Sounds of savage banging from the kitchen, where Senior Son is ant-slaying with the heel of his brother's sneaker. The kid doesn't have anything against most bugs, but he has a Thing about ants, which he hates with a pure and determined passion. As we are undergoing the annual Spring ant infestation (the first of many such entomological stampedes, culminating in the annual Junebug windowscreen- thwacking marathon), the kid is being kept busy.

Of course we've anthropomorphized ants as prudent and hardworking, devoted to the family (hive), modest, forethoughtful. Which is just plain silly. They are as they are because they have evolved in particular directions that our ancestors didn't take (or left behind.) But I'm not sure we can talk about one ant realistically, any more than I can talk about one of my liver cells as a freestanding organism. The colony is the true, whole organism; the ant is a cell of the colony. Maybe what jars my kid is that no individual ant is really an individual--more like a sentient cell on legs. As one strongly individual individual, with no use for the conventions, the kid disapproves of blind conformists. On principle.

Ants aren't supposed to have individual personalities--for starters, the hive economy simply wouldn't work if they did! But we are. Aforementioned Senior Son was born with a definite, quite distinct and highly flavoured personality--none of this bland vanilla stuff! His brother was born with a very different but still quite distinct sort of soul-flavour. Each of us has our own particular me-ness --like an individual colour or personal scent. Unless we are identical twins, we are endowed (usually a blessing, sometimes a bane) with own personal cell identifiers, genetically programmed, which tell the immune system what is Griselda or Fred and what is non-Griselda or not-Fred. Each of us is a tune unlike any other tune in the whole world, distinct and irreplaceable.

We're born individual. And from there, we often slide straight downhill. I think probably for some people, life becomes so crushing --starting with bad parenting--that the selfhood gets squished or warped or maybe cut down to a fraction of what God intended. Or maybe it wasn't given nourishment and so failed to thrive and be strong. With decent luck, however, most of us do better. We get pruned here, forced into growth there, sometimes gently, sometimes strongly. We die some necessary small deaths and undergo tiny resurrections (or sometimes even some medium-sized ones). And these forces and events shape us.

Life (God?) has a remarkable facility for teasing out whatever individuality we have, which is probably why institutions for the very elderly are so very full of Strong Characters, happy or miserable. Somewhere in midlife, most of us turn a corner and start becoming more who we are; the veneer starts coming off and the underlying wood shows through--spruce or mahogony, rough or well-polished.

When we hear something like "and he shall purify the sons of Levi," I think most of us get the image of whiter-and-brighter, stainless, well-scrubbed ranks of identical son-of-Levi units. But purifying a metal makes it more *itself*; pure gold is gold-ier than impure gold, and it is not in the least like pure nickel or cadmium. That, I gather, is what Paul means by "perfection": not a bland featurelessness, but a new fullness of being. Which (of course) doesn't mean that we have the right to impose our egotism all over the landscape, indulging our selfishness and making life miserable for others. But it does mean trying to figure out who we are, and what God's apt to want us to become.

And somehow, I don't think God wants us to become ant-like. I think God likes variety. It's a strange thought: if there really is that Life to Come that many of us believe in, maybe our work when we get there is more of this soul-making process. Maybe all those legions of cherubim and seraphim, instead of being celestiral faceless bureaucrats, legions of heavenly ants , are powerfully different individuals, a raninbow of personalities, a symphony of wonderfully individual tunes. Now there's a thought to make heaven *interesting*.

Of one thing I am absolutely sure, from the soles of my feet upward: God knows intimately and lovingly the flavour of every soul who has walked, or is walking, or will ever walk the face of this earth, as well as those who can only sit or lie; and God treasures the differences--the you-ness of you, the me-ness of me. What we make of this gift of self--whether we train it Godward or take it in less fruitful directions--is our choice. I suspect our choices sometimes make God weep, and God's sorrow is the deeper because God knows that often our bad choices result from the evil that has been done to us .

But God knows us, loves us with a stunning extravagance of love; God's grace is wider and higher and deeper than the firmament of heaven, richer than the Milky Way, more alive than quintillions of ants. God's great desire is for us to be all we can be, most truly and beautifully our own sweet highly individual souls--and for us to take that bounty of love and wrap ourselves in it, rejoicing.