I am here

I managed to make it through most all of the holiday season with only one or two trips to the mall. Online shopping allowed me the luxury of avoiding the experience of standing in front of the large lighted mall map, trying to figure out how to find a particular purveyor, which also means looking for the little star that says, “You are here.” For all its shortcomings, the mall is one of the few places that gives you that kind of geographical certainty: here’s the context and here’s where you are in it.

Though I’m still happy to not be at the mall, I thought about the map as I began reading Transformational Architecture by Ron Martoia, one of the books kindly sent to me by the folks at The Ooze, and one that falls into the expanding body of literature focused on how our world is changing and how those of us who are followers of Christ must also change if we want our faith to be a transformational part of the conversation. I’m only about fifty pages in, which means Martoia is still setting up his argument, but he’s already got me thinking, particularly, about how we contextualize ourselves when we look at what is going on around us when there is no map to say, “You are here.” I should say the thoughts that follow are less a critique of the book – since I’m not far along at all – and more of the rabbits my mind went chasing as I read, which also means I’m not sure about the coherency of what follows.

I am challenged and intrigued by the conversations swirling around the shift in our world from modernism to postmodernism, and the corresponding claims that we are living in a profoundly transitional and transformational time and (not but – and) I wonder how well we can tell where we are on the map of history. Nobody who lived during what we now call the Middle Ages saw themselves there. How could they have been in the middle of anything when they when nothing had yet come after them? As profoundly as Galileo and Copernicus changed how we think a bout our place in the universe, when we start talking about what it means to be living in these days in more existential terms it becomes difficult to do so in a way that doesn’t make us the center of the universe once more: we are alive at the most critical time in history, or we’re going to usher in the next Reformation, or we are living in the next Enlightenment. Some years ago, as globalization and the Internet were exploding alongside of civil wars around the globe, Umberto Eco said the signs pointed to our being in another Middle Ages rather than a Renaissance and he pointed to the increased tribalism that has continued across our world.

Who knows where we are.

One of the statistics I heard about the time Eco was saying his piece that has stuck with me, though I’m sure it’s now outdated, is the amount of information in the world doubles every five years. We live in an age of informational overpopulation. Not only can we not know everything there is to know, we can’t even categorize or process it fast enough to keep up. When I go to check email, the headlines on AOL read like some sort of bizarre found poem, and it changes every few minutes. As I’m writing, here are the headlines:

• Israel Flattens Hamas Homes
• Disabled Man Left Overnight on Bus in Freezing Weather
• Superintendent Chosen to Fill Colorado Senate Seat
• Obama Family Moving to Washington Hotel
• Longtime Senator, Creator of Pell College Grants Dies
• Caroline Kennedy Critic Changes His Mind

Those stories are more connected than most. Beyond the news, Facebook means I have more information just about people I know than I can keep up with. Most anywhere I turn, I being given something else to add to the pile of stuff to know and, often, to set aside. If I’m taking a stab at where we are on the map, or at least how the world has changed while I’ve been walking around on it, the information overflow is at the heart of it: we are at the corner of We Have Too Much Information and What Am I Supposed To Do With It.

No, let me change that. Perhaps it’s more like the intersection of All There Is To Know and Based on What I Know, Here’s What I’m Going To Do. At least those coordinates give us somewhere to go.

Here’s what I know: the more global the discussion becomes, the smaller I tend to think. When we start talking about changing the world, I find myself thinking about the people in my kitchen, my church, my neighborhood, my family. Luther drove the nail into the door at Wittenberg, it seems to me, not so much because he was intent on altering the course of global Christianity as it was because he “could do no other.” People like Gandhi, Oscar Romero, Martin Luther King Jr., Mandela, and Mother Teresa were meeting the needs in front of their faces first; the universal movements that followed grew out of the particulars.

And they all took years to come about.

Last Saturday, Ginger and I went to see The Tale of Despereaux with our friend Jay. The movie has stayed with me because it is such a wonderful story of forgiveness; perhaps that’s why it comes to mind again now. As I try to contemplate my place in the universe and what I can do to live transformationally, one sentence keeps coming to mind: I want to be more forgiving.

It was St. Francis, who lived smack-dab in the middle of the Middle Ages who prayed

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace,
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
where there is sadness, joy;

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much
seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

As a middle-aged man working out his faith in the middle of a world larger than I can comprehend those are words that give me some sense of where I am and what it means to be here.

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: post-it-modernism

After rereading my first couple of posts for Advent, I called my friend Gordon to ask if they made sense. What prompted my call was his comment at the end of what was a rather heady post on my part: “REALLY looking forward to hearing about your first Sunday there.” Without assuming what I inferred was what he was necessarily implying, I took it to mean my posts were a little out of balance. Not bad or wrong; just out of balance. About half way through the post in question, I remember thinking, “This will be the place where Ginger rolls her eyes and says, ‘OK, Geek Boy, get to the point.’” I’m a better writer when I trust her instinct. (Smile.)

