Imagine the entire Universe without Man in it.
Stars burning without anyone to see them burn. Galaxies turning in their slow spirals without anyone to wonder. Mountain ranges rising and eroding over millions of years without anyone to know their age. The ocean breaking against the shore in a rhythm it does not know it has. The forest breathing. Light hitting leaves. Time passing. And no one knowing any of it happens.
A cosmos of unfathomable complexity, of beauty that would make an eye weep, if there were an eye. A universe large enough to contain itself - but with no one to know it contains itself. Just matter moving, energy exchanging, physical law unfolding blindly.
Let me point to something we are forgetting.
It is only in Man that this blind reality gets an eye that knows it sees. Only in Man that the universe gets a language to use, to tell and to hear about itself in. Only in Man that creation wakes up to itself and can call the star star, the mountain mountain and love love.
We are the place in the cosmos where the cosmos comes to consciousness of itself. This is not a small task. It is the highest we can bear.
And we have largely stopped talking about it - and therefore knowing it.
Think about what it is just to wake up in the morning. To draw breath. That something takes itself out of sleep's nothing - and suddenly is, sees and feels. That you can hear yourself think. That you can look another in the eyes and know that behind that other face is someone looking back. That two consciousnesses can meet and know they are meeting. We do it every single day - without getting dizzy from it.
But it is - utterly without parallel - the most mysterious thing there is.
And when we go into this being, we do not find a machine. We find an entirely incomprehensibly advanced architecture. The instinct that knows what is dangerous before the brain has reached to think it. The intuition that looks into another face and knows if there is truth or lie, before a word is spoken. The conscience that whispers - even when everyone around us is silent - that knows what is right even when the entire spirit of the age is against it. The reason that can recognize patterns, order experiences, see through arguments, see connections not written anywhere. The heart that binds us to another human being and will not let us go. The imagination, the fantasy that can see what is not yet. The memory that binds us to those who went before, and an unrest that binds us to those and that which must come.
And over and through it all, Awe. The quiet opening that comes over us when we stand before something greater than ourselves.. so we completely forget or are unable to say anything.
None of these are biology. They are channels. They are ways Logos touches the world through us, and through which we touch back.
A human life begins with a breath and a cry. A being grows into reality through a woman, opens its eyes for the first time, and from that moment the world streams in. A face above one. A voice. A breast. The light. And slowly, through years, the Word and language form themselves in this being. Memory begins. The self gathers itself. A human being wakes up to and in order to be itself.
See the arc that a whole life draws.
The infant that does not know where it ends and where the world begins. The child who learns to say I, and suddenly can stand before the world instead of flowing together with it. The young person who finds their first love and discovers that something can tear the heart out of the chest - without it dying. The mature human being who bears children, loses parents, struggles with work, struggles with themselves, learns what it means to give something up for something greater. The elder who has seen so much that it no longer frightens, who has begun to hear time itself pass differently.. who knows the last portal will soon open. And finally the old one who steps across the threshold, home to the source the soul came from.
Every single human being who has lived has carried this arc.
Every single one.
From the first humans in Africa's savannas to kings and peasants, from martyrs and saints to the woman next to you on the train this morning. And they have carried it with a longing toward the same thing.
Love. To be truly seen by another Human Being and to be able to see it to the bottom. Freedom. To act from the inner and not from the outer that wants to own us. Truth. To see what is, not what we wish to believe, and certainly not what we are told to believe. Justice. That the right must have room to grow in. Health. That body and soul live in the same rhythm. Wholeness. That it all will finally one day come together.
These longings are not cultural inventions. They are not something we have learned, not something we can talk ourselves out of, not something that disappears because an age - like ours - has decided they are old-fashioned. They lie beneath language, beneath culture, beneath the individual life as signatures from what has created us. They point back toward their source, because it is the source that has laid them in us.
A human being who has lost contact with them has not found freedom. He - or she - is falling out of themselves.
And that is precisely what we are doing right now. Collectively. Systematically. And deliberately. Against all ages' wisdom. And against modern science, which is otherwise beginning to point to the same thing.
We tell each other that Man is a random animal in a meaningless space. That it is a collection of chemical reactions that has learned to talk about itself. That love is hormones and dopamine. That truth is a social construction. That conscience is internalized shame from childhood. That intuition is unconscious pattern recognition. That awe is an evolutionary response to the inexplicable. That the heart is a muscle. That freedom is the choice between two brands of shampoo. That death is nothing, and that life therefore cannot be much either.
We have made poverty our self-understanding and called it science. Reduced the most incomprehensible mystery to pure measurable materiality.
Man who for a thousand generations has stood in prayer at dawn, who has built cathedrals up from stone over a single verse from a letter, who has laid down his life for another without hesitation, who has seen God in the mountains' blue mist and called it holy, this being now sits and scrolls and is told - by the Man on Television and his many Experts - that it is basically an algorithm. A collection of triggers and responses. That everything it believed about itself was an illusion, an evolutionary echo, a layer of self-deception on top of a layer of biology.
Listen.
This is not development.
It is an amputation.
A spiritual castration.
And the worst thing is actually not the lie itself.
The worst thing is that we have started to believe it.
It is the Lie of our time. Not because it is new, but because it has become self-evident. It lies beneath language and now speaks with our own mouth.
Man is not a biological accident. It is the place Logos has chosen to step forth in the flesh. Created in God's image, one with nature as its crown, not as its enemy, not as its master - but as its consciousness-bringer. And on earth as its steward. The place where creation gets eyes, which can turn toward itself, and say thank you.
That is our position.
That is what we are.
We have forgotten it under a century's nihilism, and the forgetting has reached so far into us, that we have difficulty remembering it even when someone says it aloud.
But the longings are still there. They are there in every single human being. They are there in the teenager crying without knowing why. In the adult who through their successful life feels a hole that cannot be filled. In the old one who has gotten eyes that see something the young cannot see. They are there. And they wait.
We are NOT an error in the cosmos. We are the place where it all becomes, and it is not arrogance to say it. It is the opposite. It is to take the place one - we - are set in.
Humbly and fully.
And we must start reminding each other of it again.
Hold your longings high. They are not weakness. They are not something to be outgrown. They are the most reliable compass there is, because they are set in you, by what has set you here.
And they point home.
Follow.
❤️🔥🪽
