H.I. McDonnough receives the promise

A flower, you are. Just a little desert flower. Nick Cage as Herbert I. McDonnough getting nabbed — again — for raiding his local Short Stop Mart — again. As he stands for his mug he comes face-to-face for the first time with Ed, the woman of his dreams

Hope lives where normality gives out.

One of my favorite funny movies is Raising Arizona. In it, a hapless H.I. McDonnough, small-time compulsive crook, falls in love with and marries Ed (short for Edwina, played by the indefatigable Holly Hunter), a twice-decorated police officer who works the mugshot camera at the county lockup in Tempe, Arizona. But trouble starts when Ed’s insides are found to be, according to H.I., “a rocky place where my seed could find no purchase.” Science couldn’t help them, although it had worked wonders for Nathan Arizona, a local furniture magnate who, with his wife Florence, had quintuplets — five blond baby boys — on their hands. So they devise a plan that would be “the solution to all our problems and the answer to all of our prayers”: drive up to the Arizona mansion under cover of night and steal one of the quints. After all, as Ed insists, “they’ve got more than they can handle.” H.I. pulls off the heist. With that, the circus begins. And at the end of a rollicking tale involving our protagonist, Ed, Junior, two escaped cons, a biker dude from hell, a pack of insane dogs, and a box of Huggies, the haggard couple returns the unflappable Nathan Junior to the very crib from which he had been lifted. Distraught, childless, and hopeless, H.I. and Ed decide they should break up their marriage. But a gentle and understanding Nathan Arizona encourages them to sleep on it. So they do. And that night H.I. has a dream. It is a dream of the future, a dream of children, a dream of a good land. His description of the dream closes the movie in this way.

But still I dreamed on, further into the future than I’d ever dreamed before. And this was cloudier, because it was years, years away. But I saw an old couple bein’ visited by their children and all their grandchildren too. The old couple weren’t screwed up, and neither were their kids or their grandkids. And I don’t know. You tell me. This whole dream. Was it wishful thinkin’? Was I just fleein’ reality, like I know I’m liable to do? But me and Ed, we can be good too. And it seemed real. It seemed like us. And it seemed like, well, our home. If not Arizona, then a land not too far away, where all parents are strong and wise and capable and all the children are happy and beloved.

I don’t know. Maybe it was Utah.

What a fantastic movie.

The book of Genesis tells the story of another man who, thanks to the facts of biology, could not have children. Abraham and his wife Sarah were too old. Yet God gave Abraham a vision of the future and in that vision Abraham found great hope.

The word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision, “Do not be afraid, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great.” But Abram said, ‘O Lord God, what will you give me, for I continue childless.” [The Lord] brought him outside and said, “Look towards heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your descendants be.” And he believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.

– Genesis 15.1-2a, 5-6

So I find myself lining up H.I. McDonnough and Abraham. What a brilliant pair. There is much goodness here! On one hand, H.I.: a solid-gold screwup if ever there was one. Unable to control his impulses to commit petty crimes, willing to steal children to make his wife happy, unable to keep his job at the local plant drilling holes in sheet metal. On the other hand, Abraham: paragon of virtue. The model of faith for hundreds of generations, the father of a nation, the man through whom God chooses to redeem the whole earth.

You already know the truth, though: They are the same man, they are anyone and everyone who ever had a dream that defied reason. H.I., in addition to being a world-class goof, is a model of goodness and faithful love. And Abraham, in addition to being an icon of faith, certainly drove his poor family up a tree with his aloofness, his silences, and his irrational behavior. We are all mixed bags, is my point.

And we are mixed bags who live in a world circumscribed by the possibilities — and impossibilities — dictated by natural science. The oddness of quantum mechanics notwithstanding, the world that we live in is pretty well contained by predictable laws and absolute limits. You can’t do this, but you can do that. You can’t fly by flapping your arms, but you can build a 747. You can get pregnant like this, but not like that. Etcetera. In a similar way we are bound by our societies. If you do this, you will lose your friends. If you do that, you will not. If you walk up the Mount of the Lord to sacrifice your only son, you will not be very popular when you get back home, no matter how the killing comes down. But if you play nice and push that voice down hard, everyone will smile and nod approvingly: he’s such a good family man. Etcetera.

So we are mixed bags who hear voices, who have visions, who dream dreams. Voices, visions, and dreams that won’t let us go. And we want to pay attention to them, we want to see the visions made real, we want to believe in them — even if we don’t understand them — and act in the world accordingly. Yet we fear the way the world will respond. The world of rules and hard limits. The world that pushes back. What a strange combination: We, so unknown, so mixed-up; we, goofs and saints simultaneously. The world, so set in its ways, almost mechanical in its responses.

Can Abraham and Sarah have a child? Biology says no; it would break all the rules of science. Their friends and family say no. It would be unseemly and more than a little creepy. But that voice, Abraham says to himself, it seemed so real.

Can H.I. and Ed have a child? No and no. Same story: nice vision, but no soap. But that dream, H.I. says to himself, it seemed like us.

This is not a commencement speech. I will never say that anyone can be anything they want to be. There are limits in this world. There are limits to each of us. What I am saying is, I believe in the power of Christian hope. That hope sits at the very still point of faith. That hope whispers, You can be made new. That hope assures us that our fleeting glimpses of Canaan are reliable, despite the inflexibility and resistance of this strange world. That hope speaks to us in the words of the world’s biggest goof, H.I. McDonnough: We can be good too.

May you act on your hope today, now, without fear.

Some Baptists just can’t keep their heads

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Salome with the Head of the Baptist c. 1609. Source: caravaggio-foundation.org

In the last month a friend of mine at church has sent me some interesting stories provided by the Associated Baptist Press. Both have to do with statements made by faculty and administration of the once-great Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (SBTS) in Louisville, KY. Before getting to the statements, some background: Back in the early-to-mid 20th century the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) was what one might call a “big tent.” That is, a wide range of perspectives were tolerated and even encouraged. But from the 1960′s until the early 1990′s the conservative side, through an array of interesting political maneuvers, took over the Convention and its seminaries, including SBTS, its flagship academic institution. Moderate and liberal faculty members were nicely — or perhaps not so nicely — asked to leave.  (Yes, there are liberal Baptists and liberal Baptist churches. Although the stereotype Baptist is someone like Jerry Falwell, Baptists — taken as a whole — are a cantankerous and unruly bunch and can’t be easily pigeonholed.) So SBTS is now a bastion of ultra-conservative politics and bizarre theology. As you will see.

STRANGE BAPTIST STATEMENT 1.

ARE YOUR BOYS TOO THOUGHTFUL AND INTROSPECTIVE? BLAME IT ON BERNARD OF CLAIRVAUX

I love The Story of Ferdinand by Munro Leaf. I have read it to my children many times. The story is about a gentle-hearted bull — Ferdinand — who refuses to “butt his head and stick his horns around” like all the other young bulls. But his refusal is not made in protest and he is not trying to make a point. Instead, Ferdinand is simply a kind and sensitive bull who simply prefers to sit under the cork tree and “smell the flowers just quietly.” And his mother, who is a cow, lets him.

I’m thinking that The Story of Ferdinand would not be among the books valued by Randy Stinson, dean of the School of Church Ministries at SBTS. Why? Because it is his opinion that we are too gentle with our boys, and that

We are raising our young boys to be way too soft, way too careful, as if the ultimate prize in our parenting of boys is to get them to 18 years old and say they never got hurt, nothing bad ever happened. They never experienced pain. They never experienced disappointment. They have just had a wonderfully smooth life. What you’ve done, you have handicapped that boy for the rest of his life. He will be a weak, soft, ineffective man.

Now I make a point of teaching my children to take calculated risks. I let them go a little further afield than I would if safety was my first concern. I think the culture at large emphasizes safety over adventure. And kids get hurt; that’s what happens.

