David Williams's Blog, page 62

The Morning Duties

My dog is very confused.

She knows, precisely, her responsibilities, and she's really very diligent about them.  If other humans walk by on the sidewalk, she is to bark fiercely to let them know that she can bark fiercely.  If a squirrel or bunny slinks into our yard, she is to bark even more fiercely for as long as possible, because squirrels and bunnies are clearly a menace to her humans.  Particularly if it's early morning.

Should a strange human come to the door, she is to snuffle and wag with evident glee, because obviously they're supposed to be there, or they would not be there.

The rest of the day she naps and conserves her energy, because one never knows when there might be a fox,  or perhaps even a deer, and that requires you to be at your best.

And then there are her Morning Duties.

The hairier human wakes, stumbles about making some peculiar smelling hot black fluid, and then attaches the apparatus she uses to lead him through the neighborhood so that the call of nature can be attended to.  It is known, with all the certainty of her knowing, that said call must always be heeded in specific predetermined locations.

Inside the human pack's den?  Never.  On the places where the humans walk?  No.

There is that grassy spot at the top of the hill, and that other one around the bend at the bottom of the street, where the feng shui is just so.  Those are the places, and that is where the thing that must be done may be performed.  This pattern is as reliable as the rising sun, her responsibilities clear.

Only suddenly, the whole world has just disappeared.  The wind howled, and the humans hunkered, and when it was done, everything was different.

All of the familiar smells and sights, all of the grass and the walking places, obliterated.  In their place, white stuff, deep and cold, washing out everything.

It has happened before, though her memory cannot hold it.  And every time it happens, she is lost.  She knows she has to follow the clear rules of the Morning Duties.  But what do those rules mean, in the madness of a totally new world?

She locks up, utterly confused.  She can do nothing, no matter how many times the humans who are her pack walk her, no matter how much they mutter and moan.  In the face of a world made new, she has no idea what she's supposed to be doing, because the old rules have lost all purchase.

It is only because, being a simple animal soul, she doesn't know the purpose of the rules.

We aren't that different, we humans.  We have our patterns, the scent trails and habit places of our lives.  We know our responsibilities and our duties.

But we struggle to grasp the purpose of them, the reason we live and breathe and move through our days.  It's so much easier not to think, to just mindlessly pursue the same pattern over and over.

When we stand in encounter with something that breaks that pattern, with the storms that shake our simple souls, we can fumble around trying to make the old pattern work.  It won't, not in this new place we inhabit.  And so we become lost and confused.

Humans have always done this, clinging to old patterns in the face of the new, unable to shift, unable to find their reason in the face of the changes that are part of our Creator's work.  As a poet-prophet once sang,

See, I am doing a new thing!    Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?I am making a way in the wilderness    and streams in the wasteland.

But we don't perceive it, because we want to follow the way just exactly as we always have, and cling to the letter of the law rather than to the One Law from which it springs.  So we stumble about, and whine, and feel lost.  Sometimes, we make messes.

Fortunately, God understands that accidents happen when we're confused.  And God has all the time and patience in the world.

"C'mon, you.  Figure it out."

And eventually, we will.

God-Fearin' and Cosmic Horror

Over the last year or two, my writing on faith and multiversal cosmologies has splashed out into a couple of short stories, both of which involve evolved artificial intelligences and cosmic horror.

One of those was just published in the webzine-reboot of the classic sci-fi mag OMNI, and it's pretty cool seeing it there.

It takes a lot to scare a spacefaring AI, but I figure the terrifying immensity of the multiverse just might do it.

Cosmic horror, as a genre, was pretty much defined by H.P. Lovecraft, whose feverish, clammy mythopoetics gave narrative form to the human encounter with the reality of the depth of the universe.  He wrote at a time when human beings were realizing that the scope of our history was essentially meaningless.  Our world was not six thousand years old, but billions of years old.  The space we inhabit was not defined by our planet, or our sun, but by a vastness that yawned out into mindbending and inhuman distance.

From this new understanding of existence, the "monsters" of Lovecraft's storytelling were not the demons of human myth, but the alien and ancient things that he imagined existing in a universe that was dizzyingly deeper than human comprehension.

That depth is, I think, one of the reasons that so many "faithful" retreated into fundamentalism rather than allow themselves to stand in honest encounter with the work of the Creator.  The scale of things was just too shattering.

But where traditionalists struggled, science imagined it had caught up during the 20th century.  The boundaries of our inflating bubble of spacetime became more clearly understood.  The Big Bang seemed more and more self-evident, the age and scale of things comprehensible. The dynamics of physics down to the subatomic level slowly came into view.  A grand unified theory of everything seemed within reach.

And then the Creator smirked, and drew back the veil a bit more.

What scientists encounter, as they consider multiversal existence, is a creation so vast that it defies measurement.  It cannot be known.  It is, for lack of a better word, Numinous.  And that's intimidating.

