The Strange Theology of K Pop Demon Hunters

You can ruin pretty much anything by overthinking it, and K Pop Demon Hunters is no exception.

In the event you're old and cranky and utterly outside of the zeitgeist, K Pop Demon Hunters is an animated movie produced by a partnership between Sony and Netflix.  It tells the definitively fluffy tale of a three-member K Pop (that's Korean Pop, boomer) girl band called Huntr/x who...in addition to packing stadiums full of adoring fans..are also engaged in a battle to prevent the earth from being overrun by demons.  They do this through the magic of their infectious bops and by killing demons with their prodigious martial arts skills.  Hunter/X has a chance to create a magical shield around the world with their song, one which will wall off the demonic world forever.

The demon world finds this threatening, and the dictator of the demons is convinced by a hunky demon musician that the only way to battle Huntr/x is to form the Saja Boys, a demonic boy band.   Music and actual battles ensue.

It's wonderfully animated by the same team that created the brilliant animated Spiderman movie.  It's an artfully spun cotton-candy confection, one which reflects the pop-ethos of both Korean and Korean-American culture, and it's been a wild success.  Meaning, the songs sung by the two in-movie fictional bands have topped the pop charts, the soundtrack is a number one album, that sort of thing.

Am I the target demographic?  O Lord no.

And as a Presbyterian, I'm always both overthinking and looking for a theological angle.  As it happens, theology of a sort is front and center in the movie.

Here, there will be spoilers.  Just saying.  Go forth forewarned.

The movie's obligatory romantic entanglement is between Jinu (the leader of the Saja Boys) and Rumi (one of the three members of Huntr/X, who also happens to be half-demon by birth and is hiding the tell-tale marks of that identity).  Most of the Message in the film is about how shame turns you into a demon, forcing you to hide yourself behind a web of lies and self-loathing.  For example: Like every other demon, the hunky pretty-boy demon Jinu was been enslaved by the demon king Gwi-Ma, trapped by his shame at having betrayed his family in exchange for success.

Why Rumi is ashamed isn't quite clear.  She's ashamed of being half-demon, but if becoming a demon requires you to be ashamed, how that works seems a bit recursive.  Perhaps she's ashamed of her demon father?  Or ashamed of her demonic heritage?  Or ashamed of lying about being half-demon?  I couldn't quite parse that out.

As the movie progresses, the one great goal is creating the ultimate Honmoon barrier between the worlds, trapping the demons forever in the infernal realm ruled by Gwi Ma.   Rumi and Jinu fall in love, of course, and at the end of the film, Jinu overcomes his demonic shame.  He chooses his love for Rumi, and sacrifices his soul so that Rumi and the other members of Huntr/X can defeat Gwi-Ma and...activating the new improved Honmoon shield...forever trap all of the demons in their bitter realm of shame and lies.

As I watched, this was where my overthinking kicked into overdrive.

Here's why.  We know that, if loved, Jinu can change and be released from the power of shame.  We know that Rumi, a half-demon, can be freed from the power of shame.  

But what does that mean?  It means that every other demon...all of whom are souls who have been enslaved by Gwi-Ma...can also change.  It's clear they're all living in fear of the demon king, and when they're not being slaughtered by Huntr/X, most of them are portrayed sympathetically.  They're not really threatening, and are utterly powerless against the OP triple threat of our heroines.  Heck, two of the demons...a three-eyed magpie demon and a Totoro-eque tiger demon who Jinu uses as messengers...are cuddly comic relief.

So what does that say about Rumi's goal, and the conclusion of the movie?   

Again, the great victory of the film was to be this: trapping every single soul that has been enslaved by demonic shame eternally in that oppressive realm.  When this happens, backed/evoked by a triumphant Girlboss pop song, we're supposed to cheer.  All the while, we also know that within the logics of the narrative, every one of those demons has both human backstory and a self-loathing that they could still potentially overcome.   

Yay inflicting eternal torment on the damned?  You..um..go girls?  

As a recovering Calvinist, this seemed...oddly hopeless.  

Particularly for a sugar straw candy concoction like K Pop Demon Hunters.  Being doomed forever because of shame seemed a bit on the grim side, and flew in the face of the whole "coming to terms with the truth of yourself" and "acceptance" schtick.

And here's where my plans for this post went a little awry.

As I dug into it a bit more, I found  a little detail in the freshly minted "lore" for the movie.  Because no IP out there now doesn't have lore, as internet fandom interfaces with world building to create fractally endless ruminations on the "universe" that any popular narrative inhabits.

The shield formed at the end of the film wasn't, evidently, the long planned Golden shield.  It is, or so the eagle-eyed interwebs informed me, very possibly a Rainbow shield, which may be permeable, which may mean the hunky demon Jinu could still be alive, which may point to a sequel, Q.E.D., O.M.G.  

Was that evident at any point in the watching of the film?  Nope. 

Is it evident to a casual viewer?  Not really.  

But pop fandom has an explanation for everything, and can make angels dance on the edge of even the slightest detail.  Films are watched, and rewatched, and watched again, with deep meaning hinging on the tiniest fragment of narrative minutia.

Which is, itself, remarkably theological.

It's nice to know that overthinking isn't just a Presbyterian trait, after all.

Freedom of Commerce

 

A few years back, I found myself in a gifting conundrum.  It was my parent's anniversary, and I wanted to get them a gift.  Mom and Dad had been together for over fifty years, and had become perhaps the world's greatest Ballykissangel Superfans.

Bally K, as they both called it, was a British show from the late 1990s featuring the goings-on in a small Irish town.  Romance, minor intrigues, and that sort of thing.  Not much action, just an amiable band of characters living out their lives in an entertaining way.

Mom and Dad watched it every single day, religiously, and even though they'd seen the entire series through a dozen times or more, they wouldn't miss it for the world.

As I considered what to get them, I thought to myself: where...twenty years after it aired on the other side of the Atlantic...might I be able to find some BallyK merch?  

Nowhere within the borders of this nation was there anything, which wasn't a surprise.  It'd be like finding a Phantom Flan Flinger costume, or a Blue Peter T shirt.  Decades old esoterica from the Isles is just not going to be about in the U.S.

But across the pond, there were several sellers offering what seemed the perfect Bally K tchotcke.  It was a decorative teapot, shaped like the pub that's a central meeting place in the show.  It's one of the miracles of the modern age that one can find a used specialty teapot in a knick-knack shop in rural England, and without too much muss or fuss, you can have it shipped across the planet.  That's precisely what I did, and within two weeks, it had arrived at my doorstep.

Having lived in England as a boy, that worked both ways.  My grandparents could ship presents to me from Georgia or New York, and they'd be there on Christmas Day.

