A question I’ve been pondering this week:
Is mystery the gap bwteeen the scientific data we know and the data we don’t know?

To ask that in another way: is the aim of mystery to fill that gap with more scientific knowledge?

In his book How God Changes Your Brain, neuroscientist Andrew Newberg argues that seeking mystery is integral to knowledge, and that mystery, in relationship to the brain and brain function, is defined by this innate human need to seek God. Through his observation and experience of the world, including in the realm of neuroscience (as a neuroscientist), this appears as a fundamental part of the natural order. This is true even if one doesn’t call it God.

In this way, while the seeking after mystery begins with a functional, observable embodied (physical or human) context, it is not confined by that or to that. At least not in terms of what it seeks and why it matters to the human observation and experience of this world. For knowledge of this world to be reduced to such terms is to cut ourselves from the very thing that this embodied facet of existence is seeking. More than that, it is to cut ourselves off from the necessary process, driven as it is by mystery, needed to obtain knowledge or true beliefs about this world

Thus, one implication of this, as I see it, is that defining the world in such terms (reducing it to the embodied experience rather than that which such an experience seeks to understand) cuts us off from actual knowledge of the world (or at least our awareness of it or out ability to reason from it or towards it). As Ryan Duns writes dialoguing about Rhaner dialoguing about Descartes in his book Theology of Horror,

“What we know lives by what lies beyond our knowledge. Everything we know gestures beyond the finite toward the infinite. What lies beyond our comprehending grasp is mystery: a transcendent mystery that is not inimical but invitatory. The metaphysical task is not to dispel mystery or capture it in concepts but to allow the desire to know to impel us toward that which makes all knowledge possible.”

Thus, mystery, properly rendered, does not speak to an imposed “gap” between the information that we don’t know and the information that we do. Mystery is not an absence of knowledge waiting to be filled by further scientific discovery. It is in fact a central facet of knowledge in and of itself, knowledge relating to the embodied reality and the embodied experience that this science is studying. It is a central facet of both being human and embodiment (brain function). It is a tangible component of this reality we occupy and seek to know.

And the minute we redefine that in material or scientific terms, we cut ourselves off from our ability to know a thing in any true sense of the word. Not only that, but we cut ourselves off from and set ourselves in disonnance (or disconnect) with the reality of a functioning brain. We operate on the illusion of mystery, when in fact rhe world we are seeking to know in material terms can never be anything other than the embodied experience we’ve reduced it to. In this sense there is no actual true knowledge to be obtained precisely because we are acting apart from the mystery that informs that, that draws this embodied experience forward.

In a proper sense of knowledge and knowing, mystery is upheld as that which informs a world of observable function and utility. Function and utility reveal a world that exist in relationship to mystery and that seeks after this mystery. Strip that from the picture the functional world ceases to be coherent. In this same sense, this is why participationist philosophy/theology, which understands that true knowledge comes through acting in this world and experiencing this world, is fundamental to how it is we know and whether we are able to acknowledge this necessary facet of a functional world. If mystery is simply a gap between the science that we know and the science that we don’t yet know, the great illusion of reality becomes that there is no mystery at all. The world is already known. It cannot be anything other than the thing we’ve already reduced it to.

Question:
As agnostic neuroscientist suggests in his book How God Changes Your Brain, it’s not so much that this external concept changes some brains through selective engagement with influences outside of ourselves, it’s that all human brains evolve through a necessary belief in God. If this is the case, this taps into that an important part of our reasoning regarding the existence of God, which is simply this question: is belief in God a natural outcome of the human process, or is it influenced by cultural forces from the outside, and what are the implications of either reality on our reasoning and on our lives?

In Ryan G Duns book Theology of Horror, he sets the stage for the discussion of horror in the following way, which I found helpful to exploring the above question.

First, he describes metaphysics as raising two necessary questions: what is being and what does it mean to be.

He sees metaphysics as primarily instructive in its nature, exploring the relationship between the two root meanings of the Greek “meta,” which connects that which is amid or within with that which is beyond. As he writes,

“Metaphysics begins with the experience of astonishment that catches one off guard as one dwells amid (meta) finite beings. To the unastonished mind, a mind struck by the contingency and non-necessity of being, the world suddenly appears as uncanny and haloed by mystery. This uncanniness invites reflection on what is beyond (meta) finite being.”

One’s metaphysic then is the culmination of one’s “reflective examination of the nature of meaning of being.”

He then moves on to bring in the term theology;

“If metaphysics seeks to arouse a sense of wonder and astonishment that anything exists at all; theology asks “what would happen if this creative mystery were to speak and reveal itself to us?”

Here he describes theology as “the art of faithfully discerning and responding to the ways God has revealed the divine self in history.” What I found equally helpful is his further exposition of this term held against Anselms own definition of theology as “faith seeking understanding.” He notes how at its root theology is an active and holistic process of “seeking and responding.” As he writes,

“Theological reflection involves a person who’s personal faith (fides qua) seeks to understand what the Christian tradition believes, how God has spoken within history, how God continues to be known, and how one is called to live one’s faith in solidarity with others. In the act of theological reflection, fides qua (act) and fides quae (content) are inseparable yet irreducible: faith (or acting) without content is vacuous, and content without faith (action) is indoctrination.”

Faith in this sense is “a mode of knowing that, through the gift of grace, allows the believer to participate in Gods self knowledge.”

What I found compelling about this articulation is a two-fold observation:
First, while not all metaphysics necessarily lead one to God, theology is a natural outcome of one’s metaphysicical concern.

Second, both metaphysic and theology are embodied practices. Meaning, they are forms of knowledge that can only be obtained through participation in this world, even as they seek something more true than the act of participation can hand us apart from content.

If this is the case, what Duns helps articulate is the simple fact that while participation grounds us in our sense of finite being, it is that which disrupts our sense of being that allows is to see beyond the finite and towards the infinite (the source of our metaphysical interest)

What struck me here is how the observations I found in the recently finished and aforementioned book called How God Changes Your Brain by Andrew Newberg shed some light on and support this essential idea. Newberg is an agnostic scientist whose research has led him to the essential understanding that belief in God is integral to the evolution of the human brain. While this doesn’t necessarily mean that a God exists, it does mean that our brains appear to function through a necessary belief in the conception of God.