But Stinson goes further, saying that the gospel has become feminized to the point that it is not of interest to men. Whatever. I for one am not disinterested (what must this say about me?). Anyway, what is of most interest to us here at psnt.net is Stinson’s theorizing about the origin of this “feminization.” The ABP article says that

Stinson said one problem facing churches today is a “feminization” of the gospel that began early in Christianity with a “bridal mysticism” that applied poetry about the relationship between man and woman in the Song of Solomon as a metaphor for the church’s relationship with Christ.

So, what is the problem here? That the Song of Solomon is about sex and nothing else? Just like Genesis 3 is about about apple trees and talking snakes and nothing else? Is it the mysticism thing? Is it simply the idea that any metaphorical reading of the Bible is wrong? Is it the Catholics’ fault? And how exactly does this centuries-old bridal mysticism connect with the “feminization” of the church today? Does Stinson have something against Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and Bernard of Clairvaux? I mean, besides the fact that they were “Catholics”? (My favorite professor at Candler likes to refer to pre-Reformation Christianity as “our common tradition”; during this time there certainly was no “Catholic Church.”) I just can’t figure out how Stinson connects Homilies on the Song of Songs with today’s “soft” young men. As I like to say, the mind boggles.

STRANGE BAPTIST STATEMENT 2.

FAITHFUL CHRISTIANS MUST REJECT SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE

As the president of SBTS, Albert Mohler is a real big-time Southern Baptist. In a denomination where there is no church hierarchy, many people look to him for leadership, for guidance, and even for what to believe. Time.com has called him the “reigning intellectual of the evangelical movement in the U.S.” Hm. Lately he has made some really crazy statements about evolution. Among them:

Was it true that, as Paul argues [in Romans 8], when sin came, death came? Well just keep in mind that if the Earth is indeed old, and we infer that it is old because of the scientific data, the scientific data is [sic.] also there to claim that long before the emergence of Adam — if indeed there is the recognition of a historical Adam — and certainly long before there was the possibility of Adam’s sin, there were all the effects of sin that are biblically attributed to the fall and not to anything before the fall. And we’re not only talking about death, we’re talking about death by the millions and billions.

The theory of evolution is incompatible with the gospel of Jesus Christ even as it is in direct conflict with any faithful reading of the Scriptures.

We need to recognize that disaster ensues when the book of nature or general revelation is used in some way to trump Scripture and special revelation.

Mohler argued for the “exegetical and theological necessity” of affirming the universe is no more than several thousand years old and was created in six 24-hour days as recorded in Genesis.

That a Baptist believes these things does not surprise me; Baptists have as many views on evolution as there are Baptists. But coming as they are from such a prominent Baptist leader, such direct and downright silly statements are embarrassing, hurtful, and unnecessarily divisive.

It hurts for a couple of reasons. First, because in the eyes of most people, all Baptists are the same. There is little appreciation for the extreme range of views held by Baptists, although both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Fred Phelps are (were) Baptists. So when Mohler, a high-profile representative of the world’s largest Baptist organization, makes such statements, this point is further lost. Second, by taking such extreme views, Mohler is guilty of atheist-making. I mean, if he were a true expression of Christianity, I’d be an atheist too. And who would blame me (besides Mohler)? Third, and most important, it discredits and twists the very gospel he claims to protect (as if it needed protecting). Let’s just admit it: A young earth, literal six-day creation, a literal Adam and Eve, a literal snake, etc., are not exactly central tenets of the Good News of Jesus Christ.

You know, we Baptists used to have leaders and theologians we could be proud of. And to some degree we still do. But the Baptist leaders who are making the news — as Baptists — have lost their heads. They have made it clear — to everyone — that they do not know church history and that they have rejected basic scientific knowledge. And when the heads lose their heads, well, we all lose. Not just the Southern Baptists, either; all of us. Including you, including me, including Jesus himself.

William James considers the M word

Roy Behrens, William James (2001). Source: William James Cybrery. Used by permission of the artist

THE FIRST THING TO KNOW:

Mysticism is not a very nice word.

In a recent post I said that you will not find that word mentioned very often at psnt.net. This is true, despite the fact that negative theology and the third way are closely related to mysticism. My favorite professor and academic advisor at Candler refuses to use the words mystic or mysticism in his classes, although he teaches a lot about mystics and mysticism. I try to follow his example. Why avoid these words so religiously? Because they’re terribly misunderstood. For example, the synonyms of mysticism, according to thesaurus.com, are:

cabala, cabalism, cabbalism, kabala, kabbalism, ontologism, orphism, pietism, quietism, spiritualism, Satanism, black art, demon worship, demonianism, diabolism, magic, necromancy, sorcery, voodoo, witchcraft, witchery, wizardry, abracadabra, alchemy, bewitchment, black art, black magic, charm, conjuring, devilry, divination, enchantment, evil eye, hocus-pocus, incantation, jinx, magic, mumbo jumbo, occultism, spell, thaumaturgy, voodoo, witchcraft, witchery, witching, wizardry

The association of mysticism with Kabbalah, the contemplative dimension of Rabbinic Judaism, is not so troublesome (except for the recent and unfortunate Madonna resonance). But the others? Voodoo? Jinx? Necromancy? Satanism? Good grief. You now see why my professor and I avoid the M word.

But the M word refers to a stream within Christianity that is nearly as old as the faith itself. From Anthony the Great and the Desert Fathers through Meister Eckhart, Teresa of Ávila, and John of the Cross, all the way up to (and beyond) Thomas Merton, mysticism is a strong and living tradition, despite the recent and steep devaluation of its label.

THE SECOND THING TO KNOW:

Mysticism may be about something really important and really real. It may also be a boatload of hooey.

I have been in a great online discussion with an atheist friend who lives in the small hamlet of Tokyo, Japan. We have been talking about religious experiences — in particular, so-called mystical experiences — and whether or not they should be trusted. (We have not used the M word, but that’s what we’re talking about.) Do they have anything to do with reality? He says no; reason alone should guide one’s actions. Anything else is folly. But I say that such experiences are about something real and can be counted on — in certain circumstances — to guide one’s life. Who’s right? What’s really real?

Is mysticism about something really important and really real, or is it a boatload of hooey?

This is today’s subject. Well, that and William James.

THE THIRD THING TO KNOW:

William James, an old-time bigshot philosopher and psychologist, wrote a famous book about this question — although he worded it somewhat differently — and his opinion is worth mentioning.

James lived back in the 19th and early 20th centuries. He had famous family members and hung out with folks like Ralph Waldo Emerson. Philosophers know him as one of the founders of pragmatism, a philosophy centered on the practical consequences of ideas. Psychologists know him for his psychology. But the rest of us philistines know him as the author of The Varieties of Religious Experience, an amazingly popular book — it’s still in print — based on the Gifford Lectures that James delivered in 1901-2.

The centerpiece of Varieties comes in Lectures XVI and XVII, which are simply titled, Mysticism. (Perhaps in James’s day the M word had not yet deteriorated beyond recognition.) James says there are four signs of mystical experience. The first two are, in his words, sharply marked; and the other two are less pronounced. They are, and I quote,

1. Ineffability. — The handiest of the marks by which I classify a state of mind as mystical is negative. The subject of it immediately says that it defies expression, that no adequate report of its contents can be given in words. It follows from this that it must be directly experienced; it cannot be imparted or transferred to others. In this peculiarity mystical states are more like states of feeling than like states of intellect.

2. Noetic quality. — Although so similar to states of feeling, mystical states are to those who have them also states of knowledge. They are states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect… and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority for after-time.

3. Transiency. – Mystical states cannot be sustained for long.

4. Passivity. — When the characteristic sort of consciousness has once set in, the mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance, and indeed as if he were grasped and held by a superior power.

Now it may seem that mystical experience is something that only a few oddball people, of the kind you shut up in the cellar when decent people come over, would have any direct knowledge about. But James says otherwise, and he emphasizes this by placing mystical experiences on a continuum of intensity. He addresses directly four points on this spectrum. These are in order of increasing intensity, and are in the order in which James presents them.