Only, well, that's how it used to work.  Back when things worked, and before Dear Leader and his Death Eaters mucked it all up.

Small items...like teapots, or specialty parts for old cars, or books?  These things used to be sent freely, by the mutual agreement of all of the civilized nations of the world.   If it's worth less than $800, we didn't worry about it.  

But the new tariffs included everything sent by everyone, no bottom limit, no exceptions.  And also, no process for actually doing what was proposed.  You know, like when you get that new idiot manager, the one who has no idea what they're doing, and they start making literally impossible demands that show they don't understand the business at all.  You'd have to put in an insanely excessive bureaucracy, and waste all of our time and money.

So now, a thing that has worked for 100 years no longer works.  Other nations, faced with this arbitrary, ill-conceived new demand, are choosing just not to work with us at all.  They're stopping all citizen-to-citizen or small-business-to-citizen mailing across borders.  You can't get that part for your vintage Triumph.  You can't peruse the wares at a little shoppe in Dublin and order it from the family that runs it.  You can't send a gift to a family member.  You are disconnected from the souls who still live in the lands of your ancestors.

That's temporary, hopefully.  Other people will clean up the mess.  Systems will figure their way around it, hopefully sooner rather than later.

How does that make us great?  How does that make us more free?

Incompetence never does.

Deep Gleaning

Every other morning lately, I'm out in the front yard, harvesting okra.  

I've grown far more of it than I need, with just about twenty plants chugging away.  Ten of those are packed over-dense into a four by eight bed, so their production has been less per plant.  This is only my second season growing, so I'm still figuring the whole thing out.  The tallest of them now stand well over five feet, and lately I get about a quart a day from the lot of 'em.  

I don't need anywhere near that much, and there's only so much bhindi masala, gumbo, and batter-fried okra folks in my household want to eat.  I've already selected the healthiest plants to let run to seed stock for next year, so the question becomes: what to do with the rest?

Giving those pods to neighbors?  That's a bit of a stretch in the suburban Mid-Atlantic, where okra mostly has a reputation for slime.  This is, of course, utterly unfair.  Okra's delicious when prepared properly, nutty and nutritious, with a satisfyingly toothsome texture.  But still, folks seem confused and unfairly repulsed by it.

In most of the rest of the world, that's not the case.  In the traditionally warmer regions of the planet, where most of humankind dwells, it's a staple crop.  Easy to grow and productive, it's highly desired, even in its spinier forms.

Out in front of my little church, there's that Little Free Pantry, one that we started to supplement the traditional food bank in town.  Folks get hungry in the off-hours, after all.  It's taken off in ways we didn't anticipate.  In the last six months, with the support of the church and our friends in the community, twenty seven thousand pounds of food have been funneled through a cheery little bird-feederesque box.  We've set out coolers, too, and...notably...built a Little Free Produce Stand.

Because Poolesville Presbyterian sits in the heart of an agricultural reserve, there are plenty of folks who garden, and from their efforts produce an overabundance.  There are, similarly, many who have more resources than they actually need for their well-being.  When gardens produce more than we need, it shouldn't ever go to waste.

When there's an overabundance, the great sacred narrative of the Bible is real clear about how we are to use it.  More than you need?  Torah sez: don't squeeze every last drop out of the land.  We are called instead to be sure to set a portion of our efforts aside for those who have need.  From Leviticus 19, we hear:

When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the foreigner. I am the Lord your God.  

From Deuteronomy 24, we hear:  

When you are harvesting in your field and you overlook a sheaf, do not go back to get it. Leave it for the foreigner, the fatherless and the widow, so that the Lord your God may bless you in all the work of your hands. When you beat the olives from your trees, do not go over the branches a second time. Leave what remains for the foreigner, the fatherless and the widow. When you harvest the grapes in your vineyard, do not go over the vines again. Leave what remains for the foreigner, the fatherless and the widow.

And as the Law was woven by storytellers into narrative form, that becomes part of the defining mythopoetics of a culture.  The Book of Ruth recounts how Ruth the Moabite and her mother Naomi...a foreigner and a widow, respectively...gleaned from the fields of the honorable Boaz.  And Ruth and Boaz getting to know one another better was, as the story goes, how the lineage of King David.  Without the ethic of leaving something for those who have need, there is no Israel.  There is no messianic understanding.  It's kinda sorta important.

And in our grasping, Mammonist age, we've forgotten this.  We're encouraged to anxiously optimize, until everything we have is turned inwards, our energies like those of a collapsing star, hoarding light as it folds upon itself.

If my efforts serve me alone, if I maximize my profit at every turn and seek my own advantage without exception, then I have become an affront to the justice of God's covenant.  That's a sustained and basic moral imperative, if you understand the Bible as an authoritative text in your life.

That said, there's not a whit to stop you from doing more.  Gleaning can go deeper.  If you expand your plantings, you can do so with the explicit intent of feeding those who hunger.

And so I knew, when I planted all that okra, that I'd have my fill, and that come harvest time, I'd be bringing bag after bag of tasty nutritious pods to the produce stand.

They're gone within the half-hour, picked up by women driving cleaning service vehicles, or men driving pickups filled with lawn equipment.

And every morning, when I snip those pods, I recall that if I expect any blessing upon the work of my hands, I need to be that blessing.

A Covenant of Meat

It was time, once again, to get our van inspected, and so I found myself sitting on a metal chair by an inspection station in the middle of the day.  It being the heart of suburban Annandale, all around me was strip-mall paradise, asphalt roads and asphalt parking lots radiating the heat of the mid-August Midatlantic sun.

In the sliver of shade afforded by the gas station's eastern wall, I observed my surroundings.  They weren't exactly verdant.  

Broken concrete and potholes abounded, wrappers and plastic debris scattered about, the endless flow of cars up the four lane of the Pike, all of it an anti-Walden of metal and rush and ambient polluting particulates.  Above it all, a dirty blue sky and a fiercely pressing light.  It's a harsh and ugly world we have made for ourselves, an alien incursion into the lushness of life.

Yet life adapts.  In almost every crack in that hard harsh habitat, pressing through blacktop and concrete alike were stubborn grasses.  Their roots set down in soil that was little more than crumbled rock, their shoots and growth defying and breaking apart our constructs.  

Near my feet, there lay the remnants of an almost finished hotdog.  Fragments of bun and a nubbin of sausage baked grey-black by the sun, it was hardly the most appetizing thing.  But there came a fluttering of brown and tan wings, and the sparrows landed, first one and then another.  They were dirty birds, ragamuffin birds, the sort of crass ubiquitous generalists that aren't worth a birder's notice.

