First, the symmetry

Tonight after arriving back home from the weekend with my family over in Cincinnati,I finished reading a book I had sitting around for awhile. It is entitled Evil: An Investigation and it is by Lance Morrow. In it he tells the following story: There is a story about the nineteenth-century naturalist Louis Agassiz.

When a student would come to his Harvard laboratories applying to study ichthyology with the great man, Agassiz would go to a shelf in his office and take down a jar of formaldehyde, from which he would withdraw a large dead fish. Placing the fish on a metal plate, he would hand it to the student with the words, "Study your fish."
The student would be instructed to sit in an adjoining room, with no texts and no instruments of any kind, and simply to look at the fish, to study it. Sometimes Agassiz would leave the student in there for hours.
The student at first would be mystified. But after a time, he would begin to do as he was instructed. He would study his fish. He would stare at it, first on one side and then th eother. And he would begin to notice, among other things, what?
First, the symmetry.
That the fish was a marvel of symmetry, a masterpiece of twinned features.

It is interesting to spend time with one's extended family. All of a sudden you begin to see "twinned features" between people that have perhaps missed your notice before.

We gathered to celebrate the 50th wedding anniversary of Kathy's Uncle Bob and Aunt Helen. Their five children were all there, along with their children. Kathy's sister and brother were there as well. I looked at the array of family and I began to see a symmetry that I hadn't always picked up on before. Perhaps the years of looking finally revealed something to me that was there in front of my eyes all along. It was fun to be there and see the varieties of symmetry's that could come from within one family. I saw the same thing around the dinner table at Kathy's folks home as we would gather for meals throughout the weekend and see Kathy and her sister and her brother revealing different dimensions and yet coming together to form each a unique symmetry. Very cool.

And it got me to thinking about the way in which we recognize each other in the church and in the community. Do we look for the ways in which there is symmetry and find ways to put those things together to create something new and amazing? Or do we look and shake our heads and think that nothing coming together is possible. In the church, at least, we do a bit of both.

In the community at large, I fear we rarely ever look for the symmetry. When violence takes off in the community we see it as someone else's problem (though, of course "we" have to do something about it). We have a hard time seeing our part of the symmetry. I see the same thing when I read the paper and see an article about "the breakdown of marriage" in the community -- and instead of looking for the symmetry -- we look for how to fix the people who are broken (you know the people whose "fault" this problem is -- take your pick, by the way, it's a smorgasbord!).

I yearn for vision that is able to see oneself and others we come across as belonging together in a symmetry. It's not my birthday, but I'll still close my eyes and make that wish tonight.