Connections, Part I

Connections

My present struggle for humanity and making connections

Informally written by Dan McDonald

 

            This is sort of a follow up to a previous blog, “Where am I?” In that blog I reflected on my need to make connections with the reality outside the boundaries of my mind.  I had withdrawn from connecting to creation by retreating into the safety of my own thoughts and ideals.  I had awakened from my slumber to feel like John Nash, the man portrayed in the movie “A Beautiful Mind.”

            Nash had a serious problem.  His mind had invented human characters that were then projected into Nash’s perception of reality.  A girl, a college roommate, and a military officer appeared to him regularly as a part of his true reality, but they were only imagined characters projected from his mind.  He learned to distinguish between the images of characters projected from his imagination and real people because real people changed and grew older.  The characters that never changed could be gradually sequestered back into the proper boundaries of his mind’s imagination.

            I have discovered that my mind works to my disadvantage in some ways similar to that of Nash’s mind.  But I think my affliction is fairly common, and you may well have traces of it operating upon your own ability to perceive reality.  I see people, who grow older but my mind creates labels for them.  Once the labels are pinned on these people my mind categorizes these people under the tags that describe them, and then they are filed away according to the labels on their profile folders. The people grow older but the tags remain.  The people may change dramatically but my mind still sees them according to the label I used to put them away in my mental filing cabinet.

The labels say things like conservative, liberal, or describe personality tendencies, religious perspectives, and of course warning tags on those whose past may have contained information that marks the person with a stigma.  The person may have slipped up just once or twice or several times but has gotten on down the road, but the tag remains unchanged even if the person would not be characterized or tagged the same way today if I was to meet the person.  I discovered in writing the earlier blog a refreshed vision of man as God’s image projected into our creation is an interesting sort of mirror image of God.  Man is created in God’s image, but presented quite differently than we perhaps would expect God to cast his image upon the earth.  God, according to many catechisms, is spirit and changes not.  But the image of God, the shadow he casts upon the earth is bodily, living, growing in stature with God and man, being and becoming – in two dramatic words – alive and changing.  The unchanging God is imaged in changing men and women.  The never changing people we imagine are not images of God but idols that have eyes but cannot see; ears but cannot hear; noses but cannot smell; and the form of humanity but without life.

            Ultimately I woke up feeling like John Nash.  I needed to distance myself from the thoughts of my own mind so as to make connections with a vast creation living all around me.  This creation exists just beyond the narrow boundaries of my own mind.  I have begun to try to make connections to the world and universe surrounding me.  I need to be free for a while from asking “Who am I?” to simply ask “Where am I?”  My great need, at present, is not to know my mind or my personality but to realize where I am and to make connections to the world around me.  I have made tiny steps to begin to make such connections to the yet to be discovered reality around me.

            I managed to do some lawn work.  The lawn isn’t very pretty, but I did start.  I have purchased a camera to use on adventures and to photograph people with whom I am making connections.  I am still in the process of getting all the instructions read.  Maybe soon my website won’t look like a universe of words without sights.  Words without sights, sounds, or smells are like an empty universe or many an Evangelical church, or like the theories of empiricists and idealists drawn from a barren rationalism inherited from an insane era known as the Enlightenment.  I have been awakened to my need to make connections to a universe where there are sights, sounds, smells, bells, emotions, things to be viewed, tasted, touched, and senses to be aroused and experienced.  An old advertisement to make gifts supporting colleges made the point that a mind is a terrible thing to waste, but it turns out the mind is also a terrible tyrant when it is allowed to undermine the soul’s desire to explore the universe in which we have been placed.  The mind might try to convince that everything we need is contained in its boundaries.