They watched me warily, but still set quickly about the business of living from our waste.  They aren't the only creatures that do so.  There's a roaming murder of crows in the neighborhood that makes its way dumpster diving.  There are countless rats that do the same, sharp-eyed rodents which hide away from our eyes, knowing we're eager to poison and kill them.  When the neighborhoods around the strip malls were heavy with cicadas, the rats came pouring in to feast.  There are tiny critters...roaches, ants, and flies...that are similarly flexible.

These are the sturdy creatures that seem well adapted to the current Anthropocene mass extinction event.  Just as weeds and the small generalists endured asteroid impacts and planet-wide belches of volcanism, they'll do whatever they need to stay alive and reproducing while human hubris burns across our little world.

Observing the fiercely focused energies of these creatures, I recalled something spoken in an ancient sacred tale.  Up on the mountaintop, the Lord spoke to Noah and his family, standing wobbly on their land-legs after their vomitous forty-day journey through the tumult.  There, God unilaterally made two peculiar promises.

First, that flesh could now devour flesh.  Unlike the mythic perfection of a peaceful Eden, suddenly we were in a covenant of meat.  All creatures would fear us, because all of them were now ours to devour.

Meat was back on the menu, boys.

But that meant that we, too, would be devoured by the creatures that we consumed.  Further, bloodshed was the now the fate of all who shed the blood of others.  As divine blessings go, it's mixed, sharply double-edged, the sort of blessing one might receive when wished upon the withered paw of a monkey.

The Noahic Covenant, in Torah, is a peculiar one for another reason.  Unlike other covenantal commitments in the Bible, it's not between humankind and the Creator.  It's between all living things and the Creator.

Not just humankind, but with everything that lives.  

"I will never again destroy all of you," said the I Am That I Am, and he's talking to every living thing.

Let it be noted: God doesn't say "any."   Just "all."  "I'm not going to destroy all of y'all" means an unsettlingly different thing than "I'm not going to destroy any of you."

It would be fair at this point to note that in Hebrew, the meaning of the word kol (כָּ ל).  Kol is what we translate into English as "all" in Genesis 9.  Kol can mean both "all" and "any," and Hebrew requires us to grasp the distinction from the context of the statement.  But the context is clear as crystal here, particularly as expressed in Genesis 9:9-10.  All means all.

And that means that for some flesh, destruction may be still be God's intent.

Which for "some" flesh...that which won't adapt, that which won't listen, that which won't acknowledge the real or the good, that which willfully ignores God's fierce insistence on grace and justice...is a rather notable caveat.

One must take care around any one-sided covenant written in meat.

A Nation without Shame

Don't ever let anyone shame you for who you are.

It's one of the axioms of our culture, so basic now that we take it divinely received wisdom.  Shame is just what people do when they're trying to control you, or put you down.  Love yourself!  Love everything about yourself!  Love your light and your shadow equally!  You're perfect!

This seems lovely, and affirming, and inclusive.  All of those things.

In some circumstances, these things can be true.

In Nadia Bolz-Weber's engaging 2019 book SHAMELESS, for instance, the case is made for stepping away from shame.  As she puts it:

“Christians should help one another to silence the voice that accuses. To celebrate a repentance—a snapping out of it, a thinking of new thoughts—which leads to possibilities we never considered. To love one another as God loves us. To love ourselves as God loves us. To remind each other of the true voice of God. And there’s only one way to do this: by being unapologetically and humbly ourselves. By not pretending. By being genuine. Real. Our actual, non-ideal selves.”

Shaming and mocking others is a significant human addiction, to be sure.  It's the entire business model of most influencers on X, and it's all too frequently used to bully, manipulate, and control.  What could possibly be wrong with being honestly, wholly yourself, and loving yourself unconditionally?  In the book, Bolz-Weber talks about needing to integrate every aspect of yourself, embracing the whole of who you are, and argues that shame is an impediment to that process. 

“In my pastoral work I've started to suspect that the more someone was exposed to religious messages about controlling their desires, avoiding sexual thoughts, and not lusting in their hearts, the less likely they are to be integrated physically, emotionally, sexually, and spiritually.”

And right there is where I am obligated to disagree.  If shame...anxiety over potential loss of status, wealth, or influence...prevents you from getting help in dealing with your mess, sure.  If you can't get started down the path to recovery and restoration because you fear people will think less of you, yeah, it's a problem.  

But that's a very very different thing from being shameless.  Because there are new things that are selfish, unexplored possibilities that are cruel and brutal, and you can be genuine by being genuinely evil.

Being shameless, I would contend, is the darkest form of toxic empathy.  Here, I'm not using that loaded term in the same way as the false "Christians" who have lately taken issue with caring for the poor and the stranger and the outcast.  Radical, unwavering, and complete love of neighbor is a Gospel imperative, and those clucking about feeding the hungry and showing hospitality to the foreigner are simply trying to justify their own ego-driven cruelty.  

At the same time, the most dangerous form of empathy is our own seemingly endless willingness to tolerate our own BS.  Compassion becomes poison when we constrain it with our selfishness.  It is toxic when we only feel our own pain, and only sympathize with those who are exactly like us.  Unwavering and shameless love of self is nothing more and nothing less than narcissism, and it wrecks lives.  It is purely amoral.

Morality...meaning our defining purpose, the governing ethogenetics by which we understand the good...is what integrates our personhood.   Just as pain and discomfort alert us to that which damages our physical being, shame alerts us to the damage we're doing to our souls when we act in ways that subvert our purpose.

Shame is our moral pain.  As such, it's not something we are to do to others.  It's a necessary aspect of our own ethical existence.

If and when I violate the moral teachings of Jesus...meaning the things he ACTUALLY TOLD US TO DO...shame is a healthy response.  If I harm another, if I lie or cheat or steal?  I feel shame.   When I find myself lustfully objectifying others, or am distracted by the trivial baubles offered up by consumerism?  I feel shame.  When my righteous anger devolves into blind and consuming hatred?  I feel shame.  

Those impulses are a part of me, sure.  I'm human.  Failure to acknowledge that would be fundamentally dishonest.

But those desires, uncontrolled, become my rotting edges, the parts of me that sabotage my growth in grace and justice.  They impede my life-purpose.  Like an untreated and gangrenous necrosis in a living system, they will spread in a soul until the soul dies.  They are fundamentally and essentially dis-integrative, and as such, they must...for a moral person...be debrided away.

Being truly shameless is the mark of the soulless sociopath, the bullying brute, the serial predator, the unteachable fool and the breaker-of-things.

This is true of persons.  It is also just as true of nations.

