Month: June 2017

Posted on

Creation, Day Two: in Which Not Much Happens?

And God said, “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.”  And God made the expanse and separated the waters that were under the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse.  And it was so.  And God called the expanse Heaven.  And there was evening and there was morning, the second day.  Gen. 1:3-5

_____________________________________

Compare Gen. 1:3-5 with this account from the annals of Babylon:

According to ancient Babylonian mythology, the earth began with a battle between Tiamat, goddess of the ocean, and the children she produced by sweet-water Apsu, god of rivers.  One great-grandson of this line was Marduk (see Jeremiah 50:2), god of the four winds and a hell-raiser from birth.

So, one day Marduk was approached by his father Ea and grandfather Anu to lead an army against Tiamat, who had been busily mating with monsters in order to produce a race of giant snakes, raging bull-men, etc.  Her plan was apparently to wipe out her progeny by Apsu.

Coldly blinking all four eyes, Marduk was unmoved by the possible fate of his father and grandfather.  But he agreed to take the job, on one condition: that all the deities of Mesopotamia declare him to be their chief.  What was in it for him?

My own utterance shall fix fate instead of you—

            Whatever I create shall never be altered!

            The decree of my lips shall never be revoked, never changed.

Ea called a counsel of the gods, which degenerated into an all-night drinking party.  The carousing deities built a throne for Marduk and granted him all the powers his little ol’ heart desired.  Also: May your utterance be law, your word never falsified.

Equipped with these bona fides, a formidable war-chariot, and his own mighty presence, Marduk set out

Marduk defeats Kingu for Babylon’s top spot

at the head of his army, and the mere sight of him shocked the assembled monster-sons of Tiamat.  Marduk plowed right past them to get to his great-grandmother, whom he challenged to single combat.

She accepted.  Big mistake.

It was hardly a contest; after pinning her down with his net, Marduk blew her up with the four winds and sent an arrow into her belly, then split her down the middle and defeated the rest of the enemy gods while standing on her corpse.

The body turned out to be incredibly useful:

He sliced her in half like a fish for drying:

Half of her he put up to roof the sky,

Drew a bolt across and made a guard to hold it.

Her waters he arranged so they could not escape.

East and west originated from two of her ribs, and her liver served as the pole star for the remaining gods.  Her spittle became rain and fog, and from her eyes sprang the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates.

The gods were impressed—Marduk earned that throne and crown!  What next?

Blood I will mass and cause bones to be.   I will establish a savage, ‘Man’ shall be his name.

He shall be charged with the service of the gods that they might be at ease.

The raw material for this slave-race called “Man” came from the body of Kingu, Tiamat’s hybrid son, whose blood seeded the first humans and passed down through the generations.  Rebellion is thus in humanity’s blood, from that day to this, but their fate is fixed to serve the gods forever.

__________________________________________

Almost all the ancient mythical traditions place the creation story in a setting of conflict.  The recurring themes—father against son, clan against clan, chaos resisting order—indicates something very unstable about the human psyche, but I can only give it a sidelong glance for now, while marveling how peaceful the Genesis story is in comparison.  God is not in conflict with anyone as he goes about calling forth.  On the first day, with the creation of light, all the raw material is in place: the direction of time, the periodic table of elements, the two basic forces of gravity and nuclear energy.  Particles are quivering, atoms are dancing, molecules are awaiting form.

We expect an explosion, but on the second day not much appears to happen.  In fact it’s hard to get a grip on what actually is happening, as you will soon discover if you try to explain it to young children.  When they get older they will come to understand “atmosphere” and water vapor, and water being held in a canopy (one meaning of the word expanse) until the time of the flood.  This is both good theology and good natural history, but as it relates to creativity, and creation itself, there may be something equally significant happening on Day Two.

First God pours out energy.  Then he begins to arrange it, which starts with making distinctions.

To the ancients, no property was more basic than water.  They were on to something:  Water comprises about 80% of earth’s surface and 80% of our bodies, and even in the driest desert there is no life without it.   The oldest civilizations saw water as a given.  No one made it; it was just there.  Apsu and Tiamat, the primeval deities of Mesopotamia, were the sweet and salty blend of waters that gave rise to the Fertile Crescent.

Water nourished; it also destroyed.  All ancient cultures passed around flood stories, as though a memory of watery devastation was burned into their collective consciousness.  No life exists without water, but for life to exist it must separate itself from water and establish itself on the banks—that’s why so many creation accounts are a record of struggle.  Water was the elemental force which must be overcome.  Water was the primeval chaos, which must be escaped.

Even in the Bible, throughout the Old Testament “the sea” is a threat to order, an elemental force that must be contained: This far may you come, and no farther (Job 38:11).  The visions of Revelation return to that image, for where does the beast of chapter 13 emerge but the sea?  And most intriguing of all, when the heavens and earth of Genesis 1:1 are cleared away for the new heaven and earth of Revelation 21, “the sea was no more.”

What does Day Two say about creativity?  The verb may be more important than the nouns: God separates.  He makes distinctions: heaven and earth, here and there.  The Hebrew word usually translated “Heavens” has no precise English equivalent; it’s used to refer both to sky and to everything that appears in the sky, including clouds, stars, and common sparrows.  But it directs our attention.  Look up, look down, look left and right.  Here we have opposites, here we have direction and location.  Just as “in the beginning” signals rudimentary time, separating waters from waters gives form to rudimentary space.

Imagine God as the primeval real-estate agent: “Location, location, location.”  Every work starts not only sometime but somewhere.  The second day turns out to be as vital, thrilling, and potent as the first, for in cleaving the restless water He establishes length, height and breadth.  The four-cornered canvas of darkness receives its first brushes of paint, and we now know left from right, here from there.

