My recent reading through the book Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age To the Age of Robots by James Suzman, has really been shaking up my understanding of what work is. I’m sure that this would not be Suzman’s intent, but it has also reawakened and reinvigorated my faith in God, particularly in how it is that I see (and understand) the God-Creation-Humanity relationship.

A big part of the Suzman’s larger thesis has to do with how it is humanity has shifted the human relationship to work from a view of abundance to scarcity. And I think this has much to say regarding the recent annual celebration of Earth Day and all that this day represents.

The basic tenant of the argument goes like this:

The story of human’s relationship to the world (or the earth) used to be focused on the immediate and the present, where they (we) looked out at their environment and observed and trusted in the providential nature of God and earth to provide what one needed. Therefore there was no necessary language for which to assume or describe anxiety about the future. Work set us in relationship with God and land where the functional nature of this relationship (work) trusted in immediate needs being met through the fruits of that relationship, and rest then giving us to the time to reflect on and grow awareness of God and Land.

Anxiety about the future surfaced with the creation and discovery of fire precisely because for the first time in our world’s history we had an external source of energy that demonstrated the idea of “excess”. In other words, for the first time something else did the work that normally would have been attributed to us. This brought about both physical and social/cultural changes. The problem of excess is what then formulates the rest of the human story as one concerned less with the present and more with the future, bringing with it a very real anxiety that undermines the trust of this relatationship to and with God and Land.

The Gift of Free Time

As the author suggests, considering cooking to be one of the primary roles of fire that led to direct changes in human function and physicality, “Perhaps it is because so many see cooking as hard work that we have paid so little atteniton to what may be among the most important of fire’s many gifts: the gift of free time.”

This free time has led to the increased development of more and more external energy sources that do the work for us, creating this unending and interrelated cycle of future oriented thought processes and increased anxiety. When we no longer have a relationship to the present, we instead spend our time obsessing over and saving up for the future, something that has its greatest demonstration in Western development and society. This has flipped our attention from trust in the idea that our needs will be met (that providential relationship with God and land) to to the notion of increasing want. When these external energy sources do our work for us, all of this free time leads to both the positive and negative creation of excess. This shift from need to want has led to a society that attributes to work all manners of external, identity shaping attributes that then demand that we work harder and harder and harder for these wants rather than working less to obtain our needs, and we do this precisely because of all this “free time” and “free energy.” Its a paradox and a conundrum built on anxiety that creates more and more anxiety even as it continues to progress ingenunity and invention at an unprecedented rate. Further, as external energy sources do the work that we once did, not only do we disconnect from God and Land, we also end redirecting the evolutionary process that creative entropy holds together. Most of the evolutionary process is now artificial, from the cities we create changing natural patterns and adapted species to the very rewiring of our brains and the ongoing manipulation of the earth for these energy sources.

One place where we see this most readily is in the movement from fire to the rise of the farming, the structural premise that gives rise to growing civilization and reshapes our relationship to the Land, and thus also the life that shares this land with us. Reflecting on some of the narrative problems that flow from this shift Suzman writes,

“People and their domestic animals now comprise a remarkable 96 percent of all mammalian biomass on the planet. Humans account for 36 percent of that total, and the livestock that we nurture, nourish, and then sense to the slaughterhouse account for 60 percent. The remaining 4 percent are the ever diminishing populations of wild animals…

Descartes had his famous “night of visions”- a sequence of dreams that persuaded him that his ability to reason was sufficient proof of his own existence, giving rise to the now famous disctum, cogito, ergo sum- I think, therefore I am. It also persuaded him that the human body was no more than “a statue or machine made of earth,” and animals like the warhorses that sustained his amry, lacked the faculty for reason and so were nothing more than elaborate barley- and oat-fueled automata….

almost all societies that depended on hunting for meat considered animals to have souls… many also considered the fact that hunters were in effect harvesters of souls to be morally troubling and came up with a different way to rationalize the killing…

For farmers involved in meat production or butchers, there is little room for the intimacy that comes from hunting an animal on foot with a spear or bow. The emotional weight of animals souls would be too great a burden to bear. Humans, though, have evolved the ability to be selective in deploying the empathy that underwrites our social natures… (thus) Farming socities adopted a variety of different approaches to dealing with the ethical problem of killing animals. Some simply chose to hide the messy business (Eastern and Indigenous cultures)… another option was regulation (Abrahamic Religions)… the final option was to take Descartes’s approach and think of animals as little more than machines and so assume that they were already dead even while they still lived….

When he argued that animals are for the sake of man, Aristotle wasn’t only talking about food but also the work done by creatures like oxen, horses, and hunting dogs. This too was part of the natural order of things. Perhaps unsurprisingly he rationalized slavery in a similar way…. the only circumstances he imagined slavery no longer being an institution would be if there was no work for slaves to do. And the only circumstances in which he believed that could happen were if somehow people might invent machines that could work autonomously, “obeying and anticipating the will of others,” in which case “chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters, slaves.”

To him, though, that was something that might only happen in the world of fantasy and the false stories religious people told one another… Aristotle may have built his reputation by using reason to interrogate the nature of uncertainty, but he had no doubt that slaves existed precisely so that people like him could spend their days solving math problems and having clever arguments rather than producing and preparing food. His defense of slavery is a reminder of how people in all societies have insisted that their often wildly different economic and social norms and institutions reflect nature.”

From Human Exceptionalism to Technology: The Age of the New Gods

We are at a tipping point in human history where technology and artificial evolution is taking the place of this planet’s primary energy producing source and therefore functioning as “god” so to speak, with the caveat that the narrative this is following is all based now on the notion of scarcity rather than abundance. This notion of scarcity is precisely what creates this conundrum of a planet that needs to use more and more resources while also anxiously understanding that there won’t be enough resources to sustain us into the future. It also lies at the root of understanding how it is that we moved from fire to farming and modern socio-economical practices, practices based almost entirely on the notion of preparing and storing for the future. Perhaps most notable are the ways in which this model of scarcity becomes the driving force for the creation of inequalaity with fear and uncertainty for the future forcing us to reminagine our relationship to God and Land (in providential terms) and thus to one another.

God, Land, Abundance and Scarcity

Here we have the central quesiton of how it is that life “works”, and thus how we understand our relationship to “work”. The laws of entropy (the simaltaneous destruction of or taking of energy and the making and dispersion of energy) must still be applied somewhere. The real question for this anxiety laden future is how it is that technology as the main energy consumptiive plays into this equation. This becomes especially apparent in modernity where it is assumed that our relationship to God and Land is a thing of the past, and where progress and fear of that uncertain future must be the dominating narrative driving energy producing and energy consuming practices now dominated by technological sources in order to ensure our long term survival.

Interestingly to this end, this is precisely why the problem of “scarcity” is written so sharply into religious conviction, and why in the Abrahamic religions most specificially we have such a strident focus on reclaiming this God-Creation-Humanity relationship. The ancient world bears much evidence towards the basic intuition of this shift from abundance (the Garden narrative in Judeo-Christian Tradition) to scarcity (the wilderness in Judeo-Christian tradtion), with the outcome being perpetuated by this sift being a necessary division between land and people (taking its energy sources for our wants), people and God (no longer trusting in provision but working to obtain it and control it ourselves) , and people and people (inequality based on scarcity). In the Judeo Christian Tradition, desire is the primary word used to understand a definition of sin, from which we arrive at this overarching theme of God’s either dwelling in the cosmos or dwelling apart from it. The mark of human progress captured by the Tower of Babel story in particular, a story that in itself can only be understood in the light of the first chapters of Genesis which defines both God’s dwelling within the order of creation and to call to work in relationship to God, Creation (Land or earth) and People, and the problem of desire which leads to disorder (the flood) and the picture of “empire” that posits a people controlling the narrative of the human story as one of scarcity rather than abundance (by making this tower, let us make a name for ourselves). That this happens continually within our very human awareness of the problem of scarcity suggests that the same order-disorder, chaos and creation story that guides this religious conviction with the ancient world is still very much in play. When natural disasters hit (a pandemic, for example), the fear that the narrative of scarcity brings emerges ten fold. These things then foster a never ending discourse revolving around the human capacity to control the future on one side and concerns over our failure to exist in proper relationship to God and Land on the other.

Which is where we end up with these confused and competing narratives. On the one hand we find the grand story of capitalism that holds human exceptionalism, the very image of the Tower of Babel, in its grip. Suzman writes,

“The only thing universal about market capitalism was the hubris of its most enthusiastic advocates… market capitalism was a cultural phenomenon that emerged as the modern nation state replaced more granulaar, diverse socially grounded economic systems based mainly on kinship, sharing, and reciprocal gift-exchange. The substantivists insisted that the economic rationality the formalists believed was part of human nature was a cultural by-product of market capitalism, and that we should be far more open-mineded when it came to making sense of how other people aportioned value, worked, or exchanged things with one another… wants may be easily satisfied, either by producing much or desiring little. Hunter-gatherers achieved this be desiring little and so, in their own way, were more affluent than a Wall Street banker who, despite owning more properties, boats, cars, and watches than they know what to do with, constantly strives to acquire even more…. potentially for most of human history, scarcity was not the organizing feature of human economic life and hence the fundamental economic problem, at least as it was described by classical economics, was not the eternal struggle of our species.”

On the other hand, we see many looking to reapply a humanist interpretation of the sacred to the natural order as a way of downplaying human exceptionalism. This takes the old ideas of God in relationship to the world and God existing apart or absent from the world and replaces it with a view of the natural order as standing above artiifical evolution in light of God’s absence or non-existence. And yet if the problem of the first view is that it imagines humanity as its own god, and the us the earth’s most sacred and vital componant, this second view attempts to make the sacred the natural order. Both assume a guiding narrative, one focused on the past and the other obsessed with the future, but a narrative nonetheless. And narratives that have a tough time reconciling this notion of work with the distinctness of the human capacity and vocation without either diminishing it based on an assumed elevation of the sacredness of the natural order or elevating the sacredness of humanity above the natural order. We can’t assume the sacredness of the land as something the defines our relationship to it if the land cannot attribute this sacredness to itself, nor does it seem we can maintain the right and godlike ability to attribute this sacredness to ourselves (humanity) without necessarily subsuming the sacredness of the land itself for the sake of humanities future. We are stuck with narratives that have little to say about our (humanities) working relationship to Land in the present.

The Source of Life and Entropy

In any case, I think what is obvious as well is that there remains an uncertain longing for the sacred to be evident within the evident chaos. It would seem that the same storyline that we see in the Judeo-Christian story continues today, with the added question of this picture of cultural and human empire now shifting from people to technology as the new god of our age. Technology is increasingly driving and (re)defining the very defintion of ethics and morality, and will soon, if it hasn’t already, become its purveryor and catalyst. It is for this reason that I would suggest that our primary problem is that age old discussion about God as one who dwells within the created order or as one who dwells apart from the created order.

This age old question (is God absent of the natural order or involved in/present within the natural order) formulates itself in the modern age as a particular concern for this notion of a God who dwells within the created order necessitating a God who then also dwells within the chaos. This is not a question that concerned the ancients in the same way as it does today, but rather these are questions that now emerge from our modern understanding of the chaos in scientific terms. As Suzman writes though, what science demonstrates and what we are discovering more and more is that the creative process of entropy, that energy consuming and energy producing process from which life emerges and is thus contained and sustained, appears to require both the destructive and constructive edges of this process in order to function. Life emerges from death, order from disorder, production from consumption, creation from chaos.

The real question hinges not on the nature of this process (Suzman maintains this is not the essential mystery), but rather on the question of its source. That is, we can see and note the necessary pattern, but this requires something to set it in process, to jump start the laws of entropy and to define its necessary starting point. The process requires a source, a foundation by which it then comes into existence and finds its necessary pattern. Here in lies the conundrum of that ancient question. If God jump started the process, is God then still involved in the process given the evidence of both order and disorder. And if God is not, do we then just imagine that God is not involved at all in the human story. And if so, where then do we locate a reason to exist in relationship to the Land if the human story seems to necessitate a concern for a future that sees us existing apart from (our in control of) the Land? And perhaps the bigger question yet, if humanity is elevated to the position of God (that is, the source and arbitrator of ethics and morality and thus the ones who set the new pattern for life and entropy), how do protect against the exploitation that flows from humanity being in the position of the primary consumer of these energy sources and this energy existing soley to beneift our (now) natural human progress? We are less dependent on the earth now than we are dependent on our ability to harness it and thus tailor it for the purpose of humanities potential future apart from it. It’s a catch 22. Our best hope for the future is to use the earth for human advancement, while this using and coopting of the natural order for the sake of human advancement requires necessary exploitation.

