On Saturday afternoons when I was a kid, one channel always
offered some kind of horror or Sci-Fi movie. There were lots of repeats.
I remember watching ‘The Incredible Shrinking Man’ a bunch
of times. The main character was a scientist who’d invented something that made
animals grow smaller. At some point (like in all this kind of movie!) he took
some of his own ‘medicine.’ The rest of the film followed his diminishment. Unlike ‘Honey, I Shrunk
the Kids,’ it wasn’t a comedy.
Life gets harder and harder, stranger and stranger for our ‘hero.’
His problems grow as he shrinks. In the next to the last scene he’s fallen into
his cellar. There’s a spider in the cellar. A ‘relatively’ huge spider. There’s
also a sewing needle. It’s pretty big too. An epic duel follows. The scientist
prevails (barely). Without any words spoken (there’s nobody to talk to) we see
his desperation to get out of that basement.
He searches, intensely, noticing a louvered vent. He
squeezes through. It’s night, moonless night. The stars are clear, bright,
infinite, and huge. The soundtrack swells—the music is not comforting.
Neither is the feeling in a young watcher’s psyche.
At some point in my future education I realized ‘The
Incredible Shrinking Man’ was about Existentialism in the mid-20th
century. Our trying to reconcile a diminishing sense of self with an expanding
knowledge of the vastness of our universe. The dominant kind of existential
practice seemed to me to be an attempt to overcome depression with stoicism—a
realization that, so, the spiders are huge—but, then again, our weapons are
bigger.
This is a perspective we continue to grapple with. In the
undeniable vastness of creation will we experience devastating insignificance or profound
connectedness?
Probably a little of both—and there’s integrity there. It is
a big universe. And we humans are not as significant in relation to it as it
once seemed.
Wise spirituality shows us how to be small and big at the
same time. Those who lose ‘self’ find ‘Self.’ It’s not so much the ‘ME’ that’s
big but the ‘ME-IN-RELATIONSHIP’ that’s big. It’s the ‘WE.’
Demeter seeks Persephone from the big love of a mother’s
connectedness to her child. Jesus goes to Jerusalem and Buddha declines nirvana
because of an even larger sense of connectedness and love.
Katabasis, Lent, The Dark Night of the Soul, falling into
the cellar all are a Going-Down. We are
less significant than our egos natter on about.
But not devastatingly so.
We are profoundly connected.
The word profound comes from the Latin ‘fundis’ which means ‘bottom’
and ‘pro’ which means ‘before.’ There’s nothing more profound than wise,
intentional, Going-Down in order to explore and confirm our deep connectedness
to one another and to God ‘before’ we hit ‘bottom.’
Discovering, mending, cultivating this connectedness is the cure for the incredible shrinking man.
