What We Inherit

As I've continued to talk to folks about their sweet, small, churches, I've had a whole bunch of interesting conversations with folks whose experiences of church are local, intimate, and sustained.  I recently chatted with Pastor Mary Harris Todd, who's been with Morton Presbyterian in rural North Carolina for thirty six years.  She and I discussed what it's like being embedded in a little community for a big chunk of your life, but also what it means when you've lived a biblical generation with a single group of folks.

One of the most peculiar things about sticking around a church for a while is that you get to watch kids grow up. As they grow up, and that brief season of childhood fades like dawn before a rising sun, it becomes more and more obvious how they resemble their parents. Meaning, I’ll be looking at a teen, and watching them talk with their parental unit, and all of a sudden I’ll see all of the features they share. A forehead. The set of a chin. A vocal inflection. And then I’ll see the other parent, in the eyes, in the smile, as our innate capacity to recognize faces susses out the roots of that young adult’s uniqueness.

Like those moments where we look at ourselves in the mirror, and we see our mother or our father. Dear Lord, I’ll say. I remember Dad looking like that.

Heritability is a blessing, but in other ways, it can be something a little less desirable. We can inherit Scots Irish alcohol tolerances, or anxieties, or a volatile temper, or a genetic predisposition to cancers or heart disease.

There’s been some discussion over the past few years about the possibility that we might also inherit trauma, that the complex system of hormones that activate and engage our genetic code might mean our genes are changed by moments of extreme stress. That concept is called epigenetics, and there’s a whole lot of discussion about the possible ways that 1) we can intentionally shape the genes we pass down through certain positive actions…genemaxxing! and 2) we might be ensnared in cycles of inherited trauma, as generation after generation are warped by the horrific experiences of blood ancestors.

The idea that we’re forever trapped in the dysfunction of our ancestors can be a powerful one.

It can feel like we are sometimes, like things can never improve, like we’re eternally trapped in cycles of war and hatred, of greed and collapse. Among the Hebrew people, there was once a saying.

“The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” The people of Judah believed their parents had done wrong, and that they were doomed to forever suffer because of it. They were convinced that the loss of their land and their enslavement in Babylon was God’s punishment.

It meant there was nothing they could do. What was the point? There could be no escape for them. They were trapped by what had gone before. The taste of inherited sin lingered in their mouths.

Wild, bizarre, crazy Ezekiel challenged this hopelessness. He proclaimed God’s word that sin is not something that lingers, not something that God holds against a people in perpetuity. God does not condemn a people for things they hadn’t done.

The same challenge rises from the Prophet Jeremiah. Jeremiah lived through the same period of history as Ezekiel, and had exactly the same divinely inspired response to that lingering despair. “Stop saying that,” says the Lord.

God does judge us, sure. God judges us right now. What are we doing, right now? Are we still making the mistakes of the past? Then we’ll be called on that. Have we turned away from them, embracing grace and justice and righteousness? Then God will see the turning of our hearts and the changing of our minds, and will embrace us in return.

That sense of hopelessness that those two prophets battled wasn’t just restricted to ancient Judah. Many of us bear within us that same despair...either consciously or subconsciously. We feel trapped by our past, trapped and condemned by things that have come before. We look at those we love, and imagine that they, too are trapped by the past that we have lived.

This happens in so many ways. How can I ever make it work? We can feel trapped by the expectations of our culture, channeled into broken ways of living that we know are wrong but feel we cannot escape. You look at your life, and say “This isn’t the life I wanted...but there’s nothing I can do.”

We are, or so we tell ourselves, the offspring of our pasts.

Old angers, old biases, old jealousies and conflicts and bitterness, those things become our sinful parent, and it is too easy for us to imagine our future as that doomed child of our own former sourness, trapped forever by the way things were, our future preordained and utterly without hope.

That flavor of bitterness, that sense of being pinned under the weight of your past, that is not what God desires for any of us. We are each called instead to cast aside that saying, to refuse to let the past turn us from the future that we are each called to discover.

That, I think, is the challenge with concepts like epigenetics. That is, beyond the fact that the research is interesting but scant, and most of it doesn’t make anything like the broad sweeping assertions about its effect that come from online wellness influencers and those whose ideology drives them find a physical mechanism for generational trauma.

