Listening to the new Switchfoot album, which for me will always be an event, one could label it a passion project, and it has certainly been a while in the making. The product of where the bandmates find themselves in this present moment, wrestling with songs that seek to find the power of the present inbetween the lyrical bookends of creation and mortality. What if, the songs wonder, the eternal begins now.

This pushes us to then consider what it means to live the present and all of the tension this evokes. How do we find the “Beautiful Life” amidst the “Darkness.” How do we find ourselves in the process of losing ourselves. How do we see when it feels impossible to even imagine. How do we define what is real and what is not. How do we define what the Natural World is.

This narrative is a powerful one on it’s own. What struck me as even more timely and even astute is the album’s lyrical reflection on one of humanity’s reigning crisis: the world of algorithms and AI. A subject that seems to be making itself known in the headlines over and over again. These past few days the thing raising alarm bells is the beloved indie studio A24 signing a deal with an outsourced company researching and developing AI technology. Just the next in line of what seems an endless line of different entities making the same noted and proactive investment in figuring this beast out.

And as it goes with this now common narrative, entity makes the announcement, public backlash ensues. Feelings loom large and heated over this uncertain subject, to be sure.

I was pondering this on my walk today. I understand the reactions. At least I think I do. What I find more interesting is assessing what those reactions are. What they reveal about where we are in this present moment and what we actually believe about the shape of this world.

This is the thought thst came to me, admittedly raw. It seems curious to me that the very thing that fears the increasing presence of AI in our lives is the thing that gave it life. AI is the product of an enlightenment society built on the myth of progress. What drives this myth is the utilitarian commitments that see progress as the symbol of humanity’s greatest accocmplishment: remaking a primitive world in our image (humanism). An accomplishment that marries both moral and technological aims, seeing these things as largely interconnected within the field of the sciences, humanity’s greatest tool.

Somewhere within that mix a seemingly arbitrary line seems to have gotten drawn in our minds. In some way, form and fashion technology has now become the enemy of the great human enterprise. This in a world where the same people have insisted streaming networks driven by billionaire entities and algorithms is somehow perfectly human.

There’s a twist if ever there were one. 

A twist, but not unexpected. If Foreman, the lead singer of Switchfoot, is correct, we are saturated in this present moment with a world already saturated in the very same soil it was birthed from. Algorithms and AI is simply the present language defining these same patterns. Ours is a world we not only championed, but bought into without abandon, and often in the name of “everything evolves” and “change is the one constant” mantras. Which is to say, the outcry over AI might feel logical and prescient, but it comes amidst the uncritical embrace of systems that have long since controlled and directed the shape of human development. AI has simply found a way to, seemingly, make people hyper aware of the nature of this world we have long thought to be made in our own image, and apparently we don’t like this reality.

In a very real sense, what lies behind the fears over AI is a fear that the enlightenment narrative which was supposed to save the world by way of our modern, evolved, human ambition is being unmasked and layed bare. Rather than concede that point, AI has become the next in a long line of scapegoats allowing us to preserve the illusion. AI, we insist, erodes true humanist systems and values. It destroys what we (humanity) have built. It’s a mere copy of the real thing, an entity steeped in plagarism and dependent on it’s true master (us).

In truth, what AI actually does is challenge our narratives of what it means to be human. For Foreman, this is the central question behind the songs on Forever Now: what does it mean to be human.

To acknowledge AI is in some ways to acknolwedge that it is modeled on the same theoretical grounds that frames human function. For as long as we can find a way to convince ourselves it is a lesser version of the real thing, whatever that happens to mean, we are able to avoid this central truth about what it is we fear. This is, ironically, part of the nature of our humanity. But the theory, for as persistent as it must be in a utilitarian/materialist worldview, can only stand if we are to see humanity as a product of this same function. Dig into the many smart theorists that are out there and you will uncover this same basic thought. The future of AI is in fact following what we can observe about this function. The irony of course being that AI becomes it’s own tool in a sense, doing the necessary groundwork on it’s own to better it’s own programming.

Which, again, a certain worldview will describe as the same pattern that we find in the functioning brain. Once AI finds the approrpriate brain map, the possibilities become endless.

Here the nuances dig even deeper yet. Because of course this has immense implications for how it is that we engage human society. As a tool, AI reaches into all facets of life. It drives medical research and inovation, environmental engagment, how we shop for groceries (or anything for that matter), what we drive, how we build, on and on and on. This is part of the conundrum it creates for us as a species. The myth of progress rests on this notion of a better world, and by better it means technologicaly advanced (bound together as that is with morality).

Not unlike the discovery of fire, the main engine of such changes throughout human history are driven by this notion of new inventions doing the work (energy) that we used to do ourselves. There are a number of voices though that will argue that we can also find in that historical picture a clear dividing line between when the rate of change began to outpace our ability to conform to it (or conform it to our lives more aptly). AI is simply one more expression of that same reality. In many ways, it’s no different than the world we have been living in for a while now. We simply haven’t recognized it, largly because we have bought so sharply into the enlightnment narrative. Lose that and the whole humanist enterprise comes crashing down on itself. The whole world becomes a machine, if you will.

And, for that matter, nothing cuts quite as sharp as a tool that seems to undercut one of our most important characteristics: our creativity. In some weird sense you can hear and feel the mantra that says, you can have our technological inovation, because in some way, shape or form we can still convince ourselves that these inovations are our own. But you can’t have our art. 

Or more recognizably, the harder statement: you will never have our art, because you will never be able to make it.

For all the social impact AI does have, this becomes the primary grounds by which we hold on to that position of human excecptionalism.

Now, this is where I would say I personally diverge when it comes to the popular discourse surrounding AI. So much of what I see echos the same concerns on the popular level. We always need a scapegoat, and right now AI is the easy target. Nothing like a great unifier. In fact, you don’t need to look far to see two sides each trying to attach the problem of AI to the other. Try as one might, the blame will also always come back to our need to make these scapegoats human. Depending on who you listen to, it’s a product of leftist indoctrination or being led by the disinformation of the right. In both cases it’s one step removed from framing either case as communism in disguise.

Those human machines are nothing if not predictable after all.

Where I personally diverge is on the front of saying, the real problem with the conversation surrounding AI is that it’s all still bound to the same root problem: a problematic narrative. Until we change the narrative AI will continue to foster the same fears, because it’s the narrative that gives it it’s power over us, not the technology. It’s that narrative that has, largely in our ignorance, handed us a premise in which the things we fear can’t even really be defined. We talk about real versus fake as though the human experience belongs to some different category in a utilitarian/materialist worldview. We train ourselves to ignore the stated systems and structures that give rise to that experience in such a view, camping out on constructed notions such as the “will.” Sometimes I wonder if the best thing we can do to hold our rational senses accountable to this end is, ask the hypothetical question: what happens in a future where AI morphs into not just a replica of the human brain (the engine of that machine), but of something with immense more capability.

And then ask how we tend to do this all the time already in, as one book puts it, the invention of prehistory. The very thing that allows the modernist narrative of the enlightenment to keep surviving against all manners of logical inconsistencies and less than rational appeals to the way the world actually works and what history actually reveals: it is the invention of Prehistory that allows the modernist narrative to set its humanist interests over and above the supposed primitive world that ironically gave it its existence (modernism needs the bloody and violent demise of so called primitive to exist within its own myth of progress).

Here I also diverge in a second way. If that narrative is what enslaves us to this fear, a different narrative can liberate us from it. In this sense it’s not so much in standing against AI as in being able to actually name what it is. It belongs to the category of technological progress. To the myth of progress. And yet, and this is where my beliefs kick in, this myth, for as much as it sells us on that all too appealing notion of remaking the world in our image, binds us to a story that can only ever lead to the same inevitable end: dividing humanity against itself. What we need is a myth that can actually bring into view our experience of something that is legitimately beyond us. That’s the irony. AI is not beyond us. In  the narrative in which we are taught to fear it, AI can only ever be us, and we can only ever be it. We are all part of the same machine that replicates the same function that fuels the pattern of all life. Just as it’s possible to experience a work of art that AI makes as genuine “in our brains,” so we experience anything in precisely the same way. That’s the truth of that particular narrative. For something to transcend the notion of construct, of being “our creation,” and to represent something real and true, inherently so, it must appeal to something outside of ourselves. So it is with beauty and awe. So it is with love. These are the sorts of things that tell a different story. about the nature of the world, truths to which we are drawn, not truths which we construct.

