David Williams's Blog, page 63

Worshipping the Same God

There's been a small flutter of conversation recently about a professor at Wheaton College, one who showed solidarity with America's increasingly nervous Muslim population by wearing a head covering, and asserting that Muslims and Christians worship the same God.

For that, she was suspended, which is not a surprise, given the more conservative nature of that school.  There is much debate on campus, of course, about her assertions.  It has been polite, actually, which is rather nice for a change.

The question is a fair one: do Muslims and Christians worship the same God?

The answer, as I see it, is both yes and no.

It is Yes, but not for the reason typically given by earnest liberals.  Sure, we come roughly from the same Abrahamic tradition.  But that, of itself, is meaningless.  It does not mean we inherently worship the same God.

It is No, but not for the reason typically given by concerned conservatives.  The names and symbols we use for God and our patterns of worship and devotion are different, as are our emphases.  But that does not mean we stand in opposition.

Both progressives and conservatives fall into a false binary when considering Islam.  Islam is not a monolithic entity, any more than Christianity is monolithic.

I can say, with certainty, that I do not worship the same God as Daesh, or as the Taliban.  When they call out to Allah, they are invoking something that is a horror to me.  Their understanding of the Creator is an abomination, a phantasm warped by ignorance, human hatred, and a radical absence of mercy and compassion.  They have no understanding of God, because if they did, they could not act as they do.

But I can say, with certainty, that where I see the actions and lives of Muslims whose faith guides them to be generous, kind, devoted, and honorable, there I can see the worship of the same God that I worship.  The forms and disciplines differ.  But when they call out to Allah, they are simply using their language to name my God.  They are on a different path, but they are not my enemy, or the enemy of my Way.

Faith is about purpose, and purpose manifests itself in our existence.

I do not doubt this, because from both reason and compassion there is no cause to doubt it.

Our lives, after all, are the truest way to know the God we worship.  Being a Theist, I believe that God exists, that God shapes and forms this reality and all others.  Being a Christian, I believe that this reality...the one we inhabit now...matters infinitely to God, and that to stand in right relation with God, our lives here must mirror the life we see manifested in Jesus.

The Creator is not a fantasy, best approached through dreamy, substanceless sentiment.  The God I call Father is not a theological construct, understood only through complex systematics and abstractions.

God, being real, is best approached by doing real things.

I know that is true, with the certainty that comes from having had good teachers.

The first place I remember learning that truth is with book in hand, reading the wonderful stories of Clive Staples Lewis.  There's a tale he tells, at the conclusion of his Narnia books, in which he talks about the distinctions between Tash--the bird-god of the elegant, pseudo-Muslim, Ottoman-esque Calormenes--and Aslan, the great lion of Narnia and narrative proxy for Jesus.  The two are not the same, C.S. Lewis asserts, but the distinction isn't a matter of names and semiotics.

As the story winds to its fantasy-apocalypse conclusion, we encounter a Calormene by the name of Emeth.  He has been a faithful follower of Tash his whole life, living honorably and kindly.  He encounters Aslan, and..having despised Aslan his whole life...expects only death.  Aslan responds with forbearance, and tells Emeth:

Therefore if any man swear by Tash and keep his oath for the oath's sake, it is by me that he has truly sworn, though he know it not, and it is I who reward him.  And if any man do a cruelty by my name, then though he says the name Aslan, it is Tash whom he serves and by Tash his deed is accepted.

Emeth, in Hebrew, means "Truth," so it's clear that C.S. Lewis was making a very pointy point.  The name of our god doesn't tell the truth of our faith, says the creator of Narnia and the greatest apologist of the 20th century.  It is the life we live in response to our faith that matters.

Of course, one might argue that this is just a children's book.  That is true, but that presupposes that the moral stories we teach our children aren't the most important ones of all.

There is another good teacher who made the same point, in the one place he talked about what ultimately matters to God.

We all know that story from the 25th chapter of Matthew.  It's the judgment on all the nations, meaning not just Christians, but everyone.  And what we hear from the lips of Jesus is that the measure of whether we are sheep or goats, whether we have passed the test or failed, has nothing to do with our words and our theology.  It has everything to do with our lives.

Did we welcome the stranger?  Did we clothe the naked?  Did we feed the hungry?  Did we visit the prisoner?  That, Jesus tells us, is the ultimate metric of our faith.  It is measure is not just for Christians...the text of Matthew is intentionally constructed to make that interpretation impossible...but for all.

