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
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.”
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.
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.
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.
And when he had said these things, he went on ahead, going up to Jerusalem. When he drew near to Bethphage and Bethany, at the mount that is called Olivet, he sent two of the disciples, saying, “Go into the village in front of you, where on entering you will find a colt tied, on which no one has ever yet sat. Untie it and bring it here. If anyone asks you, ‘Why are you untying it?’ you shall say this: ‘The Lord has need of it.’” So those who were sent went away and found it just as he had told them. And as they were untying the colt, its owners said to them, “Why are you untying the colt?” And they said, “The Lord has need of it.” And they brought it to Jesus, and throwing their cloaks on the colt, they set Jesus on it. And as he rode along, they spread their cloaks on the road. As he was drawing near—already on the way down the Mount of Olives—the whole multitude of his disciples began to rejoice and praise God with a loud voice for all the mighty works that they had seen, saying, “Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!” And some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, rebuke your disciples.” He answered, “I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out.”
And when he drew near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, “Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. For the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you. And they will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know the time of your visitation.” Luke 19:28-44
I am reminded from my Lenten devotional this morning that while we often tend to rush past Palm Sunday on our way to the Cross and the Resurrection, this passage is crucial for understanding what it is that the Cross and the Resurrection proclaims. It is a picture of celebrating that in which we place our hope before drawing back to allow the passion narrative to reshape this hope in the direction of Jesus’ death and Resurrection. The anticipation of that which we see only partly being made clear. As Jesus declares looking over Jerusalem, “would that you, even you, had known on this day the thing that make for peace!” It’s a question that rings through our own present state of affairs as one can imagine Christ looking over our lives, our cities, our Countries. Here the hopeful proclamation “Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!” becomes dangerous words when reframed through the shadow of what is to come. Hope comes in the form of a sacrificial servant who likewise requires us to give up our rights and our life for the sake of this peace as we follow in the way and and on this journey. Jesus knows this struggle intimately. It is why He weeps over the city.
And yet, is here, when we arrive at the Resurrection we will ultimately arrive back at this picture of the triumphal entry, not in the way of empire or the way of conquest or power, but in the way of this servant who brings the hope of new life itself. Thus, we can then repeat the words of this proclamation, “Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!” in the light of a new Kingdom vision, one that finds peace in our division through the reign of Christ and thus offers us hope for true life and true healing as image bearers of that which is good, which is perhaps the mightiest work of all.
It is often said that in our rush to get to the goodness of Resurrection Sunday we have a tendency to want to move quickly past Good Friday, forgetting that we cannot arrive fully at the Resurrection without first understanding the nature of this Friday that we call good.
In reading through the story of the Triumphant Entry into Jerusalem in Mark 11, I am struck by the fact that perhaps the reason many of us struggle with Good Friday is because we have also rushed past Palm Sunday, missing the Temple context for both Jesus’ Death and Resurrection. There is a reason why Holy Week begins with Jesus’ entrance to the Holy City, as the Death of Jesus is indeed the Defeat of the Powers of Sin and Death that rule this world and hold it in its grip, and the Resurrection is Christ’s full ascent to the throne in declaring the Kingdom of God on earth as it is in Heaven, with the resurrection hope being the truth that the ruler of the New Creation has taken His rightful place and is restoring a world once held in the grip of Sin and Death.