To bring it back to switchfoot, that’s what allows us to imagine eternity beginning now. That’s what frees us to believe in the present

Feels redundant to keep saying after every new release from Zahnd that this feels like his most personal and vulnerable project to date. That was true for The Wood Between the Worlds. It seems equally true for his newest, Unseen Existences. A book that arguably works to break into the present trend in Christian scholarship towards reclaiming a theology of the body and of creation and suggest that for as necessary as that reclamation has been, there is inevitably something important that gets neglected with any such paradigm shifts.

For Zahnd, this is the simple belief in heaven.

It’s not that Zahnd is looking to rewind the clock and return to a space and time before the theological giant N.T. Wright popularized and made accessible the forgotten idea that in the Christian story Heaven is in fact being brought down to earth, not us escaping earth to go to heaven.

Or, for example, to borrow a lyric from a recent collaboration between Neal Carpenter and Drew and Ellie Holcomb:

Since when, since when is it not okay. To dream of what’s right here in the room instead of world’s away, What if the future I am after is right here today, Since when, since when is it not okay, So help me Lord, help me Lord to keep carrying on

Zahnd is taking the heaven come to earth idea and suggesting that something happens when Christianity neglects and forgets one of it’s core and most fundamental truths: that heavenly realities nevertheless “lie beyond the human senses.” As he suggests, “At it’s core Christianity confesses a participation with the unseen existences of heaven… and sets forth the sacred paths into these unseen existences.” (page 37)

What’s interesting, and perhaps a bit more subtly intertwined, is the ways he bemoans a Christianity that has quietly taken on some of the markings of materialism and physicalism, both hallmarks of modernity. Instead of not being at home “in the land of their sojourn,” we have lost the art of life as a pilgrimage towards that mysterious true home to which we belong. Here he speaks of “the tyranny of materilialism” being made manifest in a world that has quietly become skeptical and, dare he say it, a bit ashamed of that Christian profession in an unseen realm. Here he begins to appeal against that predominant tendency in Wright to jettison all things platonic, and find instead a value in becoming comfortable with the sort of dichotomies that materialism readily finds ludicrous. Not at the expense of the created world, but as a way of keeping in view the redemptive story that holds our sacred pilgrimage in it’s hands.

We traverse this earth with a strident belief that the Divine Mystery has and does and indeed is breaking into our midst. Just because modern materialism shouldn’t lead us to bury this simple fact in favour of something more tolerable. In doing so we lose sight of the stories that wtness to this basic fact of our religious and spiritual convictions. We are taught to see religious experience as some lesser and less trustworthy and less demonstrable form of truth. And yet to sit in the company of these stories, something we know deep down, is to suggest otherwise. We need not be ashamed of the simple nature of this truth about how such conviction works and operates. Unseen Existences isn’t the same as saying it is unknowable, unencouterable, undemonstrable.

If Wright’s premise holds true, that to rip apart heaven and earth is to be left with a Christian narrative unable to speak to either, Zahnd’s claim that “When heaven is removed from our cosmology, earth loses it’s meaning” just might be the present crisis that emerges in the wake of this needed correction.

“The image of the invisible God” is indeed a premise that hinges on the invisible God being made visible in our midst. This is the shape of our sorjourn. it has always taken this shape. He gives a final chapter to his walking of the Camino de Santiago to give this a flesh and blood and tangible image, but all throughout his impassioned plea to remember the mystery that informs the journey breaks through, not just with his story but with the endless stories of those who have walked before him and us.

And yes, I can see this book sitting in that uncomfortable middle space, being at once too conservative in some of it’s theological outlook for some (how dare you take the scriptures and the death and resurrection of Jesus this seriously), while similtaneous feeling too liberally minded (how dare you speak of the divine mystery in all things). But for what it’s worth, this is nothing new for Zahnd. It is in fact part of his appeal. He critiques the Tradition he belongs to from the inside, but also is one of it’s biggest defenders.

Another lyric from a song that could be the soundtrack to this book. From Pilgrim Way by Stillcreek:

Verse 1

This is my comfort in affliction
That Your promise gives me life
When I’m fearful and surrounded
This I call to mind

Verse 2

Lord You’ve always been a shelter
The safest place I know
I remember what You’ve spoken
It’s my only hope

Chorus

I set Your words to a melody
I keep Your words
Right in front of me
As I walk this pilgrim way
As I walk this pilgrim way
Your statutes have been my song

Verse 3

When I look upon the wicked
Holy anger burns within
But when I rest upon Your justice
I take comfort yet again

Chorus

I set Your words to a melody
I keep Your words
Right in front of me
As I walk this pilgrim way
As I walk this pilgrim way
Your statutes have been my song

Bridge

This is how I spend my life
I remember day and night
Trusting every word You’ve said
Treasuring Your promises

Bridge

This is where I find my hope
I know You will lead me home
Following for all my life
Carried by the love of Christ

Chorus

I set Your words to a melody
I keep Your words
Right in front of me
As I walk this pilgrim way
As I walk this pilgrim way
Your statutes have been my song

Outro

Your statutes have been my song

In the recent Toy Story film (Toy Story 5), we find the creators moving to tackle the quintessential modern crisis: our relationship to technology, and specifically the epidemics of addiction and social/psychological illness it has created for the younger generations (not to mention the older ones still existing with one foot in both worlds).

This is not surpising. If one needed to find the natural progression of this story, a series that has, in it’s own way, found itself straddling these lines of conversation between the different generational contexts of it’s own time weathered longevity, this would be the conversation that we need to have today. And it does an admirable job of taking on this challenge, often rising to the same level of inspired storytelling it has become lovingly known for. I know there exists some (I would argue unfortunate) resistance and cynycism surrounding the fourth installment, with some seeing it as an infringement on what is often called the perfect trilogy with the perfect end to a perfect story, but what might lend this one a greater degree of grace is that it doesn’t impede on that trilogies prior existence. If the fourth was seen more as an epilogue, needing to add to that trilogy in some way, ways that some see as uneccessary, the fifth film is in many ways occupying it’s own portion of the story and doing it’s own thing in it’s own time.

What might be suprising, or overlooked, is the fact that this recontextualizing is neverthless drawing on the same patterns and cycles that made the original trilogy so resonant. At it’s core, the film is dealing with the same crisis and the same questions that it has been asking from the start: how do we deal with the loss that growing up represents.

As I was watching this film, my mind kept wandering back to a recently released book I’m in the process of reading by Mac Barnett titled Make Believe: On Telling Stories to Children. In his introduction, Barnett describes the target audience as the following:

“This is a book for adults. More specifically, this is a book for adults about books for children.”

If this is indeed who the book is written for, Barnett goes on to suggest that the main thesis comes down to this simple question: what is a children’s book. The part that kept coming to mind as I was watching Toy Story 5 comes from his fleshing out of this question.

Barnett first points out the interconnected relationship between adult and children’s books. By which he means the obvious but overlooked truism that the ones writing children’s literature are in fact adults. This not only denotes an existing power structure (the ones writing indeed hold power over the reader’s world), but underscores the often unexplored truth that this power means all children’s literature is an act of proselytization. This might feel uncomfortable to admit, but at it’s core, all books written by adults for children are book’s which see the world of the child through those adult eyes. If children come to encounter these stories as part of their formation, their cultural ethos, ultimatley being tasked with making it their own, the real danger comes from forgetting or negelecting the fact that this culture is the world the adults are handing to them.

Part of what Bartlett wants to do with this book is open up a conversation about this relationship. As he puts it, “There’s a gaping chasm between childhood and adulthood, and the children’s author must find some way across.” At least if they want to tell good children’s stories that reach for truth. In this way, the question “what is a children’t book,” a question that must resist the trappings of being sucked into reducing it to a simple genre, might be better posed as, “what is a children’s author.” A children’s book is, at it’s core, the product of an author deliberately navigating this existing chasm with awareness of that existing relationship between adult and child.

What this chasm is, as Bartlett does a wonderful job unpacking, flows from how it is that we grow up, “defining ourselves as older by rejecting the things we very recently loved.” I found this statement powerfully aware and astute. At the root of this is a certain existential crisis framed not only by the sense of loss that growing up represents, but by a governing narrative. We define ourselves by this underlying belief that to be an adult is somehow superior to being a child. To become something more than we were demands a rejection of the world we are leaving behind, and it’s worth noting largely because we want to be liberated to be the ones with power over it. And of course this includes this underlying belief that the point of growing up is to aquire greater knowledge of the world we inhabit. If a child sees the world one way, we grow to see it in a way that we believe is more real and more true, by which we usually mean “more factual.”

