Not relevant to this thread on “family,” lest a generous definition makes it so (so, ala Picard, “make it so, Number One”).

Your moniker, “greenflame,” made me sure you’d taken to Dylan Thomas’ poetic sorrows on the green flame of photosynthesis fueling the alcohol by which he drove himself to death. I expected here a eulogy.

Only to find I was wrong on both counts: ‘twas Thomas on the “green fuse” (not the green flame), and, you on Hildegard, not Thomas.

Alas.

While relations aren’t properties, relations too are emergent nonetheless.

So why waste this one?

But, I couldn’t get my mind off tragic Thomas (“The force that through the green fuse drives the flower, Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees, Is my destroyer”), me-thinking despite AE Housman, “malt does more than Milton can to justify God’s ways to man,” had Thomas imbibed more Hildegard than malt he’d destroy his destroyer.

In any chaotic system, small errors have catastrophic effects. So in the case of Thomas.

To wit: I’d expect that should a God trust us to deploy obedience amidst chaos, then we’d best not assume that a god-of-the-gaps would fill the gaps in our disobedience by mercy ameliorating our small errors. The key word here: “assume.”

Spiritual emergency is, just that.

While many religiously inclined critics of science see science as the modern day Tower of Babel needing to be broken down, I’d rather see it the other way around (inverse transforms are always lots of fun), with religious hegemony the more likely potential Tower, kept (or, Kept) ever dispersed into fractured denominations, like a nomological scientific method chasing vapors of collapsed waves, to assign to each collapse a unique name — denominations a sort of existence proof of the ontology of unlimited, varietal, Supply.

I mean this non-adversarially. Though maybe normatively. ‘Tis just an observation.

While Hildegard might not approve, one distant cousin in her Augustinian lineage, Mendel, with his varietals, just might.