Monthly Archives: May 2009

Animal Morals

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Richard Gray summarizes the case for a moral sense in animals, offering evidence from wolves, coyotes, monkeys, rodents, bats and whales.

Here is a sample suggesting moral empathy in elephants:

Elephants are intensely sociable and emotional animals. Research by Iain Douglas Hamilton, from the department of zoology at Oxford University, suggests elephants experience compassion and has found evidence of elephants helping injured or ill members of their herd.

In one case, a Matriarch known as Eleanor fell ill and a female in the herd gently tried to help Eleanor back to her feet, staying with her before she died.

So Eleanor received hospice care.  The research, Gray notes, has its critics.  But since we humans are a form of animal life ourselves, it is logical to conclude that what we observe in ourselves is also present in other animal species.

On the other hand, I have noted how our dog Jazz has an underdeveloped moral sense.  Her life motto is, Me first! Of course, that describes a lot of us two legged animals too.

Eugene Peterson and the Church On Pentecost Highway

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Pentecost Highway

Pentecost Highway winds north out of Adrian Township up to Sand Lake.  It’s the second best name for a road I’ve ever encountered.  The best is Lonesome Polecat Lane in Washoe Valley, Nevada, but Pentecost Highway is charming in its own right, and it has more theological significance.

If I ever started a church and had sway over the name, it would be tempting to call it Pentecost Highway.  The name brings to mind spirit and movement.  I’d hope something of what happened on the first Pentecost would characterize the new church.

I once asked Eugene Peterson what an ideal church looks like.  This was when he was pastor of Christ Our King Presbyterian Church in Bel Air, Maryland.  I was visiting relatives in the area and called him to set up a meeting.  I misjudged the roads and arrived very late, but he was still at his office.  He signed a copy of his book A Long Obedience In the Same Direction:

For Chris, with appreciation for the conversation we had sharing friendship & Christ on June 13, 1985.  Eugene H. Peterson

The one thing I remember from that conversation was his answer to the question about an ideal church.  He said, “People would gather on Sunday for an hour of worship (here he raised his hands in a gesture of praise) and then go out and do what Christians ought to do for the rest of the week.”

This is a paraphrase, of course.  (Rather like The Message.)  He meant the church would gather to praise God and disperse and do spontaneously all the other things — mission, evangelism, education and so forth — which would happen without lots of planning, organizing and recruiting.  When I asked him whether the church had ever lived up to this, he sounded a realistic note:  “Even the church in Acts probably had sign-up sheets after six months.”

Even today, though, this is still my vision of what a church on Pentecost Highway would look like — hands lifted together in praise and spontaneous mission in a needy world.

Grilling On Memorial Day

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grill

We bought a gas grill yesterday at ACO Hardware and spent four hours today assembling it.  (Tip:  put grill together before the day it’s needed.)  In the instructions we kept coming across statements like this:

WARNING:  FAILURE TO FOLLOW DIRECTIONS MAY RESULT IN SERIOUS INJURY OR DEATH.

So we followed the instructions closely.  We’ve used a little charcoal grill in the past, the kind you squat down next to on the ground.  This gas grill is a new thing for us.  We cooked corn, pork and later salmon.  Nothing tastes as good as grilled salmon. 

Waiting for the food to cook, I liked this view through the west fence:

flower and fence

Our neighbor says his wife got these ‘rainbow sorbet’ roses for Mother’s Day, and he’s going to plant them along the fence line. 

On this Memorial Day we’re grateful for our blessings, our freedom and the beauty in our lives.

Angels and Demons

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The new Angels & Demons film presents a lot of improbabilities to swallow, mainly in how infallible Robert Langdon is at deciphering symbols. And it’s too formulaic that the male protagonist always hooks up with the female scientist, who is adept at running over cobblestone in high heels.

But if you suspend disbelief for a couple of hours, this movie is quite a ride. Ron Howard has put together a great thriller. The main message I drew is that people and things are often not what they appear. It takes a while to sort out the angels from the demons and get everyone in their proper categories. And the movie doesn’t end when it appears to end. But the finale is satisfying.

It was refreshing, too, to see a film about the Catholic Church that didn’t cast a negative shadow over it, as The Da Vinci Code did. At the end of Angels & Demons an old cardinal says, “Religion is flawed because human beings are flawed.” But it’s clear that even with the flaws, faith remains at the heart of it all.

