Whose on your Re-birthing Team?

I don’t know about you, but I’m prone to thinking about change and personal growth. As I went to my bookshelves in preparation of this service I found a preponderance of self-help/change manifestation books. And therefore it would come as no surprise that I would like the concept of rebirth. When I was talking about the topic with my friend Sue, she didn’t like it. She was concerned with the concept that rebirth meant that a person was not okay as they were and that change for the sake of change had no inherent worth. I argued that it was more closely related to the idea of metamorphosis and transformation, the idea that we always sought enlightenment, that our changing world was demanding that we change. I told her that using the metaphor of rebirth was a way to reflect on whether it was possible for us to wonder about our lives, to question the pieces of ourselves that we most identify with, the habits that we maintain as “who we are,” and consider who we might assemble as a team to support us in affecting change in ourselves if we wanted to be re-birthed, transformed, metamorphasized, enlightened.

After a while she conceded that everyone was always working on something in themselves, so that she could see that you could assemble a team for rebirthing, just like you assemble a medical team if you are sick, of if you’re training for a big marathon, you might have a nutritionist, a coach…. So if you don’t like the concept of rebirth, you could think about it as working on something in yourself.

So additionally, this service is about wonder.

According to Kelly Bulkeley, in the “Wondering Brain,” (Rutledge: New York, London; 2005) a exploration of the connection between neuroscience and religion, wonder is “feeling excited by an encounter with something novel and unexpected, something that strikes a person as intensely real, true, and/or beautiful.” It is a mystery word. “Wonder may be experienced in a variety of settings, but it occurs with special regularity in four spheres: visionary dreaming, sexual desire, aesthetic experience and contemplative practice.

“To feel wonder is to experience a sudden decentering of the self. Facing something surprisingly new and unexpectedly powerful, one’s ordinary sense of personal identity is dramatically altered, leading to new knowledge and understanding that ultimately recenters the self.” (The Wondering Brain, page 3, 4)

One might imagine that it is a sort of rebirthing.
Bulkeley writes that according to Descartes, who is most famous for his quote “I think therefore I am,” it was pure rationality that was foundational for a new conception of what it means to be human. Throughout his writings, Descartes emphasizes the fact that the capacity to think rationally is inherent in all humans; it is what defines us as a species. But Descartes also wondered about a ‘mixed discourse,’ a synthetic conceptual language that aims to integrate at a higher order of complexity the specialized terminologies of philosophy, theology and natural science with a practical interest in using the new knowledge gained by this discourse to care for suffering individuals and promote a more peaceful social world. His last published book, “The Passions of the Soul” (1649) published a few days before his death, responds to questions posed by his friend Princess Elizabeth regarding the proper role of the passions in a happy, virtuous and religious life. Descartes disagreed with the previous generations of philosophers (especially the Scholastics) and said that they were wrong about the passions when they defined them as purely negative factors in human life that must be eliminated in order to achieve true moral virtue. Descartes argues that our passions are a normal and natural part of being human, even if they can be confusing, obscure and at times unruly. (page 50, 51.) Those passions are interpreted now as emotions.

He sought the connection between mind, body and spirit and said, “Wonder is a sudden surprise of the soul, which makes it tend to consider attentively those objects which seem to it rare and extraordinary.”

Bulkleley concludes that “wonder strikes us before we can judge something to be good or bad, helpful or dangerous, pleasurable or painful. In its radial novelty and decentering impact, wonder momentarily suspends the ordination cognitive filtering processes of evaluation and categorization and heralds a new apprehension of truth, a new vision of the divine, a newly recentered self.
Before the cognito is wonder.

So let us wonder together about rebirth.