THE BIGGEST STORY NEVER TOLD

The old arguments go on and on: the tob and the ra, the one and the many, the real, the imagined, the positive and the negative. There’s no end to it. Indeed, it would seem that the World requires such conflict, such drama, such passionately competing interests; and the only requirement for Drama to thrive is that it be nurtured by limited points-of-view.

The other day, we argued about reincarnation. You opposed the notion partly because you are a doctor and have seen that part of death up close. Or perhaps it was because you are a stickler for evidence and require something you can lay your hands on. I was inclined to lend my voice to the notion of past and future lives, knowing that, at least in your book, I was on awfully shaky ground. I lacked the necessary passion to turn it into a real argument, so yours and Irena’s proclamations seemed oddly adamant.

Later, I couldn’t help thinking what it was that lay behind our differing positions, what personal axes or prejudices were we grinding or furnishing with our language game? I wondered if maybe the Universe, or whatever you want to call the rest of everything that lies beyond the dramas we pretend to understand, was large enough to make both of us right. That would be neat. But if that was the case, it would also have to be large enough for both of us to be wrong. And, even more disconcerting, would have to be big enough - though ‘big’ is much too small a word - for both of us to be both right and wrong at the same time. And then today I got to thinking, what if all our idiosyncrasies of thought and feeling and action would never, ever account for everything that was, is or will be, and that even our best, collective efforts to tidy up the joint - er, I mean the World - having a long tradition of being established on glibly limited perspectives, could therefore only guarantee the production of enough emotional energy to keep the whole contraption ticking over, whether anyone really understood what it was about or not. And I thought, well, if that was the case, then prayer would be a p a u s e, or rather a PAUSE that was a prayer, or a silence, or some kind of wholly, immanent moment in which everything was, is and would be OKAY. Then all that would be left for us to do would be to contemplate a STORY that was big enough to account for everything.

Where does such a story come from, you ask? not too cynically, I hope. They can only come from YOU, or rather ME… or rather US, in the act of “becoming present not-yet”.