This doesn’t come out of nowhere. That governing narrative is the same modernist narrative that we find being depicted in Toy Story 5, and in fact in nearly every portion of our lives here in the West. A world where technological progress, and the utilitarian and scientific allegiances that drive it, is the point of a world that must grow up and reject the antiquated ways of a world once steeped in superstition and primitivism. It’s not simply that we find a world with this new “tech,” it’s that the myth of progress tells us this is the superior world, even going so far as to render it a kind of “moral” progress.

Here I would make the argument that Toy Story 5 rightly locates the existing tension, once again finding it’s symbolism in this world of toys being rejected and forgotten in favour of technological progress, or a world growing up and changing. This becomes the operative metaphor for the human narrative running underneath, that idea that growing up naturally means the loss of what came before. I would also argue the film finds the right concluding note, understanding that the issue runs deeper and requires us to dig underneath the more superficial exterior of that modern myth. There we uncover an idea that runs through all of the films, which is simply this idea that, for this world to matter, a world marked by this sense of constant change and this act of growing up, we have to be able to find something that is able to withstand this loss. We have to be able to anchor ourselves in some form of universal truth that can fight back against our rejection at the same time. A life built solely around the constant act of rebellion is a self defeating one.

If the film understands this, I think it also follows a pattern of much modernist storytelling, in that it fails to do the work of fully and rationally exploring the cognitive disonnance of these seemingly contradicting forces. At one point a main character in the film expresses, legitimately so, that they are tired of giving themselves to loving and caring for a child only to discover that their existence is ultimately proved meaningless. Everything fades away with the inevitable and constant pattern of rejection that adulthood needs and craves.

There is an easy sentiment brought in to colour over this disonnance in this moment in the film, which simply says the meaning comes from our participation in the present. Which is to say, everything is meaningful because it is feeding into what this world, or what someone is becoming. It is part of that bigger picture. And if you have seen the trilogy (which of ocurse you have), you will know this is very much the arc of those films as well. There is a problem though: the sentiment, when allowed to be held to the fires of logic and reason, that same adult reasoning that rejects childhood as a means of speaking to something true, collapses under the weight of it’s own conclusions, both acting without any true aim while also actively telling the past that it is a redundancy, a present that is meant to be done away because it is lesser. The brute truth of this belief is that it ultimate condemns our present as well, which is precisely the crisis this moment in the film is articulating. When we look at the ways we actually live and the ways we actually anchor ourselves in the midst of this disonnance, it betrays a failure to attend to this chasm that Bartlett is pointing out very much exists.

We cannot justify the act of growing up by justifying a narrative that rejects the legitimacy of our childhood. In the same way, we cannot pretend as though the myth of progress somehow solves or answers the very real truth that this cognitive disonnance uncovers. Two things can be true at once: we grow up, and likewise growing up presents a legitimate challenge to why all of this matters in the here and now.

Here I am going to say something that might be considered controversial, but it is to this end that I will continue to argue and believe that Toy Story 4 is still the most essential film of the series. Without Toy Story 4, this lingering crisis is left without a real and coherent means of being grappled with. The life of the toys at the end of Toy Story 3 indeed remain locked in the most strident and disillusioned and arguably ignored and unaddressed existential crisis: our ability to actually approach an answer to the question of why the toys matter in the first place. It’s a glaring inconsistency that the trilogy tables and then forgets, mainly through it’s appeal to a (albiet smartly drawn) sentimentality, soaked in this belief that growing up and fading away is the point, because it’s about change and progress.

An inconsistency Toy Story 4 is brave enough to face head on, not surprisingly being one of the key reasons, I think (my opinion of course), it got maligned and shoved aside by some. It pokes a hold in that modernist myth, and in doing so addresses the chasm between it’s very adult awareness of an essential childhood crisis.

That last statement is so important. As Bartlett poses in his book, “What if they (children) are in fact better equipped to engage deeply with stories than adults.” In a world where, in the language of Toy Story 5, play is about the imagination and make believe is about giving that imagination life in the confines of our minds, our created stories, make believe, properly rendered, is about forming a response to what we percieve to be true and real about this world we occupy. Far from my childhood self being distanced from this truth, the more years I live, indeed quickly encroaching on 50, the more I seek to recover the buried knowledge my childhood once made available. To grow up is to find ourselves resisting that childhood perspective (in the way of outgrowing that “baby” bed, or moving from elementary to middle grade… every point of growth comes from seeing and rejecting the thing that makes us lesser than in the eyes of our peers), and yet to grow old is to find ourselves in a process of needing to recover it, lest this whole thing come crashing down into that same sense of meaninglessness.

There is something else that was going through my head towards this same end as I was watching this film. On my way towards 50 I have planned what for me is a bucket list trip to England this summer. A bucket list trip in the way of returning to my own childhood by following in the footsteps of the children’s authors whom formed me. Of seeing the places and spaces that inspired them. What strikes me about this space, representing my family heritage, is the way it has existed in my own imagination as this liminal space between the old world myths and the modern ones. This indeed stands at that crossroads, with it’s stories continuiing to attend to that chasm.

Over the last couple years I have been reading so many books that have been echoing a similar need to return to and recover the stories that represent the childhood of our own modern, adult malaise on a historical and societal level. One that is covered up by our doubling down on our tightly held myth of progress and the constant rejection of the past that this demands. One that has indeed, for many of us, failed to rationally attend for the real questions that the lived life poses to our rational senses. If Toy story 5 isn’t quite willing to do the work, I do think it’s worthwhile pointing to it’s reigning image of something akin to universal truths running undetneath. It would be wrong, in my opinion, to suggest that this film would in any way be justifiying technological progress as either the enemy or the hero. Nor is it devolving into superficial sentiments that suggest “it’s simply how we use it.” It’s getting at something deeper. We can indeed speak to the loss of certain fundamental truths in this modern landscape. We can speak to the very real epidemics. We can speak to the very real crisis that growing old actually represents and not be shamed for doing so. But we can only do so by reaching into the past and being willing to give it credence. By being willing to say, maybe our childhood could see certain truths more clearly than our present adult, modernist position allows. That, I think, is an important message and one that more than justifies this film’s existence. After all, if Toy Story 4 is right, there’s a lot hanging in the balanace with that conversation, beginning with the question of why this existence means anything at all, and ending with the question of our lives being an invitation to particpate in the midst of that chasm, attending to the gaps of that experience.

*a transcript of a recent sermon I gave on “serve one another.”

When I was asked to take part in this series over at Faith Covenant I had to take a second to think through how long my wife Jen and I have been attending that church: coming on 14 years, which feels wild. That’s a long ways away from that much younger version of myself walking through the doors of a denomination I had never heard of. Here I was, the burnt out kid coming off my last ministry position, peddling my Irish roots steeped in a long history of itinerant preachers travelling across England with John Wesley (more information than you needed or wanted since I’ve been immersed in my family history as of late), which eventually morphed into the good old North American Pentecostalism that became my direct heritage. Walking now into this group of Luther influenced, weathered Swedes whom, rather than arguing about whether we should baptized infants or not, were content to have it both ways. This present series called “one another” is in line with what I’ve come to know about this small denomination.

Actually, true story: the topic I preached on a couple weeks ago, as part of this present series called “one another,” was the call to pray for one another. I made the joke at the time that they dodged a bullet, inviting the Pentecostal in the room to give the sermon on prayer. As it was, one week later and it would have been Pentecost Sunday.

The plot thickens again, as here I am on the other side of Pentecost Sunday being invited again to preach on the same series. I say conspiracy. They must really not want that sermon on speaking in tongues.

Another true story: when I was first asked to preach I was given a couple options. It was between a passage on prayer and an odd passage about circumcision. I’m bad enough at prayer and praying that I debated. When I went with prayer, the running joke was that I was waiting to see what our pastor would do with the sermon on circumcision and would be praying for him.

And now here I am, being handed the sermon on circumcision. More conspiracies.  

