A Letter to the Republican Committee of Lower Merion and Narberth in response to their "Join us to Support the Police" Email

I received this email this afternoon:

SUPPORT THE LOWER MERION POLICE DEPARTMENT

Dear Friends and Neighbors Across Lower Merion and Narberth, We are writing to ask you to join us in supporting the Lower Merion Police Department. Apparently, some college students and others are planning a disruptive march and sit-in for Wednesdayafternoon to protest our Lower Merion Police Department.   The language the organizers use to describe the protest, inflammatory words like “LMPD is our enemy” and “the police are the strong arm of white supremacy,” is something that we cannot ignore and something we will not stand for (see protest flier to the right). This is not a Republican or Democrat issue.  This is an issue that impacts all residents of Lower Merion. Let’s stand together and STAND UP for our police!   It is the Lower Merion Police Department, afterall, who are the ones ensuring the safety of these protesters while they march.  They are the ones who ensure our neighborhoods are safe places for our kids. They are the ones who respond within minutes to our emergencies.

Thanks to a generous donation from Christina Fink, the Republican Committee of Lower Merion and Narberth has purchased several “We Support the Lower Merion Police Department” signs from the Lower Merion Community Watch.  Call our office at 610-642-4407 or email us at info@rclmn.com if you’d like to pick one up.  Thank you!

And I thought "hmm".  And then I said this:

Hello!
  I wanted to say thank you for letting me know about the protest tomorrow afternoon.  While I do not personally condone the blanket assertion that "the police are the strong arm of white supremacy" I certainly understand what is motivating these students and protesters to protest the recent acts of police violence and brutality against people of color.  I'm actually surprised that your message did not say anything about that.  I am surprised and disappointed that you did not express one ounce of sympathy towards the people who view the LMPD as their enemies.  I am wondering if you have ever felt afraid because of the color of your skin or experienced anything like systemic racial injustice.  Given the one-sided nature of your  response to this protest, I am guessing you have no idea what it is like to be discriminated against, or be the victim of violence because of your race, gender, or sexual orientation.

Now, I don't think your protesters are 100% right, but then again, who is?  But so far they seem more righteous than you because at least they are hurt and angry about the right things.  You're mad because you feel that people aren't supporting the difficult work that police officers have to do.  You're also mad that people are calling you names.  But these folks are mad because people are being murdered for race, religion, and sexual orientation.  There's a difference here between someone somewhat mis-characterizing you and hate crimes, and I think you've lost perspective.

You know what I wish would happen?  I wish you would welcome the protesters.  Make them cookies or something.  Welcome them.  Talk to them.  Show them that you actually share some of their concerns.  Show them sympathy instead of resistance.  People don't tend to want to fight when they feel they are actually being listened to.  I wish you would invite the leaders of whatever protest group this is to actually talk with the LMPD.  If they think you are the enemy, why not prove you are interested in peace, or at least fostering dialogue and conversation?  After all, we have learned from more than one wise person that one way of defeating your enemies is to make them your friends.  If you want to do something worthwhile here, why don't you actually try to foster peace?  Or perhaps you've given up on that?  Or perhaps you think making peace with this group of people is unimportant.  I'm curious.  Every minute we spend fighting instead of trying to figure this out is a complete waste.

Where I live, there aren't a lot of minorities--I am one of the few.  In fact, according to Wikipedia the 2010 census says my little town is about 90% white.  Ardmore does a little better in terms of diversity.  I've often wondered, when I see the "Support the Police" signs in Malvern that maybe some of the people here don't think hate crimes or crimes against minorities matter very much in because there aren't very many minorities here.  Or maybe, for the same reason, you just don't know much about what minorities think of recent events, including the election.  Or maybe you just think the majority perspective matters.  I don't know what you think, but I can tell you something: you haven't really listened or heard the group of people who is presently protesting the police.

I wanted to tell you something else while I have a moment.  I'm a political moderate, or at least I used to be.  Until the 2008 election, I pretty much dithered about party politics and tried to vote for whichever candidate I thought was best, Republican or Democrat.  Not anymore.  I don't really even consider voting Republican anymore because of the way the Republican party has chosen to market itself over the last 8 years.  I'd characterize it in this fashion: "The Republican Party: racist when convenient.  The Republican Party:  subtly stoking the fears of white privilege and/or prejudice.  The Republican Party: the party that tolerates racism and bigotry because it just doesn't affect them that much."  I don't think the Republican party is "the strong arm of white supremacy".  On the contrary, I don't think you're the strong arm of anything.  Right now, you're asking me to stand up for the police: but you, as a party, just failed to stand up in a meaningful way against bigotry in the election.  Most people, I suppose, stand up for what benefits them most.  Right now, it seems like most of our country has done that: they just don't care that they benefit or profit from bigotry and discrimination.  They stand for nothing but themselves and their own perspective.  I imagine we, as a country, will not actually heal until we can do better, until we can actually sacrifice a little to understand someone who is different, even when I stand to lose something in the process.

Thank you for listening.

I thought this was a good time to revive my blog.

Metaphysics Imaginatively Engaged, For Thomists Only

I wrote this as an April Fools' joke a few years ago.  I'm still amused by it, so I decided to blog it.  Enjoy!



Question 687 of the Summa Cogitationum Seretharum "Whether it is a mark of the divine nature to be capable of perfect multitasking"

Objection 1.  It would seem that it is not a mark of the divine nature to be capable of perfect multitasking because Rebecca O.  is capable of perfect multitasking. 

Objection 2.  It would seem that it is not a mark of the divine nature to be capable of perfect multitasking because traveling at the speed of light gives the appearance of doing all things at once, and many things can travel at the speed of light, including light, and although God is light, light is not God.

Objection 3. It would seem that it is not a mark of the divine nature to be capable of perfect multitasking because the Doctor is capable of perfect multitasking by use of his TARDIS, wherein he may do an infinite number of things at the same time.

On the contrary, only God is capable of perfect multitasking about everything at once, properly.  

I answer that: "Traveling at the speed of light and multitasking" contains within it two necessary ideas: lack of mass and personhood.  But only the angels and God lack mass and are persons.  Angels are present at locations (and thus times, for all locations are time-locations and all times are location-times as the Physicist said in Relativity) by means of their power, and because their power is finite, it follows that they may not be in an infinite number of places ("spacetimes") at once.  The Angelic Doctor has said they may only be in one place (one spacetime) at once.   He also says that while the angels have no potentiality in regards to their knowledge of God (in beholding the beatific vision, the intellect is in act rather than potentiality), they may have potentiality regarding the knowledge of natural things, as they are not always contemplating everything in their intellect at once.  Therefore it is possible that angels are capable of multitasking, but because of the finitude of power, not about everything at once, or as one who is "simultaneously whole".

Reply to Obj. 1.  Although Rebecca's acts of multitasking have the form of supernatural virtue, they are not infinite and may not be mistaken as acts of divinity.  This may be proved from either the finitude of her power, or from my observation that she could not read a treatise of systematic theology, knit a garment, and hold a conversation simultaneously.  She was capable of the first two together, but not the third.

Reply to Obj. 2.  The above suffices as a response to the second objection.

Reply to Obj. 3. Although the Gallifreyan race is capable of feats of power and intellect matching or surpassing that of the angels though they are somewhat, if loosely tied to corporeal form: neither they nor TARDISes are capable of infinite power because they like the angels are created and therefore finite.  An infinite act cannot proceed from a finite cause.

***I originally wrote this as a little April Fools Day challenge to myself.  I still like it.  For those of you who aren't Thomists and braved the reading of this little spoof, I parodied the format and language of Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologiae to ask my own little theological question.

Metaphysics Imaginatively Engaged: God's Infinity, Large or Small?

    The theologians tell it is impossible for us to wrap our minds around God's infinity, which is part of the reason we struggle so much with it when it shows up on our radar screen. "On which part of what radar screen?" you might be thinking.

   How often have you heard people say they would pray about something, but felt guilty about taking up God's time?  How often have you heard people say they are afraid to bother God with a seemingly insignificant request?  Or, like in the Bruce Almighty film of yesteryear, if prayers are like emails, how could God possibility have time to think or even read them all, let alone compose a response . . . which is what we all really want?  Or, sometimes people stumble over concepts like "providence"--which is basically thinking through how God, as the one who both sustains the cosmos and keeps it running, can possibly keep track of all the details?  Or, take things a step further, if God has trouble with the present details, how could he know about the future details?  As a churchgoer and a student theologian, I've heard all of these questions and more!

    Principally, we tend to get stuck on God's infinity when we think about God's ability to multitask, if you will.  A professor of mine at Westminster seminary cleverly called this "omnicompetence" and I think of it as "perfect" or "divine multitasking".  How, when I pray, or when I think about how complicated the world is, can I imagine the ways in which God's mind works different from mine if I, quite literally, have no hope of comprehending how God really works?  Am I just stuck, or what can I do?