How intimidating?  There's a wonderful, comprehensive recent essay at space.com, written by neurologist and thought leader Robert Lawrence Kuhn, that lays out our best understandings of the dynamics of a multiversal creation.  Kuhn concludes thusly:

"If, from this essay I seem rational, coolheaded and self-assured about multiple universes, then I have been unintentionally deceptive. I am intimidated by the ineffable endlessness of an overarching, overwhelming multiverse. I shrink before the terrifying vision of the 17th century philosopher Blaise Pascal: 'The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.'"

He doesn't use Lovecraft's favorite word "eldritch," sure.  But Kuhn's reaction, as a scientist, is the reaction of a Lovecraftian protagonist.  The reasoned, structured, empirical mind reels in the face of a reality that inherently cannot be grasped.

Which is why faith..real faith, not the comfortable delusion of fundamentalism...is so very necessary for our sanity in this wild new cosmos.

How the Big Church Fails America

The problem with America, I think, is that we want to be a big church.

I was reminded of this last week, as I once again didn't watch the State of the Union.  It's not that I have any animus towards President Obama.  It's just that the ritual is empty and tired and devoid of meaning, like a worship service in a church in conflict, where half of the room hates the other half of the room.  Lord have mercy, but are those painful.

The sprawling Jesus MegaCenters of AmeriChrist, Inc. have come to define community for tens of millions of Americans.  We're still a nation comprised primarily of Christians, and of those, the majority now spend their sacred time in large congregations.  That sets a particular pattern of expectation for how we relate to one another.

Megachurches are, by necessity, corporate in structure and implementation.  They require certain forms of infrastructure if they are to maintain their size.  They have a carefully constructed hierarchy and org chart, with the pastor serving as a face-of-the-brand CEO.  In order to maintain the integrity of the structure and vision, there's a single defining worldview that establishes organizational direction and purpose.   Big churches carefully cultivate "brand identity."  Big churches enforce sameness of perspective, because that's key to maintaining the unitary vision that is central to the growth ethic of a franchise.  Like stopping in at a Subway, you get the same seamlessly choreographed meal every Sunday.

America is not that, not if you really look at us.

We're a sprawling, multifaceted, bubbling mess of a republic, rich with flavor and difference.  If the goal is to create a viable and vibrant sense of belonging, the corporate model of community ain't gonna cut it.  That rigidly managed approach to life together is a Procrustean bed, and no matter how much we stretch and lop at ourselves to fit, we won't.  All we'll do is bleed.

Healthy smaller churches are different.  In a smaller community, you have to get to know people, with all of their mess and all of their difference.  If the community is to maintain integrity, you have to be willing to embrace them, despite their difference.

And you have to trust, because trust is the glue that binds a thriving tribe.

Not the hegemony of structural and institutional authority, not the manipulative selfishness of brand, not the grasping anxiety of consumer culture, but trust that differences matter less than life together.  Trust that we're all in it together, that we've all got the common good at heart, no matter what we're doing.

This can be a hard thing, trust can, particularly in a marketized society, where caveat emptor becomes the rule of our every relationship.  Trust, as the market teaches us, just makes us suckers.

In that context, healthy trusting relationships have to be learned and practiced.  But we don't learn or practice, because most of us don't participate in small things anymore.

Like small businesses, little churches and all other microcommunities have suffered in the Walmart era.  Our encounter with difference is sabotaged by the echo chamber of social media, and the commodified character of our daily interactions.  Our ability to maintain the organic relational vibrance of a goodhearted tribe is undercut by our endless diaspora, as we are torn from place to place by the vagaries of a speculative economy.

And as we've move to the stale efficiencies of corporate scale relationships in our work, our relationships, and our faith, we've lost something.

Why The Church is a Bad Sport

It was a silly video, really, just a little bit of feel good fluff that drifted into my social media filter-feeding.

The images, from an Australian professional tennis match, in which Leighton Hewitt and Jack Sock, two globally ranked athletes, are having at it.  Leighton Hewitt serves...boom.  The service is called out, and he prepares to take his second shot at it.

Only Jack Sock, having seen the ball in, shouts out to him that he really should challenge the call.

There is bafflement, and laughter, and the call is challenged.  The video is reviewed, and indeed, the ball pasted the line, a clean, perfect ace.  It's a great example of good sportsmanship, or so we are told.  Here, someone willing to lose, because winning at the expense of honesty would just be unacceptable.

Yet though it was a feel-good flit across my awareness, of no more import than a video of a puppy saying cheese, it stirred theological thinking in me.  Because everything does.

What I thought was: this is why it's so hard for congregations to be moral agents.  Because congregations are teams, and the morality of teams is different from the morality of individuals.  Our genial tennis player, seeing the ball clearly in, is able to quickly make a choice as a moral agent.  He would rather lose the point than lose his sense of integrity.

But singles tennis is a competition between two individuals.   What if this were a team sport?  What if this were football?  If an opposing player catches a pass for a touchdown at the end of the endzone, and it's ruled out of bounds and incomplete, and you've seen his feet clearly in bounds...what do you do?  The moral calculus is different.  Can you make that decision for your team?  Do your ethics define the ethics of the group?