Creation, Day Three – The Story Takes Root

__________________________________________________

  1. Look up other ancient creation stories (such as Mayan, Greek, Norse) and compare with the Babylonian and Genesis stories.
  2. If you have to live in only two dimensions, which would you choose?  Height-width, heigh-depth, depth, width? (See Edwin Abbott’s classic novel Flatland for an idea what you can do with two dimensions.  Actually, not much.)
  3. How important is it to make proper distinctions in politics, relationships, and art?  For example, what’s wrong with these statements:
  • Love is love.
  • Advocates for border security are anti-immigrant.
  • Modern art is ugly.

 

Posted on

Where Does Darkness Come From? Creation, Day One

(For the first post in this series, see “In the Beginning“)

When children in Sunday School learn about the six days of creation, they usually don’t ask why the only thing created on Day One was light.  In other creation stories, solid “things” come first: rocks or water or a surging mass of elements, or the back of a very large turtle.  Ancient Egyptians, Sumerians, Africans, Meso-Americans and indigenous tribes the world over would have been quite puzzled at the idea of speaking light with no obvious light source.  God doesn’t get around to creating the sun until Day Four—is this not an anomaly?  So I asked, when old enough to understand what “anomaly” was.

We’re told that God is light; in him is no darkness at all (I John 1:5). The radiance of God is not something He whistled up to chase away the darkness, but something he is.  So why say Let there be light, when light already exists, in Him?

And (a more perplexing question) where does the darkness come from?  How can there even be darkness, in that blinding dynamo of Father, Son, and Spirit?  Whence the cold, endless blackness that we call outer space?

And darkness was over the face of the deep.  An artist has an idea for a painting.  His idea includes not just the subject and composition and paint medium, but also the physical size.  If he is a hands-on, muscular type, he will stretch his own canvas: purchase the stretcher boards (or make them, mitering the corners at a precise 45 degree angle), cut the fabric, staple one side of it to the center of a bar, and start pulling and stretching and stapling until the painting surface is tight enough to bounce a quarter.

Think of darkness this way: a surface, cut to precise measure and stretched over the four corners of length, width, depth, and time. The darkness is not God, for in Him there is no darkness at all.   The darkness is not the absence of God, for he made it and broods over it in the person of the Holy Spirit.  The darkness God creates is not the absence of light, but rather the canvas which will show light for what it is.

He is not it, but it is inconceivable without him: In his light, we see light (Psalm 36:9).  (Also, He makes both dawn and dark, Amos 4:13).

Light is rich with metaphor, even when thinking about it scientifically.  Isaac Newton, that great conceptual thinker who took apart and reassembled theories as some children tinker with watches, analyzed visible light as a blend of waves traveling at different frequencies.  The “frequencies” are patterns that indicate how many wave crests will travel between two points in a given period of time.  From his experiments with prisms, Newton theorized that six frequencies, from infrared to ultraviolet, determine the range of visible light.

Like scientific thinkers before and since, Newton could describe light but couldn’t explain exactly what it was.  Though his wave theory was an improvement over the earlier “corpuscular” idea (light as tiny packets of glowing particles), it was incomplete.  Waves of what?  Pieces of what?  The questions went unanswered for another 200 years while cutting-edge science was consumed with electricity and magnetism.

Michael Faraday, a self-taught physicist from humble Evangelical stock, proved in the 1850s that the two were related—that, in fact, a changing magnetic field produced electricity.

Soon after, James Clerk Maxwell theorized that vice should be versa: i.e., a changing electric field should produce magnetism.  These two basic forms of energy might actually be manifestations of the same thing: electro-magnetism.  Electromagnetic waves are linked in electromagnetic fields that travel through empty space and provide the energy for all kinds of chemical and physical reactions.  Using known quantities, Maxwell calculated the speed of those hypothetical waves.

The result turned out to be the known speed of light.

So visible light, as nearly as we can determine, is an electromagnetic wave, like X rays and gamma rays and radio waves.  They are all of the same stuff: energy.  And, roughly 300 years after Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein proposed that matter and energy were interchangeable.  It’s not too great a leap to say that what God brought into being on the first day was not just visible light.  Let there be electromagnetism! lacks drama and wouldn’t have meant much to the ancient world.  Still less would this:

(Been there, done that, get the t-shirt)

But that’s the scientific description of what happens when electrical charges convert to magnetism and vice versa: energy!  What happens is not just visibility or radiance, but the stuff of stars, air, rain, wind, soil, cloud, leaf, stone, and living cells.  Einstein said E=mc2 (energy and matter are interchangeable).  God said, Let there be light, and energy flooded the dark void that we would one day call the universe.  It doesn’t come from the sun; it comes from Him.  So there was no need, I can assure my sixth-grade self, to make a sun first.  He would get around to that.  What we get first is what we need first: matter and energy to roll into stars and cool into planets and sweep across the barren surfaces as a fertile wind.

How interesting that science agrees.

In other words, if “light” includes the entire spectrum of electromagnetic energy, Genesis 1:3 can be seen as a scientific statement.  But it’s also a philosophical one: the first requirement of creation is also the first requirement of creativity, and that is vision.  By his light we see light.  Next, he will begin to create things to see.

Day Two – In Which Not Much Happens?

___________________________________________

  1. Spend some time in a very dark room, such as a walk-in closet with the door tightly shut.  Stand or sit without touching anything.  Try to imagine “nothing.”  Is this possible?  Now try to imagine light as a physical phenomenon (which it is), invading the darkness and not just illuminating but creating the objects around you.  When you open the door or flip the switch, do you see things any differently?
  2. Ecclesiastes 11:7: Light is sweet, and it is pleasing for the eyes to see the sun (HCSB).  Does this verse have more relevance after you’ve spent some time in pitch-darkness?
  3. If you could draw light, what would it look like?
  4. “I believe in God as I believe in light: not because I see Him, but by Him I see everything else.”  This is a variant of a famous C. S. Lewis quote.**  What does it mean to you?  Can you write your thoughts in a journal or a poem?

