History, the New Year and Things that go Bump in the Night

It wouldn't seem at first glance that history would be controversial.  It's the past, it's unchanging and it only exists in memory. ("Memory" here means both our personal as well as our societal, collective and written memories.)  You don't trip over it on your way to the bathroom in the night and it doesn't break down when you're on your way to work.  It's done, over, finished.  How controversial could it be?

But like most things humans bump up against, we manage to transform the fixed, immutable thing in front of us magically into "a matter of opinion" or even the ever present "point of view."

Hopefully, for your sake, you'll be surprised that there are even POV's (points of view's) about what history actually is, what it means about where we're going and how it can help us get through today.  The simplest example of what I'm talking about is the oft quoted "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."  This quote is usually attributed to George Santayana but since even statements about historical facts can be controversial (George Santayana did actually write this), there are those who point to parallel constructs in ancient literature as the "true" (whatever that means) source of this doctrine.  And yes, technicians and philosophers do call this sort of thing "doctrine."

I want to take a pebble off this mountain of controversy and hold it for a moment.  There is one school that says the march of information discovery is taking us to an ever clearer perspective of the world around us.  Put another way, this says that as history accumulates and we learn from it (thank you George) we become better equipped to make future discoveries and decisions that will be still more right.  We owe at least the formalities of this view to a guy named Hegel whose life spanned the 18th and 19th centuries. 

This is the predominant current view.  In fact, this view so holds sway in current society, that alternatives are not even given serious consideration.

There is however another theory (still quite active in semantics and language analysis) that the further you get away from the original event, the more degraded the information becomes.  This theory was the culturally predominant one a few centuries ago.  A simple example of this is making copies of a copy.  Even on current, high tech equipment the image degrades a bit with each generation of copy.  Copies of copies of copies can become nearly unreadable.

I'm going to avoid formal argumentation on which approach might be the better one.  Instead, I'm going to suggest that generally speaking, physical discoveries over time tend to produce more and better physical discoveries.  (Please note the phrase "over time" in the paragraph above.  Sometimes it takes time to discover that the new thing in hand is actually wrong and to subsequently make the necessary correction.)  As a counterpoint, statements about feeling and value tend to degrade over time.  That's because individual feelings and values derive in part from the cultural context of a time and place.  For example, the reason Shakespeare is often considered difficult to understand is because his language and underlying cultural assumptions are no longer in play in current culture.  We don't always intuitively "get" him.

Summed up, all our accumulated knowledge is better seen as an invitation to humility than as a mountain conquered from which we can shout down pronouncements.  I will add only one specific.  All this is particularly true of life and encounters with Christ.  Jesus always offers invitation.  Although he is at least in part responsible for the idea of carrying stone tablets down from the mountain, I believe these too represented an invitation into life with God.

Hopefully as we move forward into the new year, we'll carry with us the lessons of the past.  Hopefully, these lessons can morph into curiosity and not clubs.  And hopefully we can more readily embrace a greater portion of the Body of Christ than has previously been the case.

Where We Live

My wife received an address book for Christmas.  With the ever increasing reach of technology, the address book is heading the way of vinyl recordings and incandescent bulbs.  Our old book was at least several years old and probably more like a decade.  We're social creatures and the McKim family "Book of Contacts" was much the worse for wear.

For the first time really, the exercise of copying the old book's contents forward to the new one was very poignant.  There were a good many people in our old book who have passed.  There have been many address changes for those that remain.  Sometimes such a change is positive, sometimes negative. 

It should be no surprise to anyone that time passes and that things and people change.  Indeed, this time between Christmas and New Years is the unofficial season of auld lang syne.  Never the less, the scope of change and loss can be surprising or even arresting.

John Donne in the devotion "For Whom the Bell Tolls" speaking of the universal church and of the issue of human change frames it this way: 

"When she baptizes a child, that action concerns me; for that child is thereby connected to that body which is my head too, and ingrafted into that body whereof I am a member.

