SELF-RENEWAL

Wouldn't it be strange if your car or your home would remodel themselves so that nothing about them would ever wear out? This sounds fantastic, doesn't it? Yet we are told that none of us is more than a year old physically, that our entire body is renewed every year.

The possibility of rejuvenation intrigues everyone. However, Life Itself seems to have already provided the solution, giving us new bodies for old as we travel along through the years. But what about the mind? It is now becoming accepted, in some groups, that the mind does not grow old, that the mind of a man of ninety is as young as that of a boy of ten. Maturity may slow it down somewhat, but at the same time there is no reason to believe that the mind itself really ages.

The Bible tells us to be transformed by the renewing of the mind, and the putting off of the old man and the putting on of the new. And in another place it says: “. . . Behold, I make all things new . . .“ Perhaps this is another way of saying that God, the Spirit within us, cannot really grow old.

A distinguished Swiss psychiatrist has said that man is both person and personage. The person is a real, living spirit both mind and body. The personage is the appearance of the man to those about him.

He adds to this by stating that the living being is characterized by the creation of the body according to a definite idea and not by the nature of its physical or chemical properties. Idea, pattern, or plan, all these imply a purposive action in the nature of Life. It appears that science is incapable of understanding Life, for It is concerned only with causality and excludes any reference to purpose.

Life forever eludes us. The purpose which we find evidenced in life does not arise out of that which is living, but rather directs the whole process. Physical evidences of life are under the direction of forces which are not created by them.

We find a biophysicist saying that our body is made up of atoms, which are arranged in molecules, and which in turn are combined into cells: But these atoms are not the only reality. The manner in which the cells combine to make the body a unity is also a very real thing. What is unique about a living being is not its composition, nor is it the physical and chemical phenomena involved within it, but that which organizes and directs it.

So we find that the physical body did not create itself but is organized and directed by some invisible purposeful Principle which we may call Life. This Principle of Life must be timeless in the eternal nature of such things, thus being constant and ever new, never exhausting Itself. Why then is it if Life Itself is forever new, forever young that we who live in It and through whom It flows, experience age? The answer to this problem is not to be found in that Nature which forever renews Itself - in God who is the Father of all - but in ourself!