Reshaping life! People who can say that have never understood a thing about life—they have never felt its breath, its heartbeat—however much they have seen or done. They look on it as a lump of raw material that needs to be processed by them, to be ennobled by their touch. But life is never a material, a substance to be molded. If you want to know, life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself, it is infinitely beyond your or my obtuse theories about it.
This morning I awakened pondering a non-fact I learned years ago from a short story by John Updike. Never take science wisdom from a novelist, unless it's a scientist moonlighting as a writer.
Updike posited in one of his short stories that over the course of seven years all of our cells regenerate; we in effect become a different person, in the corporeal sense. The man I was in 2014, seven years ago, no longer exists. A constant state of complete renewal.
Of course, it doesn't actually work that way. Some cells don't hang around all that long--stomach lining and sperm cells only last a couple days. Others are with us for the duration--the balance and fine motor cells that were housed in my skull in 1967 are pretty much all still there. As for the rest, according to an old study by Jonas Frisen, the average regeneration time is in fact around seven to ten years.
They used to tell us brain cells cannot regenerate, which was bad news for a tankardsman like myself. But that isn't true, either. As it turns out, a combination of regular aerobic exercise, sex, and three dimensional video games can cause our hippocampus to gradually start repopulating with new brain cells. I'm not much for video games, but it would seem that slipping the surly bonds every few days and solving things like a dodgy weather approach into an airport at night probably serve as an adequate substitute. Peg and the local YMCA can help with the rest.
So even if the basic premise of seven year renewal is a gross oversimplification, it rests on a foundation of truth. My DNA lives on in each regeneration of cells, and in that most amazing regeneration, my sons.
Of course, with each mutation my DNA changes a little as well, but for the most part this mass of meat sitting here pecking at a laptop keyboard was created from blueprints that formed around the time LBJ was getting sworn in. An incredible thing, when you consider it.
But while I am the same in the sense that each McDonald's franchise is the same, from a canned set of plans, I am different from what I was, and what I will be. The cells that comprise me, and the molecules that comprise those cells, are almost entirely of a much newer vintage, even though nothing is ever really new. Whatever I ate for breakfast this morning is simply being repurposed into a paunchy ex-fighter pilot.
We feel in our bones this sense that renewal is one of the great truths of life. Thomas Merton once said, “There is in us an instinct for newness, for renewal, for a liberation of creative power. We seek to awaken in ourselves a force which really changes our lives from within." Merton was talking about spiritual renewal, but can one really separate the two, the physical and the spiritual? Maybe we are at our best, and our most integrated, when physical, mental, and spiritual are all in flow together in one continuous process of renewal and rebirth, taking what has been given us in the combination of a prehistoric genetic code and a constant refreshing and replacement of our physical selves, and seeking to become whatever our potential makes possible.
Perhaps the analogy is a stretch, but it reminds me of something I ran across a while back, a quote from Pope Paul VI about what I used to do on Sundays: "Liturgy is like a strong tree whose beauty is derived from the continuous renewal of its leaves, but whose strength comes from the old trunk, with solid roots in the ground." Our rituals, our myths, become true to the extent they reflect the reality around us, and the reality we feel within us--Joseph Campbell and George Frazer spent volumes on that topic. In some way, when I used to walk out in front of a congregation, raise my hands, and commence the Liturgy of the Word and of the Table, new every day, with words a fourth century worshiper would have recognized, we were participating together in a scene that came from what we really were, an old script playing out in a new sanctuary.
And this old body of mine is a new sanctuary. I need to start treating it that way, and recognizing the sacramental in the personal rituals of this life.
Well, that was sure a ramble.
This morning the snow started a little before P left to go to work. I shuffled out in pajamas and slippers in the snow at 6:15 to start the Honda and brush the snow off the windshield, a little surprised that this blanket of clouds made for a much less uncomfortable morning than yesterday's sub-zero blast in the face as I walked out the door.
Or maybe my blood is just getting a little thicker.
Selah.
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