Thing is, there doesn’t need to be a physical mechanism.

There are plenty of ways that our culture passes along brokenness, trauma, and dysfunction, without having to promote the idea that it gets burned into our genes. The burned-in biases in our economic and cultural systems, if we are not wary, can become power serving power, trapping people in the condition of their parents and grandparents, setting firm bounds around who we can be and what we can do.

In the face of that, Ezekiel declares that we all remain free, free to set our own course away from the challenges of our own past.

We can acknowledge who we were, celebrating those moments of joy but at the same time letting the truth of our failings be a place of learning.

Predestination and the Garden

It came up in conversation with a prospective new member, as we talked about what it means to be Presbyterian.

"What about predestination," she asked, because it's one of those doctrines that tends to float about when we Frozen Chosen come up.  I answered that it didn't matter all that much as a teaching, particularly where church membership was concerned.  I also answered that it wasn't much of a priority for Presbyterians these days, at least not in my neck of the denominational woods.

That doesn't, of course, mean that I've not thought about it, or that it's a meaningless thing to consider theologically.   I've thought about it a great deal.  And as sometimes happens when you approach something with an open mind, my perspective on it has changed.  It has changed pretty radically, over the last couple of decades.

I no longer view God's work as linear, because as best we can tell, it isn't.  There's not one destiny, one path along which we move.  Creation does not move like a train along a track or a thread unspooling.  That seems, to be frank, both cruel and radically limiting to God.  What sort of king can only see one path, or one outcome?

It's more complex, more open, deeply free.  Creation has room within it for meaningful change.  What is this like?

I was thinking this as I walked my dog in the cool of the morning.  I wake before the dawn, and take her out as my highschoolers are leaving for their bus.  Summer is slowly yielding, and so the air at daybreak now has a little bite to it, enough that my boys bothered putting on their hoodies.

My dog snuffled around, as she does every day, tracking here and there, following scents, doing her business.

At one house, the grass had not been recently cut, and it stood slightly taller and heavy with dewfall.  She sniffed and snuffed, and wandered out to the extension of the long, long leash-reel.  I watched her move across the lawn.  As she sniffed, she began to lick, tasting the cool water that played across every blade of grass she passed.  There was playfulness and pleasure in her simple action.  Were I a dog, I'd find the taste of dewy grass delightful too.

And as she moved, she left a path behind her, as the moisture on the grass was disturbed.  It was a single squiggle across the "surface" of the yard, written across the dew.

There were, in that yard, so many different possible ways she could have crossed it, so many different   potential tracks.

And that, I think, is a fair analogy for how I think about predestination these days.  God's work is the garden, and every path we might take through it.  It includes the path we take, but it also includes countless others untaken.

Playing Like Jesus

After a long, long hiatus, this last week I've been taking my downtime and catching up on my gaming.  There's not been much new out there for consoles since the market began the transition to the next gen.  I'm not there yet, as I'm not motivated to drop a few hundred bucks on something I don't really need.

Instead, I'm going back, and playing games for the PS3 that I missed the first time out.  In this case, I'm finally getting around to the Mass Effect Trilogy.

I'd heard great things about the game when it came out for Xbox 360.  It was complex, and well acted, and well scripted, a wholly immersive space-opera that didn't make you check your mind at the door.  But I had a PS3, so I was--for years--just out of luck.  Now, though, I've remedied that.

Most interesting, to me at least, were the wildly different ways the story arc could play out.  This went beyond the roleplaying game standards, in which your character--a highly customizable version of a protagonist named "Shepard"--could be equipped and developed in myriad ways.

It was that the moral choices within the game completely changed the story.  There've been many games like this before, among the most notable being the gorgeous landmark fantasy game Fable, or the classic Star-Wars milieu Knights of the Old Republic.  But Mass Effect feels like it takes that to a deeper level.

Mass Effect plays that out through a relatively simple system, a dialog wheel that comes up whenever you're in communication with others.  There, in front of you, is the more gracious response, the neutral response, and what is typically an amusingly cruel smackdown.