Suddenly, [Symonds writes], at church, or in company, or when I was reading, and always, I think, when my muscles were at rest, I felt the approach of the mood. Irresistibly it took possession of my mind. It consisted in a gradual but swiftly progressive obliteration of space, time, sensation, and the [many] factors of experience which seem to qualify what we are pleased to call our Self. In proportion as these conditions of ordinary consciousness were subtracted, the sense of an underlying or essential consciousness acquired intensity. At last nothing remained but a pure, absolute, abstract Self. The universe became without form and void of content. But Self persisted, formidable in its vivid keenness, feeling the most poignant doubt about reality, ready, as it seemed, to find existence break as breaks a bubble. And what then? [I apprehended] a coming dissolution, the grim conviction that this state was the last state of the conscious Self, the sense that I had followed the last thread of being to the verge of the abyss, and had arrived at a demonstration of eternal Maya or illusion.

Now this last one in seems nearly pathological, but Symonds was, in the words of James, “a perfect monster of many-sided cerebral efficiency.” It is also mentioned that he had no sign of pathology about him. I know several people who have had such experiences and they too show no signs of mental instability.

1. As a matter of psychological fact, mystical states of a well-pronounced and emphatic sort are usually authoritative over those who have them. They have been “there,” and know. It is vain for rationalism to grumble about this. We can throw [the mystic] into a prison or a madhouse, but we cannot change his mind. Our own more rational beliefs are based on evidence exactly similar in nature to that which mystics quote for theirs. Our senses, namely, have assured us of certain states of fact, but mystical experiences are as direct perceptions of fact for those who have them as any sensations ever were for us.

2. Mystics have no right to claim that we ought to accept the deliverance of their peculiar experiences, if we are ourselves outsiders and feel no private call thereto. The fact is that the mystical feeling of enlargement, union, and emancipation has no specific intellectual content of its own. We have no right, therefore, to invoke its prestige in favor of any specific belief [such as Christainity -pw].

3. The existence of mystical states absolutely overthrows the pretension of non-mystical states to be the sole and ultimate dictators of what we may believe. It is the rationalistic critic who plays the part of denier in the controversy, and his denials have no strength, for there never can be a state of facts to which new meaning may not truthfully be added, provided the mind ascend to a more enveloping point of view.

4. Mystical states offer us hypotheses, hypotheses we may voluntarily ignore, but which as thinkers we cannot possibly upset.

It’s a bottomless sky

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field. Source: S. Beckwith & the HUDF Working Group/HST/ESA/NASA. Click on the image for a nice high-resolution 19 MB version. It may take a minute to load, but once you have it you can have a boatload of fun getting lost among the jillions of distant and colorful galaxies. Of course, my wife would say I don’t need the picture to do that

Every now and again I like to post an astronomy image or video that, in my opinion, has nice spiritual resonances. If ever there was a photo of the sky that had such, it’s this one: It’s called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, and it is the deepest (meaning most distant and faintest) image ever taken of the universe. Once you meditate on it while, it’s enough to knock your knickers off, if you were to wear knickers. I would like to share a little about what you’re looking at when you stand in front of this thing.

1. The area covered by the image is about one-tenth that covered by the full moon. That is, ten of these images put together would look as “big” as the moon as seen from your back yard. Or your front yard. Or anywhere else on Earth. The section of sky is in the southern constellation of Fornax, to the south and west of the more famous Orion.

2. Almost every spot you see on this image is a galaxy, which is a collection of anywhere from a million to a trillion stars. There are about 10,000 galaxies in the field. There ARE a few individual stars in the picture, though: These are the bright points of light with so-called “diffraction spikes” radiating from them. An example is the star near middle right; it carries the rather romantic name USNO-A2.0 0600-01400432 and is a pale yellow-white color. This star and the others in the field are part of our own Milky Way Galaxy and are in the extreme foreground. It’s like looking at a mountain range 100 miles away through a car window; the stars are like spots on the windshield, a few inches from your nose.

3. About 800 exposures were taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys instrument on board Hubble. The total exposure time is just under 1 million seconds (about 11.5 days).

4. Perhaps the most important — and interesting — thing to know is that, as one looks further back in space, one is looking further back in time. When we look at the Moon we see it as it was a couple of seconds earlier; when we look at the Sun we see it as it was 8 minutes earlier; when we look at nearby stars we see them as they were a handful of years earlier; when we look at the closest galaxies we see them as they were several million years earlier. Light takes time to travel, is the point, and we can’t see anything until light from it enters our eyes. So when we look at the HUDF, we are seeing the nearest galaxies (like the beautiful spiral near the lower right-hand corner), which are perhaps several hundred million light years away, as they were hundreds of millions of years ago. And the most distant ones? We are seeing them as they were about 13 billion years ago! This is just a few hundred million years after the big bang. Thus, by moving from the most distant galaxies to the nearest ones, we can learn about how galaxies are built up over time; that is, we can study galactic evolution. When we look down this deep well of the sky, we are not only looking across unimaginable distances; we are looking deep into the past as well.

5. This patch of sky is not unusual in any way; we see the same basic picture no matter which direction we look. We will see different galaxies, to be sure, but the overall distribution of galaxy types and colors and distances will be the same.

6. A typical galaxy has about 100 billion stars in it, and this image contains 10,000 galaxies. Therefore there are about 10^15 (that’s 1,000,000,000,000,000) stars in this picture. Many of these stars, if not most of them, have planets orbiting them. What kind of life is  has developed or is developing on these planets? How much extraterrestrial life are we looking at? How many advanced civilizations are contained in this wonderful image? Just a thought.

Before I sign off, I thought I’d share a few relevant links. First, there’s a nice scalable and interactive version. Next, a NASA site with animations. Over at APOD they have an infrared image of the same patch of sky. And here’s a fun 3D voyage through the image.

That’s all I have for now. If I think of other cool stuff to mention about the HUDF, I will add it to the list. I hope this helps each of you meditate a bit on how strange and surprising a place we have found ourselves living in. We didn’t even ask for it! It’s enough to freak you out a little, and I mean that in the best possible way.

An invitation for you

Jesus and Zaccheus, from the icon collection of St. Mary Coptic Orthodox Church, East Brunswick, NJ. Jesus saw Zaccheus and wanted to know his story. I’m not Jesus and you — I assume — are not perched in a sycamore tree, but I want to know your story anyway

Dear Alert Readers,

I’d like to share some happy news with you: Over the last six months psnt.net‘s readership has increased slowly but steadily. Currently it is read by about 180 (unique) people per week. And as far as I can tell, you are a diverse group in almost every meaning of the word: religiously, geographically, professionally, politically, age-wise, etc. I am grateful for each and every one of you, and I’d like to extend to you an invitation:

Please be a part of psnt.net by sharing your stories.

Jesus knew well that everyone loves a story. Zaccheus surely did; the small man climbed that tree and risked public ridicule so he could hear a master storyteller at work. But what Jesus knew is that Zaccheus himself had a story, a story that Jesus wanted to hear. And he heard it over a meal at Zaccheus’s table, a place of personal sharing, mutual trust, and friendship.

I’d like psnt.net to be a place where you can tell your story. In particular, I — and your fellow readers, I suspect — would love to know why you believe what you believe about science and religion, even if you don’t yet know exactly what you believe. This emphasis on stories is a part of what makes psnt.net different from other science & religion websites. It has been a place where, because of your interest, I have been able to tell my own story with great freedom. Now it’s your turn.

Here are some prompts that may help get the juices flowing.

1. Do you have a thought or a story to share about about human evolution and the Bible? How do you interpret the creation accounts of Gen. 1 and 2? Did your church upbringing (if any) have a bearing on this?

2. Do you think that science and religion are compatible? Why or why not? Is there a story behind your answer?

3. Have you ever struggled in your faith — or lost it altogether — because of the claims of science?

4. Has there been anyone in your life — a parent, a teacher, a friend — who has influenced you to think about science-religion issues? Was this person helpful or a real pest?

5. When you hear the phrase, Human beings have developed from earlier species of animals, what is your first honest internal response? Who and/or what experiences do you think are behind this reaction?

