"all my tubes and wires and careful notes"

so we are eating some delicious food at a place that specializes in providing that during the luncheon hour, and my friend leans back in his chair and posits something that has obviously been growing within him for awhile.

"i think science is crowding out God." he says

then he proceeds to make a case for it. the things that have been traditionally attributed to God are being explained, one by one, by science. examples flow like sweet wine as he paints a picture of this God person being effectively relegated to superintending little bits of almost completely irrelevant void.

it's funny how two people can draw entirely different conclusions from the same observational data... factor faith and theology into things and the polarity increases.

in this case, as in most, i think science is used best to somehow reinforce what we already suspect to be true. so whereas, my friend embraces the void and is quite comfortable with the incredible shrinking god, i embrace the presence and am quite comfortable with the increasingly revealed God. scientifically speaking, in the end it's all theory and one theory is as good as the next, right? we can't prove God any more than we can disprove God... especially if we have room in our theology for ongoing revelation.

what i mean is this: in my view, God doesn't cease to be involved in things simply because we come to understand a bit more about how they fit into the large 3D jigsaw puzzle called 'physical reality.' the fact that we can see a connection between this and that event only threatens the theology of the man who expects God and God's actions to be completely mysterious, completely invisible, completely unexplainable... but where is that written down?

if one holds to the idea that God is involved, whether actively manipulating objects or simply setting wheels in motion, then the explanation of the movements of those objects or the rate and rotation of the wheels and how they fit with others in a giant clocklike construction of mindblowingly intricate cogs is really cause to marvel and exult.

the psalmist speaks of ascribing to God all glory and honour due his name. through even unpardonably sloppy science, my own humble words of praise are simply a bit more informed.

and i like that.
selah

chance- get out of jail free card

on another blog i keep, a good conversation on justice developed from a post about a TV show. in my view, it's well worth reading.

a question was raised at the end that caught me by surprise, however. it challenged me to examine the chasm that exists between the man i am and the one i seek to become.

"Question is, is there such a thing as being too merciful/gracious?" (sVs)

hmm.

i don't know about this...

my old sense of crime and punishment says 'yes'

my growing sense of embraceable ideal says 'no.'

what to do?

i think that i have been raised in an environment so prone to pronouncements that it is an ongoing struggle to default beyond this. in most cases, it's fairly common to see a black hat on one guy and a white hat on the other. as a matter of fact, i have even noticed, upon looking deeply into my own relational world, that if i can identify one 'villain' in the group i am more ready to extend grace to everybody else in the room.

i believe the word for this is 'scapegoating'

not good.

it bugs me that it is so easy to focus all my negative energy, presumption, cold officiousness, harsh scrutiny, suspicion and even expectation upon one person, while granting everyone else in the game the 'chance- get out of jail free' card. it's a twisted redemption game where the lamb to be sacrificed is not the most perfect, but the one with the greatest observable flaws.

marilyn manson, mass-media manipulator extraordinaire, reflected upon this once: People tend to associate anyone who looks and behaves differently with illegal or immoral activity.

there has got to be a better way.

you'd think that, with all the preaching about unconditional love and the unmerited favour of God that i do, the best of it would either come from a deeper place or, through my preparation process, sink in a little deeper and ultimately become the new default setting. working on that.

whatever the case, here's a thought that is emerging:

if it is possible that one's capacity for mercy plays a key role in increasing the readiness to extend grace- what then?

what i mean is this: if one can be taught to see the other indescriminately- to remove the hats, both black and white- and see people's apparent inability to live to realization the best things about themselves as lamentable rather than indictable, then perhaps one can find the grace needed to extend to them, even against the pain that they seem to be inflicting upon others. there might be hope there.

oh, to be more merciful, more gracious,
more ready to give the other a chance.