Further yet, what we miss when we rush past the Triumphal Entry is that Jesus comes as the fulfillment of Israel’s story. To understand how it is that Jesus’ house (the Temple) “shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations”, we must first understand how it is that the story of Israel finds its beginning in Creation and its culmination in the Resurrection. The context of Israel’s story is written all over Mark 11 and Jesus’ entry into Jersualem, beginning with the grand proclamation of Zechariah Chapter 14 that “on that day” his feet shall stand on the Mount of Olives and “living waters shall flow out from Jerusalem” declaring the truth that “the Lord will be King over all the earth” and that “on that day the Lord will be one and his name one.” (14:9) The choosing of the tethered colt flows from the story of Genesis 49:10-11 and Zechariah 9:9, with the nature of the colt falling in line with the symbolism of Numbers 19:2, Deuteronomy 21:3 and 1 Samuel 6:7. The royal procession occurs in line with the great Maccabean procession following their successful revolt, and the chants of Hosanna flow straight from Psalm 118:25-26, a word that brings together the cry of “save us” and the declaration of praise that acclaims our savior has come. The very declaraion “the coming kingdom of our father David” in Mark 11:10 tells us that to understand what is coming in the death and resurrection is happening in line with the story of Israel.
The structure of Mark 11, framing the triumphal entry against the “Markean sandwich” of the story of the fig tree is purposely rendered to capture precisely what is happening with Jesus’ rising to the throne. As author and scholar Mary Healy puts it in her commentary on the Gospel of Mark, “He comes as the Lord of the temple, who looks around the holy dwelling with his searching gaze to see whether its true purposes are being fulfilled” in line with Malachi’s great and powerful picture of a purifying judgment.
And suddenly there will come to the temple the Lord whom you seek… But who will endure the day of his coming? And who can stand when appears? For he is like the refiner’s fire.”
Malachi 3:1-2
For he is “like” the refiner’s fire. The problem is that they, the image bearers, the lights to the world, God’s people, have made it, the temple, God’s throne room, God’s dwelling place into a “den of robbers” (Mark 11:17; Jeremiah 7:9-11). The promise to Israel, the grand picture of the covenant through which God declares His faithfulness to “restore” with fire, is that God’s house will be called a house of prayer for all nations. This is the point of the fig tree passage which both precedes and then is properly contextualized and proceeds the cleansing of the temple. The symbolism of the fig tree, one of the most prominant symbols in the scriptures for Israel and God’s working within the life and renewal of Israel is most often used to describe the failure of Israel to be a light to the world, the failure to delcare to God’s good creation the truth of our (creation’s) identity as image bearers over and against the lie of the Powers that has actively worked to hide this truth from us. In the hopeful picture of Jesus’ cursing of the fig tree in Mark 11:12-14, Jesus passes by a tree that is not bearing fruit because “it was not the season for figs”. Don’t miss the fact that the cursing follows this picture of the “season”, lest we read this entirely as God’s judgment for Israel’s failure. In the context of the temple cleansing there is something more going on here than simple judgment. As the Markean Sandwich will highlight, the point is not just the cleansing, but what the cleansing is for. The curse “may no one ever eat fruit from you again” is leading somewhere good.
This simple line in 11:14, “and his disciples heard it” indicates that we will return to this story, but not before we are given the context for this parable like story. Just as Jesus arrives at this fig tree, Jesus arrives in the temple. This is not a passive and linear progression of events, but rather an interpretative device meant to reveal what is going on as Jesus enters the temple and begins to overturn the tables. If the triumphal entry is the grand proclamation of the precise accomplishment and victory that the death and resurrection will soon proclaim, then what Jesus is doing in overturning the tables is preparing to take throne. And what is being proclaimed here? They are robbing people of the goodness of God’s great creation being declared in their lives. As Jesus takes the throne, the cleansed and eventually raised temple, which the Gospel writers understand is the precise image of the death and the resurrection properly understood, will be so that it can function as a prayer “for all.”
And so we return to the story at hand, the story of this fig tree that the disciples “overheard”. As they once again pass by this fig tree the disciples notice that it has “withered away to its roots”. Don’t miss the corelation here with the cleansing of the temple. The temple has been emptied and exposed just as the tree has been withered and the roots exposed. It is Peter who points out the simple truth that this tree has withered, which we are to understand is presented as a question that as of yet stands without an answer, something they had overheard and were trying to figure out. To which Jesus now explains in a parable type explanation:
And Jesus answered them, “Have faith in God. Truly I say to you whoever says to this mountain, be taken up and thrown into the sea, and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will coe to pass, it will be done for hi. Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believ that you have recieved it, and it will be yours. And whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone so that your Father also who is in heavn may forgive you your trespasses.”