Meaning, our brains are actively seeking that which is beyond (the abstract) precisely because it presents a necessary tension with that which is concrete. We are born with the knowledge that both of these things exist in relationship. All conceptions of God are responsive acts to this essential component of our experience of reality, and our brains essentially reformulate this tension by giving the abstract concrete images.

In other words, we imagine metaphysics and theology in embodied and human terms because this is the language we have and it is how we connect our sense of being with that which is beyond. Again, we intuitively know and are aware of both of these fundamental aspects of reality. So much so that this basic practice and awareness is already present in us as infants. But it doesn’t necessarily work in the way we might percieve it from the vantage point of our experience. As Newberg puts it, rather than moving from the abstract to the concrete, our brains begin with the concrete and move towards the abstract, precisely because we are aware of the tension that the finite-infinite natures of reality presents. It is, in Newberg’s words, the active and present mystery regarding the infinite nature of Reality that allows us to grow in knowledge, not the abtaining of concrete facts regarding a finite world. There is a degree to which the modern scientfic ethos that has come to define the modern world acts contrary to how it is we know anything at all. It actively cuts us off from the necessary mystery or tension and reduces the world to its finite properties. Whether we recognize it or not, our brains do not comprehend the world in this way. We do not act in the world in this way.

If modern societal constructs that have brought about what has become known as atheism doesn’t use the word God, assuming Newberg is correct (and I think he is), the science seems to show us that we are all still engaged in the same basic function. We are all seeking that which is called God because it’s what knowledge of this world demands of human experience. Without this we wouldn’t be able to preceive reality at all.

What will be your directive now.

In the recent movie Tron Ares this is the question posed to one of the film’s main protagonists, a digital creation and program (Master Control, played by Jared Leto, which has found itself needing to adapt to its encounters with the human world.

Tron Ares flips the script, making the story about how AI enters the world in the form of a permanence code, a code that allows these digital creations to manifest in the physical world without restriciton (meaning, without disintegrating back into the digital ethos that contains its code). Thus the arc follows two characters along parallel journey’s, a human (Eve Kim, played by the charismatic Greta Lee) whom is striving to discover this permanence code in response to a tragedy, and Ares whom seeks it as a means of adapting to this encounter with human emotions like empathy and sadness.

One of the observations the movie makes is how permanence is a bit of a misleading name for this code. To occupy space in the physical world and to be governed by its rules and laws means to have impermanance. This basic insight regarding the nature of life is given further context by way of Eve Kim’s story, a life that has been shaped by loss. As Kim states in the film, life is tough, because the very thing that brings us joy brings us life’s greatest pains and struggles. How we reconcile these things is not easy. In fact, it requires appealing to greater truths beyond ourselves to even begin to find coherence. We are driven by our imagination for a world without loss and suffering, and yet it is this experience of loss that sdrives uts to this end precisely because it makes us aware of what such things rob us of.

For Ares it is simpler. He (given that he manifests as a human male) knows his creator. He knows his directive. And yet these things hit a roadblock when the complexities of life enter the picture. He finds that life is not reducible to this functional program that he embodies. I found myself thinking in this moment, isn’t this how it goes with questions of God? We know our creator. We know what this affords us in terms of directive. But then life happens and creates this tension between who we understand God to be and the suffering and loss that we find in this world we inhabit. 

In the case of Ares, the disonnance arrives in the contrasting images of this percieved tyrant creator and the empathetic human. At least in part, rather than imaging his creator he desires to become the image of this human. He sees in this human the ability to learn what it means to live with these complexities. In this sense, he sees it as advancement.

And yet (spoiler alert), when Ares ultimately becomes permanent, when he manifests in the physical world, this is the first question that faces his new future: what is your directive in a world of impermanence.

Asked in another way: what does it mean to be human in a world governed by the cruelties of the natural order.

His answer? I don’t know. As I see it, there are two ways we can interpret this answer. One, as a positive statement that says he is free to create his own directive without rules or code. Or, it reflects the emergence of a new kind of existential crisis that now drives him to seek an answer in a world defined by its own code.

Personally, I think its the latter. To me, the power of this story is found in these parallel threads between the two characters. In the case of Eve Kim, its one thing to accept that “this is the reality of things.” Thus we cannot ignore it. It is part of what we call the human experience. It’s quite another to to acknowledge that the pain and suffering she experiences suggest that life sees such things as a virus in this program we call the natural order. The human experience would cease to be coherent if it wasn’t free to respond to that which we deem to be not right. Hence the dilemma. Such things cannot be neutral when seen in the light of the human experience, be it when we see it in the world outside of ourselves or within our own embodied existence.

It is equally true that to suggest that to say the one thing AI would be struggling to understand is this human experience requires us to fundamentally define the human experience in terms that reflect something other than a purely functional code. After all, Ares understands “function” and utility. What Eras doesn’t understand is how to reconcile this reality with an awareness of these greater allegiances or truths that disrupt simple directives. Here in lies the modern problem. It finds itself saddled between two competing allegiances but without a meeans of grounding it in anything coherent or true. What we have is the myth of progress. This is why, as the movie points out, we tend to fear AI. We fear losing ourelves in the process. The question that we can’t actually answer is, what does it mean to be “ourselves.” What is lost when we reduce life to material function and see biological function to be synonymous with intellegience and knowledge (read: computer code)? Can we logically argue that these things are qualitatively different?

If Tron Ares has a reigning message, it is that the world is not ready to answer such questions, even as AI is already here and very much here to stay.

Interesting enough, a recent book I finished called A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence (Jeff Hawkins) arrives at precisely this conclusion. What we commonly see as “human qualities” is actually part of the old brain. The new brain is that which has evolved us into a superior “intelligent species.” Intelligence is defined as that which enables technological progress and advancement by way of processing information. The way the new brain is designed, expressely layered over top of the old brain which binds us to the sorts of emotions and drives that inhibit progress, is by way of a unified engineering center of information built off of numerous identical processing centers. These centers drive what and how we think through employing a voting process. The more of these identical processing centers that we have, the more voting can occur and the smarter we become.

For Hawkins, humanity’s future and survival depends on this intelligence creating computers that aren’t “human,” but rather modeled on new brain intelligence in ways that can be its own thing. Emotionless programs that are able to progress technological advancement.

Sounds like his theory would see Ares as a real problem for the future of humanity. In fact, it is the voting process that looks to exterminate him and his dysfunctional responses.