Christ Was Blessing Me, and I Didn’t Know It

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Wednesday my soul was unraveling like a ball of yarn on the floor. The strings were all loose, and I couldn’t gather them together again.

Two funerals coming up, a sermon percolating through my mind, parishioners to visit in the hospital and a friend to pick up at the airport. People would say things to me, but it was like they were talking through water. I couldn’t follow what they said.

Then two things helped me calm down and find the center again. The first was this view from the eleventh floor at St Joseph’s Mercy Hospital in Ypsilanti:

Above the Trees

This sight above the treeline caught me and held my attention. I wanted to stay there and not return to earth. But somehow just knowing about life above the trees made me feel more whole.  Simone Weil said the beauty of nature is Christ’s tender smile coming to us through matter.

After the visits I walked to the hospital chapel and sat in silence. I let the silence envelop me on all sides. I may not be allowed to receive Catholic communion, but I can borrow their silence from time to time. It’s free of charge, and it has healing and medicinal qualities. Toward the end of my sitting I looked up to my right and saw this:

Christ Blessing

Christ was looking down on me with his hand raised in a gesture of blessing. Christ was blessing me in the silence, and I hadn’t even realized it. Your faith has saved you; go in peace. I walked out of the chapel with a peaceful heart.

On the way out a chaplain met me in the hallway. A man with a gray beard and a blue jacket.

“Did you find everything you needed or wanted?”

“Yes, thank you.”

The Other Torture Issue

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Evangelicals are on the defensive because surveys show they are more likely than mainline Christians to support government use of torture — abusive interrogation techniques used on prisoners.  (Although evangelical leaders and the magazine Christianity Today are on record opposing torture.)

Skye Jethani wonders if this is the result of an inconsistent teaching ministry in evangelical churches:

Perhaps the condemnation of abortion and justification of torture found among our congregants is the result of pastoral teaching that is losing the forest for the trees. We have taught our people to oppose abortion, but have we failed to lift up the larger ethic of life’s sanctity which applies far beyond the first, second, or third trimester? Maybe it’s time for us to preach an ethic of life that stretches from the womb to the tomb—one that even encompasses the prison camps the lie in between.

The other side of this matter is that evangelicals have been vocal in calling attention to the torture and persecution of Christians around the world.  I remember as a teen listening to our local evangelical radio station night after night as they read on the air Myrna Grant’s story of Vanya, a Russian soldier tortured for his faith.  The story made a deep impression on me.

I seldom hear mainline denominations talk about the persecuted church around the world.  But evangelicals care about this issue, and that’s to their credit.

The Most Comfortable Bed I’ve Ever Slept On

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Martins

We bought a new bed from a dear friend at Martin’s Home Center in Tecumseh.  Our old bed had reached the end of its life.  Two men delivered our new Sealy ‘memory foam’ bed Saturday.

It’s so comfortable.  It feels solid and soft, like a huge, dense heavy sponge.  (Heavier than our old bed.)  When our cat Jane first jumped on it, she kept lifting up her paws because the bed feels so different from our last one.

Three nights on it and already back pain issues seem to be diminishing.  This is the best bed I’ve ever slept on.  My wife says when the men delivered it, they said, “Be prepared for a nap you’ll never wake up from.”

The Elephant Holds Up the World

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elephant on desk

James Sire’s book Naming the Elephant is a study in the concept of worldviews. The title comes from the proverbial image of an elephant holding up the world.  Sire defines a worldview in this way:

A worldview is a commitment, a fundamental orientation of the heart, that can be expressed as a story or in a set of presuppositions (assumptions which may be true, partially true or entirely false) which we hold (consciously or subconsciously, consistently or inconsistently) about the basic constitution of reality, and that provides the foundation on which we live and move and have our being.

A worldview lies deeper than a philosophy or a set of beliefs — it’s the bedrock that supports them, the soil that gives rise to them in the first place.

Sire asks seven questions to help us understand our worldview:

  • What is prime reality — the really real?
  • What is the nature of external reality, that is, the world around us?
  • What is a human being?
  • What happens to persons at death?
  • Why is it possible to know anything at all?
  • How do we know what is right and wrong?
  • What is the meaning of human history?

He borrows a shorter list of questions from another author that I also found helpful in reflecting on worldviews:

  • Who am I?
  • Where am I?
  • What’s wrong?
  • What’s the remedy?