If a nation's only purpose is itself, it is just as amoral as the most venal narcissist.  Some, like 20th century theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, suggest that nations are inherently immoral.  As he argued in his seminal MORAL MAN AND MORAL SOCIETY, political collectives are interested only in their own constituent members, and are unable to make decisions that might go against their own power and wealth.

This is, apparently, America's national ethic now.  Brazen, self-glorifying, and utterly unwilling to acknowledge any error, we are becoming a nation without shame, blustering and shouting at the nations around us like a drunken reality show contestant.  

Our moral purpose is our own power and our own wealth, period, end of story.  We are told that to suggest otherwise is to be ashamed of America, and that we should instead glory in our greatness and our power.

If your moral purpose goes deeper than pride in national power, though, this feels like nothing more than collective narcissism.  For those of us who actually pay attention to the sacred stories of the Bible, and who understand that God relentlessly calls both persons and nations to account, this is just the teensiest bit troubling.

Because if you've spent even a few moments reading the Torah and the Prophets, or cracked open the Gospels and Epistles, you know that God has never had much patience with wanton and shameless nations.

Lord have mercy on our souls.

The Sweet Sticky Harvest

In my morning walkabout through my garden the other day, all was pretty much normal.  I knocked back some of the wild grape that's tangled throughout my sunflower patch, snipping away the choking growth.  I checked in on my butternut squash, which is starting to cure on the vine, the soft wan green tanning to faint yellow.  I watched bumblebees noodle about through the wildly abundant, sweetly pungent basil, which...as we're getting into August...I'm now allowing to bolt to flower.  No flower means no seed, and as I'm two years into basil that I've started myself, I'd kinda like to keep that pesto-fountain going. 

Finally, I went around harvesting okra pods with my best sharp steel scissors.  I've got two four by eight beds dedicated to that traditional Southern crop this year, and the pods are poppin'.  They sever with a satisfying snap, as real force is required to get through the thick stem.  The yield has picked up as the season has progressed. There's a nice fat gallon bag filled in the freezer, with far more yet to come.  Batter fried okra and bhindi masala awaits.

But as I moved to the second of the two beds, I noticed a shadowing on the leaves and flowers a single one of the plants.  Uh oh.  Okra is pretty resilient, but the truth of gardens is that everything in the world wants to eat them.  As I approached, my fading middle aged eyes only saw a dark stippled fuzz.  Fungal growth?  Perhaps.  I couldn't tell without my reading glasses, so I used my other senses. I reached out and touched the greyness with an index finger.  It was sticky.  I held my finger to my nose, and sniffed.  Sweet.

Not fungus.  Aphids.  Drat.  

I went and grabbed my glasses from inside, then peered at the leaves to confirm.  Yup.  Black Aphids, a great bumper crop of them.  They were sucking the life from the flowers, and were a grey living hoarfrost suckling on the shaded underside of the leaves.  

I'd had another species of aphid devastate several kale crops a few years back, but hadn't had these particular little devils about yet.   As I mused on how I might destroy them, I noted that the aphids weren't alone.

All across the thickly blighted leaves were hundreds of small black ants.  They streamed up and down the stalks.  They moved delicately across the dense masses of feeding aphids.  Ahah, I thought.  Farmers.  

Ants are remarkable for many things, and one of the peculiar outputs of their distributed social intelligence is insect agriculture.  Aphids poop out honeydew, a sweet sugar-rich byproduct of their digestion, and so ants will gather and tend herds of aphids.  Think teeny weeny dairy herders, and you're not far off.  They'll eat some of the aphids, too, and while I can't confirm they use aphid leather as clothing, I wouldn't put it past the industrious little beggars.   I'd never seen it in action before, not that I can remember.    

It's cool if you're an entomologist, but rather less so when you're a gardener.  

The more I looked, the more I discovered the aphids, dense on the flower clusters, or squirreled away by the veins of a leaf.  Everywhere, they were tended by ants. My early fall okra harvest was under threat.  I mixed up a spray bottle or two with a mixture of soap and water, which weakens the aphids.  I doused every one of their colonies, and let that set for a while.

Then out came the garden hose, set on "Riot Suppression."  I revisited their leafy pastures, and blasted the aphids bodily from the plants.  It was rather satisfying.  

Ants are great pollinators, and generally garden-friendly, but once they've brought their livestock to feed, they've crossed a line.  They're not working with me, but against me.  The plants so carefully placed will wither and perish under that excess burden.  In pursuit of their sweet honeydew harvest, ant and aphid alike are taking more than the garden can give, and no gardener is obligated to tolerate that.

As I rewound the hose, I found myself musing on the ramifications of that idea.  I glanced for a moment skyward.  Nestled in the sprawl of the 'burbs, where all is steel and concrete and sticky sweet hyperabundance, I looked at the August sky, the blue tinged by the haze of far-off wildfires.  I considered how much more we take than can be given.  How much more we have than is mindful.

For a moment...in my mind's eye, and all...I visualized a great nozzle in the heavens, clicking the nozzle to "jet."

It wouldn't be the first time.

Prayer, God's Will, and the Multiverse

We are tired of multiverses, because multiverses are exhausting.  Every variant of every narrative?  It's inhuman, unmanageable, utterly overwhelming.  We are creatures of linear space-time with a limited amount of organic storage in our sloppy noggins.  At a certain point, we have to stop considering every single freakin' possibility and just go with something, or we go nuts.

Disney and Marvel haven't quite figured this out yet, but having wrassled theologically with the concept of the multiverse for years, I'm quite aware of how inhuman it can be.  It can shatter the self, and unless approached with caution, be inherently dis-integrative.  

My faith is paradoxically both multiversal and orthodox, idiosyncratically heretical in ways that at many points in the history of the Christian faith would have resulted in my being turned into a human S'more, charred and crisp with a screamy filling.  

My sense of the reality of God...meaning my intellectual assent to God's transforming presence in my life...arose from my engagement with the idea of the Many Worlds.  There, finally, I found an understanding of existence in which God was both necessary and inescapable, where the Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans, Being Itself, and the Numinous had the elbow room they needed.  It's the beating heart of my practical theology.

Years ago, I expressed that journey in a book.  Who wants to read a book on faith and speculative physics written by a small church pastor?  Very few people, as it turns out.  

But...why does that matter?  It does not.

That theology still shapes and stretches me.

One struggle that I encounter in my faith comes at the foundation of my prayer life, as I speak the prayer taught by my Master.  "Thy will be done," I say, every morning as I rise, and I'll often pause to reflect on how beyond my grasp even that simple statement is.

God's will, from my theology, is everything.  Every. Possible. Thing.  The Divine Self-Expression, the Logos?  It's everything, as omniscience must be.  Everything that can be known is known to God.  God's thought is perfection, and perfection means completeness, eh?  Every joy, every sorrow, every delight, every horror, all of it is part of the Divine Will.