Okay, last true story. As I mentioned, I suck at prayer, so I went to Jen (who I would describe as a prayer) for advice. Her advice: Dave, get out of your head and just be practical. Which if anyone knows me is a tall order. I live in my head on my best days. In fact, I exist based on whatever existential crisis I might be obsessed with in the given moment

There’s a legitimate reason though for bringing that up, and given that you all have been working through this series at the same time as us, I’ll be curious to know if this has been your experience as well. To hear the call to love, to pray, to serve, it brings to mind a particular struggle, a tension. Yes, that curious tension that emerges with the inevitable thought that to speak these things is also to be reminded that I am not very good at them. And also that in some way, shape or form I should be, with all the complicated emotions and dynamics that come from navigating this within community. And yet my suspicion is, with an endless array of tensions that lie on the surface, the real struggle with these one another passages runs deeper. What hangs in the balance is what we actually think and believe about love, about prayer, about serving, which is intimately connected to what we think and believe to be true about God, about ourselves, and about others. As I said in my earlier sermon, there is a curious thing in the fact that to pray actually creates the tension- to pray, for example, is to be confronted with seemingly unanswered prayers. But, as we discover in the pages of the scriptures, it’s also the answer.

Which is to say, if we are going to get at what this whole one another series means, we have to begin there, in that space in here, in our heads, with what it is that we in fact believe about these things. However, I also think the advice is astute. If we can’t get out of our own heads, the thing that suffers is the one another of it all. This, it would seem from where I have been sitting anyways, has been the point of the series. That’s the process I hope to engage this morning as we move into the simple invitation to “serve one another.”

Intro to central verse, found in Galatians 5:1-15:

From Galatians 5:1, N.T. Wright’s translation: “The Messiah set us free so that we could enjoy freedom! So stand firm and don’t get yourselves tied down by the chains of slavery”

From Galatians 5:2-12, my own translation: “A bunch of confusing thoughts about circumcision”

From: Galatians 5: 13-15, NRSV  “For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters, only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves (servants) to one another. For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, You shall love your neighbour as yourself. If, however, you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another.”

The main commentary I used to prepare for this morning was Wright’s relatively recent work on this letter. Since we are jumping straight in to a discussion “in process”, nearly at the letter’s end, I felt it was worth framing how Wright sees this section fitting into the whole. This section in chapter 5 is the culmination of what Wright calls “a delayed rhetorical climax, by which he simply means that Paul has been allowing the tension  the problem plaguing this community has created in the context of their particular lives to percolate, and now is finally interjecting. Wright describes it as Paul taking a deep breath and saying, so finally then, here is the point of it all- “The moment where we move from what one must believe (in our heads) to what one must do (getting out of our heads).” That connection matters.

The notes in my NRSV Bible state the context of this community as the following:

“Paul is a figure on the move, travelling from city to city and engaged with Gentile converts. Chapters 1-2 provide our earliest evidence about the leaders active in the years just after Jesus’ death and before the catastrophic Judean rebellion against Rome.” (Chapters 1-2: the context (a community of Gentile and Judean believers being brought together in the light of the story of Christ’s death, resurrection and ascension), Chapters 3-5: the problem (conflict between Gentiles and Judeans over how and why they can trust this story in relationship to the covenant with Israel), Chapter 5: the solution (serve one another).

  

In the James passage (James 5:13-18) that informed our discussion on prayer, we pray in the face of two different kinds of wisdom that come from two very different places, one from God, the other that is not from God but from the Powers that enslave. We know these sources, according to James, by the different qualities that they exhibit and produce. For Wright, Paul here in Galatians is fleshing out these same contrasting realities: the story of the Powers of Sin and Death which enslave the world, which he calls the story of exile, and the story of Christ’s death, resurrection and ascension, which is the inauguration of this new creation reality Wright calls the new exodus.

This isn’t, then, ultimately a passage about circumcision. It’s about that covenant story and why we can trust what it says about God, about us, about the world, indeed in a world that continues to push back on us and say, Christ doesn’t appear to have accomplished much of anything at all.

Thus we get back to Galatians 5. You’ll notice the bookends of this mornings passage which I mentioned earlier: The Proclamation from Paul as a faithful Judean, made to a Church grappling with the breaking in of this story of Jesus as it pushes out into the Gentile world: “The Messiah set us free so that we could enjoy freedom!” (5:1) And the subsequent invitation from Paul to consider the one another amidst the tension of this breaking in: “Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another.” (5:13-15)

Lest we think this preaches a story that says, “from slavery to slavery,” which is precisely the existential crisis leaving this co-existing community of Gentile and Judean believers stuck in their own heads (and seemingly for good reason, as that catastrophic reality of the temple destruction lies awaiting them around the next corner), this is in fact a story about what is, and indeed has been, transformed by Christ’s work. To become slaves to one another, or in other words to serve one another through love is the way into the story of the arrival of this new creation reality. It is how that reality becomes known in our lives. Slavery to the powers, on the other hand, is what leaves us, as James says, in doubt, divided, knowing no other story but exile, and leaving us only to turn in on ourselves, and indeed one another, over the tensions this creates. In the same way that prayer risks these feelings of God’s absence, to love, to serve, is to risk much to same. As the Galatians passage puts it, as they step into the reality of their own world, their own context, they are driven in response to bite and devour one another towards one end- consumption of the whole. And who doesn’t like a good cannibalism analogy, am I right? Better not to risk. Better yet to put up the walls that can guard us against the tensions. And the first thing to get sacrificed in this case is the ona another of it all, because we mistake that for the true enemy: the enslaving Powers of Sin and Death.

Knowing this risk, Paul’s argument is about why this matters: it is about whether or not the new reality in Jesus has indeed been brought about. It is about whether we can trust this story. It is about what this actually means for the lives of our communities. How is it, Paul states, that we would see the long promised movement of the spirit to the ends of the earth, which is the thing that creates the tension for the readers of this letter, as a means of moving back into slavery to the Powers of Sin and Death. As Wright puts it, to find the new exodus story being played out and to move back into the story of exile. No, this movement, breaking open our imagination for this new reality that God has brought about, is precisely where we want to be, finding each other at that difficult intersection that is the already-not yet nature of this present moment. As Paul puts it, become like me, as I have become like you. When we do this, what takes up the space in the gap this creates? The true story of Jesus.  

Central to Paul’s thought is this theological word eschatology. In a very real sense, Paul, who is citing Torah as a unifying vision against those using Torah to create dissension within the community, is proclaiming a certain “eschatology,” a word that at it’s root means a focus on “end things.” Like chapter 5, eschatology is the point of it all, or how we know the point of it all is coming to be. But we misplace the force of this word when we imagine it simply as some future reality way off in the distance, something that we can then weaponize against the tensions of the here and now, and where the tensions continually undercut that future hope. This is a story of Christ whom breaks into the middle of history.  Apart from that the tension doesn’t exist. Thus why I said in my sermon on prayer: maybe the tension itself is the gift. The tension exists precisely because Christ did break into the middle of history and proclaim a new reality amidst the old. Eschatology, in this sense, is simply the constant fleshing out of this tension in our present as the signpost of God’s ongoing work. The end in this sense is found in proclaiming the beginning of this new creation reality.

In my sermon on prayer I talked about it being the great leveler. It is what allows us to co-exist within this space between faith and doubt, the “I am’s” and the “I am not okay’s.”. The sick and grieving and those who have faced immense loss alongside those who have experienced healing. It is the grounds by which we enter into the life of this new creation reality together, precisely because it is a reorientation towards and into that redemptive story. A story that all is being transformed by the Spirit of God. In 1 Peter, a letter to a community also in conflict, and as I heard it put earlier this week, taking shape near the end of Paul’s life (whereas Galatians is near the front of his ministry), there is a wonderful passage that brings this to light. Here it begins in 1 Peter 4:7-10

⁷ The end of all things is near (there’s that eschatology), therefore be serious (about the one another of it all) and discipline yourselves for the sake of your prayers (that reorienting process, the great leveller that allows the whole to be conformed to Christ).”

If, indeed, as it was said over at Faith Covenant when we kicked this series off, this storied transformation begins and ends with one thing above all- Love, then, as 1 Peter goes on to say,

⁸ Above all, maintain constant love for one another, for love covers a multitude of sins. ⁹

If we struggle to pray, love. If we struggle to serve, love. Love is the greater story. This is the gift that verse 10 calls the “manifold grace of God,” stretching out into the complicated nature of community.

10“Therefore, if this is true, serve one another with whatever gift each of you has received.”

From this all other aspects of our participation in the story of Christ, and indeed in Christ, find their source. That’s where the uniqueness of your story meets the life of the “one another.” This is not a checklist, as though we have to a, b, c to make sure we are saving ourselves from the end of all things. This is not something we do to bring about the end of all things. This is an invitation to see the world through the lens of a different story, the story of Christ’s breaking into the middle of history.

