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.

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.

An Unexpectedly Fine Prayer

Rache and I have, for the last few months, been watching our way through The Righteous Gemstones.  As a lampoon of American prosperity religion, it checks a whole bunch of buttons for me.  The cast is excellent, the writing mostly tart, and it blends drama and comedy in ways that work most of the time.  It can be a little tonally jarring, and it gets a wee bit too willfully profane at times, but I enjoy it.

What's...odd...about it is that, as much as it mocks the quarrelsome, shallow, wealth-and-success obsessed Gemstone family?  Every once in a while, a bit of faith slips through.  In season one, the megachurch spectacle was juxtaposed with a genuinely earnest presentation of mission work.  

In season two?  Well, beyond a murderous band of neon motorcycle ninjas, there was a single sublime moment that still sticks with me.

It came as the patriarch of the Gemstone clan, played by John Goodman, was renewing an old acquaintance.  Eli Gemstone was sitting in a restaurant with Junior, a friend from his former life as a professional wrestler.  Junior was reminiscing about his manipulative, distant, and unloving father, and was clearly nursing some significant emotional wounds.

Seeing an old friend struggling, Eli says, "Let's pray, Junior."

He replies, apologetically, that he's not religious.

Eli returns, "Well, it's a good thing I am.  I'll show you what to do."

And then they hold hands, and they pray together.  Now, prayer in the Gemstone world is often crassly self-interested, or presented as comedy.  But not this time.

The prayer that's offered up is heartfelt, personal, and deeply steeped in grace.  It acknowledged pain endured, the strangeness of God's purposes, and the trust that God's mercy always holds out the possibility of redemption.  It was short, simple, and meaningful.

"Damn.  Kinda nice," said Junior, surprised at how moving he found such good words.

"Dang," I thought as I watched, equally surprised.  "That was genuinely a fine prayer."

Every once in a while, the light and purpose of prayer makes itself known through the absurdity of it all.

Faith, Purpose, and Identity

Faith, as I understand it, is that which defines every other thing that you do.

It provides the answer to the question, "Why?"  It provides the overarching and unifying purpose, the moral measure of every action.   It is, in evangelical Christian terms, the thing that makes life "purpose-driven," or so Rick Warren once described it.

I share that essential understanding, although I came to it via a quite different route.  When I began my return to faith, it was through the writings of 20th century Christian existentialists.  Kierkegaard, of course, but also Tillich.  Tillich's understanding of faith was that it was our "ultimate concern," meaning it was that goal that defined all other goals, that was not "contingent," but defining.

I've not taught Tillich over the years, or preached explicitly from Tillich, for two reasons.  One, people just don't get him, and I see why.  His big thinky theology tended to be a wee bit abstracted from the day-to-day choices that define our moral lives.  Second, his form of Christian faith has no purchase in contemporary Christian debates.  His philosophizing ain't gonna fly if you're conservative and evangelical, nor does he...as a dead white man...have any lingering voice amongst the progressive oldline.

But still, that basic truth about faith remains, and it's the plumb line against which I measure both my actions and my inactions.  If I'm committed to following Jesus, which I am, then that commitment defines all other commitments.  It's how you operationalize the Great Commandment.  "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your strength and all your mind," said Jesus, and if that's not a clear indicator of Ultimate Concern in the Gospel, I don't know what is.

I was meditating on this reality yesterday, after I bumped into one of those peculiar little faith factoids that regularly drop from the table of Ryan Burge.  Burge is an American Baptist Convention pastor and a professor, who gathers and discusses the state of religion in the United States.  

The data point that caught my eye tracked the responses of Americans to this survey question:  

How important are your views about religion to your identity and how you think of yourself?  

The possible responses were: 1) Not at all, 2) A little, 3) Somewhat, and 4) Very much.  Now, I'd prefer a Likert approach to this data, myself.  Four possible responses doesn't provide a meaningful midpoint, eh?  That, and I don't quite like the phrasing, which modifies importance.  "Very much important?"  That's kinda clumsy sounding.  

But the replies, broken down by forms of faith, showed a striking outlier.  

Self-identified evangelicals responded to the question with a resounding supermajority going with the highest category.  As Burge noted, this is a strong signal, twice that of every other group.  Non-evangelicals, which presumably includes the oldline denominations?  Seventy percent replied with an answer ranging from Not at all to Somewhat.

Having bumped into this data point on very progressive BlueSky, the responses I encountered there were all from progressive folks who inhabit the non-evangelical category.  All equated the evangelical response with extremism and oppression.

But I took this another way.  

The Gospel and the teachings of Jesus aren't secondary, or one input among many.  There is nothing in them that would suggest that's an option.  They define all other categories.  They are more important than my race and my gender.  They define my moral actions as a father and a husband, as a neighbor and a citizen.

Why do I stand for the rights of the last, the least, and the lost?  Because it's what Jesus did and taught.  Why do I reject the politics of dominance, resentment, and ethnonationalism?  Because Jesus demands that his disciples set down that sword.  Why do I reject crass mammonism?  Because resisting the corruption of greed is a core theme in Christ's teachings.  Why do I press back against willful cruelty to the stranger and the foreigner in our land?  'Cause Jesus makes it real clear that's a non-negotiable.

If religion does not shape identity, does not form our souls at the most fundamental level, then what is it?  Faith that does not clearly give us both purpose and Ultimate Concern has buried the lede.

It is salt without saltiness, as a friend once put it.

  

Hating the Samaritan

One of my congregants brought my attention to a statement yesterday by Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham and CEO of Samaritan's Purse.  

Samaritan's Purse, if you don't know it, is an evangelical relief organization, one that does tremendous work to bring lifegiving support to places of crisis in the world.  They're competently run and remarkably bold in stepping into areas of crisis to provide food, medicine, and emergency support.  I have friends who have witnessed first hand the good work they're doing, particularly in Sudan and Haiti.