Mark 11:22-25
“Have faith in God.” What a powerful phrase to attach to the picture of this withering fig tree and the parallel picture of the cleansing of the temple. And how often has this passage about faith been so abused when removed from the context of the triumphal entry and its preperatory work for Jesus to eventually take the throne in the death and resurrection.
Have faith in God. Faith for what? That God who is faithful will restore Israel to its true purpose, to be a light to the world. And how is God doing this? Through the cursing, through the cleansing, through the restorative work that declares in the Death and Resurrection, Christ being the faithful one in light of Israel’s failure to be faithful, and from God’s great throne room (the temple that sits at the center of Jerusalem sybmolizing Jesus occupying the throne at the center of the cosmos, the whole created order) that through God’s reign this temple will be called “a house of prayer for all nations”. Therefore, “whatever you ask in prayer” flows from the truth of what this reign wants to instill, from the truth that the victory of the death and resurrection will proclaim in its restorative purposes the true heart of God for His Creation. The beginning of the new creation built around a new order that reflects all the way back to the beginning of the story and the order given to God’s good creation in the grand story of the Genesis narrative to be fruitful, to multiply and fill God’s good earth as God’s image bearers. As theologian Mary Healy wonders, and similar to the picture of the streams flowing outwards that we find in Zechariah noted above,
The tree is not only fruitless, but completely dead. Another, more fruitful tree must take its place. Perhaps in the background is Ezekiel’s vision of the new temple, from which flowed a river with trees along its banks, bearing fruit all year round (Ezek 47:1-12; see Mark 11:13).
Mary Healy (The Gospel of Mark)
It’s no mistake that Jesus’ words here in Mark about having faith in this truth, in God’s ascent to the throne declaring a new reality, ultimately lands on this notion of “forgiveness” in 11:29. “Whenever” is an all encompassing word that carries the same inference of the word “all”. If prayers are to reach to “all” the nations, then “whenever” we pray we must be engaging in this exercise of forgivness. For, if you have “ANYTHING” against “ANYONE”, that is keeping the prayers from reaching out to “ALL”, and how can we trust that this “forgiveness” flows back to us (Israel) in this cleansing process. If the cleansing is to do its work, it must come through our participation in this Kingdom work that the Cross and Resurrection will call us towards, and we partcipate in this work through faith in what Christ has accomplished on the Cross and in the Resurrection by rising to the throne. Just as we see in Mark the disciples being sent out repeatedly two by two, an echo of the flood passage in Genesis, so will we arrive at the call of the Great Commission to participate in this prayer for all nations as the hoped for restoration of God’s good creation in Mark 16:14-20. Or to take the original ending of Mark which stops at 16:8, this is precisely what is anticipated when they are called to follow the path to Galilee where Christ “is going before” them. “There you will see him” the angel proclaims, ascending to the throne as the raised temple and declaring that the Kingdom and the hoped for rule of God has arrived in their midst.