In the words of Paul in Galatians 5, “become like me as I have become like you.” To do so is to see one another, and to see one another is to see the work of God in Christ. It is to know that story. It is to risk knowing that story and the tension it creates. If to serve brings about this awareness that we, this world, is not yet whole, it also is the way we come to trust that story of God’s transforming work. “We serve” so that, as 1 Peter sums it up, God may be glorified (be present) in all things through Jesus Christ.” The glorious truth; God is in fact present, it is us that needs that continued revelation.

10“To him belong the glory and the power forever and ever. Amen.”

Time travel, a timeless city, a river and an apostle. Envoloping all of this were two complimentary (and massive) historical works, one about the global history of capitalism, the other about applying a European lens to that global history

I had timed finishing my reading of famed Survivor (play, voice and anaylst) legend’s first book Escape (Stephen Fishbach) to coincide with the final episode of season 50, which provided an added layer to that overall experience.

Turns out the guy can definitely write. I was a bit mixed on the book’s second half, where the nuanced approach of the first few hundred pages had struck a nice balance between this feeling that Fishbach is at once pulling back the curtain on reality tv, and at the same time upholding this equal awareness that the reality is being amped up to 11 on a parady type level, sensationalism fully intact. The fact that we never quite know where those lines truly cross is what makes it addictive. If the second half seems to go all in on the parody, and in my opinion loses some of the character appeal in the process, it’s never less than an entertaining ride. At it’s strongest it’s a unique exploration into the disorienting space of pop culture and it’s consumption through the lens of the reality tv genre.

I only finished one other fiction book this month, the second being Santa Montefiore’s The Secrets of the Starlit Sea. A book I almost set down after realizing I had started a sequel without reading the first. I hung on though thanks to the opening 20 or so pages (and also because it checked an easy box for me- the other thing I failed to realize is that it’s a time travel story). Bonus points for bringing in the supernatural/spiritual undertones. Yet more bonus points for an unexpected setting (I really should have done my research first it appears, or just payed more attention to the title). That historical setting, which I won’t spoil, proved the perfect pairing with a book that was next up on my list (which I am reading this month).

It should be said, in terms of a sequel, while I am sure (or rather, I know) I was missing some context and set up, by the time I was 50 pages in none of that really mattered. I knew the characters, and the gaps in the story were essentially non-existent. While there’s nothing overly deep here, the themes about reconciling with the past are present enough to give it some staying power.

Eddy Harris’ Mississippi Solo: A River Quest had been sitting on my shelf for a bit now. With the warmer weather finally settling in, it seemed like a good time to get back into one of my passions- rivers, and particularly the Mississippi. This one is an autobiography, featuring an unsettled soul making the (percieved) questionable decision to set a canoe on the river and make it to New Orleans. There are larger concerns driving the story, Harris being a black man navigating the waters of a percarious portion of America, but the approach here is less structured and more organic. Befitting the story of a man who knows nothing about canoeing or the river. As he encounters the towns and the people and the obstacles along the way, so do we, and we get these snippets of wisdom breaking through from moment to moment within the escapades. The book is dated, but it’s a reminder of both the river’s complicated history and it’s magic. Mostly I found it to be a captivating entry point into one man’s perspective on such a journey, becoming as it does a window into the larger world.

I happend across The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi by Boyce Upholt as I was in the middle of Mississippi Solo, and while I was reading that on paperback, I was listening to this one on audio. I have a shelf full of book’s on the Mississippi, so keep that in mind, but while I think this book would be a perfectly fine introduction for anyone unfamiliar with the river, I found for me it failed to see past the static details of what the river is, and into it’s actual character and ethos. It’s an information dump, with a lot of emphasis on the ecological realities embedded in the river’s past and pushing back on it’s future, but I found it lacked the necessary poetry needed to give it life.

On the flipside, I have been busy planning a summer trip to England, a “if I could only travel to one more place, what would it be” sort of trip marking my upcoming 50th birthday, largely centered on both a literary interest reaching back to my childhood formation, and connection to my family hertiage. Part of that process for me is of course books, beginning with the book London: A Guide for Curious Wanderers by Jack Chesher. It’s designed as a travelogue for the curious wanderer, with a focus on the sacred art (and space) of walking. It teaches the reader how to “read” the language of what it sees as one of the most unique landscapes in the world. A modern space where layers and layers of active globe shaping history and identity are hiding in plain site. An unplanned city in it’s nature that somehow finds order in the chaos. A city built to wander and to get lost in. The book is organized by theme (Stepping Through Time, Language, Culture), and designed as a collection of self guided walks. And the illustrations are wonderful. A book I will definitely be bringing with me.

The other one I finished this month was The History of London: A City Through Time by Bhaskar Bora. This is a very quick, bitesize overview of London’s history, and one that is unapologetically biased (read: not nuanced) towards its unabashed love of the city. Which there is absolutey space for (get me talking about my hometown of Winnipeg and I’d likely be handing you something similar). If I am visiting a city, I want to hear from those who genuinely believe in and defend it’s city. The ones who are ready to tell you why it’s the greatest place to be, and who will gush about it’s rivers and canals and gardens and quirks and bookstores and art and iconic sites until the editors step in and tell them to limit it a couple decent sized print pages per subject.

Speaking of passion and love for a subject, the element of my family history that runs through England is very much wrapped up in John Wesley, who’s home and grave and museum will be my starting point. For something (Wesley’s methodism) that played such a central role in what would become the stream of my family’s Pentecostalism traversing the pond to our side of the ocean, I know very little about it. Thankfully I am a bit more familiar with Wesley’s history and theology. Thus the reason I picked up (in audio form) Kevin Watson’s new foray into the history of Methodism, titled Perfect Love: Recovering Entire Sanctification- The Lost Power of the Methodist Movement. A great read (or listen) for anyone interested in those Methodist roots and development. An inspired read for making a case for it’s central doctrine- whole sanctification. Every movement exists in conversation with and in relationship to another, and those relationships awaken a larger conversation, be it western, eastern expressions of Christianity, early church development, and even the second temple period from which so much of the larger Christian Tradition finds its most immediate context. That these conversations and relationships are still active and ongoing today is a reminder of why they remain relevant, even if we are far removed from the context that first gave these movements their needed life. Perhaps more so, I really appreciated the way this book helped to lay out the flesh and blood practice of this thing I will soon be encountering at it’s source. It’s a way to imagine my family tree making it’s way through this (now to me) foreign soil as itinerant preachers of their own time.

Continuing in that vein, although not related to England, I continued on my journey through checking off the works of Susan Eastman, a blindspot for me, finishing Recovering Paul’s Mother Tongue: Language and Theology in Galatians. On the other side of that equation was the prefect compliment in The Beginning of Paul’s Gospel: Theological Explorations in Romans1-4 by Nijay Gupta and John Goodrich. Galatians is known as one of Paul’s earliest writings, and notably the one where we can most clearly see him working and fleshing out his theolgoical frameowk in real time. The material is raw, honest, muddied and revealing, and there is a reason why Eastman uses it to access what she distinguishes as Paul’s mother tongue, which is simply the shared language, broadly defined, of a given community forged from life and partcipation in community. This contrasts with the father tongue which is the language of a given populist reality as it intersects with the governing Power shaping a society. Where these two things meet in conversation, the mother and father tongues that make up this society, is called the native tongue. For Eastman, recovering Paul’s mother tongue is the necessary way into the force and motivation of his theology, a theology she names as a theology of participation (one that is informed by Paul’s apocalyptic context), a theology that is born in the soil of his own “fleshing things out” in relationship to the Powers.

Romans on the other hand, is known as one of Paul’s final letters, the one where his fully formed theology is layed out in ordered, narrative fashion. In contrast to Galatians, Romans is a grandly structured tome bringing all of the pieces together into a grand vision. No suprise then that it has become a pouplar spot from which to interpret Paul and formulate theologies, most commonly a theology of atonement or salvation. In Gupta’s book, which is a series of essays from a large collection of voices embedded in the current field of Pauline scholarship, the focus is specifically on the letter’s most popular section: Chapters 1-4. Here so much turns on our interpretation of a few select verses, and this book helps to bring us staright into the heart of the larger debate that exists regarding these select vereses. The different voices reflect different positions, but much of it exists as an example of how the dialogue itself works within scholarship, at points building off one another, critiquing portions of one another’s theories and work, and bringing different emphasis and focuses to the foreground depending on what one is seeing from their own vantage point and specialization. I found it to be informative and refreshing, aligning more with some than others, but having plenty of it challenge me along the way. In a broader sense, beginning in Galatians, and then seeing what Paul’s body of work becomes in Romans, was an equally interesting and revealing part of this ecercise for me personally.

