I: On Being Asked to

On Being Asked to Speak With Others During the Service at St. — United Church on My Vision for the Church. At the Last Minute I Was Asked to Do the Children's Moment Instead.
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The mathematics of multiplication is the wisdom of the world. Ask Alexander. Ask Stalin. Ask any local entrepreneur. Ask Qin Shih-huang Di. Qin, whose own name is not available to me, was King in what would be Shaanxi and poised to conquer what would be China when he met an itinerant scholar who introduced him to the trick of the chess board, an old one even then.

"If his munificent highness will grant me two grains of rice for the first square," ventured old Tung respectfully, "and twice that for the second, and so on…"

Now Qin appreciated a cunning trap better than any man alive, so when he saw how powerful a puny two could be when raised to the power of 64, he laughed until his whole court quaked. He had old Tung decapitated, of course, for his presumption, but he had won a precious insight. Having crushed the six warring states including his own, he standardized

a) the currency,
b) the written language,
and c) all measurements, including
the width of the axle of
a cart

so that he could construct a vast network of roads, complete the Great Wall, bum thousands of books, and bury uncounted dissenters alive, a tradition that, with variations, persists to this day. In his lifetime he had 270 palaces and 3000 concubines. In 1974 in his tomb were discovered 7000 life-size terra-cotta clay soldiers, chariots, and horses.

Here truly is the power and the glory, fed by suffering. I set this in the past but you can ask the children in the Sudan, the teenagers of the intifada, or the Indians around Spadina and Dupont. They will all affirm the wisdom of the world.

The logic of loss and division is the wisdom of God. It is difficult because it wrenches our animal nature to forsake acquisition, but there are figures like the chess board which apply: the Sierpinski carpet and the Menger sponge. First, the carpet:

imagine a square-­-
divide it into nine-­-
remove the middle–
divide the remaining eight squares into nine each-­-
and so on...

As the total perimeters rapidly increase to infinity, the substance of the carpet itself plummets toward nothingness.

But the sponge is more intriguing, more useful. Imagine a cube. Divide each of the six faces into nine squares and decore the centres as though you were going to make a pie. Continue as with the carpet. As the surface area approaches infinity, the volume disappears.

Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. Each time I give a piece of myself to another, to the world, to God, I increase. When we come together not only to see and hear but to give and receive in the multiple flow of a manifold exchange, the kingdom is ours. As now. Even Qin Shih­huang Di might have learned from this about the nature of traps.