December 28, 2007
Cut to the Bone
German anatomist Dr. Gunther von Hagens is the creator of Body Worlds, the exhibit that displays dissection and plastination of the human body. I don’t know what I expected when I first saw the exhibit, but I was surprised that bodies stripped of outer skin and fat all look the same. For instance, with the exception of one specimen that had a tuft of grey hair, all the exposed triceps and biceps looked, well…young. I’m wondering what God sees when He looks at us as individuals. “For the word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart”. Heb 4:12 NIV
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Gail;
-----Please allow me to point out one of our most significant human faults without meaning any criticism of your observation. The observation you made in your blog is very accurate. Inside, we, “…all look the same.” But the statement parts with reality at the expression, “look.” We people do not scrutinize quickly enough or deeply enough to actually notice the multitudes of slight differences in most everything we handle everyday. Take your observation of the sameness of our muscular and skeletal features, for an example. A surgeon’s trained eye would quickly notice differences produced by past disease and injury. Also, some of us are very heavy boned. I am. Others are very light framed. Some have stubby little limbs. Others have rather elongated limbs, meaning of course, stubbier or longer bones and muscles as well. Of course, on the cellular level and in the DNA, the differences are innumerable. And there are probably many other observable variations I can not even imagine.
-----We do not engage our surroundings enough to note and register all the details actually there. Much of the reason is that God wired into our brains a function which filters masses of extraneous information from reaching into the awareness of our conscious life. We are quite used to this, and have learned to deal with it well. It is automatic, and apart from drugs, only careful and deliberate training can somewhat effect it. And although it is a very vital function for reducing the risk of mental overload, it is also the cause of many mistakes, some serious, some fatal.
-----But there is also another very prominent reason for our lack of attention to details. And although its cause is usually rather sub-conscious, it receives its potency from consciously driven attitudes. It is ego and bias, the way we perceive ourselves and the things around us through mental and emotional templates. These act to filter out details we do not wish to deal with from details we acknowledge. We are much more culpable in this process, being led by our own past thinking to even deny details obviously present simply because we do not want something to be that way. These templates cause troubles in our relationships as well as in our own psyche. They are much of what stand in the way of our intimacy with each other, our Lord, and our own deeper selves. The reasons and causes that support the templates are a highly individualized entangled assortment. That is why they are so difficult to alter without the Lord’s simple touch.
-----Occasionally I practice a deliberate system of observing as much detail around me as I can. I often wish that I used such a system more by habit. And I try to see without my templates, but that takes a greater effort yet, and I have not even begun to become good at it. I believe these two things are just common human traits that are blameworthy of most of our errors. But even though they are like prisons confining us from a deeper life, they are also like shelters guarding us from input with which we are not yet capable of handling. They both need alterations and adjustments so that we can see more, but even that has to be done with careful discernment.
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