Jacqueline wrote to me yesterday, asking how I was because she hadn't seen anything written by me on the blog since June. I replied saying I was fine, it was simply I have been busy this summer with my studies for a Diploma of Palliative Care at King's College, London. Somehow there was no space for anything else.
So I find a double cause of celebration today, both the main part of my studies are over, and now I know we have our “ silent witnesses” who, like Jacqueline, follow our progress on the blog. Perhaps there is a multitude of them. We are encouraged.
I'm glad to be back here on this blog, where we find two writers, ak and mmj, in one place. Being two in one place, it helps us to measure words. We have to give space to each other’s writing, or put another way we are continually measuring equidistance.
I think the quality of equidistance has been absent in our lives as we have struggled with the separate projects which we had both taken on in the last year; ak going to Rome and meeting the ‘big mind’ of the Catholic Church; myself joining an academic department at King's College and meeting the ‘big mind’ of scientific medicine. Our two experiences have obviously been very different, but one thing we have shared in common is perhaps this absence of equidistance, as both these ‘big minds’ have pressed our noses hard up against the glass behind which wisdom is expected to reveal herself.
So I'm glad to be back here on this blog today, where we consciously and robustly measure equidistance.
There's something else we share here, which was also denied us in the last year of our experiments as trainee priest and trainee academic, and that is the experience of emergence. On the one hand, Revelation according to the ‘big mind’ of the Catholic Church, can anything emerge after His revelation some two millennia ago? On the other hand, Revelation according to the ‘big mind’ of scientific medicine, can anything emerge after the closure assumptions of the ‘classic experimental’ method? Both ‘big minds’, I think, say, No.
For both ak and myself however, there is always the possibility of emergence, what is revealed in the equidistant space of our meetings here. We deeply don't know how these “travelling conversations” are going to turn out in our writing, but in a gentle way I think both of us believe in emergence; the possibility that, as conditions ripen, some of the fruits that are revealed will be totally different to the strata of the original causes, which set us on our respective paths last year, and, equally, which began these first “travelling conversations” on this blog three years ago.
mmj