With my recent shift in jobs, I’m still driving a school bus, and still driving for a private school (which, for my American friends, means religious/faith based school here in Manitoba). These things are the same.
I have seen a very real shifts though in location and the students. I have shifted from a rural setting to the city, and from most to not all Christian kids from a uniform background to driving a busload consisting of no less than 10 different ethnic backgrounds and 7 different religious expressions.
Which has been really interesting for me. Given that it is a private school, there is a certain degree of freedom I have in discussing matters of religion and faith that I wouldn’t have elswhere, only in this case I find myself engaging with a very real diversity of opinions and convictions and perspectives. I’ve been really appreciating learning from them while also challenging myself to think about the universality of such discussions and concerns. I’ve also been struck by how the students are not afraid to talk about religion at all. In fact, they seem genuinely interested in it.
This past week one such subject was the idea of heaven, or eternity. Strictly speaking, it’s a topic that requires some imagination, as we don’t really have good language for it. I was curious to see how this subject might translate in the midst of the diversity of those imaginations that make up my busload. Here there is both overlap and specific departures, but all pointing in a similar way to the problem of death.
Usng my own imagination, I might begin with this simple observation.
I thought about how we experience time from a finite perspective. So much so that it is common to think in terms of borrowed time, or the concept of making the best of the little time we have. This is the language that we have. Time begins. Time ends. And we experience this in the space between birth and death. To begin to imagine a universe with no beginning or no end, scientifically, philosophically or religiously, is a bit of an impossibility, because we don’t have language for it. It’s not something our brains can comprehend.
And yet, at the same time, if we compare an era when life expectancy was 40 with an era when life expectancy is 80, we can see how easily we shift our value systems accordingly to fit the potentiality that this given life span represents. We don’t decry that added 40 years, we shift our expectations of what a good life is. We see anything less than that expectant life span as lost potential and, on some level, a tragedy. Thus, it would seem natural to at least consider that our tendency to make finiteness a value in and if itself perhaps should be given pause. If 80 years is our present reality, it seems reasonable to conclude that it’s, at the very most, a contextualized reality.
This is one part of the equation. The other part of the equation relates to the quality of a life. It’s one thing to talk about length of years, It’s another thing to talk about the quality of those years. The reason we know the language of finiteness is because we experience decay, suffering and death. This is, then, the measure of a life according to our potential. The potential becomes the value. But what happens when we shift this measure from matters of quantity to the question of quality. What kind of life do we experience in the in-between space, and how does this become a measure of our value. Here things become far more complex.
In some sense, it is the collison point between expected life span and the quality of our experience that informs the push and pull of these values. This is how we arrive at the concept of potential as the driving value system that governs existence. Potential is driven by norms, and norms require context. Context is shaped by our experiences of the present. Thus, if experiencing finiteness as a measure of 80 years with a plethora of medicines, practices and tools that can alleviate sickness and suffering is our context, and this context has been normalized by our culture, then potential becomes an incredibly fluid and malleable notion. Especially when you begin to apply these norms to contexts that are not our own. This brings up numerous questions:
1. At what point do we deem the notion of our potential to have been exhausted?
2. How do we measure what we might call unrealized or unreached potential? Do we imagine this potential to have limits?
3. Is something like suffering deemed to be an enemy of potential only within the parameters of our constructed norms, or is it deemed simply to be an enemy of potential and thus something that needs to be done away with? The same question could apply to death. When we think of unrealized potential, do we imagine this only reaching so far? What is the aim of progress in this regard?
4. Can our concern for the present ever be detached from our assumptions about this unrealized potential?
Here is the thing. The language of finiteness depends on our experience of suffering, decay and death. This is what defines our reality as a “kind” of reality (one which experiences suffering, decay and death). All discussions of potential are held captive not onjy to this reality, but our context. Time as we know it exists only because of the existence of suffering, death and decay.
At the same time, life is defined by its potential. This potential exists in opposition to suffering, decay and death, even as it is also held captive by it. This becomes the working tension that we carry forward into discussions of the eternal or the infinite. In truth, and this is something that philosophy can demonstrate, for as long as our reality is defined by suffering, decay and death it cannot speak the language of eternal or infinite. It can only broaden the parameters, and as I reasoned above, there is no reason to believe that such broadening has a limit. To speak in terms of the eternal and the infinite requires one to imagine a different kind of reality altogether, one that requires a different language to be expressed. One defined by the absence of death.
If this is all true, then I think we can see how the language of finitensss tells us two essential things; First, death, suffering, and decay is in fact an enemy of life, not its definition. Second, the fact that we think in terms of potential tells us that in some way, shape or form, we understand that finiteness is not our primary language. We may have lost our mother tongue, but it nevertheless is still present in the ways that life continues to exist in opposition to death. Finiteness is not a value, it is a problem that needs a solution. The real awareness emerges when we consider that finiteness is not a problem that can ever be solved by simply broadening our parameters. We need a different reality to break in and not only transform our thinking and our language, but to redefine and change our experience. To give us a different context through which to measure the notion of potential.
The Stories of my Life 