What lies beneath...

Eagle...swooping down to grab a fish for breakfast...I've never thought about this before, but Gregg Levoy tells a story of watching such a scene in person..."I once saw an eagle drop like a stone into the blue-green water of a bay in the Sea of Cortez. For the better part of a minute, he thrashed around violently on the surface, rising a little and then, it seemed, being yanked back down, sometimes nearly underwater.

Finally, he rose, clapping his wings loudly against the water, and lifted out a fish almost as large as himself..." -Callings

Moral of the story? Whatever lies beneath the surface will usually put up a fight to stay there...

Referencing Carl Jung, Levoy says it's a foregone conclusion that whatever we're unwilling to face in ourselves, we'll be forced to confront in the outer world...that our past does not obediently stay in the past...and that our lives will conspire in a hundred ways to call us toward the very things that we are trying to avoid. I think it's fair to say that this observation is probably one of the truest things I've ever read...at least as it relates to my own life experience.

I've read quite a bit about the idea that our loves from childhood inform us of the person we truly want to be, and the life we most want to live...at my age however, being a Major League pitcher or an NFL quarterback seems terribly unlikely...there must be something else that lies beneath, and I'm missing it...

Interestingly enough, I don't know that scripture really speaks very much to this subject at all. Well, there is the one Proverb that says: "Raise up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it." ...one of the most quoted and misunderstood sentences in all of scripture, if you ask me. I've heard the verse explained in a myriad of ways, all of which could be true, and if that be the case, I think it can be understood to mean whatever you would like for it to mean.

For me, the apparent absence of this topic in scripture is pretty fascinating...does God take an active interest in this part of our life experience? If, as I said earlier, he is most interested in the truthfulness of our heart, perhaps God grants free license for us to be the person that we desired to be as children, before the influences and rules of the world began to shape and twist us into an externally acceptable version of our true self. As I step back and read this, I have to laugh at myself....I might be one of only three people in the world who give a rat's patooty about this kind of pscyho-babble, but I do enjoy it, and find the wrangling about with words and ideas and philosophy to be good fun. Perhaps this is what lies beneath for me...