The answer, more often than not, is no.

As Reinhold Niebuhr noted in the last century, it's why collectives have such trouble living up to the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.  Individuals may be able to love enemies and turn the other cheek, but groups do so with difficulty.  The morality of the collective is justice...the balance of claims within the group...not grace or mercy.  The purpose of the group is self-preservation, not self-sacrifice.

Perhaps that's why churches, like corporations and political parties and armies, tend to be struggle so mightily to play the game by the rules Jesus taught.

12 Reasons The Force Awakens is a Terrible Movie

I'll admit to being a contrarian.  When something's supposed to be the most amazing thing ever, and everyone is singing praises, I approach it with shields up.  I am wary of the whims of the herd.

Having lived and breathed Star Wars as a kid, I was doubly guarded about The Force Awakens, and continued to be so as flames of enthusiasm poured from the LucasArts/Disney publicity engine.

Everyone tries to latch on to that energy, pitching out their "the theology of Star Wars" and "the science of Star Wars" schtick.

It's just not that great a film.  I say this as a film lover, as a geek, and as someone who saw the powerful use of archetypes at play in the first trilogy.  

Watching it, I honestly struggled with why it is that otherwise sentient folks imagine that it's anything more meaningful than one-a-them Buster Crabbe Flash Gordon movies.

So here, because we are in the drab heart of a listicle age, are the twelve reasons The Force Awakens isn't the thing our culture claims it is.  Or, to be more precise, eleven trivial flaws that bugged me, the pebble-in-my-shoe dissonances of plot, character, and continuity.

And, to cap it off, the one catastrophic failure of vision that sabotages the myth.

1) Finn seems to have no problem killing.  We're introduced to a character in the throes of psychological trauma.  Another trooper dies...a friend, we're supposed to infer...leaving a bloody mark on his helmet.  He stands, helpless to act, unable to engage in the savagery all around him.  It's one of the closest moments the film gets to being moving.  This faceless trooper, overwhelmed by the human horror at violence.

And then, within minutes, he's blasting the crap out of people, hooting and hollering as he massacres his former colleagues by the dozen.  He doesn't freeze up.  He doesn't weep or shudder.  He doesn't even seem to notice, other than shout victoriously.  For me, as someone with counseling training, that was more than a little jarring.  And it was the first in a series of dissonant, wrong character notes.

2) Rey is an amazing pilot.  We take that for granted.  But why would she be?  I mean, sure, Han Solo is a pilot.  That's his character.  And Luke Skywalker had experience taking out womp rats in Beggar's Canyon back home.  But Rey?  Rey may be a scrapper and a rockclimber and cunning, but nothing in the story leads us to believe that she's ever even been anything other than a passenger in a spacecraft.  We are shown that she lives a feral existence, much like the children in the third world who make a meager living scavenging from trash heaps.  That's her story, as we're introduced to her.  Take one of those children, put them in the cockpit of an Apache helicopter, and see what happens.

I'll tell you what happens: dark, brief comedy.

It was jarring, in the same way that derpy young Anakin's preternatural giftedness at all things was jarring.

3) Swordfighting is like the easiest thing ever.  I took kendo classes for about six months, years ago.  Kendo is the Japanese art of swordplay, taught with bamboo and wood "blades" and armor.  It was jolly good fun whacking around, but it taught me that you can't just pick up a blade and expect to be amazing.  It also taught me...through repeated blows administered by a black belt...that someone trained with a sword makes quick work of a novice.

Yet we're expected to believe that a sanitation engineer and a street urchin could both just pick up a light saber and more than hold their own against someone with training.  Heck, even Skywalker had to be trained first.  Right?  I mean, right?   We remember that, right?   Hell, how do they even know how to turn the damn thing on?  

It's as if, having just been handed his father's lightsaber by Old Ben, Luke suddenly was confronted by Asajj Ventress...and beat her.

4) The Republic.  What and the what?  The destruction of the "Republic" by the Starkiller was, well, it was such a rushed plot point that we aren't given time to think.  Think about what?  Well, how about the idea that the capital planet of a galactic republic...presumably the one that was re-established in the wake of the fall of the Empire...sees a planet-sized vessel approaching, and then draining all of the energy from the freakin' sun, but doesn't bother putting out a fleet of ships to resist it.  We only see a rushed sketch of panicked cities and a fleet getting incinerated in low orbit.  Wouldn't they know about the First Order?  And be actively resisting it on a war footing?  You know, like the freakin' Rebel Alliance did?

What we're given is just a sketch of a civilization, a plot point penciled on a napkin at a quick luncheon meeting, so devoid of detail as to be irrelevant.

Maybe they're counting on fanfolk to retroactively write coherence into it.  Maybe there's fan fiction out there that fleshes this whole thing out.  Because Lord Have Mercy, that made no sense.