"Thy will be done," I pray, knowing that with all possible futures open, this could include terrible things.  

There's a possibility, every day, of my own failure and inadequacy.  Of my own death.  Of the suffering of those that I love.  It's the fundamental challenge that rises from our mortal freedom.  God knows what our most abject desolation looks like, and to God, that knowledge is as real as this very moment.

It's a grim, hard teaching.  But that, if I am honest to my spiritual intuition, is part of God's will.

If it weren't for Jesus, that knowledge could leave me anxious and fearful, or estranged and angry.  But the life and teachings of Jesus define God for me, and they press back hard against my doubt and my ignorance.  There are things God knows that we would best not know, as we were warned in Eden.  God is entirely aware of how far we can fall, and will allow us to fall farther than we can imagine.

But the Gospel shows God's simultaneous desire that we not partake of that knowledge.  

Our flawed wanting, our greed and lust, our resentments and hatred?  Our compulsive injustices, and our pathological gracelessness?  We are shown they might be overcome.  We can understand our smallness, and embrace Christ's mercy, and find in Jesus the nature of the Good.

I see in Jesus the fullness of what it means when God's love is made real.  When I pray for God's will in my life, that's how I understand it.  What is the most Christlike outcome?  Sometimes, that's healing or teaching.  Sometimes, it's forgiveness.  Sometimes, the cross.

All are God's will, and as I pray, I hold to that truth with fear and trembling.

Itch and Thistle

It was in the early spring of last year, reaching down to pluck a green bean, that I first got stabbed.  

It was an unexpectedly sharp pain in the pad of my thumb, not overwhelming, but decidedly unpleasant, like experiencing the ministrations of a nervous trainee phlebotomist.

I recoiled.  Had I been stung?  There was no swelling, no redness.  I popped out my reading glasses and peered at my thumb.  There was no evidence of a thorn, or a stinger.  The jab hadn't even drawn blood.

I carefully investigated.  Down in the dense foliage of the bed, amidst the fat and growing beans, I found the culprit.  A thistle, girded round about with needle-sharp thorns.  Next to it another, and another.  Further recon revealed that they were suddenly everywhere, and that they'd spread to most of my raised beds.

I'd not seen them in my garden before, but it didn't take long to realize where they'd come from.  We'd had a birdfeeder in our front yard, one we stocked and restocked with seed.  Among those seeds: thistle.  It had gone forth and multiplied.

Thistle is, viewed through a certain lens, a very desirable plant.  It feeds pollinators, which is a good thing.  With a whole bunch of effort and some heavy gloves, it can be eaten, particularly the roots.  Most importantly, it is Indigenous, or at least Field Thistle is, and as we all know, Indigeneity is axiomatically magical and virtuous.

But believing all those things won't keep it from stabbing you.  It has evolved to stab you, and any naive romantic notions of traipsing barefoot through grass where thistle is starting to establish itself will end in pain.  

Poison Ivy is a vigorous Indigene too, as a recent trip to Urgent Care with my swollen-faced 86 year old mother reminded me.  Toxicodendron Radicans also grows vigorously, feeds pollinators and birds, and slathers itself in urushiol, an oily compound that causes rashes, blistering, and anaphylaxis.  Were it a human, it would be the sort of human who violated international treaties on chemical warfare.

The thistle is back this year, and I don't hesitate when I encounter it. Wherever I see thistle or poison ivy, I destroy them.  I root up the thistle with heavy gloves and pointy metal implements.  I poison the poison ivy.  I give no quarter, and I hunt them down proactively. 

There are always souls who'd find reasons these plants and other creatures of similar stabby toxicity should be tolerated.  They're just being what they are, one might say.  They're part of Nature in all Her Beauty!  Live and let live!  Let everything grow!  Let a thousand poisonous, needle-sharp flowers bloom!  

This seems peculiarly abstracted from the reality of life.

I am not such a soul, nor do I feel that's my purpose in this beautiful, dangerous world.  I am as alive as they are alive, and our striving against one another is simply part of the order of God's creation.  

I appreciate my opponents, their vitality, their energy, the honed foil of their thorns.  But that doesn't stop me from rooting both itch and thistle from the garden of my tending.

A Diet of Desires

I was walking the dog on a Sunday afternoon when the anxiety hit like a thunderbolt.  Earlier that day, I'd preached on the omnipresence of marketing in American life, and how what we desire is a factor of powerful systems that manipulate our interests.  It folded in neatly with a talk about my book on prayer and our desires, and how we must learn to unwant the things that we are taught to want so very badly.

I'd cited a dollar figure on the scale of the American advertising industry, and even though I'd found it multiply attested earlier in the week, I suddenly got a bad case of the yips.  Did I get that number wrong?  Had I erred?  Maybe I'd mistyped it.  Maybe I'd misread it.

If I had, my mistake was likely not a rounding error.  Not off by two percent, not off by ten percent, but off by 100,000%.  The number was the total 2024 spending on advertising, which came in, averaging from various sources, at just a smidge over $500,000,000,000.  

America spent five hundred billion dollars on marketing in 2024, I declared publicly, while church folks shook their heads in amazement.  

Surely that was wrong.  It couldn't be right.  It's a staggering figure, a preposterous figure, one that I presented with confidence.  Had I made a mistake?

The dog did his business, and I slogged home, suddenly certain that I had catastrophically embarrassed myself.  I checked the numbers again.

There'd been no mistake.

Five hundred billion dollars, more or less, against a global total of one point one trillion.  

I didn't know whether to be relieved or re-horrified.  In context, it does make sense.  Americans see more advertising than any other culture.  It's that money that feeds Facebook, that feeds X, that feeds Google.  It's that money that fills our mailboxes with crap, that forces us to pause multiple times during a show, even if we've paid Bezos for the frickin' "privilege" of Prime.  We've been taught that ads are fun, that ads are cool and great and creative, but Jesus Mary and Joseph, that's insane.

For that price, we as a nation could have Medicare for all, and a fully funded USAID, and retool our economy to actually compete with the Chinese, and have a MoonBase, and be going to Mars.  But instead, we get...what?  We get a cotton candy nothing.  We're penned up and stuffed full of manufactured desires like foie gras geese or penned up veal calves.

None of it, not a bit of it, is necessary for the functioning of a healthy society.  Would we not remember to eat?  Would we forget that we need a roof over our heads?  Would our doctors not recommend appropriate medications?

Of course not.

Imagine an authoritarian regime that spent that much on propaganda, where that amount of energy was spent manipulating the hearts and minds of an endlessly anxious populace.