    There are many ways to answer these questions and some of them are very technical indeed.  If you enjoy that sort of thing, I am happy to recommend you a book or two.  We're not going to do that here.  Instead, we are going to imagine.

    In order to imaginatively engage infinity, you have to make one of two choices.  Basically you have to think about something small and singular (a point-particle in physics, or a point in math) or something big and multiplied (the unbounded cosmos or the biggest number you can think of, or a infinite series of big numbers).  So, itty-bitty, smaller-than-one-stuff, or really big, really long stuff.  That makes it hard to imagine God, doesn't it?  Either I think of him as not being spatial and thus he's small--and hardly able to cope with the big stuff, or I think of him as being really big and thus the little stuff is beneath his notice.  Quite the quandary.

    Instead of rending our garments in despair, we're going to try an imaginative process that gets us small stuff and big stuff together.

    Imagine with me the smallest space into which you can insert your mind.  Imagine the space between spaces--zooming in on the space between dust motes in the air.  Go farther than that if you can and imagine what it would be like to be just one atom of one of those dust motes--one dust mote is like a baseball stadium to your baseball of an atom.  Then imagine God looking square at that little atom, giving it the eyeball, and quite calmly and quite lovingly saying: "I am here."  All of God's glory and personality and presence is focused on that little atom.  He knows it by name because he made it, and he still holds it in existence in the palm of his hand.  If you can, imagine him holding that atom in the palm of his hand and just chillin' with it for a while because he has nothing more pressing on his mind.

    You know why he has nothing more pressing on his mind?  (Don't let go of the image of God holding the atom.  Imagine and read.)  It's because God's mind doesn't get pressed.  How, you say?  Well, as you may have noticed as you've got this little picture of God hanging out with a carbon atom (or whatever you chose--he does seem to like the number 12, so there's my rationalization of carbon as a choice) . . . there is a major difference between God's ability to be present to one little carbon atom and yours--you are actually limited by your bigness and God is not.  Physically speaking, for me to be able to get on carbon's level, I have to be its size.  And I can't be its size, because I am bound by my physical body.  God isn't limited by body, which is exactly why he is free to be as small as he needs to be.  Or it turns out, as large as he needs to be.  

    Bring back that picture of God holding that atom again.  Then make a picture like that again, with another atom.   And then do it again and again--and fill up the room you are sitting in with images of God holding atoms.  Then spread out to your backyard, your city, your state, your country, the planet, and finally your intergalactic zipcode (or whatever).  That is more or less how you want to imagine God's infinity--God's infinity is the infinity that fills you and fills all of space and time to the nth and to the innermost degree.  Only, when you are multiplying pictures of God, you aren't making copies of God, you are just noting his presence, over and over again.

    But how do I get around the multiplicity aspect?  How can I imagine that the same Person holds all the carbon atoms from here to the center of the Milky Way, to the Andromeda Galaxy, and to all those places we don't have a name for yet? (And to the ones that we may never have names for).

    In order to handle the multiple times and places aspect, I do a slightly different and more complex act of the imagination.  First, I think of a little sphere.  Then I think of a cube, then I think of an object like a diamond that I can imagine has more facets on it.  One has 12 faces, another 24, 46, however many faces you like, but make the object more or less symmetrical.  Then I keep adding facets and complexity, until I have a little jewel in my mind that has as many facets as a golfball has dimples.  Phew--it's a light-refracting machine!  

    Now, this is the tricky part.  Look at this little jewel with your mind's eyes.  Know its form, its complexity, its beauty.  Then try this on for size: every single facet you see, or if you've got better spatial intelligence than me, every line of symmetry, represents how many ways you can divide your attention and still give it 100% of your attention.

     I'm sorry, did I say "you"? I meant God.  See, humans can't divide our attention and give it 100% at the same time.  For us, the multiplication and division doesn't work out.  You can never divide by something other than 1 and get the whole thing you started out with.  If I have 100% to give, and I divide it into two tasks, or three, or five, or 12, then you're looking at giving 50% or 33% or 20% or 8.3% to give per task.  Some of us try to handle multiple tasks and give each one of them 100%--which either means epic fail, epic burnout, or epic amounts of self-delusion.  (Take your pick, my favorite way to go is door number two.)  But God isn't like that--put as many tasks on his plate as you like, and he always has 100% to give them.  In that way, using the "big" definition of infinity, you can say that God is "infinitely present".  Remember the little golfball-like jewel--he has that many facets (and infinitely more) of 100% of himself to give to you and me, everyone else on the planet, and in the cosmos, not even the carbon atom escapes his eyes.  That's why Jesus said God kept his eye on even the sparrow . . . and it isn't a big deal for him to keep his eye on every sparrow.

    When I imagine that little golfball, I think of it as "dimensions of personhood or awareness", which you may or may not like very much.  What do I mean by that?  I mean, life as we know it, seems to be more or less divided up by how aware or non-aware things are.  Non-living matter is the least alert (as far as we know), then basic single-celled life, then fungus and plants, animals, and higher animals, and us, and then angels sitting on the highest end of the creaturely "awareness" chain of being.  Let's arbitrarily say humans are fully aware in three dimensions, and angels are even more fully aware in five dimensions.  In how many dimensions would you say God was aware?  Nine?  Ten?  One billion?  See, that's the problem.  Your brain might have a near-meltdown at the thought of one billion, but that's as close as we get to imagining the richness of God's personhood.  His life isn't like our life squared or cubed . . . we're talking about life raised to the infinite power . . . which is exactly why he has so much life, love, and presence to give away.  He has an infinite "amount", which is exactly why he can give it away infinitely.

    All right, that's finally all I have to say about this matter in as non-technical a way as I could come up with.  I really love the Christian concept of eternity as expressed by a lot of thinkers of what they call "classical theism", but I think it's pretty darn challenging.  Much of the fun of metaphysics for me is that metaphysics likes to talk about things that aren't our every-day experience, yet are completely conceptually coherent and potentially applicable.  (Granted, people argue about that last part).  I particularly love Thomas Aquinas and some of the midevals because they dared to think (contrary to modern-day popular opinion) that humans weren't the only creatures out there, they weren't the coolest joes in the neighborhood (angels were), and they weren't the brightest and best in the creaturely world either (again, angels).  They were also imaginatively engaged with their universe in a way the modern mind really has trouble with.  Part of our trouble with God is that we aren't trained to imagine him anymore--how God's ways might be different than our ways.  God's not just better than us morally, he's different in being.

   Hope that was at all helpful . . . if you feel like it, let me know which parts of this actually helped your imagination and what was unclear.  But if you do comment, make sure you slow down enough to actually imagine what I said and not just think about it.  These acts are different and the former takes deliberate effort.

