Viva!

Viva!

Last night the FSU channel aired a program about Chaco Canyon, New Mexico and the Pueblo culture that lived there from about 900 to 1150 A.D. Like the Mayans, the people of Stonehenge and others, they were an archaeoastronomical civilization with incredible knowledge of the skies and the orderly movements of bodies in the cosmos. The Chaco people constructed buildings oriented to the solar and lunar cycles, apparently with spiritual meaning and used for religious observances. Their structures were the largest buildings in North American up until the nineteenth century. The Pueblo people connect themselves to the Chacos by oral legends and myths. Why the Chaco people left the area is not known, but speculation is they suffered a drought of some half a century beginning about 1130 A.D.

There are archaeoastronomical sites around the world where once resided large civilizations, all of whom have vanished. Considered with the Roman Empire, the ancient Greek cultures, the Assyrian Empire, the Babylonian Empire, the throne of David, ancient Egypt and others, not to mention the British Empire, the Soviet Union and other moderns, the Chaco people show the impermanence of all things human, even the most knowledgeable and sophisticated -- individuals, cultures, civilizations, wisdom, knowledge, religions, governments, structures, principalities and powers. All regarded themselves as eternal in their time. But they were  transient human constructs. And so are we, one and all.

The Bible says the days of our age are threescore years and ten (Psalm 90). An online actuarial table says the life expectancy for an American born this morning is just over seventy-five years. Knowing that seventy-six years is my fair share and more, and already having lived through several challenges to my own mortality, I am mindful of endings and constantly thankful to have lived as a Christian and an American in what seems to have been America’s golden age. 

TW+