6. Do you have a thought or a story to share about the spiritual consequences or issues surrounding antidepressants?

7. What do you think about Christians who use science to argue against atheism? Have you personally known any Christians who have done this? Other faiths may be substituted.

8. What do you think about atheists who use science to argue against Christianity? Have you personally known any atheists who have done this? Again, other faiths may be substituted.

9. Is there a God? Is God personal? If so, does God communicate to you through nature? Have any of you come to faith through this kind of interaction?

10. Is advanced medical technology actually helping us live better lives, or is it mostly creating ethical problems that have passed (or are passing) beyond our ability to solve?

11. If you are from a faith tradition other than Christianity, how do you and/or others of your tradition deal with scientific questions or challenges?

There are certainly many more questions out there. Whatever’s on your mind is welcome: questions, concerns, a single sentence, a paragraph, a 5000-word essay. Whatever!

A few things you should know before going further:

1. The more personal, the better. Not only does honesty beget honesty, but honesty is always interesting. Moreover, I work hard to ensure that psnt.net is a place where opinions and stories may be shared without fear of recrimination or insults of any kind. All comments are moderated and will only be made public if I approve them.

2. I will know who you are, but you have the choice of being anonymous beyond that. If you choose anonymity, please indicate this in your note. You have my word that your name will not be made public; no one but you and I will know your identity. If, on the other hand, you allow your name to be published along with your comment, I will include a tiny bio with your permission. I’d like for you to know a little about each other!

3. There are three ways you can make contact with me: (a) use psnt.net‘s comment system (just beneath this post), (b) send me an email at paul(at)psnt.net, or (c) send me a message through my personal Facebook page or the psnt.net Facebook page.

4. I will be starting a new section of psnt.net where these stories and comments will be posted. Additionally, they may be used or referred to in my regular posts (but never in a critical way).

5. Logical arguments in support of some position, even really good arguments, are not called for. This section of psnt.net is not marked out for the debate team! You are always free, however, to challenge anything I might say in my regular posts.

Thank you again for your continued support of this work.

Your friend,

Paul

The third way

Lisa Perrin, The Triumph of Reason, graphite on paper, 2009. Used by permission of the artist. Perrin writes on her site: “Yes, that is Charles Darwin riding a unicorn as a symbol of ‘The triumph of reason over fantasy and fallacy.’ You might also note the finches with various beak sizes, the slain dragon (the sword reads “Logic” on the handle), dodo birds (skeletal and living), and mermaids (skeletal and living).” We may therefore ask: What’s the difference between unicorns, mermaids, live dodos on one hand, and “God” on the other? Hm.

Just last week I had a short online conversation with Philip Stilwell over at from synapse to byte. It was lots of fun. Phil had posted an over-simplified (his words) chart that compared science and faith. In the chart he seemed to emphasize that faith is essentially an emotion-driven phenomenon leading to “a warped sense of objective reality, tribalism, dogmatism, and social myopia.” Which is just fine; he did admit of the chart’s simplicity. But what he wrote to his readers is: “I’m especially interested in hearing from those who think that faith is based on evidence. I hear this from time to time, but have never been able to tease out exactly the relationship between the two. Where does evidence end and faith begin?” So this is what our discussion was about.

This has gotten me to thinking a bit about the essence of religious faith and what it is based on. The subtext of Phil’s post is that, in the search for the truth of things, logic, objective evidence, and a scientific approach comprise a more worthy set of tools that mere emotionalism. And on this I agree without question. Like Phil, I harbor a strong distrust of emotions with their vaporous come-and-go quality (some who know me may say, with some truth, that my distrust is too strong!). There is no doubt that reason is a better guide than whatever one may be feeling at a particular moment. But to say that x is better than y is not to say that x is the best. Perhaps there is a z out there that kicks the life out of both x and y.

There is a way of apprehending the world other than the intellectual (x) or emotional (y). This third way is the spiritual way (z). This way of seeing the world lies beneath the intellectual and the emotional, supports them, and contains them. It is much more than the sum of them. And when the world is glimpsed — even for a moment — through this spiritual faculty, it is discovered that the intellectual and the emotional are not central to life but are peripheral. When one sees in the third way, one discovers deep peace, optimism, and hope. One becomes sharply aware of one’s state of emptiness and absolute freedom. Joy and relief come with this awareness. In addition, the physical world — living and nonliving, past and present — is understood to be the infinitely deep and miraculous place it is, and fellow human beings are seen to be the beautiful creations they are. It’s enough to put one in one’s place, which is in a place of belonging and not a place of alienation. I think this spiritual way of seeing the world is what Jesus refers to when he said, Do you have eyes, and fail to see? Do you have ears, and fail to hear? (Mark 8:18) and Blessed are your eyes, for they see: and your ears, for they hear” (Matthew 13:16).

Now, intellectual questions — from tiny ones like Why are the Gospel timelines contradictory? to big ones like Does God exist? — become peripheral in light of this overwhelming knowledge (and I do mean knowledge). As do one’s emotional struggles. The intellectual and the emotional are rooted in the spiritual and may enhance one’s life but they are not central to one’s life. This is a great relief, because now the intellectual and the emotional are no longer of first importance. One does not have to cling or define oneself in terms of these categories.  In fact, it becomes obvious that there’s no need to define oneself at all. Intellectual questions and emotional struggles may now be held lightly in the face of the much deeper and more real and more stable spiritual “self,” and these questions and struggles can be seen for what they really are. Even better, life can finally be approached with a genuine sense of humor. Now I am only able to see myself and the world like this is rare cases — just ask my wife — but the knowledge that there is a very real and deep well of spirit within all of us, that we are all loved by God, that we are all OK, is a great comfort to me even (especially?) when I’m not able to act in accordance with that knowledge.

The impasse that Phil and I came to is this: The evidence for this spiritual knowledge is not objective. It is completely subjective. It is based only on what I say (and, incidentally, what thousands of others have said before me; many men and women, from many faiths, have said that the third way exists and have described it in similar language). But this is anecdotal and does not stand up to the rigors of science. I get that. Such evidence is based in personal, and usually individual, experience. Such evidence cannot be laid out on a table, poked and prodded, or explored via controlled experiments for everyone to see and touch. Such evidence is not the kind to which one can point to and say, “any objective person can see that this is the case.” But does this falsify claims made upon this evidence? I don’t think so.

There are predictable counterarguments. First, there is some distance between such an “experience” and the proposition: God exists. But one thing that comes along with the third way is an absolute destruction of anything one ever “believed” about “God” or “God’s existence.” The third way is a way of negation. Afterward, even typing the word “God” can be painful, because one knows it’s a lie: What is the word’s referent? There is not one in any normal way of thinking. This is why, in negative theology, one might say: God is nothing; that is, God is no thing. Second, it may be that these kind of experiences are simply so much electronic noise in the brain. Of course this may be true, but I’m not sure what it means. Does it mean that brain chemistry is absolutely fundamental? Does it mean that there are no other true ways to understand it? Third, there are other words and phrases without referents: unicorn, mermaid, live dodo. But these are fantasies that never held real power over people’s lives. They have never been intellectually or emotionally or socially fruitful.  And there are other words without referents, too: Zeus, Athena, Fenrir. These have held a lot of power over people, which might — maybe — be just fine; perhaps they were earlier “faces of God,” if you will. But who knows? Fourth, as Carl Sagan once wrote, Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I agree, actually. But are the words extraordinary and objective synonymous? Or is objectivity a necessary condition for extraordinary-ness? Anyway. I could do this all day. There are plenty of other decent arguments out there. But, and this is my point:

Once one gets a good look at the world in this third way, such arguments lose a good deal of power and can even appear superficial and weak. This is not to say that they lose all meaning, but they do become peripheral.

So maybe I’m not playing by the rules. If so, that’s too bad. I don’t like losing out on having conversations and friendships with those who tag as “irrational” anyone that refuses to let hard logic rule their lives.

I can’t remember where or when it was, but I once saw a sign that sums up what I’m trying to say here. It said,

Logic is the beginning of wisdom, not its end.

