Worth a watch: Thelma

Thanks to a couple online recommendations (for sure Jeffrey Overstreet, I don’t remember who else), Becky and I took the two younger kids along to see Thelma this afternoon.

Grandma gets scammed, and decides to take matters into her own hands. It’s a delightful movie. Moves briskly, treats its characters respectfully, is both heartwarming and hilarious. June Squibb turned 93 while making this film, and she uses that age and experience to great effect here. Richard Roundtree co-stars and their chemistry is just perfect.

Grab a loved one, go see Thelma, and prepare for a fun 100 minutes.

Some quick thoughts as I synthesize Beck and Delio this morning...

Richard Beck has a post this week addressing “intellectual problems with petitionary prayer”, or to put the question another way: how does prayer “work”? He critiques a vision of God sitting at a distance from the world and being convinced to reach in and intervene in a Creation that otherwise ticks on autonomously. He calls this the “magic domino theory” - the idea that prayer is to get God to reach in and tip over the magic domino that knocks over other dominos to make things happen.

Beck’s latest book, as I understand it (having read his posts about it but not the book itself) argues for a re-enchanted view of the world. In this post he builds off of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ line that “the world is charged with the grandeur of God”:

God isn’t at a distance. God’s energy and power suffuses creation. Creation isn’t ticking along autonomously, like a machine. Creation is alive and exists in an on-going radical dependence upon God. We are continuously bathed in God’s sustaining light and love, and should God ever look away from us we would cease to be.

Now I love this, but I am also internally screaming “but what does this really MEAN?” After a lifetime in fundamentalist evangelicalism being told to accept a broad disconnect between the reality of creation and the “mystery” of God in it, I need something more tangible.

This is where I appreciate being able to read Ilia Delio alongside Beck. Delio, I think, would agree with Beck’s vision of creation being imbued with God’s presence. But she would then start to talk about what that permeation might actually mean at a level of quantum mechanics. And this is so helpful to me because even though, to adapt Arthur C. Clarke, sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic, I need to at least conceptually be able to ground that “magic” (or to use Beck’s word, “enchanted”) view of God’s interaction with creation in the real, scientific world somehow.

And even though my understanding of quantum physics is quite limited, Delio’s push to bring theology into discussion with modern cosmology has been a key to my ability to stay within the stream of Christianity. I couldn’t deal any more with the disconnected, capricious, judgmental God that evangelicalism gave me. But that we could personify “God” as a conceptualization of the mysterious relational charge running through the fabric of the universe? That somehow uniquely enlightened and enlivened Jesus of Nazareth? That’s an approach that can unite my head and my heart as I (like everyone else) try to grapple with the mysteries of life.

A couple recommended newsletter reads

Quick recommendations for a couple things I’ve read lately that are worth a few minutes of your time:

Diana Butler Bass’s most recent newsletter essay On Statues, History, Politics, and Division. In discussing the removal of Confederate statues across the South, she hits on a resonant phrase.

Not long after the Richmond bronzes and marbles had been removed, I was in the city speaking at a church. The pastor, a religious leader who agreed with their removal, asked me: “Have you driven down Monument Avenue yet?”

“No,” I replied, “I’ve haven’t been there recently.”

“It is stark, emotionally powerful in a different way,” he said. “You look down the road and the statues are all gone. There are empty altars everywhere.”

Empty altars everywhere. That captures the spirit of the age, doesn’t it?

Second: Andrew Osenga’s latest, American Christianity is a CyberTruck. He looks at the sad scandal of Robert Morris and some online discussion of a modern worship song that says “praise is the water my enemies drown in” and pulls the threads together this way:

The commercialization of Christian culture has led us to sacrifice wisdom for influence, and thus we are losing both.

These songs and leaders (and books and conferences, etc etc) might get us where we want to go - a big church, a #1 single, a senate seat - but to anybody outside our little circle, it just looks ridiculous.

They don’t take our faith seriously, because we have not taken our faith seriously.