If the entirety of the human story of progress (and even the very physical evolutionary progress and development that led to our unique exceptionalism) is built on “artificial evolution” (that is, evolution that humanity has cooopted and redirected in its participation within the natural order), to what end do we then demand an upholding of the sacredness of the earth? If we are presently in control of the narrative and therefore our potential future, by what means do we then choose to inhibit and hold back this potential by changing the new narrative of evolution for the sole (and seemingly irrational) purpose of elevating nature to a godlike status?

And further yet, what do we do when technology is already re-assuming this rolein our stead? How do we locate the relationship to God and Land that the ancients assumed within a narrative that leaves little room for it to exist? Technology might be the only way we survive in the future by giving us a way off this planet that we call home, but that technology demands the continued exploitation of this place we call home for our the purpose of human progress. This, it would seem, is the natural order of things with humans in the god role. And the reason technology is now subsuming our own position as gods is precisely because it is the product of the continued and necessitated practice of handing the production of energy that once was ours over to that technology.”

These are big questions, and ones that I have been mulling around in my own mind. They seem to especially be pertinant for understanding why it is we should care about and celebrate something like Earth Day, something that seems to be far less about that working relationship and far more about that socio-political lobbying either to protect our god like status or to relegate it back to the natural order in a way that resubmits us to a source that can dictate and control our narrative as the source and virtuous authority. For myself I find myself compelled again and again back to the God-Land-Humanity realtionship that guides the ancient stories, and in particular the Judeo-Christian narrative mentioned above. There is something about the God imagined in this story as one who dwells within both the order and the chaos that continue to compell me, even if it challenges me. It provides me a way to locate the human story within the story of God and Creation as one that emboldens a “working” relationship, speaks to the problem of scarcity, and brings together past, present and future as a measure of trust in something that sits above us and holds it together in the patterns of order and disorder, even if that leaves me slightly out of control of that narrative. It allows me to revel in abundance as opposed to forever reacting to scarcity. And even more so, at the very least it provides me a means of participating within it in a way that makes sense, and even affords me the responsibility that comes from our ability to direct it in ways that don’t succumb to necessary inequality and allows me to respond to the inequality that scarcity creates and demands.

Approching the turn of the calendar year in 2020, I, like most people I think, found myself doing quite a bit of reflecting. Exhaustion with the pandemic and the never ending lockdowns has long since set in and taken its toll. While turning the page to 2021 didn’t actually promise much in the way of hoped for relief, it did seem to, if only for a brief moment, offer something symbolic- the imagining of some sort of a future. This reflecting eventually led to some renewed interest in a personal research project of mine on a subject intimately related to the future- the nature of “memory”.

I have written previously in this space about why it is that I became interested in the subject of memory, so I won’t rehash that here. But while most of my research thus far as been spent on the history of memory (as an idea) and the function of memory (as a science), I had yet to dig in to memory on a purely comparitive level, and in particular the comparitive relationship between memory past and present, and further yet the relationship of memory to how it is that we exist in the present.

To this end, I recently picked up a book by researcher Joshua Foer called Moonwalking with Einstein. While the book does carry a bit of a practical bent, taking its research and applying it specifically to some of the practicalities of memory building and memory strengthening exercises, by and large it is a powerful treaties on this comparitive exploration of memory past and memory present.

What Is Memory

One of the most striking things that I have found in my current research into the idea of memory is the basic admission that we still know so very little about it. Which is not to say there hasn’t been a lot of of headway made towards understanding what it does. At a base level though, much of the how and why of memory function remains as mysterious as those spaces in our brains where forgotten memories seem to gravitate towards. From the beginning of our awareness of memory as a function, recognized in early human development as the means by which we express our minds without the aid of developed language, to the modern age where new information now arrives at unprecedented rates, memory continues to play a critical role in human function, however different these expressions of memory might be and however negelcted these expressions of memory might have become.

What is clear in the pages of this book by Foer is that this is also true at a simple biological level, especially when seen through the simple picture of the human life span. As Foer explains, memory at birth is a curious entity in that it operates without a past. Everything is new at that age, which explains why it is that we then can’t remember our childhood until we hit age 4 and 5 (on average), because our minds as of yet have nothing to attach memories to. Everything is future oriented, essentially leaving our minds engaged in the process of building a foundation through which memories can then emerge. It is only after we have created memories, so to speak, that we are then free to interact with our memories as “experiences” which we can actively comprehend and thus translate into, well, memories. Memories that can then catapult us into the future with a functional narrative in tow. In this way, memory is at its heart a comparitive and creative exercise that requires real and actualized context to develop.

This correlates with the science of how the brains develops. In James Suzman’s book Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time, he documents the uniqueness of the human brain by way of synapses. Unlike other creatures we are born basically completely dependent, our brains a quarter of the size of what they will become in our adult years (in comparison to a great ape, where they are born with a brain almost 50 percent of its adult size). This means a child’s brain is full of synapses that take in information and more information. As we grow those synapses begin to get pruned out until we are left with what these functioning synapses that can take this information and form them into active memories, memories that then propel us forward into the most essential human activity- creating, or working. Humans by nature need information, and we consume far more of it than any other creature on earth past or present.

Something similar happens when we get old, but in a slightly different fashion and context. If a crucial aspect of building and sustaining memory is in fact holding and having a future, or working and creating into the future, the very fact that in old age this future becomes smaller and memories themselves that much greater means that those spaces where memories seemingly go to be forgotten becomes increasingly active and aware and harder to retrieve. This is true simply on the basis that these memories no longer have an expansive future to be launched in to. Foer suggests that this is less about the breakdown of our brains or our inability to remember lost informaiton (information never truly gets lost, only irritrievable) and more about the ways in which memory is in fact built and developed. Debilitating diseases aside, it is possible to sustain memories well into old age by exercising our brains and keeping them healthy, but essential to this is enabling ourselves to continue to imagine a future even when that future gets smaller. Curiously, there is a good deal of study that could be done here on the role of religious conviction towards this end, especially as a belief system that understands the importance of, to borrow a phrase from C.S. Lewis, the “spiritual imagination”.

What Does Memory Do?

To dial this down a bit further yet in dialogue with Foer’s book, what precisely is it that happens when we engage the process of remembering? As with the picture of a child building a past and then applying that to a broader picture of a potential and imagined future, memory building happens when something in our present becomes distinguishable against that which is routine, ordinary and familiar within our past. If anything from Foer’s book has stuck with me the most it would be this notion- what makes life appear to move fast is when everything blurs together, when there is no ability to distinguish between one moment and the next, or one day and the next. This might sound counter intuitive, because rationality and reason appear to suggest that old familiar adage “time flies when we are having fun”. But the truth appears to be precisely the opposite. At a very immediate and most practical level, this is what makes something like this current Pandemic so difficult for so many. When it first started one could notice a collective sense of fear contrasted by a collective sense of optimism. Having a chance to press pause for the short term and make space for things long forgotten in our busy-ness seemed like a genuine, welcome and desirable opportunity. Fast forward to today and those things no longer feel like novelties. This is because at a fundamental human level we are conditioned to live in a past-present-future co-awareness. There is only so long we can thrive, and sometimes even survive when the days begin to blend into one another without much in the way of distinction. With no way to plan for and anticipate the future, we cease making “memories” in their truest forms and life begins to, retrospectively, feel like it has disappeared or never existed at all. This, by contrast, is what makes life appear like it is moving fast. Memory is something that occurs only in retrospect, flowing from and depending on our awareness of those distinguishable moments that mark our place in time and space. We call this brain mapping. It’s the same exercise we engage in when we read a paperback book, ironically a fading art in our modern world. It is onlly in looking backwards and contrasting that with our present that we can locate these moments and recognize them as a building story full of memories, which has the very real affect of then making life appear to move slowly. To think back on our memories is to gain a sense of a life full and a life lived.

Getting deeper into the technicals, many of which this book helps to outline in an accessible fashion, we get to the following helpful distctions. First is the differentiating between artificial memory, that which we create and can manipulate, and natural memory, that which is generally unconscious and which drives much of our decisions and our choices. What’s important about artificial memory, which makes up the smaller portion of our memory systems, is that these represent the minute ways in which we can actually and willfully affect change in our lives, even as natural memory, the much larger portion of our memory systems, is what allows us to continue to function on a day to day level.

And then there is the difference between episodic and semantic memories. Episodic memories are located in time and space (as Foer suggests, concerned with where and when), while semantic memory is located outside of time and space (free flowing knowledge). This connects directly to the relationship between explicit and implicit memories. Explicit (declarative) memories are things you know that you need to remember, or that you know you remember, while implicit (non-declarative) memories are unconscious memories, things that you remember but that you are unaware that you remember. Thus explicit memories, like artificial memories deal with awareness in the immediate. They provide short term opportunity to enact real change and to shape our stories in specific ways. The unconscious memory in contrast doesn’t travel through the same short term memory circuits as explicit ones do. In terms of what dominates our lives, most of what we remember and what drives our choices is unconscious, while what we knowingly remember and thus can manipulate accordingly makes up a much smaller fraction of who we are. And yet there is an intimate and important relationship that exists between these two kinds of memories in terms of how we function and shape the human story. While one shapes who we are, the other shapes who we become, and who we become requires a very real trust in who we are, which is largely the sum of our unconcious awareness. In other words, memory making is a very real exercise in faith.

External and Internal Memory Making

Perhaps most important for the larger comparitive discussion of the history of memory and the function of memory in our present day is this notion of external and internal memory. What’s important to note here is that while external memory is all about the recording and capturing of memory in physical and material ways external to our being (such as writing it down), our brains developed and are conditioned towards internal memory function, that which we internalize and thus know as functioning knowledge. If there is one defining and disinguishing mark of the work of memory in history and the work of memory today, it is the simple fact that we now exist in an environment where most of our memories are captured by systems external to us. We not only have these external systems that contain our memories, we continue to build more and more of them out of necessity and dependency. This has the very real and measurable effect of eroding our ability to remember in internalizing fashions, and perhaps most strikingly has the most immediate impact on the very real essenence of what makes us “us”- our ability to understand our selves and our life as story through the development of connecting the explicit and the artificial to the unconscious or natural memory. In short, it has eroded our brains abiliy to the do the work our brains were developed to do. We might see it most in an external sense, be it the very real challenge of remembering more than 2 or 3 (on average) phone numbers or birthdays, but where this does the most damage is when we actually dig into that internalized reality, as this is where we make the narratives that define how it is that we function and live in unconscious ways from moment to moment. In the West where memory has arguably been most eroded, we see this most readily in the decline of the art of storytelling. We have grown skeptical of narrative exercises, preferring instead static information and rational “facts”. The problem with this is that our brains are not designed to simply retain facts. Memory itself depends on our brains necessary and adapted ability to filter through information and to forget that which we don’t need and remember that which is most important. It is on this basis then that weave this into a narrative that our unconscious selves can accept and our conscious selves can interact with.

To Remember and To Forget: The Right Ordering of Our World

In this sense, memory depends on the artful process of forgetting. Our minds developed to take in information and order it so as to then recast this information through story and narrative. And we do this for the purpose of building towards the future. This is what allows our memories to give our lives shape and locate us in this world in meaningful ways as something recognizable. When that gets eroded we end up feeling lost and aimless and unrecognizable. Reduced to mere facts that our brains can’t actually do anything meaningful with. As a human species, stories and narrative are as important to our diseminating and applying of truth as facts, and probably even more so. That we have become cynical of narrative “truth” in modern Western society is both a symptom of the erosion of the memory making process and a cause of our own increasing indebtedness to irrational processess, defined as facts artciulated increasingly without actual context through which to be formed and thus understood.