Don’t miss the greater context of Malachi’s prophetic imagery here from the aforementioned chapter 3:1-5. If the one who takes the throne “will sit as a refiner and purifier” (vs 3), the one who purifies Israel is doing so for a purpose- to declare as a “judgement” that God is “drawing near” (vs 5). God in Jesus, or Jesus as the full revelation of God with us, will be a “swift witness” against, which means that God will subsequently be a swift witness for. And as chapter 3:1-5 draw out, where Christ has gone before them to Galilee at the end of the Gospel of Mark, both the messanger (figured in John the Baptist) and the Christ in line with the picture of this messanger fully emobided, has been determined to “prepare the way before me” (vs 1) so that they can follow and seek after and thus participate in the new ruler’s Kingdom building process. And in chapter 5 what this looks like is the judgment of the oppressors, those who are “robbing God” (vs 8) by oppressing the poor, the widow, the fatherless, so that the prayers can then freely flow out to the poor, the widow, the fatherless without inhibition. A prayer for “all” is the promise. The oppression is keeping these prayers from flowing out to all. The cleansing of Israel that Malachi imagines is so that through the story of Israel, which in Malachi 1-3 is centered on God’s faithfulness to his covenant even when Israel proves unfaithul, the covenant promise can then and now be fulfilled, giving the Gospel of Mark license to show Jesus’ charge to “have faith” in this great restorative exercise of the new rule, a statement that is ironically followed up by the closing section of Mark 11 seeing those same religious leaders Jesus’ is looking to cleanse and restore challenging Jesus’ authority to do just this.
If we come to the death and resurrection of Christ without first beginning with the triumphal entry, the danger is that we will arrive at the Resurrection and resist its grand call to “have faith” in the truth that Christ has ascended to the throne and that the new Kingdom has arrived in its fullness. We will make the Gospel about us and our salvation rather than about our participation in making “his house” a prayer for all nations. And the grand symbolism of Christ’s arrival and Christ’s ascension to the throne is that we are, as God’s created humanity, image bearers of this truth to the whole of creation. This is why we are sent out two by two and called to participate in this act of prayer being sent out to all the nations. In Christ, if this is true for Israel than it is likewise true for all the world. That we have resisted God’s rule and failed to image this truth to the world is the reason Sin and Death is allowed to hold its grip, the grip Jesus as the faithful one has defeated.
If we come to the death and resurrection without first beginning with the triumphal entry, we will miss the fact that Christ’s restorative ministry begins with our own cleansing, which is precisely the point of moving from the humbling posture of Ash Wednesday through to the Friday we call good before we arrive at the Resurrection. Don’t miss the fact that the den of robbers is aimed at those in the Jerusalem temple. The Church is the very thing being cleansed and restored for the purpose of being a “prayer to all nations” because we, collectively and consistently, have failed in being that light to the world. You, me, we that stand within the walls of the Church and call ourselves “Christians” are the ones that need to heed Malachi’s words when he asks, “who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears” in 3:2. The inference is that God is going to restore the Church by freeing the Church to step into its true vocation through faith in what Christ has done on the Cross and in the Resurrection, which flows out into this grand picture we find in scripture of Christ’s dwelling within us and thus by nature of this dwelling cleansing and restoring our lives “like” a refiner’s fire for the purpose of that great message of inclusion that flows from this exercise of “forgiveness”. In truth, none of us can stand when he appears precisely because we are all, collectively, being withered and cleansed so that Christ can ascend and declare the promise of the new creation from His throne, out of which then we are called to get up and to follow Him in this Christ centred, Christ driven, Christ proclaimed ministry of bringing the light of the Easter message to all people and to all the world in faith. In faith that God is indeed making all things new, and God is making all things new through us.
Back at the turn of the calendar year I started to give some intentional focus to a research project on the topic of memory that I had been sitting on for quite some time. The research project was inspired by a particular experience I had years ago when I found myself really struggling with life and contemplating suicide. I had recently abandoned the faith that I had once held, and consumed by research into life and its inner workings had come to the conclusion, based on the facts, that if I could not come up with a truly rational reason “not” to commit suicide, then based on my life and who I am it felt like it just might be the most compelling answer to life’s questions that I could find. If meaning in life is constructed, people with my story were simply taking up space, and there were many, many reasons to suggest that meaning is not only constructed but temporary and highly selective. If one of the greatest challenges to prolongued human existence and survival is over population, and my life exists near the most insignificant rung at the bottom of that ladder, then it not only made significant sense not to add to the problem through procreation, but some of the most signficant voices and theories looking to the future were correct in that at some point in time this selective nature would have to take precedence over any created meaning. That was or is simply the hard truth that we chose to ignore in order to create meaning on a daily basis.
