The Speed of Love

by Stephen Muse, Ph.D.

I spoke with a group of young men and women, who for various reasons had dropped out of high school and were now working on their G.E.D.'s As part of their Stephen Muse_03_resized

program they invite speakers in from various professions as a means of learning as well as to gain skills of social interaction. So now they were talking with a "shrink". I told them that actually psychotherapy was a very old word that means "cure of the soul." It was a novel idea.

So was the fact that life was more than simply survival. I asked them what the purpose of being a human being is. "To reproduce," (chuckle) was the first response. I countered, "Cows can do that. So what?"

"To survive," another suggested.

"If we survive just to survive, what's that worth?" They were stumped. I asked, "If you had never seen a locomotive before and discovered it, could you tell anything of its purpose by studying it?"

One bright young man quickly responded, "It has wheels. It's going somewhere." Indeed. We ended up talking about a lot of things: Riemanian geometry where you can have square circles (Ever thought about that?) and how solutions to "impossible" problems depends on enlarging your perspective from the one that creates the problem.

One young man discovered a creative solution to drawing a circle with a dot in the middle without lifting his pencil off the paper which I had not come across in more than 30 years. From there we moved on to the nature of time and space and how the light from Alpha Centauri, the nearest star to us, is already four years old by the time it reaches us. I asked them what they thought about the position of the earth in space. Is it a special place or more like a penal colony isolated in the Universe from all other life forms?

One young man suggested, "You're trippin, man." I agreed. I am. The world is far more interesting than we tend to realize; certainly more than we discuss on a routine basis. Perhaps we should. We human beings are designed for special purposes. We have spiritual wheels so to speak, but don't use them. Too often we don't even notice. According to Jesus and the Apostle Paul, we human beings are living stones who can sing and dance and pray and love.

We are strings of flesh, played like a Stradivarius by the hand of the Spirit. How is it

that we can so easily eat and drink and reproduce without discerning the Mystery in our midst and of our middle? Does it matter? Or is it more as one fellow suggested, "What's this got to do with today? I'm just trying to survive, man."

Being fully alive and remaining vital and able to love and be loved over a lifetime has to do with noticing what we don't ordinarily see. It has to do with young men and women whose hearts ache to find purpose and meaning in life beyond mere survival, entertainment and reproduction. The light shining in their eyes as they puzzle over how a square can be a circle at the same time or how light traveling seven times around the earth in one second can take four years to get to earth from the nearest star is evidence of something at work far greater than mere survival.

Rabbi Abraham Herschel once defined religion as "what people do with their wonder." How long does it take for God's love in the depths of the human heart to reach the outermost hell of a person's life and turn it completely around? Answer:No time at all.

At the bottom of every human heart there is One who illumines each one of us and calls to us from a perspective that reveals us as capable of far more than we have ever dreamed possible. When even a single spark from this light finds its way to the surface of our lives, we see the world with new eyes. It's contagious. When one soul lights up, the rest of us catch a little fire and the world is a warmer and more creative place. This is part of the great secret which theologian Howard Thurmond recognized and captured in his observation that invites us beyond mere survival: "Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go and do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive."

Contact Stephen Muse at smuse@pilink.org