I started reading this morning and both my Advent books were talking about metanarratives. I sent Google looking for links and then, just for fun, I asked it to search for images and came across an old friend: Opus.

I would be the one with the eraser. (Another smile.)

I started reading my books again this morning and found the philosophical terms swirling around in my head like some sort of theological tornado. When it finally put me down, I had this image of two guys talking in what we call the Middle Ages, wondering aloud what they were in the middle of. I suppose they considered themselves contemporary and intelligent rather than stupid and stumbling around in the dark. Whatever had come before, whatever was going on in their time, and even whatever was to follow, they were a fresh as history got in their day. Their world was small by our standards, but it was the world they knew and the world to which they responded.

I find it ironically symbolic that we live in a time when Post-It® notes were invented – by accident, to boot.

Everyone knows what Post-it® notes are: They are those great little self-stick notepapers. Most people have Post-it® Notes. Most people use them. Most people love them. But Post-it® Notes were not a planned product.

No one got the idea and then stayed up nights to invent it. A man named Spencer Silver was working in the 3M research laboratories in 1970 trying to find a strong adhesive. Silver developed a new adhesive, but it was even weaker than what 3M already manufactured. It stuck to objects, but could easily be lifted off. It was super weak instead of super strong.

No one knew what to do with the stuff, but Silver didn't discard it. Then one Sunday four years later, another 3M scientist named Arthur Fry was singing in the church's choir. He used markers to keep his place in the hymnal, but they kept falling out of the book. Remembering Silver's adhesive, Fry used some to coat his markers. Success! With the weak adhesive, the markers stayed in place, yet lifted off without damaging the pages. 3M began distributing Post-it ® Notes nationwide in 1980 -- ten years after Silver developed the super weak adhesive. Today they are one of the most popular office products available.

The irony, for me, is we use a lot of “posts” to describe where we feel like we are in terms of history – postmodern, post-liberal, post-Christian, Post Toasties – when we, like Arthur Fry, find our place when we learn how to look at what we have around us. It’s how great recipes are born. Some of the most imaginative flavor combinations have come about not because the chef was theorizing, but because he or she was trying to work with what was already in the kitchen or connecting the dots between otherwise disparate dishes. One of my last meals in New England, I had fried calamari with cashews, grapefruit segments, diced papaya, wilted spinach, and a Thai sweet chili glaze. I’m telling you: no one built that from scratch; they found it by surprise – by improvising.

In my reading today, James Smith has been discussing Jean-Francois Lyotard’s (I think I’ll call him “Stretch” – get it: “Stretch Lyotard”?) take on postmodernism as “incredulous towards metanarratives.” Smith makes his point by quoting a scene from O Brother, Where Art Thou?

DELMAR
A miracle! It was a miracle!

EVERETT
Aw, don't be ignorant, Delmar. I told
you they was gonna flood this valley.

DELMAR
That ain't it!

PETE
We prayed to God and he pitied us!

EVERETT
It just never fails; once again you two
hayseeds are showin' how much you want
for innalect. There's a perfectly
scientific explanation for what just
happened -

PETE
That ain't the tune you were singin' back
there at the gallows!

EVERETT
Well any human being will cast about in a
moment of stress. No, the fact is, they're
flooding this valley so they can hydro-
electric up the whole durned state...

Everett waxes smug:

Yessir, the South is gonna change.
Everything's gonna be put on electricity and
run on a payin' basis. Out with the old
spiritual mumbo-jumbo, the superstitions and
the backward ways. We're gonna see a brave
new world where they run everyone a wire and
hook us all up to a grid. Yessir, a veritable
age of reason - like the one they had in
France - and not a moment too soon...

Everett’s take is an example of a modernist metanarratives because he assumes his “criteria of legitimation [to be] understood as standing outside of any particular language game and thus guarantee universal truth” (67). I turn to my scientist friend Randy for further clarification. He often questions the conventional wisdom, or at least the conventional media coverage, when it comes to issues of climate change. He’s not saying there is no change, he’s just saying the explanations – the legitimation – is not necessarily accurate: the metanarrative of the global warming crowd sees their perspective as universal truth rather than a narrative that requires some level of faith to believe, as do all of our stories.

We aren’t going to find a universal theory of everything that holds the universe together in an easy-to-grasp explanation anymore than Spencer Silver was able to come up with his super strong adhesive. We are Post-It notes on the pages of history, living in a world connected by hands and hearts holding on to one another, not by ideology or institutions. Whether we are pre- or post- or once again in the middle, we are a people grounded in the story of an imaginative God who breathed us into existence and calls us to incarnate what we trust to be true about the life we have been given and the world we have to share.

Peace,
Milton