            Perhaps my life has been changed, or at least my direction has been refocused.  I finished a four day vacation during the week when I wrote the aforementioned blog.  I went back to work and saw co-workers differently.  I tried to say no to the labels I had placed on them.  It was as if I was beginning new with each person connected to my job.    I tried to make a joke with a younger guy that has several tattoos.  He is sometimes a little self-conscious of being shorter than average.  I told him that I understood why he didn’t like being short, “because it means you’ll too quickly run out of room for tattoos you want to get.”  He enjoyed the remark.  Mostly, I said the remark to remind my mind to get past the labeling thing, and to say to him I’m going to be here for you.  I know I need to overcome thinking of people by the labels I affix to their lives.  It is not easy for me, but I’m beginning to think that is part of what God has done for me.  That is part of what he did when he decided to descend from heaven and come into our lives so as to give us his life.  He has done so not to enslave us but to free us.  He hasn’t freed us to simply fill our lives with boring lists of daily obligations meant to fill our times in “spiritual” activities so that we could move upwards on some church corporate structure ladder as if we had arrived once we got proficient at our check-list Christianity.

If God has a special calling for any one of us, it will not be a calling meant to limit our humanity or our freedom, but a calling meant to focus our energies into the very activities for which our lives had been created and unto which our personalities had been growing for all of our lives.  He calls us to a work for which he equips us and to which our whole lives have all along been moving.  The wonderful Neander written hymn “Praise to the Lord, the Almighty” contains this wonderful verse describing the matching of God’s calling with the desire of those who love God;  “Praise to the Lord, who o’er all things so wondrously reigneth, Who, as on wings of an eagle, uplifteth, sustaineth.  Hast thou not seen how thy desires all have been granted in what he ordaineth?”( http://www.hymnal.net/hymn.php/h/166).  The twin themes of God’s sovereignty and humanity’s freedom has been discussed and probed by all the great theologians without ever resulting in any sort of explanation that satisfies anybody and everybody.  But we rest in the sense that God, who is the all-wise is able in his sovereignty to promote and not destroy our human freedom even with his sovereignty reaching to the ends of time with a plan for the final destination of all things.  Yes indeed our understanding finds itself only able to be expressed in a hymn of praise singing “Praise to the Lord, who o’er all things so wondrously reigneth.”

            One night this week I went to a Japanese restaurant to join my four year old godson as he celebrated his birthday.  He is a lesson in itself of making connections.  Children and pets almost always make their connections to the creation around them.  The restaurant was one of those restaurants with places for the chef to cook a meal right in front of the people seated around the top of the cooking area.  As the flame leapt above our heads, my four year old godson’s eyes grew wide and excited.  He also found a fountain and watched the waters run down a wall and watched a couple of small fishes in the pool beneath a small walk-over bridge spanning the decorative pond in the restaurant.  Little children are always looking for connections to the world around them.  They want to know the creation around them.  Animals do likewise.  A cat that sits quiet on your lap for several minutes will suddenly extend his claws into your skin and leap in attack mode at the ball of string on the floor.  But occasionally there is something extremely sad that happens in human existence.  A child is born and develops autism.  The child makes almost no connections to the world outside of himself.  It is a sickness and a tragedy.  Sometimes the autism is able to be overcome through therapy and sometimes the child is a prisoner to his affliction, but surely God has a tender eye upon this one in his affliction.  Adults may not be autistic, but we are tempted to seek security as opposed to making connections to the universe around us.  We withdraw into our barren World War I style trenches, trenches of the mind looking for security even if that security exacts from us the price of withdrawing ourselves from the wonderful grandeur of connecting to God’s glorious creation.  The whole world slips beyond the reach of our souls now imprisoned in safe thoughts.  We are cut off from everything.  We are cut off until our minds are the prison bars that contain the full scope of our lives.  Technically we have not committed suicide, but how much of life must we separate ourselves from before we have virtually separated ourselves from life itself?  Is the sin of a virtual suicide characterized in our escape from the universe around us a cardinal sin or a venial sin?  Surely such a sin if categorized would lead to our great unhappiness, our ineffectiveness, and our being continually grieved and overwhelmed without hope until rescued from such a wretched condition.