It's a humbler measure, certainly.  It doesn't have the bright prideful certainty of ideology, the fierce uncompromising hardness of our carefully defended imaginings.

But as a way of understanding the truth of the God we worship, it does have the advantage of being real.

Myth, Fantasy, and the Real

I'll get around to seeing it, eventually.

The multi-year buzz around the Force Awakens has reached its deafening crescendo, splashing out across all media, the One Campaign to Rule Them All.

It's in the newspaper I read in the morning.  It's on the news my wife half-watches as she gets ready in the morning.  It's on the radio as I listen on the way back from dropping her at the metro.

My social media feeds are a riot of memes and posts of all shapes and sizes.  Warnings against #spoilers, pictures of tickets and selfies taken in theater, all part of a campaign that has gone literally viral, weaving its memetic influence into both the virtual and meatspace consciousnesses of my peer group.

My curated feeds are the same, as lists created to connect me with the art world and the world of science now yield a healthy smattering of fan-art and "the science of Star Wars" listicles.

Even the pet store is selling Chewbacca chew toys for dogs.

It is inexorable, relentless, bordering on cultural monomania, our collective subconscious consumed by a publicist fueled bout of social OCD.  In so far as we understand ourselves through media, Star Wars cannot be escaped.

Only it can.

Because Star Wars is fantasy, and fantasy disappears like a morning fog the moment you step outside of the monkey chatter of mediated existence.

Like this morning, just after dawn, when I walked my dog, as I always do.  The morning was colder, almost seasonal, and the wind was rising as a front approached.  The air was sharp and the sky was bright and dappled with cloud.

Star Wars was not there.

The cold biting at my hands was unaware of Kylo Ren.  The hum of the wind in the trees spoke only of the change in barometric pressure, and had not a thing to say about where Luke Skywalker might be in all of this.  My pup showed a remarkable lack of interest in anything other than the squirrel scents and her morning business, and not once mentioned any desire for the aforementioned branded chew toy.

As a narrative, Star Wars stands at a remove from reality.  It is wholly play and metaphor, with nothing but language to bind it to the reality of this time and space.  It evokes themes from older stories, certainly, deeply mining the classical narratives of humankind.  But it does not, itself, have more than a tangential connection to our reality.  It does not participate in our world.  It remains forever in a different time, and far, far away.

I found myself wondering, as the morning moved on, about the distinction between fantasy and myth.  Myths, as Joseph Campbell so clearly laid out for us, are not simply our imaginings.  They intentionally frame and connect to the reality we inhabit, giving meaning to both folk and place, casting the familiar in the light of a greater story.  They are stories in which we can wholly participate, not just in cosplay, but in the fullness of who we are.

And it's not that cosplay and fantasy are bad or wrong.  They are not.  They are whimsy, delight, and diversion, and there is a place for that silliness.

Myths are different.

Myths are less like the fantasies of our collective daydreaming, and more like the deep work of our dreams, which sort and organize our encounter with reality in ways that go past our conscious understanding.

I do wonder, in a culture where myth fades and fantasy reigns, how that shapes us.

Yet Another Thing to Do

'Tis the season for stress, here inside the Beltway, where we wear our anxious and compulsive overscheduling like a badge of honor.  And last Saturday was a typically busy Saturday, and there was a half-written sermon to complete, and a family event to attend, after an evening that involved schlepping from one corner of the DC Metro Area to another at the height of rush hour for various offspring obligations.

Into the thick of that Saturday, there was another thing to do, something that was shoehorned in, a forty minute drive away.  The day was surreally glorious, warm and sunny deep in the heart of December.  I fired up the snarling great clatterbox of my motorcycle, and roared around the Beltway and up 270 towards my destination.

I was going to work.

Or, more specifically, I was about to spend a couple of hours serving food and scrubbing pans...just because.

My tiny church is located in the heart of Poolesville, Maryland, and while we open our space up for those in need in our community and work heartily to support our local service organization, the desire to serve goes deeper.

So we all make our way over to nearby Gaithersburg, where once a month we prepare and serve food to those in need.  It's a feeding program, a classic soup kitchen, housed by the good brothers and sisters of St. Martin of Tours Catholic church.  Some of the folks are homeless, some just lower income.  Some are struggling with mental issues, some are just day laborers for whom a free meal makes a difference.