Therefore you will not hear me making arguments for the existence of God, or arguments about how the Christian God and evolution can coexist, or arguments about the location of the causal joint between God and the physical world. psnt.net is not about making arguments; it is about painting a picture. It is about getting a glimpse of reality. It is about seeing the world in the third way.

Thoughts on solitude

Marc Chagall, Elijah Touched by an Angel, from the Bible suite, 1958. Image source: The Jewish Museum, New York

Ahab told Jezebel all that Elijah had done, and how he had killed all the prophets with the sword. Then Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah, saying, ‘So may the gods do to me, and more also, if I do not make your life like the life of one of them by this time tomorrow.’ Then he was afraid; he got up and fled for his life, and came to Beer-sheba, which belongs to Judah; he left his servant there. But he himself went a day’s journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a solitary broom tree. He asked that he might die: ‘It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life, for I am no better than my ancestors.’ Then he lay down under the broom tree and fell asleep. Suddenly an angel touched him and said to him, ‘Get up and eat.’ He looked, and there at his head was a cake baked on hot stones, and a jar of water. He ate and drank, and lay down again. The angel of the Lord came a second time, touched him, and said, ‘Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you.’ He got up, and ate and drank; then he went in the strength of that food for forty days and forty nights to Horeb the mount of God. At that place he came to a cave, and spent the night there.

– 1 Kings 19.1-9, NRSV

Elijah lived his life mostly in solitude, marginal to the popular religion of the day, marginal to the power politics of the day. It was from the solitary margins that Elijah recentered the life of Israel. For people schooled in a biblical imagination, the [modern-day] fascination with numbers and goals as a sign of efficacy is strange indeed. Virtually all the men and women who prepared the way of the Lord, which became the way of Jesus, worked at the margins of their societies and cultures. Elijah is conspicuous but is in no way unique. The story of Elijah is told from nine site locations. Only one, Mt. Carmel, provided a public stage for a crowd of people. All the others were out-of-the-way and marginal.

This is important. Elijah appeared from time to time without fanfare and then disappeared from public life without notice. Basically, he lived a solitary life in obscurity, but his formative impact on how we as a people of God understand responsibility and witness in society is inescapable and irreversible. It never goes out of style and by God’s grace is replicated in every generation. The essence of the way of solitude is that it counters the world’s way, the culture’s way. What Elijah did, and what his contemporary progeny does, is purge our imaginations of this world’s assumptions on how life is lived, on what counts in life, and on where power comes from.

– Eugene H. Peterson, from his introduction to Annemarie S. Kidder‘s book The Power of Solitude: Discovering Your True Self in a World of Nonsense and Noise

In my last post I talked a bit about why the church is a good and necessary thing, why the community found there is different from other communities, and why, though tempted, I have not left the church. And in that post I mentioned that I valued the emphasis on solitude and silence found within Christianity. This is an aspect of the Christian tradition that is not well-known or understood today. In particular, very few — at least outside of the Catholic and Eastern churches — know about monasticism past or present. This is unfortunate. When monks or monasteries are brought up they are often regarded by many as curios, as oddball holdovers from the medieval past. The monastic life is often seen as a means of escaping “real life.” Having known several monks and having visited several monasteries, I have found that monasticism is none of these, and it seems to me that we need to hear monastic voices today more than ever.

We need to listen to the words of our monastic brothers and sisters — all of whom regularly practice the disciplines of solitude and silence — precisely because of the essential banality and hyperactivity of our modern lives. Large-scale consumerism and high-speed communication networks (yes, including blogs) encourage groupthink over creativity, narcissism over true individuality, and trivia over depth. We are blinded by our constant exposure to nonsense and bullshit. And we have no idea what we would see if we could just get rid of it for awhile. Most of us — myself included — don’t want to see what we would see in the absence of all the noise. That’s why we love the noise; it covers up what truly frightens us: solitude and silence. Yet sustained exposure to the solitude and silence that we fear can renew our minds and clear our vision and reconnect us to ourselves and God. It worked for Elijah, it works for monastics, and it can work for us too.

It’s good to listen to voices from the margins, voices purified in the flame of solitude and silence. Here is a sample of such voices. Not all the people quoted here are monastics, but all have something to tell us about solitude and the interior life. And not all of these will speak to you; some may even come across as so much nonsense. But perhaps there is at least one good word here for each reader.

1. DROWNING IN COMMUNITY, Annemarie S. Kidder, from The Power of Solitude: Discovering Your True Self in a World of Nonsense and Noise (2007). Building connection, maintaining friendship, nurturing fellowship — all are considered building blocks in the emergence of a healthy self. But the popular emphasis on community and relationship has blurred the boundaries between a personality that is self-differentiated and interdependent and one that is dependent on others for self-definition. Often the participation in and belonging to a certain community covers up and overshadows the soul’s need to develop an autonomous self. By over-identifying with the community, the soul is drowned by external demands and unable to hear its own pulse and life. Stepping back from these external demands, taking stock of where community ends and the “I” begins will require solitude. Reflection, soul-searching,  self-examination are needed for the autonomous self to emerge that is aware of veiled projections, irrational expectations, and blurred boundaries. When the need to belong overpowers our need to become and simply be, we give greater importance to externals than internals, to public image than to personal growth, to others’ voices than God’s voice whispering in the soul.

2. THE VEIL OF WORDS, Thomas Merton (Cistercian, 1915-1968), from Thoughts in Solitude. The solitary life, being silent, clears away the smoke-screen of words that man has laid down between his mind and things. In solitude we remain face to face with the naked being of things. And yet we find that the nakedness of reality which we have feared, is neither a matter of terror or of shame. It is clothed in the friendly communion of silence, and this silence is related to love. The world our words have attempted to classify, to control and even to despise (because they could not contain it) comes close to us, for silence teaches us to know reality by respecting it where words have defiled it.

3. SOLITUDE IN THE CITY, anonymous Desert Father (5th century), from Sayings of the Desert Fathers. Amma Matrona said, “There are many in the mountains [in solitude] who behave as if they were in the town, and they are wasting their time. It is better  to have many people around you and to live the solitary life in your will than to be alone and always longing to be in a crowd.”

4. COMPANY WITH GOD, William of St. Thierry (Benedictine, ~1077-1148), from The Golden Epistle. The man who has God with him is never less alone than when he is alone.

5. THE NOISE AMONG OTHERS, Thomas à Kempis (Brethren of the Common Life, ~1380-1471), from The Imitation of Christ. The greatest saints guarded their time alone and chose to serve God in solitude. Someone has said, “As often as I went out among men, I returned less of a man.” We often experience this when we have spent a long time in idle chatter. It is easier to be completely silent than not to be long-winded; it is easier to stay at home than to be properly on guard outside the monastery. A person whose goal is the inward, spiritual life must cast his lot with Jesus and not follow the crowd.

6. WHAT ONE MAY FIND IN SOLITUDE, Guigo I (Carthusian, d. 1136), from Carthusian Customs. Jacob, having sent ahead everything over the ford of Jaboc, remained alone and saw God face-to-face (Gen. 32.23-30). He was rewarded by a blessing and by a change of name [and by a lifelong limp! -pw]. He gained more in one moment alone than a whole lifetime in the company of others.

7. THE NEED FOR BALANCE, Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Lutheran, 1906-1945), from Life Together. Let him who cannot be alone beware of community… let him who is not in community beware of being alone… each by itself has profound pitfalls and perils. One who wants fellowship without solitude plunges into the void of words and feelings, and the one who seeks solitude without fellowship perishes in the abyss of vanity, self-infatuation, and despair.

8. THE PORTABILITY OF SOLITUDE, Richard Foster, from Celebration of Discipline (1978). Solitude is more a state of mind and heart than it is a place. There is a solitude of the heart that can be maintained at all times. Crowds, or the lack of them, have little to do with this inward attentiveness. It is quite possible to be a desert hermit and never experience solitude. But if we possess inward solitude we do not fear being alone, or we know we are not alone. Neither do we fear being alone, for they do not control us. In the midst of noise and confusion we are settled into a deep inner silence. Whether alone or among people, we always carry with us a portable sanctuary of the heart.