see, somehow God affords the breaker of natural law opportunity to be redeemed. neither the most nor the least unrighteous of us is struck down where he stands because God has just had it with him. the yet-to-be-realized good in a person may be the only thing that God sees in his infinite mercy and patience. the ability to see in our limited capacity for the same is what's needed for the rest of us who aren't God, for this is integral in bearing his image, recognizing and responding to it in others.

for chris and richard

dogma

recently on another blog, my friend hineini left a question in the comment box that got me going:

what would our theologies gain/lose
if we were to jettison the idea of original sin?
***

now, i LOVE the idea of jettisoning original sin. really i do. the problem is that i and all the 'good' people i know have this capacity to do 'bad' things.

bad: self destructive. disunitive. exploitive, self-absorbed and self-serving at the expense of others, ... all that.

somehow we have to deal with this because we are called to something existentially higher than the 'survival of the fittest/ fight or flight' defaults of the animal kingdom. seems that the stakes are higher for us.

what i mean is that, in being exalted above an instinct-driven state of being, we are afforded both the luxury and the responsibility of not only contemplating morality, faith, and a spiritual realm, but engaging in the expression or at least the exploration of these things. in being raised up to this higher level of awareness, we are pressed to do something useful with it.

but all that botching up... all that hurting and being hurt. all that violence. without the doctrine of original sin, these things become even more confounding than they already are with it.

the question is a pretty intriguing one though:

what would our THEOLOGIES gain/lose if we were to jettison the idea of original sin?

if theology is the science/knowledge of God and so much of our picture of things turns around our picture of the creator of these things, then the change we're talking about here is something fairly all-encompassing: our picture of God would change drastically if we were to do away with this idea, even just in speculation. i mean, all that business of grace and hope and redemption would be moot. i think we'd lose a great deal in our picture of God if we decided that somehow we should be able to just raise ourselves above the current state of 'fallenness' simply because there would be aspects of God that are inherently positive and comely which would disappear from our perspective. we would have no reason or context through which to encounter them... could it be that, with the fall of man came an exaltation of God, as certain things about God's nature became apparent for the first time?

(NOTE- tangent: ...much like the way radio waves are invisible to our eyes. radio waves are 'real' within our physical realm, yet are imperceptible to us because we have no natural way to engage with them. the best we can do is develop a theory, then develop a technology to try to meaningfully bridge the gap between our theory and our experience. turns out we know radio waves are real because in small measure they can be used to communicate information relatively cleanly and efficiently- provided we have a network of transmitters and receivers in place. we know that they are real because, in large measure they can be used to either fuel our greatest exploits or kill one another... yet whether we're dealing with a little or a lot, to our senses radio waves remain undetectable. in a quirky, but mildly interesting curio called Radio KAOS, roger waters, conceptual mastermind of the band pink floyd, explores some of these ideas... found a vid on youtube circa 1987: mullets and mall hair abound!)

so anyway, our knowledge of God is very heavily affected by the ways that we are permitted to encounter, explore and interact with him- the ways God chooses to reveal himself to those created in his image. all this kinda makes me wonder what other aspects of God are also true but have not found expression within our reality.

what aspects of the image of God are yet unrealized amongst those who bear it?

and what aspects of God are interfered with or otherwise distorted because of the doctrines we've constructed in our attempts to arrive at some kind of reasonable agreement with one another about some of the most troublesome aspects of our own existence? somehow our knowledge of God seems to be contingent upon our knowledge of self in community with others, and vice versa.

perhaps, without all this business of fallenness and original sin we'd also be able to embrace at face value the invitation of God to participate in the ongoing celebration of life and love within the cosmos. perhaps our relationship with God would also be freed of all that self-interested, soul-saving stuff and, in being freed of it, be released to one of loving God for God's sake, rather than our own?

like LSD in the 60's which promised to unlock the real potential of human consciousness but instead just left, in its wake, a generation of seekers whose minds had been so opened that they struggled to discern the difference between the real and the surreal, is our doctrine of original sin a version of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that we have become addicted to because no one has passed a law against it yet?