What struck me, in the rush and bustle of the season, was just how calming the work was.

I am not "in charge," nor am I the one running things.  I offer the prayer for those gathered at the beginning, if invited, but after that I am simply a human being doing stuff.   I'm running soup and salad and chicken pot pie out to hungry people.  I'm scrubbing the bottoms of deep soup pots with a vigorous circular motion hitherto unknown to the people of this area.

I did not stop moving, not really, for the whole time I was there.  And yet the two hours I spent were remarkably restful.  They were as calming as a meditation.

I was busy, yes.  But not with busyness.  Because the only reason I was working, the only reason I was serving and cleaning?  I wanted to.  Voluntarism is activity, devoid of anxiousness.  It is work, devoid of desire or grasping.  I get no pay, I make no profit, I fulfill no community service hours requirement.  I'm just there, doing a thing because it sings with both practicality and purpose.

It is practical in that it gets something done.  It looks into the face of need, and responds materially and directly.

But it also has existential impact.  I am part of people being fed, which resonates with my own ethical core.  Service and voluntarism are integrating actions, things that give our souls cohesion.  And in that, such actions are peculiarly joyous, in the way that things you do for love are imbued with joy.

I was reminded, through the good simple work of caring for others for the simple joy of it, of something dear old G.K. Chesterton once said about joy:

Melancholy is negative, and has to do with the trivialities like death: joy is positive and has to answer for the renewal and perpetuation of being. Melancholy is irresponsible; it could watch the universe fall to pieces: joy is responsible and upholds the universe in the void of space.

In a season when our mad rushing about can drive us to anxiety and melancholy, it was good to turn my whole self to something joyous, something that renewed both myself and others.

Reunion Memories

It arrived in the mail, a reminder from the alumni association of my alma mater, like the tolling of a bell.  Twenty five years, it'll have been, since I wrapped up my bachelor's degree at the University of Virginia.  And, of course, I'm supposed to be eager to return, excited to recall my youth, here in the deep weeds of my midlife as my children prepare to go off to college themselves.

"What is your favorite memory from your time at U.VA.," it asked.

There were representative recollections in the little brochure, samples of what we in our sagging, graying late forties are meant to have as our fondest memories of Mistah Jeffahson's University.  Football featured prominently, or is apparently meant to.  Sports...and football in particular...are three-quarters of the Whitman's sampler of memories presented.  That, and sledding.

Important things happened to me at the University of Virginia.  I have vital memories of that time.

None of them have anything to do with any of the variant forms of sportsball.  Oh, sure, I worked at Bryant Hall, washing the dishes of athletes back when that was a dining facility, and not part of an 86 million dollar sportsplex that includes luxury suites and donor recognition lounges.  Do I remember games?  Not so much.  There were one or two, here and there, and they were fun in their big loud way, but those memories aren't what defined that time.

What I remember, instead, are the relationships I formed in the small tribe of my fraternity.  I mostly remember those, although there's some...er...haze in there.

And more significantly, I remember the classes.  

Beyond the relationships, what was important, powerful, memorable, and life-transforming about the University of Virginia were the academics.

What I learned there changed me as a person, and redirected the arc of my life.

Courses in psychology deepened my understanding of the human soul, how it can break, and how we can build it back.  Courses in film introduced me to visual media, to the power and subtlety of the form, and to Kurosawa, whose genius still amazes.  Courses in Eastern European literature, African literature, and the writings of Latin American authors and poets deepened my understanding of both the variances of culture and our shared humanity.

It was at U.VA. that I was first exposed to historical-critical scholarship in Religious Studies, with professors who opened my mind to the serious study of the Bible as literature.  I'd been struggling with my faith, struggling with the relevance of Jesus-following in my life, in the face of an often crass and reactionary cultural Christianity. Those classes were a joyous apocalyptic unveiling.  Suddenly, the books of my faith were rooted and grounded in the real, in a way that didn't subvert their sacred character but only deepened and enriched them.

It was at U.VA. that I first encountered the heady interconnection between philosophy and faith in the human struggle to find meaning.  In a graduate level course on Nietzsche, I discovered Tillich and Kierkegaard and thinkers whose existential honesty helped shape my understanding of myself and my faith.

My coursework gave me the intellectual depth to thrive for ten years at the Aspen Institute.  They helped water the seeds of my calling as a Presbyterian pastor.  And they continue to shape me.