How we answer these questions and the resources we use in answering shed light on the presuppositions that form our worldview.  Sire sees worldviews as a tool for self-analysis.  The concept is also useful in understanding the collision of beliefs between people.  He acknowledges pluralism, but he doesn’t believe the plurality of worldviews necessitates a relativism that sees them all as true.

Sire calls his worldview Christian theism.  He also says while we cannot prove a certain worldview is true, we can nonetheless advance arguments in its favor.

All Distinctions Void

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A hymn for Sunday ends with this verse:

Love, like death, hath all destroyed,
rendered all distinctions void;
names and sects and parties fall;
thou, O Christ, art all in all!

This comes from Charles Wesley’s Christ, From Whom All Blessings Flow. I love his poetry.  These lines follow Paul’s sentiment in Galatians 3.28 (which Wesley echoes in the preceding verse).  The whole hymn offers a vision of a Christian community filled with divine love, where all members are ‘touched with loving sympathy’ for one another. 

The vision is stunning to contemplate.  Not the ordinary friendliness that characterizes churches (for which we are grateful), but a love so powerful it renders ‘all distinctions void’ and erases ‘names and sects and parties.’  This is the shocking thing. 

The Detroit Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church is meeting now at Adrian College.  Our congregation is active as the host church.  Since I’m Presbyterian not Methodist, I don’t take part in annual conference, but I’ve attended plenty of presbytery meetings over the years and know well what happens at denominational gatherings. 

Much good takes place at these meetings — friendships strengthen, ministry deepens and important business moves forward.  Yet these denominational meetings also feed on and reinforce the ‘names and sects and parties’ Charles Wesley said love came among us to do away with.

Ugly Buildings

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This post by Ann Althouse introduced me to ‘Brutalist Architecture,’ the concrete, boxy style of building popular in the 60s and 70s.  Brutalism – that’s a catchy name.

Now I have a term to describe our local courthouse:

new courthouse

Courthouse viewed from side parking lot.

There must be some who find this boxy style appealing, but for me it lacks the grace and charm of the old Adrian courthouse across the street:

old adrian courthouse

Althouse’s post concerns the Third Church of Christ, Scientist, in Washington DC, built in the brutalist style.  She wonders about how aesthetics change over time and asks if we should preserve ‘historically significant ugliness.’

What makes a building ugly or beautiful?  Umberto Eco (I think) said beauty is ‘that which pleases when seen.’  So it must be a subjective thing.  But if lots of people have the same subjective reaction to a piece of architecture, does that add more weight to the matter?

When I see the old courthouse, I smile.  It pleases me.  A few years ago the city was going to tear it down, but there was a public outcry against that, so they renovated it instead.  They chose to preserve historically significant beauty.

Looking For Silence

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ut hospital

My mother had surgery Monday at the University of Toledo Medical Center. (Known to locals by its old acronym MCO, Medical College of Ohio.)

I said goodbye to her in the pre-op area at 9 a.m. and returned to that place of purgatory on earth — the waiting room. The surgeon came by after lunch to tell us the procedure was successful, but we didn’t see her till 5 p.m.

There were a dozen folks waiting throughout the day. We sat on green chairs and read books, magazines and the Toledo Blade. A couple of people worked on laptops, which made the familiar Windows music when they powered up. Everyone talked on cell phones. Since voices carry I learned more than I cared to know about personal lives and business projects. I read all the jokes in Readers Digest and solved a Sudoku puzzle from the paper (no small feat).

When The Loud Family came into the waiting room, I left looking for silence, or at least less noise. I walked over to the Meditation Room, a small space with a prayer log, a semi-circle of chairs and a floor-to-ceiling picture of sunlight through trees. A woman was sitting with her back to the door, talking on her cell phone. I paced the halls instead and came back to the Meditation Room later.

Philosopher Dallas Willard says silence is a critical practice for disciples. It can be a hard commodity to come by in some places, hospitals among them. My mother is doing well, but the noise has made it difficult for her to sleep. Many forces in our day resist silence.

Narnia Magic

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Jordan Davis reflects on the appeal of Narnia:

What holds the story together is Lewis, or rather, the benevolent, attentive, encouraging narrator and his occasional presence in the story disguised as a professor, a dwarf, a badger, a lion. His is a sane and playful presence, not tame and never thoughtless. Though great danger is always imminent in Narnia, there is a profound sense of excitement, of mystery, of being loved.

