Thought Experiment Miniseries, #3:

Redoing what was Undone

This is the third and final article in a series on “Thought Experiments”. I chose to write on this because our lives fly by, and we don’t spend enough time thinking about what’s most important. Rather, it’s easy to get caught up in just trying to survive.

Sometimes we have to step back and get out of our own heads in order to gain new perspective and insight into who we are and how we can grow.

Here’s an excerpt from a book called “Slaughterhouse-Five”, about a vision that a character had:

“It was a movie about American bombers in World War II and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this: American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers , and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans though and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.”

― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

Can you visualize the image that Vonnegut so eloquently gives us? Bombs getting sucked back into airplanes, eventually returning to the ground again never to be used. Wounded men getting returned to new. He turns war upside down, rewinds it, and it becomes healing rather than destructive in his imaginative world.

Here’s the thought experiment:

Imagine a future of destruction and pain for everyone on earth. It’s not hard to do, because we’ve all experienced it to some degree. Not necessarily war, but hurt, pain, disappointment, our own failings, heartache, and so it goes.

Now, what if we could undo, rewind that horrific future so that it doesn’t happen?

To make the bombs go back into the airplanes, and the wounded men to be healed, metaphorically speaking.

What would that look like in your life? Or phrased another way, “What is a problem in the world that you would like to see go away?”

“The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” ― Frederick Buechner

The world needs people who are set about to undo the curse, not so much in others as in ourselves.

Ever since I came across this book via a thoughtful friend, I haven’t been able to shake the section above. In a good way. It’s a metaphor for a life of “re-doing” what was undone. Setting right what was made wrong. What are some ways you can begin re-doing what was undone in your life and in the lives of others around you?