My senior seminar in the Religious Studies department involved a depth study of the Amish, one that was so lingeringly fascinating that over twenty years later I used the primary text from that class to help write a novel.  The one that actually interested a publisher, and that'll hit bookstores as a hardback in early 2017.

That education, provided by professors who were almost uniformly excellent, really did stick.

Which, I would hope, Mr. Jefferson would find heartening.  That was his vision, as I seem to recall.

Faith, Science, and Race

In the thickets of all the handwringing about race in the United States, a little meme sparked my interest.  It's one of those publicist driven memes, tied to the release of a book by none other than Bill Nye the Science Guy.

Mr. Nye has become the go-to source for science as of late, the bow-tied defender of the scientific method in the media.

The statement is right there at the top of the post.  Essentially, it is this: from the standpoint of hard science, race is pretty much for crap as a category.

Oh, sure, there was plenty of pseudoscience in the late 19th and early 20th century that justified the classification and segregation of humankind by "race."  But all of that was racist [male bovine excrement].  From the standpoint of actual genetics and the dynamics of biology, race is trivial, functionally discardable.  It was as meaningless and misguided as phrenology.

Human beings are too similar for race to be a meaningful category.  What we call "race" is primarily socially constructed.

Meaning, it's made up, a distinction we homo sapiens sapiens make that has nothing essential to do with the fundamental mechanics of our being.  That doesn't mean race has no ground in reality.  It's just, well, not significant.  It isn't like respiration or circulation or digestion.  It has no bearing on the process of reproduction.  It's as trivial as hair color, or height, or the specific shape of a nose, or...in the case of phrenology...the bumps on our skulls.

It is more like language, or culture, more about a set of shared memetic assumptions than anything fundamentally part of our identity as human beings.

Encountering this lead me to wonder: is Nye's perspective a progressive or conservative view?

Because it is both, and it is neither.

It was progressive, radically so, back in the civil rights era.  "We are all fundamentally the same," or so I was taught.  When I was confronted by racial hatred as a boy, which I was, I'd respond with science.  I was 12, and the boys were 8 and 9, and we were on a playground in Georgia at the height of a late 1970s summer.   "Ain't it right that n****rs aren't as good as white people," said the taller of the two boys, as he and another boy bullied a black girl and her little brother, hoping that this older boy who'd wandered over to see why the girl was crying would join in.  They got a peroration on genetics, skin color, and adaptation.  I got insults back, but they stopped their harassment and stormed off.  Science, for the win.

But now?  Now I read statements like Bill Nye's, and they feel...conservative.  Could Nye walk onto a college campus now, and declare that "...there really is no such thing, scientifically, as race?"  Or "each of us is more alike than we are different?"  I'm not sure he could.

The progressive movement has lost all sense of the universal, as it endlessly tears itself into smaller and smaller categories, infinitesimal conceptual fiefdoms cast from the tenure-driven need to differentiate.   Academic leftists obsess about purity, clucking over "cultural appropriation," as if cultures...like language, like genes...are not fluid and permeable.  As if cultures...like language, like genes...were not made richer in the sharing.  As if cultures...like language, like genes...do not stagnate and die when kept in isolation.

Science will have none of our squabbling over imaginary divisions.  It has a larger view, and a larger purpose, just as faith has a larger view and purpose.

There is no Jew or Greek, no slave or free, no man or woman, says Paul, tearing down the walls of categorical division.

Paul, sounding, in his own way and in his own time, much like Mr. Nye does now.

#Tweets and #Prayers

Such a strange irony, this last week.

It came in the #prayershaming silliness, as hashtag activism took on the practice of human beings praying in a time of crisis.

"Don't do something stupid and pointless like praying," went the retweeted refrain.  "Do something!"

On the one hand, I get that.  I really do.  Just saying you pray is meaningless.  Publicly announcing your prayerfulness is one of those things that my Teacher had some real beef with.  He was big into prayer, huge, the biggest ever.  But public assertions of prayeyness were something for which Jesus had no patience, a reality that I struggle with every week as I pray publicly.

Pray quietly, simply, and deeply in places of intimacy, and then let those prayers guide your actions.

On the other hand, seriously?  People are #tweeting...tweeting on Twitter...about how praying is just useless self-gratification?

