Letter #18: Who's on First?
That's what I'm saying!
Dad,
I know it was hard for you to grow up in the age of the Beatles when you really loved Frank Sinatra and the jazz greats of a bygone generation. Well, all I can say is: try explaining to people my age and younger why you love the Abbott & Costello routine “Who’s on First.” In high school, before I knew better, I used to spend a lot of time saying things like “so my dad played me this skit from the radio…you know what, never mind.” Now I usually have to add, “and a radio was this technology his dad used, kind of like streaming but with only sound….”
It’s almost as lost a cause as the routine itself, in which Costello’s trying to get a straight answer out of Abbott about the identity of the St. Louis first baseman, whose name is Who. “Who’s playing first?” “Yes!”
When we get to talking about the body and the soul, I always start to feel that kind of tail-chasing coming on. Which comes first? We shouldn’t have to ask: once, spirit and flesh were in perfect alignment. But the curse of Adam has set the two against one another.
As you say, if technological advancements make our bodies into playthings, “how can we not begin to feel that our bodies are other than ourselves, that they are strangers to us?” It’s a process that began long before Neuralink and the iPhone. “I think that tastes, odors, colors, and so on are no more than mere names so far as the object in which we place them is concerned, and that they reside only in the consciousness,” wrote Galileo in 1623. But if “the consciousness” is only smoke and air; if thoughts and experiences are just “mere names,” what are we left with to shape and temper our relationship to our bodies?
If the flesh comes first—if our minds are just phantoms arising from the friction between molecules—then our bodies are just inert putty to be molded according to the passing whims of a dying ghost. Only if the spirit comes first—if our minds provide clues to a world that is more real, more primary than the world of matter in motion—can we hope to find any guide or standard for judging our use of technology.
It’s a question of the direction of travel: does the flesh dream up the spirit? Or does the spirit breathe life into the flesh? “In the beginning was the Word”: there, I think, is the key to who’s really on first.
Love,
Spencer
 | A guest post by
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Similarly, our secular world teaches us to think that G(g)od is just our idea. (Hence Religion departments in universities are full of atheists.) But the Bible indicates the opposite: we are His idea! "Oh how precious to me are Your thoughts, O God, how vast is the sum of them!" So says the psalmist in a deep meditation on the mystery of the body and its meaning... We can't worship nothing because that's how God made us, and if we don't worship God, we will worship whatever is expedient. Thanks for these conversations. It's very edifying to listen in! I thank God for both of you.
Hey Spencer! Welcome back! Travel out of ones comfortable home always adds deeper perspective of the bigger world.
I like what you wrote, but question one comment:
“once, spirit and flesh were in perfect alignment. But the curse of Adam has set the two against one another.“
I don’t think sin, separated the body from the spirit and set them against each other, it separated both of them from God. Sometimes they are in alignment with each other, but not an alignment with God. Sometimes they are out of alignment with each other (when you want to quit drugs but your physical addiction takes over). And when we submit our spirit and body to God, they can both be in alignment with him, at least for a little while, with God.