This rationalized thought process hinged on the understanding that what science tells us is that any and all human activity that is involved in meaning making of any form is at its heart irrational. This is what compelled me all those years ago, is that while I had abandoned my faith as something inherently irrational at its core, wish fullfilment and a self indulging process of meaning making, what was equally true is that in this supposedly rational world I was now occupying, the only way I could actually live in it was to actually tell myself the lie every morning that this life actually holds meaning, and to do so knowing that this meaning is illusionary at best, destructive and harmful at its worst. I was in effect having to be even more irrational in my thought process than I was before, because at least my prior faith delusions could offer me a sense of conviction that I truly believed was true. From where I now sat I had to be intentional about lying to myself knowing that I was doing precisely this very thing on a rational basis. The problem was, the more I came to know, the more knowledge became my new god, my driving force, the point of my existence. And when this knowledge, untainted by those irrtational thoughts, consistently told me that I was meaningless and irrational at my core, it became harder and harder to reconcile this in the day to day workings of propping up these irrational choices and decisions and experiences. When you know how the sausage is made (and what it is made from and the death necessary to make it) the sausage is no longer appetizing. I have to willingly ignore these facts in order to eat it and enjoy it (and even then it can leave me feeling gross more often that not in my human tendency to over indulge).
The evidence to me seemed to be undeniable. If I cannot fully justify my life without abandoning my sense of reason, then there was no good reason for me not to commit suicide, especially when it seemed I actually wanted to die in this moment. This is when I had an experience that I could not explain away. I had come to this conclusion, and I felt my last ditch effort to convince myself that faith was not actually true was a prayer to God. I felt if the notion of God was true then God would interject and intercede. And so I prayed the most honest prayer of my life with little to no expectation anything would come of it, alone with my experiences and my thoughts in the darkness of the night. I did not expect God to answer. And yet the result of that prayer was God speaking to someone who I did not know in an effort to save and repurpose my physical existence. That person was given words to write down that were meant specifically from God for me, not knowing my situation nor why they needed to share them. It recounted my prayer word for word, and called me to this one task- to remember.
And so I gave myself to this task of remembering. Remembering my memories.
So why I am bringing all of this up? I recently finished two books that brought me back to this space and that drummed up all of these thoughts once again. The first is the book Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, in which author Dan Ariely walks through all of the ways in which who we are is shaped by external forces.
The stuff that we believe, the stuff that we argue, the stuff that we think, whether conscious or unconsciously flows from these external forces. There is small evidence that from time to time we can circumvent these influences and forces and redirect them, but by and large that is the exception to the rule, and even when we do there is no guarantee that this circumventing will lead to something positive or negative. That appears to be not a matter of logic or rational direction, but rather more a measure of luck and naturally derived determination.
The second book was called Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason.
Author Justin Smith does a masterful job at demonstrating how all of this effort by the enlightenment thinkers and subsequent inventors of modernity to replace the old gods with the gods of knowledge and reason have actually led to a more irrational society based purely on the fact that we have been trained to think we are inherently rational beings. This has led to some of the most violent and destructive tendencies and actions in human history, and, if the West can be taken as evidence of this inevitable trajectory, some of the most irrational societies in natural history. It’s basic premise suggests that at our core we are necessarily irrational beings. We have to be in order to make sense of life in the face of death. By ignoring this fact we actually end up becomming more irrational, and worse yet this irrationality becomes a weapon that creates destruction. And one of the biggest challenges facing the often presumed superiority of the West and Western thought, lined with its addiction to knowledge, reason and progress as the highest virtues, is coming to terms with the limiting nature of reason and rationality itself.