What is compelling to me on this front is to note how this basic scientific assertion regarding what intelligence is and what it means to the quesiton of defining the human directly contrasts with the vision Ares is pointing towards as a story. Here it imagines the “human” quality creating progress. Or at least the human quality it wants to raise up over the unwanted qualities it deems bad. Herein it seems to find the greatness and potential of the whole human enterprise. And yet, it can’t escape its own conundrum. In reality, the technological advancement and differences the program could make by prioritizing intelligence would be greatly superior if it had followed the purely functional and utilititarian vision of the “tyrant.” One could even argue this is actually how the world and it biological history works in reality.

This begs the question, from where does this allegiance to old brain emotions get its directive for the characters who sense the world cannot be reduced to material function? In a world governed by the natural order, loss is a means of adaptation and evolution. And yet in the realm of human experience we can see that loss is that which life fights against. Loss is, in relaity, disorder. Same with suffering. Same with violence. Unless we raise the inherent value of all life above the myth of progress we cannot justify  the human agenda. This disonnance occurs because reality is based on this simple fact: the preservation of one thing requires the loss of another. Welcome to the program.

Which is why I think that for Ares’ character, permanence, better undestood as impermanence, creates an existential crisis that demands an answer. And if he understands that AI is expressely modeled after reality, this seems to logically conclude that this search at the very least desires and longs for some sense of a creator. Something that can root this new life he has now embodied in something true and coherent. After all, as he moves to explore the world, this world only intensifies and heightens the disonnance, especially if he has come to resist those modern tendencies to reduce reality to a functional, material property built on codes. This, I would suggest, is the seeking that affords a life of impermanence its directive. And its the very thing that seems to define the human experience throughout its long history: we seek God. This is true even where and when we redefine God in certain or uncertain terms. It is, by my best definition, what it means to be human.

Paul’s letter to the Philippians has been a favorite of mine ever since I was a child. I was rerreading a portion of it this morning, my childhood long behind me, and jotting down some thoughts that maybe reframe how this letter continues to speak to me today:

⁴ Rejoice in the Lord always. Again I say, rejoice! ⁵ Let everyone see your gentleness. The Lord is near! ⁶ Do not be anxious about anything. Instead, in every situation, through prayer and petition with thanksgiving, tell your requests to God. ⁷ And the peace of God that surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and minds^[e] in Christ Jesus.

• Philippians 4:4-9

1. I noted how the call to rejoice needs to be repeated? (4:4) Why is that? Perhaps because our default is to question such an act when things don’t seem or feel rejoice-worthy. The older I get the more this needs to be repeated
2. Maybe rejoice-worthy is a better translation than praiseworthy in 4:8. Rejoice in Greek is chairo, and indicates something that we are, or to be someone with a particular posture and who abides in a particular way that reflects joy and trust. The Greek for praiseworthy is epainos euphemos. This digs underneath the what of what we are called to be (rejoicers) and names that particular posture as good. Thus these two words are intimately connected, Locating the source of our being in that which is true and beautuful
3. To rejoice is to see that the Lord is near, nearness is an invitation to prayer, prayer is an invitation to give thanks. (4:6)
4. Nouwen, Willard, Bates, Wright, Gorman, McKnight, Gaventa, Rutledge. These are just some of the names at the forefront of a conversation about the word faith that has been going on over the last 15 or so years. There has been a movement to reclaim the heart of the word pistis as trust or allegiance. Thus to pray is also an appeal to trust (as I heard Tyler Staton put it in a recent sermon). Trust is an active word. It is also a responsive word. Thus it is neither blindly rendered  nor removed from the art of rejoicing. It binds us in allegiance to that which is named true and beautiful, to the one who has come near.

Picking up Ryan G Dunns Theology of Horror: The Hidden Depths of Popular Films seemed an obvious fit for spooky season. Less obvious would be pairing it with Paul J. Schutz’s A Theology of Flouishing.

There were two portions of Schutz’s introduction that helped solidify this as a helpful conversation partner with a theology of horror. The first comes in his observation of the potential clarity that comes from placing a theology of flourishing as a starting point and center of gravity for our theological practice and outlook.

“Only by taking seriously the suffering, violence and degredation that so often characterize creaturely life can Christians come to  authentic hope that moves us to action.”

For Schutz, a theology of flourishing invokes a “foretaste” of the fulfillment that informs our hope, affording us a logical “basis for standing in solidarity with all creation in the here and now.”

In other words, if a theology of horror is the naming of the problem, a theology of flourishing is the naming of the hope. Schutz intuitively understands that at the root of taking suffering seriously is the necessary naming of that which opposes Life, which is the naming of Death. If we cannot name Death as antithetical to Life, we cannot name Life. To act in a world held captive to Death is to act in a way that finds the signposts of the fullness of life breaking into this reality. Reshaping this reality. Helping us to distinguish between the horror and the hope.

As Shutz puts it, “Flourishing is in fact consituent of a proper understanding of salvation.” (p xxvii)

In my morning service this Sunday morning this was made more evident in the passage being reflected on in the homily. We’ve been working through the letter of 1 Peter, Here the pastor evoked the analogy of a horror movie to exercise his point regarding the authors conviction of the hope that shapes a life lived in the reality of a struggling creation. He noted one of the paradigms of the thought process made evident in this letter is one of the same markings that informs the tropes of the horror movie (or story): the penchant to seperate and go our own way when faced with the horrors. This is what leads to the trope being formed.

But of course all tropes are anchored in a truism. In the life of the Church, then, 1 Peter is intently concerned with the ways in which outside pressures result in a fracturing body. This is the natural reaction that results from our inherent anxiety and fear. If the call is towards unity rather than division, at the root of this is the difficulty we all have with giving those fears and anxieties over to God. Why is this difficult? Because our natural tendency is to want to regain control in the face of uncertainty and choas and disorder. All coincidentally markers of that larger thing the ancients called Death. In 1 Peter this is the enemy that prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour (4:8). Resistance begins with undestanding the shared reality of the whole.

Shutz applies this same though to the whole of creation, finding in this theology of flourishing the further question of a theology of participation. or participationist theology. What does it mean for the potential to exist for participation either in the horror or the hope? Or, as Schult also puts it:

What does it mean to live? What does it mean to experience the fullness of life- in a word, to flouish.

It is only when we recognize that we share this reality with the whole of creation that we can begin to find ourselves as particiapants in this storied tension. A creation enslaved to the Powers of Death. A Gospel that liberates through the proclomation of Death’s defeat. Not to escape this world but to restore it. This is what it means to be a participant of a greater hope that casts out fear. To live as those with shared anxieties and yet also as those who’s anxieties have been placed on the one who carries them to the cross and reforms them in the resurrection.

