The Call
Picture by Rhonda McMahon
The Call
“Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you.”
Sep 09, 2024
I had lunch with my older sister yesterday and listened to her stories of her recent arctic expedition. What a delight it was to see the stunning pictures and glimpse the soul light dancing in her eyes. She shared the stories of polar bear, walrus, and musk ox encounters in a landscape, or better said, an ice-scape that has been trodden by few two leggeds. There was intrigue as the Canadian Coast Guard contacted the ship to say an ice sheet was heading their way and they need to depart James Sound asap or else be trapped. Should this happen it would take 8 days for an ice breaker to free them. This is the high arctic where something greater than the human rules. Nature is a most powerful Master. There was a visit to Grise Fiord to hear the heartbreaking history of relocation from the descendants of the survivors. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Arctic_relocation) There was a stop at Beechey Island and a solemn visit to the graveside of the lost sailors. That the ships were named HMS Terror and Erebus seems to have set the trajectory for the tragedy that followed. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin%27s_lost_expedition) The stories of my sister’s adventure of a lifetime are hers to tell. I hope she will tell them. Often. She has become to me, an Ambassador of the North. While an expedition to the high arctic is not an adventure I feel called to make, we are all called to adventure. Life finds meaning in answering the call. I am so very proud of my sister for answering this call. At 66 years of age!
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
An illusion persists in the West that we pursue happiness. I disagree. Happiness is a byproduct. What the soul truly seeks is meaning. The story in Genesis tells us that Abraham was an old man when God called him out of his father’s tent and hedonistic life to adventure. He was a good deal older than 66. The Lord had said to Abram, “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you.” Abraham is considered the common Hebrew patriarch of the Abrahamic religions, including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. While it is disputed whether a historical Abraham ever existed, the story persists as an archetypal pattern. Mythos is oftentimes truer than true. We live in the stories we tell and are carried by the stories told of us. I had a Jungian teacher who once insisted on the literal story of Abraham. He decried Abraham’s failures as a father to Ishamel and Issac. Abandonment of Ishamel and his mother, Hagar, and attempted filicide of Issac are part of the story, and maybe even hidden in the persistent religious strife raging in the middle east, but to literalize archetypal patterns is to lose the plot. There is always a story and a Story.
I listened to a podcast on my way home from my sister and her stories, about the nature of existence and the nature of God. It was deeply philosophical and intense. What I conclude at this point is, when we answer a higher call we improve ourselves, our lives, and the lives of others.
“I will make you into a great nation,
and I will bless you;
I will make your name great,
and you will be a blessing.
I will bless those who bless you,
and whoever curses you I will curse;
and all peoples on earth
will be blessed through you.” Genesis 12 NIV
When we seek hedonism alone, our life turns in on itself and becomes cannibalistic. When we deny, distort or deflect the higher call, we wallow in anxiety and nihilism. The so called new atheists and their intolerance of superstition, religion, and irrationalism as the way to betterment of the species and the planet, have been little more than snake oil salesmen. The pseudo religion of scientific rationalism is in decline. The pseudo religion of woke ideologies is burning itself out. Some say we are on the threshold of an awakening. The waning tide of religion posited by the poet Matthew Arnold in his prophetic poem, Dover Beach, has perhaps reached its zenith and is turning. Nietzsche warned, God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? Surely scientific discovery has its place. In of itself it can be a call to adventure, if it is not mired in corruption. The same can be said of politics and most ideologies. What we have to discern is what exists at the top of Jacob’s ladder, the end of the journey, the summit of Sinai, the voice in the centre of the burning. We have to discern the Logos or else we follow the wrong god home. When god is dead, what have we made our religion?
There is an instinct in the human that C. G. Jung called a religious instinct. Take that in. The human and the animal have innate, typically fixed patterns of behavior in response to certain stimuli. Some would call these archetypal fields and archetypal patterns. Jaan Panskepp, a radical neuroscientist posits that human beings are driven by seven ancient instincts, or “primary-process affective systems”. These are: seeking, anger, fear, panic-grief, care, pleasure/lust, and play. Note that some of these are what we would deem positive and some negative. Freud was not far off the mark to posit the contradictions inherent in human nature between both Eros and Thanatos. We are called to Life or we are seduced to Death. Make a choice. What is death to one is life to another. And vice versa. The call is unique to every individual. Isn’t the task of this great adventure called life to discern What or Who is making that Call? Ethos in not only a human construct. Nietzsche posed the question about the source of morality and created a mythos around the Übermensch: but, Jung would argue, and I concur, morals are both subjective and objective. Madness is in the splitting. We are made and we make a life based on what or who sits at the summit of our yearning, the depth of our longing, the breadth of our reaching. Consciousness as a human evolutionary marvel, is the awareness of this. We are the eyes of the universal looking back on itself. Maybe ethos is also an instinct?
I had a deep discussion with a colleague about the sentience of the non human world. In her experience, in her life’s work, in the courageous purpose of her life, she believes a spectre haunts our philosophies. To paraphrase her, humans are neither the source nor destination of consciousness as most of our foundational philosophies take as self evident. Consciousness is the alpha and omega of life. All life. Human and non human. If this integral consciousness be the elusive God, doesn’t our human purpose shift dramatically? To become conscious, to seek consciousness, to apprehend consciousness are perhaps the whispers of Logos. Logos is defined as the divine reason implicit in the cosmos, ordering it and giving it form and meaning. At the trail head of the adventure called life, is Logos the cry in the wilderness, the voice in the burning bush, the compulsion to go on a polar expedition? This is so beyond Darwinism. So beyond hedonism. Maybe beyond or implicit in any of the great religions? Is this Intelligent Design incarnate in the mythos of Abraham? Jesus? Buddha? Mohamed? Does it really matter how it is represented? Isn’t it more significant that it is represented? In a life. In a work of art. In a grand adventure. In the conception of a child. In the unconditional love of an animal. In the stewardship of a 100acre wood?
I suspect my sister will never be the same after her polar adventure. I am convinced that it has changed her, changed us, changed the world we inhabit. God promised an old and childless Abraham that He would bless him and his descendants so that all the families of the earth would be blessed. The blessings of answering the call to adventure are as numerous as the starts in the sky. Oh, and how many stars can one see against a high arctic skyscape? In image and in story, my 66 year old sister has gone where few have gone before and brought back an ethos. Ethos is defined as a Greek word meaning 'character' that is used to describe the guiding beliefs or ideals that characterize a community, nation, or ideology; and the balance between caution and passion. The Greeks also used this word to refer to the power of music to influence emotions, behaviours, and even morals.
I close these musings with the poetry, the logos-music of Tennyson. To my Ulysses-like sister, I bow with deep respect:
It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy'd
Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when
Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour'd of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,—
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.
There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me—
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'T is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Alfred Lord Tennyson, Ulysses