Look at How We Kill You

Yesterday morning, as I was doing the final edit on my sermon, I flitted briefly to web-based news sources to check in on the world.  It's always wise, before the community gathers, to be sure you're not blithely arriving, unaware of some momentous and terrible event.

There they were, a sequence of short videos.  A montage, if you will, courtesy of both the armed forces of my nation and those of one of our allies.  They were familiar images, in both content and format, ones we've seen from most of our recent wars.

The format was monochromatic, the images filtered through a FLIR or similar thermal imaging scope.  There, a nondescript building in a compound, marked with a targeting computer's symbol.  Three, two, and at one, there's an explosion leaping from the roof, as the armor-piercing portion of the munition punches through.

Then, a millisecond later, a much larger explosion as the primary payload detonates, obliterating the building, casting a fiery cloud of debris and dust that consumes most of the compound.

The video stops, and loops.  With it, there are others, which I watch.  Here, an animated GIF length image of a tank, which explodes.  There, a vehicle in motion--a truck, or a HUMVEE--and then it flares out as the explosion maxes out the thermal camera tracking it.

It is seven-thirty on a Sunday morning, and in preparation for worship I have just watched dozens of human beings killed.

What struck me, looking at the videos, was that they were a peculiar mirror to the net-circulated videos that I had only been able to watch in part, those from a few weeks ago.  Those were personal, brutal, savage and monstrous, of unarmed men butchered like pigs or cattle.

"Look at how we hate you.  Look at the way that we kill you," those videos said, and they were horrors.

And yet, here we are, sharing our own images of killing.   They are different, in the way that industrial killing is different.

"Now, look at how we kill you," our videos say.  They are distant and dispassionate, precise and clinical.

At the dawn of the internet age, there was this great hope: now, human beings will finally be able to share information freely with one another.  It will change who we are, the dreamers proclaimed.  Through that sharing, an age of peace and mutual understanding will dawn.

It hasn't quite worked out that way.

Cassini and Faith

Yesterday, the first of the raw pictures came back from the Cassini spacecraft, on its long trek to the gas giants in the outer reaches of our solar system.  Many were striking, but the one that got me was the one to the right.  There, in the deep blackness of space, a bright point of light, a featureless blue-white sparkle in the heavens.  Below it, a smaller, slightly dimmer speck.

Earth and the moon, those two dots are.  Here we are, seeing ourselves from a distance that renders all of human life and history to its actual place in the universe.  We're teeny tiny, so infinitesimal as to be just a speck in the vastness.

This is not a new observation, of course.  It was made wonderfully by Carl Sagan, years ago, as images of a distant earth first reached us.  That Pale Blue Dot is so precious, yet so ephemeral.  

What struck me in seeing those Cassini images was, unsurprisingly, the faith spin on all of that.  Unless a faith can take the reality of our place in the vastness into itself, it just isn't real.  So much of the way human beings have come to understand our faith casts all of existence in earthbound terms.  We often proclaim a great and cosmic struggle, and yet the scale and scope of that struggle never leave the bounds of the speck we inhabit.

If the most fevered yearnings of John of Patmos came true, and Revelation were fulfilled tomorrow, and the seas ran with blood and there were horsemen and beasts rose from the sea in a way that would give Guillermo del Toro goosebumps...so what?

The view from Cassini would show that same binary planetary system.  Maybe the Earth would have a slightly redder hue.  

But the rest of the universe would trundle along oblivious. To be meaningful in an existence of this scale, faith has to be both larger and more intimate.

Larger, in that we have to understand all of our sacred stories in a radically different way than our forebears.  They need to speak into the reality of our place in a Creation that is more wondrous and humbling that we ever imagined.

More intimate, in that we need to see the defining existential purpose of faith...which gives meaning and purpose on a human scale.  What matters is our capacity to find that which gives life integrity and direction, and there, an open, gracious faith does so.

If we can do these things, our faith still has purchase, even if all we yet are remains on that tiny bright speck.

The slightly bigger one, that is.