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Simon writes:
I’m part of a research group – by which I don’t mean I’m being experimented on (not after last time), I mean I join up with other people involved in research and listen to them talk about what they’re working on. Don’t judge me. I’m a very boring man.
This week it was my turn to talk about something I’ve been working on, so true to form I took some bits of work I’ve done in the past, and did something new with them. That last clause almost perfectly sums up my career over the last decade or so.
My paper was called ‘(Don’t Fear) The Reaper(?)’ I like to use parentheses because I think it gives a title some gravitas. No brackets? No interest.
But as you might have picked up, the title was a play on the words of the title of the Blue Oyster Cult Classic – well, not so much a play as a steal. I love that song, and want it to be played at my funeral.
“Seasons don’t fear the reaper,
nor do the moon or the sun or the rain,
we can be like they are…”
When Buck Dharma (aka Donald Roesner) wrote those words, he intended it to be a song about enduring love, but it puts me in mind of the never-ending process of life.
According to “process” thought, what we perceive as life/reality is a constant stream of perishing and becoming. Or if you like, constant, iterative, death and birth. Each moment is a moment of perishing, just as it is a moment of becoming. This process never stops.
The necessity of death and new birth is also baked into the story of Christianity, I am contractually obliged to point out.
When you look at the world like that, I think it puts things into perspective – even things like the decline of the church.
There’s no doubt that the church is in decline in Western Europe and North America, the only question, really, is what to do about it. Lots of money and considerable effort has been spent on trying to arrest the decline, or to put it another way – to prevent the perishing. Everywhere you look, people are burning out as they do their best to shore up their declining congregations.
In my research paper I posed an alternative perspective: What if, instead of trying to stop the perishing, we accepted it as part of the natural order? What if we all stopped trying to stop the perishing, and instead looked for what is becoming? What if we stopped trying to hold up the building and instead looked among the rubble for whatever is growing in the ground?
From the perspective of Process thinking, perishing (The Reaper) is not something to be feared. That’s not to say perishing isn’t painful, sometimes it can be very painful. But it is necessary.
‘(Don’t Fear) The Reaper’ was, I think, heavily based on The Byrds’ version of ‘Turn, Turn, Turn’ by Pete Seeger – listen to the guitar and the vocals, reflect on the content – I think it’s quite obvious. That song was, itself, a reworking of a passage from the Bible. All things have their season, even songs.
I think the wisdom that all things have a time, and that time is limited, is a grand truth. And when seen through that lens perishing/death/The Reaper can be something very positive. It offers the promise of something new to come, because perishing leads to becoming.
Find out more about Blue Öyster Cult at http://www.blueoystercult.com/
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