Our minds have long since been trained to forget by nature of how we consume information, just not in the fashion that our brains were actually built to forget. Foer points out that Socrates predicted this long ago when looking at the potential danger of putting what we know internally into print (external memory). Print, followed by indexes (the external ordering of information), and much much later the age of the internet, has played out Socrates’ very real concerns in a prophetic fashion. The world that is being created now is one based almost entirely on external memory systems whereas almost the whole of human history, on which the development of our brains hinges, was built through internal memory processes. As Foer suggests, progress is simply outpacing humanity at an unprecedented rate, and one of the greatest challenges of human society at large is our inability to address the changes this is bringing in terms of this internal/external process, something we can no longer fully engage and recognize because of this progressive lack of narrataive understanding and context. We have lost the ability to tell our stories, and thus our external reality has picked up where our internal process left off, ordering our memories and thus telling our stories for us. We are no longer what our unconscious memories make us to be, but rather what those external memories tell us we we must be.

Intelligence, Dualism and the Decline of Narrative Memory Making

There is another important question to add to this discussion, and that is, what exactly is intelligence? Is it as we have been trained to define it in our modern understanding- data, facts, and information? There is a degree to which intelligence relates directly to knowledge based systems, but as this book points out, knowledge itself is entirely different than actual knowing. As described earlier, intelligence used to be based on our ability to take information, analyze it, and then forget what we don’t need and remember what is most important. It is from here that our brains apply this to a functional narrative that helps us to make sense of that which we can then come to truly know. Over time what has happened in the modern world is that we have been trained to disassociate facts from narrative. Narrative, or stories are untruths that the facts, the science, the knowledge, can set straight. This might be as simple as observing the gradual seperating of academics from the arts, or the subsequent subsuming of the arts into mere existential statements about the rational facts. It is also as complex as the exchanging of one worldview for another, which now sees the right ordering of the universe as the assembling of information rather than revealing and recovery of necessary and narrative shaping truth. This is the basis of enlightenment style rationalism. In any case, what has happened is we have essentially elevated this kind of rationalism as the new god of this new age, trading in the God-Human-Creation relationship that humanity once engaged through story for a new form of dualism. As theologian N.T. Wright often puts it, in this new world, this new age, God can either be out there detached from the world (epicurianism), or God can be non-existent altogether. In either case this is effectively doing the same thing, which is forming a dualistic picture of the world in which the facts exist apart from humanity and the natural order and we exist primarily as beings in service to this capital T “Truth”. We end up with naturalism as opposed to “natural theology”, but a naturalism that has no way of reconciling how it is that humans fit into this natural world in a meaningful way. A naturalism that has long since abandoned its ability to interact with the human story as a memory making process. Progress has become the new obsession, and rationalism is its god. This is the same thing that happened when persistant dualism affected and gradually corrupted the ways in which we are able to imagine the gods actually interacting with the natural world, essentially leading to this familiar divide of facts versus fiction, religion versus rationality, and narrative versus information. The real danger then is this gradual eroding of the very essence of what it means to be human and to exist in relationship to this natural world.

Historically speaking, as Foer rightly points out, back when print first emerged on the scene suddenly the songs, the poetry, the stories that were once synonymous with human intellect and true narrative driven knowledge were no longer seen as bastians and holders and expressions of truth. As the book says, they were free then to become art, but in that freedom they suddenly also became distinct from true knowledge. Dualism at work.

The Modern Problem: A Loss of Imagination

To speak of all of this in quite personal terms, when we pause to take a look at all that we consume today in what has become a society built on mass consumption, which includes in a very real way the mass of information we take in every second of every day, and it becomes startling how little of it we actually are able to remember. We consume so much and remember so little, all the while educating our youngest minds based on data driven memory based systems that, in the more concerning reality, do not have the time to actually settle into our unconscious and natural memory making systems. It is as if we are reconditioning our brains in a real tim, self made evolutionary process to exist perpetually in those first 5 years of our life. This is what defines progress today. There is so much information coming at us all the time, and it does so with a sense of urgency that says progress or cease to exist as a human species, that our world is being redeveloped around external memory making systems where there is no ability to actually reflect on and analyze this information in the way our brains need to do to make sense of it in a meaningful way. Everything is new, and thus in this world everything must be new all the time to qualify as progress. Rewatching films or rereading books or sharing familiar stories, for example, becomes a cumbersome exercise, Traditions become a hindrance. We have a tendency to fill our days unecessarily with work and we structure our lives according to expectations of building entirely towards this obsession with the future. Intelligence gets whittled down to the central concerns of our modern age (environmental concerns, technological advancement, space exploration), while, as the film Ad Astra so aptly captured in its powerful inditment of modern human progress, we stand a very real danger of arriving at the future with no ability to actually make sense of any of it, let alone to even be able to ask the right questions to begin with. To ask the necessary questions is a part of what it means to be human. To fit these questions into a necessary human narrative is a part of what it means to engage the memory making process. What we have become less and less able to do is that which our brains developed to do, which is to apply these facts to a narrative structure. To tell these stories of our lives and our history, of our persons, our communities, of our humanity in a way that can then translate to capital letter Truth regarding who we are and how it is that we live in this world in a meaningful way.

As Foer explains, the Latin word for memory comes from “inventory” and “invention”, two ideas combined to make a whole. Memory in this sense is a “tool of recording and a tool for invention and composition”. It is the process of “making new connections between old ideas”, and as Foer so aptly puts it, “memory makes” or imagines “new things.” We have been trained in this modern world to think of memory as stuffing facts inside our heads. But memory as both a concept and as a very necessary human exercise is not built for this. Memory is by nature an imaginative process that has its roots in narrative making societies and cultures. “Learning, Memory and Creativity”, the bastians of what truth fundamentally is and becomes, are shaped around the same fundamental idea, which is that truth emerges from this interrelated function of past-present-future realities. As the book points out, “the art and science of memory is about developing the capacity to quickly create images and link disparate ideas” with memories of the past for the sake of the future. This is how story emerges. Creativity, then, as Foer suggests, is the ability to “form connections between disparate ideas or images”, the ability to “create something new and hurl it into the future so that it becomes”… a story. Creativity is “future memory” in the strictest and most fundamental sense of the word. Unfortunately we live in a world today where it is all future and no memory. We dismantle the external markers of our past in the same way we dismantle the internal markers of our past, forging our way into an unidentifiable future ill prepared to give it much in the way of meaning.

The Modern Solution: Building Memory spaces. Memory Blocks and Memory Castles.

So what is the solution? I think the solution remains the same as it always has- recognize the power of artificial, explicit and episodic memories to afford us agency for change. In other words, spend time building conscious memories. This is the way we begin to take back control of our memory making process from those external buildings to constructing internal ones. This is described in technical terms as building memory castles, metaphorical rooms and spaces through which to tell our stories and make meaningful memories. What’s important to note here is that while simply spending time doing meaningful things is important, what gives memory its shape is foward movement, definitive decisions, choices, actions, that shake up the routine and give us something to distinguish our story as a story that is being told, that is developing, that is building.

Secondly, reengage with story and the storytelling process by retelling the stories from our past and thefore giving them new and fresh context as time moves forward. Accept that just as the truth that guides our lives is mostly unconscious, telling stories is the best way to truly know this truth as something other than facts. We need to do away with our modern skepticism and embrace this ancient and human artform and creative exercise as the means by which we can make sense of all of this information in the modern age. We need to trust that our memories will preserve what it is that we need to know to prosper and learn how to step out through faith in our subconcisous and unconscious knowledge of this world and who we are, and yes, I would argue, God. This doesn’t make us less intellectual, it actually makes us more knowledgeable. What’s important here is that for as much as memory depends on forward movement, our ability to remember also depends on giving us the mental capacity to afford the present its meaning. Routine and Tradition is as important as change and progress in this regard, as that becomes the means by which we can then be able to connect the past with the future. One potential of connecting this in concrete ways to curating our explicit and conscious memories is through attaching these stories to concrete things, be it a meal, a park, a building. There is a deep and intimate connection, for example, to memory making and architecture. Seeing a film together in a public space like a local theater builds a visible and tangible marker into our memories in ways that seeing it home cannot.

Third, and in conjunction with the second point, we need to be willing to temper the amount of information we take in by allowing ourselves the space to forget so that we can then begin to remember that which is most imporant. This might look like creating space to connect once again with nature in a way that brings our human experience into relationship with it. This might look like prayer and meditation. This might look like creating Traditions, forcing ourselves to rewatch important films or read important books, sharing familiar stories over the supper table. It might look at resting on a piece of information and submitting it to dialogue and conversation with others as much as we can. It might look like spending time reading or listening to longer forms of discourse or camping out on singular ideas despite that feeling that we simply don’t have the time for this or that we must keep up with this world’s astronomical pace of disemmination. This might look like taking the time to journal or blog or write out thoughts about certain ideas. And like above, attaching these spaces to something visually tangible like a building or a park or a coffee shop or a river side ect. can be a very real thing we can reintigrate into our lives in this fashion as well. It probably looks like all of the above. The more we do this the more we give our brains the chance they need to begin to build these internal systems of memory that can then translate these experiences and this information as necessary or unnecessary for telling the story we are building through our memories.

Space is tied to time, with memory recognizing this as our means of occupying a “when” and a “where” and then knowing and understanding the “why”. For me personally, when I think back over 2020 what I recall is a blurry and indistinguishable mix of activity that feels like it never actually existed at all. And I remember feeling in the past few weeks that this is a frightening notion when it comes to thinking about my life moving forward. My story is marked by pre-pandemic life, with my last meaningful and identifiable memory essentially erasing a year and a half of my life from my mind (and thus my story). This presents a very real challenge for the memory making process in a world where the memory making process is already being eroded. And yet perhaps there continues to be an opporunity for the empty space this pandemic has created to awaken us to this larger reality of our memories potential for knowing and for Truth and identity. However it is that we eventually emerge from this pandemic, if we can allow the experience to empower us back towards the memory making process this can go a long ways in helping to push back on the forces of this modern shift towards external building memory blocks and reclaim control of the human narrative in an internalized sense. Let the past inform our present so that we can reiminagine a future by way of a better and arguably more ancient story.

“When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”
– John 20:19-31

If you are not and have never been part of a liturgical Church expression, chances are you are like I was was before experiencing liturgical worship and assume that the Easter season ends on Easter Sunday. In the liturgical calendar the story of God continues with the celebration of Eastertide (or Paschaltide), literally rendered “Easter Time”. This is marked by these weekly cycles that allow us to enter into the story of the Resurrection, culminating in the Day of Pentecost where the spirit given empowers the Church to be the mission of Christ to the world.

The Second Sunday of Easter (also known as Divine Mercy Sunday), is especially relevant because it establishes what for the Gospel of John is this pattern by which can  recognize the new creation reality established in the death and resurrection of Christ. The writer of the Gospel of John builds the narrative of Jesus around a new “Genesis”, a new beginning, and in the end of the Gospel we are brought back in line with the opening phrase “in the beginning” by nature of this being “the first day of the week” of this new creation order. It brings to mind our role as image bearers placed in God’s temple, which in a bit of irony contrasts the “locked” doors of a building and this charge of being “sent” outwards into the world. The beauty of the Cross and the Resurrection is that it is not an exclusive property of faith meant to assure us of our salvation and bolster our fortresses, but rather it is the proclamation of both identity and vocation. “As” I have been sent, says Jesus, “so” I send you. To do what? To live and embody the ministry of Jesus in the new creation. In other words, to get on with task of creating and building that informs the Genesis imagination.