The CyberTruck might get you to Target, but people are going to roll their eyes when you get there.

I don’t know what kind of car Jesus would drive, but I do know that He has asked me to love my enemies, to pray for those who persecute me, to give what I can to the poor, and to pick up my cross and follow Him.

What if the world saw a young pastor turn himself in for his sexual abuse, offer his guilty plea, do his jail time and then live the rest of his life quietly doing good and serving others? What fruit might grow from that true repentance?

What if, rather than weapons or drowning, our big sing-along songs were about loving those who persecute us? How might that change the nature of our cultural conversations?

In many ways it feels like the sun is setting on a particular era of American Christian empire. Its leaders are crumbling like pillars of sand and the institutions feel like empty shopping malls.

In the grief and pain of so much damage, may our tears water new fruits of kindness and humility, thoughtfulness and wisdom. The world doesn’t need Jesus-brand products, it needs to see Jesus in our eyes, hear Him in our language, and feel Him in our actions.

Yes and amen.

2024 Reads: A Window to the Divine by Zachary Hayes, OFM

I just finished up a slow read of a wonderful little book. A Window to the Divine: Creation Theology by Franciscan theologian Zachary Hayes draws from Teilhard and Whitehead to suggest that we need to recognize that our approach to synthesizing modern science and creation theology needs some updating. As he notes,

…the worldview mediated to both believer and unbeliever alike by our modern culture is radically different from that which provided some key structural elements for our familiar theological vision and language.

After all, he asks,

If scientific or prescientific views of the world inter into the structure of a theology in some way, and if believers forget where a style of theology has come from and what elements have entered into its structure, what would one expect to happen when the scientific vision of the world begins to change?

In the first chapter, Hayes examines the relationship between theology and science, noting that they exist to answer very different sorts of questions. They need not exist in opposition to each other, he says.

…we will not expect science to prove faith claims, nor will we expect theology to prove the claims of science. But we will attempt to allow religious faith to express itself in terms relevant to its cultural context, which, at least in the Western world of the present, is strongly conditioned by scientific insights.

Hayes goes on to briefly examine the creation texts, suggesting a theological interpretation of the beginning of Genesis that is focused far more on God as the source and origin of creation rather than on a scientific explanation of how things came into being. He takes a chapter to discuss the origin of humans (all from Adam? or from multiple parents?) and how that view interacts with Romans 5. (As in Adam all sinned, so in Christ all will be saved…) Hayes suggests that these texts, too, should be read etiologically, that is, as discussing the cause or origin of sin and salvation, not of some literal genetic propagation of sinfulness. He bogs down a bit in a very Roman Catholic discussion of Original Sin, trying to briefly address both Augustine and the Council of Trent.

The last chapter, though, is worth the whole read, as he pulls the threads together. I will quote more liberally here, it’s just too good.

First, about sin:

Human history is a history of response, both negative and positive, to the lure of God’s love… Sin is not a mere infringement of a law extrinsic to our nature. It is a failure to realize the potential of our nature itself. If our nature is fundamentally a potential to expand, sin is a contraction… Sin is the resistance to expansion through union with others. It is the attempt to create human history in alienation from the only end that we ultimately have… Sin is a failure in the collaborative effort to move toward full personalization in human community.

And then regarding grace:

The history of God’s grace and human response finds a distinctive form of self-consciousness in the history of the Bible, and an unsurpassed level of realization in the person and destiny of Jesus Christ… God, who is love community, calls forth love community in creation through free response of human persons to the offer of divine grace.