“The Lord spoke to Moses “in the wilderness of Sinai, in the tent of meeting, on the first day of the second month, in the second year after they had come out of of the land of Egypt, saying, “Take a census…” (Num 1:1-2)

I’ve been working my way through a new commentary on the book of Numbers by Peter Altmann, which has been really great thus far. A number of weeks ago I found myself jotting down some observations and notes in this space that I’ve finally found time to come back around to. And in the process I came across an old post sitting in my drafts on Numbers that I never published or did anything with. Much of it was based on a Jewish commentary I had worked through years ago from Rabbi Glenn.

As Altmann notes, on a narrative level Numbers chapter 1 picks up from Leviticus 10;16:1 and Exodus 40, following the group that leaves Sinai. In Numbers, God speaks in the desert within the tabernacle, not on the mountain, placing the tabernacle at the center of the story through its depiction of the centralization of this people in the desert. This places Numbers “along the way” and represents a qualitative difference to the method of Gods speaking.

Further, he exposits the notion of the census, which in the ancient world is present either in connection to  military campaigns or to the raising of taxes or a labour force, often for a building project. In the case of Numbers the image being evoked is that of a sacred army on a campaign. In the case of Israel however it contains a theological purpoose that explicity acts and functions in opposition to the idea of Empire. Having left Egypt and finding the people “along the way,” the book intentionally connects the generation that exited Egypt at Sinai witth the generation after (the descendants of this group). The numbers act symbolically in a way that binds these two groupings together through a singular story. Those in chapter 1 die in the desert after their refusal to take the land, and those in the second is about how this story moves forward towards “the transformation of the community.” Altmann describes this as a liberated community becomming a sacral congregation on pilgrimage with the Divine royal tent (the tabernacle). Hence why, like the book of Leviticus, we find the imagery of the centralization of this community beginning with the organization of the camp around the tabernacle, with Judah being placed closest to the tent and the tents symbolic of the scattered nations being placed furthest away.

This positioning becomes important when the Tribes are named and given the symbolic nature of the 12, which we can see being creatively drawn out for a theological purpose of drawing readers towards the hopeful promise of transformation, which begins with Israel and flows out into the whole, all with the express interest in God’s defeat of the Empire, an image that in Israel’s story is made synonymous with the serpents seed of Genesis 1-4. The organization of the camp matches the building of the tabernacle, and the building of the tabernacle matches the narrative of Genesis 1-4. Even the census itself is divided into 12 parts, drawing the reader into the same imagery. As an aside, this becomes a stepping off point into the relevance of the Levites and the firstborn, which occupies prominant space in the early chapters.

For Rabbi Glenn, he sees Numbers as a travelogue. It is both about looking forward and looking back, which fits with Altmann’s connecting of the census with the bringing together of this generational gap “along the way” of this singular story. What I especially liked about how Glenn expresses this journey is the way he connects the liberative act of the Exodus with the necessary movement into the desert. This is a lengthy quote, but I love how it emphasizes the nature of this journey as one that reaches “beyond history” and makes the unseen seen in this concept of the spoken Word:

The Hebrew word midbar, wilderness, has the same root as the word dabar/davar, meaning “word” or “thing.” It has the same letters as medabber, “speaking.” It is in the wilderness that the Israelites hear revelation, the word or speaking of G-d.

Fundamental to Judaism is the belief that G-d cannot be seen. For every ancient faith but one, the gods were present in the phenomena of nature: the sun, the stars, the sky, the sea. They were visible; things seen. In Israel a revolutionary idea reached expression, that G-d was beyond nature: When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, The moon and the stars which you have set in place . . .The vast universe is no more than the work of G-d’s fingers. Everything we can see is not G-d but merely the work of G-d. Hence the repeated prohibitions in Judaism against making an image or icon. To Judaism, the idea that G-d is visible is idolatry. G-d is beyond the totality of things seen.

But how then can He be perceived? In Judaism for the first time revelation becomes a problem. For every other culture, revelation is self-evident. Where are the gods? All around us. In polytheism, the gods are close. In Judaism, G-d – vast beyond our imagining – would seem to be infinitely distant. The answer Judaism gave was beautiful and world-transforming. G-d who transcends nature is close, because He exists not in things seen, but in words heard…

In the great river lowlands where civilization began (the Tigris-Euphrates and the Nile) the eye is captivated by the shifting scenes of nature; in cities by the works of man – art and architecture. Only in the emptiness of the wilderness is the eye subordinate to the ear. Only in the silence of the desert, can the sound beneath sound be heard: In Hebrew thought, Book and Desert are contingent upon one another. When G-d revealed himself to Moses and charged him with the task of freeing the Hebrews, terms such as ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ were not used. The idea of emancipation from bondage is expressed as “going on a three days’ journey into the desert, to sacrifice to G-d our Lord,” (Ex. 3: 19; 5:3) as if G-d could not be apprehended without this initial journey into the desert. (Jose Faur, Golden Doves with Silver Dots) Or as Edmond Jabes puts it: The word cannot dwell except in the silence of other words. To speak is, accordingly, to lean on a metaphor of the desert, a space of dust or ashes, where the triumphant word is offered in her unrestricted nudity. (Du Desert au Livre)

The historian Eric Voegelin sees this as fundamental to the discovery by the Israelites of a completely new form of spirituality: If nothing had happened but a lucky escape from the range of Egyptian power, there only would have been a few more nomadic tribes roaming the border zone between the Fertile Crescent and the desert proper, eking out a meagre living with the aid of part-time agriculture. But the desert was only a station on the way, not the goal; for in the desert the tribes found their G-d. They entered into a covenant with him, and thereby became his people . . .