5) The Starkiller Itself.  So here's the mechanism, as presented:  you lumber your carved-out-of-a-planet death machine into a system.  You charge up your Megadeathbeams (tm) by sucking the system's sun dry.  Then, you blow up all enemy planets in said system with your Megadeathbeams (tm).

The issue with this seems obvious: the Megadeathbeam (tm) is completely redundant.

If you CONSUME THE SUN, you kinda sorta render a solar system uninhabitable.   Why even bother blowing up the planets?  Everyone not in a ship or a sealed habitat is going to die anyway BECAUSE THERE IS NO SUN.

AAAAAAAAAAGH.

Which, of course, raises the question: how are people traipsing about on the surface of said Starkiller?  Sure, it's a "planet."  But it moves from system to system, right?  Meaning, the surface is probably more like the surface of Titan, meaning: it's not just winter.  It's seas of liquid methane.  And given that they're destroying the freakin' sun, that'd be rapidly freezing methane.

That would add a different spin to some of those later scenes.

6)  Attacking the Starkiller.  Sure.  It has shields, which have to be taken down.  But if the way to destroy the planet is to blow up a large armored building on the surface...why use tiny little fighters with tiny little payloads?  How 'bout the aforementioned capital ships, which have big guns that'd blow the bejabbers out of a ground-based target.  It's not like you *need* little fighters to peg a womprat sized hole.  That odd conceit was just to make it feel like A New Hope.

It's this huge freakin' object right out on the surface.  Just take the shield down, and bombard it with big ships and their big guns.

7)  Attacking the Starkiller.  Yeah, again.  But the thing about attacking the Death Stars was this: it was hard, hard enough to be a major plot point.  You had to have the plans ferreted away in a droid, the getting-of-which-to-the-Rebellion was the whole first movie.  Many Bothans died to get the information required to take out the second Death Star.

But the Starkiller, the Super-Death-Star-On-Steroids?  The attack plan is basically: "Eh, we'll wing it."  We'll use a low level sanitation engineer's limited knowledge to kind of figure out how to blow things up when we get there.  Good thing it was remarkably easy.  I mean, why would you have any significant security presence around a vital heat management system?  Or any staff, for that matter?

8) The Map.  BB-8's A New Hope Artoo redux schtick involved having a portion of a galactic map in memory, one which shows the way to Luke Skywalker.  But, we are told, there's a problem.  Without the full galactic map, there's just no way to know where that piece fits.

Why?  The galaxy in question may be far far away, but it's a mapped place, in the same way our planet is a mapped place.  We know, having watched the last scene of the Empire Strikes Back, that galactic civilization has advanced to the point where it can move beyond the galaxy and observe it.  Key features are known.  If said key features show up in a map..even just a part of it..you'll know where it is.

If you give me a map of England showing the route from London to Stoke-On-Trent, I won't need a freakin' globe to know where the heck that is.  I recognize familiar features from existing cartography, and boom.  Unless for some reason both cartography and astrophysics in the Star Wars universe are less advanced than that on Earth today, this seems something of a narrative flaw.

9) Poe Dameron's wildly varying skill level:  That scene where the X-Wings come sweeping in, and Poe Dameron proceeds to take out a Tie Fighter every two seconds?   I mean, he's supposed to be good.  But this was "oh you've got to be kidding me" good.  It felt analogous to that scene in Two Towers where Legolas surfs down the stairs on a shield, blipping off arrows like it's just the easiest thing in the world.  It's not cool...it's cartoonish, Wiley Coyote absurd.

And then, in the attack on the Starkiller, they seem to be struggling.  Why, would this be, if you've got a pilot who can pop a TIE Fighter every two seconds?  I'm sure there's some explanation having to do with midichlorian depletion, but...c'mon.

10) Maz Kanata.  Really?  Jesus Mary and Joseph, her name is Mas Que Nada?  I found myself humming that opportunistic Black Eyed Peas remix of the Sergio Mendes classic almost the moment that name dropped, because it seemed apropos.  It was an Admiral Ackbar's flagship Mon Calamari moment, only they kept saying it.  It just reminds us that this really is a silly thing that doesn't mean anything, which...hey.  That's what mas que nada means.  Hmmm.

11) Captain Shinyhelmet Wusses Out.  Evidently, she's supposed to be amazing or something, which again, I'll leave fanfiction to work out.  The sketchy script means we never see her do anything but tromp around and look shiny. But as a villain?  She's pretty mediocre.  When you point a blaster to her head and say: "Give up the information that will allow us to destroy this entire world, defeat your right-wing reactionary counterrevolution, and kill everyone under your command?"  She does.  Is this the reaction of a cold, hardened warrior?  "Go to hell," she would say.  "Your Resistance is doomed," she would spit, right before they coldcocked her.

Speaking of which: what the hell happened to her?  Did I miss that?  I mean, I know she's showing up in the next episode, because, well, duh.  But did they lock her in a closet?  Did they take her helmet as a souvenir?  Did they, having gotten the information, pat her on the head and send her on her way?  I should remember this, but maybe my mind was wandering at that point.