How is that not what's happening?

A Fierce and Joyous Voluntarism

Last year, my butternut squash really struggled.

Voracious chipmunks devoured the seedlings, necessitating multiple replantings.  Deer savaged the spreading vines.  It was a horticultural debacle.  I got a quarter of my usual yield.

This year, things are different.  I moved our bird feeder out of the front lawn, reducing the attraction for rodents.  I've been more diligent about applying deer spray.  

Out front, it's a riot of sprawling fan leaves and questing vines.  The most vigorous of my butternuts this season is, as it happens, not one that I planted at all.  It's a volunteer, one that came up early in a four by four raised bed where I'd intended to grow okra.  I didn't, at first, even know it was a butternut.  I could tell it was a squash of some sort, but that thumb-high sprout could have been zucchini, or perhaps a cuke.  Cucurbits...that's the common name for that family of plant...all kinda sorta look the same early in their development, at least to my amateur eye.

I thought about rooting it up, as I often will with volunteers.  I Had A Plan, after all, one that involved okra and not butternut.  But I had okra growing elsewhere.  Given the failure of my squash crop last year, I was inclined to give it a chance.  That, and if it turned out to be a butternut, it would have room to run, and butternut does the best when you let it sprawl out wild and free.

It was a butternut, and Lord, has it run.

It quickly leapt out of the bounds of the raised bed, as every single day the tendrils extended their reach.

  Its goal, best I could tell, was the sun, as it pressed due East towards the dawn.  The plant is now about thirteen feet long, the striving vines and sprawling leaves inscribing the shape of a beleafed comet onto the green of my yard.  Along those abundant vines, the glorious yellow blossoms have drawn a host of bumblebees, who will often fall asleep deep inside of the flowers, cozily cupped and pollen-drunk.  

From the female blossoms, with the help of the bees, a half-dozen squash have begun to form and fatten.  More than my entire harvest last year.

From just one plant, that showed up unexpected and was given the freedom to use its gifts.  This feels, as so much gardening does, flagrantly metaphorical.

There's a tendency amongst Professional Jesus People to assume that our task is to set agendas and establish plans and be all Leadershippy and stuff.  We are the prophets and the vision-casters!  We dream the dreams!  We know the knowledge!  Without the byzantine complexities known only to us professionals, poor hapless amateur Christians would wander around like little lost lambs in the great deep darkness.  

This is a spiritually dangerous assumption.  It's why we pastors overfunction.  It's why we're so prone to getting anxious, exhausted, and overwhelmed, as we take the entire weight of our local universe onto our shoulders.  It's why we can become megalomaniacs in microcosm, and get prone to doing things we oughtn't.  

Our pastoral task, instead, is mostly to encourage, inspire, and occasionally give some gentle redirection.  The vital and creative energies that keep our communities healthy extend far beyond our egos.  They rest within the souls who choose to give their time freely and joyously to music and mission, to service and care, to teaching and reaching out.

The best measure of a healthy church, as some of my choir folk so perfectly put it while chatting before the service this last Sunday, is that people want to be there together, pursuing a commonly held joy.

The heart of a vital and free society, as Alex of Tocqueville famously put it, is "..the art of pursuing in common the object of their common desires."

Without our fierce and joyous voluntarism, nothing good can stand.

The Big Beautiful Lie

The email came on the morning of the Fourth of July.  It was from the Social Security Administration.

In it, folks like me with a social security account were informed that we should celebrate and rejoice in the passing of the recent budget bill.  That bill eliminates taxes on a significant portion of social security benefits, which...according to Trump-appointed Social Security Commissioner Frank Bisignano, will do amazing things.

By significantly reducing the tax burden on benefits, this legislation reaffirms President Trump’s promise to protect Social Security and helps ensure that seniors can better enjoy the retirement they’ve earned.

Yay money back! Yay Trump! Promise kept! 

Problem is, it's all a lie.

The Trump bill, as enacted, pretty much guarantees that the Social Security Trust Fund will run out of money by late 2032.  That's seven years from now, kids.  One year of solvency has been sliced away, giving us one less year to deal with the future America has been putting off for decades.

Remember what you were doing in 2018?  For oldsters and my fellow middle-aged, that doesn't seem like that long ago.  Heck, I've had both of my current cars longer than that.

That's how much time we have.  In seven years, thanks to Donald J. Trump, Social Security runs out of money.  Benefits for seniors will be slashed by 25%.  There are ways around this, of course.  I mean, the easiest solution?  

Plan on being dead by then.  

But those of us who are still alive and have spent our working lives contributing to Social Security will all be royally screwed.  Don't believe me?  Read this report from the leftist socialist communists over at FoxNews.   Their opinion bull[horn] might be all in with the Big Beautiful Lie, but their business folk know what's coming.

Everyone knows it.  All of us have known this was coming for years.  

Even the liars and thieves who are trying to buy our favor with money they just stole from our future. 

Beans and Berries and Sweat on the Brow

This morning, as the sun crested the small rise to the East, I was out in my garden picking the last of the blueberries. 

 The day was going to be fiercely hot, stinky sticky smothering hot, with humidity in the eighties and real temperatures potentially cresting one hundred degrees Fahrenheit.  It's the sort of day when spending time outside is best done early, the sort of day when the heat doesn't dissipate with the setting of the sun. 

The last of the succulent deep-purple berries hung fat on my bushes, though, and my greenbeans were poppin', so there was harvesting to be done.  After walking the dog, drinking my coffee, and attending briefly to the daily mess of world news, I took a couple of shiny metal bowls out into the yard and started picking.

I'd already pulled a gallon and a half worth of berries off of our two bushes, and so there wasn't much left worth plucking.  Just about a cup of ripe fruit remained, the berries perfect and ready, popping off their stems with only the very lightest of effort.  The dull faint tink of each falling fruit against the bottom of the stainless steel bowl was pleasing to the ear, chiming to mark the sultry end of my blueberry season.  

Then it was on to my four by eight bean patch, where I squatted and plucked again, pinching beans from stems with thumb and forefinger.  My trusty old bush beans, seedsaved for nearly a decade, were starting to produce.  

As I picked, the heat continued to rise, and sweat prickled across my forehead beneath the shade of my hat-brim.  I felt the effort in my middle-aged thighs as I squatted, moving counterclockwise around the raised bed.  I peered into the dense interwoven foliage, gently parting it with my hand, eyes moving from bean to bean, my mind sorting between those that are ready and those worth leaving for another harvest later in the week.  About a half-gallon of beans today, filling my larger bowl.

It's simple work, physical and wholly engaging.  For forty five minutes or an hour before the heat of the day becomes too much, it's no great burden.  But for a whole day?  For eight hours, even with breaks?  It would be utterly exhausting, and the endurance required to work in the fields seems...to my flaccid suburban flesh...herculean.