I alluded to these two book’s earllier: Capitalism: A Global History by Sven Beckhert, and Europe: A New History by Roderick Beaton. I’ve been working through Beckhert’s book for a while now, which lands at around 1100 pages. Finally finished it alongside reading through Beaton’s book (listened on audio) over the course of May. Both books find their overlap in the ways they look outwards towards anaylizing a global narrative. Beckhert’s challenging treaties takes aim at capitalisims noted adaptibiliy, something that allows it to ebb and flow through different contexts precisely by taking different shapes stemming from a myriad of different concerns and questions. On that front it’s not accurate to reduce it to a singular conception. And yet, this ability does tend to mask the fact that capitalism is also distinguishable as a singular idea. The thing that sustains it is progress. And not just progress, but a kind of progress.

Beaton’s book comes into the conversation by applying a specific European lens to the same question regarding the formation of a global society. It is equally provocative, although perhaps a bit more precise and narrowed in it’s starting assumptions (as opposed to the broader objective of Beckhert.) I loved both, and I found them pushing me to consider the ways societies are formed, not in a bubble but in a constant clash of powers and peoples and cultures and movements. That we find universal concerns withinn this is a witness to the fact that our way into history is through those transcendent truths that give rise to our critiques. For me, as someone born and raised and living in  a particular section of the west (and as an inheritor of that historical context), it also is a way of reminding me that all such histories belong to a bigger reality.

A Call to Persevere

¹⁹ Therefore, my brothers and sisters, since we have confidence to enter the sanctuary by the blood of Jesus, ²⁰ by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain (that is, through his flesh), ²¹ and since we have a great priest over the house of God, ²² let us approach with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. ²³ Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful. ²⁴ And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, ²⁵ not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching.

Hebrews 10:19-25

Over the past number of weeks my church has been in a series called “one another.” The premise is simple: the phrase “one another” runs through the entire body of the scriptures, being one of the most oft repeated phrases in the canon. So much so that it feels necessary to say, this emphasis on how we relate to one another and how the Gospel is transforming the one anothers running throughout the pages of the scriptures (and forming the world behind the text) indicates the aim the Gospel. Just as, which I uncovered in my recent studies of James’ letter, the culmination of this letter is found in the phrase “pray for one another,” the overarching aim of the Judeo-Christian Tradition is that two-fold phrasing: in Christ we are a transformed body, therefore live as a transformed people. The way to do so is the “one another” of our participation in the Gospel of Christ.

What holds it all together of course is Love itself. This interconnected phrasing to love God, and love one another, which are so tightly intertwined that we cannot pull them apart without losing the whole. The qualities of this Love, which is a qualitative source, not an action, a gift not an accomplishment, are what reveal the nature of God, humanity and creation. In other words: the Gospel is revealed through particpation in the reality the Gospel brings about.

This morning brought us to the simple call to “encourage one another.” And yet, as our pastor pointed out, we don’t have to look far to see that a simple idea has deep roots. Starting with the opening argument: the underlying reason to take this seriously is, as the letter states, “since we have confidence.” Confidence in what? in the Gospel. Or more precisely, the accomplishment the Gospel proclaims. Meaning, the audience of Hebrews is assumed to have good reason for this confidence. This is assumed in the backdrop of the letter’s context.

There is a second assumption at play here as well, and that is the idea that the audience of the letter to the Hebrews was needing change in their given circumstance, and this change is what the Gospel affords. Without needing to dive into what that circumstance is (rooted as it is in the world of second temple Judaism), what can be said is, since they have good reason to believe the Gospel, the invitation that follows is in fact the life of participation. The “change” has removed a barrier to this end. It has made a new way, a fresh path.

As my pastor parsed out, what drives the structure of this passage is the “let us” statements that follow this invitation to participate in this new reality brough about by Jesus.

Let us approach

Let us hold fast

Let us consider

It can be said that the point is found in the final “let us” invitation: let us consider “how to provoke one another to love and good deeds.” My pastor fleshed out this word provoke, which despite having a narrowed definition in modern language nevertheless retains this dual nature in being both positive and negative, sometimes one or the other and often both at the same time. Which is precisely the point of the call to “consider” how we engage in such provocation. How we engage this in relationship to “one another” can lead in different directions, one which is destructive, the other which transforms.

But, it’s also important not to miss this: the provocation is nevertheless seen to be a necessary thing. Here my pastor pointed out another word association in the Greek which can be helpful, a word that can also translate the phrase “consider how to provoke” as “beholding.” Which is to suggest, the sort of provocation this has in mind is an act of seeing, an act of knowing. This is what brings about love. Which gives a whole new force to why it matters to the author of Hebrews that provocation only happens when we “meet together.” This is where the call to encouragment takes it’s shape and is given it’s potential.

But of course, the pattern is equally necessary to uphold. Without approaching we cannot come to see the other, and without holding fast we do not have confidence in our reasons to approach. In the context of Hebrews, it imagines a space where all that is seen is the hopelessnes of a world that has not been transformed. That this hope flows from the transformation of one figure in the middle of history is the thing that invites them to see the world through a different lens. one in which we are handed a resurrected imagination, one that can reenchant the world and fill it with a renewed wonder. A wonder that produces hope. This then becomes the interconnected force of this argument. If we are not participating in transformed communities, the one another of it all, we lose sight of the Gospel. At the same time, it is the Gospel that moves us into the one another of it all. This is, indeed, how community works and why they matter.

I am reminded here of a citation from Brian Zahnd’s newest book, Unseen Existences, where he speaks of the wonder of this resurrected imagination in the following way:

“To cease to wonder is to fall plumb-down from the childlike to the commonplace- the most undivine of all moods intellectual. Our nature can never be at home among things that are not wonderful to us.”

• George MacDonald

“We have the fact, let us seek the mystery.”

• Saint Augustine

“In the pilgrimage of the soul toward the homeland where we’ve never been, wonder is one of our most reliable way markers.”

• Brian Zahnd, Unseen Existences

I was going through some of the unpublished drafts that I’ve saved over the years in my blogspace. Most of these are unfinished pieces, notes that I took on books or articles, thoughts I jotted down but never fleshed out.

I came across a couple I composed close together that were ruminating on the concept of time. Although I am not someone with a great brain capacity for the technical language of science and math, the element of science that I do connect with is the narrative form and abstract theory that can be pulled from the technical language. On this front I have long loved the subject of time (and the more fantastical language of time travel).

In any case, I came across two old drafts from years ago, one dialoguing with an article (and the study it was exploring), another with a book. Relating to the study I jotted down the following quote:

“The universe’s tendency to become more chaotic with the passage of time is part of what solidifies the forward-facing direction of the arrow of time – the more chaotic, the more challenging reversal becomes.” (Scientists Get One Step Closer to Unraveling the Mysteries of Time by Chris Melone)

My notes on the book (which unfortunately I didn’t record the name, so it could be from any number of possible contenders I was reading at the time), follow a similar thread. Time, the author states, “is not a built in feature of spacetime.” Rather, time is a matter of perception, a mental construction. To measure time is not in fact measuring a thing that exists in the way these constructions percieve it, but to measure the relationship between different things in space (whether space is also a mental construction in the same way is another subject according to my notes).

What’s interesting to note about this observation is that, looking back at this draft I can see some of my initial observations about participationist philosophy/theology taking shape alongside this idea of “all things in relationship.” This is how we come to knowledge of anything in this world in regards to that perception of reality.

There is another dynamic at play here though that I noted as being hugely important to how we navigate that truism, and that’s the shape of this percieved arrow of time from order to disorder. What this suggests is that, to come to knowledge of reality through participation (all things in relationship) is to be confronted with the reality that our perception of time is contingent on a “kind” of reality. A reality that is shaped by this conception of finiteness. In conceptual language we speak of this as a movement from life to death, or in the broader terms of entropy, from order to disorder. We percieve this pattern to be the shape of reality precisely because the predictions and patterns that we find in relationship to this world hand us this movement from order to disorder. But here’s the thing I note from this particular study and book: The simple fact that time is a construct, a mental perception that formulates out of a world defined through relationship, tells us that this “kind” of reality isn’t the whole picture. When we look at human function, it would appear that this notion is intuitive. Finiteness, or disorder, is something that life appears to act against. If one wants to give it it’s equally material and spiritual name- Death- we can observe that Death is in fact a state that enslaves our perception of reality to one kind of reality. This is not confined to our neat and tidy appeals to something as reductionist as non-existence. Death is the force of disorder and chaos that pushes back against a different state which we would call Life. This is how we distinguish between what Life acts against and what it desires to bring about, and what Death acts against and what it desires to bring about.

