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.

  

Myth and Franchise

The interwebs are abuzz with chatter these last few days over the latest teaser-trailer for the Christmas-release-blockbuster of the next installment of the Star Wars saga.

Fanboys and fangirls are all squealing...or is that "squeeing"...over what looks like it might be an actually watchable movie.  A palate-cleanser, I suppose, after the agonizing prequels.

It's a professional grade reboot, clearly, from a practiced and proven rebooter.  There's evidence of character development and human-scale interpersonal narrative.  There's the evocative use of prior musical and visual themes.  There's the now-requisite "handoff" from the prior generation, with first-gen actors reprising iconic characters to give the imprimatur of canon.  Think Shatner for the Star Trek Next Gen films, or Nimoy in the first JJ Abrams Star Trek.

When Harrison Ford announces that "we're home," that's exactly the feel that's meant to be teased.  We have finally made it to that place we wanted to be.  This is going to honor the soaring myth of our childhood.  You will be able to embrace the renewal of the mythic tale with big fanny fan love.

Only...is it myth?  Is it really?

Myth, after all, is storytelling, turned to the task of shaping purpose and self-understanding.

I wonder at this, because I do not believe that myth can be monetized and remain myth.

And Lord have Mercy, but is this myth marketized.  A major corporation purchased the franchise for $4 billion, after all.  Disney's absorption of LucasArts had nothing to do with the epic-scale space-opera mythopoetics that established these films as icons.  Or about storytelling as something that binds community together and creates a sense of common purpose, as a gifted protocol droid spins out a wonderful tale around a fire.

It's about the acquisition of a franchise with significant and proven ROI potential, an established global brand that can be leveraged to both increase Disney's near term shareholder return and increase quarterly profits on a five to ten year time horizon.  It's about creating ten consecutive quarters of rising share prices, representing a 100% increase in DIS market capitalization since LucasArts and its intellectual property holdings were absorbed, with a total rise in market cap of nearly 90 billion USD.

I can't seem, for the life of me, to forget that.  It'd be more fun if I could yield to the great orgy porgy of it all.  It really would.

Because as it is, I can't get past having a bad feeling about this.

Moral Phenomena

I came across it, just a link to a story, part of the endless fountain of distract-o-media that some random algorithm creates Just For Me.

It was a random thing, a small but intensely painful tragedy, a bit of local news that fluttered briefly to the subsurface of the collective consciousness before floating down again into the dark realm of the forgotten.

It involved an Arizona mom of twin toddlers, walking them on a path on the side of a drainage culvert.  They were in their jogging stroller.

And a wasp or a bee started pestering them.  Just buzzing about, as stinging insects do.  The mom swatted at it, and it got angry, and she swatted more.  In that process, she let go of the stroller for just a moment.  And the stroller, being on an incline and being a jogging stroller, rolled down the sidewalk, then off it.  She raced after it, but could not catch her children.  The stroller tumbled into the culvert, filled with fast flowing water, and though she threw herself in after it, and desperately tried to wrestle it to the bank, the current tore the stroller from her grasp.

Both of her little ones drowned, still strapped into their stroller.  It was tragic, and heartbreaking, and absurd.  Here, a simple cascade of events, a moment of distraction...almost laughable, in how trivial and familiar and human it was...and utterly devastating.

Because...why?

We want to ascribe purpose to such things, to weave them into some plan or intent.  We want to feel that there's a reason behind them, some larger justification.  But I just can't believe it is so.  We are small, and we break easily, and we all die.  Two deaths every second of every day, or so the statistics about human dying go.  Some are expected, others tragic and untimely.  Every one, the momentous end to a story.  Every one, just a droplet diffused in the endless tide of our dying.

But are such tragic things imbued with purpose?

Meaning: are they part of some great moral narrative?

One the one hand, you can say, no, no they're not.  My ol' buddy Nietzsche certainly would.  "There are no moral phenomena," he'd say.  "Only moral interpretation of phenomena."  For those moments of mortal fragility, I'd agree.  There is no moral imperative demanding the deaths of those little twins, or the deaths of that pastor-couple who just happened to be driving under a bridge at the exact instant that part of our crumbling infrastructure crumbled.

The Tower of Siloam falls on the righteous and the unrighteous alike, say I, willfully mashing up my scripture.

But then there are those phenomena that only occur because sentience chooses them.  Actions taken from my moral purpose are non-random, and directly serve a moral end.  When I choose to do X because my faith demands it of me, that is a moral phenomena.  That act has ontological impacts, meaning, it's a real thing, dude.