A Different Kind of Fasting

I must say, I really love reading science-fiction and fantasy and I always have.  But I recently decided to fast from reading novels in order to "free up" some brain space to absorb more non-fiction.  The wonderful thing about fasting in general is that it brings clarity because you resist your deeply ingrained habit patterns.  And sometimes, the fast works so well that it breaks up some of the gluttonous mast that has been collecting in the little pockets of your soul that you forgot were there.  So, two weeks ago, I decided to fast from the normal kinds of fiction books that I read.
    It occurred to me that I was reading my books of choice, not because they were so good and deep and fulfilling, or even so vastly entertaining that I couldn't keep away from them.  On the contrary, novels, most of the time, function like junk food for me.  They aren't as much junk food as TV or movies are, but they are pretty close.  I realized that they weren't remotely challenging to me, and I wasn't really learning anything from them.  At best, they were comfort food, but who needs comfort food all the time?  Thus, I decided to make a little experiment and give up reading "my usual" sort of novels (normally run-of-the-mill science fiction and fantasy novels, interspersed with some better-than-average science fiction and fantasy) in favor of being purely engaged in academic non-fiction, devotional literature, or more demanding literary works.
   So far, I rather like the effects of my fast.  My one consistent superpower in life has been my ability to speed-read without really trying.  Thus, I can read about 100 pages an hour of undemanding prose--say a Harry Potter novel or maybe even a Mercedes Lackey novel.  But my attention span for non-fiction has never been quite so good.  I am limited to a paltry 30-35 pages an hour for a very demanding book like Personal Knowledge (Michael Polanyi) that I am still making my way through.  (At least, I think so, I have definitely documented my ravenous inhalation of fiction much more thoroughly than my more stately march through non-fiction.)  I can't tell yet if my rate of reading has increased, but I know that I've already finished The Great Chain of Being (Lovejoy), which I had worked on for months, and made short work of Mircea Eliade's Myth and Reality (and I firmly intend on reading everything that man has to say, peculiar Romanian genius that he was).  I also reread Rodney Stark's Rise of Christianity yesterday, and got through one and a half books (read, chapters, for the uninitiated) of Plato's Republic--which I have been meaning to reread all year.  Oh, yes, and I am still working on that frustrating and beautiful book, Mysticism by Evelyn Underhill.  For me, this is really excellent.  I rarely plow through academic literature at this rate.
    But there's more here, I think, than merely shifting gears.  For years, fiction had been a great teacher to me.  Learning through stories is a natural way that humans learn, and a very natural way for me to learn.  Science-fiction has also been a real imaginative tutor for me.  Anything is possible, and I learned that lesson much more thoroughly from Star Trek or Orson Scott Card than I did from my science teachers at school.  But that has changed.  These days, what I read in Scientific American about current scientific research blows my mind far more than any work of science fiction.  What I learn from Polanyi or Lovejoy about ancient and modern cosmology spurs my imagination more than the average episode of Doctor Who.  In short, reality is every bit as enchanting and mysterious as the world of the imagination.  Imagination--and art in general--was always supposed to be a way to get at what was truly interesting about life itself, but for many people (for much of my life, myself included) that's simply isn't the case.  For many, the realm of science fiction isn't a gateway into a new way of thinking about our world--it is just a replacement for our world, because our world is uninteresting.
   It very possible to live as if our world is uninteresting.  To take what exists for granted--to live without curiosity, without wonder, without any sense of the art and magnificence of the contingent, without any attempt at real scientific discovery or real philosophical inquiry or reflection--this is to make light of the world and to reduce it to far less than it is and far less than it was intended to be.  I imagine most of us are guilty of at least one of these crimes, if not all of them, and that is why Socrates bothered to say that the unexamined life is not worth living.  That's not just a snooty intellectual saying trumpeting the superiority of the life of the mind.  It was Socrates' way of saying that the unexamined life doesn't mean anything to us, and therefore isn't really worth much.  You don't have to be an intellectual to want to have a soul that does something and is something worthwhile.
    Furthermore, the examined life is not first and foremost about intellectual virtue, although for those with academic gifts, it certainly contains intellectual virtue.  The examined life is about practical virtues--about the everyday work of the soul in each human person and in humankind collectively.  In other words, it is something accessible to everyone: everyone can think about what they have done in a day, what it means, what they are grateful for, what brought them life, what brought them death.  Recollection, reflection, and gratitude are not skills for the intellectually wealthy, they are skills for anyone who does not wish to be impoverished in the life of their soul.
    It took me a long time to really appreciate that this world is truly fascinating and wonderful and worth paying attention to.  I required the tools of academic life and the arts of imagination to discover that fact.  I doubt everyone needs that.  But everyone does need meaning, and sometimes we have to let go of things that we like in order to find things that are really good and fulfilling.  That's what I learned from fasting.  I like novels and worlds of fiction a lot.  But they usually don't feed me the way scientific and philosophical inquiry do.  And I need to give those novels up for a while to discover why I seem to have this deeper, more encompassing taste for something else.
 

Jesus and Zacchaeus

          He entered Jericho and was passing through. And behold, there was a man named Zacchaeus. He
          was a chief tax collector and was rich. And he was seeking to see who Jesus was, but on account
          of the crowd he could not, because he was small in stature.  So he ran on ahead and climbed up
          into a sycamore tree to see him, for he was about to pass that way.  And when Jesus came to the
          place, he looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at your
          house today.”  So he hurried and came down and received him joyfully.  And when they saw it,
          they all grumbled, “He has gone in to be the guest of a man who is a sinner.”  And Zacchaeus
          stood and said to the Lord, “Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor. And if I have
          defrauded anyone of anything, I restore it fourfold.”  And Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has
          come to this house, since he also is a son of Abraham.  For the Son of Man came to seek and to
          save the lost.”
The story of Zacchaeus is a story full of ironies, full of things one does not expect.  First we learn that Jesus is passing through Jericho, which gives us our first bit of textual irony.  In Jericho, the City of Palms, the city of desolation and curses about whom it was written,  "Cursed before the Lord be the man who rises up and rebuilds this city, Jericho.  At the cost of his firstborn shall he lay its foundation, and at the cost of his youngest son shall he set up its gates.”  In the city of cursing, Jesus finds one whom others call a notorious sinner, and his house finds salvation.  Long ago, Rahab the harlot was such a one as this, and she found salvation for her house as well, though all others were destroyed.
    But Jesus goes to the cursed city on his way to Jerusalem, the city of David, the city of those who inherit the promise.  In Jericho, Jesus stops to restore a sinner to life and to bring salvation to his house, but in Jerusalem, despite the procession of joyful hosannas, he stops only to weep over the city, saying, "Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. For the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you. And they will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know the time of your visitation.”  In Jericho, the word of salvation is preached, in Jerusalem, a word of condemnation.
     Zacchaeus himself hardly looks like the model convert.  He seems to be unfaithful to the Jewish nation in every possible way.  He takes a Greek name though he lives in the heart of Palestine.  He is a tax collector, a Roman collaborator in the employ of the Empire.  He is chief of the tax collectors, and has become rich because of it--rich because he has unrighteously harvested from the labor of men less fortunate than himself.  Perhaps he has taken bread from the mouth of the poor, and one would be likely to think that the God of justice would reckon Zacchaeus his enemy.
    But, somehow, Zacchaeus really is the model convert.  His is the heart that both shows receptivity to the gospel, and the "fruits in keeping with repentance."  His is the good ground upon which the seed is sown, where that seed grows and blossoms into a true harvest of righteousness.  How can such a thing be, in the midst of such obvious sin?  Why is Zacchaeus' heart not irrevocably closed to the Lord?  Why does he greet Jesus with great joy where the Pharisees only envy and conspire to kill him?  Why is the tax collector more righteous than the Pharisee?
    Sin can do one of two things: it can break the heart or it can harden the heart.  Sometimes, in the Providence of God, God lets a sin go on and on in the human heart, not that the human heart be lost forever, but to break that heart, to humble that heart, to prepare that heart to receive grace and mercy and salvation.  As Jesus says, only those who are sick go to the doctor.  Sometimes it is only by sinning, or by being lost in a sin, that a human being comes to know she is lost and in need of healing and salvation.  It is hard to think too well of ourselves when our sins are very obvious, so the sin of greed might in fact be a kind of proof against the sin of pride.  Other times, of course, sin can be a hardening, a blindness that does not lead one to God.  But the tax collectors and prostitutes were public sinners--their sin was public, communal, universally condemned.  It is harder for them to be so proud as to not consider themselves in need of help, redemption, healing.
  Not so the Pharisee.  The Pharisee has spent his entire life in being instructed in the Law.  He has either learned to keep the parts of the Law that can be observed from a real zeal and a real moral strength, or else he has learned to fake it, or else he has learned a deeper form of humility: he has learned that it is impossible always to love one's neighbor as oneself and love God with everything one has.  Having failed, the Pharisee will find that true righteousness consists only in faith and repentance, not in perfectly keeping all the inward and outward works of the Law.  But how easy it is to be deceived!  And how tempting to protect and perhaps to promote one's reputation for holiness, for moral strength!  How easy to sidle past true Biblical righteousness into a real self-deception, into very dangerous pride, vanity, vain-glory, self-righteousness.  If the tax collector is going to think well of himself, he will probably glory in his ability to have power over someone else, but he isn't too likely to be securely deluded that he is a good person.  In this way, greed and graft can be less dangerous than pride and vanity.  He has the power of a rich man, but not the power of a rich man upon which society dotes its approval.  I am not sure that the prostitute has much to glory in, he or she will find it perhaps in a successful rebellion against society.
    Against, then, what we might imagine, Zacchaeus' heart is open, wide open to the chance of salvation.  He must have heard of Jesus before, must have wondered about him, wondered whether he would ever actually see him with his eyes.  So when he hears of the crowd and hears of Jesus' coming, he runs ahead to better see Jesus.  Running--an undignified pastime for a respectable man in the Ancient Near East, but Zacchaeus does not care about this at all.  If running isn't respectable, I imagine climbing a tree must be far more disreputable, but Zacchaeus is up and away.  He doesn't try to overpower the crowd, he doesn't posture or threaten or use his position as leverage to get ahead in seeing Jesus.  Rather, he employs his wits so he can just get a glimpse of the Lord.
   And then, curiously, he doesn't say a word.  He doesn't try to get Jesus' attention, he just watches.  Maybe he thinks Jesus won't notice--maybe he even hopes no one notices him up in that tree.  But then Jesus looks up to him and knows his heart.  He knows his heart and speaks words of impossible welcome and blessing: "Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today."
   Why "hurry" and why "must"?  Why must Zacchaeus hurry and why must Jesus stay with him?  Salvation is the thing at stake and no time must be wasted: and Zacchaeus' response is perfect obedience.  Jesus says, "Hurry, and come down," and thus Zacchaeus' hurries and comes down joyfully receiving Jesus' word.  He is the perfect disciple who does not question his master's word, he only obeys and does so with joy.  "All of them," everyone, grumbles, everyone speaks against the Lord's visitation to this sinner.  No one speaks for Zacchaeus, not a one considers he might be a worthy man, that there might be some treasure for the Lord to harvest.
   But there is such a treasure.  This small man, this sinner, has his heart lit on fire by Jesus' taking notice of him.  God sees Zacchaeus, Zacchaeus knows he is known by God, and knows he is given a gift of the presence of God and the beginning of the kingdom, and he also knows what the proper response to all of this is.  Repentance.  Zacchaeus is a sinner, and the mean of his sin has helped him see his own need for salvation, and to see Jesus and his Gospel as the means and end of that salvation.  He sees his own sin, and takes on the character of his Lord instead.  In following the Lord of Jubilee, he restores not only what he has taken unrighteously, he also has mercy on the poor.  He sees in himself what the Pharisees do not see in themselves, and this sinner in the city of destruction finds salvation that they do not find.   For all that the Pharisees live in the city of kings and priests and that the Law and the Prophets are their inheritance, they do not see Jesus and they do not receive him with joy.
   The Son of Man is the Good Shepherd who seeks and saves the lost, who is perfectly able to restore sinners to repentance and amendment of life, to reconcile those sinners to God, and to give them a new life.  Part of the good news is believing that God is capable of restoring, in his own ways and in his own timing, absolutely anyone whom the Lord goes out to bring home.  Ours is the part to have faith in the Lord's goodness and hope for all to come to repentance and newness of life.  It is also our part to understand how small we are.  Not that human beings are insignificant: we aren't insignificant to God and that's the only measure of significance worth having.  But we are small--we don't have much strength or power or intelligence or goodness of our own.  The angels excel us in every way, and our sacred history starts with humans beings deceived and naive, fragile and mortal.  Our lives are gifts of grace that are in God's hands, not our own.  We are, like Zacchaeus, quite small.  But we are loved and we are imprinted with the image of God, which is a great dignity.  There is something to being mindful of what we lack and how we fall short as a protection against the greater evils of thinking we have no need of any help or saving.