When we undertake the exodus and wander into the world, in order to found a new society elsewhere, we discover the world as the Desert. The flight leads nowhere, until we stop in order to find our bearings beyond the world. When the world has become Desert, man is at last in the solitude in which he can hear thunderingly the voice of the spirit that with its urgent whispering has already driven and rescued him from Sheol [the domain of death]. In the Desert G-d spoke to the leader and his tribes; in the desert, by listening to the voice, by accepting its offer, and by submitting to its command, they had at last reached life and became the people chosen by G-d…

The way to the Holy Land lies through the wilderness. It is there that the Israelites learned what it is to build a society that will be the anti-type of Egypt, not an empire built on power, but a society of individuals of equal dignity under the sovereignty of G-d. An impossible task? Certainly not an easy one. But to quote Eric Voegelin again: “What emerged from the alembic of the Desert was not a people like the Egyptians or Babylonians, that Canaanites or Philistines, the Hittites or Arameans, but a new genus of society, set off from the civilizations of the age by the Divine choice. It was a people that moved on the historical scene while living toward a goal beyond history. “

What’s so fascinating to me here is this image of a people delivered from the enslaving Powers in order to enter into the world as a liberated people. And yet this “liberation” is not described as being towards the politics of the world, it is defined as a journey into the desert where they are expressely in the world but also not of it. What’s interesting to point out is, as per Altmann’s mention of Stubbs in his commentary on chapter 2, the human counting of one’s people or army actually indicates a transgressing of God’s initial desire and authority and knowledge. This is so easy to miss, and yet its so crucial to how this story is being told. Even here in the centralization of a people set apart in the desert we find two parallel and opposing forces at work: to bind ones self to the politics of Empire (to be like the world) or to bind ones self to the voice of God. This tension carries forward into the whole of the story, following the building of a temple and the asking for a King, both things God does not desire and yet accomodates within an express commitment to a promise that reaches beyond the confines of history.

Which is of course what makes the theological signifance of the “numbers” in Numbers so fascinating. Just as we find in the creative rendering of genealogies in the NT, expressly rooted in the authors intentional connecting of the promise to Jesus through the messiness of the human  story it must circumvent, we find the same creativity at play here in this early depiction of Israel connecting to the 12. The reason for the creativity needed to get to 12 is that the Levites aren’t counted: they are set apart. There are thirteen tribes that can be counted as 12 in various ways, and the reason for such counting is rooted in a people looking to locate God’s acting in their midst over and against the failure of the people. Which of course draws all the way towards a similar portrait regarding the 13th disciple in the Gospels. But here is what is important in this narrative: each tribe is seen as necessary to the idea of Israel as a whole. And as each Tribe is seen as necessary, so is the focal point of the promise as being for the whole of creation. This is what comes together at this central focal point of the tabernacle Here in this narrative we find a transition from a family to a people, thus bringing to the forefront the question “who belongs to God’s people.” This is answered: through kinship. This is what brings the mixed group that we now have into a singular whole, all centered around the Exodus. And yet this binding together, the creative rendering of the community of God as a portrait of a singular image of the Kingdom of God, is always carrying with it this existing tension between the exodus and the desert, the mountain and the golden calf. This is the same tension we wrestle with today as a people called to follow in the Way of Jesus towards the cross. Through the cross we find resurrection.

One last note to this end. Judah is obviously presented as the biggest tribe and the most relevant. In terms of the texts composition history, we are following the thread of the story of the winners (the only surviving tribe from the exile). Altmann notes the puzzle piece of the promise given to Judah (to make a people while they are still slaves) and the whole ensuing motif that comes out of the Exodus regarding Judah willingly suffering on behalf of his brother Benjamin (Gen 44), a reversal of this thematic interest in slave versus free which underscores the persisting image of the suffering servant. Here in the soil of this centralizing movement, God’s indwelling of creation within the tabernacle functions as a reminder of where this journey is going. The image of Judah and Benjamin. The image of Moses and Aaron. The image of the Levites whom are established as representative of and in place of the firstborn of the firstborn (Israel) when Israel is depicted  as “fearing” speaking to God directly (as Moses fears speaking directly to the Pharoah of Egypt). This is where and how we move beyond history into the promise of new creation. This is how we learn what it is to name God not through the visible presence of idols, but through the revelation of a spoken Word that transcends the visible.

In the beginning God spoke to bring about creation

In the end God spoke to bring about the new creation in Jesus

In the middle God speaks in the wilderness to a people set apart to image the True revelation to a divided creation. To fear the gods we can see is to fear that which we have made in our own image. To fear the God we can hear is to fear that which dismantles our idols. The one who dismantles our census, who brings down kings, who destroys our temples, all so that out of the desert creation might be transformed from death to life.

31 years.

That’s how long it has been since I graduated high school. And subsequently that’s how long it has been since I’ve seen most of my graduating class.

Had a random invitation the other week to meet up with some old classmates. Two to be precise. The reason? My old school was honoring a former classmate for his life long accomplishments. Thus the odd intracation on social media led to a saturday morning breakfast, filling in the gaps of the past 31 years. Mostly on my end since the two of them had remained in contact over the years.

It’s such an interesting experience. If the knowledge I have of tumbling towards 50 in 2026 is looming large these days, nothing cements it more than finding myself in what felt like a surreal time capsule. Here we are, three souls who’s memories remain trapped in time attempting to contextualize the very real passage of time.

But of course that brings a ton of emotions along with it. Beginning with the fact that fhere I am sitting across the table from successful architects here to celebrate the lifelong achievements of a doctor. One of whom was voted in our graduating year book “most likely to be Prime Minister. I was voted most likey to be a bum for the rest of his life.

Me. The same one who’s life story travels the failed attempts at music and ministry. The same one who has spent the last 13 years driving a school bus and making $30,000 a year (with christian and spring and summer breaks off of course).

I suppose that’s the closest I could come to living up to the prophecy of my graduating yearbook.

It’s interesting. I was telling those two former classmates about a particular pivotal year of my life following our graduation. The same year saw two of my closest friends make decisions that would go on to define the rest of their now extremely successful lives. One would go off to school to become an investor in multi-million dollar businesses. The other would go off to school to become a professional musician. I had both of them come to me and try and convince me to go with them. They saw potential in me and believed this journey could change the course of our lives.

One of them even tossed a book on the table (How To Win Friends and Influence People) with the request to read it before making my decision.

I ultimatley chose not to follow either of them. I know now that my life likely would look a lot different had I done so. And yet here I am, sitting at a table across from two familiar faces from my past being reminded that what makes a life is the very real path shaped by the very real succession of our choices. Choices that are not reducible to a singular conception of some kind of self determining will. Reality is far more dynamic.

My former classmates responded to some of these musings by pointing out that its all about where we place the emphasis regarding what is important. This certainly applies to our relationship with God. This also applies to what this lived life looks like in relationship to God. To grow to learn. To come to the table as those who have a perspective to offer. Whether we are successful architects, receiving prestigious awards, or whether we have spent the last 13 years driving a school bus. What fills in the gaps between our careers and our identity is how this plays in to who we have become in the process of living in the inbetween spaces.

