janie | Janie B. Cheaney

July 14, 2017

“Hinder Them Not”

You know the story, pictured in so many children’s Bibles and Sunday school literature: Jesus and the Children. When the officious grownups—his own followers—tried to brush off women who were bringing their babies for him to bless, his rebuke stopped them cold and still warms every mother’s heart: “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for to such belong the Kingdom of God.”

This implies a lot—that little children would run to Jesus if they had the opportunity, that they are often hindered from coming, and that they possess some quality that preeminently suits them for membership in the kingdom of God. You’ve heard sermons on the “for such belongs” part, so I won’t dwell on it here. I’m interested in “Let them come” and “do not hinder.” Two questions: Would little children freely come? And if so, how are they “hindered”?

The answer to the first question is probably yes and no. In himself, Jesus is inherently appealing, as every excellent and beautiful thing we cherish in this world owes its very existence and character to him. But our minds are clouded by less-than-excellent and beautiful motives, distractions, and impulses. If we could see him clearly, we would all run to him, not just the little children. But we can’t, so most of us don’t, and that includes little children.

However . . . let’s say our motives are honorable and we have welcomed Jesus as our Lord and Savior and earnestly desire our children to do the same. Can we still hinder them?

Yes—with the best motives in the world. Here’s how:

A too-literal interpretation of Deuteronomy 6:7: “You shall teach [God’s law] diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise . . .” It’s one thing to apply God’s law in ordinary conversation, and another to drop leaden exhortations. Character education was a thing back in the 80s and 90s—remember that? (And did you notice any general improvements in character as a result?) Often this came in the form of reminders to “Be diligent” or “Be kind” coupled with mini-biographies of people who modeled these virtues. Too often it sounded like school, as though everyday relateable Mom or Dad switched off for a moment to let Preacher Mom or Dad make an announcement. As soon as Preacher Mom comes on, the kid tunes out.
“Jesus” training. You know the Sunday-school joke about the right answer to every question being “Jesus”? (It happened to me just a couple of Sundays ago, when I asked what the first five books of the Bible were. The answer, of course, is “Jesus.”) The statement “Jesus is the answer” is literally true but not always truly literate. That is, it takes a few steps to get from the problem to the answer, so when the kids come to you with a problem (or clearly have one they don’t want to talk to you about), don’t be so quick to solve it with the Jesus answer. Take some time to explore the issue, and as you do, you’ll find that Jesus almost certainly said something that applies. And if he didn’t say it, he did it.
Shutting down honest doubts. If you ever get a fluttery feeling in your stomach when your kindergartner wonders how all those animals could have fit inside the ark, or your pre-teen asks who made God, or you high-school senior demands where God was during the Holocaust . . . relax. It’s often a good sign; it means they’re thinking. Talk through their doubts, share (where appropriate) your own questions and uncertainties, explore possible answers, and offer to look into it further. You can be sure every question has been answered and no doubt necessitates unbelief all by itself.
Non-engagement with the culture. You will not protect children by isolating them from the world. Their main problem is within, not without. The question about how much to “engage” is a vexing one that parents need to think through carefully, since what may be appropriate for one family could be damaging for another. A mom’s background in literature or psychology, for example, could help guide her teen daughter through a suicide novel like 13 Reasons Why, where another mother with a super-sensitive son might be well-advised to skip the novel altogether (and the TV series even more). Don’t ever forget: They’re going to grow up. They’re going to leave you. They’re going to have to make these decisions about engagement on their own. Your job is to prepare them, not protect them.
Creating your own “culture.” As a homeschool mother from 1985 to 1996, I encountered parents who told me that homeschoolers were God’s new shock troops who were going to change the culture. They related everything to religion, scattered Bible quotes throughout the house, referenced Jesus everywhere, spoke in a certain vocabulary and dressed a certain way. Especially around their children. Many of these kids turned out just fine, but many others broke loose at the earliest possible moment. And by the way, they didn’t change the culture.
Relying too much on ourselves and our own resources. See “Creating your own culture,” above. With some parents, the impulse is almost frantic: If I don’t do x, my kids will fall into y. Chances are, they’re going to fall into some kind of sin; you may steer them away from drinking but they’ll stumble at sex. Or if they avoid all the fleshly pitfalls, they’ll fall prey to spiritual pride, which is even worse. Your Savior is also their Savior, and he is supremely able to do what you can’t.
Failing to be genuine. Is your speech more “religious” when speaking to your kids than when you talk to your peers? You can be sure they pick up on that, too.