Both of these books should have come with trigger warnings. They brought me back to that space and uncovered that part of my journey once again. They reminded me of a revelatory moment I had when reading through a recommended book a friend bought for me called How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie years ago. I remember when I finished that book being struck by the fact that we are all inherently predicatable and thus inherently manipulatable. So much so that the science of this fact can be replicated over and over again without fail even when we are aware that we are being manipulated. In truth, as Justin Smith points out, we are all far more aware of this fact than we care to admit. We just choose to ignore it so that we can actually live.
More so, they got me thinking more about this particular research project. One of the reasons I decided to research memory is precisely because, when measured against reason and rationalism, memory is known to be an unreliable source of information. They are the way we tell and retell our stories, but more so they are the way we reconstruct the narratives that give our life meaning. As Psychologist David Clear writes regarding the science of memory,
Each time you remember something, you’re not retrieving some immutable image of what happened. You’re actually reconstructing it. In other words, you’re repainting the retrieved image when you’re remembering it.
David B. Clear
In other words, on the surface it would appear that memories are in effect lies. Falsehoods. Untruths that we tell ourselves on a daily basis in order to give our life some sense of context and identity. They are the shaping of our own personal myths in the enlightnment sense of the word, which is to say a story that is untrue but that attempts to breathe meaningful ideas into our existence as small letter truth. The fact that in the highly rational and reasoned Western world this is what gives myth its power is of course an obviously contradictory exercise, and yet as Justin Smith so aptly outlines, we continue to do it because we can’t live without it.
I am currently neck deep in my research on memory with a lot of scattered information that desperately needs organization, but at a fundamental level the two books I mentioned above sparked a resurgence and reawareness of why this subject matters to me and of the material that has been emerging through my research with consistent measure. In James Gleick’s wonderful book Time Travel: A History, he proposes that we break down into two highly generalized and very basic camps as a human species- those who would choose, if time travel existed, to travel to the future, and those who would choose to travel to the past. There is a bit of irony to the fact that the Western world as a whole is obsessed with the future while I am someone who is obsessed with the past. This explains my affection for these Old world-New World dichotomies. I am someone given to the art of nostalgia, and I value the memory making process above all else. Because I know that without memories our life and our sense of meaning fades. We are shaped either by our own memories, or in the case of our inability to remember, the memories others are able to carry on our behalf.
If memories are so integral to our sense of being, to our ability to exist and to live and to have meaning, then somehow and in someway these memories must be more than lies and untruths. They literally hold the power to shape our stories and to define who it is that we are and how we make sense of the world. And their most powerful iteration is in fact as story. Memory making is at its heart a storytelling exercise, which is why we find this notion of memory driving the very heart and substance of those old world mythologies. It’s why we see it at the heart of all cultural development. It’s why, as a Christian, memory lies is at the center of all Christian practice. The Western world and civilization, in its striving to locate and retrieve some form of individuality out of the collectivism it has long tended to demonize, has forgotten what memory is, ironically speaking, precisely because of its necessary infatuation with the future. And this is not surprising, because when rationalism and reason uncover the true meaninglessness of the human story, what remains is this constant push then to reinvent, to progress, to move forward. Because if we aren’t we are either regressing into the past or getting lost in the senselessness of the present. The end result though is that we tend to move forward without context, without that necessary story that grounds us in that necessary sense of meaning that flows from memory and the memory making process. This defines one of the greatest challenges facing Western society, which is our disconnect from history as truth and from histories ability to tell a truthful story of our world, our societies and our sense of identity. To remember the past and for the past to hold meaning, we must be able to see it and recognize it as trustworthy, as being able to say something true about who we are. This demands that we be able to let go of these Old World-New World conflicts between rationalism/reason and supposed superstion and faslehoods, and recover some sense of truth about who we are, what humanity is, and, in a necessary sense for me personally, who and what God is. This is why God remains important for me, and this task to remember remains vital to my understanding of God. If truth is merely created and manifested by way of lies and falsehoods we intentionally ignore in order to find meaning in our lives, then truth is not only subjective and relative, it is the ultimate unreliable narrator. If Truth is something that is given, revealed and discovered, something that sits above us and informs our existence whether we are aware of it or not, then that gives us something to trust in, something to believe in. Something to place our faith in. This doesn’t necessarily demand a god in the deified sense, but to me it does demand us to turn something into a god. For the Western world that god is rationalism, reason, knowledge and progress. To me those gods have been left wanting, or at least unable to afford us meaning in its truest sense. It is simply playing the role of a necessary, functional god that we have concocted in order to keep moving forward. It is completely future oriented, and it is dependent entirely on where we are headed and what we accomplish. It is the deification of truth made in our (or natures) own image.
