Falling Apart

It was that sort of evening.  I was planning on getting to bed at a Ben-Franklin-approved healthy-wealthy-and-wise hour.  I'd read until fatigue took me, and turned in as the rest of the family still puttered about the house.  It was nice and neat and just so, an evening that followed the natural order of household evenings.

But just as I reached REM sleep, our dog started having another seizure and fell down the stairs.  Which we were trying to deal with, when my older son announced that he was starting to feel lousy, and lo and behold, he was running a pretty substantial fever.  Ack, we went, running around as our orderly expectations came apart.

From order to chaos, in less than ten minutes.

Existence, or so we are told, bends towards disintegration.  Chaos is, we hear, the very state and nature of the universe.  Order degrades, and all descends to entropy.  Things fall apart, as the recently deceased Chinua Achebe reminded us.  The universe is slowly, surely, declining, as columnist Michael Gerson wrote in a particularly reflective recent op-ed.

These things are true, and feel ever the more true as the years progress.  Few things remind you more of the gradual degeneration of being from order to disorder than your arrival at midlife, as your body aches and sags and creaksaround.

Yet in the face of that, there's the reality of life.   Not my own life, but life itself, as we can observe it.  Life seems to drive fiercely and intentionally in the opposite direction.  Life moves from complexity to complexity, growing ever deeper and more sophisticated as it grows and evolves and adapts.  From random bitlets of protein to cells to multicellular organisms to social organisms, from the flail-around-till-a-mutation-sticks adaptive spamming of evolution to the intentionality of sentience, life shows a peculiar trend towards more and more elegant systems, as it tacks hard through the waters and winds of chaos.

Life moves, as it moves, against the flow of the second law of thermodynamics, in ways that appear to be non-random.  It is being, standing in relation to being, seeking cohesion and order and continuity and memory.  And knowledge.  And will.  And personhood.

It is possible, I suppose, to consider sentient life as an anomaly, just a swirling eddy in the great current of entropy.

Or it could be something more.  Something that must be part of the system, and that arises from the great completeness of all being.

From purpose.   Or so it feels, even after those times when things have fallen apart.

The Sweet Song of Chaos

For the last few months, I've been listening to just one playlist as I bustle about in our car, shuttling kids from one place to another.   Just one.

It's on an old iPhone, one that's had the sim card removed and every app and image deleted.  In their place, just audio files, thousands and thousands of songs.  I renamed it "Daddy's Tunebrick," turning it a single function device that only exists to store and listen to music without the bother of having calls or texts interrupt my listening pleasure.  

Hey...that sounds like a great idea for a product!  I wonder if anyone at Apple is thinking about such a thing.  Hmmm.

Anyhoo, my Tunebrick has one playlist at the moment.  That playlist is the whole of my music collection.  All of it, every single sound file I possess, set to random play.

Which means, as I drive along, I never know exactly what is coming up next.  If I'm not in the mood for what entropy serves up, I just punch the steering wheel control with my thumb, and we're on to the next thing.  It's not always music.  

Sometimes it's sound effect MP3s, gunshots and explosions that my son downloaded for use in videos.  Sometimes it's the Hebrew teacher who prepared my boys for their bar mitzvahs, teaching and singing her way through a piece of a torah-reading.  It's random. Really and truly random.

Like last night, as I drove my younger son back from his drum lesson.

We clicked through a couple of things, and then listened to a random mp3 from a sound-pack of faux movie trailer voiceovers.  "THERE WAS JUST ONE MAN," intoned the announcer in a rumbling basso, at which we laughed.  We then segued into Pink Floyd's Comfortably Numb.  We sang along to that, he and I, as Floyd is his favorite band in the entire universe.  After we'd finished with that, entropy served up the theme song to The Love Boat.

We sang along to that, too, because it's just a bucket of delicious seventies cheese, and when that was done, the universe decided to pitch us Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C Sharp Minor.

"I love this way of listening to things," my son said.  "It's like it's a game whenever we're in the car.  You never know what's coming next."

Just like life, I thought, in a Forrest-Gumpy sort of way.  Just like life.

Syria and the Strange Blessings of Chaos

I'll admit it.  I didn't watch the speech.  I rarely watch speeches, or speeches responding to speeches, which is a peculiar thing for someone who gets up and talks in front of folks on a weekly basis.  Perhaps it was all those years of dutifully watching State of the Union Addresses, which have soured me on political yammering.  Plus, I'm in the thicket of reading World War Z, and I'm not about to put down a page turner to listen to someone telling me something I already know.

