Raw materials

National Catholic Reporter, Oct 13, 2006

"It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs."

This opening paragraph from Chapter 5 of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein captures the rawness of "raw material"--the basic elements of life, of creativity, that must be shaped somehow into a result we cannot foresee.

We asked NCR readers to share their thoughts on raw material in our sixth "variations on a theme'" feature.

Most of my life I have worked with raw materials.

When I was in college, I worked with cardboard tubes and plastic shields. As a research assistant, I worked with slides of spinal cords and visual cortexes of animal brains. As a clinician, I worked with blood and body fluids. As a chef, I worked with raw vegetables and meats. As a writer, I worked with words and phrases.

But as a person, I had to face the awful image reflected in my mirror. I had to see myself for who I was, if I was ever to be able to see beyond me. I tried to envision how God looked upon me, too: heavy down below, too out of balance up above. I did not like what I saw, yet I could not deny what I felt--and that was that I was loved for who I was, not what I did.

Learning to discriminate between raw material and finished product is not all that difficult. The challenge exists in learning to discriminate between raw material and garbage. Garbage flows in and out of our lives more than we are willing to admit. Finished product, in the eyes of God, is an evolving phenomenon--more of a way than a thing. In many ways, I hope never to be a finished product, because if I am, then that is all I am. And I would rather be more of I Am Who Am, than who I am.

HILLARY BENISH

Bluefield, W.Va.

My desk faces Lake Superior, with its ever-changing moods and awe-inspiring countenance.

When people come to visit, especially for the first time, they inevitably ask, "How do you ever get anything done with a view like that?"

My answer is often just as predictable. "That view is my anything."

For example, yesterday, as I sat at my desk pondering this topic, a deer passed directly in front of the window. This is not unusual. What was unusual was the rectangular piece of grayish cloth (a pillow case? a kitchen towel?) hanging from its head.

My husband had seen this creature a few days earlier. From the distance it resembled a white-tailed buck with two tails, one at each end. A closer view revealed a frantic deer trying to dislodge a cloth stuck on its newly sprouting antlers. When he told me about this deer, I was reminded of the young elk we'd seen several years earlier while traveling through Alberta, Canada. Eyes rolling in terror, the elk raced toward the road with a length of rope swinging from its massive antlers, the end twisting like a writhing snake.

Yesterday's deer did not race past my window in terror. Stately slow is how I'd describe its movement. The cloth now hung like the veil over its right eye rather than over both eyes as it had when my husband saw it, making me wonder if the deer had learned that walking slowly made the swaying veil less scary.

How had these poor creatures gotten themselves into such predicaments? Had it been a quest for food that betrayed them? The deer perhaps raided a bag of animal feed and netted its fibers in its budding antlers. Had the elk, browsing on marsh grasses and lowering its massively antlered head into the water, encountered a piece of tenting rope carelessly dropped by a camper?

The deer with the antler-anchored cloth, the elk with the antler-tangled rope are the raw materials that lead me to ponder the often calamitous intersection between the vulnerable wilderness and encroaching civilization in this fragile but wondrous world.

BERYL SINGLETON BISSELL

Schroeder, Minn.

What is raw material? Is it something not manufactured? Or perhaps it is a substance from which something may be made, like the clay of the ground in Genesis 2:7--"The Lord God formed man out of the clay of the ground and blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and so man became a living being."

It seems the beginning of life, a child's life, can be compared to raw material. How can we help this new life, this raw beauty, to grow into a fine human person?

Although we are witnessing a remarkable revolution in technology in the 21st century, there exists the danger that while we focus our talent on creating marvelous technology, human contact is becoming less important. After all, the technology was created to assist humans, not to take their place.

Too often today we interact with robot-like devices and constructs, like the recorded menus we hear when phoning a corporate entity. Children use toys that transform humans into cyber action figures. Today's blogging revolution not only eliminates the physical contact between people, it also eliminates the voice contact of the phone. Fewer and fewer people come together at community meetings and prefer to keep in touch through the Internet. Desktops, laptops, CDs, DVDs and MP3s occupy a bigger and bigger chunk of humanity's time.