What continues to draw children to Lewis is not only the pleasure of traveling to a world that sounds better than this one but the promise of his company, so entertaining and learned, and so light about it.

I’d not considered before the idea of Lewis himself disguised as a character in the stories, except perhaps in passing in a professor.  Davis’s words remind me of God’s sane and playful presence hidden in the creation.

I first encountered Narnia on a backpacking trip in the Sierras.  The leader read aloud to us The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, a chapter or two at each meal.  The world of Narnia enchanted me.  When Aslan died, I was dismayed, and when he came to life again, I was astonished.

Lewis’s portrayal of the atonement in that story helps me understand.  It’s magic.

Two Stars for Star Trek

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Star Trek tugs at my memories. I’m a ten-year-old boy watching reruns of the original series on a black and white TV in my bedroom. I’m a seminary student watching The Next Generation in the basement of Alexander Hall.

The movies have never had the same emotional impact, although The Wrath of Khan told a good story.

The new film is serviceable. It works pretty well to fill in the background of the characters in the original series.  The visual effects are striking.  The movie adapts the save the universe by the seat of your pants theme common in Star Trek lore.  Kirk often gets the stuffing beaten out of him or hangs by his fingers over an abyss.

My brain doesn’t grasp ‘alternative timelines’ well, so the plot was hard to follow.  There were also unanswered questions:  Why were these raw graduates given command of the flagship?  And what really happened to Spock’s mother?  (I see the sequel.  Star Trek:  The Search For Mom.)

Not a bad movie, but no emotional tugs.  Two stars out of four.

You Will Weep and Know Why

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Kelsey on bench

“We don’t see a lot of cats born in 1993,” said the woman at the clinic as she spread out a pale green blanket for Kelsey to lie on.  It was her last trip to the vet.  I seldom cry enough to taste the salt of my own tears, but I did as she slipped away.  She’d been failing for months and had lost over half her weight.  The picture above dates from happier times when she’d sit on the piano bench with her paws crossed ‘like a lady.’

A poem by Hopkins came into my thoughts:

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Today I mourn for Kelsey.

Walk the Labyrinth

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labyrinth

Labyrinths appeal to the sort of people who find labyrinths appealing.  This one takes 244 steps to reach the center.

I walk around in circles in what seems a random and aimless way, constantly changing direction, but the path itself follows a logical design and takes me at last to the center of things.

It’s like my life. I meander in random circles on a path laid out beyond my control, and suddenly the center appears.

Why I Am a Literalist

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I don’t believe Adam and Eve were flesh and blood people who lived in a garden and talked to snakes. I don’t believe Jonah was swallowed by a great fish. These are stories of faith that need not be literally true.

But it’s always mattered to me whether Jesus actually did and said the things attributed to him in the four Gospels. I never wondered whether he did until I encountered critical scholarship.

All we can know of the Gospels, I learned, is they arose from hypothetical faith communities long after Jesus who expressed their beliefs in symbolic language and stories. We must take them seriously not literally. To believe otherwise, one is chided for being a literalist.

I am a literalist. I believe the Gospels give us reliable access to what Jesus said and did. When people erect a wall of separation between the Gospels and Jesus, this flies in the face of what the Gospels themselves claim to do, which is to give us access to Jesus through the testimony of his earliest followers.

The problem with the critical approach, taken to excess, is it makes the Gospel writers false witnesses — they attribute to Jesus things that do not comport with what he actually said and did.

Of course the Gospels do not present Jesus raw and unfiltered. We see him through the lives and lenses of his earliest followers. In this sense I agree with Robert Sokolowski:

The New Testament presents not only the life of Jesus but also the reaction and response of those who experienced his life, and the reaction and response of those who believed in him without encountering him; what he said and did had to be responded to in these two ways, and once the two reactions were accomplished, a kind of closure was reached.

This is how identity forms. I am not only who I am and what I say and do — I am also what other people perceive me to be. The image other people have of me is part of my identity. The closer they are to me, the more accurate their image of me will be.

To take one example, I’m not saying everything in John’s Gospel happened exactly verbatim as written. No, the narrative is too highly stylized and artificial for this (rather like an icon). But only that the author, who claims to be an eyewitness, stood close enough to Jesus to form a faithful perception of him.  The author didn’t misrepresent Jesus.  And so with the other Gospels.