9. EACH OF US HAS BEEN ALONE WITH GOD OUR WHOLE LIVES, Thomas Merton (Cistercian, 1915-1968), from No Man is an Island. Secrecy and solitude are values that belong to the very essence of personality. A person is a person insofar as he has a secret and is a solitude of his own that cannot be communicated to anyone else. If I love a person, I will love that which makes him most a person: the secrecy, the hiddenness, the solitude of his own individual being, which God alone can penetrate and understand. A love that breaks into the spiritual privacy of another in order to lay open all his secrets and besiege his solitude with importunity does not love him; it seeks to destroy what is best in him, and what is most intimately his… If I cannot distinguish myself from the mass of other men, I will never be able to love and respect other men as I ought. If I do not separate myself from them enough to know what is mine and what is theirs, I will never discover what I have to give them, and never allow them the opportunity to give me what they ought.

10. THE INNER AND OUTER LIVES, Meister Eckhart (Dominican, ~1260-1327), from On Detachment. Now you must know that the outer man may be active while the inner man remains wholly free and immovable.

11. ON LIMITS, Marie of the Incarnation (Carmelite, 1566-1618), from The Relation of 1654. There is no limit to the interior life.

Queen of the Damned quits Christianity. One asks, why not?

Anne Rice by I Am Second. She was a Christian, now she’s not

The news is a few weeks old, I guess, and maybe I need to get out more. But just this week it has come to my attention that Anne Rice, most famously the author of many dark and popular vampire tales, has publicly dissociated herself from Christianity. On 29 July, the following appeared on her Facebook page.

For those who care, and I understand if you don’t: Today I quit being a Christian. I’m out. I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being “Christian” or to being part of Christianity. It’s simply impossible for me to “belong” to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten years, I’ve tried. I’ve failed. I’m an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else… I’m out. In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life. In the name of… Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen.

This seems a little strained. I am a Christian and I know lots of Christians. And many of us — myself and many friends — refuse to be anti-gay, anti-feminist, anti-science, etc. And we’re not exactly a rare breed of animal. Folks like us can be found in any town in America. Is Ms. Rice selectively blind? I’m not sure, but I agree heartily with Rod Dreher over at Big Questions Online when he writes, “Surely a woman of her age and experience cannot possibly believe that the entirety of Christianity, current and past, can be reduced to the cultural politics of the United States of America in the 21st century… How can a woman of her putative sophistication really think that Christianity is nothing more than a section of the Republican Party at prayer?”

Whatever her rationale, Ms. Rice’s decision has gotten me to thinking and reminiscing, and I must admit: There have been times, some not so long ago, when leaving the church has seemed like a very good idea to me. There are plenty of reasons  — some straight from Ms. Rice’s list of complaints — why leaving organized Christianity seems to be the smart way to go. Here is a short off-the-top-of-my-head list. There are certainly lots more.

1. The church moves too slow. By mistaking convention for tradition, the pace at which the average church moves ensures that those outside of the church see it as irrelevant and out-of-touch.

2. The church reflects — and avoids challenging — the conventions of consumer culture. Perhaps the best place to see this is in the prepackaged curricula for vacation Bible schools. The basic idea is that everything comes in a box, and all you have to do is open the box and fit volunteers into preset roles. and follow the instructions. The “teachers” don’t even need to now anything about the Bible, because all their prompts are written out for them already. Plus the kids spend no more than 20 minutes in any one place, ensuring that, even at church, one need not develop an attention span greater than that of a squirrel monkey. Plus at the end of the day they get a crappy plastic toy to snap together and take home with them and forget about. That’s creativity? What a God-forsaken disaster. Happy Meal Bible school, as a friend of mine at church calls it. And the same thread runs through so much of what the church has become. There is no escape from banality and consumerism. There is little genuine use of peoples’ gifts.

Why? Competition between churches for members and money. Another market effect. In an effort to provide the best and newest and flashiest summer programs, all churches end up looking alike, afraid to look old-fashioned or out-of-step.

3. The church does not encourage critical or free thought. Boy, is this ever true. I have been a member of a number of Sunday school classes and have at times felt free to speak my mind. This has gotten me in trouble with other class members. Therefore I have sometimes offered to teach, because when you teach it’s not about you. You don’t have to say what you think; you have to pull out of others what they think. I felt much safer teaching. In general I have a much easier time discussing my faith with skeptics, atheists, and non-Christians than I do with Christians, because most Christians are uncomfortable with points of view that diverge from the company line.

4. The church does not understand the best of science and art and thus fears them. It is one thing to not understand something, but another thing altogether to feed your ignorance by consciously avoiding the it. Or, worse, to shun the idea because it does not square with what you think you’re supposed to believe. From the big bang to evolution to abstract art to great Christian writing, if it’s not “safe for the family” (read: “bland, insipid, and dull as hell”) then let’s just avoid it. The church prefers Thomas Kinkade to even joyful and playful artists like Henri Matisse or Alexander Calder, to say nothing of middle-of-the road folks like Georgia O’Keeffe (too much sex and death) or Mark Rothko (too abstract, too weird) or Edward Hopper (too plain, too depressing). A subset of this issue is the church’s seeming insistence that art, music, literature must be explicitly Christian to be holy or even spiritually significant.

I should mention, however, that there are outposts where Christianity and culture meet happily and fruitfully. But, so far as I can see, they’re not associated with the church.

5. The church encourages bad behavior. This is because it does not, in general, have the courage to face down those who poison it from within, especially when these people are prominent and/or rich.

6. The church domesticates the divine. Too often, God becomes as soft as the seat cushions in your local megachurch. In the interest of gaining members and dough and power, the church often paints a picture of God that, quite frankly, is therapeutic, materialistic, me-centered, and thoroughly uninteresting. God: your own personal cheerleader. Who needs a God like this?

7. The church thinks it can’t afford to be honest because it doesn’t believe in its own message. This is, in my view, the most serious problem of all. I am in seminary now and we ministers-to-be have the pleasure to learn a lot of interesting, even radical, theology. But that gets lost in the weekly realities of the parish. I know because I’ve seen it. Most M.Div. graduates have a fairly clear — and, at least in the case of Candler — even radical theology when they enter the professional ministry, but if they told that truth in the pulpit they would be out of a job fairly quickly. That’s because, on the whole, the truth can’t be prettified or polished without becoming something other than the truth.

So, with all of this being true, why stay? Why associate with such a group? There are at least two answers to this. First, there is much good in the church that’s impossible to see without getting up close and personal with it. That means getting your hands dirty. And even though I have tended to emphasize the negative here on psnt.net, over the years the church has been a place filled with my best friends. They are saints, all of them. I mean this as I say it. Those who say that religion has done more harm than good have no idea about the resurrected lives of people like Darren, whom Christ redeemed from the pit of depression and suicide; or Adam, who has joyfully said yes to his call to take the love of God to the city’s impoverished and imprisoned; or Ginny, who in quiet gratitude to God washes the swollen and cracked feet of the city’s homeless at the nearby shelter; or Alvin, who in the hope of God’s promises wins small daily victories against alcoholism. In general, my church friends have not been academics or scientists. They are people from whom I have much to learn.

I was once lamenting the problems at a church I was a member of, and a dear non-Christian friend of mine overheard me. So she asked, Why are things so ugly in the church? I don’t see how that could be. I asked her, Do you have a family? Yes, she said. Does your family have problems? I asked. Yes, she said. The church is a big family, I said. Oh, she said. I could tell that a light had gone on. Like a family, the church can be dysfunctional; like a family, it can be the community that saves you from yourself.

The following is a story I told in a sermon once, about a moment of absolute clarity I experienced in the context of a small church community.

