Continuity

The mistake we make again and again is declaring an end to history. We think, My entire life has built to this moment, to my current understanding, and there is no future. I will never again be surprised, pleasantly or not. I will never again learn.

One of my lazy pleasures is re-reading books I first tackled when I was a child. Naturally, I now catch things that I didn't notice, or wasn't ready to grasp, until now. But it's almost brain-wrenching to think that I might come back in my sixties or seventies and spot bits that whooshed right over my head back when I was a clueless forty-two year old. Nevertheless, I'm sure I will, and doubtless more so with the Bible than with any other book.

This spring, I've found myself in more discussions with people who think that our consensus, authorized, "safe" account of what the Bible teaches cannot, must not, will never change in the slightest, than I ever would've seen coming. In the course of those discussions I've pointed out that for centuries, both the curse of Ham, and Ezra's command that the Israelites divorce their foreign wives, were cited as proof that God had instituted white supremacy. That was taught in seminaries and preached from respectable pulpits by giants of the faith. Then, when the time came, when our slowly accumulating understanding of the world flowed into the proper shape, God moved, and a tipping point was reached. Today we understand that the Bible never taught white supremacy or nonwhite inferiority. Its text didn't change in the slightest, but our understanding of it improved.

Another example, and one I hadn't considered until I read about it earlier this week: for endless stretches of time, it was unquestioned truth inside Christian teaching that the Jews as a people were rejected by God because of their collective guilt from Christ's unjust execution. People clung to this teaching despite Christ's pretty unambiguous words on the subject, and some still do to this day. For the most part, though, we've understood our error and moved on from it.

This is on my mind today because two recent graduates, of whom I'm inordinately fond, have recently been struggling a lot with their faith. One is struggling publicly, and the other quite privately. What I want so desperately to convey to them is that history hasn't ended, learning hasn't run its course, and it's not time to close the book on their faith. The Church has had to return to an unchanged Book and accept that we had outgrown our flawed understandings, just as surely as I revisit books I loved in my childhood years and measure my own growth against ink on a page that was the same before, during and after my encounter with it. In my teens and twenties, I had a long fallow period when I never cracked my Bible, and had a lot of cynical things to say about its teachings and reliability. After that ran its course, and my understanding had germinated and gestated to the precise degree of readiness, it got its second wind, and doctrines I found naïve and childish reasserted themselves as powerful and moving truths. They hadn't changed, but I had continued to grow.

I'm fairly confident that these kinds of discoveries lie ahead for these students, so I'm not too worried, so long as they don't develop an ego-attachment to their incomplete understandings. I'm pretty sure they're inquisitive and curious enough that that's a small risk. It's something that figures prominently in my prayers.

Summertime

So back in summer of 2010, it was jump-rope rhymes. This morning, my philosophy professor colleague and former pastor was working on the eulogy for someone he barely knows, and it struck me funny that you could write quick little two-line, grossly inappropriate eulogies. Here are my first attempts, and you are invited to share your own in the comments:

Don't get too big a whiff
Your loved one's now a stiff!

Don't hope she sits up
Your loved one's gone tits-up.

Her to-do list? Time to chuck it;
She's hauled off and kicked the bucket!

The coroner's report confirms
Your family member's feeding worms.

Don't get tear-stains on your shirt
She won't notice through the dirt.

Want your dearest? Nope! Can't have her
How to put this? Look -- cadaver!

Don't protest my word belies her;
What's she care? She's fertilizer!

If you'll stop crying one smidge sooner, I'll
Speed things up and end this funeral.

Expectations

Two things I've heard people say they admire about politics are, to be blunt, idiotic. The first is direct language, and the second is ideological consistency.

Officeholders who want to make a positive, constructive difference are going to speak diplomatically. They have to thread the needle between too many different, opposing groups. Politician-speak is not incredibly pleasant, but neither is it avoidable. Someone who seeks office and promises to tell the simple, direct truth in all cases is like someone who promises to run a nursery in which there will never, ever be even the slightest odor of poop. The promise is, on a moment's reflection, dumb, and what they're promising to eliminate is a necessary and manageable part of the enterprise.

The second idiotic expectation is ideological consistency. Any office-seeker who promises to be a "consistent conservative voice," or a "consistent progressive voice," is like a mathematician who promises that the solution to every math problem will be an even number. Math solutions are sometimes odd numbers, sometimes irrational numbers, sometimes zero, and the proper next move for government sometimes appears progressive, conservative, libertarian, or any one of a dozen other political flavors.

There's a study waiting to happen about the turn against cognitive complexity in American political culture in 2012. Already I've seen reams of political commentary lamenting the persuasive force of the claim that refusing to compromise, or even listen, is somehow a form of strength. In fact, that's a glaring, crippling weakness, and even more tragic when it's self-inflicted. And the puzzle, for which we desperately need a solution, is why so many people embrace it; what particular fear or narrative or lingering trauma so twists their decisionmaking that they're receptive to it.