Workers for relief agencies work side-by-side in desperate conditions, even as they may come from different national and ideological backgrounds.  Those workers face violence, desperation, and privation, all to ensure the hungry are fed, the thirsty have water, and those wrenched from their homes by war or natural disaster are cared for.  

It's heroic work, and every effort counts.

Which makes Graham's statement about USAID utterly incomprehensible.  USAID was founded during the Cold War to use American soft power to push back against Soviet propaganda.  Like the Marshall Plan, the goal was to win the hearts and minds of the world by showing that we as a nation were noble, honorable, and generous.  It provides relief in precisely the areas where Samaritan's Purse operates.  And yet Franklin Graham said the following about it yesterday:

"USAID, under the control of the Democratic left, has been pushing LGBTQ, transgender, and other godless agendas to the world in the name of the United States of America. We the taxpayers have been paying for this to the tune of billions of dollars. Thank you Elon Musk for exposing this—and now President Donald J. Trump is bringing it to an end. I encourage the State Department to continue providing life-saving aid like food and medicine."

Is this true?

The first sentence has some truth to it, as do most well spun falsehoods.  A tiny fraction of the USAID budget has been used to support organizations that assert that Queer folks are human beings with rights.    But the second sentence does not follow from the first, and what it implies is false.  Yes, the USAID budget is in the billions, but those billions are spent on economic development, humanitarian assistance, and health initiatives.

Because faith-based initiatives are a major part of American identity, much of that money goes to support the efforts of Christian relief efforts.  The largest single recipient of USAID funding, at over $4 billion dollars, is Catholic Relief Services.  World Vision and Lutheran World Relief and the Presbyterian Church in East Africa have also been significant USAID partners, with total annual giving to Christian organizations in the billions of dollars.  USAID also buys billions of dollars of food for emergency relief from American farmers. 

Franklin Graham knows this.  He knows this because his own organization received $90,000,000 from USAID over the last four years.  Ninety million dollars.  Samaritan's Purse alone receives ten times as much USAID funding as all of the grants supporting Queer folk combined.  Watch this far right propaganda video listing every "offensive" grant they could find, and add up the amounts.  It's not even close.

Again, this is not meant to in any way denigrate Samaritan's Purse, which does excellent work.  They're worthy of support.  But Franklin Graham should know better.  I think, on some level, he does know better.  But when you've bent the knee to Powers and Principalities, and made your witness subordinate to a decadent worldly authority, you must parrot the lies that they tell.  And that dissonance makes you angrier and angrier, as you shout down the voice of grace in your own heart.

Perhaps the greatest irony in all of this is that Graham seems to have completely forgotten the point of an obscure story Jesus told.  Maybe you've heard of it?  The one about the Samaritan?  

That parable was about how we approach those who we consider our enemies, yet through the fruits of their actions show themselves to be our neighbors.  Samaritans were hated by Judeans, considered unfaithful and idolatrous and traitors to the faith.  Yet it was the good work of a Samaritan that Jesus honored, as a way of telling us who we are to love as much as we love ourselves. 

It's straight up, right there, front and center.  But Lord have mercy, we mortals are so good at missing the point.

Facebook and Religious Freedom

Back during the pandemic, my little church scrambled for a way to stay connected to one another.

Worship is the beating heart of congregational life, the place of shared experience that engages, sends forth, and re-engages.   It's an experience that is at its best incarnate, but that can be shared through media if distance or plague so demands.   As generally speaking the goal of my little church is not to send our worshippers to meet Jesus face-to-face before their time, that meant COVID forced our hand.  We had to livestream, and had to scale up to meet that need.

Our choice, for its ubiquity, was Facebook.  As we reasoned it back in 2020, Facebooks' depth of engagement and relative ease of use made it an good medium for streaming.  It allowed the sharing of invitation across our personal networks, which meant it was open to those who might wish to visit, and wasn't delimited to invited members.

It's worked for that purpose, more or less, but lately it's become...well...worse.  

Our worship is traditional, meaning the hymns we sing are...more often than not...reflective of this pastor's strong preference for sturdy old Gospel standards.  

They're meatier theologically than most Christian contemporary music, but they also rise to meet the vocal capacities of a little church.  They're lovely and totally singable if you can sing, which my fellowship can.  And if you can't, there's something about old gospel standards that brings beauty and grace to the heartfelt caterwaulings of even the most vocally challenged faithful.  

Almost every week, we're hit with copyright claims, as Facebook's avaricious algorithms flag the hymns we sing as violations of copyright.  

The latest ding was for singing a beautiful mid-nineteenth-century standard, Abide with Me.  "This is our music," said a subsentient fragment of code slaved to Warner/Chappell Music USA.  "It belongs to us. We demand our cut of ad revenues from this video."

To which I say, advisedly and with purpose, the hell it is.  

The music dates from 1861, so far out of copyright that it's utterly preposterous to even suggest ownership.  It's sacred music for a sacred purpose, one that goes deep back down into the evangelical tradition, back to the time of the founding of my humble historic church.  We're singing it from a hymnal, copies of which were purchased for use in public worship.

Our "ad revenue" is, of course, zero, as corporate sponsorship of worship isn't something we do.  These claims don't impact our worship...not yet.  But the needling annoyance of these mammonist machines seems a marker of a shift in our culture, as the crass profit-maximization of our increasingly false and decadent society stakes its claim.

Does this impact our religious freedom?  No.  Not really.

Facebook is not a public space.  It is an owned space, a place of radical venality, where we and our relationships are bought and sold like chattel, and where even our most sacred time is commodified.

Let me suggest, Mark, that reminding us of this on the regular is remarkably foolish.

I So Basic

Why write a book on the Lord's Prayer? 

I mean, it's hardly a complicated thing.  It's one of the most familiar rituals of the Christian faith, and it's pretty danged simple.  This isn't a deep dive into the discursive techniques of Thomistic theology, or a treatise on the distinctives between Tillich and Berdyaev.

It's not particularly trendy, or buzzy, or pushing the leading edge.  It's just the Lord's Prayer.  We all know that already, right?

It's. Just. So. Basic.

I mean, of course it is.