 

*  “A situation or surrounding substance within which something else originates, develops, or is contained,” American Heritage College Dictionary

**  “I believe in God as I believe the sun has risen . . .” The last sentence of “Is Theology Poetry?” (1947)

Posted on

Here’s to the Patriarchy

Those days are behind us, they say, except when some irritating male trait pops up in the workplace or too many men gather around the hyper-masculine president while he’s signing a bill.  Patriarchy deserves no respect. The new definition is toxic masculinity, two words that tell you all you need to know about the proper way to think about what we used to call a “man’s man” or “all boy.”  It’s not that we’re down on men, just that they need to stop being men, for their own good.  “Toxic masculinity” is killing people, and the toxic males themselves are primary victims.  Studies show it’s a leading cause of suicide among Canadian men, and no doubt elsewhere in the western world.

What is it? The article linked above teases out the following factors: “winning, emotional control, risk-taking, violence, dominance, playboy, self-reliance, primacy of work, power over women, disdain for homosexuals.”  Telling boys to “man up” is a quick route to tearing them down.

I’m sure some boys are raised to this caricature; I’ve seen it in the movies and read about it in novels and memoirs.  Stereotypical men exist, or there would be no stereotype.  But some key elements are left out of this description, elements that round out the picture:

Solitary. What about comradeship, brothers-at-arms, or just good buddies?

Emotional control. I guess this refers to the “real men don’t cry” cliché.  But anger and fear are also emotions—shouldn’t they be controlled?

Risk-taking. Well, of course–where would we be without that?

Dominance. For most men, a better word might be competition.

Self-reliance.  As opposed to what—welfare reliance?

Power over women. In the past, well-brought-up boys were taught to use their power in defense of women.  And wise women understood their power over men as well.  It’s a subtle power, which is why it’s often overlooked, even squandered, by girls who aren’t taught to recognize it.

Maybe one reason for high suicide rates among men is that simple (non-toxic) masculinity is no longer affirmed or valued in an information-based, sedentary, air-conditioned, risk-averse culture. In fact it’s often mocked and disdained: Men have made a mess of things—it’s time for the women to take over.  Neither sex has a corner on virtue, so I’m not especially optimistic about a culture ruled by women.  Before saying goodbye to the patriarchy, however, here’s a partial list of what we owe to it, with gratitude toward the high-achievers, deep thinkers, bold adventurers, and everyday working stiffs who pulled on their boots every day and went out to do their part in all kinds of weather:

  • Tall buildings (and short ones, too)
  • Roads and railroads
  • Steel and concrete
  • Quarries
  • Universities
  • Philosophy
  • Safe neighborhoods
  • Banks
  • Electrical grids
  • Nations and governments
  • Democracy
  • Western civilization, based on Christianity, which introduced the idea of equality, liberty, and justice for all to the world.

It should go without saying that the patriarchy would have achieved none of this without a matriarchy to stabilize and civilize it.  Disbanding both seems like a wrong move.  Passive, dependent, powerless males may live longer, but I suspect their societies won’t.  Because there will always be men of the opposite type who will storm the gates once they know the virtuous men have been shamed out of their manhood.

Posted on

Friday Night Fathers

Since my husband and I married some decades ago, we’ve never owned a television.  That used to be saying something: now not so much because any show can be streamed over any electronic device, and we do have a few of those.  Still, the very idea of owning an entire TV series would have never occurred to me until I fell hard for Friday Night Lights.  I have friends who never tuned in to FNL because they hate football.  But as any fan will tell you, It’s not about football!  The game is the metaphor.  What the show is really about is fatherhood.

Okay, maybe not all about.  But after watching every episode at least three times, I’m struck by the full spectrum of father-son relationships:

  • Billy and Tim Riggins’ father is a deadbeat, forcing Billy to be a substitute dad for Tim—a role he’s
    Behind every successful man is a good woman.

    no way ready for.

  • Matt Saracen’s father has a tough time with relationships, bonding with the U.S. Army instead of his son.
  • Jason Street’s father has a great relationship with his son until tragedy strikes and throws them both into uncharted waters.
  • Landry Clark’s father loves and supports him—almost to a fault.
  • Brian “Smash” Williams’ father met an untimely death, leaving a hole in the heart.
  • J.D. McCoy’s father worships his boy’s talent but can’t accept his weaknesses.
  • Vince Howard’s father is in jail, after planting a tangle of mixed emotions and resentment.
  • Luke Cafferty’s father can’t understand his son’s need to break away .

Some of the girls have complicated relationships with their dads, too, especially Lyla Garrity, and mothers are more of an issue with Becky Sproles and Tyra Collette.  Tami Taylor, school counselor and principal, mothers troubled students relentlessly.  But the show is more about dads, mainly Tami’s husband Eric, the Coach.

Coach Taylor has no sons, only daughters, and his relationship with teenage daughter Julie is a particular challenge for him (to be fair, Julie would be a challenge for anyone).  He’s by no means a perfect father, but at various times he supplies that need for Tim, Matt, Jason, Smash, Vince, Billy, and Luke.  He’s the necessary presence to tell them to suck it up, to be a man, to push harder, to stand up, to stand down, to make it right.  He’s a catalog of traits that in another context might be called Toxic Masculinity.  He’s not one to cry, and when he can’t think of anything to say he says nothing.  But he’ll be there.  Every player on the team knows he can knock on the Coach’s door at any time of the day or night, and the Coach will be there, even if he chews them out first.  If he makes a mistake, he’ll correct it sooner or later, and if trust falters he’ll gain it back.

Riggins learning to man up

Buddy Garrity, one of the most frustrating characters ever to appear on network television, is the big contrast.  As a man with misplaced priorities—for him it really is all about football—Buddy fails at fatherhood spectacularly, first by driving away his wife and then by alienating his favorite daughter.  Buddy is Eric’s foil throughout the series, his opposite in almost every respect: emotional, spiritually weak, untrustworthy, and conniving; more a wayward son than a father.  But even he might be getting a grip on the fatherhood thing when his own son comes home.  Likewise Billy Riggins, a father of three by series’ end, who has screwed up throughout all five seasons but at least picked a good role model in the Coach.

