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Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul
that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And
cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in
utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
William Wordsworth
"As man is, God once was.
As God is, man may become."
C. S. Lewis,
The Weight of Glory:
It is a serious
thing," says Lewis, "to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting
person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a
horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping
each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe
and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves,
all play, all politics. There are no 'ordinary' people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations
-- these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry,
snub and exploit -- immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We
must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who
have, from the outset, taken each other seriously -- no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be
a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner -- no mere tolerance or indulgence
which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment.
...men
are, that they might have joy.
2 Nephi 2:25
My Dad, Jack Davidson, was cool. When younger he won first place in stock car races with the old jalopy he had
turned into a blur of speed, performed in a country music band (playing songs like “Tennessee Waltz” and “Hear
That Lonesome Whippoorwill” at Trestle Creek Inn near the tiny town of Hope), moved massive amounts of earth with a
bulldozer, felled a scandalous amount of trees, built our home himself including electric, plumbing, water well, etc. and
wrote poetry to boot. In his seventies he often could be found careening around sand dunes on the Oregon coast in a homely
dune buggy that he had built from scratch. When the young whippersnappers with their shiny new buggies got stuck in the sand
my Dad would graciously pull them out with his muscle buggy.
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