Materialism, by far the leading worldview of the modern world, to me has a real problem when it comes to making sense of Life in this broader use of the word, precisely because it’s held captive to a singular perception of the shape this world takes. As I cited from the book (again, apologies for not being able to name it properly), to even allow ourselves to speak of time in a coherent sense (meaning, using a constructed term to get to a concrete shape of reality), we have to acknowledge what is actually going on within this reality. “What we have is a surface of constant time that spreads throughout the universe, in which every point is the same relative to its vantage point.”

And this isn’t contained to the concept of “time.” For example, the book describes how free fall is the natural state of motion while our constructed conception of gravity is the experience of the push of the object (for us the earth) in an accelerated reference frame.

Most importantly is this simple statement: Entropy hinges on the irreversable. It hinges on the disorder, the chaos. If this is true, it is equally true to say that Life intuitively knows that this is not some natural state given superiority because it appeals to our want and desire for certainty and control (which is what materialist worldviews are expressions of). Life knows and desires order. Life understands that the language of finiteness is simply a construct we create to make sense of the qualities of this thing called Death.

Here I could bring in a book I happen to reading right now called Dark and Magical Places: The Neuroscience of Navigation by Christopher Kemp, a book that discusses the ways in which we “find our way” in this world, this reality. Here we find a tension that a  key aspect this formulation of our preception, the function of memory, creates. The localization of this neuroscience within something we might call our experience of this world has to be reconciled with the idea that the same matter from which this emerges is found to be present in space as well. Meaning, and this is one of the key observations thus far from this book, the process of memory cannot be and is not, scientifically speaking, contained to some material object called the brain. Our navigation of this world, quite literally, comes from our relationship to it. That functional process, which we can observe, exists both within the brain and outside of it.

The real question then comes down to this. If it is true, as the study suggests, that our construction of this idea of time is a product of this percieved (and experienced) distance that entropy (increased disorder) creates between ordered Life, from where do we get the language to understand and name the other “kind” of reality that this reveals at the same time. And this isn’t just abstract, theoretical thought. Any time we respond to violence, to oppression, to suffering, we are in fact living this out. One potential answer to this question comes from Brian Zahnd’s recent book Unseen Existences: Of Heaven, Earth, and the Divine Mystery in All Things. Here he argues that we have indeed been trained to see this world for something that it is not through materialism and the reductionism it craves. Thus, what is inituiive to Life has been relegated to the realm of the unseen, and in materialist terms unproveable, unscientific, un-real. Even as Life continues to act otherwise. Here Zahnd gives Life the name Heaven:

The modern soul is disenchanted because we have sealed off the soul from heaven. We have built a materialist ceiling over our heads and said, “There is nothing beyond the ceiling- all of reality exists beneath the ceiling.” (page 14)

As Zahnd goes on to suggest, noting the logical implications of materialism (whether we recognize it or not): “If we are to avoid ending up as hollow men and women whimpering about the emptiness of it all, we need to find the paths of unseen existences.” In truth, we do so intuitively. The question is, do we do so rationally. It seems telling to me, at the very least, that even where science is telling us otherwise, our predication towards materialist assumptions looms large. Which seems to suggest that even the scientific enterprise is something we feel we need to control in the face of a disordered world. Materialism remains the best way to do that.

In Zahnd’s book, he invites his readers, which his audience would arguably be those whom are open to the language of Heaven, defined as a different “kind” of reality than our perception/cconception of time, to consider the necessary reenchanting process in a materialist age as a pilgrimage. Analagous to (or with) a movement from one reality to another, but more accurately towards an unveilving of the true shape of this relaity which we occupy in relationship.

A pilgrimage, it could be said, towards a critical deconsruction of our constructs as authoratative voices, and the embracing of a process of giving up our need to control. To confront the irony of the fact that what modern materialism teaches and encourages is a control that desires to preserve and protect Death. No amount of appeals to “progress” can escape or explain the logical implications of materialism to this end. The disorder. That’s our modern obsession. And as Zahnd points out, even within the framework of theological confessions that do have a built in language for this idea of Heaven, materialism looms large. It is the same old Epicureanism played out again and again in context. Life is a far more dangerous and uncertain and precarious thing to embrace, precisely because it is not something we can control.

In one of those surreal moments that anchors a specific memory in a time and place you don’t forget, it was on a road trip from Winnipeg to California when news broke of Micheal Jackson’s death. Even more specific, a mere hour after we had been traversing a mostly empty Hollywood Boulevard (back before it made its turn into inevitable decline). What was empty suddenly filled with a seemingly endless stream of people, all looking to snag a picture at his star.

It struck me in that moment how our relationship to these iconic, usually from our childhood, figures can become such an enigma. On one hand a necessary part of our lives. We are in many ways bound to the ways in which their creations become the soundtrack to our lives. And, at least back before the social media age, these figures have a way of becoming larger than life precisely because they appear to occupy this space we never could ourselves.

And yet to grow up with these figures is also to encounter them in our adult lives, where the seemingly unreachable inevitably come falling back down to earth. And one of the most pertinant questions that usually follows this cognitive disonnance is, what do we then do with our memories? Do these memories stand as witness to the ways we were formed in the soil of such delusional constructs, or do they reveal something more fundamentally true, and thus worth preserving, than our weathered eyes might be able to conjure from this kind of “pull back the curtain” form of cynicism.

I was reflecting on this thought as I watching the recent biopic Michael. A film which i saw heading into it’s fourth week with a packed crowd (quite literally, I bought the last available seat, and subsequently rained on the parade of the guy using it to hold his stack of boxed left overs). I was very aware at this stage in the game of the much publicized criticism of the biopic’s decision to steer clear of the controversy surrounding his complicated history. This was, I was told, going to be our childhood memory, not our adult cynicism, and in truth that is exactly what this film is. It taps into the reason these iconic figures mean anything to us at all, which is precisely why this film is hitting on such a different level with actual flesh and blood audiences.

It will of course be the critics whom will say that such an exercise in fealty to the power of memory is somehow a negative thing. That tapping into that innocence and that wonder is somehow reflective of an anti-intellectual pursuit. That such a film is, by it’s nature, a lesser thing for treating this as an important and necessary part of our lives, of how it is we know and experience truth in this world. To me, the fundamental thing these critics miss in this conversation is the simple fact that most people watching this film are fully aware of the adult figure that co-exists alongside our memory. We haven’t punted that to the side. We aren’t failing to see the nuance. We aren’t giving into shallow reconstructions. We are simply understanding that life cannot be reduced to that one thing. What we find in Michael is an important and vital part of what it means to be human, and to pretend as though that’s anti-intellectual is in fact to cater to a delusion.

I would push this further. Beyond the crafts of the film, which I think are worth analyzing and talking about and even celebrating (and yes, I watch a lot of film across a wide spectrum- why i feel I have to qualify that is simply pointing to the larger problem), is the story itself. This hits at another aspect of modern film criticism that bugs me. There is a sense in which the only true form of intellectualism is one which is tied to a certain conception of justice. We find this rampant through much of the present state of academia, but perhaps no more so than in the arts. We live in a world that not only loves its scapegoats, but it needs them. To see past the moral constructs that allow us to preserve our hierahcies is to somehow lose our hold on certainty. When it comes to Michael, for these same voices the fact that two things can be true at once, that a person can have a problematic childhood that feeds into later struggles and similtaneously have that struggle open up a desire for something more, is simply not something willing to be entertained. A Michael who had his innocence stole from him at such a young age. A Michael who had an abusive and controlling father. A Michael who sought refuge in childhood stories and animals in a world where adults and people just seemed to be so much harder to relate to. A Michael whom genuinely responded to the suffering he was encountering around him, and who paved a way through a world dominated by the system (ultimatley against that system). A Michael who’s own craft produced songs which spoke to the angst of an entire generation in the same way.