Like comforting the bereaved.  That's real.  Like an embrace, or a kind word, or showing respect to a human being used to being mistreated.  Like a warm meal, given to an empty stomach.

Or words of forgiveness, delivered from a place where a curse might be expected.

Emergence and Purpose

Amongst the folks I blog-feed, there are many who are wrassling now with the state of "emergence," that conversational/relational movement within Christianity that fluttered into being just about a decade ago.

Emergence has been described as many things, and presented in many ways.  It's resistance to the theological rigidity of literalist fundamentalism.  It's a struggle against the strangling formalism of the dying old-line denominations.  It's a wandering away from the bright shiny falseness of marketized Christianity.  It is those things.

But mostly, it has been talking.  Or rather, talking about talking.  Emergence is, in my experience, a fundamentally epistemological movement, to use a big honking incoherent philosophical term that just shows you how very smart I am.  Ahem.  Epistemology means, more or less, the study of knowing how we know.  It is seeking to know how we know.  It is talking about how we talk.  It's very postmodern.  It's very academic, in the pejorative sense of the term.

Epistemology is a sign, pointing to a sign, pointing to a sign.   It goes nowhere, an ouroboros serpent devouring its own tail.   Epistemology has defined philosophy for a hundred years, which is why philosophy as a discipline is now utterly irrelevant.  It is also a defining feature of emergence, which is an ill wind for those who hope it might become something more than it is.

To be a movement, emergence needs to find its ontology.  Meaning, it needs to be articulating something fundamental and transforming about the very nature of being.    Philosophy used to have the ovaries to make such statements.  That's what made it fun.  That's what gave it purpose.  That's what made it relevant.  Not "culturally" relevant.  Bigger than that.  Deeper than that.  Relevant to our existence as beings writ into the fabric of reality.  Relevant to what God hath wrought.

Making those statements...using theology as a way to point to the depth of the creation we inhabit...is one of the things that faith needs to do if it is to be meaningful.  Faith says: this is how the Creator has spoken and shaped the Universe.  This is the Real.  Because of this, I will orient myself towards reality in thus and such a way.  It doesn't dither about, unwilling to commit itself to any statements about anything.

Why is it important for the faithful to be tolerant and open minded?  Why is relationship and transforming conversation so meaningful?  Why should we place such a high value on creativity and dynamism and seeking the joyous New?

And...for Jesus folk... why is this way of understanding faith a more reliable expression of God's Word than the faith claims of fundamentalism?

Emergence needs to be able to claim that it knows something about what is true.  

I think it can, but for that, the conversation will have to change a wee bit.

More on that tomorrow.

Product and Service

I'm typing this on an iMac, which is unsurprising, because my house is littered with Apple products.

The wife and I both have iPhone 4s.  That's 4s, plural, not Four - Esses, which we probably won't get.  My Four is the fourth iPhone I've owned, as the first two met untimely demises at my clumsy hands, and the last one got handed down to my son.

The boys both have old nanos, which see intermittent use.  One has a Touch, which is his camera and primary portable gaming platform.  The other has that repurposed, de-simmed iPhone 3GS, which is serving the same function.  To replace our recently flamed-out first-gen Intel Macbook Pro, we acquired an Air, which is a lovely piece of kit.  Oh, and my wife has a 3G iPad, first gen.

If you've invested in Apple over the years, our family has done our part to insure that your investment yielded handsome returns.

The legacy of Steve Jobs is, without question, those exceptionally well-designed products.  His legendary precision and unrelenting focus on product excellence was what made him such a competent CEO.  The bottom line, if you are making something to sell in the marketplace, is to make that product as well-designed and constructed as possible.   That was always Job's focus, which meant that he had absolutely no tolerance for mediocrity.  He was an absolutely legendary perfectionist, and had an unerring sense of what makes for a solid product.

That, frankly, is what guarantees the profitability of a corporation.  If you focus on making an excellent product, and price it fairly, you will succeed.  If you focus on profit above all else, you will become distracted from that primary goal.  You will start making Chevy Vegas, and you will fail.

In that, Jobs knew and lived out what it takes to be successful in business.

But in the thickets of hagiography for this profoundly accomplished entrepreneur and businessman, I hazard to ask:  is that what matters?

Jobs created great, innovative, well-designed products.  But do they make the world a better place?  I remember what it was to be alive in the pre-iMac era, and a time when Apple was not my preferred provider of quality electronic devices.

Honestly?  It makes no difference.  What has been created is ethically neutral.

