proximity to the base of the brain made it, literally (as Scripture pointed out,) the ‘rudder’ for the whole person. You will never receive the Eucharist the same way again, after reading about PoNS! I also loved Doidge’s first book, The Brain That Changes Itself.
The Placenta
The placenta fascinates me so much that my friends and family almost groan when they hear the word. I know, I know: you’re tired of hearing about it! I used it in a new context, speaking at Benedictine College about Building Community. It surprised me that comparing the Church to a placenta was a surprise to my audience. To me, it seems obvious that there needs to be a mediating structure between things that are utterly disproportionate, in order to rightly order the flow between them. Wouldn’t the Church be that structure within which the rich supply from all Her means of grace is mediated ‘down’ into the people to raise up the life of Christ within? Wouldn’t the Church be that protective, nurturing structure that helps buffer the world’s toxic load from poisoning the dear One growing inside? Wouldn’t she be the two-way means of communication between the matrix of space-time and the higher order of the Kingdom and Eternity? Just thinkin’.
Well, that’s it for now. I would dearly love to hear what fascinates you, where you place your interest, what topics you could talk about for hours. Please let me know! Editor@ChestertonAcademyKC.org