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.

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.