In reading this morning's summations, Obama said, well, what I'd thought he was going to say.  My Fellow Americans.  Horror.  Pursue all options.  The strike is on the table.  International control of chemical weapons might stay our hand. For now. Justice, responsibility, international community.  God Bless America.

Honestly, though, in the mess that Syria continues to be, what has caught my attention the last day or so has been the peculiar way in which a potential resolution has manifested itself.   As this crisis has unfolded, one consistent theme has been the frustratingly amorphous response from the United States.

Here inside the Beltway, there was about a week of talking head handwringing about the scattershot and vacillating "messaging" from the Administration.  Where do we stand?  What's going on?  We seem to be going to war, and yet there seem to be a dozen different perspectives coming out of the White House.  It was maddeningly chaotic, disorganized, and seemingly at odds with itself.

This was perhaps most frustrating to Republicans, who found themselves without a clear thing to stand in opposition to.  How can you reflexively disagree with someone if they won't clearly tell you what it is that you don't believe?

And yet it had struck me as a frustrating but peculiarly appropriate response.  In times where the response is obvious and the path was evident, clarity and decisiveness is vital.  But this was not one of those times.  Faced with a situation with no clear outcome and no apparent "good" path, bold certitude is the response of a fool.  "I really have no idea of the implications of what I'm doing, but I'm going to commit to it completely" may appeal to folks who view the universe in binary terms, but nine hundred and ninety two point three seven five times out of a thousand that just takes you deeper into the [excrement].  On the side of that path lie the ruins of countless relationships, businesses, and nations.

So things moved slowly and circuitously, and direction seemed hard to discern.  The threat of a strike was clearly there, but the path towards it seemed unclear.  When?  How?  Huh?

Then, out of a vacillating thicket of seemingly contradictory policy statements, there came one that opened up a possible out for Assad.  Turn over your chemical weapons to international authorities, and this could be averted.   Suddenly, a brokered deal seems possible.  America's military engagement may yet be averted, and the core goal...preventing the use of chemical weapons...may be preserved.

"May."  It's not a sure thing.  Not by a long shot.  Syria is still a mess, and will be even if their sarin is secured by the UN.

But this week, there is suddenly an opening that was not there last week.   From a cloud of terrible options, a better path seems to have appeared.

And the strange irony is that in this instance, a seemingly chaotic response to a chaotic situation seems to have created the potential for order.

Why Love Wins

My reading list is insane.

Here, I'm not complaining about how many books are in the holding pattern.  I'm saying, "It's insane," as in, DSM-certifiable.   Having just dispatched statistician Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise, I'm now most of the way through Blaise Pascal's Pensees.  Pascal is flawed but undeniably delicious, a delightful mind whose prose shimmers with a salon-sharpened wit.

The next book in the rotation?  A pastel-covered book by popular bestselling Christian author Stormie Omartian.  It's titled The Power of a Praying Cat, or something like that.   And yes, that's her real name, although I'm invariably tempted to write that surname O'Martian.

And then?  Then on to Rob Bell's Love Wins.  See?  Totally crazy.  Wild!  Wanton!  Utter chaos!

That last one I've been meaning to read for a while, particularly as my little church handed Bell's book out to our graduating seniors as they went off to college.  It seemed useful, a gracious and rational counterbalance to the callow dorm-room anti-theism they're likely to encounter.  But I hadn't read it.  Mostly, I've read reviews, some fluffy support, some raging bile, others more measured and balanced.

What intrigues me from my pre-reading, though, is that while Bell makes the theological case for the victory of God's love over all things, he doesn't appear to make the leap into the created order.

Of course we want love to win.  It's love, dammit.  But does it?  If we look out at the world, it often doesn't appear to be the case.  Love is for the weak and the bleeding hearts.   Love gets its [butt] kicked after school.  Love is cut down by AR15 fire as it puts itself between the children and the shooter.  And the kids still die.

Look out at the world.  It's red in tooth and claw, savagely Darwinian and seemingly loveless.  Partisanship wins.  Snark wins.  Hate wins.   But love?  Is there a rational case for the victory of the compassion that is at the heart of what Jesus taught?

Here, my wildly profligate reading has stirred a thought, one I'm chewing over in my mind.   Love wins because love is stronger.   Love is much, much stronger.  Why?

Because love can adapt, and hate cannot.   Love can change, and hate cannot.

A sentient being governed by love as a defining principle will approach another being as having something to offer.  It will encounter a new reality as a new opportunity.   If you love another, you can see from their perspective, moving beyond the confines of your subjectivity into a place in between.  We don't do that perfectly.  The existential walls between us are high.   But we can, nonetheless, get there.  With a little help, sure, but we can get there.