"Santa Maria Pasta Fazool," as I sometimes say when I'm channeling a Sicilian Ned Flanders.

I mean, seriously, folks.  Let's look at the minimum that prayer does.  At its crass reductionist mechanism, my prayers involve a complex organic neural network lighting up with an intricate interplay of chemical and electrical energies.  Those potentialities organize themselves into a specific set of symbolic structures, if I'm praying using symbol and semiotics.  As those symbols play across conscious and unconscious aspects of my being, they establish a deeper probability that my integrated awareness will respond through specific actions.  I am more likely to remember to call, or to visit, or engage in a caring action.

If I'm self emptying through the contemplative prayer techniques of mysticism, those same semiotic structures are washed away, placing that same neural network in a position to receive and engage with reality with all cultural bias and preconception removed.  I am able to be more creative, more gracious, more open.

Social media posting is similar to that, only one step farther removed from the real.  It is "thought," as manifested in the abstracted substrate of our nascent macrointelligence.  A tweet or a post...or even this blog, I'm not oblivious to that, eh...are little more than the firing of a single neuron in the homo sapiens hive-mind.

Our tweets and posts, in that context, are simply the thoughts and prayers of culture.

Those social thoughts are, bluntly, waaay less real.

They are even less likely to result in meaningful and concerted action than my prayers.  If I think something...or pray something...I am likely to manifest behaviors in material reality that reflect that thought in a cohesive way.  But social media does that rather less well, because human culture is not an integrated self.

I mean, duh.  Really.

The disembodied thoughts in our dreaming partially-manifested collective unconscious result in no coherent action.  Twitches and spasms, perhaps.  But very little more, as we flail around in maddeningly endless self-opposition.  That is particularly and consistently true if those virtual thoughts and prayers are devoid of compassion, and if they only reinforce our disconnectedness from the Other.

And the brittle, abstracted false-reality of the internet does disconnection, opposition, and Othering real good.  It makes us endlessly angry, shallowly tribal, reflexively reactive, and wildly hyperemotional.

Really, then.  What is the difference, ye who wouldst #tweet against #prayer?

As a committed believer in God, I'm not sure that the Creator of the Universe sees one thing as particularly distinct from the other.  How much smaller, in the infinite scale of creation, is an individual than a society?  How much smaller is the collection of cells that make up my body than the collection of selves that make up a nation?

From the Bright and Numinous Deep, I'm not certain there's much distinction, which is why the Lord judges both persons and nations.

Long and short of it?  The Tweet doth call the Kettle Black, methinks.

Race, Person, and Power

A peculiar parallel has been resting with me over the last few months, one that I'm not quite sure what to make of.

On the one hand, we have the Republican party, which tends to be nativist and reactionary, a party that is increasingly and perilously limited to old cantankerous white people.  On the other, the Democrats, progressive centrists who are deeply concerned about racial justice.  Looking out at the attendees of their conventions speaks to the truth of that distinction.

Yet the GOP slate, as has been noted by many commentators, is far more diverse.  Sure, the leading candidate is a bizarre reality TV freakshow, but the rest of the candidates look like America.  Women, Latinos, people of color from a variety of cultures.

The Democratic slate: it's various riffs on good ol' vanilla.  Would you like vanilla with organic free-trade almonds?  Or maybe with gluten-free white chocolate chunks?  Or mayhaps a dollop of vanilla on your latkes?  Mmmm, latkes.

So the "racially conservative" party has a diverse slate, and the "racially enlightened" party does not.

That reality resonated with an observation made during my doctoral work, as I contrasted small church life with the corporate megachurch.  It's a reality often observed in congregational research.  The Jesus MegaCenter I visited as part of that research was very, very conservative and also very, very diverse.  The leadership?  All white, all men.  But look into the congregation, and every hue of humanity was represented.

More progressive churches?  They tend not to be so good at that.  The liberal, open-minded oldline social justice denominations are incongruously divvied up by race, segregated out as rigidly as the Jim Crow South.  My own denomination, which is increasingly progressive, frets endlessly over what we pale-faces insist on calling "Racial-Ethnics."  And for all our fretting, we remain almost exclusively "white."

That parallel has me wondering about the impact of the conservative and progressive ethos on functional inclusion.  The progressive movement has moved beyond the universalistic humanism of the 20th century into an endlessly fractal subdivision of humankind into academic subcategories of gender and race.