hmm...

but what to do with all that other negative stuff that we carry within and express so easily? pretend it's not there?

hmm... hmm...
and again i say hmm...

playing bongos at the opera house (a rant)

It doesn't seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different plants, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil- which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama (Richard Feynman)

this heterodoxious quote flew from the face of feynman as part of a television interview in 1959, six years before the 'distinguished young theoretical physicist' (as he was introduced on the early-morning eisenhower-era broadcast) would win the nobel prize "for (his) fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics, with deep-ploughing consequences for the physics of elementary particles."

it is picked up by herman wouk and placed, with no initial explanation, as the forward of wouk's book on science and religion The Language God Talks (the title of which is also taken from a feynman soundbyte.) that's where i read it.

what i find exciting is how one person can speak a thought into being, and that thought can be preserved and shared back and forth for decades, centuries and even millenia, continuing to challenge people to discover the truths contained within it that have yet to be revealed. it is not just scripture or other epic pieces of literature that engage and exalt us in this way.

in this case, a brilliant scientist makes a mildly scandalous cosmological remark on a 'good morning, pleasantville' tv show that is faithfully transcribed and later discovered by one of the scientist's contemporaries to life-changing effect and to be explored in a book written by this contemporary a half century later and sold at superstore to a preacher who is wandering around looking for things to do while he waits for his son to get off work... but who also happens to be planning to speak to the little flock assembled the following sunday about how the Holy Spirit of God draws people into ongoing dialogue with himself and each other in ways that are sometimes 'unconventional.'

in any event, feynman was probably intending to communicate something very different in the articulation of his thought than the meaning that i took from it.

what can you do, though?

as i used to tell my students ad nausium:

"the moment you release an aesthetic piece into the physical realm, you forfeit all rights to its real meaning. It will mean whatever the person engaging with the art decides it means, which is perfect because what we really want to accomplish here is the engagement of other people in what we're doing together..."

yeah, those poor kids had to endure more preaching than the sunday morning crowd because they had me once a day, every day for an entire term or more...

anyway, feynman's words lead me not away from God,

but towards God.

words of doubt always lead me there- not in a glib, faith beyond reason, hard right-wing-push-back-attempt-at-maintaining-defaults-in-order-to-resist-change-and-ultimately-growth kinda way, but simply by inviting me to consider possibilities about God rather than impossibilities about 'the Old One.' (wouk's term of endearment)

i agree that the stage is far too massive to support this relatively small and self-contained little show about good and evil. that's because in any opera (derived from latin opus meaning 'work', but decidedly more... a 'large, multifaceted, composite work') of significance, every aspect of the production is part of the intended purpose: set, properties, costuming, lighting, visual and sonic effects, stage management, direction, blocking, choreo, harmony, score and orchestra all move together with the story and the songs, but do not come to complete realization until the show closes and the audience, cast and crew disperse, having been collectively moved and individually touched by the experience, afforded stories to tell in reflection.

in God's universe- comprised of all of those rich dynamics: the sound and silence, the beauty and horror, the darkness and light- the scripturally stated purpose is God's glory and this purpose is only completely realized when the show closes.

so in my view, a large part of our roles in this piece of cosmic performance art is to explore our beingness, not be preoccupied with explaining it. if our place in the big show is to be, say, the bongo-player, then let's get on with playing the bongos rather than go on and on about whether these bongos and the ability to play them is ordained by God or not.

epifony [sic]

we had been talking about epiphanies and i found myself seated reflectively in one of those ridiculous plastic chairs at tim horton's caught up in a moment of internal conflict over what to make of that fairly deep and pointed online discussion, and what to do with what i was making...

syd barrett's tortured voice from 1968 broke through my own inner din:

and what exactly is a dream?

and what exactly is a joke?

luckily, i had a pencil.

epiphanies are very personal things.

one will say that

too many can be painful

another will counter that

too few can leave us feeling rather alone in it all.

the thing about one person's moment of discovery or clarity is that

it's one person's moment

and in so being is limited by this person's perspective...