There, eleven reasons it didn't work for me.  And yes, I get it. It's fantasy.  It doesn't have to feel real.  These are trivial, my geeky overthinking and nattering.  But there's something more, and it's this:

12)  The Force Awakens destroys the Myth of the Original Trilogy.  What we got from JJ Abrams, frankly, was similar to his craven cannibalizing of the Khan narrative in that wildly disappointing second Star Trek film.  He didn't create a new movie.  He just cobbled together a film from bits and pieces of earlier work.

And sure, it's better than the prequels.  Anything is better than the prequels.  

But The Force Awakens, unlike the Benedict Khanberbatch debacle, does not exist in a convenient alternate universe.  It is part of the same story.  And cast into the light of what will end up being a nine movie series, the derivative character of The Force Awakens corrupts the mythic narrative of first trilogy.  It destroys the power of the Star Wars story.

All of the story of the Original Trilogy?  The narrative arc that affirms the triumph of light over darkness?  The tale of victory through the final redemption of a fallen soul?  All of it, a complete waste of time.  Things are just going to fall apart again, so quickly that not even a single generation will have passed before a functionally identical conflict returns.

Mythopoetically speaking, it's like having another battle after Ragnarok.  It turns the Return of the Jedi from a moment of apocalyptic fulfillment to just a meaningless datapoint in an endless Nietzschean cycle of return, the final cosmic victory demoted to a moment of self-delusion in the ever-turning wheel of samsara.

But damn, it's made Disney a lot of money.

The Emperor Wears No Clothes

Maybe it was the buildup, the unyielding relentlessness of it.  Month after month, reveal after reveal, one manufactured controversy after another, to the point where my innately contrarian nature was feeling a little put upon.

Or perhaps it was that Star Wars Battlefront has been spooled up on my Christmas-gift PS4 for the last week, and that I was so steeped in the immersiveness of that medium that any additional LucasArts inputs couldn't feel new.

Or maybe it was that, as a introvert-pastor on a Sunday evening, I was a little neurally fried.

But there I was, finally watching The Force Awakens with my family, the single most materially successful film of all time, and it was doing nothing for me.  It felt utterly unspecial.

It wasn't terrible in the way of the prequels, which were dismal messes.  Visually, it was superior, generally uncluttered and with a fine sense of scale.  The actors were trying, and generally competent.

But it wasn't working.

I was not swept up by the scale of it, by the palette of it.  The new characters failed to connect.  The old familiar faces just seemed...out of place.  The plot, wildly, impossibly flawed, less a reboot than a rehash, to the point of feeling faintly parasitic.

Honestly, though, I think most of the issue was fatigue.  When I lined up to see Star Wars that summer of '77, what I saw in the theater was wildly new, unlike anything I'd ever seen.  That wonder continued with Empire Strikes back, and was satisfyingly completed in Return of the Jedi.

But The Force Awakens felt...familiar.  I've seen this film now, a hundred times.  I've watched epic battles against impossible odds, explosions and wild heroics and CG hoohah.  Again, and again, and again, in Middle Earth, in Guardians of the Galaxy, in the Star Trek reboots, in the endless superhero movie conveyor belt.

Bing bang shooty-slashyness is so relentlessly present in the blockbuster-spectacle storytelling of corporate media that every movie may as well be the same film, clumsily shoehorned into a different skin.

It didn't feel light, or magic.  It just felt...industrial.

Ah well.  Everyone else seems to like it.  And I'm sure the shareholders are pleased.

Strange Familiarities

We arrived on the day after Christmas, tired and faintly out of place.

Christmas had been as it always is, the gentle candlelight and song of Christmas Eve worship followed by a quiet day with family, simple shared meals and gifts under the tree.   But then, we took to the sky, and found ourselves somewhere completely different.

We were Yankees right at the heart of San Jose, Costa Rica.  Being in a new place was, well, it was a little bit strange.  Here, we had traveled thousands upon thousands of miles, across seas to a culture I'd never encountered before, and I was expecting strangeness.

And strangeness came that evening as the sun was setting.  Our bags were unpacked, we'd rested up, and it was time to explore the city a little before dusk settled.  From across the corrugated tin roofs and down the peculiarly paved streets, there was the sound of ruckus, of thousands upon thousands of voices, of shouting and music.

It was Tope, the annual horse parade and festival through the heart of the Costa Rican capital, and we wandered a few blocks over to take a look.  I'd expected, well, something like Poolesville Day, only with horses instead of cheerleaders and old cars.  Or perhaps the Macy's Day parade, with horses all neatly in a row.

It was not that.  It was an equestrian bacchanale, with horses and riders by the tens of thousands posting and displaying in what felt like utter chaos, stretching out as far as the eye could see.  Mariachi bands trumpeted and strummed.  There was no evident order, no visible organizers, only a couple of grinning cops every couple of hundred yards, and occasional EMTs bearing stretchers bearing the bleary and the bloodied.  The dress code was Urban Cowboy, jeans and boots and ten gallon hats.  Everyone, riders included, seemed to be drinking beer, and the men's room evidently extended out into every nook and cranny of the surrounding buildings.