What’s a father?  What can he do that a mother can’t?  Mothers like Tami, Corinna Williams, and Katie McCoy provide emotional support.  They cry and hug and plead.  Every kid needs emotional support, but what the Coach provides is mind and will support.  The keynote event of the first season, and in a way the whole series, is star-quarterback Jason Street’s unfortunate tackle that leaves him a paraplegic for life.  In a single second, a young man’s strength is cut off at the knees, and it could happen to anyone.  It does happen sooner or later—to everyone.  That’s what a good father knows, and at the same time he knows that strength must be exercised.  Not grimly, but joyfully: “There’s a joy to this game,” he tells his rookie team at the beginning of Season 4, just before they go out on the field and take the worst mauling of their lives.

Temperamentally, mothers make the home a place children can always return to, while fathers prepare their children to leave.  Mothers teach security; fathers teach risk.  “Give us all gathered here tonight the strength to remember that life is so very fragile,” the Coach prays after Jason’s accident.  It’s a prayer repeated in the promotional video for the last season:

We are all vulnerable and we will all, at some point in our lives, fall.

We will all fall.

We must carry this in our hearts: that what we have is special,

that it can be taken from us, and when it is taken from us, we will be tested.

We will be tested to our very souls . . . .

It is these times, it is this pain, that allows us to look inside ourselves.

Coach Taylor has plenty of opportunity to look inside himself, and when he faces his own ultimate test (which is not what you think) he doesn’t fail. The decline in American fatherhood is well-documented and probably a big reason why the kids are so sad.   They haven’t learned that strength is for testing, that failure is inevitable, that pain has a purpose, and that there can be joy in it all.  The best person to teach all that is a good father.

 

Posted on

Can We Talk? Round and Round on Immigration

Janie and Charlotte, good friends from college who have gone their separate ways politically, try to be reasonable about some hot-button issues.  We’ve talked about religious freedom, the proper role of government, and state-supported health care.  Then . . .

Janie: So here’s what happened: I threw you a short list of topics, and you chose this one.  Thanks a lot!

Seriously, I haven’t said much about this subject because I don’t keep the figures and stats on hand (figures and stats tend to fall out of my head anyway).  But it strikes me that a lot of people who debate this question do so on the grounds of broad principles, not precise numbers, and broad principle is where it starts anyway.  So I can do that.

As you suggested, we may have area of broad agreement here.  So let’s see—as a way of opening the discussion, which of these statements would you agree with?

  1. No nation in the history of the world has been more open to immigration than the United States.
  2. The Statue of Liberty symbolizes the mission of the U.S. to offer a home to the homeless, a new start for the destitute, and a shelter for the oppressed.
  3. Legal immigration is not a problem, but illegal immigration is, and can become an even bigger problem.
  4. Sanctuary cities are in violation of the U.S. Constitution.
  5. The rule of law is a casualty of our incoherent immigration policies.

I realize some of these statements can be interpreted different ways, and some of them can be qualified on a scale of 1 to 10.  Feel free to throw some statements and/or questions my way, too, and we might choose the most contentious as a way to start.

Charlotte: This is what you get for letting me choose the topic. Ha! You are very welcome!

Okay – I’m good with this approach, so here’s my quick response to your five points. Then we can continue the conversation by unpacking the “contentious” ones.

  1. No nation in the history of the world has been more open to immigration than the United States.

This may well be true; the USA has done a remarkable thing. Not exactly a “melting pot;” it’s more like a fascinating “buffet.” However, there is some ugly history that we need to discuss, especially since our entrenched national bigotry continues to affect immigrants today. (see point 5)

  1. The Statue of Liberty symbolizes the mission of the U.S. to offer a home to the homeless, a new start for the destitute, and a shelter for the oppressed.

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free; the wretched refuse of your teeming shores.

Send them – the homeless, tempest-tossed – to me.

I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

I LOVE this! I typed it out without even googling it because the words are fixed within me from the time I sang this song with the passion of a young, idealistic girl. But if this is the “mission” of the US, it is an aspirational one, a high ideal because we both know the Statue of Liberty bears no legal weight.

  1. Legal immigration is not a problem, but illegal immigration is, and can become an even bigger problem.

I think you mean that people who immigrate through the legal process are not a problem. I agree with this. BUT the immigration laws as they currently function in the US are definitely a problem. (see point 5)

Also, many people initially came to the US through legal means but have overstayed their limit. Most of these people are hard working, law abiding, tax paying contributors to our society. (Here is a Pew Research Center article with some interesting charts and graphs about the current situation.)

But yes, there is definitely a practical problem of what to do now. Deport 11 million people? Rip apart loving families, separating mothers from their children and removing the financial and emotional support of fathers/husbands? Find a way to incorporate them and help them become citizens? Yes, I see this as a huge problem that needs practical solutions grounded in compassion. But I’m guessing this kind of problem is not what you are referring to. Help me understand.

  1. Sanctuary cities are in violation of the U.S. Constitution.

This one made me suck my breath in. What on earth are you talking about?!?

Sometimes laws are just flat wrong. Sometimes Supreme Court decisions are wrong. Protesting and resisting unjust laws is the DNA of Americans arising from foundational acts of the Founders of this nation.

  1. The rule of law is a casualty of our incoherent immigration policies.

I don’t know what you mean by this one either, even though I heartily agree we all suffer from incoherent policies in numerous ways – immigration being only one. Actually many of our laws are incoherent as well as our policies and (as laws always have) they can reflect cultural bias and even bigotry.

Consider the plight of African Americans, for example. 12 million human beings were legally imported as slaves, legally defined and generally considered to be not completely human, legally restricted from becoming citizens even though they were born on American soil. Finally, in 1868 the 14th Amendment of the Constitution was passed in order to remedy the “rule of law” that held sway in many states.