What’s striking to me about this new creation vision is that it begins with the simple words peace which contrasts with the word fear that precedes it. This word peace is deeply interested in and intereconnected with this notion of sending. It’s not simply a message that says, Jesus died for my sins and now I get to go to heaven, as the Gospel is so often understood. It is peace for the purpose of vocation. And how does this vocation get summed up? As a reconciliatory work. A unifying work. Forgive so that you can be forgiven. In other words, the resurrection breaks down the barriers of fear that comes from looking out on a world that feels hostile and uncertain and divided, and affords us this phrase “peace be with you”, a phrase in liturgical circles that actively embodies a time of reconciliation with one another. In the ancient world of this text, this would afford us a new vision of a world no longer bound by the cycles of division that we see instilled and perpetuated in the familiar story of Cain and Abel, one built on an eye for an eye form of justice and the never ending repayment of the sins of the people that flows from this kind of division. In Christ this cycle is broken, and thus in Christ we can move out into the world declaring “peace be with you” precisely by living in this model of forgiveness. This calls forth this great story of a whole humanity (literally rendered “Adam”) divided in order to become one in our divsersity (the fruits of labour bearing the child as a unified whole), a vision distorted by the idolatry of our desire which leads in the narrative picure John is evoking to a humanity divided (Cain and Abel) with no way to become a diversified whole. The competing image is that of Babel, where homogeneuity tells a different story than that of being fruitful and multiplying so as to fill the earth with our diversity, becoming the very template for the notion of nationalism and empire that flows from the term “Babylon”.

In the new creation of the Gospel of John, Jesus occupies the center of the new temple of creation enabling us to begin the reconciling work needed to heal a divided world. It is precisely through setting all that divides us at the feet of Jesus that we can both declare and live the kind of peace that bears the promise and mark of this liberating Gospel message. The breath of life in the Garden is the same breath of life declared in 20:22 and 20:31. Faith then, the kind of faith the Gospel of John contrasts with Thomas’ doubt, is the simple notion of believing that this promise of life is true in a world that often looks quite different. It is the proclamation that in the Resurrection God has been faithful to the promise to bring about this new creation reality. To bear out the promise to make Abraham the father of many nations bound not be this idea that some are made in the image of God and some are not, but so that our true identity as image bearers can once again be made known, and in so doing ushering and bringing the diversity of these fractured and scattered nations of image bearers into this creative vision of a diversified whole. What Eastertide reminds us of on this second Sunday of Easter is that Resurrection is not the end of the week, it is the first day of the week, the great imagining of a new world reality that has only just begun. The great bearing out of this new world reality through this peace giving and unifying vocation as image bearers.

Back when I found myself stepping away from my faith and challenging a lot of my beliefs, I found myself at something of a crisis point. It started with a process of questioning the rationality of my faith after opening myself up to the wide world of academics and thinkers I had not previously been exposed to, and at a certain point coming to accept that I should abandon my faith on the basis of reason alone.

I then came to a point where I realized that these same academics, including the grand and storied world of philosophy, were basically caught in the exact same space as the religious conviction it wanted to critique. It is one thing to say that this is simply the way the world is, it is quite another thing to make a case for why living in this world must matter in the face of death.

I came to understand that contradictions abounded in terms of reconciling these two things, and if the same rational minds that had convinced me to abandon my faith in the idea of God based on reason alone consistently chose irrationally based narratives as the means by which we can then live in this rationally constructed world in a meaningful way, what then was the essential difference between the narrative of faith and the narrative of materialism or, what I would have described at the time, secular humanism, a term I’ve since come to dislike. If I was taught that faith must be deconstructed on the simple basis of rationality alone, on what basis should I then refuse to submit my lack of faith to the same rules. This becomes especially crucial when it comes to applying a notion of personal responsbility, an idea that continues to inform our problematic understandings of retributive justice.

This is what led me eventually to a nihilistic conclusion of it all, acknowledging that if this is simply the way things are, there is no truly rational answer to the question, why live in the face of death. There are simply answers that we arrive at based on the nature of our circumstance and narratives we choose to accept on often irrational grounds that allow us to then give this life a certain level of meaning.

I had one big problem though. In abanding the world of faith I was also abandoning the specificity of the Christian faith, and in particular the weighty nature of the determinism that soaked much of this renewed interest at the time of my departure in Reformed Theology. As many of my friends were migrating either away from the Christian faith or towards this grand exodus to these neo-Calvinist circles, I came to realize that this faith expression had played as much of a role in my loss of faith as my grappling with the wide world of academics. This led me through an exploration of different faith traditions, but for me personally I continued to be arrested by this notion that I encountered in Tolkien of needing some kind of anchor in terms of locating a “True” story. If anything was going to make sense, landing in any Tradition of faith or non faith needed to rest on a central conviction of faith in something. The only way multi-culturalism and diversity can hold any power in this world and be protected against homogenious tendencies is to find a way to preserve this sense of conviction in something that is capital T “True”. While this part of my journey is colored with plenty of nuance and reasons and stories, I came to undertand that being able and willing to say that Christianity, should one come to that convcition, is the True story that gives all of our other stories their meaning and foundation, the very basis for which Tolkien imagines his own writings, is not elitist or exclusionary or arrogance, but quite the opposite. In fact, I was at my most arrogant and exclusive and elitist when I was pretending that my godless worldview was not based on a simlilar conviction of capital T Truth. What gives all these expressions of faith their meaning and their power is their conviction in this shared allegiance to Truth. However we reconcile this as a diverse people who live in faith of something, we simply cannot ignore this simple fact. I have little to say if I don’t hold a conviction in something, and what makes diverse cultures beautiful and compelling is the fact that this something is in fact a conviction.

Why I am bringing this up? This recent podcast episode linked below from The Reluctant Theologian Podcast (Time, Physics and Free Will With Jeff Koperski, Episode 62) reminded me of a voice that helped give me an in road back into not just the idea of God, but a renewed grappling with my Christian faith. It is an interview with author and physicist Jeffrey Koperski. In specific, it is the work he does on the nature of this relationship between the science of determinism and the human will that helped open me up to the wide range of possibilities in theological thought. He’s not the easiest read, but his brief book The Physics of Theism: God, Physics, and the Philosphy of Science released about 7 years ago is a wonderful and nuanced dialogue of the intersection of faith and science, and really helped to dig underneath where it is we impart and depart from reason alone as our basis for understanding the mysteries of God and this world. The podcast offers a concise overview of some of his central premises, and his newer book, Divine Action, Determinism, and the Laws of Nature is currently available for free in Canada through Kindle reads. For me anyways, reconciling determinism and the will was the most crucial point of perspective for making sense of either faith in a godless reality or faith in God, as for me determinism in theology (via the sovereignty of God) or materialism (via the laws of nature) leads to nihilism, and it is in the ways which we deal with this question with God or without God that breathes meaning into this exercise of faith.

A couple quotes from Koperski,

Even if there are windows through which God can act without breaking natural laws, such approaches have “simply replaced one mode of interference with the world – that in which the laws of nature are set aside – with another, in which those laws are used as tools… The very idea that there are laws of nature is a modern innovation…. Ideally, though, an appeal to mystery occurs after a great deal of progress has been made on an issue.

Divine Action, Determinism, and the Laws of Nature, Jeffrey Koperski

https://poddtoppen.se/podcast/1455521623/the-reluctant-theologian-podcast/ep-62-time-physics-and-free-will-with-jeff-koperski

Chloe Zhoa is a master at capturing the intimate nature of the human story and experience set against the backdrop of the larger narrative of the natural landscape and world that affords these stories and experiences their sense of place and meaning. Having recently picked up and read the novel on which this film is based, the source material ends up providing Zhoa with an amazing opportunity to flex those imaginative and creative muscles. Her previous films incorporate a significant cast of non-actors, and in Nomadland she brings in characters who actually live the lifestyle that Nomadland is highlighting. This allows her to play around with that kind of raw, almost documentary like feel while telling the story she wants to tell with this inspired adaptation, something she does with casting McDormand as the lead. She gives an understated performance that is made all the more powerful by the fact that she has to embody a character in the midst of a cast who are playing themselves, something she manages to do by channelilng the ecentricities of the novel’s main character in an inspired fashion. Add to this the nature of a story that spends a good deal of time in the world that becomes the nomads very real backyard, and this ends up a real marriage of sensibilities and like minds.

One of the interesting things about how Zhoa pens this adapted script is the way she hides the narrative arc within the story itself. It could be tempting to think that there isn’t an honest story here, rather simply a meandering collection of moments and experiences that emerge from our main charcter joining those who live without a house and going through the everyday challenges of adapting to this environment. This includes gaining a picture of the seasonal routine that gives this lifestyle its structure, be it working at campgrounds in the summer or with the Amazon Work Force Program in the winter. The film has a meditative quality to the way it just moves with the flow of this community, offering these stark contrasts between the liveliness of the in seasons and the emptiness and silence of the emptied spaces that follow their departure. Zhoa also does an incredible job capturing all of the different emotions that come with this ebb and flow, including sorrow and sadness, joy, anticipation, lonliness, moments of transcendence and togetherness, and fear and frustration. We get these scenes that are designed to sweep us up into a moment of transcendence only to have it abruptly interupted by an inconvience or the simple, mundane reality of a moment. This switch in perspective affords the film an incredible control over the narrative arc that eventually does emerge with clarity and precision.

And what’s profound about the narrative arc is the way it is able to pull out a powerful theme from the interconnected stories that bind this community. This is at once a film about the larger socio-political reality as it is about the individual struggle within that. And on this larger level the story contains an almost existential concern for the expectations that such a society creates, particularly for those who find themselves suddenly facing a crisis or a tragedy or an unexpected change. At the same time, Zhoa’s eye for this story narrows in on the individual struggle, with the main throughline being about the subject of grief. And not just grieving the loss of someone. The way these stories interconnect provides us with a more comprehensive sense of grief, a process which flows from the notion of unexpected change. Grief over memory of what was lost as life pushed them, sometimes willingly, more often less than willingly into this new life and lifestyle. And within this process comes the need to accept and embrace this new way of living not as less then, but as an opportunity, be it an opportunity to simply survive, to discover a new outlook on life and community, or to even regroup and remigine a way to get back to where they once were.

This throughline of grief however does find its most poignant expression in the story of our main character, a middle aged and quickly aging woman who lost her husband and is coming to terms with a life where he is no longer a part of her world. Her story connects with the stories of others who have lost someone as well, and as the film progresses it begins to give us these different pictures of “home” as preserved both in the memories of the past and the new memories they continue to make in the present. It’s a truly beautiful process that is enlivened by Zhoa’s signature cinematography, which is given the grandest stage yet. I am genuinely grieving myself the loss of a chance to see this in theaters, as these are the kinds of films that are truly made for that experience and with that experience in mind. It both saddens me and enlivens me to know that someone like Zhoa is keeping this aspect of the artform alive in her commitment to making films like this, something that is becoming less and less common in the age of streaming unfortunately. We need to cherish these films while we can, and support them where we can so Directors like Zhoa can continue to champion the artform and continue to grow it in this kind of cinematic form.

Nomadland is poignant, heartbreaking, joy filled, and inspiring. It’s a story about change and the space we make for grieving and growing as the experiences and perspectives we occupy often change with this. It’s an emotionally gripping reminder of the world we live in, the places we occupy, and the stories that shape us within these spaces. In its most inspired moment it speaks of our intersecting stories, coining the phrase “see you down the road” as that which this community symbolizes. There are no official goodbyes in a community like this, only the expectation that our interconnected stories intertwine with an interconnected Spirit that assures us that no matter where we find ourselves on this journey called life our stories will continue, and we will continue to make our stories together, be it in this world or down the road in the new creation. The nomadic community then becomes a grand metaphor for communion with one another, the spaces we occupy and the spaces that occupy us, and God and Spirit, especially in times of struggle. A metaphor for the universal art of living and living together in the spaces that make up this great big world.

This is a film that is perfect for our present times, helping to remind of the beauty that exists and persists in the pain.

Now go ahead and just give this film all the awards now. If this doesn’t walk away with the Oscar for Best Director, Picture and Cinemtography it will be a travesty.

I can still vivdly remember the trip my wife and I took to Italy, our first time to the Country and our first time overseas together. After scoring flights through an auction sight for $200 a person round trip, we jumped at the opportunity. The only catch was we had to fly out of Chicago. Given that we live in Winnipeg, Manitoba, this meant adding the 12-14 hour drive across the border to the 8 hour overnight flight to the 7 days we had off over Spring Break to make this happen. Most sane people I would imagine would see this as less than rational despite the $200 tickets. My insanity managed to override my wife’s comon sense, and so off we went leaving at 3:00 in the morning to make our evening flight to the great city of Rome. This leaves the story of an adventurous ride home driving on a Sunday on a broken altenator and two purchaesd batteries for another time. Suffice to say that 

As would be expected, before we left I spent a good deal time researching places to stay, tips, and other helpful information that might help us navigate a foreign Country. Nothing prepares you for stepping off that plane though, and the minute we set foot onto those old stone streets we were struck with that sense of being somewhere strange and unfamiliar. This perhaps became most aware after checking into our accomadation and heading out to grab some food. If you have never experienced Italian culture, unlike Canadian culture which moves at a quick space and expects a certain kind of attentive service, there when you sit down to a meal they expect you to linger. Eating quickly and asking for your cheque and tracking down your server is considered bad etiquette. It’s a good thing I didn’t know it at the time, but cutting your pasta is also something considered on offence.