This is the true foundation for which to frame and understand those adult struggles. As it is said at one point in the film, wanting to grow up into adulthood and being prepared to grow up into adulthood are two different things. This is something the film genuinely leaves on the table for us to consider, even as we celebrate what he meant to our childhoods. The complicated mess of his adult life that follows is just that- another part of what it means to be human. Lest we forget that our childhoods are more than just an elongated march towards a knowledge that it was all a lie, Michael is a reminder that perhaps what our adult lives need more than anything is that childhood wonder. The freedom to sing again when life threatens to steal the songs that once formed us.

Some thoughts on Roderick Beaton’s Europe: A New History:

Listened to this one on audio, which worked fairly well. It’s not the kind of book that demands a ton of underlining, rather it’s interested in drawing out a historical narrative. One that begins with the Greek city-states (or more accurately with the seed bed that gives rise to them) and ends with the modern geo-political realities of 2026.

What’s the essential aim of the book? What makes it new? I was trying to put finger on the pulse of that question, and I think I would simply say the folloiwng: the author (historian Roderick Beaton) wants to take a fresh look at our present geo-political reality by seeing it through the lens of the development of this idea called Europe.

This of course reaches into the global space (as all lenses do, giving us a way to interpret the world), but the difference is, the thing that makes the authors point of view a fresh outlook on an old idea, how we understand the global space depends on our understanding of the European idea. We cannot get to present without it. Here the author puts forth the premise that the historical narrative has been shaped largely by two distinct and co-relating truisms: the existence of this notion of the super-nation on one hand, and the existence of warring super-powers. Who or what controls the other is the pertinent question when it comes to parsing out the nature of the world’s conflicts.

To this end I found the author’s premise compelling and persuasive. i was most interested in the ealier portions, which lays the foundation for the conversation in the ancient world, and the latter portions, which speak directly to the world that I know today and to our present conflicts. Middle portions, specifically the ones dealing with the world wars, weren’t insignificant (far from it and perhaps the most significant moments in this discussion), they were simply overly familiar territory. The second world war is one of the most studied, written about, disected, documented historical periods in the modern era after all.

As I like to at least attempt to do, boiling this all down to a reduced summary of what is a broader picture remains tough. The most important ideas pertain again to the question of these two governing forces, the super-nation versus the super-power. Much of this discussion, which interestly enough feels to be incessently conjuring up the ghosts of the Roman Empire, traverses the relationship between America and Russia. It was fascinating to put on the fresh lens the author is providing and see in that historical narrative the ways in which the idea of Europe, for as tumoltuous as it has been in the divisions that plague it, has forever existed within the push and pull of these two nations. Even more fascinating to consider how the idea of Europe has played into the rise of these two super-powers.

As the author maps out, the tension lies in this similtaneous tendency to ignore the face of these super-powers and the nature and revelance of their presence as (in perception) antithetical forces. What is often missed is the simple fact that both super-powers actually need (and want) this idea of the EU, the present day response to the divide that has plagued Europe in the past and a symbol of it’s ideolgoical presence, to persist and remain stable? Why? Because for as long as nations are held in check by the EU, the superpowers retain their grip. The flipside to this: the EU, at least a functioning one, is actually the European nations greatest counter to the superpowers. The thing is, the superpowers know why this need not be feared: the states which make up the nations will forever be held in check by the fears that nationalism creates. And there is no better source for stoking these fears than the nationalism of a given superpower, especially in the aftermath of the Cold War. Thus, one can look back through history and see how nearly every move America has made on the global front has been in the express interest of both ensuring the EU remains stable while also ensuring that they stoke those fears (for example, their role and interests in stabilizing a divided Germany against their once disinterest in the EU).

It’s worth stating here that, one of the distinctives of the idea of Europe is that it is an idea built on a different kind of power than that of America and Russia. It is a power of collective influence and investment in policy rather than military. Hence why the superpowers have such a massive grip over it’s functionality. When the threat is always (in modern terms) nuclear, you are always a slave. Meanwhile, America and Russia retain it’s power through might, something that in a global age has turned into an equal investment in geo-politics (it’s always about occupation and control of space and borders in a geo-political reality). It’s often assume that “America” is the great modern idea (or ideal), the grand experiment leading the world into the new era. What is apparent, and this is true for any superpower appealing to an ideal in such a way, is that this is in fact a shadow of a pre-existing imagination called Europe parlayed into a functional Empire (superpower). The one thing that convices people this is something other is how people think of military power as the necessary tool of the ideal. This is the great lie of the modern age, and it’s built on the back of Rome.

There is an element here of buying into this particular lens which requires a reader to endorse some semblance of respect for the idea of Europe to begin with. It’s easy to see the conflict and to anylyze the challenges, but if you don’t think it’s a proper aim one might be a bit retiscent to give it the degree of global and historical importance the author does. This is going to be hardest for those who exist within the language and culture of the superpowers. That alone is worth asking why that retiscence exists and where it arises within the historical narrative. It’s also worth asking why the idea of Europe matters as well to the world as a whole. I think posing both of those questions providesd a challenging but rewarding inroad into breaking out of some of our preconceptions, even those that exist within Europe itself.

I loved this move (The Sheep Detectives) 

If you get a chance, go and see it and support it.

My thoughts: 
I expected to like this film. I did not expect to love it as much as I did. From the film’s opening montage, which invests us directly in this relationship between this middle aged man and his sheep, the film establishes a level of emotional intelligence and authenticity rarely seen in such films (such films meaning, live action fare with talking animals) 

That really is the film’s greatest surprise and strength, and if the rows of people sobbing in their chairs behind us was any indication, it absolutely succeeds in achieving what it sets out to do, which is to use this unassuming relationship to say something relevant and important about the bigger questions all of us face when it comes to matters of life and death and how it is we exist in this world. 

I’ve been on record expressing my issues with the recent Knives Out film. I mention that film only because in many ways you could overlay this film on top of that one and find certain similarities. The pairing of the struggling believer with the skeptic. The “mystery” acting as vehicle to bring us to the existential crisis. Fleshing out the relationship between the I and the we (and the thou). The religious symbolism. The central emphasis on this metaphorical examination of the shepherd and the sheep. 

There is a key difference here however. Where I found the latest iteration of the Knives Out films failed to justify the grounds for its own exploration of its questions and its journey, and where I found that film deceptively clouded its own atheist conclusions in illusions of a coloured agnostic “skepticism,” this film is clear about what it’s saying and is willing to say when it comes to those same matters of faith and doubt. 

Which is to say, it’s that rare film that is willing to be honest about the implications of different possible conclusions concerning these questions of life and death, and in so doing it manages to do the very thing so many modern ideologies and worldviews and approaches fail to do- it doesn’t romanticize death, it names it. Further, it challenges us to do the same within the framework of the working relationship it is fleshing out, namely in its philosophical analysis of the challenges nature poses to our valourized human constructs. Rather than simply pretend as though secular humanism can afford us a rational ticket and free licence to avoid the logical implications of natures cruelest expressions, it recognizes the limits of many common appeals to dealing with those questions. It also builds on this in a positive direction however, wondering about what these challenges can reveal to us when it comes to moving towards some form of conviction regarding what is true. 

Which is to say, it’s engaged in actually fleshing out the logical argument and giving it power over over our reductionist readings of the world. 

The subject of memory plays a particular role on this front, and to cite one small example of what this film does with its themes, it explores that inevitable cognitive dissonance that emerges from wanting to set our hopes and investments on memory itself- on keeping a memory alive when such “memory” is not only held captive to another, but inevitably as precarious a thing as the others own enslavement to the same powers and forces of death. How we confront and become honest with this reality matters, and it becomes the only way we have into ultimately justifying what we believe and why through the tools of logic. 

And in case it’s not evident, any kids film that is dealing with such subjects in such a way deserves to be praised. For me it hit on so many levels important to my own journey, being one who has long wrestled with our (human) relationship to the whole of life, and as someone who continues to critique a failure in the modern West to take death seriously. Most of all, even if you disagree with the film’s conclusions, it teaches us how understanding and being able to articulate what we believe and why is a worthwhile and necessary endeavour. Such things are found in both the deconstruction and reconstruction, a process that can be afforded to both young and old. To this end, as the film suggests, what is true about this world and our lives matters because it informs the ways we participate in it. It is in fact our lives in the face of the reality of death that become the grounds for the necessary justification. 

Now if only Rian Johnson had watched this film first. 

And one last note- the scene where the sheep is making his best attempt to describe the church is hands down one of the best and funniest sequences I’ve seen in a long time.