            This week I also visited a dear family.  The husband had been one of my roommates in college many decades ago.  His being a roommate was a great blessing to me, and he endured the experience, which is something of a credit to him.  His wife was a literature major, whose humility is such that you hardly realize how full of thoughts she actually is on varied matters of life.  She likes to take photographs but doesn’t imagine herself as being exceptional in the photographs she shoots.  Maybe when she reads this blog she will send me a small album of some of her photos for me to add to this page so I can let you decide if she is good or really good; or almost Annie Liebovitz good but with a different perspective and spirit.  She captures so much with a camera lens in her own backyard, things which I would have walked by a thousand times and never seen take center stage in her photograph yielding a view of the beauty and wonder of creation.  Sometimes she links her photographs to humorous captions she places on her photographs.  She photographed a scene from a decaying part of our city which she aptly labeled “urban decay” and then showed a rural scene of a rotting fence which she then labeled “rural decay” to be set alongside the photograph “urban decay.”  Anyone seeing the work appreciated the photography, the titles, and the kindly spirit whose eyes captured the scene before her use of a camera showed the scene to the rest of the world; a world that would normally have walked right past the same scene.

This family asked me to bring a movie.  I brought with me a Neil Jordan movie entitled “Ondine.”  It is one of my favorite movies to show to people who have never seen the movie.  I like it partly because the movie draws parallels between humanity’s myths, Christendom’s sacraments, and our human feeling of a need to find wholeness and meaning in our existence.  In case, CB is reading this, yes I did have a bit of an attraction to the blonde playing Ondine as well.  But you knew that.  The philosophical beauty of the movie is in its exploration of how truth relates to our mythologies, to our sacraments, and to our experiences.  The movie is brought to a moment of truth when Ondine is forced to tell Syracuse (nicknamed Circus because he was to everyone a clown and a recovering alcoholic) the truth of herself.  She tells two truths, only one of which I will describe here.  She tells the truth that one truth is that she died swimming in the Irish sea when the waves overcame her and she sank and acknowledged her death and belonged to God when she was brought back to life by being caught up in Syracuse’ net.  That she says is a truth, it is one truth.  There is also a second truth that explains her life.  She knows she must tell that truth also to Syracuse but it is a truth that will lead him to either embrace Ondine or discard her like a fish thrown back into the sea.  How much is truth simply what is?   And how much is truth what we make of what is?  These are the philosophical questions that sometime capture our imaginations.  Is truth something simple or something complex?  Is there an ultimate truth or parallel truths or even perhaps trinities of truth?

In my Evangelical background there was a sense that such questions were more like temptations than gateways to more thoughtful considerations of what might be known and what might be believed and what might be the difference.  But I am more and more drawn to believe that the Scriptures themselves form the basis for such ponderings.  We ask about truth as Christians knowing that we live in one world and are of another world.  In one world we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell; while in the other world we receive by faith a message about that which we cannot see, measure, or detect.  Is there but one truth or is the answer that we must to some degree speak of ourselves in two truths yet to be resolved in that day when heaven descends into the midst of the earth and the fruit trees yield their fruit throughout the year?  Are we really able to speak one truth as we understand it or speak truth as on one hand living in a world seen and in another world unseen?  I would not tell you the answer even if I knew it.  Reason suggests to me that there is no answer, and faith tells me there is one and only one answer that connects heaven and earth.  It is the one who both descended to the earth and ascended into the heavens; who was both God and man, a mediator between God and man and between two worlds; one seen and the other unseen.

I think the Evangelical generally has tried to speak of truth too simply, as if truth could be minimized into a propositional statement with Scripture texts listed behind the propositional truth.  Such propositions are truth, as a Christian I believe such, but they don’t exhaust the questions of faith or the questions of truth.  We believe in accord with the mystery of faith, able to give answers in part and not in the whole.  Ultimately St. Paul in describing what it is to know God defined it not as our knowing God but in our being known by God.  We know him because when we died in the waters he rescued us.  Is that not the meaning of our baptism?  Dare we imagine we can give a final answer to the meaning of truth and faith?  We believe in him because he has somehow reached out to us and made us feel his claim upon us; his claim as creator, sustainer, redeemer, friend, Savior, and Lord.  Ultimately the Christian saved by grace after exhausting himself trying to give a reason why he believes simply looks the questioner in his eyes and says in a matter of fact tone of voice, “I believe because I can no longer do otherwise.”