"And when she buries a man, that action concerns me: all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another."

Our McKim address book is more mundane then John's but is never the less likewise connected to all the others, as are we all.

Merry Christmas

On this day, there's a very present invitation to forget everything except meeting together as family and friends and celebrating God becoming man.

So again, Merry Christmas.

Who?

I've been struggling some to find words for what I've come to believe Christmas is.  Fortunately, the apostle John worked this out some time ago, albeit somewhat indirectly.  This is from the International Standard Version:

1Jn 1:1  What existed from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we observed and touched with our own hands-this is the Word of life!
1Jn 1:2  This life was revealed to us, and we have seen it and testify about it. We declare to you this eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us.
1Jn 1:3  What we have seen and heard we declare to you so that you, too, can have fellowship with us. Now this fellowship of ours is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ.

In Christmas, we celebrate the birth of Jesus because of who he is and has always been, summed up beautifully above.  We celebrate the birth from a human mom of the incarnation of God.

We are who God created, to understand and to reveal a unique part of the glory of God. The "unique" part will only, ever, be revealed by you.  He didn't create anyone else to do your job.  No one ever has or ever will love like you do, even as he fulfills and completes your ability to love him.

Christmas is beautiful for who Christ is and who we are in him.  As the hymn says:

Word of the Father,
Now in flesh appearing!
Oh, come, let us adore him,

Merry Christmas

Echoes

(Gratuitous irony:  I'm going to use this title more than once and maybe a great many times.)

Echoes are everywhere.  I learned about the standard garden variety echoes of sound when I was a kid.  My mom taught me about them.  That is, what kind of terrain was likely to produce them and that generally speaking higher pitch tends to make an echo more pronounced and defined.

I think our kids first really encountered echoes at Dinosaur National Monument.  The Green River runs through the monument and the steep, winding and rock hard canyon walls set up some pretty decent echoes. Our kids spent a while yelling at one particular canyon wall that proved to be particularly resonant. 

There are other kinds of echoes in our lives.  Historians demonstrate this idea when they say, "Those who don't understand history are destined to repeat it."  This type of  "echo" can also be defined as a pattern or a recurring sequence.  I think the idea of echo though, captures the essence of the matter.

There are a couple salient points about the echo idea:

1. Echoes are always a derivative of a first event.  Something happened to make the "noise" that trickles down in other forms.
2. Each instance of the echo sounds recognizably like the first event but is usually quieter.  

In 1964 a pair of radio astronomers, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovered background radiation that was present no matter where they pointed their telescope.  They eventually (1978) won the Nobel prize for their efforts.  Their cosmology, born of current scientific thought on the subject, suggested strongly to them that this noise was energy left over from the Big Bang.

Christians believe a good many different things about creation.  Some hold that the earth is young and was created in a literal 7 days.  Others hold that the seven day story of creation is metaphor.  This latter view in turn leads to a great many sub views that cover a spectrum of possibility regarding time and space and our place in same.

What's interesting I think is that regardless of your cosmology or theology, the energy found by Penzias and Wilson must be the echo of something.  And for the Christian, regardless of doctrine or cosmology, that background energy, that echo, must be the echo of God's creation and all the planning, love and subtlety that implies.  Indeed, it may even be the actual reverberation of the voice of God as described in John 1.

The Sons of Man live in creation and were spoken into it by Christ (again, see John, chapter 1).  Their creation was unique and pivotal.

The echoes of Christ's loving and creative voice are still resonating in all of us. 

If you listen quietly, you will hear the ongoing reverberation of Christ's creative voice in nearly every story (certainly every compelling one).  You will hear it in the voices of those you love and you will, with work, time, patience and grace, eventually even hear it in the lives and stories of your enemies and of those who have caused you hurt.  The more you hear it, the more you appreciate the value of each member of mankind.

And if we listen very quietly, we also occasionally hear a very small voice.  It is the voice that spoke us and that calls to us still.