There was once a small church situated in the woods just north of Chapel Hill, NC. The building was small but beautiful, especially its sanctuary, which had a smooth hardwood floor and large windows opening to the trees and wildlife outside. Its openness and light made it seem larger than it was. In this place an unlikely group of people met every Sunday. There were elderly people, college students from UNC and Duke, a couple of families, single adults of various ages, academic sorts, hippie sorts, conservative sorts, liberal sorts, all sorts. It had about as many sorts as it had people, which was no more than about 40 on any given Sunday. A number of these folks met during the week for lunch and for Wednesday night studies. For reasons that are not important here, the church did not last. But while it lasted, there was community.

A few comments are due about that word.  What do we know about community? We who live in a country awash in individualism, what does it mean to us? I don’t pretend to know too much about it, being as much a product of America as anyone else, but I suspect it may have something to do with what Jesus called the kingdom of God. This phrase may not be much more helpful, because Jesus did not tell anyone exactly what it is. But he thought God’s kingdom was really important and he talked about it a lot. And community seems central to the kingdom. After all, it is like a great banquet, a great feast. That’s what Jesus said.

The kingdom showed itself, if only a little, in the community of that tiny North Carolina church. I was there and I think I saw it. After every service of worship we would push the pews to the edge of the sanctuary and we would set up dinner. For three years we did this, every Sunday. It seems remarkable to me now. One day, I was seated at the end of one of the long tables.  In the midst of the meal, in the midst of conversation, I looked down the table at those present. And for a tiny moment a darkness seemed to lift. I saw the kingdom. I saw reality. And I realized how much I loved everyone there. For a few minutes, everything was different. In the words of Thomas Merton, they were shining like the sun and didn’t even know it.

Moments like this make the Christian life unaccountably livable.

What I did not say in that sermon is that this particular event occurred after several trying weeks of real internal struggle, weeks in which me and some others in the church had disagreed sharply about the direction we thought the church should go. Things had been tense and difficult. Miraculously, there had been mutual surrender but it had been hard to come by. I can point to other times in my church life when I have come to see the world anew, times when my internal eyes miraculously opened up, times like this one. And without exception they had been preceded by — and often followed by — difficulty and struggle within the church body, either large-scale and public or small-scale and private. Loss, struggle, and pain, when faced honestly and corporately, leads to redemption and freedom. The place where this has been done most graciously and consistently in my life is the church.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to be a Christian apart from the church. This is because Christianity is intrinsically so counter-intuitive and peculiar that one simply cannot maintain a Christian outlook without being reminded regularly of its substance, without being part of a remembering community. Iron sharpens iron, and one person sharpens the wits of another (Prov. 27.17), and we can never stay sharp so long as we insist on being Christian only in ways that we approve of. I am theologically liberal; I need my conservative friends. I tend to focus on the humanity of Jesus; I need those who connect with his divinity. I tend to focus on the values of solitude and silence that have been nurtured within the Christian tradition; I need those who insist that Jesus was about social justice. You get the idea. I’m like an academic who needs the university environment to keep her mental faculties piqued, but for me it’s far more urgent; I need a community of faith to keep myself from dropping off the edge of life altogether.

Which brings me to my second point. So often I hear of people who have left the church because of its judgmentalism or its hypocrisy. I won’t insist that these are not found in churches; I’ve been around long enough to know better. But one must be very careful to not become what one despises, or, more to the point, to not despise what one already is. Because it may be that what you think you see in the church is really a reflection of your own troubles. The truth is, we are all a mess, and the church is a mess. But — and this gives me great hope for all of us — Jesus did not wait around until he had perfect people to spend his time with. Instead, he chose a bunch of selfish, quarrelsome, disputatious creatures who constantly argued among themselves, who missed the point over and over, who were afraid and timid and petty, who betrayed him and turned their back on him at the crucial moment. It is precisely these creatures we are called to love, who we are called to throw in our lot with, because it is precisely these creatures that we ourselves are. And if you think you’re above all this human muck and folly and need, you’re fooling yourself.

You will never hear me say that God does not act outside of the church, or within and among people and groups that do not describe themselves as Christian. God can work, and probably does, through the most hard-boiled of atheists. And the church is not a golden circle within which all good people reside. The church is a mess, but, in the words of my brother-in-law Keith, who is showing up in these pages more and more often, it is a beautiful mess. It is what we have, and we must learn to love it and nurture it. For it is in that very learning to love that we put ourselves aside and become more like Jesus, who we profess to love and to follow.

I for one am sorry that Ms. Rice is quitting the church. She was, for me personally, a first-rate public example that not all Christians are sunny feel-good types who are miraculously shielded from the darker side of human life. And I wish the very best for her as she leaves us quarrelsome and obnoxious Christians behind.

This just in: Bible proves Einstein wrong

The left-wing rabble-rouser, anti-truth conspirator, and Bible-unbeliever at his home in Princeton, NJ in 1950. Only a liberal agitator would wear shoes like that

Friends, I had to create a new category, weirdness, for this one.

I really love it when people of some prominence say things without thinking about it first. In this case it is Andy Schlafly, son of Phyllis, founder of Conservapedia, and sayer of many silly things. (If you don’t know what Conservapedia is, click here and spend and hour poking around. There are no words to adequately describe it.) Lots of people have said lots of dumb things, but this one, unearthed at Talking Points Memo by my ever-alert brother-in-law Keith, beats the life out of all its competitors.

I will share a few quotes.

The theory of relativity is a mathematical system that allows no exceptions. It is heavily promoted by liberals who like its encouragement of relativism and its tendency to mislead people in how they view the world.^[1]

I will handle the footnote in a moment. First, I don’t know what “mathematical system that allows no exceptions” means. But if I may venture a guess, it means that relativity is “expressed in mathematics.” So was Newton’s physics, but exceptions were found. Hence Albert’s fine work. This is how science operates. So I really have no idea what “allows no exceptions” is supposed to mean. Second, the name relativity is misleading and everyone who learns the subject properly knows it. Einstein never liked the name, because the one single thing that Einstein’s relativity is founded on is the invariance of (1) the laws of physics and therefore (2) the speed of light. That is, physical laws are absolute and c is absolute. Time and space may be relative, but only in such a way that c, the speed of light,  is always 3.0×10^5 km/s in a vacuum. I could go on to the “promoted by liberals” thing, but why? It’s really too easy.

The footnote to the last quoted sentence above reads,

[1] See, e.g., historian Paul Johnson’s book about the 20th century, and the article written by liberal law professor Laurence Tribe as allegedly assisted by Barack Obama. Virtually no one who is taught and believes relativity continues to read the Bible, a book that outsells New York Times bestsellers by a hundred-fold.

This bears repeating: Virtually no one who is taught and believes relativity continues to read the Bible. The mind boggles.

Most interestingly, Schlafly points to the Bible as a reason that Einstein’s theory must be wrong. In particular, he mentions the so-called “action-at-a-distance” performed by Jesus and described in John 4.46-54. [Note: action-at-a-distance, also known to physics persons as nonlocality, describes a situation in which an event causes something to happen instantaneously at a different location. Put another way, it requires that information travel infinitely fast and thus move (way) faster than light. Not allowed, so sorry, says the good Professor.]

Anyway, relativity can’t be true because the Bible says so, says Schlafly. Here’s the triumphant passage, John 4.46-54 (NIV).

Once more [Jesus] visited Cana in Galilee, where he had turned the water into wine. And there was a certain royal official whose son lay sick at Capernaum.When this man heard that Jesus had arrived in Galilee from Judea, he went to him and begged him to come and heal his son, who was close to death.”Unless you people see miraculous signs and wonders,” Jesus told him, “you will never believe.” The royal official said, “Sir, come down before my child dies.” Jesus replied, “You may go. Your son will live.” The man took Jesus at his word and departed. While he was still on the way, his servants met him with the news that his boy was living. When he inquired as to the time when his son got better, they said to him, “The fever left him yesterday at the seventh hour.” Then the father realized that this was the exact time at which Jesus had said to him, “Your son will live” (pw’s italics). So he and all his household believed. This was the second miraculous sign that Jesus performed, having come from Judea to Galilee.