Author Stalking: Mercedes Lackey and the Diana Tregarde series

(Spoilers Alert!)
I happily confess to what I call "author stalking", that is, having enjoyed a book, I assume that the author of said book has some skill transferable to other novels, and I presume I might like those books as well.  So I tend to pursue the acquisition of new (to me) reads, which are most often fantasy and science-fiction novels, but I follow this pattern with non-fiction as well.
   That being said, Mercedes Lackey has been one of my favorite fantasy novelists since high school, and  has obliged me by writing dozens and dozens of novels, many of which I like, some of which I really love and have read multiple times.  (Mostly, I've read nearly all of the Heralds of Valdemar books, and it shouldn't take me too long to polish them all off.)  I will write about some of those later.  Last week, I encountered a new-to-me set of books by Lackey, featuring the character Diana Tregarde, and thought I would give them a whirl.  Part of the reason I went on the war-path to read some new novels was to study them: I'm trying to get more serious about my own fantasy writing and it helps to pay attention to what works and what doesn't work (or just what I like or don't like) in the writings of others.
   Typically, I encountered the books quite out of chronological order.  What I encountered was the most recent Diana Tregarde book, which was actually a novella published in Trio of Sorcery in 2010.  But it was a prequel to the other novels, set years in the past, when Diana is a freshman in college and first working out what it means to be a "Guardian", that is, a magic practitioner with the special calling to aid those innocents who find themselves in the clutches of dark magic either against their will or out of ignorance.  Complication: the job doesn't pay at all, and the only reward is knowing you've done the right thing.  I'm fairly certain Lackey is a Kantian ethicist, she likes duty, which is only intrinsically rewarded by satisfying one's calling and one's conscience.  It doesn't provide, doesn't pay the bills, duty isn't interested in your personal life, though maybe the gods remember your good deeds in the next life.  
     In some ways, this is a coming of age story--Diana transforms from being a lonely teenager trying to embrace her new Guardianship by herself (her parents are dead and her grandmother has recently died, too) into a capable adult with a circle of friends who want to support and help her.  She learns to operate in the world "on her own"--without the support of her parental figure--but with a group of friends.  She even gets a boyfriend at the end of the story, which is something she was sure she'd be denied, since everyone in high school avoided her because she was so strange.  In any case, I liked the story--the characters were dynamic, most of the supporting characters contributed uniquely and interestingly, and Diana is a likable and interesting heroine who knows how to employ a good sidekick.
  Thus, I decided I would go back and read some of the earlier published Diana Tregarde novels, of which there are three, published in 1989, 90, and 91.  With such a heroine and a sufficiently interesting magical world, what could go wrong?
  Well, lots of things, apparently.  Now, I've read Lackey's Arrows of the Queen trilogy, which were published just before these novels.  Those I thought rather good, so I don't think my dislike was a matter of it just being a "stage" of Lackey's writing.  I read Burning Water and Jinx High and probably I will not go on and read Children of the Night.  But here are the things I thought went wrong and some things that went right.
   #1 Characterization.  In both Burning Water and Jinx High there are at least two characters other than Diana who narrate a good deal of the story.  But none of them, including Diana, are what you'd call dynamic characters.  No one changes significantly.  Each of the supporting characters, Mark in Burning Water and Larry in Jinx High have contributions to make to the story, but even those contributions are passive.  The reader knows from the start of Burning Water that Mark is a medium and thus one assumes this will play in the climax of the story in one way or another.  It does, but it isn't terribly interesting because the medium's role is essentially passive, and although Mark makes some risky decisions about the role he will pay, it isn't presented in a way that preserves the dramatic tension of those decisions.  One might contrast this with a parallel role that Karal plays in the Mage Storms trilogy.  In that story, Karal is revealed to be a "channel" for magic, though otherwise a very poor mage, but in those stories, Karal's role is an interesting one because of all the moral and religious discernment and decision making that Karal has to make in order to use this gift of his.  He uses it at a very great risk to himself, he's also very young, which makes him more sympathetic to the reader.  (Karal is probably my favorite Lackey character.)  Larry is in a similar position as Mark in Jinx High, though he doesn't have near the role in that story as Mark does in Burning Water.  Larry's son, Derek, is one of Lackey's narrators, and is revealed to be psychic (as is one of the other minor characters), but Derek never does a single useful thing with his gift, and other than being duped, plays no interesting role in the climax.
     In both novels, you see the perspective of the "good guys" and the "bad guys" and there is at least one good guy and one bad guy other than Diana whose perspective you get to listen in-on.  But none of them, including Diana, are very dynamic characters.  Mark is a passive agent throughout the climax of the first book.  There's some inner struggle for him about being Catholic amidst a seemingly pagan universe . . . but he confesses at the end of the book that he's happy with his Catholicism and it isn't obvious how he's learned anything.  Diana herself is by no means a "perfect" character--she makes the kinds of mistakes that a normal human would translated into a supernatural setting, but she's not dynamic either--it is hard to discern how she has changed from the beginning to end of either novel.  Likewise, in Burning Water, Diana encounters an interesting healer whose powers seem fascinating and different, but she is whisked off-camera before you can learn much about her.  The villains in both stories are also "passive" in a way--both plots revolve around villains who are doing the same thing in the present as they have done in the past, and they aren't changed by the action of the story either.  
     #2 Camera-angle.  Another problem of the books is that the reader sees exactly what the villains are up to, start-to-finish, and the fact that the heroes don't catch on until the end of the story makes the heroes seem incompetent.  From nearly the beginning of Burning Water, the reader knows who the villain is and more-or-less what he's up to.  The same with Jinx High--the readers know the gimmick, which is a great gimmick, but the characters don't, and in the case of the latter book, the characters never figure it out.  This is an unsatisfying way of telling a story, or else Lackey doesn't quite pull it off here.  She does something similar in the Mage Winds Valdemar series, but there I think it works, possibly because the reader has a better handle on Valdemar's world and magical system.  Falconsbane, the villain, is impossibly evil, but his back story is so complex that it is no surprise that none of our characters realize what they are up against.  Also, those characters have had plenty of time to have their abilities and competencies fully established by the author.  With Diana, we don't so much see for ourselves how competent she is--we are supposed to take other people's words for it.  Except in Arcanum 101, where I do think one gets a good feel for how good the young Diana is at her job.  Oddly enough, I think Lackey does a better job showing us her villain than she does showing us her protagonists.
     #3 Lecturing.  Diana lectures.  I suppose Diana is a writer, so maybe it is fitting that she lectures, but I find her moralizing disingenuous.  I don't think people like her pause to moralize and give their personalized moral creed--what Diana calls her Ten Commandments--to their friends.  Diana is neither a prophetic figure nor a philosopher, though she's intelligent and a bit of an academic, but I'm not quite sure why she lectures.  Diana spends a lot of time spouting off advice for how to live in the crazy, complicated world that she and her friends find themselves in, but to a reader, her reputation as a "wise woman" hasn't been established.  She still seems too young to do that sort of thing just out of a stereotype of middle-age, and I am hard-pressed to buy that as a part of her personality.  Again, Lackey handles these kind of characters better in her Valdemar books.  The Shin'a'in are sources of proverbial wisdom, and characters like Kerowyn aren't afraid to throw them in people's faces.  But it works for them, partly because it is an established part of the Shin'a'in culture and partly because the Shin'a'in proverbs are short--it isn't annoying because it doesn't take up that much time.  
    But I suppose I should say a bit on what these books do well.  They have fascinating backgrounds that are complicated enough for me at times to be confused as to what part Lackey made up and what part really is based on some bit of Aztec mythology or ceremonial magic.  They really have a fantastic lot of detail, and are suitably complex--which is something I always love about Lackey's magic and Lackey's worlds.  Her characters are readable and likable and interesting people even if they don't do interesting things (except maybe for the teenagers in Jinx High).  Mark is an especial favorite of mine, which is probably part of the reason I was annoyed that he didn't get a good climax or character transformation.  The Diana of Arcanum 101 is very likable and interesting, and I would really like to hear more stories about her, from her perspective, in a way that makes her dynamic and shows how she learns from her adventures.  Maybe "the seasoned magician" who is neither Sherlock Holmes nor Hercule Poirot wasn't the easiest character to write.
   Also, I think Lackey was trying to make a statement by the way both of her novels ended, even if it was a statement that I don't think works very well in a story.  And I think the statement was something like, "No matter how good you are, you don't and you can't know everything, and you're not always going to be able to save the day."  In some ways, the endings of these novels are the sort of realistic endings of everyday life.  Sometimes you get a partial victory over the evil powers-that-be, sometimes you only win at great cost.  Sometimes you never figure something out and you have to do the best you can and only time will tell what you didn't accomplish (which is how I interpret the ending of Jinx High).  Those are worthwhile themes to meditate on . . . even if in this case, they didn't provide very effective denouement.