1Ki 19:11  Then he was told, "Go, stand on the mountain at attention before GOD. GOD will pass by." A hurricane wind ripped through the mountains and shattered the rocks before GOD, but GOD wasn't to be found in the wind; after the wind an earthquake, but GOD wasn't in the earthquake;
1Ki 19:12  and after the earthquake fire, but GOD wasn't in the fire; and after the fire a gentle and quiet whisper.

Voodoo

Voodoo

I think it was in elementary school when I first heard of the voodoo practice of sticking pins in a doll that was in the image of someone you wanted to "curse."  That sentence represents 100% of what I knew about voodoo at that time and about 97% of what I know now.  I remember it hit me as a little silly, seeming to be one part demented evil and one part wishful thinking.

My thinking on all things spiritual has changed some over the years.  I now consider a good many practices like voodoo to be great evil.  I do however think this particular evil practice is a good metaphor for a bad and common mistake made by people seeking and following Christ. 

In Pensee (Prayers), Blaise Pascal makes the observation that "God created man and man has been returning the favor ever since."  "Returning the favor..." probably isn't as obviously horrible as sticking pins in a God doll.  However, we do consistently project onto God our tastes, values and sensibilities. We indulge ourselves with a theoretical embrace of Christian theology that includes the possibility of redemption for all creation while at the same time cursing pedophiles, Democrats, Republicans, various historical figures (Adolph Hitler is a perennial favorite), the guy who just cut us off in traffic and of course anyone who has inflicted either a real or perceived wrong on us. 

Of course, none of this sort of thing actually curses God.  However, it doesn't do us any good and accumulated over time, can do a great deal of harm.  And, I do think it is hard on God's heart to watch us carry that particular load.

The true horror of this problem doesn't take a lot of digging.  Start with this question:  Do you want God to be the sum of the projection of your values and experience?  Answering this question with any flavor of  "Yes, that's what I want," is bad news for the rest of us and very bad news for you.  It means that we (you and the rest of us) are forever constrained by your sensibilities as they sit right now; that is, we must all live with your voodoo for as long as you hang on to it.

Here's the next question that follows:  What's the surest way this side of the veil (i.e. of death) to see the truth of Christ's existence, identity and presence?  Isn't it when we encounter something that is outside our comfort and ideals and yet we find Christ squarely in the middle of it? 

The moment of discovery and surprise at finding God waiting for us in pain, in poverty, in abandonment and even in death, is the moment when our illusions are stripped and we are left face to face with the living, present God.  Since this is at least an unexpected find and probably even a jarring one, the possibility that this is a projection of ourselves is completely removed and we are left face to face with the one who spoke us.

In that moment there is one last choice.  We must choose to abandon our pretenses, our sensibilities, our projections, all the voodoo we cling to.  And as we lay it down we step forward to Christ.  This is the moment of becoming Christ In Us.

My life is teaching me that there are many such moments and probably even a final one.  That's very good because it is always good to be face to face with God, even when looking or even passing through a veil.

Sickness Unto Death

The title above is taken from a book by Soren Kierkegaard.  I don't mean to give away the punch line, but the specific "sickness unto death" Soren is concerned with here is despair.

Today, this sickness claimed the life of Bernard Madoff, son of the most infamous swindler in history.  Bernard claimed that he and his brother who both worked in the family firm, had no knowledge of their father's crimes.  This is likely the case since an ocean of motivated prosecutors have never indicated that charges would ever be filed against any Madoff family members.

At one level, it is easy to see this case is a matter of the sins of the father being visited on the sons.  This is likely at least partially accurate.  Indeed, this is a tragedy that would not have occurred were it not for the most monstrous embezzlement in history.

However I think that Bernard's unnatural death points to another kind of despair; one that is all too common with all of us.  I would guess that Bernard felt both the need and inability to escape from who he was. He needed to become someone and something other than he was.  He didn't realize that this is common to all of us.

We all need to be something other than we are.  Some of us see it sooner, others later but we all see it eventually.  This is the primary point of Kierkegaard's "Sickness Unto Death."