This is where we find the ability to navigate the what and the why of our continued journey. We never stop making choices, and we never cease having the chance to understand how we arrived at such choices and why. Perhaps that’s what makes the whoie enterprise worth investing in.

I recently finished the book The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind by Jason M. Baxter. Highly recommended. It’s a rich and compelling exploration into the writers that shaped Lewis’ own journey and thought practices. It is in fact these voices that provide a window into what plagued his own sense of restlessness with the world, both as a once staunch athesit and a christian convert.

It is often assumed that we can jump to spirituality apart from religion or without it. Or we think that spirituality is the foundation of all religion. One of the compelling ideas that I took away from this book is the authors conviction that what we find in the medieval mind of C.S. Lewis is this deeply felt conviction that it is in fact religion that is the necessary foundation for a true spirituality.

And for Lewis, he found this shared conviction in the medieval minds that shaped the space he occupied standing on the precipice of these shifting tides between the old world and the new. Lewis was a product of modernity, a world in which he felt he never belonged. This is where he finds an awakening of the imagination in the works of those looking backwards to the world modernity had forgotten and left behind in the shadow of its failed promises. This framed and formed his relationship to the Inklings, anchored as it was in the chorus of voices preserving the act of mythmaking and mythtelling in the face of an entirprise that threatened to redefine such essential human practices as allegiance to stories that “are not true.”

There is a curious sense then, at least for me, in which modernity of course never did truly buy into its own positivist premise. Spirituality just kept breaking back in and imposing itself on to the sometimes unarticulated but often expresssed disatisfaction with the world modernity was creating.

One question this book begs is, but what about religion? What is spirituality apart from its formative myths? What is it that makes religion the demon and gives spirituality its accepted preservation in the age of modernism?

There could be many ways to answer this. Some practical. Some theoretical. Some philsophical. What this book underscores is that religion and myth-telling are one in the same thing. The problem then is not religion, but the demonization of myth-telling. Reclaiming myth-telling means both challenging modern definitions and challenging conceptions that any truly exist apart from a formative myth. We are all in this sense religious creature and religious beings, although not in the way modern apologetics often likes to state it. It is simply meant to say that no spirituality, or a perceived lack of such, exists apart from a necessary myth. Myth is simply the narrative that governs how we interpret the world. It makes it coherent and gives it defintion. It names the Truth that our intperpretations are responding to.

Earlier this year I read the book The Last Romantic: C.S. Lewis, English Literature, and Modern Theology by Jeffrey W Barbeau. Equally recommended, and it covers much the same topic by narrowing in on how Lewis was shaped by the Romanticists based on his same disatisfaction with the modern world. Here he locates an undeniable witness to a shared disatisfaction, with this historical movement and interest functioning in direct response to a world that needed to be reenchanted by recognizing our need for myth-telling. It is only here that we can distinguish between the competing narratives of our world.

So why is religion necessary to this conversation? Perhaps it is because modernity is left needing to attend for spirituality but without a way to catgetorize it or make sense of it. Perhaps because modernity cannot function apart from this essential part of what it is to be human. To be human is to be a religious creature. Perhaps it is a simple acknowledgement that attempts to reposition ourselves in a world defined by the absence of myth has actually made the world incoherent.

It is true that even for views that reject spirituality, they are still operating from a religious foundation. It does however carry a unique relevance for those who acknowledge the presence of spirituality in our world.

However we come into that conversation, this simple idea that religion always precedes spirituality has been forcing me to reconsider how it is I find my own resistance to religious structures. It is easy to misplace such resistance as a targetting of systems and organization and institutions. After all, when we find ourselves wrestling with certain realities and pushing back on things that leave us unsettled or reactive and responsive against, we need somewhere or something to function as our scapegoat. And if we accept that spirituality appears unavoidable on a cultural and social level, this affords us the appearance of a spirituality that is able to break the chains we are trying to dismantle all its own. What the historical vantage point of this book challenges is the idea that spirituality can ever logically stand on its own own. If we have recovered or rediscovered or discovered spirituality, it means we are operating from a religious foundation. This is a good and necessary thing, perhaps at odds with a world which has spent so much of its energy dismantling both our institututions and our belief in them, but nevertheless coherent when seen in the light of a studied historical reality.

Which is to say, if the end for Lewis was a liberated spirituality, that liberation needed to be able to both name the narrative/myth it embraces and the one it is challenging. It needs to be able to afford us a narrative lens through which to reason from if it wants to be able to critique a lens it sees as a distortion of the truth. This is not a bad thing. We’ve been taught to fear the notion of conviction, but convictions, or true beliefs, are necessary to living in this world in a way that is truthful. For Lewis this meant coming to terms with the fact that he felt isolated and alone in his disilusionment with modernity, and equally at home in encountering the voices bringing some of the necessary parts of that medieval mind back into the conversation. In a similar way, I find books like this allowing me to feel a little less alone in the world I occupy. I have long resonated with the concerns and intrests of The Inklings, and this book helps capture why that is the case.

In my half point reflection back at the beginning of July, I noted the overall lack of releases in 2025, along with these films reflecting a slate of good to very good but not great releases with there being very little in the way of real standouts.

Following up on the first front, at the end of the summer I did a comparison between this year and last, showing a considerable drop off in the numbers. On the latter front, i would say that narrative has been holding strong, with a plethora of think pieces and analysts and critics noting similar thoughts.

We are however now in the thick of September, which is otherwise known as festival season. This is where those anticipated fall releases, typically made up of Oscar hopefuls, get their premiers and start to get seen. This offers us filmgoers a chance to shift our attention towards some anticipation

It’s also worth noting that there is some optimism on the box office front, albeit with certain qualifiers: the box office is up nearly 20 percent from where we were coming out of the pandemic. I’m not sure everyone is over the moon about the top performers, which include Disney’s Lilo and Stitch, A Minecraft Movie, Jurassic World: Rebirth, and the live action How To Train Your Dragon (while there’s nothing wrong with the others and they certainly have a place in the filmgoing ethos, this is the one four star entry for me), but there is another good news story to add to the mix that helps to buffer the never ending headlines about the struggling superhero genre. That’s the fact that WB has presently broken a record for the number of films that opened at number one. One of the reasons this should be seen as a good news story is not just because its bringing bodies and money to the theaters, but because it has done so while fostering diversity. They’ve demonstrated they can do it with a small film like Weapons, franchise films like Final Destination and The Conjuring, and are even taking risks with films like Mickey 17.

