Going in circles

Circles.

We wear them every time we slip on a ring or bracelet. We ride them every time we get into or onto something with wheels.

Circles.

Children play inside one whenever they swing in a tire or jump into a pool clutching an inflated plastic ring.

Sometimes, we philosophize about circles. (Italics in quotations below are mine.)

“Conversation is a game of circles,” wrote essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson.

“Little-minded people’s thoughts move in such small circles that five minutes’ conversation gives you an arc long enough to determine their whole curve,” said another U.S. writer, Oliver Wendell Holmes.

“In universities and intellectual circles, academics can guarantee themselves popularity – or, which is just as satisfying, unpopularity – by being opinionated rather than by being learned,” said British author, A.N. Wilson.

“Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hall-mark of true science,” said another Brit, Aldous Huxley.

In 1623, Galileo Galilei, the Italian physicist, mathematician and astronomer sometimes called the “Father of Modern Science,” said, “Philosophy is written in this grand book – I mean the universe – which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures . . .”

Thirteen years earlier, peering through the telescope he created, Galileo had discovered four moons circling Jupiter. “This observation upset the notion that all celestial bodies must revolve around the Earth,” says Wikipedia.

Ah, yes, when the Pilgrims landed in Plymouth, most people still believed what Aristotle had taught more than 1200 years earlier. They insisted: Everything in the universe circles the earth. Galileo decided: Everything in the universe circles the sun. Little did Galileo know how much universe lay beyond the solar system. Little did he know how much trouble circles could cause him.

His teaching that planets and their moons make circles, but not around the earth, so upset church leaders they called Galileo a heretic, declaring his notions “contrary to the true sense and authority of Holy Scripture.” Actually, Galileo’s teachings contradicted those of a Greek philosopher whose profound influence on Christian thought continues to this day. The highly opinionated leaders of the Inquisition forced Galileo to recant his teaching. He spent his last years under house arrest.

Circles.

We don’t know when we’re going in them until we find ourselves back at an all-too-familiar place. Long ago (but not as long ago as Galileo lived), my parents, siblings and I took a vacation trip to Texas. Trying to leave Houston, we traveled many miles, only to find ourselves repeatedly passing the same landmark.

What if we hadn’t broken out of that circle? What if, decades later, we still traveled the same circuitous route? You’d think that ridiculous? I’d think it hellish. Yet, how recently have I found myself at an all-too-familiar place I first passed decades ago? How often have little-minded thoughts kept succeeding generations going in circles for centuries – even generations adamantly affirming Scripture?

Three hundred years before Aristotle lived, a man named Paul wrote what did become Holy Scripture: “For the power of the life-giving Spirit – and this power is mine through Christ Jesus – has freed me from the vicious circle of sin and death.”

Yes! Desperate to escape hellish circles, to leave behind “specialized meaninglessness,” I cry to experience more of what I too possess – the power of the life-giving Spirit.

© 2007, Deborah P. Brunt. All rights reserved.