Stained Glass Faces

"For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known" (1 Corinthians 13:12).

What do we want in our faces, our interiors, on an everyday basis? We want constructive thoughts about work and study of various kinds. We want rumination on the Word and application of it to our feelings and thoughts, both those that flow outward into deeds and utterances and those that remain within. And we want humility, direct reminders of our being just another dot in a big universe. And we want gratitude.

We who live in the developed world are not nearly grateful enough. We do not take sufficient consciousness, as a rule, of how we have access to a quantity and quality of goods and medical and dental services that even royalty did not enjoy in most times and places of human history. 

Someone who makes little more than minimum wage and works full time has access to hot showers and dental care across the developed world. Royalty did not have advantages like that in most of history. And much of the world does without what we regard as 'normal'. 

It is a fragile 'normal', a 'normal' subject to terms and conditions like EROI, which drops even as prices of fertilizer, food, gas and everything else rise. Rises, trendlines, are what they are: arrows pointed in a particular direction. It would commit the intellectual error of hysterical projectionism to assume that this trendline of EROI decline will simply continue, never halting or reversing for a while or reversing quite spectacularly.

Nonetheless, we can see the fragility of our 'normal'. It would not take much more EROI decline for airplanes and automobiles to become untenable, along with every institution and commercial activity dependent upon them. 

We should accordingly be very grateful to see airplanes in the sky and autos on the roads; but we should not forget that this 'normal' is extremely abnormal compared to human norms across time and space.

I recently watched a video of Bangladeshi men collecting sewer water from outside of a goldsmith business, subjecting that water to harsh chemical treatments, and obtaining therefrom a small nugget of gold; which they then sold back to the very goldsmiths whose sewer water they had collected.

...They got 11 Euros out of a night's filthy and chemically hazardous work. (I believe they were handling mercury with their hands.)

Meanwhile, in the United States where I live, people are looking down on others for making smidgens less money, or not being so hellbent on becoming rich.

I see ridiculous ingratitude, and I cannot do anything about this pervasive American and developed world complacency. But I can reflect very carefully on gratitude, and I can consciously cultivate gratitude every day. So can we all. So let us do.

What do want? We want stained glass interiors, interiors in which our feelings and thoughts are full of constructive action and learning and gratitude, humility and remembrance of people's good qualities with their bad. We want faces, interiors, like those of the angels; for such do they become who cultivate faces like these by applying the Word of God to all that is ugly and deformed and inhuman within them. 

Appendix:

" On the other hand, in hell, because they who are there are in things contrary to charity and celestial love, in their own light they do indeed appear like men, but in the light of heaven as dreadful monsters, in some of whom scarcely anything of the human form is recognizable. The reason is that the Lord’s influx through heaven is not received, but is either rejected, or extinguished, or perverted, causing them to have such an appearance. They are in like manner such forms in the smallest things of their thought or in their ideas; for such as anyone is in the whole, such he is in part; these being analogous and homogeneous. That form in which they appear is also the form of the hell in which they are; for every hell has its own form, which in the light of heaven is like a monster; and those of them who appear from this light show by their form from what hell they are. They have appeared to me at the gates which opened into the world of spirits, and they were seen as monsters, with much variety" (Arcana Coelestia 6626).