Fascination with Fire

How surprised do you think the first people were who made a fire? I am guessing that they had seen fire happen naturally, and they wondered how they could make that happen.  Somewhere and somehow they must have seen a spark or a flame and they were so curious about it, they figured it out.  We human beings have a history with fire, a history that dates, we assume, from our earliest days, and without a lot of change in the basic idea.  In fact, “sitting around the fire” is, I surmise, one of the ways that we most closely mimic the first human beings in Africa who figured it out. Not much has changed in a million years (or whatever time you want to assign to the first fire.)  We humans have “improved” and “advanced” many inventions in the course of our history, but we still love the fundamental idea of gathering ‘round the fire on a cold night.

Why is that, do you suppose?  Well, Alison Gopnik (WSJ, Oc.t 11-12) writes about the findings of one scientist who studied how people change their behavior when they gather  around the evening fire.  They just become different people when the focus shifts from the busyness of the day to the slowness of the night.  People’s “talk was transformed”” by the fire. She writes, “Fire gave us the evening-too dark to work but bright and warm enough to talk.”  What happened to that kind of evening?  I suppose before there were books to read and televisions to watch and computers to absorb our minds, what could we do but sit and talk around a fire.  The art of storytelling no doubt developed in the evenings too dark to work but bright enough to talk.  The children would need to be entertained; young couples would need to be romanced; patriarchs and matriarchs would tell stories of “remember when…”; and maybe something else used to happen when the whole village had to sit around the fire which made night warm enough to talk.  Maybe the fire burned away the anger and hostility that the day’s work had stoked as people looked each other in the eye through the flames.

 I wonder if that is what it was like when the night faded and the day dawned and Jesus met the man who had abandoned him in his darkest hour. I wonder if it was the dancing of the flames on that night becoming day, as the soaking wet Peter warmed his body by the coals of the cooking fire, that allowed Peter to raise his eyes to look his friend in the eye and confess, “Lord, you know I love you.” “Then feed my sheep” came the reply, and the world was never the same.

What ever happened to that kind of evening, to that kind of fire?  Look, do you see the flame? Do you hear the question? Do you feel the fire?