The Happy Moron

I went back to school this week.

Here’s how it was – I saw a notice in the church bulletin for a three session course on Christian Life and Witness, sponsored by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.

I thought, “That has to be good; I should go.” and so I went.

Part of the little course package they handed out was a DVD. When I received it, I thought, “Oh, goody. More overproduced Christian cultural advertising.”

But it’s not. Its the entire NIV bible as .mp3 and as text… And the NIV is the good version – the 1973 copyright version that’s not going public domain any time soon. Score!

I love getting stuff. Who doesn’t love getting stuff? It makes me feel Great to get stuff. I just got the most tremendous jag when I realized I’d gotten a whole free audio NIV and a whole free html version of the NIV.

But then I thought to my little idolatrous self – I have NIVs scattered about my house. I can search the entire NIV text online, already.

Our modern information age is making a spiritual truth more important than ever. This might eventually be a good thing; it might force us to learn something the hard way that we would otherwise never have bothered to learn.

In the Gospels, Jesus talks to a rich young ruler who knows everything and who has done everything. He’s flawless, and yet Jesus is able to speak right to the heart of what he needs. The ruler comes asking, “What must I do to gain eternal life?” and Jesus is able to pick out what the ruler hasn’t done.

The ruler hasn’t received the Scriptures inside him. He has read them and obeyed them and has followed all the commandments since he was a boy, but he hasn’t received God’s word inside him. This is why he is confused about eternal life, and this is why he ultimately goes away sad. Although the ruler has engaged the scriptures at a shallow level, Jesus opens up a deeper level to them.

“I have hidden your word in my heart, that I might not sin against you.”

The psalmist’s declaration talks about receiving the Word of God. There’s scripture we know and have, and then… there’s Scripture we receive. Scripture we accept and make a part of us. The psalmist is talking about words to live by.

On the internet, information is becoming ever cheaper and cheaper. I have access to more information than I could ever glut myself on in a thousand lifetimes. But the only information that does me any good is the information that I take advantage of. Simply the state of having it available to me does me no good whatsoever. I look at it all and I get really sad, because I’d like to harvest it all, but I can’t.

If our modern internet world will teach us one thing, it will teach us that information is useless and that informed living is priceless.

Simply reading the scripture without making any commitment to doing what it says will put me in the same boat – walking away sad.

This is an extremely meaty article from the New Yorker on the Anglican Church in England.

It illustrates the ugliness of the Church when the power of God’s Spirit and action are eclipsed and when the shell of the institution is believed to be the whole.

I read that article and I was hurt by the squabbling and power games and politics.

But there were moments of hope in there, too.

God, please give grace and discernment to Rowan Williams and all the leaders of the Church of England.

I have successfully created a cake containing rutabaga.

Thank you; that is all.

The very nature of faith is that you don’t (and shouldn’t be) rational about it. In fact, you’re entitled to be aghast when anyone confronts you with proof. Proof and rationality aren’t the point.

Seth is right about so many things, but he falls into a modern trap about faith.

It’s very easy to live in an either-or world; even very smart people do it.

You can be either rational or faithful.

You can be either scientific or religious.

You can be either us or them.

Unfortunately faith doesn’t work in an ‘either-or’ fashion with rationality.  Faith doesn’t make us ambivalent towards evidence or proof – faith just accepts that we don’t have them.

Accepting a lack of proof is essentially scientific, by the way. The famed scientific process graduates a hypothesis all the way up to the rock solid status of, “Theory”.

The theory of gravity. The theory of relativity.

Sometimes faith is a matter of understanding that things are more complicated than we can measure; of accepting that our knowledge is, and perhaps always will be, incomplete.

To walk by faith and not by sight means saying, “The truth is more than my eye can measure.” This isn’t irrational, just… bold.

Again, this is right up science’s alley – scientific progress is a steady stream of new research telling us that what we thought was going on was really far more complicated than we ever imagined; what we thought we knew was just a drop in the bucket… or totally out to lunch.

Mmm… lunch.

Pitting faith against rationality is like pitting ketchup against mustard. Sure, they’re made of different ingredients, but why let that ruin your hot dog?

The very nature of ketchup is that you don’t (and shouldn’t be) mustardy about it. In fact, you’re entitled to be aghast when anyone confronts you with mustard. Mustard and relish aren’t the point.

Faith doesn’t mean irrational zealotry.

All it means is that mustard isn’t enough to make a decent sandwich.

I took my last downtown express bus ride this morning.

Sunday the train comes

When my friends and I are walking through the cold dark parking lot of the movie theatre, having just come from watching Hollywood’s latest offering, the first question asked is always, “Well, what did you think?”