Author's Note:  The earlier Diana Tregarde novels (by publication date, not by internal chronology) are what you'd call dark fantasy.  The evil characters really are evil and they do all sorts of evil creepy things that you'd hardly want to imagine, and a lot of their evil surrounds sexual practices, which is unfortunate. This is a motif in Lackey's writing in general, so if bothers you a lot, I would be careful about these books.  It's definitely possible to skip or skim over these parts of her novels, and ironically there is no sex at all in the parts of the novel about "the good guys".  Only the evil people, or the occasional stupid persons, are having sex.

Dreamform Three: Zombie Apocalypse and the Doctrine of Providence

I never watch horror movies.  (I only watched Cabin in the Woods because it was written by Joss Whedon and I knew it would be a satire or critique of some kind.)  The closest I get to horror is the X-Files, and probably nothing on network television should count as horror.  I have never particularly liked vampires or zombies or ghost stories.  I have either found them unbelievable, or or too gory, or fixated on death and fear--and who wants to be fixated on death or fear?  Not only are they unbelievable, they are also undesirable--who wants anything in horror movies to actually happen?  I am perfectly reconciled to the fact that part of my love of superheros, science-fiction, and fantasy is wish-fulfillment.  But there is no wish being fulfilled for me in the genre of horror.

As such, I was rather surprised when I had a dream that was more or less about a zombie-apocalypse (even though that's the in-thing right now).  Now, my imagination tends to be apocalyptic, but it doesn't tend to be full of zombies, so I thought it was unusual when I first woke up.  But I will get on with telling the dream.

In the dream, I found myself at a fancy party on the top-floor of a fancy building.  It was a large room, with low-lighting and candles.  Later, I would notice the sun-setting, so apparently it was early evening.  There were all sorts of important-looking people milling around--it was clearly a professional-class event of some kind.  There were small tables dotting the room, bedecked with candles and wine-glasses.  There were high-to-do buffet tables of some kind lining the far walls, perhaps just with hors d'oeuvre.  People were busy talking, but despite the evening attire, it was all the talk of academics and professionals going about their business.  No small talk.  A current of anxiety was sweeping through the room--people were talking in small groups and they were problem-solving.

At some point, I wandered out of the room with my companion for the evening, into a front-room of some kind, the western wall of which was entirely made of slanting glass.  I went out in the room to look for a mirror--something was wrong with my dress.  But when I went outside, I could see out the windows over the western part of the city, and I saw the whole horizon of buildings aflame. Los Angeles, I think, was burning.  And then I knew--the plague that had swept the world in a matter of days was finally here.  It was here sooner than we had expected or hoped, and things did not look good.

My companion said something to me about the city burning, and I remember looking in the mirror. My eyes were starting to change color--one of the initial signs of the plague.  Soon--perhaps in 24 hours--they would turn entirely red, and in the course of that 24 hours, I, too, would be turned by the plague into one of the raging, pillaging, burning maniacs out there trying to destroy the world.  I remember praying in the dream for help--saying to God that surely if the 21st century ever needed divine intervention, it was now.  I was met with a curious kind of silence--the kind of silence that feels like you're being deliberately ignored because you're asking the wrong question.  I remember the feeling distinctly--and I've certainly had that sensation in waking life--but thinking how odd it was to have that impression under the circumstances.

I hurried back inside to find a group of professor-scientists talking.  Everyone knew now--and knew because we were also changing--we could tell by eye color and by other signs.  One woman, who was a biologist or medical doctor of some kind, was talking.  "I have the cure," she said.  She waved a vial in her hands.  "I have it, beyond a shadow of a doubt, I have it.  Now all we have to do is get the military to deploy it.  We're going to have to do it in the water--in the oceans, but we have it, it will work."

Whatever the woman said, whatever her position was--we all believed and trusted her instantly.  She was one of the few people in the dream I recognized--in real life, she's one of the most intelligent women I've ever met, an Indian woman and PhD I met at the University of Pittsburgh.  But  in the real world, she doesn't study life sciences--far from it.  Here, she was playing a medical doctor, but I think she was a useful dream construct--because I believed her and believed she knew what she was talking about.

But by that time, we had another problem: Though we purportedly had a cure, no one wanted to use it anymore.  The change had already begun, and even with the initial symptoms came a sort of giddy confidence and intense thirst for the rage, madness, and power that one could sense coming.  I don't remember feeling that way myself--I more felt numb or neutral.  I knew we had to stop the plague, but I didn't really care which way what happened.  But the others were wavering.  They had the cure, but they were no longer interested in using it.

At this point, our building was attacked by the front wave of the victims of the zombie plague.  I remember the group of us heading outside on the roof--although no one wanted to stop the change, no one wanted to killed by the fully changed either.  But outside on the rooftop I stopped everyone and got their attention.

"I know you don't want to stop this, but we have to do it anyway.  We have to.  Not wanting it to stop is part of the disease, but we just have to stop it no matter what we feel."  I remember pausing for words, searching for something elegant or persuasive to say and coming up short.  But to my surprise, they listened.  They all listened.  They listened and agreed, and then we were off to save the human race somehow.

Saving the planet involved going down to the Navy shipyards or the docks.  I remember thinking the entire time that there was no way for this plan to work.  It simply wasn't.  The military personnel were waiting for us.  Our doctor had the cure, and there were another few vials in existence, but basically our next few hours were spent preparing hundreds or maybe thousands of decoy units--so the zombies wouldn't be able to distinguish the real vial from the fake ones.

Finally, we suited up and went underwater.  I remember diving underwater in deep-water diving gear with a  metallic cylinder tucked under my arm.  And there were hundreds of us divers and thousands of zombies following.  I still didn't think this was going to work.  I thought we were all going to die and the world was going to go out in a way I had least expected it to.  I think there were some underwater fights of some kinds, and some of the fake capsules were destroyed.  And maybe a couple of the real ones.  But it didn't matter.  By the time I surfaced, the sky and the water were already turning green--and green was good.  Green was the sign that everything had worked according to our doctor's plans.

Before my eyes, things were turning back to normal.  The change was stopping in me and my companions, and the zombies were turning back to normal.  I think maybe I shook my head as the sky changed color and the world return to normal and Los Angeles stopped burning.  It took less than 24 hours, and all was restored.  I promptly woke up.


This dream was primarily about two things I have discerned thus far.  The first is about the genre of horror itself, and the second is about the curiously unanswered or curiously answered prayer in the middle of my dream.  First things first: horror, etc.  As I said in my introduction, I don't really like horror that much and I really don't like fear.  I'm probably one of those counter-phobic persons you hear about:  I detest being afraid so much I usually try to run out and both meet and master my fears before they can get the better of me.  The sooner confronted, the sooner conquered, and then you can go back to your peace of mind.  But I don't normally go courting superfluous stress or anxiety or fear, especially in my leisure life of reading or t.v. and the movies.  So I've always looked down on horror as the one obviously pointless and irredeemable aspect of contemporary human entertainment.  God can meet people anywhere but here, I thought.  Surely God is not interested in the imaginations of those preoccupied with enlarging our fears and bringing them to life.