But how are we at the basics?  How important are the basics?

If you're entirely new to the faith, how much do you know about the point and purpose of prayer?  What do you know about this core Christian practice, and the whys and wherefores of this thing Jesus asks his followers to do?  There was a time when most Americans were culturally Christian, but honey, that time ain't now.  Sure, it's basic. Basics, after all, are a good place to start.

If you've left the church, burned by politicization or the mean-girls cruelty that often drives folks from communities, were the basics what drove you away?  Likely not.  I bailed on church in young adulthood after a totally pointless ego-driven fight tore the church I'd grown up in apart.  Watching Christians squabble and scheme over control of a church just made the whole thing seem like complete [bovine excrement].  When I finally returned, it was to the simplest practices of following Jesus, of service and prayer.  When you start again, it's a fine idea to start at the beginning.

But what if you're deep in, so far past the first stages of being a "Baby Christian" that talking about the Lord's Prayer feels like going back to read Hop On Pop or Horton Hears a Who.  You're sophisticated.  You're experienced.  You've got your doctorate in Presuppositional Apologetics, or host a podcast on Queering the Meta-liturgics of Contemplation.

You need this prayer.

Because when Jesus taught this prayer, he didn't describe it as a "starter prayer."  This isn't a prayer for beginners, to be replaced by more sophisticated mystic incantations as we advance to higher and higher levels of spiritual power.  This is.  The Prayer.   It doesn't matter if we've just discovered the grace of the Gospel, or if we're the Renowned Senior Pastor of a Gigachurch.  It doesn't matter if we're tenure track or if we've got 97,000 followers on ChristTok.   

This is the prayer we are meant to pray.

It is meant to shape us and form us and remind us of our purpose, no matter where we are in our journey.  

And as we're in a time when Christians have kinda forgotten the purpose of prayer, when we pray for wealth and material success, when we pray for political power, when we pray for influence?

Perhaps a refresher is in order.

Not Praying for Power

As a Christian, there is, in this political season, a deep and abiding temptation.  I feel it, as others feel it.

It is the danger of conflating the divine intent with my own, and to turn to God to give me power.

I have, without question, certain sociopolitical predilections.  They fall, generally, somewhere in the peculiar Venn diagram of anarcholibertarianism, liberalism, and social democracy.  This means I'm politically a bit on the odd side, but, eh, I'm the sort of weird that isn't afraid to be weird.

This has, generally speaking, meant that my voting falls on the Democratic side of the rigidly binary US political spectrum.

That hasn't lessened, as the political heat has intensified and American conservatism has gone on a drunken bender in Trumpsville.  When you're a faithful person with a great deal on the line, the Tempter whispers in one's ear: pray for power.  Power over them.  Pray for the reins of the Wagon of State.  Pray for the sword.  Ask for dominion.  Manifest the success of your party, and the grovelling, complete demise of your adversaries.  You pray for Gott Mit Uns, as the Germans used to pray it.

That's certainly been the case on the American far right, where the operating assumption is that Trump is God's Perfect Righteous Anointed, chosen for such a time as this, and prayers for God to give power to the One have become the norm.

Beyond the self-evident absurdity of that core premise, that's a terrible way for Christians to pray.  It is, bluntly, an AntiChristian form of prayer.

Over the last six months, and with the help of some fine editors, I've put the finishing touches on an upcoming book about the point and purpose of the Lord's Prayer, which is the beating heart and solid rock of my prayer life.  At the center of that simple prayer is a turning away from all but the most necessary things of this life, and a refutation of the human ego and its grasping for power.  In the prayer Jesus taught us to pray, the only thing we ask to be given is our "daily bread."  Nothing else.  Everything else is about emptying ourselves to make room for God's spirit, and about turning our hearts away from evil and the seductions of the worldly realm: moral decadence, political power, material wealth, social status, all of it.

It's a tough prayer to offer up in a fiercely partisan time, but a necessary one.

It checks the ego against the lie that rises from willfully misrepresenting one's opponent, the Luciferian bargain that Alinsky would have radicals of every persuasion make.  It challenges the partisan unwillingness to show grace and mercy to those who are on an opposing path.  It reminds the one praying it, if they're paying attention, that blind fealty to a party or a leader is a form of idolatry.

As is praying for power, even and especially if you're sure you're right.  Sure, we want power.  But that desire is a broken thing.

And our broken wanting breaks the world.

The Flavor of Weak Sauce

I love my denomination, but if I am entirely honest, it often frustrates the bejabbers out of me.

At our recent General Assembly, we once again backed away from investing our resources in renewables and other forms of energy that might blunt or slow the onslaught of the climate crisis.

For over a decade, we've been noodling around  the edges of making our investment portfolio more clearly reflect care for creation, but once again, our bottom line got muddled by the endless competing interests that sabotage progress amongst progressives.

Of more concern, frankly, was the tepid, enervated approach to the incipient collapse of our republic.  Presbyterians were at the forefront of the American Revolution back in the day, and watching the work of the Founding Fathers systematically undone by the far right should stir us to a hue and cry.  

"Christian nationalism," in the context of both the American Constitution and the Presbyterian Constitution, is an abomination.  It reflects a fundamental failure of representative government, and a toxic commingling of political power and faith that betrays the intent and purpose of the Gospel.  

The current name of that movement is Trumpism, and it is organized around Trump and those who are either in on the grift, in his thrall, or taking a transactional perspective to morality.  

Its rise threatens every single social position the denomination holds: on climate, on racial justice, on inclusion of Queer folk, all of it.   

But it is, ultimately, not a political challenge.  It's a spiritual and existential threat, one that demands an immediate moral response.

And for that, my fellow Presbyterians are catastrophically ill equipped.

What we collectively did on that front?  We funded a study to examine the dynamics of White Christian Nationalism.  

A STUDY.  I know what that means.