As we would venture further to explore the city the next day, we would discover that it was common to simply shut down at random times to go and spend time with company and food in their many many public and communal spaces. This is frustrating for a Canadian looking to shop or expecting attentive service but it’s also an element of their culture that I eventually brought back with me as something that I valued.

Perhaps most striking of all was the deep connection that Italians had to their streets, their public spaces, their Piazzas, and their buildings. Everything is designed so as to life up your gaze to the tops of their buildings, which are bursting with life and creativity, but then to shift your gaze back down to the funcionality of these spaces. These buildings and spaces are meant to be lived in and occupied, with each structure and space and monument and building telling a story. This was so drastically different than buildings in North America where they are designed to turn our gaze upwards towards progress but never downwards towards this same sense of life life and culture.

The height of our trip of course eventually brought us to the famous Colloseum, a building with a story that reaches far back into the pages of history. A building that I never thought I would get to see in my life time. Walking up to it in the daylight reveals its majestic and towering presence over the cityscape, but it was approaching it in the evening that was most surreal and which left me most humbled. You see it in  pictures all of the time, but to be standing beside it, touching its stone and walking in its shadow is something altogether different. That’s when the lights come on illuminating under the overlooking moon and the stars. I remember pressing my hand to the stone and just standing there beside it for a good long while, eventually finding a seat on the surrounding hillside to just sit with the larger than life image for a while. It reminded me of just how vast and dynamic human history really is. Many of the people who had lost their lives in this space (and others just down the road) I would imagine came with some tough questions about the world they inhabited, and as I considered the crosses that now adord the entrance ways, and how the structure now stands as a symbol of Christian piety and grace, it struck me that for as big as the structure is, the world that surrounds it under the setting sun and the emerging moon and stars is that much bigger. And for as big as our world is and as unfamiliar as this ancient setting might feel for my modern deyes, the story of humanity and God and Creation looms that much bigger.

In the book The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories, author Edward Hollis walks us through the stories of some of the world’s most significant buildings, which then tells the story of humanity, which likewise flows out into our own stories as we consider our place in this world and the ways in which our architecure helps to bind us to it, both in the present and in our historical and cultural memory. Buildings and architecture are not static entities but places that actively invite us through their presence into these interconnected stories, into participation with the human story.

Similarly, Paul Goldberger’s book Building Up and Tearing Down: Reflections on the Age of Architectue, along with the complimentary and perhaps more emotionally available The Architecture of Happiness by Alain de Botton, help us to see how it is that these buildings, in their construction and deconstruction, participate in our growth and offer us meaning.

Recently I came across a film by Director Eugene Green called La Sapienze, an American born French filmaker with an interest in educating young voices about the power of the arts and artistic expression. La Sapienze is a stylistic and creative expostion on our relationship to the architecture that we create. The film begins with a lecture being given by one of the main characters (Alexandre), a middle aged architect who has seemingly lost his passion for his work and who needs to find and rediscover some inspiration. This scene and this lecture establishes two important elements of this film’s story and arc. First, it establishes the inherent connection between buildings and our worldview. Buildings are at their heart both creative and philosophical exercises, and what we hear in the words of this lecture is the expression of a fundamentally modernist worldview that informs the buildings he creates, and thus also his life. For the architecture that he imagines, these buildings are and must be about progress, and thus to lose one’s inspiration and is to lose sight of how it is that we are able to build forward into the future.

The second thing that emerges from this scene are the human characters that build and occupy these spaces. Here we are introduced to our second main character, a middle aged woman (Alienor) sitting in the audience listening to her husband speak about architecture. In a brilliantly imagined scene, the camera focuses in on her face as the lecture comes to a close and the audience, including her, is applauding, and then it stops and lingers as we see her shift from a smile to a sudden blank expression. This blank expression leads us into the next scene where we encounter the couple sitting across a table from each other at a restaurant locked in a seemingly emotionless gaze.

The Director establishes all of the charcters in this film in an equally emotionless state. Their faces stay static throughout and the lines are delivered in equally static form. It’s unsettling to say the least, but what this does is continually call our gaze to shift from them to the world that surrounds them, specifically the buildings that carry the emotional weight. It’s an intentional contrast meant to capture the way these buildings are as alive as them, able to inspire and to give life.

What’s startling about this Directorial choice as well is that the arc of the film is interested almost entirely in their emotional journey. As the story pushes forward, this couple eventually decides to go on a journey to Italy to try and reclaim some inspiration. Being around that old world architecture might be able to spark some of this within him, and she comes along to be part of the journey. This is something I can very understand from our own journey to Italy. While there, they encounter a younger man and woman (Goffredo and Lavinia) which then sparks this journey of self exploration set alongside this intergenerational dynamic, between Alexandre and Goffredo and Lavinia and Alienor. The relationship between the young man, who is brimming with optimism, and the aging architect seemingly stuck in his cynicism begins to pave the way for a larger discussion of how it is precisely that the past, captured in our buildings as memories, connects to our future. And as this discussion and this journey unfolds, what becomes more and more clear is that these buildings and the philosophy this architecture represents is a symbol of the relatiionship between this couple, and thus the relationships that inform our world as well. To recover inspiration for the creation of and presence of this architecture is recover inspiration for their struggling relationship.

I have long been fascinated with architecture and buildings, particularly the spirit that they exude and the way in which they help to tell the story of a specific place and time and people. Further, what has often been interesting to me is comparing the approaches of modern artchitecture, which tend to be future oriented expressions of idealism and progress, to that of the old world which progress often tears down in its wake. This is one of the great allures of Europe and the East, is a world where history and story comes alive in the protection and persistant presence of its buildings. They invite us into a larger story. And yet, in both cases we find a similar sense of ethos illuminating from the buildings that a society builds, be it this old or new world tendency. As this aging architect is toured around the Italian city by this young man, the film walks through the nature of a building in terms of what it is and what it does. Its ability by design to draw our view upwards towards the focal point of its story, while also having the levels and layers of its story draw us back to the ground level in particular and specific ways. In every great architectural design there is an interplay with light, space and shape as it does this horizontal and vertical dance intended to bring together the creation and the creator, the building and the human story.

What lies at the heart of this film’s interest in this idea of the horizontal and vertical elements is this image of the Church. We learn that the aging architect, a professed atheist, refuses to build Churches. The buildings he is interested in building should be symbols of progress and humanism, not these antiquated ideas of imagining God at the center of our world and our ideas. And yet what becomes clear as he is forced to encounter these Churches in the old world is that the architecture he envisions in its place holds an equal centering presence and force. They represent an equal god if you will by nature of expressing the particular worldview that defines our story. All buildings point to which god it is precisely that governs both the world we occupy and the stories that inhabit it. They all direct our gaze upwards towards something, and then bring us back downwards in order to ground this story within our relationships. We cannot excape this fact. And as the conversation unfolds between this architect and the young man, what begins to boil to the surface is how it is that we can imagine this power playing out in our lives in a meaningful way. At tension is this sense of a relationship between the creator (the architect) and the creation. And the way that buildings humble us as places located in the shadows of the past and in the potential inspiration of the present is by connecting our creation to something other. How it is that buildings imagine the future has a lot to do with how they are able to preserve and tell the stories of our past. As we create these buildings, these buildings then draw us to a greater awareness of the source of this creation that comes from outside of ourselves, the inspiration if you will. This is the very life and light and beauty that inspires us as given Truths, as given mystery that flow from this creation. This is how buildings take on a life of their own, and this is then how we are able to participate in life together, with these buildings centering and anchoring us in something greater than our human accomplishments. They draw us together to the other, to the beauty, to the spirit of life itself. They help to tell the stories that bind us to this other and to one another.

This isn’t necessarily at its core a religious film, but religion does bleed from the crevices of its story and its arc. In actuality, I think this just might be one of the most profound representations and arguments for faith I have encountered in quite a while. It hits on some things that I found quite meaningful, and it wraps it up in some symbolism and visuals, and more pruposefully an emotinally laden and very human arc that really strikes at the heart of what it means to exist in this world and to be empowered by this mystery that creation, be it ours or the greater source that these creations beckon us towards and help us to imagine. I found myself so profoundly taken with how it brings all these working parts of the discussion and the journey together into a really beautiful and immenently cinematic portrait.

It is also, and this is part of the film’s impact, a cautionary tale. Not simply of neglecting the relationships in our lives that point us to that greater meaning, but of neglecting the past and the stories that connect us to the past. There is something about modern architecture that stands in danger of losing sight of what it means to be human in connection to the divine, however that sense of the divine translates for you. Modern architecture tends to be swaddled in this constant interplay between the flat and emotionless nature of modernity and its streamlined and effecient expressions of progress that render them synchronized, economically proficient and given to sprawl, and these grand structures and monuments that point us upwards towards those same enlightenment ideals without anything to bring our gaze back downwards, without a way to contextualize the god of the deeply rooted modernist ideals back into our human story in a meaningful way. It tends to be, for a lack of a better word, detached. This is perhaps no more apparent than the struggle many Asian cities face with the constant push for progress encroaching and hiding, and in many ways burying the richly centered nature of that old world architecture. And as we arrive on Western soil, we can see something similar even with our more recent history. A society built on these images of a past divided between Greek and Roman philosphical influences that reveal remnants of these images peeking out from the rubble of what has largely been bulldozed and forgotten. Images of those grand old monuments with Greek and Roman markers and appeal hidden in the refabricated buildings of our modern sensibilities. The age of the skyscraper continuing to tower over these pieces of our past as the now dominating story. It’s a similar story that plays itself out over and over again across the great cities that populate North America.

The real questions in light of this film’s journey are, what are the stories that these buildings tell. To where do they draw our gaze, and to what end are they able to redirect our gaze downwards with fresh perspective. How do they inspire not just the building of our cities as a present and living memory, but the human stories that imagine them, occopy them and give them life. To where do these buidings illuminate the necessary light that allows us to engage with the mystery of this world in all its shape and profound interest. And how does this mystery then inform our lives and our relationships with meaning, especially in a communal sense.

A powerful film with powerful quesitons that will be staying with me for a long, long time, and it is in these questions that my own memory of my experience in Italy, and the inspiration I brought back home with me from that experience.

“And when the sixth hour had come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour.”
Mark 15:33

Mark’s passion narrative has been deliberately structured in three hour intervals. This moment of darkness signifies the final hours of this narrative, telling us that what is happening holds a cosmic (whole “world”) reach. This is designed, following the setting of the Passover which leads us to the Cross, to bring us back to the three days of darkness that preceded the death of the firstborn sons in Egypt, the very thing that awakened the people of Israel to their coming liberation (Ex 10:1-23).

It is directly after this sweeping mention of the darkness moving over the earth that Jesus quotes from the very recognizable Psalm 22, a Psalm that careful readers will note has also played a significant role in Mark’s Gospel as framing the dialogue of Jesus Hiimself. Jesus is playing out the story of Israel. The words “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me” bring together Israel’s experience in the wilderness with the fulfilled promise of a liberated people.

To read through Psalm 22 is to encounter another theme that becomes prominant in Mark’s Gospel narrative, Jesus’ kingship. The first time we hear the phrase in Mark’s Gospel, the King of the Jews, is in this narrative, and the writer of mark then inundates the Gospel with references to this kingship. This would recall Israel’s demand in 1 Samuel 8:4-22 for a king in their desire to be “just like other nations’. This very notion is caught up in Mark’s mention of the encounter between Pilate and Jesus that leads to him being handed over to be crucified. Pilate percieved “that it was out of envy that the chief preiests had delivered him up.” Envy that leads our attention back to the central problem of the Biblical narrative, the envy between Cain and Abel that led to this still yet unbroken cycle of violence and division that holds us in bondage. A cycle that is commenting on the envy present in the Adam and Eve story of a people desiring to ‘be like God” (Gen 3:5). This becomes the lie of the evil that hides humanities true nature as God’s image bearers, made in fact in the very likeness of God for the prupose of bearing witness of God’s goodness to the whole of creation, the very creation now cloaked in darkness.