But he is.  Or at least, he is interested in meeting and engaging every aspect of human experience, and what humans do with fear is certainly an important aspect of human experience that God will engage.  I never expected my imagination to engage with fear very much, and I especially never expected God to engage with me there in a very imaginative way.

The truth is, I suppose, the further one goes in acknowledging the darkness in human life, the more things appear monstrously or supernaturally bad.  Evil disfigures the human psyche and deep down inside most of us are afraid of some aspect of the mystery of iniquity--but what if that evil and disfigurement were made physical--the opposite of sublimation, which is deposition.  (In chemistry, sublimation means moving from a solid to a gas without stopping over in the liquid phase of matter.  Deposition means going the other way.)  In any case, for the first time I felt in my flesh and bones how the genre of horror is capable of speaking to or about our fears by embodying them.  This is something worth doing.

But there was also the issue of my curiously answered prayer.  As I said before, when I prayed in the midst of my dream for a supernatural deliverance from the zombie horde, I had a curious sense that God was smiling wryly at me, letting me know with a glance that my prayers had already been answered, had already been provided for through normal means.  What I thought needed supernatural attention, God had already attended to naturally.  Sure enough, through the gifts and talents of our medical doctor, a cure was given though hope had seemed like folly.

This was a helpful reminder to me.  In our age of complex problems, where difficulties that surround human life seem on the surface to be such complicated jangles that they can hardly be solved through normal human effort (I think of international conflicts, ecological difficulties, fossil fuels, the national budget, cancer, AIDS, etc), things are not quite so impossible as they seem.  So often we hear anxious reports, or reports so anxiously given, that this or that issue or calamity is of such and such a difficulty level that we can hardly have hope of solutions to problems.  No doubt some of this is reactionary against the optimism (at least in the United States) of the 50s and 60s.  Technology did not solve all ills nor even the ills it promised to resolve (since it promised time-saving, making life simpler, making life "easier"), so there is some pessimism in response.  There is a greater pessimism, though, from the collapse of the cheerful Enlightenment ideologies of clear and distinct ideas paving the way for universal peace and concord among human beings, and a complete mastery of nature.  Having realized our goal to be untenable, we despair of it, and despair not only of a sure and certain victory, but also of our own competence to vie with our difficulties at all.  We have come of age in the cosmos, and found ourselves unequal to the challenges of adulthood, and thus we dither in anxiety and fear and security-mongering and despair.

But I think there is a middle way, or at least, a third option of how we ought to conceive of human fitness and capacity to deal with what comes our way.  Hubris and cynicism are both false paths and false idols that lead to the shipwrecking of cultural wisdom and identity.  A Christian, I think, ought to be properly confident that human beings were made by God to fit well with the universe around us.  It is neither too big nor too small for us, with God's help.  But his help doesn't have to be what we generally think of as supernatural.  God doesn't actually need to rescue us from every skinned knee--or even from global epidemics.  He will provide, as he always has, and the human race will go on, and he will provide, most of the time, through natural means--through the natural application of human intellect and wisdom to the problems of the world that confront us.  This does not mean that God is not active.  Rather, it means that most of God's activity is providential rather than miraculous.  (Which in turn is why double agency matters as a theory of causality, but I'll write about that some other time.  Hopefully.)  Recognizing the power of God's providential care is just as important as recognizing when God acts miraculously, and if you aren't grateful and attuned to the former, you won't be spiritually prepared for the latter--which is the story of Israel and the story of the human race in general.  The example par excellence of this occurs in Moses's admonitions to the Israelites concerning gratitude in the early chapters of Deuteronomy.  When Israel segues from miraculous provision (manna in the desert) to general provision (normal food from the Promised Land), he warns them not to take the latter for granted or think of it as something they had earned for themselves, rather than a gift given to them from God.

Naturally, this is all complicated by the presence of sin and death in the cosmos, which makes the universe a much more difficult place to live in.  (This essay, of course, is not at all an attempt at theodicy).  But this isn't because human beings' natural capacities are not fit to take on the universe--of course they are, they were built to be--but rather because these capacities are warped and distorted by sin.  So, instead of a "comfortable fit" with the cosmos, we have an uneasy, toilsome fit--our work in the world is marred by hardship and tragedy that need not have been there.  But we were meant to be reconciled to the cosmos as well as to God, and wisdom and knowledge concerning the natural world can do a lot to bridge the gap.  But it is not that the world is too big for us, it is that we are at odds with it, and it with us, and all of us now subject to futility and loss.

So my prayer was answered, and had been anticipated by God's provision.  And so much of our prayers are both answered and anticipated by God's provision.  We don't always have to look for miracles or what we think of as divine intervention, but we can expect to see the hand of God everywhere.

Anxiety, Healing and the God of Provision

These are thoughts inspired by a wonderful sermon I heard by Luke Powery of Duke Divinity School.  I appreciated everything about his sermon, but I was left thinking that there were still some unaswered questions.  Listen to the sermon first, if you like:   Calvin College Symposium on Worship--Luke Powery Sermon, Saturday.

Succinctly put, my internal response to Powery's sermon was, "There's a deeper aspect to this that I'm not quite hearing."  Powery masterfully demonstates how anxiety is an enemy to the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love.  The more anxiety, the less room for faith, hope, and love.  The less room for God, and the less room for love of neighbor.  He also talks about the "contagious" aspect of anxiety, how anxiety can spread from person to person if you aren't careful.  In addition, he menions the addictive side of anxiety--how anxiety can become so all-consuming and central to one's life that it actually becomes idolatrous--that it displaces God at the center, and people actually go out of their way to maintain their high level of anxiety.  Why?  Because they've become so accustomed to it, they don't know how to live without it.

To me, that's not terribly shocking.  Most of us, when doing significant psychological and spiritual work that entails a major change of life, both interiorly and exteriorly experience the jarring cognative dissonance of adjusting to a "new normal".  Sometimes this "new normal" is so foreign it feels wrong for a while, or in some cases, people feel a loss of identity--they are so used to thinking of x dysfunctional or broken aspect of themselves as being a part of who they really are, they don't know what to do when that aspect disappears, changes, or becomes healed.  There is a period of time in which you have to fumble around until you adjust to the "new you" who is actually just a "more healed you".  In any case, I think I've seen lots of people "worship at the altar of anxiety" as Powery says, sometimes in more or less superficial ways.  He says this can ruin your relationship with God because it really is idolatry and you can't serve two masters.  I have seen it take over personalities and compromise one's sense of identity because x person cannot imagine not living without being the one in control of the cosmos (and I've seen that in myself).  His is the more serious point, though--he's describing one who has really lost the battle of idolatry and is in some serious need of rescuing.
   
Powery goes on to contrast the picture of the anxious soul with the picture of the Providing God.  God is the one who has given himself to us in eucharistic gift and eucharistic sacrifice--he has given us himself, he has guarded us against the tyranny of the devil.  So why don't we believe him?  Why do we have such little faith in the presence of such a great God?  Why do we end up having "theological amnesia", as Powery puts it?  That, by the way, is a great way of describing what happens to someone who is truly consumed by anxiety--the anxiety is just so overwhelming it swallows up the knowledge of God and annhilates it in the anxious soul.  We just don't and can't remember anymore who God said he is and what he is like when we're drowning in anxiety.
 
But why the drowning aspect?  It is one thing to be embroiled in conflict with anxiety, and quite another thing to be overwhelmed to the point of drowing in it.  (This isn't an altogether inaccurate description of what some composes some forms of depression.)  Yet another, perhaps, to give up and just fall down and worship the false god.
 
I am sure there are any number of explanations and some of them are probably just fairly cut-and-dry theological accounts of both idolatry and pride.  When we are at the center of our own cosmos and self-reliance is our default mode, frankly, anxiety is just realism.  Fearfulness and anxiety are normal responses to a chaotic and unfriendly world . . . if human beings are the ones with the most chance of having control over the world.  It takes a lot of work to root out this idea and replace it with a lived doctrine of creation, where God is the God of order and the origin of all things--such that he is in control by virtue of being the Creator, and by virtue of the world being ontologically dependent on him for existence.  (I will explain that more in another post sometime.)
 
But there's also a side to this that is both about formation and development, and is also relational, and for that I speak out of my own experience of reflecting on God's provision for several years.  I've known for a very long time that I've had issues with God's provision.  When I was younger--say in my early college years--I used to have this invisible roller-coaster ride with God that it took me a long time to see properly, and then begin to understand.  It would go something like this: I would find myself drifting away from God (in the emotional sense) and becoming angry with him.  I would avoid prayer and Scripture reading until it made me miserable.  At some point, perhaps a few weeks later, I would inevitably find myself at Psalm 104, weeping, with little understanding as to why.  And the cycle would repeat itself, and did repeat itself about twice a year for two years or so as I slowly began to realize that I didn't really believe in God's provision.

