Adaptation

 Adaptation

I closed last week’s writing with “gratitude can . . . become a way of living.  We practice, evaluate, adjust, and practice some more.”  Instead of “adjust,” I wish I had written “adapt.” 

So, up front . . . I want everyone who can, to read this book,  The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela.  Only a few other biologists have so significantly influenced my thinking.  Even fewer have so equipped my biblical interpretations or my assumptions about humans who try to follow the example and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.  

To understand the authors we need to consider their description of biological evolution.  In short “survival of the fittest” can be better described as preservation of adaptation.  

Since Charles Darwin, most have understood “survival” as a species “winning a competition” with a rival or especially as it has been used by Social Darwinism’s commentators, “dog eat dog.”  The authors, Chilean academics present preservation of adaptation as a better shorthand because they see evolution less as a contest between rivals and more as a cascade of multiple outcomes when diverse and unpredictable elements and players are involved over time.  

Instead of Neanderthal vs. Cro-Magnon: Match of the Epochs they see ice ages, diseases, droughts, genetic mutations, floods and more; each taking a part in staging an “evolutionary drift” in the adaption of all life.  Those that “survive” are the ones that have a persisting capacity to adapt to a “world of changes” outside their control.  Another shorthand: think of species diversifying like a snow melt running and branching out down a mountainside instead a single “king of the mountain” nearly frozen on a snowy peak.

If you’re still reading, I thank you.  All before is to say that I feel confident in presenting gratitude as including, perhaps depending on our ability and willingness to adapt to a world that is not under our control.  Adaptation is how our species got here in the first place.  It is what will keep our practice of gratitude viable through victories and defeats, good days and bad days and even through those days we forget to pray like deacons.  

Adaptation and gratitude are mutually effective in furthering each other and in staging our roles as recipients and practitioners of grace, forgiveness and reconciliation.  Practicing one helps us to practice the other.   So we wake up in honesty to remember how we have survived and in humility to look ahead in hope that we may adapt with a world being set free to evolve and change.

FrDann

Habituation

 Habituation

A paraphrase of my closing from last week is that “ . . . hindsight begs honesty / trust begs humility.” I was writing about how we can move forward with gratitude and want now to describe how we might avoid slipping into what looks to me to be a kind of self-hypnosis. (I’m remembering the “little engine that could” puffing its mantra “I think I can, I think I can.”) 

The Deacon’s Prayer (DP), “Lord, I thank you for getting me up this morning” is a great way to start the day but it also serves to promote an ease of spirit when we speak it at the end of the day.  In short there’s never a bad time for the Deacon’s Prayer.  

If seen with honesty, our hindsight can admit a whole day’s worth of things hoped for AND things unexpected.  Closing with an acknowledgment of one’s reliance on God continued from the morning sets the frame and makes it possible to include “all sorts and conditions” in one’s accounting of all which God tends for us in love and mercy.

Because our God is a also God of surprises the humility implied in the DP allows us to make room for God’s time and expects us to give God as much credit as possible for all that has transpired or not in our day.  

Hindsight and humility can be partnered to protect us from a kind of magical thinking that would prefer incantation to prayer, superstition to self-examination, control of outcomes to adaptation. Magical thinking abhors surprises, avoids innovation, and slips into the stubborn insanity of repeating the same action while expecting a different outcome.

Gratitude can be expansive for others as well as one’s self.  But like agape — the New Testament name of “self-sacrificing love for the sake of others” — gratitude does not press itself across boundaries, even those made from fear or hatred but it waits, even persists in confidence to be  recognized by its honesty and humility.

We all know that person and we all remember how we felt when we saw them seeing us struggle.  Our breathing changed, became more prayer-like and our pride no longer prevented us from accepting the company and help of another. 

That’s how gratitude can work and become a way of living.  We practice, evaluate, adjust, and practice some more, so that one day we are “habituated.”  We can inhabit gratitude. 

FrDann

Worship from Following

 Worship from Following

I closed last week’s writing with “This season of Lent is going to help us to see Jesus’ journey to the cross as a labor of divine love and we can make our way — one Deacon’s prayer at a time — onto that path to follow him with our gratitude. 

This gratitude “thing” is not only an attitude adjustment begging for discipline and focus but as much a reaction to one of the other standards of this Lenten season.  The lectionary takes us through “days in the life of Jesus” and each of these days has work or some challenge to his unique purpose and ministry.  First the wilderness temptations, then “Nick at night.” This next Sunday we’ll read of how poorly the disciples — echoing Nicodemus’ take — misunderstood his embracing the moment with the woman at the well.  They were astonished Jesus was stooping to speak with her.   

It’s as if in the Fourth Gospel everyone is playing catch-up because Jesus is resolutely striding so far ahead of us all.  So much for the “Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”  

Just like we see God ahead of us in our temperate northern hemisphere springtime bloom-fest, Jesus is begging us to keep pace and to follow him.  Worship as reflective respite will have to wait because he’ll be puzzling the Pharisees and calling Lazarus out of the tomb before we can wrap our heads much less hearts around his saying things like “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth. (John 14:24) 

So we can try to keep up with him and trust that our understanding will almost always emerge from our experience. It’s called hindsight and it begs our honesty.  We can also remember that God’s love of us will always outlast all our walking or worship. It’s called trust and it begs our humility.  One day we will celebrate as he again calls us — just like he did Peter who denied him three times — and says to us “Follow me.”(John 21:19)

FrDann