Sunday at home with a sick baby, and a lesson in free will.

Mary Jane threw up a couple of times this morning, so I stayed home with her while Mark took the boys to Mass.  She fell asleep and I settled down with the Office of Readings and Morning Prayer (Lauds) as a lesser substitute for Mass. 

I liked the way the offices worked together this morning.  First, this bit from the Office of Readings for 3rd Sunday of Advent, from a sermon by St. Augustine, on the analogy John : Christ : : the voice : the word, as follows:

   Take away the word, the meaning, and what is the voice? Where there is no understanding, there is only a meaningless sound. The voice without the word strikes the ear but does not build up the heart.
  However, let us observe what happens when we first seek to build up our hearts. When I think about what I am going to say, the word or message is already in my heart. When I want to speak to you, I look for a way to share with your heart what is already in mine.
  In my search for a way to let this message reach you, so that the word already in my heart may find place also in yours, I use my voice to speak to you. The sound of my voice brings the meaning of the word to you and then passes away. The word which the sound has brought to you is now in your heart, and yet it is still also in mine.
   When the word has been conveyed to you, does not the sound seem to say: The word ought to grow, and I should diminish? The sound of the voice has made itself heard in the service of the word, and has gone away, as though it were saying: My joy is complete. Let us hold on to the word; we must not lose the word conceived inwardly in our hearts.

...And the question came: Who are you, then? He replied: I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness: Prepare the way for the Lord.

I liked that bit:  distinguishing voice, the mere sounds of speech, the physical act of speaking and of hearing; from word, the comprehension and the meaning, the incorporation of meaning created by one person's human reason into our own human reason, into our own intelligence and body of knowledge and character.  It's a bit like distinguishing arrangements of ink and paper from the meaning of a text. 

Augustine reminds me of the requirements of passing "a word" from one person to another:

1. reason, memory, and intelligence in the mind of a speaker
2. intention to speak
3. a physical act of producing speech (or, I suppose, of writing text)
4. a physical medium to carry the physical information (yes, electromagnetic fields count, no ether is required here)
5. a common culture and language by which the physical information may be translated into meaning
6. the physical act of receiving the information (hearing, seeing)
7. intention to hear, listen, understand
8. reason, memory, and intelligence in the mind of the recipient. 

These requirements provide a wealth of meditation on the identification of Christ as Logos, "word," eternally uttered by the Father.

Moving on to Morning Prayer,  we get Psalm 148:

Praise him, sun and moon,
praise him, all stars that shine.
Praise him, waters of the heavens,
and all the waters above the heavens.

Let them praise the name of the Lord,
for he commanded and they were made.
He set them firm for all ages,
he made a decree that will last for ever.

I was thinking of the "stars of heaven" and planets and such, praising the name of the Lord because they do what He asks of them:  in their case, after a fashion, the "decree that will last forever" is the set of physical laws that they, being physical bodies, must obey.  The other psalm and the canticle convey a related message, for example, in Daniel 3:

Bless the Lord, sun and moon; all stars of the sky, bless the Lord.
Bless the Lord, rain and dew; all you winds, bless the Lord.

and so on.  (Anyone who prays Morning Prayer for more than a few months gets pretty familiar with Daniel 3, as it shows up frequently.)  So I was thinking about how, in the sense that they must obey the  physical laws -- the temporal part of "decree that will last forever" -- every physical body (including animals and the bodies of human beings) must bless and praise the Lord. 

With human reason comes the choice to praise or not to praise, to bless or to refrain from blessing. The air around us waits, a ready messenger, its pressure can fluctuate in patterns of blessing or patterns of curses.  And even if we enlist it to curse one another, it -- not us, but it -- moves according to the decree that will last forever.   The part of the chain of command that can deviate, that does deviate, from the "decree" is human intention.