THE WISE MAN BUILT HIS HOUSE UPON THE ROCKS

When I was a boy in Primary (Elementary) School - perhaps eight or nine years old - we learned and performed a song in front of the school which related to the biblical Parable of The House on the Rocks.

I can still recall the words of that song to this day, nearly four decades later:

Now, the wise man built his house upon the rocks

The wise man built his house upon the rocks

The wise man built his house upon the rocks

And the rains came tumbling down.

Oh! The rains came down and the floods came up

The rains came down and the floods came up

The rains came down and the floods came up

But the house on the rocks stood firm.

Now, the foolish man built his house upon the sands

The foolish man built his house upon the sands

The foolish man built his house upon the sands

And the rains came tumbling down.

Oh! The rains came down and the floods came up

The rains came down and the floods came up

The rains came down and the floods came up

And the house on the sands fell flat!

As a child, critical of authority even then, it seemed like a bit of a pointless lesson to me. What man would be so foolish, I recall thinking, as to build his house upon the sand? And why have a parable about something so absurdly obvious? Wasn't the point of parables to impart wisdom that might evade the grasp of most grown-ups, not to offer advice that even eight-year-old boys already instinctively understood? I didn't get it.

It's only relatively recently that the penny dropped for me regarding this very old riddle. Naturally, I had long ago reasoned that the parable wasn't intended to be taken literally - but the allegorical allusion nevertheless still evaded me.

I have come to understand in this last year or so of unprecedented and ubiquitous craziness that the parable wasn't referring to literal houses, literal floods or actual sand; but to belief systems and their relationship to the physical world.

We dwell in the houses of our worldviews: our understanding of the cosmos and our place and role within it, the parameters of our egos and identities; who we are, what we're about, the things we support and the things we decry, our sense of the possible and the impossible - all of these things inform our sense of Self and Other, and of the relationship between Self and Other.

Our sense of Self is like a house of memories, lessons, feelings, ideas and suppositions that we build and expand upon as we go through our lives. 

But what of the foundations upon which we build this sense of Self?

 What if the visceral, tangible world upon which we orientate and navigate our daily experiences is not the infrangible rock we always believed it to be, but is in fact merely comprised of shifting sands - fated to give ground under the very feet of our self-identity? The physical universe is, after all, in a constant state of flux and motion. (Show me something that doesn't move or change and I'll show you something that doesn't exist, so to speak). 😁

This being the case, what implications for building the house of our sense of who we are - and where we fit into the scheme of things - on the things we can smell, taste, touch, hear and see?

That which has manifested into the physical realm has become subject to the physical laws of time and motion; it will move and it will change form sooner or later, like water ... or like sand.

For me, the true message of that parable is that it is the unseen, the ineffable, that is represented by the rocks. And that only if we build our sense of who we are and our place in the cosmos on the unseen and unknowable, will we be able to weather the storm, should the very foundations of the world we know one day be swept away beneath our feet.

But what does that even mean, to build your sense of self and your place in life on the "unseen"? Is that not a complete waste of time, a farcical indulgence - like inventing a nothing burger and then claiming to have developed the perfect diet? Far from it. Because it is from the unseen that the world we live in is formed. Everything from your bed to your breakfast to your annoying boss with the face you wish you could punch started off as nothing but an idea (or an urge) in the mind of another. On the physical plane, the unseen (or undetectable, if you prefer) can only be known as a concept, like pure spirit; a castle in the clouds. Nebulous and immeasurable and unprovable. And so it will always be: the only true constant.

To put it much less subtly than the Parable of the House on the Rocks, I reckon this is why spiritual people have always been predicted since the ancient scriptures to fare better at the End of the World than hard-nosed materialist types. It's got not so much to do with them being "chosen ones" or "righteous" or whatever as it has to do with the fact that they are not as heavily invested in the physical world as it explodes or goes up in flames or simply gets eroded away by the shifting sands of time. Their sense of themselves doesn't get washed away with it all: They have their castle in the clouds - untouchable and immovable; immaculate and eternal.

We may have a very good idea of who we are and what we're about as it relates to the world around us, the one that we interact with on a daily basis. And that's all well and good when the weather is fair. 

But winter (as they like to say in Game of Thrones) is always coming. 

And when the proverbial rains come tumbling down and that old house somehow gets flushed away ... where is one gonna take shelter then?

Image by homestead1997 from Pixabay