• perspective: the gestalt of his/her experiences to date synthesized with all learnings heretofore gathered;

• perspective: the summative who what where when and how the person is today;

• perspective: the id and superego engaged in their seductive dancing, each beckoning the other to cross the great divide of the ego

and is, therefore

subjective observation at best,

high treason of the heart at worst.

so with all this illogical clutter

unsubstantiated allegation and

crazy emotion-driven inkling, what makes it an epiphany at all?

simply the preceding search for one?

search on, man

Look to the LORD and his strength; seek his face always. (psalm 105.4)

to search for truth, strength, direction, redemption, hope... and to keep on searching is a challenge that is put forth by the psalmist. it is his MO, his raison d'etre...

and isn't it that way for us all?

the ancient creed says that

the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever

well, if this is true then the means to this end is the search. it takes us there, qualifying our glorification and enjoyment with context- taking it out of the abstract and into the concrete.

There's a belief by the

Children of Man which states

all will be well

Search on man, calm savior

Veteran of wars incalculable

greed. Search on man, calm savior

God-speed & forgive you

morning-star, fragrant

meadow person girl

(Jim Morrison)

deconstructing the skeptical fridge magnet

so what do you say to something like this?

i mean, sure, the tone is a bit off, but this executive summary of the basic articles of religion has a lot that is found in scripture, the apostles creed and church dogma.

(and if you don't feel like reading a lengthy rant today, scroll down to the bottom for the whole point.)

BELIEF:

Christ praised thomas the twin for his belief when presented with visual evidence. however, he had even higher praise and blessing for those having faith, believing even in that which they have not seen.

COSMIC JEWISH ZOMBIE and LIVING FOREVER:

Jesus Christ was of jewish ethnicity, raised by jewish parents in a jewish household of a respected line (Jesus' stepfather was of the royal line of david, which was kind of a big deal) in ancient disciplines that would equip him for a rabbinical role in the leadership structures of his traditional belief system.

the holy writings of this tradition spoke of an enlightened deliverer who would lift israel and the world out of the disparity, desperation, disease and death that had become the feeling of life... and when considered in a certain light, appeared to be pointing right at Jesus with such focal clarity that

• his birth triggered a tragic infanticide
• his life (or at least the last three years of it) was considered a model of perfect living even though it seems oxymoronic, being simultaneously gracious, loving and kind on the one hand and outrageously sacrilegious, impatient, outspoken, rebellious and rude on the other
• his death became the scandalous stuff of debate for millennia to follow, claiming exclusive rights to the redemption solution for all humankind in the face of the tradition from which he had risen.

and the zombie idea? well that's just kind of a fun way to try to get our brains around something as beyond our scope as resurrection and eternal life.

we are arguably the only species on earth that deals with its mortality from a very young age. part of our early childhood development has to do with coming to grips with what it means to 'be' while also sorting out what it means to 'not be anymore.' mortality is a huge pill to swallow, and tends to scrape a bit going down, leaving scar tissue that is tender and prone to discomfort when similar objects are swallowed at future meals.

(ha ha- for some further rambling on the zombie Jesus idea, go here )

SYMBOLICALLY EAT HIS FLESH:

speaking of meals, this one was a bit dodgy in the first century as the symbolic part was missed and people thought that this new cult had, as the centerpoint of its ritual, embraced cannibalism as a means of grace. in truth, symbolic enactments play meaningful roles in nearly every religious tradition (the fact that the Lord's Supper is derived from the jewish passover Seder that Jesus and the boys were celebrating that thursday night is, perhaps, good evidence of this) because of the common spiritual aspect of these traditions: religions turn upon the possibility that there is an order to things which is broader in scope than those immersed in these things can grasp completely.