It was a riot of sound and smell, like a frat house party through which a herd of mustangs is stampeding.  It was totally outside of any frame of reference I had, beyond maybe a couple of Western films.  It felt, suddenly, like the 19th century.

With one exception.

Everywhere you looked, people were taking selfies.  Selfies.

There were clusters of Costa Rican cowgirls in their high-heeled boots, duckfacing into their iPhones.  On a huge prancing white charger, a barrel-chested sabanero held a beer in his rein-hand and a selfie-stick in the other.  A member of a marachi band one-handed his trumpet, videoing the band while playing.

In the midst of the wildness, it was strangely familiar, a new pattern of life peculiarly layered over the old.

And in that peculiar juxtaposition, of new experience and the familiar, of the old and the modern, it seemed an appropriate marker for the coming of a new year.

Falsehood and Marginality

"...truth is in order to goodness; and the great touchstone of truth, its tendency to promote holiness, according to our Savior's rule, "By their fruits ye shall know them."  And that no opinion can either be more pernicious or more absurd than that which brings truth and falsehood upon a level, and represents it as of no consequence what a man's opinions are.  On the contrary, we are persuaded that there is an inseparable connection between faith and practice, truth and duty.  Otherwise it would be of no consequence either to discover truth or embrace it."  (Presbyterian Book of Order, F-3.0104)

We're in a strange place right now in our national conversation, a place shaped by the wildly polar dynamics of our culture and the seething fever-dream of our socially mediated existence.  Reality itself seems to have no footing, and truth?  Truth is meaningless.

It does not matter if a claim is a misrepresentation of reality.  A Presidential Candidate can say that Muslims were celebrating the fall of the Twin Towers in America, and even though that is a bald-faced, raging, hateful falsehood, all he has to do is refuse to back down, and he's rewarded for it.  As he was for baselessly challenging the citizenship of a standing president.  An entire political party can organize itself in willful defiance of scientific evidence of a clear shift in the global climate, one where the Occam's Razor cause is clearly human industrial era activity.  Or deny that our benighted approach to firearms is not directly and causally linked with the repeated massacres in our schools and workplaces.  On the far right wing, the slur "political correctness" increasingly is just an attack on truth itself.

But it is not a question of just one extreme getting it wrong.

On the left, a movement can organize around a symbolic gesture, their hands raised in the air, even though the moment that inspired that symbol never actually occurred.  That it is a false, objectively debunked collective memory means nothing.  A crowd can gather, shouting, outside of a fraternity, protesting a crime that was nothing more than the fabrication of a mentally ill person...and then, when the rationale for their outrage is proved false, only respond with rationalizations and justifications for their outrage.  Academic postmodernity can assert, without batting an eye, that truth itself is socially mediated.  Meaning, bluntly, that nothing is "true," because truth itself is a fabrication.

What is most striking, in this, is that a willingness to fiercely embrace perspectives that are materially, empirically false seems correlated with marginality.

"The mainstream is inherently to be mistrusted," say the fringes.  "The truth is out there," say those who inhabit the margins, pointing even deeper down the path they're on.  "God is the the god of the margins," say earnest seminary professors.

Only, well, that tends not to be borne out by empirical evidence.

Those whose perspectives are most intensely radicalized are least likely to adapt those perspectives to countervailing evidence.  Those who have vested themselves--personally--in a belief system that demands radical binaries, a demonized "Other" to oppose, or in the principle of being "disruptive?"   Empirical reality, for such souls and movements, can become less and less relevant, replaced with confirmation bias and driven by ideology.

Marginality, culturally and memetically, often feels like the sociological equivalent of mutation.  That is not inherently dysfunctional.  Biologically, some mutations resonate with reality, and create a stronger being.  Many are immaterial, neither conferring benefit nor causing harm.  But a significant proportion are maladaptive, and result in either systemic dysfunction or the death of the organism.

Being disruptively marginal is ethically meaningless, because it can mean inhabiting places of darkness and falsehood just as easily as it can mean being on the leading edge of grace and hope.

The greatest danger of marginality arises from the same source that corrupts all human endeavor: our desire for power over others.  That is certainly true of the center of culture, which can react to the leading edges of change with oppression and hatred.  In the case of the margins, the danger comes from wanting to be the One with the secret truth, the one who has discovered something that no-one else has.  From a sense of powerlessness, we are drawn to the extreme, to the different, to the radical, because it makes us feel like we are more significant than the ignorant, shallow masses and in "control."

That desire was the great sin of Gnosticism, that early Christian heresy that cast Jesus as a purveyor of secret magic for the powerful.  Gnostics trafficked in codes and mysteries, comprehensible only to those initiated into the circle of power.  Humanity was damned and doomed, with only those who were strong enough to get the secret of Jesus allowed to survive.  The Gnostic Jesus does not seek out the lost sheep.  He seeks out the fattest, strongest, best sheep.