If you play the Renegade side, hard and selfish, butchering enemies and bullying subordinates, and seeking advantage and wealth at every turn, it'll shape your story.  Certain avenues will open up, and others will close.  

If you consistently choose compassionately, trying to do as little harm as possible and showing mercy and a commitment to justice, the game plays out very, very differently.  Doing the right thing does not always get you out of conflict.  You can't always save every relationship, or insure that every friend and companion survives.  But going Paragon does make a difference.

Those choices run deep, and have a cumulative effect.  They create patterns of relationship that sustain through the whole of the first game, then are uploaded into the second, and then the third.

How do I play?  When I play these games, I find that I don't want to "act out" being cruel.  I just don't.  I'm not really even curious to see what might happen if I did.  My would I be curious? I know what that looks like, bitter and resentful and oppressive.  Why would I want a story to play out that way, if it doesn't need to?  I get enough of that in the news, and in the bitterness of virtual shout-fests.

It's not quite that easy in our day to day exchanges, those moments when we connect to others.  We don't have a convenient moral dialogue wheel that hovers in the air in front of us to guide us, although perhaps there's an app in the works for Google Glass that might remedy that.

But then again, perhaps it really is that easy.  We know our hungers and our angers and our resentments, and how those make us speak.  We also know, in part, that best self that we're called to be, and what it looks like when we act in accordance with that grace.

It's a bigger and infinitely more complex choice wheel, and a wildly more intricate story.  But as we shape our small corner of it, what we have to do is be intentional about making that right choice, every time it presents itself.

Abortion and Passivity

The recent slaying of a doctor who provided abortion services resurfaced something that has always troubled me about the pro-life movement. Without question, the vast majority of pro-lifers oppose murdering doctors and clinic workers. Killing other human beings is in direct opposition to the life-ethic that those who oppose abortion espouse, and it's certainly antithetical to the core teachings of Christian faith.

Where things have always seemed peculiar is in the disconnect between the rhetoric of the pro-life movement and the way that movement articulates itself socially and politically.

Abortion is, in the language and frameworks of the pro-life movement, murder. Though there aren't plain-text scriptural grounds for conservative Christians who make this assertion, folks who hold this worldview understand abortion as the intentional slaying of another human being. It is also something that is systematically practiced, making it...again, in the language of the pro-life movement...akin to genocide. Doctors who routinely perform abortions are mass murderers. A society that tolerates and permits abortion is engaged the moral equivalent of eugenic cleansing, no less horrific than the eugenics of the National Socialist movement in the 1930s. For those within the movement, these aren't hyperbolic straw men. These are the core ways in which American conservatives articulate their opposition to abortion.

What I can't quite grasp is how the pro-life movement as it has existed over the last several decades can believe all of these things and be as...well...passive as it is. The vast majority of folks who believe that all of the statements in the previous paragraph are an accurate description of reality are just going about their day-to-day lives. They might write a letter or two to their congressman annually, provide funds to pro-life organizations, have a bumper sticker, or occasionally show up at a demonstration. But they are otherwise indistinguishable from everyone else.

This strikes me as odd. Why? A recent Gallup poll indicated that for the first time, slightly more Americans self-identify as pro-life than identify as pro-choice. Within the pro-life group, those believing that abortion should be illegal under all circumstances represent 23% of the population. Applying that percentage to the baseline number of voters registered in America, that means that around 38 million citizens believe that abortion is wrong in all circumstances, and that it is...well...murder.

Yet though tens of millions hold this position, there is no similarly massive campaign of peaceful civil disobedience. Rotating teams of tens of thousands of protesters aren't engaged in 24-7 non-violent physical resistance. Our local jails aren't filled with conservative moms and dads and teens who have laid their bodies down to physically block access to clinics in which they believe mass murder is being perpetrated.

If a nearby orphanage was regularly culling unwanted children, or if Sunrise Retirement Communities had a cost-benefit-termination clause for the elderly, I'm fairly sure I'd be both outraged and active...even to the point of getting arrested. The lives of other human beings are worth it.

Being arrested is, admittedly, both unpleasant and inconvenient. Folks have to go to work to provide for their families. Kids need to be home schooled, or taken to Young Life programs. Prison time gets in the way of those things.

