The Age of Reason

The age of reason was six, we were told, my first grade classmates and I.  With it came the ability to distinguish evil from good, right from wrong, and the state of sin from a state of grace.  Our baptisms had freed us from the guilt of original sin, a guilt that even then I wasn’t willing to acknowledge because it wasn’t fair.  Now, through confession and the Eucharist we would be fully members of the one, true, apostolic and universal church, unlike the poor, dead, un-baptized African babies who were condemned to the spiritual and sensory deprivation of Limbo.

            While far away in Moscow, Khrushchev was denouncing Stalin, and in New York City, Charlie Parker lay dying, painstaking preparations drilled us in our catechism as if we were a flock of talking parrots and set us to commit to memory the Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory Be, and mea culpa, the Confiteor, the confession of faith.

            We were told the Mysteries.  Ah, the Mysteries; the Trinity, the Immaculate Conception, the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, the Ascension, the tongues of fire and the infallibility of the Pope.  And somehow I began to acquire the elements of an image of the source of all evil as a large, black, monstrous apparition with horns on his head, cloven hooves, ass’s ears, claws, fiery eyes, gnashing teeth, a huge phallus and a sulphurous smell.  All this before the Second Vatican Council, when the priest turned around and started speaking English instead of Latin and we were told not to say Holy Ghost anymore, it was Spirit, Holy Spirit, because we didn’t believe in ghosts.

Ruins of Ephesus

This tiny fragment of marble (8cm) has a story to tell.

Our story takes place in Ephesus, located on the eastern Mediterranean coast in present day Turkey. Ephesus was a Greek city-state of classic antiquity, home to one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, namely, the Temple of Artemis, a many-breasted fertility goddess. It boasted the second largest library in the ancient world after Alexandria.

The façade of the ancient library still greets visitors today. As do the remains of the public baths across the street, featuring an outer courtyard latrine surrounded by marble benches, under which water ran to flush away the waste. Musicians are said to have performed on a platform under a colonnade in the centre of the courtyard to entertain the people as they went about their business, (so to speak).

You guessed it. This fragment was once part of that very toilet seat.

There’s more:

Also to be seen in Ephesus is the House of the Virgin Mary, both a Christian and Muslim shrine. It is believed by many of both faiths that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was taken to this small stone house by St. John and lived there until her Assumption into heaven.

This is clearly the official doctrine of the Catholic Church. Why else would the current Pope say, on his very first foreign trip, undertaken to Turkey, on November 29, 2008:

"From here in Ephesus, a city blessed by the presence of Mary Most Holy, who we know is loved and venerated also by Muslims, let us lift up to the Lord a special prayer for peace between peoples."

It is my contention that this fragment may well be a priceless holy relic.

After all, what can the Virgin have done with her time between the Ascension and her own Assumption? I suspect she must have availed herself of the wondrous library. And when nature called, she must have slipped across to the public toilet, where this fragment of marble, attached as it was to the rest of the seat at the time, almost certainly must have come into contact with the immaculate backside.

Ephesus dwindled and was eventually abandoned in the 15th century as its port silted up and its trade access failed.

How Things Stand

The current thinking is that at the center of stars, the primordial stuff is squeezed so tightly that it fuses; becoming stuff that’s slightly less primordial and that weighs an infinitesimal bit less than the original primordial stuff. This tiny difference in mass is released as radiant energy. We sense the heat. We see the light. We feel the beat.

         Among the people who think about these things, most seem to believe that the universe will continue to expand forever. That is to say, no big crunch; that the possible future or futures stretch much farther ahead than the fourteen billion or so years of the past that have so far accumulated, notwithstanding the idea that there might be no theoretical limit to the size of a hydrogen bomb, or a reactor meltdown, these being fuelled by the most plentiful element in the universe.

We can even go as far as to say that hydrogen has a single proton with one electron orbiting it.

No. But wait. We shouldn't say orbiting anymore. That would be seeing things through the frame of the outdated and discredited Rutherford model. It seems we would be much closer to the truth if we said, more or less hovering around it, or associated with it, in a fuzzy and indistinct sort of way. But even so, we can still feel an exhilarating certainty that hydrogen has one proton with an electron more or less hanging around with it.

Things were once much simpler. The trees of Eden bore both fruits and flowers in the same season. The first realization of Adam and Eve, after eating the forbidden fruit, was that they were naked. They found themselves harvesting the fig tree, for its leaves, not for the figs.