Sure, I can use that iPhone to open up new lines of communication with a deaf shut-in, or help a lost stranger find his way.  But that same tech allows that guy down the street to video-sext with his lover while "working late" in his upstairs office while his wife sits alone in their bedroom, or your 15 year old daughter to send NSFW pictures to her manipulative 18 year old boyfriend.   Sure, I can use my Air or my iMac to blog about justice and grace, or to drop a supportive comment on the Facebook page of someone in need of prayer or kindness.  But I could also use them to spew anonymous hatred as the stalker-troll on some other human being's online presence.

The world is shinier and faster and more elegant.  But better?  To speak true, it does not feel so.

As I consider Jobs' life, I wonder at the meaningfulness of a life driven by perfectionism.   Having worked in the field of philanthropy for a while myself, I know that unlike many leaders in industry, Jobs had no interest in charity.  It simply didn't process.  He had no time for it.  He was far too busy and far too focused on product.  Unlike Bill Gates, who has poured his wealth into fighting diseases, or Warren Buffett, who has used the fruits of his business acumen to support Gates in that effort, or countless other leaders in the business sector, Jobs did not use his wealth...or the wealth of Apple...towards any end other than the improvement of Apple products.

Though the products are desirable, and exceptionally well crafted, they are just that.  Products.

And I wonder...is perfectionism what makes for a worthy existence?

And I wonder...is creating profitable and elegantly-designed products what merits a "that'll do, pig, that'll do" at the completion of this life?

I respect Jobs ferocity of purpose, and his creativity, and his intelligence, and his showmanship.  There was much to admire in his life.  I'm just not sure I'd want to live it.

The Fabric of the Cosmos

My delving into M-Theory has continued over the last few nights, as I've waded into Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos.

Greene is a theoretical physicist and professor of physics at Columbia University, and his writing for a popular audience is both substantive and accessible.  Unlike Kaku's Parallel Worlds, which routinely used terminology related to faith, Greene is more vigorously secular.  Issues of meaning and purpose are subordinate to determining mechanics and structure.  The book makes very little effort to explore the whole Meaning of Life question.  It's purpose is to go deep into the underlying processes of reality.  Period.

Well, perhaps that's not quite right.  As Greene lays out his own journey of understanding, the first outside reference point relative to meaning and purpose is the existentialist movement.  His opening chapter is full of talk of his adolescent reading of Sartre and Camus...which, of course, endears him to me immensely.

What's interesting in Greene's brief discussion of philosophy is that he neatly steps around the struggle for meaning.  Meaning, Greene assumes, can be found in the "...assessment of the universe at all possible levels."  (p. 21)   That is his Sisyphian "struggle to the heights."  Instead of the application of the will in shoving that rock up a hill, his existentialist purpose comes in shoving knowledge further and further into the mysteries of the universe.

In the midst of affirming the value of heaving string theory up that mountain, Greene surfaces...as, if I'm remembering correctly, did Kaku...a famous quotation from physicist Richard Feynman.  That little snippet of wisdom claims that a knowledge of cosmology deepens appreciation of everything.  In contemplating a rose, for instance, one takes in color and scent and texture, but then that goes deeper.  You see..."the wonder and magnificence of the underlying molecular, atomic, and subatomic processes." (ibid).

Here, I found myself suddenly bemused.   I find the underlying molecular, atomic, and subatomic processes of creation equally wonderful and magnificent.  But when you go to that place of marvelous complexity, are you still contemplating a rose?  Or has the rose qua rose ceased to be relevant, just as space and time themselves cease to be relevant at Planck distances?

During a time of midweek meditation at my congregation a few months ago with a few of the old saints of my church, I was similarly contemplating a stained glass window in the sanctuary.  It's a bright and impressionist rendering of Jesus.

Deep in meditation, I found myself lost in the the light of the reds and greens, in the rippled textures of the glass, in the way light hung and refracted.  Seen from that level, the reality to which the window pointed ceased to be discernable.  The image vanished.  The meaning and intent of the artist disappeared in a thicket of other inputs.

It was a delightful, calm moment.  Yet at that level of contemplation, something was absent.  The awareness that a sentient being applied to create that particular arrangement of matter, the intentionality that went into creating that image, the narrative underlying that image...all of that was not evident.

There was still beauty.  But the storytelling and the imprint of sentience were gone.

When Greene implies that meaning can be found by knowing the universe "on all possible levels," I wonder if that is true.  One can find beauty on almost all of the levels.  But meaning?

Cosmology and Purpose

Those dancing strings sure can make the world odd..