I mean, I've lived most of my life inside the Beltway.  I live here now.  I can hear the thrum of 495 in the distance from my front yard.  If you want to do nothing, or to stall, or to kill something, what do we inside-the-Beltway types do?  We commission a study.  We say more information is needed, and that we need to be more deliberate in assessing the complexities of the issue, and opine that there are subtleties that need to be examined, and more perspectives that need to be considered.  We need to hear from all of the constituencies, particularly those that are historically underrepresented.

By the time that study is completed, Christian Nationalism may well be in power, in such a way that meaningful constitutional governance of our republic no longer exists.

"Something is actually happening, Reg!" as that line from Life of Brian goes.  

Which, of course, calls for immediate discussion.

Of Trump and Jesus

"Jesus of Nazareth.  Donald Trump.

Both were prosecuted and convicted of crimes by the state.

Therefore, they are the same."

This seems to be the logic permeating a substantial portion of American Christianity of late, the portion that sees Jesus and Donald Trump as essentially equivalent persons.  Trump is, by this way of thinking, a martyr, whose struggle is our struggle.  The only reason he is being pursued is that he is the only one who can speak up for the little guy, the only one who knows and speaks the truth.  And like Jesus, he is willing to pay the price for his truth-telling.

This is, of course, utterly insane.  

One could just as easily place Adolph Hitler into that Venn Diagram, only Hitler actually went to prison for the beer-fueled uprising he instigated in Munich.  Like Hitler, the trial and conviction of Adolph Hitler only cemented his popularity among his followers, for precisely the same reason that Trumpists take Trump's convictions as a marker of his legitimacy.  Only a true patriot would be willing to suffer for us!  Just like Jesus!  And Hitler!  Yay TrumpJesusHitler!

But just as Jesus and Adolph were nothing alike, so too Donald and Jesus are nothing alike.

The two bear no resemblance to one another whatsoever morally or personally.  They are, in point of fact, the opposite sort of person entirely.  Making the argument that they are the same is a marker of a disordered mind.

"Are you saying my mind is disordered?" might come the snarled aggression response from the avowed Trumpist, who has learned that threats and bullying are their most effective tools in silencing opponents. 

Yes.  Yes I am.  Insofar as you are in thrall, yes.

But I will admit that there's something inaccurate about my statement.  

That way of putting it assumes that Trumpism is a physical pathology, a peculiar and pernicious neurodivergence or imbalance in brain chemistry.  

It is not.  

Trumpism is first and foremost a moral disease, the same moral disease that has afflicted humankind since we were first driven from Eden. It is the willingness to blame others for our own mistakes.  It is the desire to resent, to attack, and to manipulate truth to our own ends.  It is the hate of one's enemies, and the love of mammon, and the delight in violence and violent thoughts. 

It is a disorder of the soul, a spiritual illness.  

To use some pointlessly overcomplicated words, Trumpism is a sociopolitical manifestation of Augustinian concupiscence.  It tastes of the fruit of the knowledge of evil, its' sickly sticky siren song sweet as Turkish Delight straight from the cold hand of Jadis.  

There, I suppose, you do have your theological connection, because the reason we human beings need Jesus so utterly is our hunger to be ruled by men like Donald.

Of Darkness and Clarity

Progressive Christians love complexity and uncertainty.

It's a significant part of the discourse, as integrated into the prog faithy schtick as Kramer's abrupt arrival through Jerry's front door or a Dangerfieldian tug at one's collar.  

The world is complex! The world is uncertain! Therefore, faith is complex and uncertain!  One must, if one is a progressive, embrace the Holy Dark, that place where we cannot see and where our path is unclear.

This, one is led to believe, is a marker of authenticity, a sign of progressive faith's connection to the Unknown and the Unknowable.  "Look at how bravely we acknowledge that we know nothing, and accept that our faith centers on simply sitting with our uncertainty!  Embrace the darkness!"

There is, of course, a truth to that.  We contingent, mortal beings cannot know the wholeness of the Divine intent.  The Numinous is infinitely beyond us, because, like, yo, that's what makes it Numinous, brah.

But true as that might be, there's a practical flip side to that truth.

If you're a church hawking uncertainty and complexity?  No-one, by which I mean pretty much functionally no-one, wants what you're selling. 

Why would they?  They have it already.  I mean, seriously.  It's the old "selling-refrigerators-to-the-Inuit" absurdity.  

Our blighted saeculum provides complexity and uncertainty by the heaping bucketload, every single day.   We are stuffed like foie gras geese with meaninglessness, directionlessness, and the irreconcilable cognitive dissonances of culture.  Truth and meaning are torn from our grasp by the shrieking winds of political disinformation and mammonist hucksterism, and human beings feel utterly lost in the yawning chaos of it all. 

We can feel it tearing at us, taking us apart, bit by bit.  Our sense of ourselves trembles, and the yearning is for something...anything...that can hold us together.

A theology that says, "Well, sure, yeah, we have no idea what we're doing, really, I mean, who even knows, lol, whatevs?"

Sure, you're "being authentic."  You're "authentically" offering cups of water to the drowning. 

That is not what the Gospel is, nor is that what souls seek when they realize how very lost they are.

Faith embraces the cloud and the Holy Dark.  Sure.  Fine.  But it is also and more vitally the pillar of fire by night.  It is the light that shines in the darkness, that the darkness cannot overcome.

On the Partisan Mind

Late last week, I woke early and puttered into southeast DC on my scooter.  I was headed to a formerly industrial area near the DC Navy Yard, where I planned to spend a day amongst members of a different Jesus tribe.

My own tribe is rather particular.  I'm a cradle Presbyterian, the child of a storied old church in downtown Washington.  It's the church of Lincoln, of Eisenhower.  The pastor who baptized me, and who was a regular guest at my house?  He preached the sermon that helped put the words "Under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance.  Let me note, because history warps weird: that same pastor also marched with Dr. King in Selma, and fiercely opposed our misbegotten war in Vietnam.  

I've been part of the PC(USA) since before the PC(USA) was the PC(USA), and after years of conservative flight, we're now a very uniformly progressive gathering. 

