Heroes Not Zombies

Can you tell what this is? This table caught my eye as I wandered through the market. The scattering of the pieces on the green surface made it look like a real life version of Monet’s lilies. The sparkle was beautiful and I’d never seen something like this before.

Here’s another view

If you haven’t guessed yet, these are the crystals which are used to make chandeliers.

But here’s my question. If you’d never ever seen a chandelier before, could you imagine what one would look like from just looking at these pieces? If someone said to you “make a light from these”, would you know what to do if you hadn’t seen a completed one before? It’s a hard question to answer because we’ve all seen chandeliers before, but my point is that it’s pretty hard to imagine something whole if ALL you have is a view of some of the pieces. Let me push that just one step further. Have you ever experienced a room lit by a chandelier? Because it’s one thing to see a chandelier but it’s quite another to have the experience of a chandelier-lit room.

Here’s a photo of a chandelier I spotted in a shop window (just in case you haven’t actually seen one!)

If that principle is correct, how much more difficult is it to imagine a person from an examination of bits of them? How can we know a human being by studying only some blood tests, or X-Rays, or even DNA? It’s not enough to study only the parts. We have to understand the whole. Following my analogy one step further, a healthy human being can only be known by studying the experience of health. Being able to describe a human being is not enough. We have to listen to their stories to understand their experience. That’s true of health and it’s also true of illness.

We are much more than the sum of our parts…….beautiful and amazing as the parts might be!