In April 1973 my great grandmother,
Monte Stanger, turned over in bed, speechless, reaching for her husband. Grandpa Ira didn’t think anything of her embrace. In the morning he got up to make coffee. He returned to the bedroom, unable to awaken
her. The time for aiding her had passed away
when she had vainly reached for him in the night.
I
was eight years old when I overheard this account of grandma’s stroke-- too
young to have my psychological defenses against death dismantled. Until then I’d pretended that death only came
to other people’s families. Facing such forces of destruction so early led me
to become a precocious little philosopher.
So,
it was again at a much too tender age that I picked up Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things at Howard’s
Bookstore in Bloomington. There’s no
shortage of things a young man can lay ahold of in Bloomington, including an ancient
Epicurean philosopher who believed that we are nothing more than atomic
particles in motion. The late Stephen
Hawking likened us to “chemical scum.” The rock group, Kansas, no less starkly said, “all we are is dust in the wind.”
Recently,
I re-read Lucretius, noticing a critical feature of his argument. Lucretius hypothesized that atoms swerve to combine and make an increasingly
complex world. Lucretius never discusses
where such an unaccountable swerve
comes from.
Yet, it’s some swerve! In order for the element Carbon, upon which
all life is based, to have been formed in the slow-burning bellies of ancient
stars, gravity and expansive force had to be minutely balanced. I’m told that the
odds of this happening are like that of one person winning the lottery…numerous
times… in a row. I’m no mathematician,
but when the same fellow keeps winning the lottery, my bet is the game is
rigged.
Indeed, the world does seem rigged, swerving in favor of life against the
odds. So, you will perhaps forgive my
Easter faith for believing that a Presence more loving than my sleeping grandfather
one again swerved down to catch my
grandmother as she reached out in the night.