The purpose of my day last week was to attend something called The After Party.  There, I intended to listen to the voices of evangelicals lamenting the toxic direction of American political discourse, and challenging how the partisan mind has seeped into the faith.  Two of the three primary speakers...Russell Moore and David French...have been vigorously outspoken about the poisonous impact of Trumpism on the Christian witness, and their presence was a significant draw.

It was, I will say, a very different experience than attending Presbyterian gatherings.  The event was held in the worship space of an evangelical congregation, which was...as such spaces tend to be...a sleek conversion of a former industrial warehouse.  The seating, theater-style.  The tech, stunningly sophisticated, with a board exceeding the width of my congregation's sanctuary, gimballed cameras, and a primary ultra HD screen that spanned the entire front wall.  To my oldline sensibilities, such spaces parse as functional rather than sacred, but one has to appreciate the depth of the functionality.  

So it didn't look like most progressive Christian events.  Meaning, pastel fabrics wantonly festooned everywhere, like someone set off a grenade in a Michaels.

The attendees were a diverse mix of races and genders, as evangelicals tend to be.  There were also plenty of folks in their twenties and thirties, which was...different.  The oldline, progressive as it has become, remains remarkably and increasingly old.

It was a vigorous, intellectually bracing, remarkably grace-filled day of engagement.

I'm not sure, from my conversations and observations, if there was another mainline liberal in attendance.  

This got me to thinking about the partisan mind and progressivism.  

In this gathering, at least as my frank and remarkably civil conversations at table about queer folk and inclusion were concerned, I felt very liberal.  In mainline gatherings, I almost invariably feel like a conservative.  Decades of reimagining and reframing and deconstructing have created discourse that...to my soul...often wanders from the heart of the narrative.  Justice is a worthy fruit of the Gospel, but when it supplants grace as our purpose, we are no longer telling the same tale.

There is a point, without question, when the partisan mind...the mind that divides, that is motivated by hatred and resentment, that embraces the useful falsehood...infects any movement.  This is true of left and right.  If we understand that Christian faith is not and cannot be a creature of the saeculum, that disciples of Jesus are committed to the Gospel first and foremost, then there are places where we set bounds against our partisanship for that highest principle.

Unlike the bat from Aesop's fable, which claimed allegiance to whatever party held power, the Christian witness is to affirm commonality wherever it can be found, but also to retain integrity of witness to our own tribe when partisan conviction subverts the call to grace and redemption.

Falun Dafa, Swastikas, and Fascism

Falun Gong...or Falun Dafa...is such an odd thing.  In the United States, they're perhaps best known for the inescapable Shen Yun show, a relentlessly hypermarketed spectacle of music and dance that retells Chinese history from their religious perspective.

Over the past several years, I've seen the adherents of that religious movement making their presence known at large, open social events.  They march in local parades, their floats festooned with signs proclaiming peace and love.   They're consistently present in the annual parade in the little town where my church resides.  They're there in my hometown Annandale Parade, as they were this last fall.

It was at that hometown parade that I accepted a flyer pressed into my hand, neatly produced and earnest.  Peace and Love, proclaimed the cover.  I opened it up, and there they were.  The symbols of their movement:

Swastikas.  Oof.

I'm not ignorant of the history of that symbol.  As an image, the swastika had a long history before it was co-opted by Hitler's National Socialist movement.  For millennia, it had none of the connotations of brutal, genocidal nationalism that now hang around it like a cloud in the West.  When someone from Asia or Southeast Asia uses it, I think rather differently about it than I might were I to see it flying alongside a Let's Go Brandon flag in rural America.

Still and all, there's a clumsiness to putting that front and center, an awkward failure to acknowledge the context you inhabit, like walking into a mosque with your shoes on and wearing a t-shirt that asserts that everything goes better with bacon.  "Hey, it's just my culture, get over it" doesn't quite cut the mustard.

And there's another, peculiar level to this story.

Falun Gong has been systematically and often brutally oppressed in their native China, with adherents subject to imprisonment, "re-education," and exile.  Because of this, they are vehemently opposed to the Communist party in China.  Like Sun Myung Moon's "Moonie" Reunification Church back in the 1960s and 1970s, their vociferous anticommunism overcompensates into something peculiar.

In addition the the ubiquity of Shen Yun, Falun Dafa is also responsible for the media content produced by The Epoch Times, which they own.  

That outlet, if you're not aware of it, is a "fair and balanced" news organization that aggressively promoted claims of election fraud in 2020, that sees communist influence everywhere, and that routinely casts doubt on the efficacy and safety of vaccines.  They're purveyors of "hard-hitting documentaries" produced by entirely "neutral and reflective" folks like Dinesh D'Souza, and proudly highlight the endorsements of thoughtful moderates like Sebastian Gorka, Pete Navarro, and Paul Gosar.

For entirely comprehensible reasons, they're pro-Trump, because Trump is performatively anti-China.  This position mirrors that of the Moon's Reunification Church, which purchased the Washington Times back in the day to both promote themselves and align with far right wing causes.

Which brings us back, in the deepest of ironies, to their use of swastikas.

Saying "the swastika is just our cultural sign of peace and love" feels a little off when your media outlet is championing the messages of the far right, and amplifying authoritarian voices that would overturn the constitutional foundations of this republic.

Ashes to Stay

Every winter for the last several years, I've had to figure out what to do with ashes.

On a night that's below fifty degrees, I'll build a fire, a crackling dance of light and warmth that fills our home with a primal comfort.  We human beings evolved with fire, and evolved to delight in fire, and the place of the hearth in our lives only changed during my parents generation.  After countless millennia, the scent of carbonizing oak or pine or sycamore has been supplanted by the cool glow and flicker of our screens, the soft time of story and quietness around the open flame replaced with the bingbamboom bustle of one thing after another, scrolling ever downward.

It's a loss, it is, because in our frenetic rushing about we are forgetting things.

Like what ash is, and what ash does.

In our disposable age, we assume that when we have used a thing up, it no longer has worth.  We toss aside teratons of plastic nothings.  We crumple wrappers, we plan for obsolescence, we create a wastestream, a Heraclitan torrent of the unvalued and forgotten.