And then, finally, about the relation of theology and science, and why it matters:

Theology need not fear science nor tremble before the power of reason. Rather both theology and science need to stand in awe in the face of the mystery that is our world and in the even greater mystery of God to which the world points…

We have no reason to assume that the mere fact of human life is the goal of the universe. What is important above all is a quality of life, not the mere fact of life. With this in mind, we can see that it is a more significant question to ask whether this sort of world is apt for the accomplishment of God’s purpose. It is, indeed, a cosmos that challenges humanity in mind and in will, and that is capable of eliciting both awe and wonder. It is a cosmos that draws humanity out of the narrow point from which it begins to expand to the mystery of the world and thus to move towards the Ground of the world. It is a world apt to stretch the finite spirit to the limits of its possibility to bring forth not only the fact of life, but a Godlike quality of life that is a created sharing in the loving thought of God from which the whole of creation emerges.

Beautiful stuff.

Family vacation recap: DC and NYC

I’m always a little hesitant to write about traveling while we’re still out on the trip, since it does put out there in public that our house is empty (even if we have people coming over multiple times a day to care for pets). But now that we’re back home, it’s worth a review of the past 9 days.

National History Day National Competition
Our youngest daughter, Katie, just finished her first year of high school. For the second year she competed in National History Day, where she researched a historical topic (this year: the codebreakers of Bletchley Park) and wrote and performed a 10-minute monologue on the topic. She took second at state this year, which qualified her for nationals. So, we took Katie and Anwyn to the DC area for the contest. (Laura is in Nebraska for the summer, working… we missed her!)

NHD nationals are hosted at the University of Maryland. We stayed in the dorms there for 4 nights, from which I draw two observations: 1) cafeteria food has improved a lot since I went to college; 2) I’m too old for dorm living. The days that Katie wasn’t competing we took the Metro down into DC and played tourist. I think the Museum of Natural History got the highest praise from our crew, though Katie was very excited to go to the International Spy Museum and see actual Enigma and Lorenz encoders after having researched them all year!

Katie’s performance went very well, but she didn’t make it into the top 10 to perform again in the finals. We opted out of the 4-hour award ceremony (so many categories! so many medals to hand out!) and headed down to Georgetown where she had a college visit scheduled. Three years ahead isn’t too early to start planning, I guess. The G’town campus is beautiful. Katie knows she’s gonna have to work hard if she wants to be able to make it into a school like that. I am confident that she will.

New York City
Friday morning we got in our rental car and drove up to Manhattan. I’m the only one of the family that had been to NYC before, so we decided a long weekend would be a good time. And it was. We visited museums and memorials, the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, did some shopping, ate too much good food, and one night Becky and I made a late night (for us old folks!) outing to the Blue Note to see Wynton Marsalis and his Future of Jazz Septet play. They were fantastic. We spent Sunday hanging out with some friends who came up from New Jersey, and had a great time wandering around Midtown and Central Park.

Monday morning I woke up to a notification that our 5pm flight out of LaGuardia was already delayed an hour. Thankfully I was able to get us rebooked on a flight that left a little earlier, took a more direct route home, and got us home an hour earlier than scheduled (and 2 hours earlier than we would have on the delayed flights!). It is very good to be home. Becky did the math and reported we walked more than 50 miles over the past nine days… there’s a reason my feet are sore. But it was a delightful family trip, and I’m very glad we were able to make it work this year.

Rosaria Butterfield and the trajectory toward anti-LGBTQ violence

Man, Rick Pidcock has become a must-read. His piece this morning on Rosaria Butterfield’s trajectory into anti-LGBTQ hate is really something. She’s one of those people that was lionized at my old evangelical church after she hit the scene - the perfect “ex-gay” story for them to hold up. She still spoke kindly about gay people in the church, even though she loudly said they were wrong. But no more:

Notice the shift in Butterfield’s language over time. She goes from considering Side B Christians as “faithful brothers and sisters” to calling them heretics. She goes from promoting hospitality toward LGBTQ people to promoting hostility, even referring to the conversation as a “war.” She goes from extending mercy to LGBTQ people to cutting off mercy due to thinking God was less merciful than she was. She excuses homophobia. She embraces conversion therapy despite its ineffectiveness and the harm it causes.

Phew.

