Along the way...on time and space and God

The flattening of space and time is the defining action of our age.

I remember clearly my first “remote” event. My beloved Kansas home was several hundred miles away from the little Oklahoma Church where my friends were wed on a non-descript evening. Some months later a small box went in a larger box connected to a still larger box and I watched a fuzzy screen and heard a preacher's voice.

Years later, also in a church, I watched a man with a large machine on tripod video-record the preacher and I wondered how this makes any sense. It is enough to hear a good speech or sermon once, to savor the moment and hopefully gain lasting help. And it is valuable to have things for posterity.

But who has time to listen more than once?

The old cassette tapes bring the same question. I listened to some of them repeatedly as a young man, to much benefit. But most of the time when I thought I should get a tape I never did, and never would have listened again.

Yes, modern digital media has changed all of this and we can find most whatever we want whenever we want and we are better for it.

Better?

This is not the carmudgeon extreme, casting all new things as negative. New things are new and we adjust. Walking to horses to cars to airplanes: talking to telegraph to radio to television to sat-phones. Like all of us I love it. Like all of us I feel the loss and the grief.

I absorb my mind and fingers and eyes in a box putting shapes on screen, soon to be words of meaning, likely to be short-lived and barely noticed, certain to be a mere breath in a colossal storm of similar digital musings. What does it all mean?

I was trying to say the flattening – the death – of time and space is the defining reality of this era. I doubt I have the wisdom to understand this claim, much less prove it. I will only say it is real and I am sad for it.

Because I can always do it later, I often don't. Because no Sabbath is set, there never is one. Because I can always call Mom, I value it less, and because I can always fly to wherever my loved-ones live I have less – of seeing them and of loved-ones.

For love means more than seeing or talking. Face time or zoom or cell or text are all good and happy. I am thankful for them. But they never replace being-with, hearing the voice and knowing the person breathing, laughing, speaking is really there, right in the room. But because we don't have to be-with to have what we call relationship, we do it less and we lose.

It is the painful crux of life, the two-edged sword of relating, the loving and loathing we cannot escape and by which we are often bewildered. We want belonging with our independence; we want someone to care but leave us alone; we want control but despair for the wisdom only others can give us. It means in the end we choose death, for nothing is more real to life than the reality and necessity of relationships. Modern tech is just another way we cheapen or escape them.

Trying to explain it plays into the problem as much as anything I suppose, though awareness seems a good thing. The journey wearies us, the effort to evade the gnawing pain is exhausting. So we pick up the phone, but dare not call. Text will do. But it never does.

I find the answer in part when I invite my friend over and we chat about nothing, coffee and toast, chairs near, and life what it is: embodied, earthy, personal, present.

Later, my wife comes home and the day is real again if I will let it. A grandson visits and the pictures I love become nothing compared to his laugh. And I plan to write a poem for my sons and daughter-in-law, knowing that's as close as I can get for awhile.

Yes, time and space is flattened and we think we control it. But we are controlled in the end. Our need for closeness can never be undone by the fear that makes us run. And time is contrived master that only dies when we surrender to the moment and know it is bigger than the seconds that try to define it.

Perhaps the brilliant line from Scripture ties this together: “It is in God we live and move and have our being.” (Acts 17:28) That's time and space all wrapped up in an infinite, personal God who made the world, showed us how to live by giving Himself for it, and will some day make all things new. It ties time to the eternal, space to a Creator, and life itself to a God I dare to believe is good.

That's enough to give hope to the most entrenched carmudgeon, and make this child of God rejoice for the gift of another day!

Along the way...

Our passions, deeply felt (for that's what passions are)
shove us into corners (for that's what passions do)
of our own making.

But passions seldom think (that's not what passions do)
for there's no room for doubt (that's not what passions are)
on even one thing.

Passion speaks and patrons say “hurrah.”
Passion gives no quarter to the hurt, the wondering, the confused.
Ideas, the right ones -- mine, of course! –
are deep within, inarticulate until, laden with emotion
they come forth and wisdom suffers, as do friends who wish
to learn. The passion shuts them out.

Hyperbole is a thing, often wielded with skill to amuse, enlighten,
persuade, reveal.
When left to run wild, wild on wild, it inflates the wielder
with itself and lays thoughtless death blows on would-be interlocutors.
It should reveal the path, not trample those upon it.

“There is no peace on Earth,” a song soon to be heard with love.
The line hints the contrast coming, the sweet answer to the awful word. Those who speak of doom do well to dare, to believe; to let passion bow to persons, to love people more than their ideas, and know – yea create -- peace.

We can do it. I've seen it and, though poor in practice, I long to do it. Will you join me? The wrong can fail, the right prevail, but not without peace and goodwill that must be born and bourn in the hearts and loves and words of all of us so painfully divided.