But ash isn't waste.  Ash isn't worthless.  Nothing God makes is waste, even the greyblack remains of the flame.  It only seems so because we now think in shallow, rushing, wasteful ways, flinging ourselves from moment to moment and missing the whole.  

When I clean out my hearth, I do not discard the ashes.  Ashes are precious to a gardener, rich with calcium and carbon and micronutrients.  Ashes are pitchforked into my compost.  Ashes feed my garlic, plumping the bulbs that have been patiently enduring the winter.  Ashes enrich the soil in which my asparagus grows, and a diet of carbon can keep them yielding for decades.  I'm setting three small beds aside for a new plant this year.  I'm eager to experiment with okra, a plant that is remarkably nutritious, easy to seedsave, beautifully ornamental, and will adapt well to our rapidly warming Midatlantic.  

What does okra love?  Okra loveslovesloves wood ash.

To appreciate ash, one must be unhurried about it.  Over patient years, you learn the richness it adds to the earth, come to know the living things that thrive and grow as they take that ash into themselves.  When you smell the cut garlic on your fingers, snap the first spear of asparagus in the spring, or taste the nutty crunch of fried okra?  

You see the value in what the fire has left behind, and that life has reclaimed and made its own.

Faith, Madness, and Multiverses

 

As a writer, I'm used to failure.  

Most often, it's just a publisher letting my agent know that "this manuscript doesn't meet the interests of Book Bookman and Siblings at this time, best of luck in your future endeavors, e pluribus unum, etcetera, etcetera."  This is ninety eight point three percent of the writing life, so I sigh, and move on.

Every once in a while, that rejection will be more pointed.  Not formulaic, or the welcome word of helpful critique, but actually the teensiest bit sharp.  Like, for instance, the tart response I got back in 2019 from an editor of renown at a major religion publishing house.  My stalwart agent had sent him the draft manuscript of a book about Christian faith and multiverses.  The concept of the multiverse, as drawn from speculative physics, is that the nature of reality is not just our linear spacetime.  Instead, reality is a functionally infinite array of universes, in which all possibility is made real.  

For years, I’d encounter this cosmology in conversations with atheist friends and conversation partners, presented as an alternative to God’s creative act in making our universe.  As I was listening to and not just yelling at them, I found myself fascinated by how that way of viewing reality interacted with my faith.  So I started writing about it, and a book materialized.

How, I asked in the manuscript, does Christian faith encounter this understanding of the cosmos?  While multiverse cosmologies have often been presented as a counterargument to faith, they really aren’t at all.  In fact, they’re almost indistinguishable from faith, in ways that are both heady and delightful.

With the book completed, it was time to send it out, and so my longsuffering agent and I did. 

We'd dutifully waited the months and months it took the editor to get around to it.  His response, when it finally came, didn't beat around the bush:

"No one cares about this topic, and even if they did, no one would care what he has to say about it."

Well.  Alrighty then.

There's truth to the second part of that statement, to be sure.  As the hermit-ish pastor of a sweet little congregation in a rural town, I'm not a "name."  It's a fair cop, guv.  A publisher doesn't typically make back an advance, even a modest one, if they gamble on a relative unknown.  I get it.  Publishers do want a return on their investment, and that editor was right about me.

But he couldn't have been more wrong about the multiverse.

Unless you've been living under a rock, you know that multiverses are front and center in the cultural zeitgeist these days.   Avengers Endgame, the final film in the sprawling Avengers saga?  If ROI is your crude capitalist metric, that alone brought in two point seven billion dollars of global box office, against four hundred million in production and distribution.  What's the theme?  Multiverses.  Spiderman: No Way Home managed to shake off the cinematic malaise of COVID this last year to reach actual audiences.  It also yielded one point eight eight billion dollars in box office, against two hundred million in production and distribution.  What was the schtick?  Multiverses.

Right now as I write this, the delightful action comedy Everything, Everywhere, All at Once?  It's an indy-ish film, with limited release, but it’s punching well above its weight, and it's all about the multiverse.

Coming out this Spring is yet another film from the Disney/Marvel superhero entertainment complex, Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness.  I’ve been looking forward to that one for years, as I find the mystic stories of Dr. Stephen Strange and his reality-bending magic both entertaining and excellent grist for sermon illustrations.

And that’s just film. It’s equally pervasive in literature.  The brilliant, entertaining  ALL OUR WRONG TODAYS by Elan Mastai?  Matt Haig’s bestselling blockbuster THE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY?   A THOUSAND PIECES OF YOU by Claudia Gray?  All stories of the multiverse.  

In blockbuster movie after blockbuster movie, novel after novel, streaming show after show, our contemporary storytelling is pervaded by the idea of multiverses.  But there's more to multiversality than crass materialist profit seeking.  These alternate universe narratives have purchase now because they speak to something fundamental about our society.  

In the internet age, we human beings are being forced to confront a panoply of different truth claims and competing visions of reality, each rising from the ground of a variant culture or subculture.  Some of them can be reconciled with one another, but many claims exist in diametric opposition.   This has always been true, but the immediacy of new media concentrates that experience, intensifies it, and we find ourselves torn between wildly disparate visions of reality. It seems, frankly, like many of us live in entirely alternate timelines.  

 In a multiverse, in other words.

In a multiverse, after all, every single possibility is actualized.  Every version of ourselves, every timeline, every possible choice?  They're all made real.  While this might make for entertaining storytelling possibilities, it’s also more than we can wrap our heads around.  Human beings cannot handle everything, everywhere, all at once.  The cognitive dissonance that generates is too great, and our sense of self decoheres.  

What if we hadn't done X, but instead chosen Y?  Or Y1b.A-sub7?  How would we know what our "best self" means, or what our "true" self looks like, if every iterative variance is equally real, and equally "true?"  We can't do all of them, or be all of them.  For our sanity, our selves, and our souls, we must choose who we become in the face of the unformed churning yarp of being.  That choice can feel overwhelming, as competing visions of who we might be paralyze us.  Every decision we make precludes another, and confronted with the anxiety of choice overload, we can end up curled up on our old sofa, watching endless Youtube snippets, making no choice at all.