Rick’s conclusion is spot-on, though. While evangelicals warn about a “slippery slope” of LGBTQ tolerance leading to full acceptance and embrace, they don’t recognize the slope they themselves are on: from dismissal and dehumanization to full-on hatred and violence.

So yes, once you begin interpreting the Bible through a lens of love and wholeness, there can be a slippery slope toward accepting LGBTQ people because planting seeds of love and wholeness will produce the fruit of more love and wholeness.

But there’s also a slippery slope on the other side. And planting seeds that cause the violence of disembodiment and dehumanization will produce the fruit of more disembodiment and dehumanization. The question we must face this Pride month is toward which fruit we want to slide.

Choose love, my friends. Love wins.

25 years!

A milestone snuck up on me this weekend: as of June 1st I have been working at Collins Aerospace for 25 years. In 1999, fresh out of college with a CS degree, I moved to the Midwest to take a position in an industry that I knew almost nothing about. Still, a job was a job, and this Nebraska boy was ready to be done living in Texas. 25 years later, the name on the door has changed a few times, but many of the faces have stayed the same.

I started as a software engineer for flight management systems. Two weeks later, I got loaned out to our flight displays department, and FMS never got me back. After ten years doing software development, I got interested in airworthiness certification. Got my FAA DER ticket and for the next 13 years I worked full time in our certification group. For the past two years I’ve worked in Advanced Technology, trying to apply the lessons I learned from all my time doing compliance finding to help us do better, easier work during the design cycle.

I know I’m a little bit of an anomaly for my generation to be so long with the same employer. One of the advantages of working for a large organization is that at whatever point I’ve gotten bored in my current position, there’s been a new position I could move into, and the learning could start again. On the whole, I keep enjoying the job, and they keep paying me, so 25 years later I’m quite happy and thankful to still be here. I’d say “here’s to another 25 years”, but I sure hope I’ve retired before then.

The reality gap

So Trump was convicted of 34 felonies. This morning I have a distant cousin on Facebook last night complaining about how broken the justice system is. And this morning he’s calling for another Civil War. I’m just not sure how to bridge this reality gap.

First off, as Matt Tebbe so brilliantly put it:

It’s not a miscarriage of justice when
a Black man is choked out in the street
Or a Black woman is killed in her bed
Or a Black man is gunned down running while Black
But it is when a white millionaire is convicted of many felonies.
This is how whiteness works.

That cousin surely didn’t make a lot of noise about the broken justice system after George Floyd was killed, or Breanna Taylor was killed, or Trayvon Martin was killed… I wonder why now?

And secondly, is that cousin really ready to take up his guns and kill people like me because we disagree politically? And because I think maybe the justice system did its job here?

Now I know it’s far easier to grumble on Facebook than it is to do actual work, and I’m willing to bet at this point I’ve been to more political protests in the last 5 years than he has. But I do wonder how we ever bridge the gap here. Are things so irreparably broken that chaos is inevitable? I fear so, but I hope not.

Bullet Points for a Friday

  • Between now and July there are only 2 weeks where I’m in the office for 5 full days. This week I was in DC Monday through Wednesday.
  • I’m gonna be back in the saddle, er, on the bench as a church musician the next couple weeks. Looking forward to it.
  • Pretty dang excited for the concert tickets I bought this week. More on that later.
  • Next week I’m out of office for 3 days for Anwyn’s high school graduation.
  • This means that by next week at this time we’ll have 2 of our 3 kids out of high school. When did we get old?
  • I’ve been helping pick out the hymns for our church services for the past several months, which has been a good way to learn the Episcopal hymnal and also to pick out songs I enjoy singing. Is that self-serving?
  • Obviously I mean that I got old but my beautiful wife is as young and lovely as ever.

Happy Friday, everybody.

Because I need more piano music...

Because I’m a sucker for trying out new piano music that I’ll probably never be good enough to play (or at least to play well), I just ordered this one:

A Russian composer writing jazz-styled preludes? Too much awesome.

Here’s a video of the composer playing one of them: