It popped in my head the other day, waiting in line at the grocery store, that “the love of life is the beginning of wisdom”.
Ponder for a moment the cultural significance of the Christian admonition to hold this life in contempt, to risk all now, for a better life to come. William James has convinced me, in some of the stories he relates in “Varieties of Religious Experience” that some people genuinely do become filled with light, but those people become happy NOW as a result. They become good people, pleasant people, loving people.
But I feel many, many people use religion to hide from life, and that their “devotions” make them mean and even cruel. It may seem odd that so many Catholic priests are pedophiles–obviously as a pedophile anything that gets you close to children works–but it seems to me they already live in a world of abstraction, one made concrete for them by their crimes. Abstraction is the realm of the traumatized, and no one commits acts of willful cruelty who has not themselves in some way been pushed out of their natural bodies and selves.
The love of life, though, becomes naturally the love of others–and starts with love of one’s self–and love itself is the essence of wisdom, or so I believe.
I was discussing the other day with my youngest a story related by Jean Houston about meeting Helen Keller. She was struck by how radiantly joyous she was. My youngest, naturally, said that it would be great to be really happy, but she would hate to be blind and deaf.
I pondered it for a moment, and said that maybe there is another sense, one which seeks out happiness, and that most of us are blind in that direction, but Helen Keller was not.
We both thought this was deep, and I share it with you.