Not, “What did you think?” in terms of abstract thought, but “What did you think?” as a reaction. “What did you think?” as the gut, visceral response that highlights the conflict between the world the film offered and the world we live in.

The point of a story is to tell us what did happen, just so that we learn what can happen.

The natural result of a story is that our worldview is either reinforced or restructured.

When we take in a story, we need to trust the storyteller. We need to know with absolute certainty that they have an understanding; that they have something worthwhile to tell us. When they present us with a new thing, a new piece of understanding, which way will things fall? Will we accept it as something to be learned, or reject it as something to be debunked?

The phrase “Suspension of Disbelief” comes up when a storyteller has lost our trust. They’ve introduced a gross lie of some sort – they’ve made a statement about how things work that is so absolutely false that we recoil in unconscious rebellion against them and their story.

It means they’ve failed in some way, and lost our trust.

You’ll notice that we never, ever have issues of Suspension of Disbelief over the mere appearance of green fish-men in a story.

We have issues when green fish-men start acting grossly un-green-fish-man like.

We have issues when green fish-men show up in the middle of the heated discussion between the patent lawyer and the attractive widow who is trying to push her husband’s invention to market  in the face of a corporate monopoly which is trying to bury her. We don’t mind that they appeared, but we mind that their appearance… doesn’t make sense.

We have issues when green fish-men turn into blue butterfly-men through some sort of ‘mystical transformation.’ A butterfly is not the natural consummation of the evolution of a fish.

Give us a story where green fish-men behave appropriately and through courage and endurance overcome obstacles and attain the approprate reward, and we’ll be in bliss.

If the storyteller can’t convey a picture of a world that is consistent and truthful… well, what’s the point of listening to an incompetent storyteller?

Tell us what did happen, so that we will know what can happen. But we need to believe that it did.

We need to believe that, in a world where fish men actually live, when Quish-ptsosh did exercise courage and learned to believe in himself and listened to the wise old stingray’s song that he was able to rally the Quareen to defeat the Shark invasion, and that the result was that the kingdom was saved and he became the new king and married the beautiful fishcess.

Then we’ll accept to what you have to say about what can happen in the midst of treachery and betrayal and personal struggle and romance and all that stuff.

But if he turns into a butterfly man, or eats caviar, we’re going to watch the hockey game instead.

Sorry folks, there’s been no real content for a while. My thoughts are elsewhere at the moment. I’d like to muster some creative juices at some point, but they might take some mustering.

Later, I might throw out a couple of links.

Naomi Elise

Rhymes with, ‘niece’

But the ode of her uncle

Regrettably stunkle.

Call it quantum, if you like.

Back when I measured my week’s worth of time, I kept a little notebook in my pocket. Coil notebooks are handy – if you have a short little pencil stub it fits nicely within the coil .

Having pencil and paper everywhere is a good thing.

I doubt I filled more than a doublesided sheet per day. It wasn’t a lot of writing. But it was a fair amount of typing up. About an hour of my day was hijacked by measurement overhead.

This is self destructive, intrusive, measurement; measuring my day in some way altered it. The measurements were corrupted by the act of measuring.

So my time measurements were flawed; this highlights a bigger problem.

Time is a relatively poor approximation of what I really wanted to measure that week.

A far better indicator would have been thought. I would love to have a breakdown of my thought-space for a week. My physical activity is some indicator of where my life is spent, but where my mind wanders is a far more truthful reflection of where I am at a given moment.

The problem, is that if measuring physical activity is marginally self-destructive, attempting to measure thought is far, far worse.

Even measuring my physical activities encroached severely on my thinking; I can’t imagine what trying to track my thinking would do.

Chances are, I can’t do it. Chances are, that’s a good thing, because it smacks a trifle obsessive to me.

Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil. — Ephesians 5:15-16 (NIV)

May the Almighty and merciful Lord grant unto you pardon and remission of all your sins, time for amendment of life, and the grace and comfort of the Holy Spirit. — Order of Compline

I’ve always had a neutral view of time; I’ve never thought it either malicious or compassionate.  I remember reading that passage in Ephesians and being taken aback. I was shocked; I had never heard someone call the days evil.

Time is of course, measured only by events – by those things which we put inside it. A unit of time is the motion of a planet; inside a watch, it is an oscillation of a quartz crystal.

A good day is a day that we stock with good activities; an evil day must then be one stocked with evil things.

A while back, I obsessively logged my time for a week straight, tracking my activities at 15 minute intervals. I wanted some sense of where my time was spent; I wanted some sense of where my life was being spent. Was it good or evil?

In Compline (nightly prayers), the prayer is for more time; and the particular nature of this time is that it is filled with amendment of life.

If Ephesians is warning us that the world is filling its days such that they are evil, Compline is reminding us that it is *our* role to fill them with something of a different nature entirely.