In my heart, what I really believed is that I was left on my own to cope with all the craziness of life.  While most of the time I had enough optimism and naivety and natural resilence to find this exciting and adventuresome . . . deep down inside, my soul was suffering because God never made it to cruise about the cosmos on it's own.  We are made for God, and we are made to live with God, from the deepest and most inward and invisible parts of our hearts to the most external and visible parts of our lives.  Every moment is suppose to be caught up in both dependence on and partnership with God, and while I didn't understand either very well, I was especially clueless about the former.

At some point after college, I went to a parish retreat that was a real step forward in healing in this area.  Unbeknownst to me, there was a real blockage in my ability to understand God's love for me and his provision because "deep down inside" I thought he was unwilling to help me and resented my dependence on him.  I had picked that up from some unfortunate family dynamics, which brings me to my point about development and formation.  From an early age, we all learn what "love" is from our families of origins--and sometimes those families of origins have either broken or wicked definitions of love, which we absorb in childhood without the ability to reflect on what we absorb.  We carry that into adulthood and oftentimes we project these definitions onto God--and sometimes even, we hate God because we imagine he is like the earthly people who failed to love us in the ways that we needed to be loved, or failed to provide for us in the ways that we needed to be provided for.  Oftentimes, we don't even know this is going on, and we certainly don't understand the maelstorm of anxiety and anger that rises from needs being unmet and for generally being maladjusted to the world around us.

The answer to this I think is both theological and experiential--like most healing.  Central to this is genuine reconciliation with the True God, which involves renouncing all the idols and all the lies that consume our imagination about our Father, Son, and Holy Spirit who love us very much.  That task really is theological, because it is only the study of theology that can correct our ideas about him.  But this is also relational--for obvious reasons.  If you've been "friends" with someone who you thought was a jerk for years, and the friendship was equal parts tolerance and affection, only to find out after ages and ages that the person wasn't the jerk you thought he was and was in reality a great deal better and nice than you had imagined . . . well, that would change the nature of your relationship with that person.  It would open up things because you'd be able to trust that person more.

One could sum up my supplementum to Powery in this way.  There is an element to combating anxiety that is the cognitive side of faith: we are all in need of theological therapy at one point or another, and "believing the right thing" can make a difference.  But we also need a deeper change of heart, a deeper reconciliation with God, and a deeper experience of God's provision: it is these things that result in true healing for those who are drowning in anxiety, and this is a costly transformation that is the work of years in relationship with the Lord.  And we don't talk enough about the spiritual work that takes years to accomplish.

Iron Man and the Quandary of Self-Love

"You're tiptoeing, big man. You need to strut."

Tony Stark (Iron Man) to Bruce Banner (Hulk)


Rewatching The Avengers the other day, this snippet of a conversation caught my eye.  When I first encountered Tony Stark and the Iron Man movies, I wasn't a terribly huge fan of Stark's "text-book narcissism" as Black Widow put it in her report to Nick Fury.  But he's starting to grow on me.  One of the reasons he's starting to grow on me is because his very narcissism presents a challenge and a question to the audience: what exactly is the difference between narcissism and proper self-love?  And given a good definition, how do we actually go about recognizing that difference in the field, per se?   

One of the challenges of Tony Stark's case is that he is an exceptionally skilled individual who believes that he is an exceptionally skilled individual.  That's not the problem, and it certainly isn't the part that makes him vulnerable to the charge of narcissism.  In recognizing his own genius and achievement, he's just being honest.  Being honest--at least in good moral psychology, Christian and pagan--is one of the things that leads you to self-knowledge.  In acknowledging that, Stark is just being a realist.

The real reason people say Stark is a narcissist is because he is a) thoroughly devoted to self-pleasure and feeding his own interests without proper courtesy and attention to others and b) because "the rules don't apply to him."  But that isn't the thing I'm most interested in.  The thing I am interested in is the way in which Stark's advice to Banner was actually hitting on something good.  The following conversation gets at the heart of things a bit more.  When Tony Stark suggests that Banner will be "suiting up" with the rest of the Avengers, Banner replies:

"Ah, see. I don't get a suit of armor. I'm exposed, like a nerve. It's a nightmare."

"You know, I've got a cluster of shrapnel, trying every second to crawl its way into my heart.  This stops it. This little circle of light. It's part of me now, not just armor. It's a terrible privilege."

Banner responds: "But you can control it."

"Because I learned how."

"It's different."

Stark says, "Hey, I've read all about your accident. That much gamma exposure should have killed you."

Banner replies: "So you're saying that the Hulk, the other guy, saved my life? That's nice. It's a nice sentiment. Saved it for what?"

Stark: "I guess we'll find out."

With a wry smile from the resident Hulk, "You may not enjoy that."

Tony Stark: "You just might."

It may be true that Stark's enjoyment of the Hulk's destructive tendencies isn't terribly wise or constructive.  But the movie goes on to prove his perspective to be the right one.  Whatever burden the Hulk side of Banner might be, he's also a terribly effective asset equal to the task of taking on Loki single-handedly and dealing some serious damage to the Leviathans.  

What struck me, however, was more the enjoyment side of Stark's remarks.  Stark's not just egging Banner on to higher heights of self-esteem--he wants Banner to let go and enjoy himself.  He wants him to enjoy the destructive power of the Hulk, and see the power and hope for a more constructive use of the Hulk, even if it seems unlikely that the Hulk be fully trained to saddle.

Aside from the exaggerations of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, there's some very good advice there.  We spend a lot of time not enjoying ourselves.  We spend a lot of time berating, criticizing, and finding fault with ourselves.  We spend a lot of time in self-hatred and we don't spend a lot of time in appreciation and delight and even in glorying in ourselves.  But proper self-love is difficult to think about well.  How do I love and really celebrate and enjoy and even glory in the part of me that is good and wonderful and fearfully made by God without being a narcissist?  How do I love myself because God has loved me and wonderfully made me and destined me for glory rather than loving myself simply out of a false sense of ownership?  How do I balance the call for self-denial and proper abandonment of one's self and the call to the celebrate one's own goodness?

We are all faced with the quandary of reconciling loves--love for self, love for God, love for other created things, and we only succeed in reconciling loves when we know, understand and have been converted to the true purposes for which we love.  When I love myself and God for my own sake, I may not do wrong, but I haven't done much good either.  Self love, when it is the beginning of loves, is not a bad beginning.  It, however, is a terrible end for love--love of self and God for one's own sake must mature into something else or it will turn into narcissism.  (Narcissism is real life is much less attractive than narcissism enacted by Robert Downey, Jr.)  

When the world becomes contracted such that I--myself--am the only reason and purpose for which I love, my world becomes a false and ugly alternate reality.  Self-love is meant to be a natural tutor and example which shows us how it is we might love others.  The instinct for self-love does not have to be taught, though the maturation of it does, and self-love matures as the love of self is submitted to the love of God and the love of others.  It requires having our ideas about love submitted, transformed, and joined to the will, wisdom, and love of God.  And it requires a lot of obedience and renunciation and suffering--in many ways, we seem to lose much of ourselves before we find ourselves again, secure in God.

But during and after all of this transformation, when our loves change and are matured into ripeness--when we begin to see ourselves in God's light, purpose, and love, a wonderful thing happens.  We are freed, as Teresa of Avila told us so many years ago, to love ourselves for God's sake.  Having learned already to love God for his own sake, having seen God at the center of the cosmos and not ourselves, we begin to see ourselves again.  We perhaps catch a glimpse of ourselves out of the corner of our eyes and find that we are wonderfully and beautifully made.  And we begin to find out why God was so interested in the first place--we see what he sees, we find beautiful what he finds beautiful, and we find those things in ourselves.

As Bernard Lonergan and Henri de Lubac taught me, the first and most precious gift that God gives to us is ourselves.  We are meant to accept our lives as occassions for joy and goodness and to understand that there is more to the Creation than what is broken and damaged and harmful.  For some of us skeptics, joy and delight and acceptance of what is good in ourselves is most difficult because we think the most honest or the most rigorous or the most intellectual thing to do is to identify what is wrong rather than what is right.  But no matter what darkness exists in the human soul, it cannot overcome the brightness of creation, for the beauty of Creation is upheld by the hand of God, redeemed in the Resurrection of the Son, and preserved and guarded until the end by the work of the Spirit.

But we are called to a holy joy in ourselves.  We are called to take the same joy in ourselves that God does.  It isn't the only joy we have, and it isn't the most important joy we have.  But it is the very first gift God gives us and we are meant to come full circle in loving ourselves for his sake.

Dreamform Two: Gold Leaf Scrolls and Red Writing

(Note:  These dreams are in no particular chronological order.  I had this dream sometime in January, 2013.)

