"Progress............"

Heraclitus, a 5th century Greek philosopher, noted that: “Whatever is, is changing. You never step into the same river twice, because the river is in constant flux and out of flux. In fact, it is nothing but flux. The only thing that is permanent is change.” Cratylus, his disciple, took such thought a step farther, declaring “Not only do you not step into the same river twice, you do not even step into the same river once! Why? Because the river is not the only thing that’s changing; you are changing as well. The same you is not constantly you. With the passing of each fraction of a second, your physical and mental makeup is imperceptibly in transition.” Not to be outdone, then, Parmenides, the disciple’s disciple, opined “Whatever is, is; for while things may appear to change in form, in substance they are permanent. Just as energy cannot be created or destroyed but is always there in some form, so life has an indestructibility to it.” Boil all of that down and it would seem to suggest the Biblical statement that, while within man exists eternity, yet there’s this present journey wherein everything, including man, himself, is in a constant state of metamorphosis, the puzzle always more than he can completely conquer and, as Yogi Berra once said: “Even nostalgia is not what it used to be.” I recently read somewhere the description of how our society is walking through a maze of cultural land mines and the heavy prices being exacted as we send our children on ahead. Has not that long been our history, however? If today seems any different than how it has always been, perhaps sit is only because we sense the possibility of having finally arrived at such point in time where we now have the capability to extinguish all that we know, the enigma not yet solved and our intelligence not quite what we believed it to be. For the religious, there is, of course, faith. And yet the question merely becomes “faith in what?” In what do we anchor our souls? In a doctrinal dogma stitched together out of our own reasoning? In a denominational list of “thou-shalt”s and “thou-shalt-nots”? Or in a resurrected Reality who long ago said of Himself that there was nowhere to lay His head, His only point of assurance found in a connection known with His Father. For me, that same umbilical cord is what feeds all else. Indeed, ANYthing else is just a theology under construction, developed as I go, following Him through the veil……