The cycle set in play with the story of Adam and Eve and actualized in the Cain and Abel story as envy incarnate culminates in a world filled with violence and division perpetuated by the “eye for an eye” form of justice that leaves the people calling “upon the name of the Lord.”(Gen 4:26). A cycle that is now being broken at the very foot the Cross, the culmination of this envy that has left Israel a divided people set one against the other. It is on the Cross that the full weight of this eye for an eye form of justice gets heaped on Jesus’ shoulders, leading him to express the familiar cry of Psalm 22 as he shares in the fulness of Sin’s repurcussions.

And yet, in bearing the weight of this darkness something new is happening.

Welcome to the sunrise.

As the curtain of the temple is torn in two with Christ’s final breath, the sweeping narrative in Mark of this temple that must be first deconstructed is being torn down, just as it had in the story of Israel. And just as the stranger in the crowd is swept up into the narrative in order to help carry Jesus’ cross, the great phrase of Mark 16:7, “He has risen, he is not here” beckons us towards this process of moving out of the darkness and into the sunrise where Jesus has gone “before” us in order to participate in the work Jesus is doing. To take up our cross and follow Jesus in the way of the truth that says this cycle of perpetuated violence and division that led us into the wildnerness has been broken. In Jesus’ victory over the cycle of Sin we find true liberation, the ability to lay all notions of judgement and unforgivness at His feet. Where the cross Jesus carried was heavy, ours becomes light as we step into this new temple reality, this new creation reality that Jesus’ Resurrection ushers in. The darkness is no more. Death has been defeated. The weight of sin can be set at Jesus’ feet as we learn to take up the cross and follow where he leads.

This is what enfolds the whole of Psalm 22, a song that captures this wilderness reality with the full hope that God will once again be bringing us back to Eden. The King of the Jews, hung on a Cross with two criminals enthroned on his left and his right, the deep and profound proclamation that we find in the Gospel of Mark is that yes, Jesus indeed is the King of the Jews, a phrase Mark cleverly shifts to say “King of Israel”, symbolic of a divided nation being made whole in the shadow of the Cross, the divided body made whole by declaring the full forgivness of the sins of the fathers held bondage to this cycle of division that has held this story of Israel in its grip. With the great and powerful news being that in the story of Israel, Jesus’ Kingship, this taking on of Israel’s story in His covenantal faithfulness to His promise never to foresake us and never to leave us, is moving out into the whole of the creation in order to bring about the new creation order, the rule of God established in the order of the Cross and its call to service, humily and sacrifice for the other. This is the good news of the sunrise, where we can now sing with Psalm 22 the words, “he has not hidden his face from him, but has heard, when he cried to him”, thus “the afflicted shall eat and be satisfied… for kingship belongs to the Lord.”

Which brings to mind these words,
“How precious the gift of the cross, how splendid to contemplate! This tree does not cast us out of Eden, but opens the way for our return.”

– Theodore the Studite

I’ve been reading through the passion narrative in the Gospel of Mark this morning as I reflect on the Friday that we call good. The good news of God with us, of the Christ who entered into the suffering of our world and bore the weight of sin in all of its manifestation, all so that we might be called to walk in the way of Christ as we take up our vocation in being image bearers to the whole of Creation which God declares good.

This is a good news story.

That might not be immediately clear when we enter the beginning of the end of the story in Mark 13 with all its language of destruction and turmoil, and yet, as the lesson of the fig tree emerges once again for the third time in Mark’s narrative, the declaration that “my words will not pass away” (13:31) captures the promise that in the suffering of the Christ we find the suffering of this world, and the season of fruit bearing and fruitfulness then becomes the hopeful promise that the Cross speaks over the fig tree that was not yet “in season” (11:13). Therefore, if the lesson of the fig tree is to be fully understood, it is to be understood in the call that accompanies its second mesntion, the call to “have faith in God” (12:22) and what God is doing. To have faith that God is indeed making what is wrong in this suffering world right.

And yet don’t miss this important part of the imagery of the fig tree. My words will not pass away, “but” heaven and earth will pass away”. There is an invitation that accompanies the good news of the Cross, and it is one of allowing the Cross to deconstruct our own lives in the way of the cursed fig tree of Chapter 11 so as to reshape us in the character of Christ. It is the invitation to follow in the way of Christ, to be the means by which this good news of the new creation can then be declared to the suffering in this world through our participation in Christ.

And here is the most important part of this picture in Mark 13-16- the thing being deconstructed is the Church itself. Allow that to sink in. It is no mistake that 13:1 begins with the foretelling of the destruction of the temple and ends with the prediction of it being raised again anew. The temptation of Christians reading this passage has often been to relegate these passages of “the signs of the times” (13:3-13) to the present and future suffering of the Church itself, using it as an excuse to strengthen the fortress of our Church walls against the evils of the world out there that will inevitably come against it. But as the teacher of the law brings Jesus out to admire all these “wonderful buildings” (13:1), Jesus’ striking words declare that “there will not be left here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down.”

Again, let that sink in as you read the words “the abomination of desolation” that informs 13:14-23.

The setting of the Mount of Olives that begins Mark 13 is symbolic, bringing the full breadth of the scriptural narrative to a pivotal and climatic point of crisis and potential. The imagery of Daniel, the words of the Pslams that Jesus has been applying to His own ministry, the words of the prophets, the story that begins in Genesis and runs through Abraham to Moses to David, the culminating offices of Priest and King that find their ultimate climatic shodown in the meeting of the high priest of 14:53-63 and Jesus. It all finds its culmination in Christ as the fullness of God’s revelation to a good creation. And it is here on this mountaintop that heaven and earth are about to meet and truly shake the church up. It is on the day when this meeting of heaven and earth is delcared as the Kingdom of God now arrived that the fruit of that fig tree will be in season and Christ and the cup which we partake in with Christ will be filled (14:25). And yet, we have faith in this even as the already not yet nature of this reality continues to play itself out in our midst. This is why Christ is also a call to participation in a Kingdom come and a Kingdom coming.

And why is the church being deconstructed and reconstructed? According to Mark it is so that as Jesus goes before us we can then follow (16:7). It is so that we can begin to bear witness to the goodness of this creation in the created world, a world that is now being remade and renewed in the way of Christ. This is what the Church is being raised for, not to board up our walls and wait until Jesus comes again to take us to heaven, but to recognize that on the Cross the Kingdom has arrived in our midst. Heaven has come down to earth and has shaken down the walls so that we can once again see the world God so loves and participate in it as image bearers of Christ. And in case we missed it, this whole narritive of keeping watch for the coming destruction has happened once (the first temple), will happen again (the second temple) and will continue to happen as the Cross does its deconstructing and reconstructing work in our midst. The problem of the Church is that it keeps falling asleep (13:35) and neglecting what it is that Christ is actually doing. Jesus is the temple that is being raised, and thus as we heed the words of this necessary shake down we wake up to see Jesus on the way, going before us and calling us to follow. The context for the Cross is the story of the Passover (the promise of liberation), but it is also the story of the exile, the story of Israel being shaken out of its own complacency and thus formed in the promise of its eventual return.

There’s a small note that we find in this whole section of the Gospel of Mark that I found to be quite profound as I’ve reread it this morning. The story of a (young or old) widow giving all that she had to the temple (12:41-44) that is followed immediately by the foretelling of the temple being destroyed in 13:1. In 14:3-9, the story of another young woman who this time is giving to and annointing Jesus begins the passion narrative that starts immediately after, the story of Jesus being torn down and raised up as the new temple. This curious phrase in 14:9 which says “wherever the gospel is proclaimed in the whole world” it will be “done” and “told in memory of her” strikes to the heart of what defines the very mission of Christ and the Church. In the second reference to the fig tree in chapter 11, these words ring through the waiting for this promised and hoped for season- “believe” that Christ is at work making what is wrong right, and “whenever you stand praying” to this end, forgive. We are being torn down so that we can be raised up in participation with Christ’s work in the world, and at heart of this word forgiveness is reconciliation between God and a Church that has fallen asleep, and between a divided Church and world in which we have forgotten our vocation. In this way we build the Kingdom of God in the way of Christ.

FILM

LA SAPIENZA (2014) Directed by Eugene Green

La Sapienza is not an explicitly religious film, but I think it just might feature one of the most powerful arguments for the notion of faith. At the heart of the film is a discussion about the relationship between architecture and people, with architecture containing both the stories of humanity and the stories of the divine, however one interprets the divine. Buildings are designed to do two things- to draw us in and turn our gaze upwards to whatever Truth or god this building represents, be it the gods of modernism or the gods of the ancients, and then, through its use of space and light and detail, to draw our gaze back downwards so that we can apply this upward looking perspective back into our lives here on the ground level. It is through this horizontal and vertical exercise that buildings can then tell the stories both of the eternal “Truth” which governs our trajectory, and the stories of that truth as it is then revealed in the personal journies of our lives and our relationships.

The way this film captures this relationship between people and architecture and architecture and divine is powerfully rendered then, symbolically speaking, into the relationships that govern this film’s central human arc. As it follows an architect, a creative in search of inspiration in his very modern context, he travels to the old world to find this inspiration and in the process finds the inspiration he needs to reinvest in his relationship with his wife. It’s a beautiful portrait framed by this narrative device that features performers who all remain “emotionless” and “expressionless” throughout the story, a choice that then shifts our perspective to the emotional gravity of the buildings and the world around them. It’s an inviation to be swept up in the most basic human vocation to create, but a reminder that we create in faith or trust that it is Truth that gives creation its value.

DISTANT VOICES, STILL LIVES (1988) Directed by Terence Davies

This is the second film in an “autobiographical” series reflecting the Director’s life, and here we are given insight into the working class family that defined his growing up in the 40’s/50’s in Liverpool. From the opening scene it becomes clear that the Director intends to evoke a miriad of emotions all at once, leaving me as a viewer a bit unsettled in terms of precisely what kind of film this is and where it is heading. But this becomes the means by which the film invites you into the process of what it becomes. It bears a distinct feeling of nostalgia even though this is not my world and not my life, and functions as a collection of “stills” as if it were a scrapbook of photographs set in a world full of music and visuals and experiences that allow these stills to come to life in full interprative force. That it also functions in part as a kind of musical sets these images in synch with the rhythms and lyrics of its song. A magical and stylistic vision of ones own dance with the ebb and flow of life’s journey.

MY SALINGER YEAR (2020) Directed by Philippe Falardeau

A captivating performance by Margaret Qualley anchors this exceptional look into a period of Salinger’s life from the perspective of a colelge grad who takes a clerical job working for the literary agent of Salinger. It tells the personal story of Joanna, but it is through her story that we gain insight into the literary world that she is immersed in and shares with Salinger. At it’s heart it is an exploraiton of the power of story and the telling of our stories, but  it contextualizes this through the story of Joanna in her desire to become a professional writer. As she tries to make sense of her own life and her own passions and ambitions, she finds insight and inspiration within the story of this reclusive writer who is as distant as he is present in the world that surrounds her. As a period piece it is rather wonderful, but as a character study and as an examination of the power of story and the art of writing I found it quite captivating and memorable.

ELEVATOR TO THE GALLOWS/ASCENEUR POUR L’ECHAFAUD (1958) Directed by Louis Malle

There is an inevitability to the way in which events unfold in this older film noir/crime caper. The perfect crime that immediately goes wrong, leading to a sequence of things that just seem to keep spiralling towards that inevitable end, a persitant foreshadowing of a series of unfortunate events. At the same time, it is in the imperfect exucution of the perfect crime that the film finds its poetry, concocting this sense of a cycle that they both must break and that defines their collective drive and need. As poetry, the film becomes an examination of the question of how it is that the interconnected events of our lifes can be seen as a narrative rather than an inevitability, something it holds in tension but also represents as a mystery in terms of the film’s intricate detailing of colors and visuals and moments. When we can see in life a narrative to step into, this empowers the writing of a story from life’s imperfect plans.