If none of these apply to you, you are the perfect Christian mom or dad. Bad news: You’re not. Good news: Though you have a vital job to do, its success doesn’t depend on you. Even better news: God is fully aware of your weakness and has already accounted for it. That’s what the cross is about. So everybody take a deep breath and then we can get practical.

Once we become a little better about not hindering, we can start encouraging. The children in the story didn’t come to Jesus on their own accord; their mothers had to bring them. Even today, in a society vastly removed from first-century Palestine, it’s usually the mothers who bond early and teach their little ones to walk and talk and eat what’s good for them . . . and take their first steps toward God.

One very basic step along that road is learning to pray. Chances are, the very first person a child hears praying is a parent. It should be so easy, yet it’s hard to teach. In fact, the inspiration for this blog post is a mother asking me for advice in teaching kids to pray. She had little confidence that her children, ages 10 and 12, had never learned to pray on their own, in spite of all her modeling and teaching.

I told her I could at least think about it. So I did, and I came up with some thoughts. But you’ll have to come back next week to see what they are.

July 11, 2017January 26, 2018

Creation, Day Four: Dancing with the Stars

And God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night. And let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years, and let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth.” And it was so. And God made the two great lights—the greater light to light the day and the lesser light to rule the night and the stars. And God set them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth, to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day. Gen. 1:14-19

Hum the first two notes of “Over the Rainbow.” (I’m not kidding: hum it!)

You’ve just hummed an octave, with eight musical steps between the low pitch and the high pitch (octave stemming from the Latin word for “eight”). If you’ve ever taken piano lessons or sung in a choir, you know what a musical scale sounds like: do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do. From the first do to the next do is eight tones, and if you sang only those two notes with no others in between, it would sounds like the first two notes of “Over the Rainbow.”

Image result for do re mi scale

Now try humming the first five tones of the scale: do-re-mi-fa-so. Hum the first do again, then go directly to so, leaving out the notes in between. One time, but hum do twice, followed by so twice. Does it sounds like “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” (or “The Alphabet Song”)?

One more: think of the first three notes of “Taps,” the bugle call played at military funerals. Or the first four notes of Wagner’s “Wedding March,” also known as “Here Comes the Bride.” Or, if you’re from the same great state as I am, “The Eyes of Texas.” With the first note as do, the second note is four steps up the scale: do-re-mi-fa.

We call the interval between the pitches in “Somewhere over the Rainbow” an eighth, or an octave, the opening interval in “Twinkle Twinkle” a fifth, and the opening interval in the “Wedding March” a fourth. And none of this seems to have anything to do with Day Four of creation, when heavenly bodies appeared in the sky. But roughly 2600 years ago, Pythagoras thought differently.

Pythagoras is such a shady figure he may not have existed at all. But no one doubts the existence of the “Pythagorean School” of scholars and mystics who congregated on the island of Samos and pledged to eat no meat and have no sex. For a small group of bachelor vegetarians with a possibly mythical leader, their influence on history was profound.

A major principle of Pythagorean thought is that reality is based on mathematical relationships. His famous theory of triangles* is only part of it. Even more fascinating, and apropos for our purpose, were his experiments with music.

Pythagoras discovered that a string tuned to any musical tone, when cut in half, will produce the same tone at a higher pitch. Hum the first two notes of “Somewhere over the Rainbow” again. These two notes have a precise mathematical relationship. Pythagoras had discovered the octave; to get the same tone, eight steps higher, divide the string exactly in half. Mathematically, the ratio is 2:1. Scientifically, the half string vibrates exactly twice as fast as the full string, producing a note that is equal in tone but higher in pitch.

Continuing his experiments, Pythagoras cut an identical string 1/3 from the lower end. The new pitch, combined with the original, now sounded like the first notes of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” (Could Pythagoras have been the mythical author of that ancient ditty?) Not an echo, like the octave, but a pleasing transition with, again, a precise mathematical relationship: 3:2. The short string vibrates two-thirds as fast as the long one.

What if he divided another identical string in half, and half again, so that the length of the string was one-fourth the length of the original? Now the transition between the two notes sounded like “The Eyes of Texas” (or rather, “The Eyes of Samos”)—another pleasing interval with a mathematical relationship of 4:3.

As it happens, the Octave (Somewhere), the Perfect fifth (as in Twinkle, Twinkle), and the Perfect Fourth (Wedding March) are musical intervals common to all cultures everywhere. Eastern music and primitive music have distinctive scales, tones, and rhythmic patterns that mystify Westerners , but all cultures make use of octaves, fourths, and fifths.

All melodies consist of stepping from one note to another, and the distance one note to the next is noted mathematically: not merely fourths and fifths, but thirds, seconds, sixths, sevenths, and descending, augmented, and diminished versions of all those. Pythagoras would have said that music is mathematics, and mathematical relationships are a form of music, extending throughout the cosmos. Each heavenly body, each star and planet, has its own pitch, hummed in harmony with all the rest.

Here the mystical side of Pythagoras overreached the scientific, but he was on to something. A couple of thousand years later, Western science would come to the conclusion that the key to the universe, its language or code, was numbers—or, more precisely—numerical relationships: intervals, measurements, calibrations.

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Let them be for signs and seasons, and for days and years.

You want numbers? Here are some numbers:

Two of the great forces in the universe, gravity and electromagnetism, have to be balanced in a precise ratio, namely 1 over 10⁴⁰, or one part in ten thousand trillion trillion trillion. If the ratio is off, physical life is impossible.
Space energy density, or the self-stretching property of the universe, can’t vary more than one part in 10¹²⁰and still produce stars and planets.
Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, measures approximately100,000 light years from one arm to the other. Our sun is located far from the center, but if it were any closer radiation would have destroyed it.
The distance from earth to the moon varies a bit depending on where the moon is in its orbit. The average is 238,857 miles—much closer, and the moon would have crashed into the earth. Any farther, and the moon’s gravitational effect would have no influence. As it is, that cratered chunk of rock stabilizes the earth at an axial tilt of approximately 23.5 degrees (it varies slightly with the moon’s orbit). Without the pull of the moon, earth would wobble from burning hot to freezing cold, a variation of 200 degrees. Because the moon is where it is, we have signs and seasons, days and years.

Signs and seasons, days and years. Light exists—we know it does, even if we haven’t exactly figured out what it is. Time exists, too—we know that because there was “a beginning.” But what was the form of time? Were days always marked by twenty-four hours, or was there a time when time itself roamed outside the discipline of measurement, stretching thin and bunching up? Is there a master clock? When was it set, and who set it?

Day Four marks several new developments. First, the heavenly bodies appear: a kingly sun, a queenly moon, and attendant stars beyond number. The language of Genesis gives a nod to mythological notions of the sun “ruling” the day, like Apollo’s flaming chariot, and the moon presiding over night like the huntress Diana, stalking her prey.

Secondly, Day Four sets up a parallel structure. On days one, two, and three, we have regions, or territories: the heavens (and earth), air and seas, dry land. Day Four begins the process of populating those regions. “The heavens” are the realm of heavenly bodies, whose mysterious influence and regular movement would occupy thinkers and observers for millennia.

But another significance of Day Four is often overlooked: in it, God establishes the principle of measurement. Not only for time (“days and seasons and years”) but also, I think it’s safe to infer, for space. I remember past events based partly on where we were at the time: the where indicates the when. I interpret what happens to me partly by locating myself in space. Spatial relationships, ratios, and measurement are essential to figuring out where we are, where we’re going, and how to get there, both practically and scientifically. And numbers are the key.

Pythagoras may have been the first to link numbers with music and space. But two thousand years later, in the pursuit of science, Johannes Kepler made an amazing discovery that hearkened back to the Island of Samos.

While drawing a geometric figure of a circle within an equilateral triangle, circumscribed by another perfect circle, it struck him that the ratio of the two circles equaled the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn. What if all the planetary orbits displayed a similar geometric relationship? The hypothesis didn’t work out quite as well as he hoped, but speculation along this line led to Kepler’s three laws of planetary motion and the discovery that a) orbits are elliptical, not circular; b) a planet’s speed varies between aphelion (when it’s closest to the sun) and perihelion (its farthest distance from the sun); and c) the duration of any planet’s orbit depends on that planet’s distance from the sun.