That's where faith comes in.  Faced with the irreducible complexity of a reality so wildly chaotic that our souls cannot bear it, faith gives us a ground on which to stand and imbues life with meaning.  That has always been the strength of faith, be it the purpose-driven life of Rick Warren Evangelical Christianity or the Ultimate Concern of Tillichian Christian existentialism. 

However you define it, faith gives us our integrity.  It allows us to act, to make that choice against a measure that transcends us infinitely.

I, for instance, try to make every one of my choices as a disciple of Jesus of Nazareth.  Are there other choices I could make?  Sure.  There are so many other ways I could live that I could spend my whole life counting them. But faith is an orientation towards a defining purpose, one that integrates and gives cohesion to our souls.

What choice should I make?  What path should I take?  The answer, for the faithful Christian, is simple.  As Scots mystic George MacDonald so bluntly puts it, if you call Jesus Lord, you must do what Jesus would have you do.  “How do you call me Lord, Lord,” Jesus sighs, rolling his eyes at us in Luke’s Gospel, “if you do not do what I say?”  If we claim not to know what that means, we’re deluding ourselves.  Of course we know what that means.  Every day, in every way, striving to love God, love neighbor and enemy alike, and endeavoring to be in all things guided by Christ's teachings.

Make the call to that person you know is suffering.  Take that time to center yourself down with a prayer.  Spend a moment in study, or sort clothing at a local clothing closet.  Share a meal with a friend, or with a stranger.  Forgive the one who done did you wrong.  

Some days, the thing Jesus would have you do is simpler still.  Make that bed.  Sweep that floor.  Wash those dishes.  Weed the garden.  Do what needs to be done.  Those potentialities are right there, and how we actualize them is the measure of our faith.  This is true in a complex, linear spacetime, and remains true in the functionally infinite branching wildness of a multiverse.

But how do we know, our anxiety asks, that we're doing that thing exactly right?  How do we know that we're making the best possible choice, and that we're following Jesus in the best possible way?

The answer, again, is simple.  We don't.  Nor, if we've been listening to Jesus, do we need to.  Because that's where grace comes in.  Grace is, after all, both the heart and foundation of Christ's teachings.   Grace, which accepts our flaws and imperfections.  Grace, which understands our human limitations.  Grace, which forgives our imperfections, and shows mercy, and gives us the courage to strive again.

As a writer, after all, I am used to failure.  Failure, to paraphrase Dr. Stephen Strange, is an old friend.  As a writer, as a pastor, as a husband and father and human being, pretty much nothing I do is perfect.  Failure happens. But every moment shines with the grandeur of God, each offering up the promise of something new.   I dust myself off, remember my purpose and the grace of God, and then do what needs to be done, as best I understand it.  

No matter how dizzying and maddening the universe around us might be, we can meet that complexity with the hope that rises from faith.

Seven Ways to Survive a Solar Apocalypse

In my family, we have some apocalypse rules.  These vary, depending on the type of apocalypse.

If it's a pandemic, we sneeze into the inside of our elbows, and hide out inside the house for a month or two.  If it's zombies, Dad has a bite-proof armored motorcycle suit, a sledgehammer, and knows to go for the head.

If it's robots?  Meaning, an artificial intelligence that arises to challenge humanity after a singularity event?  The family rule is this: side with the robots.

Yeah, I know.  I'm a species-traitor.  But I always did kind of have a thing for the Borg.

But there are other, less familiar apocalypses, ones that call for different tactics.   The question was posed to me, in a phone meeting with my publisher: how would you survive a massive solar storm?   My novel When the English Fall examines the impact of such an event.  In it, our little world is hammered by an unprecedentedly massive coronal mass ejection, a wave of charged particles from the sun that fries the global power grid, shuts down the net, and compromises most electronics.

It's happened before, way back in 1859, when what's called the Carrington Event damaged telegraph systems, gave folks electric shocks, and put on an astounding auroral display.  If a Carrington-scale event happened now, the impacts on our technologically dependent culture would be catastrophic.  What would increase the likelihood of our surviving?  How could we cope?  What would the prospects be for our recovery?

Here for your amusement and survival advantage, I offer a listicle, your seven best ways to make it through that particular civilization-busting disaster:

1) Have emergency reserves.

This is pretty standard, but nonetheless key to most crises.  The question, simple:  how long could you shelter in place?  If you look at your stock of nonperishable food and water, how long could you last?  A week?  A month?  Two days, but only if you include that questionable Chinese food at the back of the fridge that you can't quite remember ordering?

A Carrington scale event might require four to six months to recover, but that first month would be key.  Could you and/or your household manage a month with no outside support?

If the answer is, gosh, we just never seem to have food in the house, then you really do need to change it.  Canned food, for several weeks.  Potable water, and a way to either purify or collect drinking water.  A heat source for cooking, with sufficient fuel.

With all electronic records either wiped out or inaccessible, we'd likely revert temporarily to a cash economy.  Your credit card/debit card/Applepay?  Utterly useless.   Having cash on hand as a reserve would be useful...assuming our culture maintains enough trust in one another that'd anyone would still take it.

And no, gold doesn't count, for all of the right-wing pseudo-prepper sites that pitch it in the event of currency collapse.  I mean, sure, you can stock up on the bullion and krugerrands if you want.  But when push comes to shove, gold won't be worth its weight in Chef Boyardee.

2) Keep physical records.

Our new net-economy creates all sorts of wonderful forms of connectivity, all of which would go away if our communications infrastructure was critically compromised.  That means no access to records, no evidence of your bank balance.  Full recovery from a Carrington-scale event would be a matter of nine months to three years, after which, what?

If everything you do is online, where would be the evidence of your culturally-held resources when things clambered their way back into normalcy?

So print a couple of things out, so you'll be able to prove you have those accounts.