What I’m pushing against in all this is the ‘truth need not be fact’ argument. It works in some cases. But in most areas of life facts matter.  I don’t think the Gospel testimony can be proved true beyond any and all doubt, only that it can be believed plausibly beyond reasonable doubt.

If I ask a neighbor whether the Cadmus Road bridge has been rebuilt, and she says ‘yes it has,’ it matters whether I believe her testimony and whether it is factually true. Similarly, if Jesus is our bridge to God, it matters whether I have any reliable access to him through the testimony in the Gospels. They re-present him to me as an object of faith leading to eternal life.

This is why I am a literalist.

Financial Peace

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Sunday we finished Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University. We met for 13 weeks, watching videos in the sanctuary and moving into two classrooms for small group discussions.

In his Tennessee drawl, Ramsey taught us how to ‘beat debt’ and build wealth.’ He uses humor, biblical wisdom and financial acumen to convey his insights.  Along the way he covers everything from household budgets to Roth IRAs.  He emphasizes frugality, hard work and delayed gratification.

He summarizes his financial plan in seven steps:

  1. Start by getting $1000 in the bank for emergencies.
  2. Pay off all debts except mortgage.
  3. Increase emergency fund to three to six months expenses.
  4. Invest 15 percent of income for retirement.
  5. Invest for children’s education.
  6. Pay off mortgage early.
  7. Give your money away.

He says it usually takes two or three years to accomplish the first three steps.  For the last, he recommends giving all along while completing the earlier steps.  His approach reminds me of John Wesley’s saying about money, “Get all you can.  Save all you can.  Give all you can.”

Dave Ramsey is a masterful communicator.  He holds an audience’s attention through difficult subject matter with grace and wit.  I commend this program for churches and individuals.  The sooner people start the better.

I Don’t Finish Books

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books-on-shelf

I abandon books. I start one with enthusiasm, but soon the novelty wears off, and another seizes my attention. Like a child enchanted by a new toy, I drop the old one. The promise of a new book stirs my imagination — finishing the old one involves tedium.

I finally finished The Divine Conspiracy, by Dallas Willard, a book begun in February. Willard gave me a new perspective on being a student of Jesus. But his 400 pages were a chore to complete.

Clergy are supposed to read. ‘Leaders are readers.’ I heard a tall steeple pastor once say he read a book a week. I tried to follow his example but soon fell behind. I admire religion blogs with long lists of books down the sidebar. I feel guilty for not finishing the books I begin.

Yet I also wonder about the emphasis placed on reading. The Gospels don’t portray Jesus reading anything but the Hebrew scriptures, which happens once. He only writes once too, and that in sand. Reading and writing, though part of his upbringing, didn’t figure much in his ministry.

I wonder what it would be like to live without books. My library has 800 — 200 more than Chaucer’s — but they haven’t made me more loving or faithful.

A desert father was asked how he could live without books. He responded, “My book is the nature of created things, and when I want to read the words of God, the book is there before me.”  A noble sentiment.

This line of thought leads to Qoheleth’s ‘the making of many books’ weariness. But to understand the book of nature, I need the other books. So I read them and occasionally finish them.

Several lie orphaned on my shelf and bedside table. Maybe I’ll finish another.

Politics and Pulpits

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Tim Ives flamed out.  A dedicated pacifist, he preached against guns, war and violence, but in a post 9/11 world he found himself more and more at odds with his congregation in Chappaqua, New York.  Conflict and confrontation ensued.  He grew weary and left the ministry to become a psychotherapist. 

Some months later he encountered a former parishioner whom he’d once shared ‘bitter words’ with.  Ives took the meeting as a divine invitation to be reconciled to his personal enemies.  His own healing was taking hold. 

He’s a therapist now, and he’s returned to pastoral ministry, but he preaches less about political and social issues:

“I still feel the same about guns and I know I’m right,” he said. “If I thought giving that sermon would be the end of guns in this society, I’d give it again in a second. But it won’t. That sermon was more about placating my need to be right than about preaching the Gospel. It does more to defeat my case than help it.

The need to be right seduces, overpowers and blinds us.  That’s why it’s so dangerous.  It inevitably fuels a self-righteousness at odds with the gospel. 

I avoid politics in the pulpit — not from a desire to avoid self-righteousness, though.  No, in me the avoidance arises from pusillanimity.  Which in this case serves me well.  (Not so well in other arenas.)