I am going to file this under ‘Everyman’s Divinity’ because whatever it is that makes us different from other beings should be considered as akin to whatever the divine might be.

On one hand we are animals, do all the things that animals do, functioning physical systems.

On the other hand we are different than that, it is not a matter of having more of some feature, we are that and are also beyond that.

An Auden poem, pinned on the wall above me, makes me feel more myself whenever I read it, it has to do with the nature of love, of unqualified love. This comes from other than a functioning physical system.

I am aware of this specialness when I call Bert ‘my old friend’ and he smiles back at me, shakes my hand , thanks me. There is a connection that is more than two beings existent at the same place. Yes I know that elephants do something when one of them is about to die similar perhaps, but love is a different kind of thing; I know that someday I will be dying, that I will be where Bert is:

I am more complete for knowing that right now.
A sparrow is what a sparrow is, will not, can not be otherwise. But I am what I am because of how I see my father, how I attached to one teacher or another, how and who I loved, and was loved, or not. What I am is not fixed, it is an open endedness that is frightening because where I am going is unchartered. Knowing this makes me special, you special, each is special.

That Jesus needed to experience complete humiliation, rejection, torture and murder in order to complete whatever it was that he was about—-that is special. Each of us should remember that example, feel the power of that example, try to understand it.

That we have common threads is not a surprise nor takes from our specialness, that Joseph Campbell or Carl Jung could catalog these threads seems to me a boring and mundane effort, my reaction always was ‘so what’.

I am going to leave this page for now, may add to it later.