Rungs

 

Connecting heaven and earth

Jacob left Beersheba and set out for Harran. When he reached a certain place, he stopped for the night because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones there, he put it under his head and lay down to sleep. He had a dream in which he saw a stairway resting on the earth, with its top reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it.  Genesis 28

Even before Jacob the refugee dreamed of a cosmic ladder, humans were trying to "connect" heaven and earth in the universe — and the direction of the connection is very important. The Tower of Babel was one notable attempt to connect earth TO heaven which apparently exceeded budget and was abandonned — although some believe its clandestine resumption ended the Dark Ages and led to the Reformation and Enlightenment which ushered in Modernity. In any case, several things are notable about ladders: rails, rungs, tension and direction. Let's look at the first two for the moment.

Rails

We are all familiar with a "railroad" but seldom stop to think about what makes it work until there is a catastrophic accident such as a train going "off track" at a high speed with alot of people on board. You can think of all the interrelated causes of a train accident and gain great insights into how a "railroad" works, but the first thing you must understand is the rails.

Rails work in tandem and usually appear to be identical. Did you know that the human brain is bilateral — a right and left hemisphere connected by rungs colletively called the corpus callosum? But the brain's "rails" are hierarchical and complementary not symmetrical and identical. There is much more to learn about the brain at Channel McGilchrist. HOPE-2025 is a ladder like the brain, but [as explained by AN Whitehead in The Aims of Education] our ladder is named "religious education" and its complementary rails are:

• "Duty" — which arises from our potential control over the course of events so that where attainable knowledge and timely action could have changed the issue for the better, ignorance and/or inaction have the guilt of vice — and
  
• "Reverence" — which is the perception that the present holds within itself the complete sum of  existence, backwards and forwards, that whole amplitude of time, which is eternity.

As strange as it may seem, there is NO HOPE in the cosmos without these two rails functioning together with integrity.

Rungs

We are naturally more interested in the rungs of a ladder, because they "support" us as we ascend or descend. But what we often fail to consider consciously is that every rung presents us with a different perspective — our point of view POV or "attention" changes as we move. The lower we are, the more clearly we can see the earth. This higher we are the greater the horizon which eventually becomes the heavens themselves. Think of an ant versus the James Webb Space Telescope — and everything in between — and you will merely start to get an idea of the VAST hierarchical and complementary importance different POVs bring to bear on order and life in the cosmos.

Of course, there is MUCH MUCH more than can and will be said about the hierarchy on which our HOPE for 2025 rests, but, for the moment, we simply need to understand this principle:

The presence of rungs does NOT imply that one is more or less important to the integrity and purpose-full functioning of the ladder. Every rung is vital as are the rails.

Rungs — beginning FROM earth TO heaven — allow the flow of information and power up then back down the ladder in something like a hydrological cycle — forging a usable and sustainable connection across all levels of the cosmos — uniting and reconciling different POVs into a single vision in a phenomenon similar to what ophthalmologists know as monovision.

The rungs of HOPE-2025

 

As you may now see, HOPE-2025 is attempting

• to construct a ladder called RELIGIOUS EDUCATION [and be SURE you do NOT misunderstand or misconstrue that name]
• that rests on the EARTH and reaches towards the heavens
• with DUTY and REVERENCE as the common rails
• passing thru EVERY LEVEL of our existence, up and down, along the way
• which are the RUNGS that make the flow of information and power [POVs] possible and meaningful,
• TRUSTING that IF we honestly seek to understand then use the ladder for the purpose of ladders [ie. to connect the levels], we will be utterly surprised at the beauty, blessing and joy it brings as we begin to see the entire cosmos — and our different but complementary roles in it — across its different POVs.

See the RESOURCES page for rungs that will help you in your climb!