Patterns. Happy Sunday!

“If your eye is generous, your whole being is full of light!” Jesus

We humans have an eye for pattern...more than an eye, we have a mind for pattern. We are constantly looking for patterns in the world...and for the meaning behind the patterns. You could almost say that this preoccupation with pattern and meaning is our defining characteristic...it is what makes us human. It is how we define intelligence. Our drive to make sense out of the world around us is, more than anything else, what makes us us. 

Understanding the patters, the way things fit and work together, allows us to predict the outcome of actions...our own and others...as well as natural phenomena. If we can predict, then we can choose our own actions to produce the results we want, or to avoid the results we do not want. We understand this to be a good thing. 

Meaning, on the other hand, is always an extrapolation from the pattern. We can understand how things work without understanding why they work that way. Some of us at least claim not to care about the why...about what it all means...and it easy to forget about the meaning when you are busy playing the angles to get what you want, or to avoid getting what you don’t want. But I firmly believe that you can not separate the meaning from the method...that it is just as much human to ask “what does it all mean?” as it is to ask “how does it all work?” Both are defining aspects of intelligence...of who we are. In fact, you could say, you should say, that it is the pattern we perceive is an extrapolation of the meaning. It is the meaning made real.

There is more than a pattern in the stacked chairs...there is a meaning. :)

The generous eye is always looking for meaning...for what the world around us, for what the universe, is trying to say to us. We see it written in the stars. We see it the eyes of those we live with. We hear it every spoken word. And the message is simple. The meaning is easy to understand. It is love. God is love. God always and forever acts in love. Love is the meaning that informs every action, and love must move us in all we do and are. Love is what holds the universe together, and what, ultimately, really makes us human. We are the meaning, we are love made real, or we are nothing at all.

It is love that is written in the stacked chairs. Or at least that is what the generous eye sees. Happy Sunday!