I include a link here to a helpful article if you are interested in reading it. One quote:

By the early twenty-first century, the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment served as the basis for a broad range of protections extended to both citizens and immigrants in the United States.

Non-citizens as well as citizens have rights under the US Constitution.

I hear Conservatives talk about “the rule of law” quite often. Please tell me what this means to you.

Janie:  All of my original propositions are debatable, and I’m still thinking through them.  For instance:

1) If the US is not THE most welcoming nation in the history of the world, it’s certainly the largest and most prominent.  You don’t have to remind me about ugly history.  Ugly history is everywhere—all nations have had their blind spots and national sins, as do we.  Some of our vices owe to our virtues—if Americans did not recognize early on that our harbors should be open to later arrivals from other countries, walls would have gone up and ships turned away from the very beginning.  But immigration has been our history from the start, and in its very nature—shifting demographics, gullible foreigners making for easy prey, native fears, evolving law—abuses developed as well as benefits.  To my knowledge, no nation (except Canada, to an extent) ever tried to populate itself with large numbers of immigrants.  The process wasn’t flawless, but taken overall it was an amazing success.

2) Is it the mission of the United States to offer a home for the homeless, etc.?  No.  The mission of any nation is to sustain itself and its citizens.  That said, the US is different from most nations because of its founding on a set of ideals that have a lot to do with benefitting mankind.  The mission expressed by Emma Lazarus is a secondary principle developing from our first principles of liberty and equality, and her words have a strong appeal.  (I don’t have to look them up, either—memorized them in sixth grade back when kids still had to memorize stuff.)  They’re beautiful words.  But not the primary mission of the USA.

3) I think we agree, at least in part, on what “the problem” is: what to do about people who didn’t go through the legal hoops to get here, as well as those who have overstayed their visas.  By and large, they aren’t criminals; they’re good folks who are looking for opportunity and a decent paycheck.  Can’t blame anybody for that.  So there’s a problem of people, but there’s also a problem of policy, and of not being able to talk about immigration reform without one side being accused of mean-spiritedness.  The term “anti-immigration” is a case in point.  Conservatives by and large are not anti-immigration—most of them are descended from immigrants like everybody else and recognize the importance of immigration in our history.  We’re willing to revise the laws as long as the laws are followed (and seem reasonable and safe!).  But a swirling dust storm of inflammatory rhetoric from both sides obscures the issue enough so that nothing can be done about it.  The confusing messages going over the border are not fair to immigrants, either, many of whom risk their lives to get here only to be turned away or put on hold.

4)  Okay, so I looked it up: what, exactly, is a sanctuary city?  My impression was it’s a municipality that declines to come under federal oversight in deporting overstays or identifying criminals.  It’s more complicated than that—in fact, it’s pretty darn unclear exactly what a sanctuary city is.  If it’s a city that refuses to enforce federal law, that strikes me as unconstitutional because immigration is a federal matter.  But that’s one of the many murky areas that need to be clarified.

5) Rule of law: this might be where most of our discussion centers.  It was John Adams, I believe, who coined the phrase, “A nation of laws and not of men,” by which he meant the government should respond to written precept rather than the opinions and ideas of whoever happened to be in power.  I’m sure he was realistic enough to know that the law was occasionally going to be ignored, overstepped, and misinterpreted, but with a solid enough foundation the US could still avoid sliding into monarchy or dictatorship, where whoever held the power made the rules.

Third-world countries often operate like that: their laws sound just and fair but everybody knows the only way to get ahead is by and sucking up to the big boys, whoever they are.  That is rule by men.  Governing by misuse of executive order is also rule by men.  Making law from the bench based on the majority of nine black-robed jurists is also rule by men.

There have been unjust laws and there always will be.  The only way to correct unjust law, though, is by just law—overturning, not overruling.  Legislative remedies are slow but they keep the structure in place; extra-legal remedies eventually break it down.  And sidestepping or ignoring the law altogether, as when immigration laws are not enforced, leads to confusion, suspicion, and cynicism.

That’s what just happened with Trump’s revised executive order: the Fourth Circuit overruled it with, as I understand it, invalid reasoning—reasoning based on what candidate Trump said during the campaign rather than clear constitutional guidelines on what a president has the authority to do.  I’m not a fan of Trump, or of that particular order, but court decisions like that may do more long-term damage to the system than an ill-conceived executive order.

I’ll concede that non-citizens have certain rights—as human beings, of course they do.  But it’s unclear how far they extend.  Should we talk about that next?

Charlotte: Again, thanks for this conversation, Janie. I find I have much to talk about here.

For starters, you say: “The mission of any nation is sustain itself and its citizens.” Maybe. I offer that, in particular, part of the key mission of the United States of America, as stated in our Constitution, is “to establish justice” and “promote the general welfare.” This mandate applies to all persons and not just citizens. (see below)

You say: “By and large, [undocumented immigrants] aren’t criminals; they’re good folks who are looking for opportunity and a decent paycheck.”

I can’t tell you how glad I am to hear you say this. You probably know, one of my “jobs” is to follow comments on a large political discussion Facebook page and I confess I grow so weary of the ugliness and hard heartedness of too many Conservative commenters. Many of these folks define “criminal” as any kind of law breaking, and so by virtue of the fact that anyone is living within our borders without proper documentation makes them “criminals” and the only proper response is to deport them. This group insists on nouning these human beings as “illegals.” I’m sorry, but these kinds of comments do feel “mean spirited” to me. So again, thank you for your compassion. I wish I could believe most Conservatives think as you do.

I agree that the “swirling dust storm of inflammatory rhetoric from both sides” complicates our ability to converse. Conservative accusations that all Liberals want open borders are ludicrous and offend me. I can see how Liberal labeling like “anti-immigration” would offend you. As I said at the outset, I really believe this is an issue in which we probably share much agreement. I believe if Liberals and Conservatives would speak gently and listen deeply to one another, we could find some sturdy places from which we can build solutions.