its a problem of perspective, like the awareness of a missing sense. within humankind there is both this existential self-knowledge that we are mortal and this desire for meaning and legacy in larger than immediate physical terms. we recognize the comfort in being reminded that our impact on humanity is as difficult to gather and gauge as seeds carried by the wind are traceable, yet this comfort is cold. religion and its ritual help us address this need for a place in the cosmos, while also addressing the 'God-shaped void' (pascal) within.

all that being said, however, there is a common dogmatic misconception that has led to many an infant baptism and probably even more final communions as a way to somehow secure resurrection reservations in advance. the enactment of the Lord's Supper (with all that eating of flesh and the drinking of blood) carries deep significance, but does not accomplish this eternal life thing any more than the sacrament of baptism saves us from being 'consigned to flames of woe'. both of these are celebrations in the physical realm and on physical terms, of something that has taken place in the spiritual realm. they are participatory spiritual metaphors. they are symbolic.

TELEPATHICALLY ACCEPTING MASTERSHIP:

well, the telepathic bit (prayer) has to do with trying to establish relationship with an invisible being. quite frankly, i'm surprised that the problem of the invisible God hasn't made the list of things that are hard to embrace.

let's face it- if God was more apparent it would be a lot easier to relate. instead, we have to sort out just what we conclude from God's invisibility: is God gone? is God here, but hiding? is God present but uninvolved? is God present and involved in deterministic ways that impede upon our freedom to make choices? all these lead us to the big two:

1. if God IS involved, then why do awful things happen?
2. if God ISN'T involved, then why not?

so what to do with these? well, there are a couple defaults that can be set in order to not go crazy thinking about it all but these are issues that are greater than can even be encapsulated in this humble blogspace, much less solved here.

it could be that the face of God is perceptible only by that 'missing sense' mentioned above, and that apart from this we need to rely on revelations- small glimpses of glory- in order to hold that this God person even exists.

revelations of God come in many sizes and shapes, but are usually contingent upon our will for their recognition and interpretation. one person will look at a tree with blossoms in spring and see a miracle of God and a metaphor for resurrection there, while another will look at the same tree and see life and hope and the promise of fruit. both are encouraged at the evidence of the passing of winter, but take different meanings- one more natural, the other more supernatural- from this glimpse of glory. both could be considered correct. both have depth. both have to do with the person's perspective and what that person is seeking. however, another thing to consider is that neither contradicts the other and neither ceases to be a possible interpretation simply because it is not being considered.

possibilities simply exist. they are static.

one might even say they are a form of objective truth.

conclusions, however, are arrived at as part of our journey through observing, speculating, synthesizing, and in all other ways interacting with both nature and supernature.

it could be that this is our whole problem with God: we treat God as a subjective creation rather than an objective creator. if we simply embrace God as a possibility rather than a conclusion, then all this need for data which proves or disproves is done away with. furthermore, if we are able to bend our minds away from the empirical (which is a fairly closed system of thought) in order to be more theoretical (more openly ready to embrace possibilities) we might find that master, that Lord, who invites engagement through the most subtle of revelations, to be a rather welcome friend in a suddenly much larger universe.

EVIL FORCE, TALKING SNAKE and MAGICAL TREE:

okay, so evil is all around, in and through us. please tell me we don't need to argue this one too much. it is an inescapable reality. whether the story of the tree and the snake is an allegory for self-awareness (which, by the way, includes both the awareness of our imminent demise and the desire for immortality and purpose built into it) or a literal play by play chronicle of humankind's fall from grace is one of those things that we can intellectually and theologically arm-wrestle over in perpetuity to no avail. the problem is not whether there is evil or how it came to be so easy for us to express- the problem is what are we gonna do about it?

PERFECT SENSE?

this is where those who wanted to skip all the drivel should rejoin the dialogue, for herein lies my actual point:

who said it was all supposed to make sense?

i don't think God said this...

i think we did.