Recycle all souls, recreate all saints

Carbon, the building block of life consists of matter and energy. The “and” intends to describe, not separate. Simply, in its solid, fluid, and gaseous state, carbon is matter. In its sub-atomic state, it is a wave or a field of energy. It is, however, indivisible.

Recent research has also confirmed that the class of compounds critical to earth’s biochemistry is prevalent throughout the universe. In Newtonian physics, they are indestructible.

This understanding of life undergirds the Greek concept of sarx and pneuma, body and soul, a dichotomy that represented two ways at approaching reality, first, through the flesh and its substantive qualities, and the other, through the spirit with its energy and power. This was not science. This was about perspective, or in today’s lingo, attitude. As concepts, body and spirit can be separated, but as reality, they are inseparable.

In many religious symbolism, the cycle of birth-death-and-rebirth is common. Early Egypt thought of the sun (Ra) as being born in the morning and dying at dusk, to journey into the underworld only to be born again the following day. The pharaoh’s power was derived from the myth that through his person, knowledge, and will, he can effect the resurrection of the sun each day.

Promoting and propagating life is flesh while defying the limits of life to effect transformation is spirit. Many journey narratives, from Homer’s Odyssey to Capote’s In Cold Blood bewail the travails and the weaknesses of the flesh and glorifies the strengths and the triumphs of the spirit.

Unfortunately, literalism of our mythology, scriptural and otherwise, wrought havoc on our science and practical operating vision. Our management of “reality” suffers from the strict dichotomy between body and spirit. This dichotomy has become an accepted tenet in explaining not only human behavior but also making sense out of contradictory dimensions of existence itself. While this has conceptual merit, presumed conflicts are often translated into substantive characterizations beyond the bounds of the mind. Body becomes the bad boy, and spirit is the angel of redemption.

The yin-yang perspective is one window where a seeming contradiction can be perceived as complimentary dualism. Imaginatively, the yin perspective is made whole only as a compliment of the yang. The picture clearly shows that one is nothing without the other. In each is a portion of the other.

In contemporary literary coinage, “soul” is referred to as earthy power underlying flesh and bones. But soul food is not only bounty but finesse. Soul brother and sister have the force of umbilical cord sibling-hood. In our time, this is the closest to the reunification of the apartheid imposed on body and spirit by Graeco-Roman Judeo-Christian traditions in the last two millennia.

Shift the internal camera to the external world, say, to the environs of Saipan’s Chalan Kanoa by Mt. Carmel Cathedral the first of November. In the midst of the whitewashed crypts and the beflowered tombs, the mini-mausoleums and the above-ground catacombs, sepulcherian motifs are enshrined in memorials of the departed. In this matrilineally guided culture, nothing unblocks the floodgates of tears faster than the memory of the late grandma! Nothing moves the beads of the rosary faster than getting loved ones out of the confines of purgatory into the comfort zones of the saints.

Medieval mythic cosmology splits body and spirit into the realms of hell and heaven where the struggle for final destination is fought over the terrain of the flesh. The saints make it beyond the confines of the flesh into the blessedness of innocence and paradise.

Demythologize this cosmology into the street smart level and you are left with the gracious practices of earthly survival. Not the perverted dog-eat-dog cynicism of decadent Darwinism but the flowering of the evolutionary soul in its profound depth, heights of greatness and breath of glory.

The slit-eye view sees ancestors not as spirits to be saved from the perdition of hell but as ordinary personae of constant memory. Their images are best kept familiar in one’s own journey, revered and celebrated with fruits, candles and incense in a designated corner in one’s abode, or around a solid post in one’s dwelling. Annually, the same ancestors serve as a convenient excuse to gather kin and neighbors around a table by the grave where mah jong is played, and one’s good fortune is subtlety heralded abroad.

All souls’ day venerates the ineffable carbon, the eternal stuff of life that keeps getting recycled. All saints, now called ‘heroes’ in our time, are the congregates of carbon molecules, exemplary ones who embody in their human lives Gaia’s nature in all her chaotic splendor, revering this indwelling in the Land of Mystery. They embrace the struggle of ascent and descent into heights and depths, and dare keep repeating these Promethean and Sisyphean strangleholds as labor of love in the Mountain of Care. They think beyond conventional boxes and wander away from the straight and narrow, meandering through the bends, detours and flourishes of the mind as a wild ride down the way less traveled in the uncharted River of Consciousness. The saints sail and surf in the Sea of Tranquility, ever lucid that under the calm surface runs the undercurrents and undertows of indeterminate fortunes, and the future emerges not from the architectonic of deliberate bureaucratic planning but from the ravages of unpredictable monsoons and mercurial equatorial flows.

All souls, they will keep getting recycled. In the name of the Father. All saints, we will keep recreating them. In the name of the Son. The blessed Mother will look at her heroic off-springs, and see them as Holy. The Force – body and soul—IS with you!

(Strictly a personal view. Vergara writes a weekly column for the Saipan Tribune.)