But how you can on the one hand believe that millions upon millions of innocent human beings are being murdered and on the other be...well...doing basically nothing about it...has never computed.

As reprehensible as yesterday's killing was, it seems in its own horrid way more coherent than the strange acquiescence of those who talk a great deal about abortion or nod their head when their pastor laments about it, yet go about their lives as if that doesn't actually mean anything to them.

A Sign of The App-Ocalypse

One of the more peculiar little apps that you can buy for your iPhone these days is something called "Pocket God." It's a tiny little gamelet, in which you have absolute control over the short, brutish lives of a few primitive villager types. By "absolute control," I mean you can kill them in a variety of ways that are intended to be entertaining.

You can pick them up and drop them into the sea, where they promptly drown. You can pick them up and hurl them into a volcano, where they promptly get all nice and crispy. You can smite them with lightning. You can shake your iPhone violently, causing an earthquake. You can tilt your iPhone to one side, which alters gravity and causes them to tumble off the island into the sea, where, once again, they promptly drown. It's like Tamagotchi for the Sith.

Beyond the fact that I'm apparently unable to find amusement in tormenting virtual beings, I can't quite figure out the appeal that has made this little bit of virtual sadism such a seller. Four hundred thousand downloads? Really? I've watched the gameplay, and even with the regular updates that permit new ways to torment your virtual victims, it just seems a bit tedious.

That your only choice is killing the denizens of your world in unusual ways seems...well...a bit limiting for a god. What if you're more benevolently oriented? Or if you tend to prefer games that allow for moral choices, or for actually being moral? Teaching them to swim would seem like a good start.

And where's the challenge? Destroying things is the easiest thing in the world. It's building things that's hard.

Homosexuality, Orientation, and Choice

During the hurly burly of the summer of 2008, I managed to read this article, which details a recent study on the neurophysiology of homosexuality. Obviously, the researchers in question are interested in doing more research, and make no definitive claims about causality between orientation and brain structure. But that there is a seemingly meaningful correlation between gay male brains and heterosexual female brains is nonetheless fascinating. That a similar correlation exists between lesbian brain structure and the structure of heterosexual males just adds to the sense that there is in fact something real at work here.

As my own denomination prepares to plunge once again into the fray over the ordination of gays and lesbians and the gay marriage issue, the continuing witness of objective neurobiological research like this makes the assertion that homosexuality itself is a choice seem more and more tenuous. On the radical left, there are many "queer" activists who are utterly unwilling to accept that homosexual orientation is not something chosen. On the fundamentalist right, homosexuality is declared a "lifestyle choice," something analogous to being drawn into a cult, and from which you can be deprogrammed.

Both of these perspectives don't seem to reflect the reality of homosexual orientation, and are instead rooted in an existing bias. The "choice" that gays and lesbians face has very little to do with orientation itself. It has more to do with the way that they respond to their orientation. Individuals who tend towards same-sex attraction have to find a way to respond to that orientation...and it is there that Christendom needs to determine what responses are permissible within a Christian moral framework.

If you've read my previous blogging on this issue, you'll know that I reject the two extreme positions. I reject the idea that any and all expressions of human sexuality are acceptable in the eyes of God. Here, I part ways with the radical left, which asserts that morality is contingent and essentially meaningless. Sexual behavior that is predatory or radically self-seeking is inherently sinful. It tears not just at the fabric of society, but also represents a radical violation of the love ethic, which is itself an expression of God's nature. I apply that standard evenly to heterosexuals and homosexuals. If you act sexually in ways that treat another child of God as an object, you sin, and God will hold you accountable.

I also reject the position that holds that homosexuality is inherently sociopathic, that any and all same-sex interactions are automatically evil. Here, I am explicitly rejecting the position of Biblical literalism. That does not mean that I reject Holy Scripture as the rule of life and faith, but that I understand it's authority in a radically different way.

From the core principles of scripture, I hold that either celibacy or covenant relationships are acceptable ways to set boundaries around our sexuality. As not all of us are called to celibacy, covenant relationship is a more viable approach. Those covenant relationships allow us to express our hardwired sexuality freely within their boundaries, and give us the moral basis for stepping away from destructive and disrespectful desire. That moral core is something that Christians should apply to all human relationships.