Everyone Has That Split-Second

Quick, what's 3l,536,000 times 78....?

That's the average number of seconds each of us has in this lifetime. At least according to the latest actuarial projections. How you feel about this depends a lot on your age and your faith in actuaries. Or, for a better gut-check, ask yourself how you feel about the hundreds of lives just lost in the recent Italian earthquake? Or in last year's Chinese earthquake? Or in that Asian tsunami a few years back? Or what about in that volcano at Pompeii two thousand years ago?

Here's the point. With each tick of each second of our lives, we are one more second closer to that split-second. To that sudden slicing shard of time which forever splits our lives asunder into "before" and "after."

Our split-second needn't be some abrupt catastrophe (although they seem the easiest to recall), for it can also be some abrupt cadenza. That moment your graduating class cheered your valedictory...that surge when you first saw him or her across the room...the flush when you first held you first child...the joy that morning when the blazing sunrise seemed all of a sudden to light up all the shadows of your doubts.

These split-seconds that click so emphatically into place are, at best, mysteries. Neither religion nor science can really predict them; neither faith nor fortune can actually explain them. Perhaps our best guides among these clicks of our lives, those eyes which can best pierce such mysteries, are our artists. The poets, playwrights, composers and directors whose works are entirely familiar with mystery, for their gifts of expression are likewise inexplicably sudden and staggering.

You and I, we thrive in an age of enormous science and technology. It has helped our species probe so many of the eternal mysteries of our physical bodies and our planet. Geologists, archaeologists, chemists and physicists have made the world around us more explainable. Now, science is taking up the still greater mysteries of the world within us. Psychiatry is being joined by neuro-science and biology in order to tour the inner-sanctums of our being and our behaviors. This passion to know is our specie's first passion, and these passionate seekers seem to be entering the real final frontier.

It has been said that as these scientists travel further, they will eventually meet the theologians who got their first!

There may be a better answer to this ancient riddle between science and theology, between reason and faith. Our artists....! They seem to have a mighty footprint in both those paradigms, for the artist works with the cognitive skills of a scientist, at the same time with the affective intuitions of a theologian.

Throughout their lives they experience these split-seconds which permit them to suddenly fathom our split-seconds. Michelangelo who suddenly sees the touch of God upon our lives there in the barren plaster of the Sistine ceiling...Rodin whose sudden swift sculptor's chisel finds our seeking souls in marble....Mozart and Beethoven and Stravinsky whose fingers suddenly fly across keys that sing clarity amid our confusion...Frank Capra, Steven Spielberg, Francis Coppola suddenly splash their sudden insights onto the great screens of our lives.

Art is the fusion of all that is best about both our reason and our faith, our science and our theology? I don't know how many seconds are left to tick, but at this point I'm inclined to believe it is our artists who are best gifted with the mortal means to explain these mysteries to us.