In my dream, I found myself ushered through rooms lit by torches clustered at the intersections of rounded arches.  The torchlight was warm and bright, and had the effect of coloring the walls reddish-gold.   The upper sections of the walls may have been plaster or stone, though the lower sections were definitely of a more textured and less reflective material, stone or wood.  The almost oval archways connecting various rooms were neither very high nor very wide, though I did not feel that the spaces were crabbed together in anyway.  Some of the archways slunk away into darkness, but I found myself in long, rectangular rooms filled with tables, light, and with robed men hard at work.  I had the impression of being underground, being very secure, and being in a place not my own.  The setting was familiar to me, yet I have never been in any place like it.  It was simple and beautiful, and reminds me most of Neogothic Anglican-style cathedrals and churches (say built in the late 19th, early 20th century).
   I did not stop to talk with anyone, and although I felt led to a very particular place in the bowels of this place, I did not see who was leading me.  After ducking through a few different rooms, and winding around tables and people, I found myself in another workroom, with a large, well-lit table in the center of the room.
    At some point, someone handed me a set of very large, honest-to-goodness scrolls.  The only time I have seen actual scrolls in waking life (in person, anyway) was ceremonial Torah scrolls in a Conservative Jewish synagogue on one of the High Holy Days.  Those were lavishly decorated.
    These were too.  First of all, they were enormous--probably they were two-and-a-half feet tall, and there were two sets of them.  The rollers were made of gold, or a material that looked like gold, and were stylized, though not elaborately so.  I unfurled--or someone else did--both sets of scrolls and laid them down the whole length of the table--maybe 10 feet or so?  I don't know: waking or sleeping I am a terrible measurer of distance or length or quanitity of any kind, really.  In any case, I am fairly certain I could have easily laid down on the table and not come to the end of it--and I'm about 5 and a half feet tall.  When both scrolls were unrolled the full length of the table, I am not sure that they were opened all the way.  Now that I think of it, I think they were not, but what I could see was this.
   The paper itself was covered over entirely in gold.  Rich, sparkling, deep gold.  And written on the gold, in the reddest, most perfect letters you can imagine, in a language entirely unfamiliar to me, in an alphabet entirely unfamiliar to me.  The letters were whole and perfect--perhaps a little raised from the text, either done by a typeset or the best calligrapher in the world.  The language looked a little like the Cree language, which I have only seen once while visiting The Forks in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and I had absolutely no hope of ever reading it.  Yet, I knew absolutely that the scrolls were mine.  The person who was showing them to me was showing them to me precisely because they were mine, and indeed, the Someone showing them to me, was really showing them to me becuase the scrolls were me.   And at some point after that, I woke up.
   As a student theologian, I am well aware that human beings are made in the image of God.  (Hey, that's what I wrote my graduate thesis on!)  And as made in the imagine of God, human beings are the parodox of parodoxes: we are finite pictures of the Infinite One.  As such, human being really are a living mystery.  You think particle physics is hard to fathom?  The human person more.  You contemplate the workings of a cell and think it profound?  The human person more.  And not the human person reduced to biology or chemistry or math or physics.  No, the human person who is biological, chemical, physical, and also much more than that--God-breathed, God-touched, God-crafted, and God-imaging.  Calvin said that the universe was the "mirror of God's work" (and I'm totally going to steal that for a book title someday), but the human person more.  No matter how deep how wide how unfathomable any part or even the whole of Creation is, in some mysterious sense, the human person--your neighbor, your enemy, your friend, your loved one--more, because while God has touched all of his creation and left traces of his presence there, he has left something more with human beings, His Very Image.
   But that's all well and good and not even all that difficult to say.  What is much more difficult is figuring out what that really means in the sometimes not so bright light of every-day life.  C. S. Lewis brings this to life brilliantly in the "Weight of Glory" when he talks of the hidden and potential glory alive in every human being.  He was inviting us to regard our neighbor as a holy and dreadfully important subject, worthy of considering, love, and something close to reverence . . . because the destiny which God has in mind for us is so great.       This dream was more about the noetic side of the equation, whereas Lewis' sermon was more about the ontic.  "Noetic" is philosopher-speak for "pertaining to knowledge or knowing."  So when I say the dream was noetic or epistemological, I mean that God was trying to show me something about how I am to know myself in light of the mystery of the human being made in the image of God.
     The thing he was communicating was this:  "You [and potentially anyone and everyone human] are priceless and beautiful.  Your soul is priceless and beautiful.  You can't even see your soul--meaning the invisible aspect of human life--all the time, but it really is there and it really is beautiful.  And you have no idea what's in there.  You have no idea what you are or who you are because what you are and you who are is absolutely too wonderful, too deep, too fantastically complicated for you to know.  You aren't going to know everything there is to know about yourself precisely because you are made in My image.  It is too much for you.  It is beyond you.  You don't speak the language, and you certainly can't read it.  But I know.  And I will tell you.  I will tell you what the writing says--what I have written--and I will tell you over time and I will tell you what you need to know.  But don't worry about it too much, because the thing is in my hand and there's nothing you can do about it apart from what I am doing and what I am saying to you.  So don't worry.  I will be there and I will speak."
      This was all very comforting to me.  Partly, it was comforting to me because I am indebted to the Spanish Mystics for a lot of their teaching on the spiritual life, and Christian discipline and virtue, and they, especially Teresa of Avila, have much to say about self-knowledge as a virtue.  One of my undergraduate professors said that only Christianity made self-knowledge a virtue.  I haven't researched that much myself, but it would be interesting to see the ways in which that is true.  In any case, Christianity certainly takes self-knowledge very seriously--you see it especially in Augustine and Calvin.  For you Reformed peeps out there, perhaps you remember how The Institutes tie together knowledge of God and knowledge of self?  For such diverse Christians as John Calvin and Teresa of Avila, these two things are intertwined and inseperable.  And for both, self-knowledge is both a duty and a gift.  Self-knowledge is revelation from God just as knowledge of God is revelation from God.   The word "revelation" speaks for itself here: God reveals himself and is revealed to human beings--in Christianity, you can't come to the knowledge of God by yourself, it has to be a gift from God.  If you think you've come to the knowledge of God by yourself, what you've actually come to (as Calvin nicely puts it) is the knowledge of an idol--something you've made up in your own mind that may resemble God in some ways, but won't in other ways.  And it won't be him, and you won't have drawn closer to him with that knowledge, so the project is pretty much moot at that point.
   But things that are both gifts and duties are tricky to keep in proper balance and proper dependence on God.  If you are prone to having an overactive sense of responsibility as I am, it is easy to confuse the boundaries between responding to God's initiative and gifting in gratitude and obedience and taking on burdens to do things it is impossible for human beings to do in their own power.  For me, I tend to get so wrapped up in my quest for knowledge that I forget that knowledge is revelation, knowledge of God and self especially so.  I am much more inclined to view self-knowledge as a project for me to complete, and a project that I am responsible to complete.  And in my worse moments, to judge other people for not knowing themselves--for doing so poorly on this project, or for failing in their duties to self-knowledge.
   In this particular case, I woke from this dream with a sense of relief.  Lately, I had had the feeling (though I wasn't quite aware of it) that I was epically failing in knowing myself.  There were parts of myself I just didn't understand and frankly that I had not the time, energy, skill or wisdom to address.  They weren't necessarily problematic parts of myself--just parts of myself that I either hadn't seen in a why or were new to me.  I didn't know what they meant or what I was going to do about it, and while I had decided to accept those parts of myself, I didn't understand them and that made me a bit nervous.  I kept wondering, am I doing the right thing here by just accepting myself and moving forward?
   The answer I recieved was "yes" and helps free a facet of my personality that I do know isn't the most helpful: getting stuck locking things down with enough certainty to get Descartes to at least grudgingly nod his head at me.  Oftentimes, that's a waste of time or an impossible enterprise, but it often doesn't look that way to me: it seems more like a moral responsibility to pursue that kind of certainty--and what more important place to start than the knowledge of who I am as a person?
   Now, and particularly with the help of a dream, I can see what a rabbit-hole that is.  If all our theology is right and humans are these gloriously complex, weighty, and deep creatures . . . my intellectual and moral enterprise didn't stand a chance.  I actually can't achieve what I'm hoping to achieve.  In my humanity, I'm actually not capable of fully understanding my humanity.  But God already understands it, and he's going to help me see and know and understand in the ways that are proper to do so.  Through this dream, I was freed from my over-active sense of responsibility, which was telling me I had to know myself perfectly, on my own, with little or no help from God.  That's generally a bad combination of assumptions, and this was no exception.
    Well, that's it.  Except for two more things.  I was thinking that I know why the scrolls were gold and the writing was read.  Gold is a useful symbol because it is precious metal that is beautiful and does not rust.  That's why it symbolizes things that are supposed to last forever: like human beings, like love, like our most important promises.  Red is the color of blood and can symbolize life, which is the function it served here.