That said, our current president has intentionally basked in the power of inflammatory rhetoric. Suggesting that large groups of people – simply because of their ethnicity or religion – are “criminals, drug dealers, rapists” or “terrorists” is grossly irresponsible. Following his lead, too many elected officials have made outrageous comments about immigrants (and even American citizens!) How are we ever going to pull off immigration reform if so-called public servants refuse to serve the public good and continue to stoke the fires of fear against anyone who is “other?!” These are far and away Republican spokespersons and I hold Republican voters responsible to stand up them and demand civility and bipartisan cooperation.

Secondly, you say about sanctuary cities: “If it’s a city that refuses to enforce federal law, that strikes me as unconstitutional because immigration is a federal matter.” We are on thin ice here because neither one of us is a Constitutional expert. In some ways, this is over our pay grade.

Even so, every citizen should remember that the Founders originally did not write the Constitution to apply to cities and states; the US Constitution is the law of the land, of the nation. And yes, citizenship and immigration are the purview of the federal government. So again, it was the 14th Amendment that extended national citizenship to former slaves and thus states’ laws were overturned (to the ongoing chagrin of too many unrepentant confederate loyalists.) Since then the 14th Amendment has appropriately (in my understanding) addressed numerous areas where states’ laws were not providing “equal protection” for all persons. So now yes, increasingly, states have greater obligation to adhere to the US Constitution.

(Look over this explanation from the Constitution Center to see how Constitutional law has evolved over time. The Constitution doesn’t just mean what it says; it means what the Supreme Court says it means. This is my paraphrase of Justice John Marshall’s famous quote in Marbury v. Madison. I think this topic definitely needs more discussion.)

So where do sanctuary cities fit into all of that? Beats me. We’ll see what the Courts do with this. But, for me, as a Christian, such protection for the vulnerable is a foundational tenet, no matter what civil law says. And for me as an American, I would have been proud to provide sanctuary for the Suffragettes and the Underground Railroaders and the Sitters at the Woolworth counters. Protecting those who protest unjust laws is a good and noble thing in my mind. Sometimes the process for overturning unjust law demands and includes such bold resistance.

You reluctantly concede that non-citizens have basic human rights but question how far those rights extend legally. Here’s a helpful article from Forbes that discusses some of the history of the development of legal rights for non-citizens. It is much broader than many “rule of law,” Constitutional Conservatives think it is. Yes, let’s go there for our next conversation. I’ll begin and get something to you very soon.

Janie: A couple of points, and we can wrap this up.  We often hear that the U. S. is a “nation of immigrants,” and that’s true as far as our ancestry goes.  But a few years ago a conservative writer (I forget who) made what I believe is a necessary correction: we are a nation of citizens.  Assimilation is key.  In the naturalization ceremony, newly-minted American citizens are asked to renounce their former allegiances and promise to support the laws, ideals, and founding documents of the United States.  To the extent that anyone is willing to do this, they are welcome, and most conservatives would agree.  (I might suggest that Facebook is not the best place to evaluate conservative thought.  I certainly don’t go there to figure out what progressives are thinking!)

What some of us fear is allowing in more immigrants, “legal” and not so much, who do not subscribe to American ideas and want to change it to something else.  Or they’re coming for welfare benefits or criminal activity or outright subversion.  These are the minority, I know, but there are significant numbers to cause concern.  Stronger border security and vetting would alleviate some of these fears if we could settle down long enough to stop insulting each other and make some reasonable compromises. I can compromise on amnesty, for example, if we could get a more secure border.

Rule of law, judicial review, Constitutional protections for non-citizens—all sufficiently weighty, wormy, and worthy of discussion.  Have at it!

Posted on

In the Beginning–What Creation Means for Human Creativity (Part I)

The popular term, which began as a joke but lingered as a classic understatement, is THE BIG BANG.  It all began, they tell us, from a point infinitesimally small and dense.  That point experienced an unimaginable burst of energy, and here we are!

With some explaining to do.

Here’s another way to say it: In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

The first ten words of the Bible are infinitely small compared to the universe, but also infinitely dense, like the first instant of the Big Bang.  Its meaning spirals out like the arms of a galaxy.  Is it a summary statement of the rest of the chapter?  Or is it one side of the “gap”?*  Or does this verse establish the setting and protagonist of the story, in a manner similar to

Marshall Kane squinted as he stepped into the dusty sunshine of Dodge City’s main street.

There’s a character, an action, and a place.  But the first three words of Genesis establish something else: something vital, something we take so much for granted we don’t think about it.  In the beginning sets out the phenomenon of forward motion.  In other words, Time steps out and makes History.

In the beginning, God created the beginning.

What happens when I try to imagine timelessness.

There was no time before this, because there was no “before” and no “this.”  We can’t understand it; we must accept it, as children answer their catechism question: God is a spirit, infinite, eternal, unchangeable.**  Some atheists pose the question, Who made God? as though it were unanswerable.  We laugh: No one!  A being who is infinite, eternal, and unchangeable doesn’t have to be “made.”  But when we try to think through what that means, we stop laughing.

We can’t go there, to the place where God existed infinitely.  We can’t let go of time.  We have no way to even think about timelessness; those categories don’t exist in our imagination.  Genesis 1:1 establishes that we can only go forward.  We can’t go back, because there is no “back.”***

Neither science nor philosophy can say what happened before time—the words what and happened and before are meaningless outside a time matrix.  If there was a great explosion of matter from energy, we are part of it, and our minds still ring, however faintly, with the echoes.  Strangely enough, the human mind seems to hold within it an idea of something—actually, Someone—who is responsible for all we see.  All cultures at all times have passed on their notions relating to what sort of being this might be, and how he/she/it might have existed before everything.  After thousands of years of speculation, the possibilities boil down to three.  Which are

  • God existed as that incredibly dense point, and now inhabits the universe in every particle.
  • God existed as an unimaginably powerful Force, which arose somehow from eternal matter with which he (she/it) shaped the universe.
  • God existed as a relationship of three “persons,” co-equal, co-eternal, none before the other, whose mutual love is so dynamic and powerful it must find expression.  As a painter uses vision and craft to create an image, an author uses action and character to produce a story, a musician uses mood and tone to write a sonata–so God, using the relational dynamic of himself, tossed out the heavens and planted the earth.