So where’s festival season at? Much of the buzz heading into the year was around the question of Netflix’s obvious move to go for broke on the Oscar front, aquiring a number of big time Directors and auteurs. Kathryn Bigelow’s newest A House of Dynamite. Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein. Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly. Of the three, only Bigelow’s film has really been offering much in terms of potential, and even then has been premiering to tempered reaction, indicating its not likely to have much of a presence come awards season.

Outside of Netflix, three big hitters are aiming to shake up the conversation: Paul Thomas Anderson’s much anticipated One Battle After Another, which has been trending better than expected on the eve of its wide release, and Sentimental Value, the newest film by Joachim Trier and the follow up to the successful and popular Worst Person in the World. And lastly Chloe Zhao’s adaptation of Hamnet, the one standout darling from this years festival circuit.

Zhao is one of my all time favorite directors, and having recently finished the book it has definitely given me something to look forward to along with a new PTA. I would have thrown A Big Bold Beautiful Journey into the mix, given the pedigree of Kogonada, but while its still very good, it fell short of the massive expectations thrust on it by Columbus and After Yang (no doubt a film worthy of a whole discussion in its own right, as there is a ton there to reflect upon). There is also a ton of buzz surrounding Springstein: Deliver Me From Nowhere, along with Timothee Chalamet in Marty Supreme, the sure to be crowdpleaser from “The Rock,” The Smashing Machine. Jennifer Lawrence in the intriguing Die, My Love. New Richard Linklater (Nouvelle Vague), and a new one from the underseen Director of Little Woods called Hedda. And of course Bugonia.

And then of course there is that looming awareness of the next Avatar film, which say what you will is a cultural force (and also a franchise I unapologetically enjoy and love), along with part two of Wicked (Wicked For Good), two films sure to dominate discussions in the next couple months.

Which is to say, maybe too much is made of a “good to very good but not great” year. After all, there’s nothing inherently wrong with very good films, and in some ways this leaves room for more diverse reactions and reasoning as to what is resonating with different people and why. There is a handful of films that I’m eager to revisit as well, including Kogonada’s A Big Bold Beautiful Journey. I can see that one growing on a rewatch.The Legend of Ochi, which is probably the film I’ve been thinking about the most

There was a little bit of a shakeup from where my top 20 films were sitting at the halfway point. The films that got knocked out of my top 20:

Mission Impossible: Final Reckoning

The Order

Inside

Grand Theft Auto

The final MI film is a tough one, as there is no question it represents the biggest film of the year in terms of pure spectacle and accomplishment. I think that’s a case of feeling like it doesn’t need the attention that other films could desperately use. The Order, a solid, well crafted Canadian procedural, Inside, a small, provocative prison drama, and the inventive and suprisintly emotional Grand Theft Auto, would all fall into that category. Those are the ones I’m sad to see bumped out.

The films they were traded for:

Ari Aster’s Eddington at #12, which is without a doubt his most accessible film to date, and also his most ambitious in terms of theme and ideas. The only other film challenging it on those levels would be Zach Kregger’s Weapons, his follow up to Barbarian. Eddington manages to be a film that is as intriguing in its sructural presence as it is in what it wants to do and say with that structure. Its set in the pandemic, but its reaching far more broadly in order to say something about the greater issues running underneath society dysfunction. Its set in America, but it never stays trapped there, providing a fascinating grounds for discussion.

Spike Lee’s Highest to Lowest at #18, a fresh adaptation of a timeless novel and a true cinematic masterpiece (High and Low). It’s not as good as that aformentioned masterpiece, but the book is ready made for different interpretations on its central moral crisis, offering a template on which to explore moral complexity, issues of class, allegiances. A true “what if” scenario that lends Spike’s rendition a real legitimacy all its own. What I particularly loved about it was its religious symbolism, an intentional choice that affords the imagery in the film substantive layers. It’s exploring particular questions, but its also exploring big questions at the same time.

Vulcanizadora, Joel Potryska’s debut film, also tackles a moral crisis, and just might be the most intense single concept film I’ve seen in years. Where it goes is truly shocking. It’s the sort of film that doesn’t really settle until after its done and has time to fully sink in. Then the pieces start to come together in a very real way. I have this one at #19

The addition in the highest spot goes to the only superhero film in my top 20, The Fantastic Four: First Steps at #9. Mabye its the suprise of just how good and truly authentic the film is. I had no idea what to expect, but it managed to stake its claim on my emotions and my mind with its affecting blend of nostalgia and forward thinking commentary. What’s most impressive is that it never allows itself to get too big for its ideas, managing to keep the experience simple but profound. It’s about family, but its also about community, exploring how both of these things function within a given society. It’s also about motherhood, and about sacrifice, and about how these things can operate as symbols for greater truths that inform our existence as a shared humanity. If that sounds like a lot for a superhero film, it is. But it never feels like a lot, and that is to the great strength and credit of the film.

That means my top 8 remain the same:

The Ballad of Wallis Island

Sinners

28 Years Later

The Legend of Ochi

Black Bag

F1

The Penguin Lessons

Materialists

If I had to wager what I could see moving and shifting with some rewatches, I still feel unsttled by Sinners and Black Bag. I’m banking on them being in a decent spot, but I feel like both films were clouded by being experiences given to the moment. Especially with how much I keep thinking about The Legend of Ochi. F1 I feel like I have a pretty good grasp on. I know what kind of film it is, why I resonated with it and why its ranking that hi. The Penguin Lessons is one i feel similarly about. Materialists is the one that I could also see threatening to jump up a bit when I see it again. Its a film I found myself wrestling with, and that is a pretty good indication that there is more to mine.

And The Ballad of Wallis Island? There’s no need for me to question that one. When you know you know, and that’s a film that very quickly captured my senses right out of the gate. If it holds on and goes on to define my year, I couldn’t ask for a more positive vision.

I recently came across a recommendation for a new 2025 book by author Kate Riley called Ruth. It was advertised as a book for the curious and persistant seeker, following a “fictitious” religious commune/communty that has obvious and direct allusions to the Hutterites.