That's the strange fruit of our polarized time, as the straining edges of our extremes move outside of the bounds of the real, and into the dark phantasm of our delusions.

Wilderness Paths

[A "sermon," reposted from my sermon blog. Generally, I don't do that, but hey. It's a story.]
It was dry, bone dry, death dry.
Yohanan would have licked his lips, but his mouth was filled with powder, fine dust that ground between his tongue and his teeth, that scraped between his reddened eyes and eyelids.  It was good, good that he didn’t have to speak, because all the voice he had was a raven’s croak.
There was no-one to listen, not now, not now that he’d wandered away from the river, away from the place where the crowds had gathered to listen.  Not that he’d had much to say, not then, but that didn’t matter.  People always came to see the show, like the circus of the accursed Romans.
What he had said, he had shouted, bellowed out into the shimmering heat of the day and into the stink of the crowd.  He had cursed them, cried out at them for their madness.  Some had heard, some had scoffed and left in disgust, but some had stayed, eyes bright and changed, or eyes brimming and wet with the tears that he himself could no longer muster.
He’d cast them into the water, one by one into the slow-flowing mikvah of the Jordan, the ancient ritual bath washing away the dust of their travels through the world, the copper-brown water staining their copper-brown flesh.
Still they pressed in, reverence mingled with shouted questions, debates blossoming into shouting all around him like flowers in the spring.  It was too much, too much, their crowded voices a distraction from the One voice that drowned out all others.
And yet he taught, shouting back, roaring out answers like a cornered lion, until the day grew dim and the shadows long, laying one after another into the waters.  
He had fled them, then, fled from the riverside, shouting warnings and curses at any would would follow.  He didn’t want them following, but he also didn’t want to be by the water, not at night, not when things with shining eyes came howling and gibbering.  Most of them were animals.  Some of them were not.
There, in the half light, movement in the bony fingers of a scrub-bush.  Yohanan squatted, eyes sharp and focused by his hunger.  Locusts, five, six, seven of them, more, their dull brown matching the color of the dirt as they gnawed at the furtive growth of leaves.
He plucked at one, slow in the cooling air of evening. Then another, then another, filling his hand, feeling the hard chitin against his palm, the strugglings of tiny legs.  With a thick, dirty thumbnail, he popped off the heads, plucking the legs away, and popping the thick meaty abdomens into his mouth.  Like figs.  Or grapes.  
Only no.  Not really.  Not really at all.
It was hard, hard to swallow against the dust, the acrid flavor mingling with the taste of clay in his mouth, his mouth thick with the paste of it.  Not at all like figs.
A woman had brought him figs, just this morning, and flat sour bread, and a skin with watered wine.  That had been good, a gift.  The locusts were was also a gift, only in that it stayed the snarl in his stomach for the night.
And it kept him on his path.  Because the figs were good, and the wine was gently sweet in the skin, and nearby Nazareth was full of possible pleasures.  He could choose those pleasures, in a moment.  But they were not the wilderness path he had chosen, and to which he had been called.
He remembered the first time he journeyed beyond that simple home in the hill country, with his father Zechariah, down into the bustle and stench of the town.   His father was growing old, his beard a splash of earth and silver, but it was years before that night he had been unable to rise, unable to speak, unable to move his arm.  He was still strong, and he had said to Yohannan that it was time for him to see the city.
Not Nazareth, not that little backwater, but Gadara of the Decapolis, the ten cities that were the backbone of trade in the region.  Gadara, renowned for its wisdom and teachers, a real city, filled with souls, not just by the hundreds, but by the thousands.
He was just thirteen, finally a man in his fullness, or so he thought, finally a full part of his community, and yet he’d never traveled there.
He’d not known what to expect, not known the wildness and distraction of the town. There were just so many people, so many, a press of faces, a blur, so many you could never remember them. It was too much.  The shouting, chasing madness of the marketplace.  The smell of the incense, the stink of fish, the fragrant oil shining in the beards of the merchants.  He’d not expected the brightness of the baubles, the shine of the bracelets that tinkled on ankles as the women walked past.  It had been beautiful.  It had been horrible.  
He’d not expected the cries of the lepers on the road into town, or the desperate emptiness in the eyes of that child, begging with its mother.  He’d not expected the whip of the soldier, lashing at a prisoner, dragged away for failing to meet his debts.
So much life, so much noise, and so much pain.
And no-one seemed to notice.  It struck Yohanan like a blow, like a stone.  The excitement of the journey wanted nothing more, nothing, than to return to the wilds, to the comfort of his small village.
Maybe it was that Yohannan had grown used to the quiet of the hill country around Galilee, to the slower ways of things.
Maybe it was that he lived in the backwater of a backwater, that he was just not wise to the ways of things, that he just didn’t get how important all of that rushing around and shouting and shine was.
Maybe it was that he spent his days wandering with the herd, and every new soul he encountered out there in the wilderness seemed worth knowing, seemed filled with their own story, a story that wove up with his own.  
But even then, even as a boy, he had known that wasn’t it.
It was from the teachings of his father and the songs of his mother.  It was from the reading of the Torah scrolls, the reading that had come so hard for him at first.
He heard the stories and he read, about the one whose name was Everything, who was called Adonai, the Lord, who was called Elohim, the Strong Ones, how the I Am That I Am had come to Abram and to Mosheh, how Elohim had given a covenant to his people.  At the heart of that covenant was balance and justice, a justice woven out of the whole cloth of Adonai’s love for his people.
It was a simple path, the simplest and humblest of paths.   But in the rush and chase of life, in the shouting of the market, in the pride of the sword’s sharp edge and the shouting of powerful men, the people forgot it.  There was too much to see, too many other bright and shiny things to draw their eyes, and so they lost sight of the way.
The cries of the hungry?   They couldn’t hear them, because the shouting of the fish merchant and the seller of silver trinkets drowned them out.  The shivering of the child, begging in the cold of the morning with his widowed mother?  They couldn’t see it, couldn't see that little body trembling.
Their paths were crooked, wild and circling, endlessly folding back over the same selfish, bloody ground.
They simply couldn’t, lost in the struggling rush of their loud lives.
Yohannan squatted back on his haunches, feeling the roughness of the crude cloth against his back.  Hard as it was, that was why he preferred the wilderness paths.  The quieter places, the humble dirt, paths so simple they were just part of the world. Paths so simple, they were where the voice of Adonai could be heard.  
There, in the evening sky, a single star bright in the heavens.  An evening wind whispered up, and muttered in his memory.  It reminded him of those strange stories of his strange cousin, the stories his mother would tell him when he was just a boy.  And the words of a scroll suddenly sang in his heart, that scroll of Yesahyah the prophet.
“Bamidbar Panu Derekh Y’weh,” “In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord,” it began.  “Baaravah m’silah l’eloheynu.”  “Make his paths straight.”
And though the night air was growing cold, Yohannan felt the warmth of that hope.
[A "sermon," reposted from my sermon blog. Generally, I don't do that, but hey. It's a story.]