The individual governed by love does not exist wholly within themselves.   They may not embrace everything they encounter, but they're open to new things in every encounter.  That means that when the [poop] hits the fan, they're smart enough to duck, or to at least to close their mouths for a moment.

Love learns.  It grows.  It adapts.  It does not cling to biases.   That means that when the world changes, Love is ready.

Hate?  Hate doesn't do that so well.  Hate only knows one thing: itself.  A being governed by hatred is a being ruled by the self it already knows.  Difference and the Other are to be destroyed or subjugated.  Hate defines itself by rigidly clinging to what it is.  Hate wants power.  Hate wants control.  It seeks to dominate the world, to force the entire universe into the narrative of itself that is the only thing it is willing to hear.

And when it encounters the deep complexity of God's creation, hate rails and snarls and lashes out.  But what hate does not do, because it can't do it, is change.

Eventually, that means that hate is either destroyed by the change to which it cannot adapt or devoured by itself.

Love is what it looks like when sentient beings succeed.  Hate?  Hate is the defining feature of failed individuals, and doomed cultures, and species that have flirted with sentience and then regressed.

Lord help us.

Sabbath, Chaos, and Control

As I continue on through Bill McKibben's difficult, disturbing Eaarth, my reflections on Maryann McKibben-Dana's (no immediate relation) book about Sabbath continue to echo about in my head.

One of the threads that repeated several times in that thought-provoking book was the idea of Sabbath as that place where we permit chaos to enter.  Sabbath becomes that place where we stop pouring ourselves into the structures that frame our lives, the schedules and demands and expectations that leave us continually anxious, ever behind, always stressed and struggling.  It is energy, not form.  It is freedom, not order.

I feel that, but I found myself wondering if it is something else.  A Sabbath day is not random, and it is not disordered.  It is free, yes, but when I take sabbath time...long meditative walks, times to write or draw, times to read and grow...they do not feel like chaos.  They feel calm.  They feel serene and ordered and at peace.

It's a different order.

The structure of sabbath matches the intent of creation.  Our crazy, competitive, acquisitive stresstival of striving does not.   It is a poor match for the Creator's intent.  It feels like chaos, or at least like a structure so poorly suited to change that it shakes us violently, tossing us about as it itself is tossed.

What does striving look like?  What does sabbath look like?  My mind went for visuals.   And as I thought that, I found myself drawing out an image from a movie, as I often do.   It was from the movie "Contact," a delightful bit of hard sci fi direct from the mind of dear ol' Carl Sagan himself.

In the scene, Jodie Foster is being sent to meet with extraterrestrial intelligences that have contacted humanity, in a device whose design has been provided by those intelligences.  Humanity has made one modification to that design:  the command chair in which she sits.

That chair, my metaphor-mind suggested, is our scheduled life.  And sabbath?  Sabbath arrives at the three minute mark of this little video snippet.

Thieves, Dust, and Ashes

Today was supposed to be the day I started back in again on my book.  Having been distracted by doctoral work for the last three months, I've been eager to get back into my half-finished manuscript on multiverse cosmology and theology.

Excited, even.

But this weekend, as I ran a quick errand, someone broke into my van.  The bag they took contained not only the laptop I'd been using to write, but also...because I was intending to work that morning...the backup drive I'd been using to back up the manuscript.  And the almost-finished last paper for my D. Min. program.  And my sermon.

The sermon was rewritten.  The hardware can be replaced.   But six months and 25,000 words vanish.   They're still out there somewhere, on the laptop that's likely now being reformatted for sale on Craigslist, or on the $8 USB flash drive that was undoubtedly tossed away as basically worthless, along with my study bible, my notes from the D.Min. classes, and my Book of Common Worship.  

But functionally, they're gone.

What strikes me, in reflecting on it, is how utterly they're gone.  I remember what I wrote, more or less.  Yet those words as they were can now be shared with no-one.   The images, the reflections, the concepts?  They simply no longer exist.  That book will not come to be, not even on Kindle and Nook.  It has flown forgotten as a dream, as the old hymn goes.   Like tears in rain, as the Apostle Roy Batty put it.  

And so, like Sisyphus on a day the gods were in a hurry, I stand only halfway up the mountain, the ashes of my labors crumbling chaos-blasted in my hands.   But as I trudge back down to the base of that familiar hill,  I find myself surprised at how not-upset I am.   Shouldn't I be gnashing my teeth, storming around, weeping and rending my clothing?  

Nah.  I'd spent the whole first week of Lent reflecting on the need to be prepared for the reality of our mortal existence, and so it just...well...let's just say it worked really neatly into the sermon I'd already conceptualized.   My dear little church was most supportive, and I appreciated that.   