We learn this in science class and file it with our other sets of “three laws” to remember for the test. But Kepler’s laws not only provided the necessary foundation for Newton’s principles of universal gravity, they also reached back to the Pythagorean notion of universal harmony. Pythagoras envisioned the planets ascending from earth at regular intervals, as though on the rungs of a ladder. Each “rung” corresponded to a musical interval—the same intervals he had discovered on his cut-up lyre strings. The cosmos, Pythagoras believed, danced to music. Music was good for the soul and the body, and no wonder; it’s part of the stuff we’re made from.

In formulating his second law (that planets moved faster at perihelion and slower at aphelion), Kepler calculated their velocities at these two extremes and wrote down the ratio. Saturn, for example, moves at a rate of 106 degrees per solar day at aphelion and 135 degrees at perihelion, thus a ratio of 106:135. After he factored these numbers and cancelled the common factors the ratio differs by only two seconds from 4:5, or the interval of a major third. It wasn’t just a coincidence: the ratio of velocities of all the known planets closely corresponded to musical intervals.

But that’s not all. When he compared the velocity ratios for combined pairs of planets, (such as Jupiter’s perihelion and Mars’ aphelion) he found the intervals of a complete scale. Jupiter and Mars sing a minor third, Earth and Venus a minor sixth. His discovery of elliptical orbits was a disappointment to him at first—it seemed to spoil the beauty of perfect concentric circles. But as the planets rolled along their elliptical paths, shifting speed and velocity, they described recognizable patterns, even harmonic chords. “Henceforth,” he wrote, “it is no longer a harmony made for the benefit of our planet, but the song which the cosmos sings to its Lord and center, the Solar Logos.”

Modern science, while it doesn’t come to the same metaphysical conclusion as Kepler, finds his measurements to be “frighteningly good,” as the famed astronomer Fred Hoyle observed.

This is my father’s world, and to my listening ears

all nature sings, and round me rings the music of the spheres.

Mathematics and science were created on this day. And so was music, “While the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy.”**

Creation, Day Five – Being and Soaring

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*Pythagorean theorem: a fundamental relation in Euclidean geometry among the three sides of a right triangle. It states that the square of the hypotenuse (the side opposite the right angle) is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides.

**Job 38:7

July 8, 2017July 8, 2017

The Church of Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg may be feeling a wee bit guilty. He’s had six months to reflect on how Facebook, his own brainchild, disseminated enough false information to swing an election and betray all the liberal values his heart holds dear. So he would like to redeem that wrong by making Facebook more of a force for good, to bring people together instead of driving them apart. Like a church, you know—or a little-league team.

That’s the reason Zuckerberg has been touring the U.S., stopping in every state. Political observers can’t help observing how much time he’s spent in Iowa, but maybe he likes the corn. His stated goal is to spread the gospel of community-through-Facebook across the land and eventually the world. That was the theme of the first-ever Facebook Communities Summit, held in Chicago late last month. Group administrators were invited to attend free of charge in order to network, share ideas and feedback, and hear from Facebook executives, including Zuckerberg himself, “about new products we’re building to help admins grow and manage their groups.” The founder elaborated on this vision in the Thursday-night keynote speech: “People are basically good. Everyone genuinely wants to help other people.” With that principle in mind, Facebook intends to make it easier for good folks to join other good folks for good purposes online.

The church, he said , used to meet that need and supply that sense of purpose. But with the decline in church participation, as well as in other local organizations like sports leagues, community spirit has taken a hit. “We started a project to see if we could get better at suggesting groups that will be meaningful to you. We started building artificial intelligence to do this. And it works. In the first 6 months, we helped 50% more people join meaningful communities.”

Good for him. The executive board seems to be grappling with some of the implications of balancing free speech and social responsibility—see the Hard Questions they’ve posed. I’m going to assume Zuckerberg is completely sincere about these means and ends . . .