Which, as I was taught early on in my journey beyond the fringes of faith, is a necessarily self focused endeavor that elevates humanity itself or the natural world as that which holds true authority. It is bent on future survival, not present existence. And for as much as the human experience intuitively needs to reconcile this gap, and for as much as we do so unconsciously on a daily basis, for me personally the only way this meaning becomes Truth that I can personally rest in and put my faith in is if something transcendent, something beyond ourselves and the seeming insignificance of this present world when seen within the bigger evolutionary picture, is imbuing it with meaning.
And yes, I also know that I was taught that science gives us this meaning simply by showing us how special the anomaly of life actually is when seen from the vantage point of the universe and our unlikely and up until now wholly unique existence, but that doesn’t hold water in a purely future oriented perspective. It’s a part of the lie we tell ourelves in order to survive in the present. It’s the predictably irrational behavior that human activity constantly manipulates and exploits. It’s the dark side of reason that proves us to be the most irrational creatures on the planet. It is precisely why we cannot trust our memories. And if we can’t trust our memories, then in our rush to get to the future, our meaning can only come from where we stand in the social constructs of our societies. It comes from our own happiness. And although altruism can scientifically and naturally imbue us with this meaning in an evolutionary sense, alturism itself quickly becomes a part of the same competitive field that renders this whole thing meaninglness, a way of distinguishing who and what is valuable, a self serving exercise molded into the larger narrative of survival that guides it. That doesn’t make it Truth, it makes it truth, and truth that is at its heart irrational.
The real question then for me is, to what end does the irrational hold meaning. To what end do my memories hold meaning if they are not trustworthy in and of themselves. To what end can I trust, for example, that my experience in prayer and answer to prayer represents some kind of Truth with a capital letter T? If I have to accept a lie in order for it to become truth, then to me the human endeavor starts to cave in on itself. It is limited and unreliable by nature of what it is. If it stands above me as something ready to be revealed and discovered, then it gives me reason to step out in faith and to allow it to inform my present and give this world, this life meaning. Which is what this new research project is really about- a stepping out in faith in order to recover the story of God, this world and my place in it. I totally understand that people can arrive at a similar place, and do all the time, without needing this notion of God to do so. But to me I just came to the place where I concluded that I can’t do it honestly. I don’t think any of us truly can. Without some notion of God I could only do this by simply accepting that this is the way things are, this is the reality we have been given, and thus this is how we allow ourselves to make sense of it and to live. We can only do it by submitting ourselves to something irrational, and that was something my rational mind couldn’t reconcile, especially because that appeared to have little to no answers for the present state of my life and the problem of social measure, inequality and oppression. It wasn’t a true motivating factor because it depended on my ability to invest in social currency or my ability to accept the social currency others were gaining by investing me, neither of which I could trust, neither of which were guaranteed, and neither of which were present at that time in my life. And both of which necessarily depended on perpetuating a lie as small letter truth, be it alone or together. It was, in other words, a kind of self help, a self improvement message wrapped up in social concern, the same kind of messages that drove me nuts and reeked of superficiality in the Church world. I needed something more. That moment in my life awakened me to something more, and this current research project hopefully will help grow my awarness of it. At least that continues to be my prayer.
The Stories of my Life 