That means, frankly, that you've divided folks up.  And if you divide people up, they neither get to know one another nor really share power.  When you break everyone out by socially-constructed categories, the powerful are made more powerful.  The moral, teleological unity required to create coalitions and share power?  That just isn't present.  Instead, there's a complex and tense system of alliances and competing interests.  With an intentionally divided system, where identity and particularity are the ruling principles, power rests with the strongest faction.  Their definition of "justice" rules the balance.

And on the other hand, you have the conservative ethos, which denies that race is a meaningful category.  It's all about the integrity of the individual, about personal morals and values.  Within that system of belief, individuals manifesting and articulating that position are inherently trusted.  Race may be there, but it is viewed as irrelevant.  Are you "good?"  Or are you "bad?"

The challenge in that system, where lines are blurred willfully by a shared aim, is that the net effect is the same.  The dominant culture defines the flavor of the melting pot.  And leadership, in that ethos, tends to fall to those representing the dominant culture.  In a radically individualized system, where particularity has been atomized down to the personal level, power flows to the strongest.

So sure, you may see more diversity.  But the result will be mostly the same.  Power will flow to the powerful.

Which it always does.

Both systems think they have the answer to race and power, both progressives and conservatives.  And both are wrong.

Thoughts and Prayers

It was years ago, and I had a colleague.  We were trying to rebuild a church.  In order for that endeavor to succeed, there was something specific that had to happen.  And it was out of my hands.  He had to do it.  It was in his power.

But he didn't want to do what needed to be done.  The reasons were manifold.  Though he had many gifts, he didn't yet have the skillset required.  But he was also accustomed to a particular way of doing things, an easy way, a comfortable and familiar way.  That way was also the path to the death of that community, a dark path I saw as clearly as a vision.  And so, as his colleague, I pressed hard to get him to do what needed to get done.  Week after week, I pressed him.  I wasn't in a position to simply order it.

"I'll pray about it," he'd say.  "I'm praying over it," he'd intone earnestly.

After six months, I learned what that meant.  When he said, "I'm praying over it," what he was really saying was, "I'm not going to do a God-damn thing."

Our effort failed, catastrophically, needlessly.

Now, I'm a believer in the power of prayer.  I wrote a little book on it, last year, about the one perfect prayer that always works.  No, really.  It does.  It just doesn't work in the way we think.

Prayer doesn't bring you blessings, because we Jesus people know that God makes it rain on the righteous and unrighteous alike.  Prayer does not mean you will avoid suffering, either.  I mean, dang, those of us who follow Jesus should know that.

Prayer is not magick.  Nor is it science.  It doesn't, in my experience, change the arc of things in predictable ways.  I have prayed earnestly for the healing of people I loved, and it has not come.  Yet I have prayed earnestly for healing of others, and I have seen it occur in ways that felt wildly improbable.

What prayer does, if done deeply and well, is change a soul.  It establishes a basis of connection with the Creator, and shatters the preconceptions and false certainties that imprison us in a destructive pattern of being.  It creates and sustains a foundation of compassion within us.  Prayer opens up new possibilities, and allows us to walk a different path.  Shared prayer can bind souls as one, galvanizing communities to serve and care and find new paths.

Real prayer, prayer grounded in the Logos of God?  It changes you.  That's kind of how you know it's doing something.  If you pray, and are unchanged, then you aren't really praying.  If you pray, and your every prayer reaffirms you in your correctness, then you are not placing yourself in encounter with God.

If you have been individually or collectively blessed with the power to change a situation, prayer turns the will towards a just and loving application of that power.  If you are powerless, prayer grounds you in God, which makes enduring the inescapable more possible.

But if you pray from a position of power, and your prayers are nothing but shallow sentiment and solipsistic self-affirmation that lead to nothing, then you are just mumbling to yourself.

If you pray, and your prayer turns your heart to violence, or affirms your hatred?  Then those words are the dark mutterings of a madman.

Diaspora and Rootedness

It was a blog post from a wise soul that struck me, if only because it struck so close to home.

The idea behind it: that folks who are looking to serve Jesus should be willing to get themselves out of their localized comfort zone, and travel to wherever it is that God is calling them.  It was also a message to congregations, calling them to break out of their desire to take the easiest path, choosing those who they know and are in relationship with, rather than making the more difficult call to reach out to an unknown.