But surely he must recognize that the internet, and social media in particular, is one reason local communities began to fall apart in the first place. Or if not a cause, at least a facilitator. Where else can you stream a movie, watch a football game without commercials, join a whole platoon of World of Warcraft gamers, and order a comfy couch (with free shipping) to serve as your base of operations? The internet allows us to live our entire lives inside our four walls if that’s what we want. It takes effort to pull yourself off the couch and go to church or a little-league game, still more to volunteer to teach Sunday School or coach a team. With so many family bonds broken already, more and more people see less and less reason to bind themselves.

Here are a few Hard Questions for Mark Zuckerberg:

If people are basically good, and everyone genuinely wants to help other people, why is there so much meanness and nastiness on Facebook?
If meaningful communities are formed around common interests alone, what’s to keep them from becoming echo chambers where everyone has the same opinion and dissent is not encouraged?
Also, if common interest is the glue, what happens when group members lose interest?
What is a “meaningful community,” anyway? Are there any guidelines in place? Will Facebook reserve the right to disallow any communities it thinks are not meaningful?

Facebook now has over two billion users, and I am one. I’ve joined a few groups and I’ve found links to interesting articles and I’ve enjoyed seeing pictures of weddings and grandkids. But I never confused it with community, because true community is not based on convenience, or even interest. The strongest communities, it turns out, are not voluntary: family, church, military, nation. You don’t choose them; they choose you. The glue is shared responsibility, and that can only be face to face. Not Facebook.

July 4, 2017January 26, 2018

Creation, Day Three: The Story Takes Root

And God said, “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.” And it was so. God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good.

And God said, “Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind, on the earth. And it saw so. The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to kind. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the third day. Gen. 1:9-13

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Once upon a time, “going to the movies” was as much an event as the movie itself. I barely remember this, as a child in the 1950s growing up in Dallas, Texas. Our down-market movie experience was the drive-in (with its own tacky romance, gone forever!) but once in a great while I recall getting just a little dressed up to go downtown with my family to the Majestic or the Palace, both of which began their lives as vaudeville theaters. Rocking in a tip-backed, velvet-upholstered seat, staring into the firmament of a domed ceiling so high it made me feel dizzy, was the closest I came in those days to concentrated anticipation. The lights would dim, a clash of windy chords would sound, and the MIGHTY WURLITZER organ rose ponderously from the orchestra pit.

The thing was so huge (in my memory, at least), with such a multiplicity of keyboards and stops, it was a bit shocking to locate the little person in the middle making it all go. He or she probably played no longer than ten minutes before the platform descended and the massive curtains in front of the screen rolled back. Perhaps it’s not surprising that I remember the prelude to the movie more than the movie itself, and when I think of “let dry land appear,” the first image that comes to mind is the Mighty Wurlitzer rising from the dark depths, all flash and dazzle.

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But we don’t know exactly how it was. “Let dry land appear” could mean something like, Bring dry land up from the waters like a thousand erupting volcanoes.

Or it could mean, Set dry land down among the surging waters.

Was the land already “there,” like dry land was there under the Red Sea and merely required a bit of water removal? Were the primeval waters pregnant with molecular bits of minerals that coalesced on command? Or did God voice it into being ex nihilo? Perhaps none of those possibilities, or a combination of all, but we must guard against the habit of thinking that the dry land was already hulking under the water waiting to be shaped, like granite awaits the stonemason. God calls things that are not as though they were (Romans 4:17), and when he calls, “it is so.”

The earth was in his mind, and then, whether the work of a day or a billion years, the earth was outside his mind.

Was it spectacular, a gigantic swirl of molecules pulsing with light and shouting for joy before each took its proper place as stone or soil? Or was it a steady shuffling of elements until all had shaken out? However it happened, it was without conflict. No element butted heads with another or struggled for pride of place. Just as, much later in time, the stormy winds and sea would obey the command, Peace! Be still!–just so, at their master’s command, granite, marble, sand, iron, loam, clay, gold, limestone, diamonds and chalk “appeared” in the midst of the water.

With all the elements we call “earth” came everything we would need: stone for shelter, soil for food and cotton and flax, metals base and precious waiting to smelted out of the cracks:

Man puts his hand to the flinty rock

and overturns mountains by the roots.

He cuts out channels in the rocks,

and his eye sees every precious thing.