Gardening, I reflected as I popped plump beans into my bowl, is a good reminder of what it takes to bring food to our tables.  It's the most fundamentally necessary labor, but also the labor that we've chosen to ignore as a society.  It's viewed as unworthy of our effort, as the most menial and lowly of tasks, to be performed by those at the very bottom of the economic food chain.   It is the work of migrants and the imprisoned, not that there seems much difference between those two categories in America these days.

That such labor is disrespected is an abomination.  That it is a thousand times less lucrative than dooping around with some AI-enhanced blockchain folderol seems a perversion of the order of things.  It's an inhuman and unnatural misvaluation.  As a substantial portion of our culture turns snarling against those whose sweat and strain feeds it, this seems a form of madness.  Is it seething resentment at our dependence, that we rely utterly upon the work of others, and that our "superiority" is nothing but a mask for our weakness?  Perhaps. 

Or perhaps we're just fools.

Perhaps we are as brimming with hubris as the Spartans, who imagined that their monomaniacal worship of Ares made them stronger than their slaves.  For without the humble helots who grew the crops and tended the livestock, all the martial disciplines of Leonidas wouldn't have kept him alive for a week.  Or are we like Midas, perhaps?  Are we about to break our teeth on grapes gone hard to our touch, feeling our thirst rise as we peer down at the unquenching metal of our Mammonists desire that now fills our glass?

A little less time in the false halls of golden delusion might clear our addled minds, and return us to right appreciation of the things that matter.  

A little more time in our gardens, with the fruit of the earth before us and sweet honest sweat on our brow. 

 

A Most Profitable War

So here's a thought, one that I've not seen pitched out in the bizjournals or propagated by the business-oblivious American Left.

As America starts dropping bombs on Iran, and Iran inevitably chooses to retaliate in the only way it can, there'll be disruptions to Persian Gulf shipping.  Iran's Houthi proxies will start lobbing antiship missiles at passing commerce.  Shia Iran will pitch ballistics at the wealthy Sunni petrostates, and we'll see burning refineries and damaged or sunk tankers.  

Even if we don't see that happen, the markets will price that potentiality into a barrel for a while.

So the cost of a barrel of oil will rise, as will the price at the pump.  That's not collateral damage.  I'm kinda sorta of the mind that this is a goal.  Meaning, somewhere, someone knows that war with Iran is in America's financial interest.

I mean, the primary goal is advancing the interests of Bibi and the Arab Petrostates, who are largely now aligned.  But as a secondary goal, rising oil prices are in the direct interest of American petroleum producers.  

Because right now, the United States of America is sitting on a huuuuuuge reserve of shale oil.  In Utah, Colorado, and Wyoming, we have the largest such reserve known to humankind.  It contains within it trillions of barrels, enough resource to keep us all burning carbon unabated for nearly a century.

But using that oil is very resource intensive.  It's a highly technical process, requiring substantial research and engineering, and thus has a far higher profit threshold than old-school oil drilling.  

If the price of oil, per barrel, is less than sixty five to seventy dollars?  Some production becomes unprofitable.  The farther below seventy bucks a barrel it falls, the more the business model for shale starts to collapse.  Below fifty bucks a barrel, it's time to shut down production.  You're spending more to get it out of the ground than you're making.

Three months ago, oil was running at $58 per barrel, meaning production was getting right near the edge of viability.

Now?

Now it's soared, up to nearly $75 a barrel, comfortably above the point at which domestic shale is commercially profitable.

For OPEC nations that traditionally drill, some losses and damage to production will be more than made up for by soaring profits.  For American production, this war could be a lifesaver.

Which is just such an odd, unpleasant business.

 

Nos Nunquam Movere

Nos Nunquam Movere, or so our informal family motto goes.  We Never Move.

This was not always the case.

As a Foreign Service brat, I moved every four years.  From DC to Nairobi, when I was a toddler.  From Nairobi back to DC, when I was about to go into first grade.  From DC to London, when I was in fourth grade.  From London back to DC, as I turned thirteen.  At eighteen, I moved to Charlottesville and college at UVA.  There, I shifted spaces every year.  One year in a dorm, and then three different rooms in my fraternity house.

After graduation, I moved to Williamsburg for a year to live with my fiance.  Then back in with my parents in Northern Virginia, where we lived for six months after getting married.  Then into an apartment in Arlington, followed by another three years later.  

We bought our home back in nineteen ninety nine, and the whole process came to a halt.  

Parties, or so Prince Rogers Nelson sang about the year we moved into Annandale, weren't meant to last, but we've lasted.  Twenty six years, we've called the same little suburban rambler home.  It was close to grandparents, when kids came along.  It's close to aging parents, now that the offspring are grown.    It's been right sized for us, cozy with four souls, spacious for two, walking distance to stores and restaurants, but kinda quiet.  Around us, the faces have changed, as neighbors have moved out, new neighbors moved in, again and again.  We remain.  Rache and I have both sacrificed the arc of our careers to the comfort of place, choosing again and again to remain.

This isn't the standard for Americans.  Here in this country, we move, on average, once every eleven years.  More when we're young, less as we age, but we're always on the go.  Always pulling up stakes, heading for better ground, always seeking greener pastures and new vistas.  

If you live that way, there's much that you gain, but there are also experiences you do not have.  There is much that you miss.  Your sense of connectedness to the land, and your ability to see the world changing around you?  That doesn't happen when you're in constant motion yourself.

When you set down roots, you see the wear of time, cast against longstanding memory.  You know the ebb and flow of seasons.  Sometimes change is for the good.  Sometimes?  Not so much.

There are a pair of towering poplars near our carport that simply weren't there when we moved in.  I remember when they were saplings, twenty years ago.  I considered cutting them down, but relented.  They're not nuisance trees.  They're indigenous and vital to the local ecosystem.  Now they reach sixty feet skyward, casting shade in the summer and providing sustenance to the few remaining butterflies.  They are good and lovely.  

But across the street and at the top of a small rise, the seamless green canopy that graced the neighborhood two decades ago is now irregular, where a score of chestnut oaks struggled and perished.  That was part of a mass die-off all across the Mid-Atlantic, one that played out over three-quarters of a decade.  Changing climate, dontcha know, as our world shifts fast enough that if you hold still you can see it.  

There are other benefits to remaining where one is.  One can think longer term, and taste the fruit of seeds planted many years prior, seeds both metaphoric and actual.  Thirteen years ago, I dreamed that my yard might one day be more than just an expanse of grass, and made my very first stab at growing a garden.  Today, I sit out on my sheltered porch on a misty morning, and see flowers and beans, tomatoes and squash and okra and a panoply of herbs.  Over three hundred square feet of raised beds, added in considered iteration over time.  Time is so necessary for growing things, and some things take more than a season.