Let there be peace, and let it begin with me.

Steady On [10'TU]

I settle in to type, attempting to be normal while my forearm still aches from the healing injury. As I mentioned earlier, some 6 weeks ago I ruptured the tendon connecting my right bicep to my forearm. Five weeks ago today I underwent surgery to reattach the tendon. For two more weeks I cannot pick up anything larger than a ballpoint pen.

The prohibition makes sense and is enforced by pain. I am unable to lift a coffee cup normally without pain, and do not try. Doctor's orders.

The pain is mostly the muscles recovering from atrophy, or so I imagine. I know the wound point heals slowly and needs the care of inaction. Yet I must try to touch my shoulder (very hard) and extend my arm fully while moving it from side to side (not so hard.)

This is ten minute Tuesday but I am stopping now. The pain settles in the side of my upper arm when I try to type. About a 6 and not worth it.

God is good. I am overjoyed at the goodness of life. Steady on.

Thanks Be To God

It is a difficult thing to be forced into slowness. Slowness is hard of itself, a discipline not easily embraced. Perhaps it is always forced on us.

After surgery September 23rd I was unable to type normally until the retaining cast came off October 15th. This is my first real foray into typing and it is ok. Still unable to use mouse in right hand. Left hand agility improves of necessity.

Healing is slow and painful. Things wrong must be set right and it always takes time, which takes patience. Patience, after all, is long suffering.

Who can think slow and act slowly? Yes, I know adverb is required and yet language changes, even makes a norm of transgressions. Grammarians would explain why adjectives forced into adverbs' clothing feels better sometimes. No doubt goes with our move from writ to spoken verbiage.

Speaking of, attempting to speak into text rather than typing has been that into which I have dabbled. (Avoiding the ending of sentences with prepositions is another dying practice, up with which I have learned to put, even enjoy.)

My arm hurts, I am almost done. There is so much to say, for life is rich and wonderful and infinitely layered.

Thanks be to God for His unspeakable gifts.

What is the Gospel?

What is the Gospel? Some say ragamuffin – good news for the down and out. Some say Creed, words ringing true to all that is. Many don’t know what the gospel is, a strange word seldom used in normal ways of life.

Gospel means simply “Good News” and for nearly 2,000 years references the story of Christ as we receive it in the New Testament books named after his followers.

What is the Gospel? My needy soul reaches up to God and hopes the Gospel is for the down and out, for those who have received the grace to know how lost they are and how much this world and every single one of us needs a Savior. But of course I also hope it is true, that it can be understood and accessed by normal processes of reason and curiosity and understanding. If the Gospel is true then it can weather the withering storms of centuries of doubt and attack. And so it has.

I hear myself say the Gospel is the Incarnation writ large, or perhaps most accurately the gospel IS the Incarnation. This feels closer to Creed than ragamuffin, but I want to linger here. The Incarnation tells us God is with us. There is no greater Good News. When we hear God is with us we know he did not just select the best and the brightest, the wisest and most erudite. No, he came to be with this world just as it is, full of sadness, darkness, death and loss, disappointment, addiction, broken hearts.

The Gospel is for everyone because the Incarnation is for the whole world: past, present, future. When God touches the world nothing remains as it was. When Joy Davidman Lewis surrendered her life to Christ, she used the expression “God came in” to describe the Wonder of what happened. This can happen in our individual lives because it happened in Bethlehem. If there’s a God, the one whom Christ reveals, this God doesn’t wait for us to seek him out. He seeks us out.

This is the Gospel, the Good News: God has come into the world and we need never be alone again.

Without Typing

I wonder if I can speak a poem, dictate a rhyme, write a verse without writing, only speaking. It is not my custom, this talking while electronic machine turns spoken word into type. For 2 weeks I have been unable to type or write. Hopefully by the weekend I will be able to type again, though my arm which endured surgery will take a while to be fully restored.

I am thankful for limits for I know they teach us. And yet this limit has been very hard. We get used to what we get used to, and the long arm of habit orders our life whether we like it or not. For most of history there was no typing as we know it now. I really don't know how to do this thing so I will stop.

[100WW] Left Hand Edition

On the 13th I injured my right arm when I strained overmuch lifting an appliance out of a trailer into a dumpster. There is a tendon coming from the bicep muscle, traveling through the elbow and attaching to a bone in the forearm. This tendon detached over 95% from the bone, rendering me virtually incapable of twisting my arm to the right. The doctor says roughly forty five percent of twist strength relies upon that tendon.

On Monday, the surgeon reattached it and I am slowly recovering, very thankful. Pain is managed with heavy pain killer and 800 mg Ibuprofen.