And have a few books on hand that tell you how to do things.  You know, books?  Those analog repositories of knowledge that operate independently of any external power source?

On your shelves, have books that describe survival basics, simple horticulture, and first aid.  Maybe a map or two.  Those will be remarkably helpful.  Can you eat that mushroom?  How do you stitch up a wound?   You'll need to know those things, and Google won't be around to help.

Plus maybe a novel or three, just to take your mind off of things for a while as you read by candlelight.

3) Store a generator and key emergency electronics in a Faraday cage.

If you surround a carefully selected cache of vital electronics with a Faraday cage (a grounded structure of metal), it will channel the energies of an electromagnetic event into the earth.  That's be true for solar events, extra-solar energies (like a near-space supernova or a burst of focused energy from two colliding neutron stars in our galactic neighborhood), or a localized electromagnetic pulse from a nuclear device.

So find a place in your basement, take a bale of chicken-wire, some metal posts and grounding screws, some copper wire, and a drill, and then...

"I'm not going to do that," you say.  "That's nuts."  Well, fine.

That one's a little overly preppery, I'll admit, bordering on tin foil hat levels of survival paranoia.  But it would be efficacious.  Are you sure that you wouldn't even consider...

Right.  OK.

Here are a few more that are...less nuts.  Let's go attitudinal.

4)  Cultivate an attitude of resilience. 

We are an increasingly fragile people, torn by the empty anxieties and induced stresses of our consumer culture.  That level of emotional vulnerability would nontrivially reduce our capacity to survive any catastrophic event.  The sturdier we are personally, the more likely we are to be able to deal with eventualities in a level-headed way.  Panicking or freezing up?  We'd be SOL.  Focusing our energies on complaining about how unfair this all is to us or on our feelings?  Again, that does you not a damn bit of good.

If you're used to demanding "safe space?"  Understand this: apocalyptic events are not safe spaces.  You can't worry about microaggressions when the whole world is trying to kill you.  If you're obsessed with your rights, complaining endlessly about how unfair everything is?  The universe couldn't care less.

What you need to survive more than anything else is a strong, integrated, stubbornly hopeful sense of self.

In studies of survivors, that's the most powerful shared trait.  Survivors just believe, resolutely, that they're going to make it.  Then they work towards that goal.  That belief doesn't guarantee you won't bite it.  But if you give in to despair or panic, you significantly increase the probability you aren't going to make it through a crisis.

Faith, in other words, can be a powerfully beneficial adaptive trait in a crisis.

5) Know how to do something.

Personal competence at the things that matter helps.  And by this, I mean things that speak directly to the act of survival.

Can you repair things, be they electronic or mechanical?  Do you know first aid?  Could you stitch up a wound?  Could you build a fire?  Could you build a shelter?  Could you find your way somewhere without GPS? Could you find food in a patch of woods if need be?  Do you know how to fish?  Can you hunt?  Do you know how to grow anything, or what forage can be had in the nearby woods?

It might seem overwhelming, given the strange and existentially irrelevant demands that our culture places on us.

But given how many things you do know, it's really not that difficult.  You don't need to go the full MacGuyver.  Just be really good at one or two useful things.   "I can't," you say.  "Pish posh," I say.

Just repurpose all of the neurons you dedicate to knowledge of the Kardashians, or any and all data regarding NFL salaries.  Boom.

You don't need to know everything.  Why?  Well, here's why:

6) Know your neighbors.

In the aftermath of a solar storm, social connection would be key.  One human being is a vulnerable thing.  Ten humans, working together?  Much, much stronger.  Your skills join with theirs, and the community you create becomes a more robust entity.  So you need friends. Real friends.

Meaning, not friends on Facebook.  Not Snapchat, or Twitter.  Having fifteen hundred Facebook friends and twenty three thousand Twitter followers would mean diddly squat when the net went down.  All of the blabbering hyper-immediate irrelevance of our online social lives would cease to have any bearing.  What would matter is local connection.

So.  Do you have such a place of local connection?  Who is your tribe?  Are they human beings who live near you?  Or are they commuting co-workers who are nowhere near you physically?  Are they shuttle-activity-parents you've gotten to know from your kids various obligatory sportsball teams?  Those people will be nowhere near when the world falls apart.  The people who count are right there around you.

Make a mental map of your neighborhood.  Those souls, the folks who you likely don't know, who move like shadows on the periphery of your busy bee awareness?  That's your crisis team.

Yeah.

You've probably got work to do.

7) Continue to support space science and observatory infrastructure.

This is the biggest...and most counter-cultural...one.  Honestly, the best way for modern-era humanity to survive a solar storm is supporting science.  This flies against our 'Murikan tendency to view survival as an individual thing, as a rugged loner or pioneer family wins out against all odds.

But for cosmic events, the response needs to be at a national or global level.  It requires a sense of common purpose.

That is where we are now.  An array of probes and satellites currently provides us with significant advance warning in the event of a major solar storm.   NASA and other international space agencies maintain a constant eye on the star we orbit, both to better understand it and also to give advance warning in the event of a major solar event.

With those resources in place, we'd have a chance to prepare.  We'd have advance warning to unplug devices, to shut down and secure sensitive equipment.  It's the cosmic equivalent of getting alerts from the National Hurricane Center.  If you have three days to prepare for a Cat 5 Hurricane, the outcome is different than if it just roars up in the night.  It'd be the difference between Katrina and the 1900 Galveston hurricane.  Both were devastating, but one massively more lethal, with the difference being the time given to prepare.

One of the assumptions in my novel is that America has allowed both our transportation infrastructure and our space infrastructure to degrade.  Solar missions have a limited lifespan, and they're not cheap.  And infrastructure isn't "sexy."  We neglect it to our peril.

If we don't see the value in science, or we allow ourselves to drift down the rabbit hole of technological regression, we're vulnerable.  Good thing we have an administration and a Congress that understands the value of science, right?

So.  There you go.  Your seven handy-dandy tips for survival in the event of a solar storm.  Good luck!