God calls us to be like Abram, to leave the land of our upbringing and to seek the new.  God calls us to be like Moses, busting loose from the chains of enslavement and casting ourselves out in search of the land of promise.  Jesus calls us to set aside our fields and our obligations, and to follow.

It's a real and true thing, and individual and corporate unwillingness to break out from those boundaries can stifle us, leaving us to stagnate and decline.  It is true.

Yet a thing can be true, and at the same time the completely opposite thing can be true.

As one who has chosen to stay where I have found myself, I struggle with the idea that the Creator of the Universe is the impetus behind our always moving to new lands in search of our calling.

Because the cultural norm is diaspora.  Everyone moves everywhere, because that's how our economy is structured.  It's how we do things.

You move for work, because that culture is one that makes you move.  A corporation or organization or sociocultural expectation demands that you break from family and tribe, uprooting yourself and your immediate family to seek your livelihood in another place.  It happens, and then it happens again.

That network of organic relationships you've created?  They must be set aside, as we are shuttled from place to place like industrially-kept bees on a flatbed, moving through roaring winds from one strange field to another, continuously forced to adapt and re-adapt to new surroundings.

We are a people continuously driven from land and family, uprooted and disconnected from a sense of place and home and hearth.  Sure, we can simulate those organic connections through social media, and emulate ties to tribe through convenings and gatherings and conclaves which we attend, while the communities around us fade from view.

Sometimes, though, what our churning, industrial, consumer culture expects of us is not human.  Sometimes, those demands are worth defying.

And in our culture, staying is harder.  It requires sacrifice, of ego, of advancement, of reputation.  It requires building relationships that you cannot flee.

I was reminded of this by dear old contrarian Jeremiah and that field he insisted on buying, right as Jerusalem was falling to the onslaught of Babylon.  Sure, everyone was being driven from the land, dragged off into exile.  It's exactly what Jeremiah had been going on about for so long.  Doom!  Despair!  But that, that is when a prophet digs in and fights against the tide.

In a shattered, scattered time, resistance can come in intentional rootedness.

His Eye is On the Turkey

Forty six million.

That, according to the statistics, is just how many turkeys we consumed last week in the United States.  There it is, the delicious roast beast set out for our gatherings, full of protein and tryptophan, and I wasn't partaking.

Instead, I noshed on tofurky, which is honestly not nearly half as good as the turkey I ate before I moved away from the omnivorous diet that's natural to higher primates and became a vegetarian.  It's...well... a little rubbery.  Although with enough stuffing and gravy, you can sort of get around that.

Sort of.

As I ate, I reflected on those forty six million lives.  Turkeys are not the pinnacle of organic sentience, I'll freely admit.  They are, in fact, rather remarkably far from that.

There's a peculiar trait all turkeys share, one that's generally cited as an indicator of their epic stupidity.  They'll stop what they're doing, and stare gape-mouthed at the sky, looking upwards towards the heavens for ten, twenty, thirty seconds.  Nothing interrupts this behavior, not rain, not anything.

Scientists, who note that the turkey is a social bird that is no more or less aware than other birds, have debunked this behavior as an indicator of stupidity.  It's an inherited defect, they argue, and they are probably right in the faintly drab way that science is right about the mechanics of things.

But here you have a creature that evolved to fly, and fly strongly, and it's been bred to be a meat machine.  They are pinned to the earth by the tumescent inbred flesh that dooms them to our tables.  They look to the sky, lost in it, in the freedom they once had but now do not.

And here you have a creature, part of the great complex work of God, now with a life bent and warped to serve our hunger.  It looks upward, an avian Job with face turned to the heavens, out to the vastness of blue and the stars beyond, away from the flesh factories in which it is doomed to live a short and joyless life.

Its eyes are on the heavens.  And God?  The God I profess, that resides in and beyond the fullness of being?  My Teacher tells me his Father knows the lilies of the field, and counts the feathers of the sparrow.  Just as the turkey stares without worldly hope into the endless fastness, so too does the Creator look back.

I am more than a turkey, my Teacher reminds me, in my symbol wielding social mammal complexity.

"But how much more?" I want to ask.  Is it measured by weight?  Measured by lifespan?  Is it measured by the relative volume of neurons?  Dare I ask that, in my mortal smallness?

How much suffering of simple weaker creatures can I justify, to the terrible, fiery God of Love that knows them as fully as God knows my own soul?

His eye is on me, after all.