NOTE: Since this is an investigation rather than a mystery story, I plainly state my preference for Theory 3.  Not only does the Bible report it, but all creation supports it, as we shall see.  Also, most intriguingly to me, it’s the theory we could not have made up.  Of all religions and philosophies, only one proposes a Trinitarian deity.   In only one does this odd, difficult, troublesome doctrine appear—which, once accepted, explains so much.

We still want to know a few things, such as, do “the heavens” include Heaven, or does it just mean “space”?

In the Genesis context, probably the latter.  With the creation of space (the heavens), there must of necessity be something not-space, and that’s Heaven.  How do we picture it?  Not accurately, for these are truly things too wonderful for us.  Still, for reasons yet to be explored, our minds are tirelessly forming pictures of things we can’t understand.

Suppose, rather than an ever-expanding sphere, the universe is hollow.  We can never see the end of it because like a ring it does not “end.”  It’s like a balloon that expands as we blow it up, with solar systems and constellations and galaxies strung along its surface, spreading apart as the universe grows.  The air in the balloon is not, strictly speaking, the balloon, but it defines its shape and keeps it whole.  That’s Heaven.

Or the balloon exists in an atmosphere, a negative space that hosts it without being it.  That’s Heaven.

Or, as ancient sailors believed about the earth, the universe is a flat plate you’ll fall off if you sail too far.  Beyond the edge is Heaven—a mystery, but also our destiny.

All we know is that it’s eternal, beyond time and space, and the angels are there.  I don’t make a fetish of angels, but they are persons of interest—the only extra-terrestrials we know of, whose story touches ours at several telling points.

But more of angels later.  For now, as the Bible directs us, we should turn our attention to our own homey, comfortable, mysterious, terrible, and beautiful planet.  What happened on the first day of creation?

Here are my thoughts: Where Does Darkness Come From?  Creation, Day One.

_____________________________________

Questions to think creatively about:

  1. Have you ever heard the expression, “land before time”? Can time exist without space, or vice versa?  Why or why not?
  2. Do you believe in God? No, seriously: do you find yourself sometimes not believing, even though you call yourself a Christian (or other “faith tradition”?)  Can belief exist alongside unbelief?  Is your faith mostly intellectual, or mostly emotional, or both?
  3. “There would seem to be nothing more obvious, more tangible and palpable than the present moment.  And yet it eludes us completely.  All the sadness of life lies in that fact.  In the course of a single second, our senses of sight, of hearing, of smell, register (knowingly or not) a swarm of events and a parade of sensations and ideas passing through our head.  Each instant represents a little universe, irrevocably forgotten in the next instant” (Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel, p. 25).  What does “now” mean to you?  Does it seem as elusive as Kundera describes?  Do you find that “sad”?
  4. Next week, we’ll think about “Let there be light.”  But if God is light, where did the darkness come from?

_____________________________________

* The “gap” theory of biblical creationism proposes that Gen. 1:1 takes place during an indefinite, but very long, period of time, after which the earth takes shape during a series of six twenty-four hour days.

**Westminster Shorter Catechism, Q&A 4

***Time travel is theoretically possible (though unlikely), but only if we go forward—there is no credible mechanism for traveling backwards, wormholes and time tunnels notwithstanding.

 

Posted on

Nine Things the Church Needs to Understand about Art (and Artists)

Makoto Fujimura, “Still Point – Evening”
  • Art is not a separate category of human endeavor, like “business,” “psychology,” “pest control,” “education,” or “politics.”  Some men and women make a living by creative pursuits, and we call them “artists” (or dancers, authors, screenwriters, photographers).  But in the broadest sense, art is something we are all called to, as imitators of our creative Father.  Art is one way we experience life, and to pay little or no attention to it is to miss an entire dimension of human experience.
  • Artists are not special people—they’re just like you and me, with families, backgrounds, financial concerns, virtues, and sins.  Some artists like to think they’re special, it’s true.  They’re the ones who give “art” (scare-quote art) a bad name.  If God isn’t front and center as their Maker and Redeemer they’re likely to set themselves up as makers and redeemers of the culture, and with a whole lotta luck and the right connections, they might even get paid for it.  But church-member Michael who owns a share in the downtown gallery and teaches drawing at the local community college—and comes late to Sunday school and doesn’t say much—isn’t one of those.  He’s a guy with a particular vision and gift.  You should talk to him about it sometime.  Don’t be intimidated.
  • Art is not a matter of knowing what you like.  It’s a matter of seeing what you haven’t seen before, or hearing what you haven’t heard.  This isn’t teaching, exactly; art can’t teach.  It’s not a substitute for sound doctrinal exposition, but can act as a mediator between sound doctrine and life as it’s lived. Also,
  • Art is not a tool; it’s an encounter.  Bible-story pictures, chalk talks, extended metaphors serving as sermon illustrations—those are tools, direct and unambiguous, and they can be useful for getting a point across.  Art is by nature ambiguous and will affect each member of its audience in different ways, or not at all.  A story, a painting, a song or symphony doesn’t make points or teach lessons.  It sidles up to the individual and walks alongside for a while, leaving its companion a little more insightful or sympathetic, even a little more human, for that brief acquaintance.  More about that below.
  • Art is not an esoteric subject that only specialists understand.  Here again, some artists have muddied the water by creating a club of the like-minded for the benefit of each other—when they’re not stabbing each other in the back, that is.  Also for looking down on the rubes.  But most of us rubes can be taught to see if we are trained to look.  That’s one vital service artists can perform for their church body: sharing what they know and opening windows of understanding for the rest of us.  (Wednesday-night art appreciation class after the prayer meeting?  Why not?)
  • Art should be encouraged.  That appreciation class?  It’s not just for the ladies’ book club and the amateur painter, but also for the pastor and elders and their wives and women’s ministry leaders.  They should go.  And they should ask questions.*
  • Art, like everything else, stands in need of redemption.  That’s where artists need the church, as much as the church needs them.
  • Art can’t do everything (like teach or preach).  But what it can do, it does like nothing else: 1) awaken the imagination—the “bright wings” that gild ordinary experience; 2) illuminate what we already know, and breathe life into propositional truth; 3) unify the mind and heart.
  • Art is for all Christians, who are equipped to know, better than the secular-minded, what it’s for.  They just need to better understand what it is.