Using this passage to disprove relativity is so bizarre that I actually wonder about Schafly’s mental health. It even stirs pity in my soul. I will not continue punching holes in this because I respect the intelligence of my readers. It is never attractive or interesting when one takes a straw man seriously. Instead I would like to simply sit back in wonder at the things people can believe in complete seriousness. Like Fred Phelps, who really believes that God hates homosexuals and dead soldiers and victims of disasters. Or pastors that really believe that Jesus wants us to drive Bentleys. Or terrorists who really believe that Jesus hates everyone but them and will kill to prove it. Good Lord! And these are just “Christian” examples. Again, I could go on, but why?

It’s a weird world we’re living in, friends. Grab a Coke and some popcorn, sit back, and watch the show. That’s about all we can do sometimes. It’s basically a tragedy, but it can be pretty funny at times too — just wait for the moment Schlafly figures out that Einstein was Jewish.

Evolution and the art of dying well

They died out, sure. But did they die out well? Apatosaurus lived about 150 million years ago, during the Jurassic Period (Kimmeridgian and Tithonian ages). It was one of the largest land animals that ever existed, with an average length of 23 m (75 ft). Yet it, like every other form of life on our fair planet, evolved into being due to selection pressures present in its environment. In the case of Apatosaurus, some aspect of its surroundings ensured that the larger beasts were most likely to survive. Illustration by Raúl Martin

Henry, Julia, and Kristen are my children. I love them. Those of you who have children know what this means. To have a child is to cut your heart out and let it walk around on its own. And to go to school on its own. To learn and to get hurt on its own. To live its own life, not yours. The free giving of life is very painful, and this makes the love of a parent for a child different than any other love. It is a love balanced on the brink of obsession. It is very out of one’s control: fierce, consuming, desperate. It is a love mixed with the pain of letting go. It is a love mixed with the pain of death. Those of you who have children know what I am talking about. Those who do not, know this: Your parents love you.

Henry is my son. He is ten years old. Everyone says he looks like me. Everyone says he talks like me. Everyone says he acts like me. And that is always flattering to me, because I think he’s a beautiful boy. He is handsome, smart, engaging, dependable, a really good egg. He shares my interest in math and science and I share his interest in chess and basketball. He is my only son and I love him fanatically.

When Henry was six he taught me a painful lesson. He and I went to the city park up in Rome, GA where we lived. It was early evening, surprisingly cool and dry for August in Georgia. I was looking forward to sharing an hour or so of free play with him before classes started at the college the next day. As we walked up to the playground, we noticed some Hispanic boys playing soccer out in the field. They looked to be, on average, about 2 years older than Henry. As we drew nearer to them, Henry grew excited and asked “Dad, can I go play with them?” I started to say No. I was thinking: You’ll get hurt. They’re bigger and stronger and faster than you and you will end up being left out. They don’t even speak English. You’ll be disappointed. But then, to my own surprise, I said “Yes, take off.” He ran toward the boys. As I watched him go, I realized that everyone had been wrong: Henry is not really like me. I could never have done such a thing when I was six. I did not have his confidence. I did not have his physical skill. And at once I knew his distance from me, his separateness, and the rather severe limits of my own self. And something opened up in me like a trapdoor to a cellar I never knew existed, a deep and empty place, an absence. It is a void that my son, no matter how smart, friendly, or gentle, no matter how much I wanted him to, could ever fill. There was a stinging inner death, and I mourned. I mourned the death of a secret hope: for Henry to be me, for him to seal my permanence on this earth. I stood and wept quietly as I watched him keep goal, and my newfound knowledge haunted me and as we played together until dusk and into the night.

That was a painful lesson, but do you know what? It gave me the gift of Henry. It freed me to see Henry for who he is, and more importantly, it freed me to love him and not simply some projection of myself. That night at the playground I learned: Do not be fooled by appearances. Death is not the enemy. To die is to be set free to love.

This true story is from a sermon I preached a while back. It was a sermon about death, not necessarily physical death. What happened to me with Henry was a kind of spiritual or emotional death. A good death, like this one, happens when you accept reality as you find it, when you discover that what you thought was true, isn’t. With a good death there is a searing sense of emptiness and finitude. With a good death you find the strength to let go, to lean into the loss and let it be what it is. With a good death there is a deepening of vision and a freeing of one’s very self. This has happened to me a lot.

A bad death happens when, in the face of a new discovery, you hang on for dear life to your old picture of the world. With a bad death, fear wins. With a bad death you refuse to accept the facts that stare you in the face. The consequences of the discovery are too much to manage and in an effort to survive you become more rigid in your beliefs. The emptiness is too much to bear. With a bad death there is a restriction of vision and an increased investment in bad ideas or habits, thus increased fear. This has happened to me a lot.

Death happens in other ways too. Consider intellectual death. This has happened to me a lot. As with all kinds of death, out of some kind of survival instinct we resist it mightily. Mostly it occurs over long periods of time. For example, I used to believe that one had to proclaim faith in Jesus to be saved and go to heaven. I don’t think that anymore. In fact, my view of Jesus and the world has changed so much that that formula doesn’t even compute anymore. In the words of the great physicist Wolfgang Pauli, it’s not only not right; it’s not even wrong. I’m a Christian, but I just don’t know what those words mean. But that’s not the point. The point is, over a period of many years my beliefs have changed. They can also change in an instant, like the time a few months ago when I read about the four seals of Buddhism and realized that, because I agreed with them, I was a Buddhist. I don’t call myself a Buddhist, but there it is. It was a shocking and painful moment, because it called into question so many other things I thought we true about myself. The foundation of my world view shook violently. And I have had to go through the painful process — which continues today — of reconsidering lots of my old beliefs in terms of this new discovery. That’s what it was: a discovery. And as with any discovery, there’s no use pretending it’s not there.

For example: One of the greatest discoveries in human history is that of evolution from a common ancestor via natural selection. To pretend the evidence is not there is not only to ignore reality; it is to pass up a wonderful opportunity to see the world anew, maybe even to love the world anew.

I was poking around at religioustolerance.org the other day and I came across some interesting statistics about Americans’ views on evolution. This started me down an interesting road. Check out this graph; respondents from 34 developed nations were asked “Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals, true or false?” and here are the responses:

My point is not to lament fundamentalism or the American educational system — although one does wonder where the next generation of scientists is going to come from — but to show, in graphical format, what a bad death looks like. We are the richest nation in the world, with the most resources and the best system of higher education on the planet, but the majority of us deny the evidence for the foundational idea of modern biology. The evidence sits there, staring America in the face, but as a nation we refuse to acknowledge it. This is a bad death on a national scale.

So many people are unwilling to look calmly at the data that are out there in abundance. Why? Because to allow for the possibility of evolution is to allow for the possibility of being wrong. And I suspect that in this case it’s a foundational kind of wrong, related to interpretation of scripture and thus to many Christians’ entire world view.

The fear is understandable. The world moves fast and it’s confusing. We think we need some kind of absolute yardstick so we can see how we measure up against everyone else, and many of us have decided that the Bible is that yardstick (a strange choice, IMO). What we’re doing, is looking for a place to safely moor our listing ship. It’s totally reasonable. But is it true? Are we being honest?

I would like to suggest that the more of reality we can accept, the better off we are. And even though I have my own struggles with reality — just ask my wife — I would also like to suggest that we human beings have indeed evolved from a common ancestor through natural selection over millions of years, that we are deeply connected to all other life on the planet, and that we belong here. We are a part of this thing, we are not separate. And like the rest of creation, we are loved by a God we cannot understand with a love we cannot understand. Welcome to the Universe.

Jesus knew who he was and what he was doing when he insisted that the first commandment is to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength” (Mark 12.30). He also knew who he was and what he was doing when he died. He died well, some may say perfectly, and that made all the difference. His job, like ours, was to die and let God do the rest.

Do not be fooled by appearances. Death — whether physical, emotional, spiritual, or intellectual — is not the enemy. To die is to be set free to love, to learn, and to see the Universe — evolution and all — for what it really is.