More than a decade ago, I planted a couple of blueberry bushes just to the right of our front door.  Six years ago, I put two apple tree saplings into the ground in our front yard.  Five years ago, I put some asparagus rootstock into the soil of a raised bed, just to the left of our driveway.

It took three years for the asparagus to produce.  It took five for the berries to really start popping, and ten for me to figure out how to keep the birds away.  One of the apple trees, this year, is heavy with reddening Fujis. 

For the ancient Biblical prophets, the gift of patiently appreciating and harvesting from one's place was a mark of a just culture, and of the great blessings of God's purpose.  

When times are hard, the prophets proclaimed, you let roots run deeper.  Like Jeremiah, you buy that field, claiming a deeper stake in place and the potential of the future.  I have, as the prophet Isaiah promised, planted my gardens, and stayed long enough to eat of them.

A crisis might change this, I know.  The time will certainly come when mortality will move me to another shore.  But for now, I'll remain, and enjoy the pleasures of holding fast to what is good.

Father Timex

It's been just under two years since Dad passed away, and I'm still wearing his old Timex.

I took it off his cool lifeless wrist on the day that he died, and put it on my own.  It's told the time with reasonable accuracy ever since.  A simple mechanical watch serves many purposes.  Telling the time, of course, but other purposes that have value in our digital age.  It reduces the number of times per day I feel compelled to look at my magic devil box, which is a blessing.  It ticks audibly, as the mechanism physically marks away the seconds remaining in my own mortal coil.  This feels real and tangible, an analog actuality in a vaporware age.  It does one thing well, without distraction.  These are good things.  

That's not to say there aren't challenges with an old watch.

The watch will need a new battery soon, as the Timex IndiGlow (tm) feature for nighttime timekeeping has started to dim.  It's started slowing down a little bit, requiring readjustment through the little twisty knob on the side.  Again, a new battery is all that's needed. 

The primary fail-point, though, has been the band.  It's a simple leather thing, faded and worn.  The watch lug loops have given way multiple times, the leather yielding to entropy, the machine-stitching well past its functional lifespan.  I've been tempted, each time, to replace the band.  

I mean, it's a band.  Just a strip of cheap hide.  It's not expensive.

But like everything that matters, the watch isn't just about function.  It rested on my father's wrist for decades, and the band...being organic and slightly permeable...carries with it more of him than the metal watchbody itself.  It's stained and suffused with his sweat.  Some of his DNA, no doubt, is sequestered away in the folds and cracks of that old leather, as surely as it is in my own flesh.

Letting go of the band, or so my utterly illogical sentimentality dictates, is letting of a substantial portion of that intimate reminder of him.  So what to do, when that band fails?  

Given that my leatherworking skills are non-existent, I've taken the easy route, applying a classic Dad-fix to that memento of my own father: epoxy.  Just glue it back together.  It works, right up until it doesn't.

Last week, my most recent repair failed, and the watch fell from my wrist.  Undamaged, thankfully, but the whole leather lug-loop was gone.  There was nothing left to glue, nothing left to wrap around the bar of the lug.  This, I thought ruefully, might finally be the end of the band.  I let it set for a little bit, as I mulled my options.

A fierce sentimentality can be the mother of ingenuity, and time for reflection stirred a thought.  

The band was two stitched pieces of leather, and were I to carefully slice them apart and trim away one half, I could construct a new lug-loop.  Simply slice, apply epoxy, and boom.  It'd be back on my wrist.  Why not?  If it failed, I'd just sigh and get a new band.  If it succeeded, I'd still have that soft worn remembrance snug wrapped around my arm.

So I sliced it carefully, opening up the seams of the leather.  I whittled about the edges with the blade, and then...with vise and glue and time...remade what had failed.

This Father's Day, that old Timex still rests on my wrist.

Our Father

I was sitting at table with a group of fellow Presbyterians, where they were pitching out their reactions and thoughts around my recent book on reclaiming the Lord's Prayer.  It was an engaging conversation, and their frank comments and thoughtful ponderings made for some delightful back and forth.

During the discussion, one of the folks around the table started chatting about the very first chapter of the book.  It being a book about the Lord's Prayer and all, it tracks through that ancient prayer phrase by phrase, and the very first phrase is "Our Father."  Pater Hemon, in the Greek of Luke 11 and Matthew 6, although without the italics or capitalization, because common Greek didn't roll that way.

One of the participants, an Older White Gentleman, had something to say about that.  "I was struck," he said, "by that first chapter about fathers."  "I didn't think," he continued, with a mischievous grin on his face, "that we were allowed to use that word any more."

This, I will confess, did occur to me in the writing of the book.

It is the strong preference of my comrades in the Presbyterian People's Front to avoid male pronouns in the evocation of God.  Growing up in a very progressive church, this would typically manifest in prayer language that either centered the divine feminine or attempted to avoid gender altogether.

There's a strong and relevant truth to all of that effort, because YHWH ain't a male bipedal hominid.  We're not talkin' Zeus here, not some towering white bearded dude in a robe glowering down from His Obviously Anthropomorphic Throne.  Theological assumptions of male dominance or superiority rising from that language aren't to be tolerated.

I steer away from the use of gendered language to describe God myself, truth be told, and at no point in the book do I ever refer to God as "He."  Not even in the chapter where I talk about God the Father.  Not even once.

I also don't mind if folks want to use other terms to describe God.  So many other words and images point to the Divine Nature.  God is Love, of course.  And Light.  And a Consuming Fire.   If Scripture's cool with God being like a mother hen with sheltering wings, or telling us the Creator of the Universe can manifest as an incandescent shrubbery, then all bets are off.  You do you.

So in that spirit of inclusivity, I'm not of a mind to abandon the use of the word Father in prayer, because it, um, works.  It ain't inherently broke.  Is it perfect?  No.  Of course not.  No human language, none, can bear the full weight of God's reality.  We could theologically wordsmith until the end of time, and still not fully capture it.  Our efforts to use our categorical semiotics more precisely just ends up creating a muddled, clumsy tangle.

Were I to reword the prayer to my own heretical idiosyncracies, I'd be forced to acknowledge that "Our Numinous Omnipassible Multiversal Panentheist Reality Engine" just doesn't flow off the tongue.   

Father isn't that.  It's not an academic abstraction.  It's a concrete, actual, material relation that's comprehensible on a human scale.

And we human beings, with our propensities for overcomplicating our lives?  That can be helpful.