ON-GAKU: OUR SOUND (2019) Directed by Kenji Iwaisawa

Whether you play an instrument, are in a band, or simply appreciate music, this understated animated gem is a must see. The film is not just a love letter to the power of the note to inform our world and our selves, its a love letter to that sense of being a young teen trying to discover their voice and find their way through the language of song. The animation is simple and lovingly crafted in its hand drawn detail, and as we follow the events of these young kids it brings to life the Japanse culture that surrounds them as well as inviting us into their own wandering experience through this world. While we might want to describe these kids as rebels, the films compassionate and empathetic view reframes this, particularly through the creation of their punk style music, into a universal language full of common human emotion. It could almost be described as a musical, but in its deconstruction of the punk rocker stereotype its much more than this. It’s a reminder that all human stories hold equal merit regardless of age.

Honroable Mentions: News of The World is now available on demand. It’s a film I had been waiting anxiously for as I loved the book quite a bit. The film makes a couple interesting interpretative choices that reframe the narraative ever so slightly, but it remains a powerful picture of what it is for us to see beyond the present divide and to imagine a world where relationship can draw us together regardless of language and place and culture. It’s up for some Oscars, so now is a great time to catch up with it, along with the wonderful documentary The Painter and the Thief, a film that explores themes like forgivness and restorative justice in a powerful and intimate fashion. Lastly, The Last Blockbuster proved to be a perfect romp through the nostalgia of a past, longing for some of what we have lost in our modern push towards an increasingly digital and isolated experience of what is at its heart a social and cultural exercise and expression.

SERIES/TV

ZOEY’S EXTRAORDINARY PLAYLIST SEASON 2

I was a big, big fan of the first season of this eclectic, fun and highly emotional series, and so I was curious to see how they continued the story. As the first half of season 2 has looked to find its voice and direction, a couple of things stand out for me. First, it has taken more of an episode by episode approach rather than the larger and linear storyline of the first. The result might be a bit more uneven in terms of that cohesive focus, but it has led to some of the strongest material I have seen in a series in a long, long while at the same time. Not every episode carries the same weight, but episodes like 2 and 5 see it at the peak of its game, experimenting and taking it to new heights and new places. This is especially impressive given how they had to navigate what is a show with a lot of working elements and a large cast during Covid. You can see the limitations at points, but also the creativity. As an additional note, this kind of elongated series is a lost art form, and to have this show as a part of my (and our) week is something I cherish and will cherish for as long we have it. It gives me something to look forward to and anticipate.

WANDAVISION

It’s the show everyone was eagerly anticipating, and to particapate in the collective viewing of this show across streaming platforms reminds me that every once in a while the social experience of watching together still exists and persists. As it is the show, for me, surpassed expectations, even in its amped up final episode that didn’t quite land for everyone in the same fashion. The inventiveness of its opening episodes which each refelect a different era through its sitcom style offering, shifting from black and white to color, stands as some of the most inventive Marvel storytelling to date, and the way it parallels this thematically with the story lying behing this plot device provided a startling and powerful exploration of the grief process. Quite powerful.

STORM OF THE CENTURY

I was made aware of this series through a podcast that I follow and listen to weekly called The Fear of God, and so I would direct you to their episode on this short series turned lengthy film should you be interested. It’s currently avaialable for free on YouTube. It’s an adaptation of the Stephen King novel of the same name, and it’s one of his most spiritually aware works that he has written. The themes that pour from the story are immense and powerful in their ability to frame our understanding of how it is we pair our moral awareness and the weight of certain moral choices and points of crisis/tension in our world with our responsibility to engage our social responsiblity to one another. The story goes to some dark places, but it employs its vision of spiritual forces and agencies as a metaphorical device that helps to bring to the surface just how it is that blind ourselves to the sins we bond ourselves to on a daily basis. It brings to light the idea that we sacrifice the freedom that certain choices to break sins cycle and power over us can bring for the future in exchange for the need to evade the suffering that sin brings with it now all the time. It’s a sobering realization and a genuine wake up call found within a narrative that, while in its on screen adaptation is slightly uneven, holds a real punch.

BOOKS

JIM HENSON: THE BIOGRAPHY by Brian Jay Jones

There is a bitterwseet tone to this celebrated biography of an iconic and recognizable figure in the field of children’s work, puppetry and the arts, and it comes in the way this exhaustive work draws out the honest character alongside the equally honest struggle of existing within a brutal and competitive industry. It’s even heartbreaking when we come to wonder near the end of the book and realize that perhaps it was the weight of the industry in which we were privileged to get his most creative and reknown work that was the reason for his premature death. That aside though, this book is certainly a celebration of his life and work, and it’s equally a joy to uncover the story of the man behind the art and the characters that have become so beloved. Henson was as deeply spiritual as he was creative, and that spirit shines through his creations in an undeniable way, revealing a complex man who loved people, who loved his craft and certainly found inspiration through the young minds that his art was created to serve.

IRRATIONALITY: A HISTORY OF DARK SIDE OF REASON by Justin E. H. Smith

A profound expostion of the challlenges and limitations of modernism and reason, and a critique of the strong tendency of modernism to gloss over one of the most important truths of the human experience and the human longing for truth- that humanity and reason is at its heart an irrational exercise. There is an old world-new world picture that Smith draws on to help outline the larger picture of how it is that we arrived where we are today, and by helping us to gain a well researched and well articulated picture of the bigger picture, he helps to dismantle some of the key points of contention and tension tha exists between the old world and the new world approaches to truth and reason. This book is important in how it humbles those in the West and necessary in how it calls us to recognize the ways in which, when we ignore the irrational nature of reason we actually end up becoming more irrational, and more imporantly we become irrational in the most dangerous of ways. Ways that actually steer us away from truth rather than towards it.

FLORA AND ULYSSES: THE ILLUSTRATED ADVENTURES by Kate DiCamillo and K.G Campbell

I watched the film adaption before becoming aware of the novel, and the film struck such a strong chord with me that i had to read the book. And I am so glad I did. I love stories about the struggle with adult cynicsm paired with the wonder and and magic of the childhood imagination, and this book hits all the right marks. It’s incorporation of the superhero motif is a central part of the story, bringing this discussion into the modern setting, but what the book elevates is the story’s philosphical and theological perspective. It’s a powerful picture of what it means to understand that there is more to this world than just what we see on the surface, and it presents an empowering exercise for wondering minds to perhaps be equpped to push back on some of the teachings and belief systems they have inherited from the enlightenment and western assumptions.

THE LADY FROM THE BLACK LAGOON: HOLLYWOOD MONSTERS AND THE LOST LEGACY OF MILICENT PATRICK by Mallory O’Meara

Amazing. Funny, heartbreaking, revealing, socially relevant, entertaining, part mystery, biography, and passionate for all things horror. And super readable. The way she brings to light what it is to be a horror fan and a woman (read: hard) was stuff I was aware of but needed to hear again, and again… and again. As a white male, I rarely consider the fact that while creatures and monsters are meant to express those most human parts of oursleves in metaphorical and universal ways, those images are all male, relegating women to being victims, sexualized and subservient in the genre as a whole. Brilliant book.

THE DEATH OF THE MESSIAH AND THE BIRTH OF THE NEW COVENANT: A (NOT SO) NEW MODEL OF THE ATONEMENT by Michael Gorman

What makes this book so exceptional is not simply that it’s another model to add to the mix, but that it cuts through the heart of what so often divides the Church to offer a way and a means towards real and fruitful conversation. It is, after all, our ability to converse with one another from our places of disagreements that brings unity about, and if unity is not optional, and in fact division within the Church and the people of God is the central problem that Christ came to address on the Cross and in the Resurrection, then we better sit up and take notice. What is crucial to allowing conversation to happen is the table, the eucharist, It is at the table where Christ is able to take precedence over our agreements, and thus it is our ability to come to the table together, to partake and eat together where unity comes from. If we can’t do this then we stand divided.

The key for Gorman in terms of coming to the table is, as he outlines, the new covenant reality. This new covenant reality is the place where all of the models find their intersecting conversational interests, and it offers the narrative in which all models can then be brought into conversation and thus shaped and challenged and formed by the other in light of Christ as the central force and focal point. The new covenant model offers freedom in Christ to enter into community together with our differences in tow, and to know that at the end of the day we can all still come to the table together.

MUSIC

HARRY CONNICK JR.- ALONE WITH MY FAITH

Harry Connick Jr. edges into full on Gospel territory with this latest release, and it provides a mix of upbeat and hopeful and contemplative and reflective, all of course wrapped with his signature style and tone. I’ve been listening to this one along with Andra Day’s Billie Holiday Soundtrack, and together the old school jazzy stylings have been provided a soothing and soulful soundtrack to make it through these never ending Covid days.

JON BATISTE- WE ARE

I would highly recommend the Song Explorer episode of the creation for We Are. That’s a big part of what inspired me to pick up this record, and it didn’t disappoint, It’s inspired and anthemic, and he brings a real spiritual awarness to his grassroots concern for the universal story of people seen from the unique perspective of the black experience.

JOSEPH- GOOD LUCK, KID

I came across this band by complete random chance, and this trio of women churn out some really outstanding tracks. It’s catchy, layered, and features lots of great melodies (and harmonies) and compositions set within a serious hard rock style.

MIKO MARKS- OUR COUNTRY

Apparently absent from the industry for a good while, Miko Marks makes her return with an exceptionally strong album that is simply dripping with delicious country roots. To hear her story is to know the rough go she had as a Black woman trying to break into the Country scene, something we can to the story of the autobiographal cut “We Are here”. Nevertheless she stayed true to her passions, found her niche and remains an important and iconic voice in the Country music scene.

FRUIT BATS- THE PET PARADE

This is a true band unit, with every aspect of the instrumentation, the lyrics and the vocal effort working together to create these nuanced indie folk songs steeped in atmsophere and a grass roots style simplicty. It’s the kind of album that fit a variety of moods, always ready to accompany you on a rock or a ride or simply a day at home.

Honorable Mentions: The richly spiritual and eclectic Gable Price and Friends album Fractioned Heart is one that I can listen to over and over again, and the new Julien Baker, stock full of some experimental instrumentation to help accent her songwriting and vocal skills normally set to minimal orchestration. A must listen.

Memorable Singles: Sour Widows- Crossing over, Jervis Campbell- Teach me to Dance; Wayley- Ready For It; Lighning Bug- The Right Thing is Hard To Do; Hardline Lightning Bug; Middle Kids- Today We’re the Greatest- Jackie Hill Perry- Crescendo

PODCASTS

AMON SUL, Episodes 1 and 2 (The Fellowship of the Steve and I shall Make for Weathertop)

I recently was made aware of Father Andrew’s podcast from Ancient Faith Radio which deals scripture from an Eastern Orthodox perspective, which also led to a recommendation for this podcast which is all about Tolkien and his writings. Since I have about 6 books on Tolkien ready to go in preparation for the series, this has been a perfect compliment to that foray.

And while you’re at it, check out Father Andrew’s podcast The Lord of Spirits. It is seriously amazing. Perfect for anyone who struggles witih some of that Western tendency to be cynical of magic in the world and ignorant of the power of metaphor and symbolism to open our eyes to the greater truth that lies in the unseen world.

SONG EXPLORER Episode 215 (Jon Baptiste- We Are)

I mentioned this episode already above, but it’s worth rementioning. Hearing the story of this song’s construction from the perspective of its writer and creator was eye opening and added a whole new level of appreciation for its many working parts, especially the insane amount of singers and people and voices and musicians who played a role in bringing it to life. A testament to the Black spirit but even more so a song with universal inspiration.