Perhaps a Jewish philosopher’s insightful thought might help us to understand the connection between the believing of the unseen and our understanding of the seen.  Abraham Joshua Heschel suggested, in the book God, in search of Man” that the importance of believing in miracles was to lead us not to distinguish between miracles and common events but to remind us that the entirety of the creation in which we live is a miracle.  God’s very own creation is wonderfully and fearfully made, the whole thing is the miracle in which we live our entire lives.  We believe in miracles not because miracles are somehow extraordinary, but we believe in miracles to remind ourselves that everything in God’s creation is extraordinary.  The truth of the seen becomes empty apart from the truth of the unseen, but the truth of the unseen is given that we might understand that the truth of the seen is extraordinary in itself.  The world is, and that is often how we look at it, no sense of miracle, it is just there like a work week, breakfast, lunch, and supper.  But then a miracle seems to occur.  The miracle draws us to imagine one who is greater than the universe, greater than natural law, someone who is above and beside us, our origin and our destiny.  The miracle opens us up to realize that what is had a beginning and is moving towards a destiny.  If a big bang started it all, will a black hole finish it all?  It is all a matter of fact but then a miracle is noted and we ask ourselves, is it true, has this all been created by him?  Then if he can do a miracle through or in spite of natural law then what if he created all this surrounding me from nothingness?  Then would not that be a miracle?  Would not all this, the entire universe be a miracle?  Then perhaps my existence is not explained fully by two sexually active people getting together in one evening for some pleasure.  Maybe the one who did the miracle, who created the universe, had a plan in my being born, a plan that exceeded a father’s or mother’s love.  Perhaps this whole creation is a miracle and I am a miracle and my neighbor is a miracle, as well as my cat and the neighbor’s dog.  The world that is unseen is felt in a slight miracle and our hearts melt in us as we realize that in seeing the unseen I have understood that all this that I am and all this that surrounds me is a miracle. “Praise to the Lord, the Almighty, the king of creation.  O my soul praise him.

In a day or two, hopefully but perhaps more I will set forth second part to this blog.  In that blog I will describe how I do theology much like I keep house.  Things get cluttered because I don’t put things away and I keep adding more to the clutter and never quite am able to throw much of anything away.  That is how I also do theology.  In my life I have followed interests in theology in a haphazard way, without any plan, but have spent seasons thinking about the contributions of differing Christian schools of thought.  In the end I have absorbed truth here and there in a cluttered fashion but from the various sources there has emerged a sense that they gave testimony to the God they discovered in their seeking.  This is part of the journey of the soul towards God; knowing God only in part but being drawn forward by the pull of one who knows us in full.

In my next blog I will also acknowledge a school of thought that has surprisingly grabbed my attention.  I have been fed and nourished from a source I would not have imagined.  An article or two grabbed my attention written by millennial women, often from Evangelical backgrounds who have struggled to find a place in the faith.  They describe themselves after being disappointed in their roots by such labels as progressive, feminist, and Christian.  I don’t think they have drawn their conclusions easily but they have come to their views with much contemplation, sorrow, sometimes bitterness, and yet often with a sense of hope and destiny.  I have grown confident that their testimony is a part of the story of what God is doing in our day.  They may consider themselves progressive and feminist, which are loaded words for those of us who are conservative and traditional, but I think ultimately these are women who embrace life and feel the time is now for a reconsideration of what it means to be human.  I want to introduce some of these ladies I have discovered because I hope that as the day turns to sunset on my boomer generation, we may form partnerships with a new generation that like us boomers are those who question everything and are trying to forge a renewed vibrant humane Christianity to express to the world in the days ahead.  I better leave something for that next blog.