As I finished up my reading of Michio Kaku's Parallel Worlds yesterday, I'll freely confess that large chunks of it came off as coherent as Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky.  As uffish in my study I thought whilst sitting by the Tumtum screen, the words describing string theory and superstring theory came whiffling through my tulgey brain, and burbled as they came.

Part of this...a large part of it...comes from the inhuman scale of quantum mechanics.  I'll catch images here and there, as my spacetime-formed mental clutch graunches gears mightily against eleventh dimensional cogs.   The best I can get are approximations, images that rise out of my knowledge base in a feeble attempt to represent a reality that is utterly beyond my capacity to experience.  As I struggled to conceptualize strings, the best I could do was think of those little wiggly dragon tongues from James and the Giant Peach.  When Kaku got into talking about the challenge in modeling the music of membranes, the dimensionally expanded forms of string theory that provides the "M" in "M-theory," I found myself thinking of drum-heads.

This is the pesky thing about being a mystic and not a mathematician, I suppose.  The swirl of symbols that Kaku doubtless uses to conceptualize these things are surely more precise.

Then again, when it comes time to lay out the "why this matters" conclusion, the summative chapter of Kaku's book has no answers.  As far as Kaku is concerned, the structures of the universe may prove to be elegant and beautiful mathematically.  But there's no meaning to be found there.  He writes:

...I do not believe this design gives personal meaning to humanity.  No matter how dazzling or elegant the final formulation of physics may be, it will not uplift the spirits of billions and give them emotional fulfillment.  No magic formula coming from cosmology and physics will enthrall the masses and enrich their spiritual lives.  (p. 358)

And then, Kaku goes on.  While he claims not to derive his ethics from his cosmology, the purpose Kaku finds in life is remarkably relativistic.  We build our own meaning, says he.  Meaning is what we make of it, nothing more, and nothing less.

Being a good sort, Kaku tries to articulate this in a way that affirms some generally good stuff.  If we're really creating meaning, then, well, we're going to create good meaning.  Work hard!  Love people!  Carpe Diem!  Be a mentor!  Work for justice!  Dominate the globe with your unstoppable army of quantum-forge-powered robots!

Well, not that last one.  Kaku's brilliance in cosmology seems to wander into Joel Osteen's shallow waters when it comes to ethics.   It's earnest and well-meaning self-actualization talk, but without a clear vision of what that might mean relative to concepts like "good."   He tries, for a whole page, to talk purpose and ethics, but it's just a gloss.  A pity, because the vision of being he proposes does seem to give a foundation for talking about "good" in terms that integrate with his physics.

When he talks about fulfilling potential, it feels for an instant like he's catching the importance of intentionality in an m-theory universe.  When he talks about the fundamental unity of quantum reality, it almost...almost...feels like the foundation of the mystic ethos.    But those things flutter away, undeveloped.

No matter.  It's still a faskinatin' book, and Kaku's efforts to translate this mindboggling complex stuff into lay language are to be strongly commended.

Rays, Part Two

It was the final day of our stay in Bermuda, and I was taking a little bit of time to pray.

Praying from a balcony on the twelfth deck of a cruise ship probably doesn't qualify me for membership in the Desert Fathers Monastic Ascetic Club. I hadn't spent the last 40 days sitting atop a pole. I wasn't wearing a hairshirt. Locusts had not been an option at the buffet that afternoon.

I was taking my usual approach to praying, meaning that rather than trying to come up with a nice little list of things I want God to do for me, I just tried to stop thinking and wanting and grasping for a while. As I did that, I looked out across the water of the King's Wharf Harbor, and...well...just looked at it.

It was late in the day, and the rays of light from the afternoon sun played like ten thousand fiery jewels across the surface of the sheltered water. The wind stirred and folded the water into ripples and whorls, and the sun shattered itself again and again across that stirring surface. It was so very simple, just the interplay of three basic elements in a tiny patch of creation. Yet it was also infinitely complex, as the patterns of sun-dapple shifted and changed on the waves in ways that were both logical and unpredictable.

As I contemplated it, I felt a strong sense of the interconnectedness of wind and air and light, how each one moved according to its connection to the other, and how each connection was both simple and almost unfathomably complex. Modeling even simple fluid dynamics is something that gives physicists headaches, and yet here it was before me.

The elegance of the dance between water and air and sun seemed, at that moment, just impossibly marvelous. These mindless things seemed so paradoxically mindful of their place, and of their relationship to one another.

If only human beings could move with such consistent grace.