Chaos Leadership

There was an absolutely fascinating article about the GOP frontrunner in the Washington Post recently, in which a journalist simply observed the dynamics of the crowd at an Arizona rally.

What was most intriguing was the utterly counterintuitive character of the interaction between the candidate and the throngs that had gathered to hear him.

Demagoguery, as we know, has very particular dynamics.  You gather a crowd, and work them into a frenzy.  You use music, shared symbol, and increasingly passionate oratory in equal parts, manipulating emotion until you have shaped the crowd into a single unitary frenzy.

Individuation slips away, and what you have is a mob.  Or an army.  Or a movement.  The masses, stirred towards a collective end.  The people, roaring, ready to rise up.

Demagogues create their own order out of the chaotic energy of crowds, shaping and bending them to a particular will.  That is the order and energy of the human social animal, when we gather in our mobs and throngs.

Only, if you read the report, that was not the method.  The method was different.

It began as all crowd-events begin.  There was a coalescence, a gathering of thousands.  They were worked into a heat of anticipation, with signs and music and semiotics designed to heighten their sense of collective outrage.

And then the candidate arrived, and...did nothing.

He did an interview, his back to the crowd.  It was as if the thousands gathered were a sideshow, a prop.  All of the tools used to motivate a collective were set aside, and the energies were not focused.  Those who gathered to hear the powerful, famous man they'd seen on TV were not galvanized or forged into one.

They were allowed, instead, to fragment and drift away, their frustrations and yearnings stirred but unmet.  The candidate simply talked about himself, about how wonderful he was, and while poking and teasing at them occasionally to stir the pot, seemed mostly disinterested in their presence.   From other accounts I've read, this is a consistent modus operandi.  His crowds are treated, frankly, like they are dirt, just a gathering of orcs, fresh birthed from the mud.

And I wonder at the method of it, as there is likely a method to it.

Having studied leadership in my doctoral program, I know there are ways to be a leader and embrace chaos.  You can lead both an organization and a movement in ways that embrace generative energies.  You stir particular newness, disrupt areas that are dying, and keep a community from calcifying and becoming a closed and dead system.  But that form of leadership is not evident in this candidate's efforts.

Perhaps the goal is not to create a movement, or to rally the energies of a frustrated throng.  The goal may be to simply leave those frustrated souls frustrated.  If they find a purpose for their anger, they'll become a different thing.  They will have expectations.  The fierce bright emptiness of the mob-mind may not be the best thing in the world, but it at least gives a strange form of fulfillment.

But if those who gather arrive angry and directionless and hopeless, and are left that way, they're more likely to vote for someone who stirs but willfully refuses to shape the chaos of their souls.

What is being fomented is not chaos as creativity turned towards change, but chaos serving chaos, the self-annihilating and recursive feedback loop of energy turned in on itself.