___________________________________________

*Come to think of it, the whole church would benefit if some time were set aside, once/quarter or once/month, for members to share about their profession: what it entails, how it benefits the community, how they do it for the glory of God, and how they might do it better.   Retired people and stay-at-home moms, too!  Think how much better we could know and encourage one another if we knew what occupied 1/3 of a brother’s or sister’s time!

Posted on

Sad Kids

At National Review, Mona Charon writes about an extensive study reported in the journal Translational Psychiatry: “Sex differences in recent first-onset depression in an epidemiological sample of adolescents.”  (Here’s an abstract of the study)  The sex difference findings are interesting—teen girls are twice as likely as boys to feel depressed—but the real punch to the gut is in the sheer numbers of kids who manifest severe anxiety, depression, and other forms of mental illness: about one in four.

Could this be due to more awareness of mental health issues, and better reporting? Less stigma or ignorance about depression, or even increased self-dramatizing among teens?  Maybe a little, but a pediatrician responding the Charon’s column on another website added an informal statistic that makes it real.  While reading, he checked his phone for the current status of the Emergency Department in the children’s hospital where he worked.  At that moment, 28% of patients were there for “suicidal ideation.”  “What Mona Charon writes about is the lived experience of every children’s hospital around . . . This is a national crisis.”

People were less depressed during the Great Depression.

People were less depressed during the Great Depression.

The two obvious questions are Why is this happening now? and What should we do?

As to why, social media, family breakdown, economic anxiety, political turmoil (it’s Trump’s fault!), and education all come in for blame.  But what do kids need that they’re not getting? Pretty much the same things we all need, which are

  • Meaningful relationships.  I would trace most of our social problems to no-fault divorce, which made the most essential social bond a matter of personal preference.  Since then, children have had the rug pulled out from under them.  Single-parenting is a huge predictor of all kinds of negatives, from low school performance to relationship failures in adulthood.  In the teen years, when kids begin the transition from parental relationships to peers and others (which should eventually lead to stable marriages of their own), social media is lurking for them.  Instead of bonding with friends, they bond with their devices.  Their real friends are their phones.
  • Meaningful education.  Somewhere in the early 20th century, public education began to divorce brains from souls.  Reductionism took over: humans can dream up whatever metaphysical system they want in their spare time, but at school, we’re all utilitarians.  Transcendence has no place in a melting-pot schoolhouse where not everybody shares the same religion or philosophy.  This wasn’t so obvious in my southern-culture elementary school, with our morning devotionals and music classes, but the trend was in place–it’s the subject of The Abolition of Man, a brief treatise that C. S. Lewis considered his most important work.  The intense focus is on academics now, to the detriment of the arts and even recess.  That’s because we’re educating brains, not people, and the supplementary education kids used to get from church or their parents is less likely to be there for them.
Those three summer jobs were at least as useful to me as the classes I took in school.
  • Meaningful work.  Who likes working?  I didn’t.  My mother had to push me out the door to get a
    job after graduating high school—otherwise, she said, no college.  I didn’t have the best reasons for going to college and no clear idea of what I wanted to do, but it was that or a full-time job.  Horrors!  Summer jobs were bad enough.  And yet, those three summer jobs were at least as useful to me as the classes I took in school: practical experience, being responsible, listening to instruction, getting chewed out when I didn’t.  (“At least you didn’t cry,” said my supervisor after one of those times, just before I escaped to the bathroom and bawled my eyes out.)  Every legitimate job is meaningful because it connects the individual to his community and creates a sense of obligation (as opposed to entitlement).  You show up; you do the job; you get paid.  Less than half of Americans get jobs while still in their teen years, and when they do enter the work force in their mid-twenties, they don’t seem to know what to expect.  I hear about millennials who have to be corrected carefully so as not to ruffle their feathers, and who get frustrated after eight months because they’re not “having an impact.”  Then there are those blue-collar dropouts who simply don’t show up.
  • Meaning, period.  Q: What is the chief end of man?  A: The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.  (Westminster Shorter Catechism, Question #1)  What can beat that for significance in life and death?  There you have it all: relationship, education, work—and heaven besides.  Even an atheist, whose philosophy offers him no objective reason for meaning in anything, can find it in family, art, democracy, benevolence, etc.  But it takes a strong will and other advantages, such a good parents, to find your own meaning in life once you’re turned loose to live it.   And if your life ultimately means nothing, why not OD on heroin and end it sooner?
We despise our youth, loading them up with the accoutrements of adulthood without expecting them to act like adults.

And that’s what we do: turn them loose.  A 16-year-old girl gets mixed messages about empowerment and victimization, while she longs for a loving relationship; a 19-year-old boy is told he’s toxic and unnecessary, while he inarticulately searches for some dragon to slay.  We despise our youth, loading them up with the accoutrements of adulthood (sex, cars, phones) but not expecting them to act like adults.

What to do?  Rescue them, one at a time.