THE LETS READ PODCAST Episode 83 (Vacation and McDonald’s Stories- 21 True Scary Horror Stories)

Maybe I’m weird, but there’s something about hearing true horror stories that I find therapeutic. I like having my senses challenged, and I also love suspending any cynicism I might have and just letting them sweep me away, be it straight up mysteries and scary situations or something supernatural. And some of the stories are genuinly challenging for the rational mind. Thankfully I’m built for resisting cynicism and employing childlike wonder for even the craziest things. I highlighted Episode 93 not because it stands out, but because it is about travel stories, particularly going to McDonalds. Being in Covid times still, any chance to travel in other ways is more than welcome. And if you want more, I would also send you to the podcast The Confessionals (try out Episode 319, “The Monster Outside My Winidow”. It’s crazy), and Strange Journeys, a true horror podcast that hits the road.

THE BIBLE FOR NORMAL PEOPLE Episode 159 (Richard Elliot Friedman and Who Wrote the Pentateuch)

Friedman is such an excellent and distinguished speaker, but his greatest strength as a scholar and theologian is his ability to break down complex ideas and make them accessible to normal people. Here he does such an incredible breakdown of the structure and composition of the Pentateuch, and he helps walks us through some of its complexity and intricacies, especially in the different threads that we have to navigate in terms of different Traditions evident in the text, but he does it with such humility and grace and out of a great love for God and scripture that even the most difficult problems become swept up into that grander perspective and story about the relationship between God and Humanity.

MYTHS AND LEGENDS Episode 301 (Italian Folklore: Unhand Me)

Host and storyteller Jason Weiser has a gift for bringing these old myths and legends to life in a fresh way, with some of them being unfamiliar, and helping us to hear some of the stories we are familiar with in a new light and with information we might not expect. In this episode he travels to the Italian countryside to tell a story from the Pentamerone. It’s fun and lively, and because I can’t get out travel right now it gives me a slice of a culture that is able to transport me to a different time and place. I would also recommend the Podcast “Tales” if you are looking for good storytelling from different places.

As I have often said in the past, the mark of a good book is when I hightlight the  heck out of it.

Having just finished Michael Gormon’s The Death of the Messiah and the Birth of the New Covenant: A (Not So) New Model of the Atonement, I’ve got a LOT of highlights from this book. Enough quotes to fill a book itself. This being my first Gorman, I’m also hooked. This book inparticular, with its emphasis on the atonement, has found me working through some of my own thoughts on the subject yet again. It’s not so much that Gorman is offering anything new, what he is doing rather is finding a way towards possible reconciliation by bringing to the surface the one thing that can make room for all of the theories to be a part of the ongoing conversation- the new covenant.

The way Gorman writes and outlines his arguments is really concise, which means he’s also an easy academic for any layperson to read. He’s very methodical in his approach. That’s not to say that this book won’t require time and investment from you. It is FULL of scripture, and it would be impossible to truly appreciate without having a Bible open and deliberately tracking along with his progression of thought.

If I was to summarize his thoughts as succinctly as I could, I would say this. The Christian Church and Christian history is full of different and even opposing ideas about what the atonement is, what it is doing, and how it achieves what it is that it is doing based on what it is. There is a good reason for why we have so many seemingly conflicting ideas about the what and the how (the fact that this is somehow wrapped up in the death and resurrection of Christ is essentially agreed upon)- Christ’s death and resurrection is in fact a multifaceted idea. It cannot simply be whittled down to a single notion of atonement or an atonement theory because the human experience is also, equally so, multifaceted. The fact that the Cross and the Resurrection is in dialogue with the human experience means that this complexity flows both way.

If there is one thing to understand about the word “atonement”, its that it is a complex word in its own right. As Father Andrew Damick describes in the The Lord of Spirits Podcast episode The Priest Shall Make Atonement, the word emerged from english translations of scripure (see Wycliffe) which itself was trying to make sense of an already difficult Greek word, which itself was also trying to make sense of an even more complext Hebrew word. It’s worth saying that atonement as a word, be it in Hebrew or Greek, was not some working theory, but rather a part of a larger story, a word that described an activity within that story. It might be fair to describe it in its complex Greek sense as trying to make sense of this notion of being “at one” with. More appropriately it is best to locate it in its Hebrew sense which, in a simplified sense, means to “cover”. It is here that we can find the context that plays through the story of Israel from Leviticus 16 that describes The Day of Atonement, important because, as Father Andrew points out, every reference in the New Testament to the word that we now translate as “atonement” is in reference to The Day of Atonement. Therefore, all of these atonement theories that we have are born from people asking necessary questions and wrestling with real challenges regarding how it is that the Cross and the Resurrection plays as good news in our life and in our world, but it is born from people asking these questions in their context with external factors playing into the word itself. Far from its original Hebrew context, we have tended to ritualize and theorize this word with all kinds of weighty concepts that these external factors have posited onto it, many of which continue to work to divide Christian communities, particularly in the Western world. This is something all of us should be aware of as we consider what it means to navigate the messiness of this divide.

The real challenge then, is to learn how to allow all these ideas to sit in dialogue with one another, to inform the other, because behind these ideas are reflections of the human experience of god in relationship to the world, and behind that is this experience as understood through the world of the text itself. It becomes dangerous when we get hung up on english words, equally dangerous when, as Father Andrew points out, we justify our english words with Greek translations, because translations by nature are making sense of ideas that are envoloped in a language that is not our own. It is dangerous when we make one single idea, and further our understanding of what that one single idea must be, the penitulant idea on which all else must then be based, because it is here when the conversation can no longer happen and when we elevate ourselves above what it is Christ is actually doing and create these divides. And while most people would love to stand up and insist that they are actually engaged in a conversation with the multifaceted idea, in truth most people are actually working to make their idea the right one. This is why we have so much division.

To press this sumary of Gorman’s ideas a little further, this is where he says that the one single measure, which becomes the very measure of his not so new new covenant approach to the atonement, is participation in this new covenant reality. Whatever the Cross is and whatever the Cross does, it must make sense in our lives, in our relationships. What Christ accomplishes on the Cross, we are also called to participate in. Too often what happens is people take their ideas of God and place them on this theological construction of a distanced other. This allows their ideas of God to then function apart from the human experience, and allows them to say things about God and God’s character that wouldn’t actually make sense within the human experience. That God is love, for example, means that the Cross is an action of love that we are called to imitate in our lives through loving others. What happens when we distance God from the human experience through our theological constructs is that the atonement becomes about protecting our knowledge of the Character of God rather than about our participation in the life of Christ. And this knowledge is divisive by nature of excluding based on who has this knowledge, and often it excludes over extremely problematic depictions of God’s character as one who stands above and apart from our own moral understanding. God is allowed to function in a different way than that to which humanity is called to follow. Which of course creates much tension. Again, for God to make sense, God must make sense within the love we are called to embody.

If there is one single thing Gorman suggests that plays through scripture as the central problem the Cross is addressing it is division and violence. From the opening pages of scripture we find the problem in Garden to be one of the serpent set against the people and creation (the land), people in contest with creation (the land), and people in contest with one another (the man with power over the woman). This plays out in a particular way as the Cain and Abel story, modeled and patterned after the Adam and Eve story, results in an outcome of violence. And violence doesn’t have to be murder, it can be anything that divides. And what we see in the story of Cain and Abel is that this gets perpetuated into a recognizable cycle. It gets stuck in an eye for an eye form of justice that sees a wrongdoing demanding repayment. The problem being that this simply increases as the cycle continues unbroken (read the Noah story). What Christ does on the Cross then is break this cycle by taking that eye for an eye form of justice, the kind that demands repayment for sins, and subverts it through the self giving love of the Cross. What Jesus does is take all of the sins of the world that find their root in this perpetuated cycle and says, I have taken it on myself. Therefore it no longer needs to be repayed. The cycle is broken. And in this Jesus can decalre the whole forgiveness of sins.

But, and here’s the catch. It is from here that we are then called to participate in this same action. This is what lies behind the tough phrases that say to forgive others as I have forgiven you, or the one that says to forgive “so that” I may forgive you. Participation in what Christ accomplishes in the atonement for our sins becomes the means by which Christ then breaks the cycle that holds us in bondage. It is by taking unforgiveness in all its forms and setting it at the foot of the Cross that we are free to step into the full forgivness of sins in a way that does not demand repayment or an eye for an eye form of justice. And we then enter into a new and greater way of peace and unity with one another, which Gorman argues is at the heart of the good news, the Gospel movement that we are called to imitate in building a culture of non-violence, and the atonement itself then is wrapped up in a multifaceted concern for every aspect of our lives, those who are oppressed and those who are oppressing. This is how forgivness works.

If you have the time, I highly recommend this espisode from The Lord of Spirits Podcast which I reference above. https://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/lordofspirits/the_priest_shall_make_atonement

It walks through the development of the word “atonement” over time and through languages and translations, breaks open the context of Leviticus 16 and the Day of Atonement, and locates that setting within all of the uses of the word atonement in the New Testament and Second Temple Literature and beyond.

They have so much informative and insightful context to share regarding how it is that we come to this word atonement and break it down into theories, and by helping us to understand The Day of Atonement it enables us to reclocate the language into a larger context, including the Cross itself. We miss the the ways in which the story breathes through the New Testament text because we have reduced atonement to a system. As we live the Christian life more, we will gain understanding and meaning in the story, of The Day Atonement and the story of Christ Himself. Just to give one small example, the way the episode helps us to understand the meaning of the two goats in the Day of Atonement story helps us to understand how it is that Christ takes on the imagery of this day within His own ministry. As the blood of the one goat which represents life is brought into the sacred space, it coveres the sacred space of God’s dwelling. The second goat is then given the sins that cover the people through the laying on of hands (not individual sins, but sins as a whole) and is sent out into the wilderness (not killed) where the “spirit of the goat” (Leviticus 17) dwells, the very entity that they saw as the source of all sin. There is no sacrifice, no putting the sins on the one who’s blood is shed, and no punitive, ritiualized source to the passage and descriptive of Leviticus 16 at all. This frees us to understand, for example, Christ’s tempation narrative, which flows straight from this story, the scapegoat imagery, the blood imagery as a “covering” rather than a payment, and so much more that we find in the New Testament text.

Perhaps what struck me most of all though in the podcast episode is the way Father Andrew weaves the knowledge of the material into the experience of Christian participation. This is what really matters the most as we navigate these ancient ideas in our present and modern context. If the imagery isn’t sweeping us up into the story of God and pushing into full participation in what all this imagery represents in the life of Christ, then it really is no good. Sometimes being freed from some of the constructs that we have used to protect our isolated spaces are necessary to let go of in order to create space for the sacred calling, the sacred vocation. And at other times gaining or regaining an awareness of how the larger story works can invite us to a sense of wonder and amazement and gratitute and humility. What’s interesting in the episode is tollow how it is that God’s dwelling place travels throughout the scriptural narrative. It begins in the Garden where God’s dwelling place is the whole of the cosmos with earth as His footstool. We, as God’s creation and the image of His being, were then placed in His temple (the whole cosmos) as His idols (a common practice in the ancient world) intended to fill the earth and bear witness of God through all the world within this diversified movement. Where disorder, and thus corruption came into the picture, with the flood picture a decreation narrative providing this pivotal point that shifts us from the garden to the wilderness, we begin to see God’s dwelling place, His temple formulated through this mobile tabernacle meant to dwell with His creation in the wilderness. They now need to find a way back to the Garden, to God’s dwelling place, and the tabernacle becomes this place.

It is when the people become a nation and dwell in the land that the temple is built and God’s presence becomes seen as in there while the wilderness then gets translated as all the nations out there. This is where we begin to see this loss of focus of God’s dwelling place being the whole cosmological order, the whole of creation that is said to be good and equally loved. This is why the story of Jesus becomes so poignant and beautiful, in that it moves God’s dwelling place from temple to Jesus Himself, who’s dwelling place becomes the whole of creation once again with us once again declared to be God’s image bearers placed in the temple meant to be a light to the whole world. This is what the story of the Cross and the Resurrection invites us into, is this call to participation in the temple, the Kingdom of God by Christ breaking open the realm of His rule to reach the ends of the earth and the whole of the cosmos and to all the nations and peoples that occupy it as that good creation. Jesus in effect sprinkles God’s domain Himself, declaring that this good will dwell and the sins and powers that bear their source are driven out into the wilderness. The invitation into this story then becomes one of our desire to be swept up into this narrative, this story of what God is doing. This is what Easter is all about. More than just a theory or a construct or a muddied word that divides, rather a person and a ministry who unifies.