If our faith provides anything, though, it is the understanding that while as mortal beings we cannot control what happens beyond the span of our own flesh, we can choose how we respond to what we face.   I'll just begin again, once I've re-written that paper.  

And it was fun to write the first time, so...well...I'll just find joy the process of writing it again.

iPhone Scripture

In the midst of the whirling chaos of cascading failures that was our worship this last Sunday, I found meself with a conundrum.

As the anthem faded and our Youth/Lay Pastor came up to read the first scripture, I was scrambling to get my MacBook to communicate correctly with the little Dell projector that had been brought in to replace the failed Sony projector. A few tweaks and twiddles were all that needed to happen, and when it was done, things were more or less copacetic, even if the images weren't quite working well. The Keynote was good to go.

With the first reading almost under way, I looked to my right for my old worn well-loved study Bible. It was at that point that I realized that my old worn well-loved study Bible had not accompanied me into the sanctuary. It had remained on my desk in my office as I spent the morning frantically trying to figure out why the church didn't have any heat.

Erk.

Not having memorized the passage for the day, I had...well...forty seconds to find a Bible. I looked around for another Bible, but the extra I'd left behind the lectern for emergencies had somehow wandered off. The bible to my left was in Korean. No dice there.

I now had thirty seven seconds. Do I make a dash for my office? No. Fleeing the sanctuary right before the sermon generally doesn't look..pastoral. Do I wander out into the pews in search of one of the pew bibles? Seemed too random, and most of the bibles were in folk's hands. Do I run over to one of the worshippers, wordlessly snatch their Bible, and scamper back to the lectern, cackling mischievously? Entertaining, but possibly counterproductive.

I fumbled in my pocket for my iPhone, popped it out, and hit Safari. Twenty seven seconds. I called up the bookmarked website of my church. Twenty two seconds. I tapped "Scriptures of the Week." I tapped the link to this week's readings. Fifteen seconds. As the microscopic text appeared on my touchscreen, I touchscrolled down, then did that little unpinchy thing to make the passage legible. All was copacetic, with seven seconds left to spare.

And thus I became one of those hipster pastors who read their Bible verses from an iPhone during worship.

Innocent Chaos

It was, by all accounts, a mess of a Sunday.

I arrived an hour and a half before worship, and as I was doing my morning rounds to unlock doors and turn things on, I found the church utterly without heat. It was going to get pleasant later in the day, but the morning was cold, and so was the church. A quick trip to the boiler room and some futile twiddling of emergency override knobs yielded nothing. I put in an emergency call to our HVAC company...but there was no way they could get there before the service. Fiddle.

Right before the service began, our projector punked out. Which means no lyrics to praise songs, and no way to project the Keynote presentation that framed my message. Gah.

A small backup Dell portable projector was secured, but it didn't work quite as well. Nor did it want to be friendly to my MacBook Pro when I hooked it up. There's nothing like knowing you've got two minutes to resolve a hardware issue to focus the mind.

After worship, I encountered a member of my church and a member of our struggling Korean sister church talking in animated Korean over by our abandonware organ. Apparently, someone had hung a large painting from our unused high pulpit. No-one knew who was responsible for it. It was a bright melange of swirling simple shapes and colors on a decent sized canvas. I thought it was rather pleasant. The church folks seemed perturbed by it. Perhaps, one of them suggested, it might be...demonic. Sigh.

As the day wore down, and I prepared to run this month's food collection by the local food pantry, I encountered a young man wandering the church. When I asked him if I could help him, he said he'd like to "meet the owner." I told him I was the pastor, and we began to talk. He was a bit disheveled, but bright-eyed and smart as a tack. He was also clearly schizophrenic. I'm cool with that, as ministry with folks whose minds are wired waaay differently from the norm has been a major part of my life.

As I shared a little fellowship with C, he shared that the painting was his, and that Jehovah had told him to donate it to the church. Well, it wasn't a painting, said he. It was a spell. He had named the spell Innocent Chaos, and it represented the way in which everything is simultaneously distinct and yet interwoven and interconnected. "Things don't know they're working together, but they are," said C. He offered to help me carry our food donation to my car, and on the way we talked about art. He told me he thought all art requires us to make a leap of imagination, to open ourselves to seeing multiple meanings and other perspectives beyond our own preconceptions.

I told him that wasn't just an issue for appreciating art. It's the great problem most human beings have, our inability to see past ourselves and being able to view the world with another's eyes. "Yeah," said C. "Jehovah tells me that's the demon you're fighting with."

Not quite the way I'd have put it, but not really wrong, either.