Friday, August 5, 2011

We see a dim reflection.

Still on a bit of a detour from the usual.
In Kenya, as in Ireland, England, etc., they drive on the left side of the road. Anyone who has ever driven under these conditions has some dificulty adjusting to making right turns and responding to a threat that is coming in your direction; your tendency is to respond to the right as the safe place of escape. My personal belief is that this condition points out that, to some degree, all humans suffer from some form of left/right confusion. (Here is a test...try cutting your own hair using a mirror...then 2 mirrors! Thank your dentist that he has this issue trained out of him!) The really interesting thing that is revealed by driving on the wrong side of the car when the 5-speed gear shift pattern is the same as ours is that we are not as rational as we think we are...or ought to be. The shift pattern appears to have a schematic logic which we think is put into play as we use it daily. We soon forget that it took a few minutes (or days for some) to master the pattern because we are more concerned with the obvious difficulty of higher priority = stalling the vehicle. Clutch and gas and brake and shift and turn all have to be worked in concert so we misunderstand how the process came to fruition. Once it is done, it seems to be a thing that was pre-destined.
Driving on the wrong side of the car is an oblique commentary on this supposed sense of destiny. If asked, we would probably say that we are folowing after the prescribed logical pattern of shifting gears that is outlined on the shift knob -- 1 up, 2 down, 3 over/up, etc. Drive on the wrong side of the car and the pedals remain the same, as does the shifter. The prescribed pattern is the same. The logic of your brain is the same. Guess what you will do more than once?? You will down-shift when you want to up-shift or vice versa. You will! Shifting gears like this demonstrates that you store the activity in your mind in relation to your body core, not because it makes sense. I assure you that you feel very helpless when you are passing a farm tractor with a truck approaching from over the hill ahead and you senselessly (irrationally, stupidly, maniacally) up-shift and feel the vehicle speed slump when you needed Pep, pizzzaz, Go-get-em (as my dad would say.)!
Pre-destined, Calvinist type people seem to be mostly right-handed people in a right-handed world of their own making or choosing. God forbid they be put into a simple test condition of left-handed consciousness (in other words, give up their Augustinian nonsense about a Greek style ball of fire they CALL God and accept the Old Testament Jesus as really, fully God Himself...the LIVING Word!) to see whether there may be some right/left confusion they have avoided by refusing to use mirrors.
Another solution might be to try the hair-cutting test above and laugh uproariously at the results. Absurd, little provisional creature. Your only eternal hope is to trade in your sin as raw material for new creation (2 Cor. 5:21...you weren't made righteous in advance). Come to the cross!

No comments:

Post a Comment