It is in the depth of this sickness that we encounter our profound need for the divine.  Many religions promise changes of circumstance and attribute.  Only Christ promises to change our very nature and the nature of our identity.  Christ is the only cure.

It is a tragedy when a life passes without recognizing the value of the lifeline that we're offered, of the potential for being other than we are.  Such is the tragedy of Bernard Madoff.

The End of the Road

When I was a kid, I had a fascination with driving every inch of a road.  I was particularly interested in boulevards and such that I traveled in every day routine but usually didn't have time or legs sufficient to explore.  When I got my first car, I drove a good many of those and ran them out to their end.

Highways too were a priority for me.  I've driven every mile of Interstate 5 and US 395.  Both are amazing journeys in their own right.  (I'm also in love with the dirt paths and small lanes that split off of these arteries but that's another story.)

Usually though, we don't push through to the end.  We jump on and off highways on our way to something completely incidental to the road.  Most of us are pretty easily distracted.

All of us though, eventually come to the end of the road.  For some, this happens tragically early.  For others, it is a painful, jarring surprise.  It is usually painful and always a loss.  I wonder about where we might have left our maps, our intent to finish, our heart for the drive and as always, the wonder at all that passes by.  I have at times in my life, forgotten completely that the road and the journey both have ends.  However, I seem to be one that put's great stock in consulting maps and landmarks and these always, eventually serve to remind.

My maps are the Christian bible and the love it teaches along with the promise and reality of Christ lived out in lives I know.  I do get lost on side roads, but my maps always return me to the highway.

I find myself in this part of my life, to be a bit of a guide.  I like helping those who are sitting in a cul de sac someplace, spinning the map to make sense of the road. I like to help them find their way back to the highway.  It's okay to give directions and sometimes that's all that circumstance allows.  It's much better for all though, if you can actually get in the car and ride a long for awhile, maybe even taking your turn at the wheel.  That last part is not always easy.  It can be hard to give up your own journey for someone else's, even if it's only for a while.

Finally, the road is long and it can be fairly rough.  Sometimes directions don't help with the "long" and "rough."  That's when just reading to someone driving, engaging in conversation with them or reminding them of the wonder of the journey both behind and before, being a present friend, can make the journey so much more enjoyable, peaceful and complete.

Tracks

It's important to enjoy or at least appreciate where and when we are.  It's also important to always be moving toward something else...and probably most important and most difficult is the balance between the two.  Here's a pic that helps me with the balance part.  It's also a real place I travel to frequently.

 

Regardless of where we find ourselves and our spirits at any given time, our God and our very being that he spoke call us to imagine what's around the bend. 

Beginnings

Beginning is usually one of the most difficult parts of any activity.  For this blog, this first post is a beginning.  Nothing was in this place yesterday.  And now there's something...maybe only a little better than nothing but still something.

Beginnings are never anything like endings, although we often lump them together, with a particular activity or even a life placed in between.  Beginnings are primarily about the activity necessary to start and about unrealized promise and potential, about looking ahead, about birth.

Endings are about looking both forward and back.  Endings are an invitation to integration.  That is, integrating the just ended endeavor with the never ending march forward of life.

It's tempting to think that a nothing follows an ending in the same way a beginning is preceded by a nothing.  That's not so.  An ending has both a before and an after.

Our dog of 7.5 years (Lady) just passed away.  My wife and I struggle to find our new daily routine.  The old one has ended too suddenly and too soon.  Feeding, letting her out, always checking your feet when going through a door to make sure she wasn't going to bowl you over and many many other small etceteras .  All this has passed with her.  We are left to find our way through the veil of whatever is next. We've begun this process.  It too will end.

When that particular kind of ending comes for each of us, it will be the greatest invitation to integration with God and Christ there is.  It will be both an ending and a beginning.  That's the great truth of endings.  They don't exist without beginnings and by the very substance of their nature, they can't help but bring a new beginning.

On we go...