He dams up the streams so that they do not trickle,

and the thing that is hidden he brings to light. Job 28:9-11

But in addition to all that, ground gives us grounding. Terra firma. Out of the flux of waters comes a place to stand. Columbus could not discover new worlds without starting from an old world. He could not venture forth without venturing from. To use the old metaphor of life as a voyage, we little Columbi are always venturing out from something: a home, or a family, or if we’re lucky, both. The location of home and the composition of family may change, but our greatest emotional need is a place to belong, and our first creative necessity is a place to begin.

This is what we were given on the third day: a home. The scenery of the earth would change, and one given spot may overbuild while another is destroyed. But we always have home base, a place to build.

Except for the one time it was taken away.

Picture Noah, adrift in a huge wooden box for seven months. The waters above the earth have wrung dry and the fountains of the deep have exhausted themselves and the primeval chaos is back for a return engagement. In a massive act of judgment, God temporarily reversed creation, pouring water back over the land he had earlier brought forth. Forty days and nights of deluge was only the beginning; after the rain stopped, 150 days passed before the waters even began to subside. But all this time, The Lord had Noah in mind. (Gen. 8:1, NIV). Just has the Lord had had the ground itself in mind before causing it to be. On the seventh day of the seventh month, “the ark rested upon the mountains of Ararat.”

Peter Spier’s classic picture book Noah’s Ark shows a rough landing: the ark strikes Mt. Ararat’s rocky peak like a fist and everything slews sideways. Correcting waves would level it a bit, but that one pictorial moment is enough to suggest that the re-creation of the world, its second reclaiming from chaos, was not nearly as smooth as the first.

The water recedes slowly, blown by the wind. It would be another four months before dry land “appears” again in bountiful measure. The flood was a warning, an example, and a reminder that we can’t take our foundations for granted.

The other vital element of creation established on the third day: continuity. Plants grow, and with them, seed. Organic life takes root on dry land, and because the land isn’t going anywhere, the plants will have time to propagate themselves. Imagine what is stored in each tiny seed: the potential to grip the soil while reaching upward toward the light. Each tiny seed packs generations that will span millennia. Generation (from the same root as “Genesis”) means beginning but it also means continuing. It’s a promise that this page will be turned; history itself emerges from the watery flux and takes root with the first plant.

Sp the three great realms of creation are established by the third day: sky, sea, and finally earth, rising like the Mighty Wurlitzer with all the stops pulled out and its bellows going full blast.

Now we can turn the page.

Creation, Day Four: Dancing with the Stars

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Go outside on a clear night and lay down in the grass. Spread your fingers wide and imagine yourself holding on to the earth as it turns. Can you feel it? Close your eyes and try to tune out artificial sounds; can you hear it? What does it smell like? Does it seem dead to you, or somehow alive?
This is a children’s exercise, but I still get a kick out of it. Fold and roll up enough paper towels to fit inside a clear drinking class. Tuck several seeds of different kinds (flower, vegetable, even tree, such as a maple wing) between the glass and the paper towel. Water the paper towel until it’s damp but not dripping and keep the glass in a dark place, such as a kitchen cupboard, for several days. Keep the towel damp, and after just a few days you should see the seeds begin to sprout. What does this tell you about the life stored inside them, and the capability they have of renewal?

June 27, 2017January 26, 2018

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

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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.

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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

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Look up other ancient creation stories (such as Mayan, Greek, Norse) and compare with the Babylonian and Genesis stories.
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.)
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.

June 23, 2017January 26, 2018

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?

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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?
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?
If you could draw light, what would it look like?
“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)

June 20, 2017June 20, 2017

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.

June 16, 2017June 17, 2017

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.

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.

June 13, 2017

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?

No nation in the history of the world has been more open to immigration than the United States.
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.
Legal immigration is not a problem, but illegal immigration is, and can become an even bigger problem.
Sanctuary cities are in violation of the U.S. Constitution.
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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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 14^th 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 14^th 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 14^th 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!

June 9, 2017January 26, 2018

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.

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Questions to think creatively about:

Have you ever heard the expression, “land before time”? Can time exist without space, or vice versa? Why or why not?
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?
“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”?
Next week, we’ll think about “Let there be light.” But if God is light, where did the darkness come from?

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* 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.