I’ll be honest, after going out and purchasing it and now having finished it, I find myself conflicted. I can sense, and even see in part, notes of brilliance behind the page. And yet, the further I got into the book, the more distance I was experiencing when it came to grasping that brilliance. Even further, I felt like the story had lost me despite my best efforts to stay centered in it, and no amount of retreading and re-reading pages and even chapters seemed to help in relocating me within what this book was trying to do.

However, the book did leave me thinking and wrestling. In particular, I loved the way the author uses the basic premise of this fictionalized Hutterite community, which we navigate from the point of view of a young woman named Rtuth, to flesh out certain nuances regarding the human experience, especially where it relates to our beliefs. Where the book feels like it is operating as a critique in one moment, it deftly “critiques the critique” with the same brush using certain questions or observations or plotting to try and upend and overturn our expectations for dogmatism on either side. For example, as it explores the restrictive social dynamics of this community, the challenge of an ideological vision for a community where no one lacks is juxtaposed against this idea of an enforced impoverished state. Or the idea that this is built on a partioning out of needs and wants, an act that often blurs where and how and why such lines get drawn. The same “want” can be seen to restrict ones sense of self while similtaneously being correct in the potential destruction it can bring about in the life of a community, family or individual. Or the same “need” can be seen to give itself to the illusions of wanted desire, leading one to question where certain restricitons are actually leading to forms of oppression and harm.

These sorts of nuances play through the intracicies of Ruth’s own delicate dance between the safety of the community and the constant allure of the world that lies beyond it. In a very real sense this is a book about seeking truth, and the more Ruth seeks the more complex and shadowed things become. It is one thing to note sexual desire, for example, it is another to attend for the ways such desires can enslave. In this, the world might offer us the allure of desire and discovery but it cannot attend for the destruction. It can only contain such realities within the reductionism of our constrcuted ideas of a liberated self. Which of course is never a truly liberated self. We are all slaves in the end.

The book also uses this same approach to explore the nature of belief in God. After all, when God is rooted in the bigger questions regarding the nature of reality and the foundations of our beliefs and convictions, the temptation is to reduce that to the sorts of practicalities of rules and regulations that are easier to control, which of course are part of any given society, Hutterite or secular. And as is common, where we find rules we want to break them and escape them. Thus seeking the world often means seeking a world without God precisely because we believe this promises true liberation from the shackles of religious oppression. As is often the position of the common secular humanist/atheist, in a world ruled by a particular conception of law and order, religion achieves such control of society by attaching the ideas of reward and punishment as negatives that belong to this agent called God. And yet in Ruths story, we find in the world that surrounds this community the same shackles and the same questions and the same control built on systems of reward/punishment. Thus this forms the essential struggle of the faith journey, forcing us to see beyond the trappings of moralism to find what actually grounds such constructs in something true. This constant push and pull between feeling God’s absence and God’s presence, between the practicalities of acceptment and judgment, of the allusive natures of Love and what we might call evils, of encountering our doubts and our convictions, is the thing that finds us always sitting in this pervasive tension regardless of where we find ourselves on this journey.

This is as far as I got with this story, and most of this I gleaned from the book’s first half. There is a transition that takes place around the halfway point in the story that progresses the plot, and it was here that I found myself trying to keep up, trying to figure out where to place and fit those above observations. And to be clear, there’s a good chance that the issue here was me. I’m okay with that being the case, and I would actually love to get someone elses thoughts regarding their navigation of the story. Maybe it will help clarify and bring some of that struggle into fresh light. As it is, I appreciated it more than I was able to truly experience it fully, even while I found its themes resonating nonetheless.

What was helpful for me however was finding some illumination on similar ideas in another book I’m presently reading. This was another recommendation, having come across an interview with the author that sold me on her voice and vew of the world. It’s a book called Confessions of an Amateur Saint: The Christian Leader’s Journey from Self-Sufficiency to Reliance on God written by Mandy Smith. To offer a very concise summary, its a book about how it is that Smith occupies space in Christian community while holding the sorts of tensions described in Ruth above. Part of what emerges from her own observations and experiences to this end is firstly, the simple concession that these tensions follow us regardless of where we find ourselves, and second that experiencing and carrying these tensions does not and should not disqualify us from occupying the spaces that we do. This is true even though the common perception is that it does and it should, a perception that is not discriminative to secular or religious grounds. It is not contradictory or hypocritical to exist within a community that abides by certain rules that we might or might not make sense of or disagree with or embrace on any given day with differing degress of nuance. In fact, this is precisely what it looks like to partcipate at all.

Here there are three insights Smith offers that I found especially resonant.

First, she invites us to root ourselves not in our own imagination but in God’s imagination. This distinctive becomes more than semantics, as it shifts our point of view towards an embrace of both a necessary foundation and its proper and fallible and always incomplete contextualization in our lives, societies and communities. There is something liberating about Ruth’s journey towards seeing the tension as much bigger than illusions of her individuality, and for Smith this becomes an important part of how it is we exist in the world, and how it is she exists in the Christian world.

Second, seek the grace to find a new river. There is context for this insight in Smith’s own journey that the book makes available, but to explain why it resonated with me leads me to my own love of rivers, oceans, seas and lakes. It is here in this essential image that we find the tension of existence embodied and symbolized. Chaos battling against beauty. Expanse battling against barriers. Life against Death. There is a reason why humans have long found a potent and transcendent imagination captured and held sacred in this space, in this image. For her, she uses this to imagine the necessary act of always seeking within the tension, and we should not be resistant to the notion that this requires binaries, even as participation works to flesh out what this means beyond (or within) these binaries. In a certain kind of irony, it is the existence of these certain binaries that seem evident in the foundation of the cosmos that liberates us to deconstruct the boundaries in the emergent properites that we find within.

Lastly, she invites us to test God’s resources. If this world is one in which we find God, if this world is one in which God exists, this world is then defined as a resource. The question is, a resource to what end. Further, to what degree of responsibility does this resource obligate us towards. If we are to move outside of ourselves we thus find ourselves moving towards something other. And our beliefs and convictions are simply acts of similtaneously naming this other while locating our acts of participation as the necessary means of knowing this other. In a world that is defined as one in which God exists, such a world is the resource of God, and thus to participate in this Reality is to know God.

There is a definite practicality to the way Smith unpacks these big ideas. It just struck me as profound in the moment, and perhaps it was reading Ruth that effectively helped prime these observations to take on an even greater weight. That’s the power of story after all.