Chiasmus

Warning:  What follows may seem to the reader as the wanderings of an irrational mind.  Indeed it may be, because I am writing this at 3:30 a. m.  So, if it makes absolutely no sense to you let it go immediately—don’t try to make sense of it—and tune in again in a couple of days when I have written something more conventional and coherent. 

 

Chiasmus means ‘a crossing’ – a structure or a pattern or connection of two parts coming together such as in the two lines that comprise the letter ‘X.’   The word is most commonly referred to in discussing ancient literary, especially biblical or scriptural styles or as a medical or anatomical term. 

(In this brief discussion I simply ‘free associate’ what was going on in my mind that awakened me a few minutes ago.)

In a university astronomy class I took years ago we discussed ‘cosmology,’ a branch of philosophy dealing with the origin, general structure, and ultimate fate of the universe.  The ‘Big Bang’ and ‘Oscillating Universe’ and ultimately ‘Grand Unifying Theory’ (GUT) were parts of the discussion and probably still are.  What I took from this discussion then and, I guess, awakened me tonight, was the idea that there may be a chiasmus in all things. 

    

I can certainly see a chiasmus in human relations—especially in marriage and in the human growth process.  We come together and we grow apart and then repeat the process over and over.  We are born; we grow old; we die; we are born again. Thus, some of these cycles are very close together, and others—as in the birth-death cycle—cross only years apart.  John Denver’s song “Seasons of the Heart” is suggestive of the notion:

“Of course we have our differences, you shouldn't be surprised
It's as natural as changes in the seasons and the skies
Sometimes we grow together, sometimes we drift apart
A wiser man than I might know the seasons of the heart”

The process of growth and development of a human being (as well as an animal, the vegetable kingdom, even a star or a world, I suppose) follows a similar pattern. 
 

When we were a prenatal person we were as close to our mother as we could possibly be—indeed, we were inside her.  Shortly after birth we could hardly be away from her, but over time we slowly grew away from her.  In the breakaway time of late adolescence we became largely independent of her, and in later years, hopefully, started the rebound back to her.

As a spiritual being having a mortal experience it is largely the same thing—the pattern holds.  We go away from our spirit home, come to earth, and then return to our spirit home for better or for worse.  In the process, we grow, learn, form attachments and connections with others in parentage, family, cohorts, marriages, associations.  We then break, or strain, or hopefully strengthen them in rebounding and returning to our roots and become more unified, ultimately, in the process.  “If ye are not one, ye are not mine.”

In marriage we must have a very tight chiasmus to be strong—keep the cycle more like this: xxxxxx, than like this: X. 

  

I hope this opened up some thought for you.

But I must now get some sleep