The backstory and meta-narrative

Posted on May 24, 2012 by

When J.K. Rowling released the whole set of Harry Potter novels as ebooks weeks ago, I was one of the first on the website to buy them. And having them with me now, I’ve been rereading them. It’s been fun. And different than when I first read them.

I had heard about the Potter Universe from people with small children when I was serving as rector of Trinity Church in Bethlehem PA. But even though there were all sorts of whispers about how they were selling out everywhere, and children were devouring them, our daughter wasn’t quite old enough for them yet, and I didn’t really pay much attention. So when the first movie came out, I wasn’t sure if we were going to go or not. Some friends with children our daughter’s age invited us to tag along with them (they’d been reading the first three books and were very excited about the movie) and we did. The movie was magical. And I had a sense that it was incomplete. It hinted at things and ideas that it didn’t fully develop, and it contained subplots that seemed like they were included for marketing purposes (plush dragon sales for instance) and not because they were important to the plot.

So I decided to read the first book. Actually both my daughter and I decided to read the first book.

I have a funny gift of reading very fast. It’s sort of curse in ways. I can plow through two novels in a day when I’ve got the time or the interest. It’s always made packing for beach vacations sort of a challenge. I would take one bag of clothes, etc and one large bag of books to read. I really don’t like running out of things to read. (When I was in High School I used to buy books by thickness and read series by the numbers of volumes…) That’s why I like ebooks so much. You can pack a whole library onto a Kindle or an iPad and it doesn’t take up any more space loaded than it does empty. But I digress…

So I read the first book. I think I started it just before dinner and finished by breakfast the next morning (I left a little to read for when I woke up in the morning.) My daughter was as impressed by that as anything I’d ever done. So I grabbed a copy of the second book to show her that it wasn’t just a “one off”. Read that by the next morning. And so on with the third.

I suppose because she tried to keep pace with me, and it was getting her to read (she still much prefers video games and other sorts of non-linear story telling) that I kept at it with her. And I suppose I started to enjoy the books too. We started a tradition of going to the bookstore together at midnight the night each new book was released. And we’d both start reading in the car on the way home. (Her mother was driving.) By the time she’d wake up in the morning I’d have finished the book. And she’d double down trying to finish it too.

I started to notice clear Christian themes in the books as I read through the series. But they came out so sporadically and I was speed reading them without much time for reflection that I didn’t pay much attention to the themes other than to defend the books against charges that they were somehow Satanic.

So when the ebooks were released, I decided to read the books again, but more slowly this time, more like poetry, savoring the words and paying closer attention to the various clues scattered along the narrative now that I knew how the story came out. And it’s been a totally different sort of experience. I’ve noticed allusions that I missed as I rushed through. I’ve seen more subtle writing, particularly in the interesting characters, than I expected or remembered. And I’ve reaffirmed my belief that Rowling was dead serious when she said in an interview that her hope was to follow in the path of the Inklings, the Oxford set that was trying to tell Christian truths in modern literature.

Her writing was reminiscent of Tolkien’s to me. Neither are particularly gifted literary stylists. But with both writers you really have a sense that you’re only being told a little of what they’ve imagined of the world they’ve created. There are all sorts of little hints and allusions to other stories throughout the volumes of their writing. Both of them have notebooks full of characters and ideas that they didn’t use in the story. They edited down their ideas to tell a story set in a fully imagined parallel world. And it’s the hints that there’s much more to what they not saying that give their writing it’s ability to draw people into that other world.

If you think of it, the Potter stories keep telling the same story over and over. Orphan child meets wise mentor and struggles against focus of evil. Each book has the same landmarks: start of term, halloween, Quidditch matches, Christmas, climactic battle at end of term. What makes it all so fascinating is that each time the story is retold though, there’s more nuance and more information being shared. It’s as if in each retelling, each recapitulation of the basic plot, we are getting closer and closer to the core truth that she’s trying to tell us. Her main idea, that love conquers all, that friendship and loyalty matter, that tolerance is critically important is finally fully formed in the last book – and the last book becomes the key to understanding all the previous books.

That sounds like something doesn’t it? Like the story of Israel and coming of the Messiah?

The biblical meta-narrative works almost the same way (actually I suppose I really ought to say that Rowling is using the same technique that God does as God is telling us the story of human history). You read the biblical stories and you start to notice themes emerging and being repeated. By the time you read the Gospels you already know the outlines of the story, and as the same story is told four times, you start to notice that each version is retelling the stories of the Old Testament too. By the time we come to the full recognition of who Jesus is, and what his passion and resurrection mean, we want to go back and re-read the stories that came first to see if we can now see new meanings, new hints of what is coming contained within them. Didn’t the early Christians do exactly the same?

I’m thinking that we’ve managed to raise a whole generation of young people who will now instinctively understand the idea of meta-narrative and the way the books of the Bible are telling us the story of God. It’s worth thinking about how to make this idea explicit for them, because I don’t think they’ll have to struggle with the idea that it is in there the same way that people struggled in the 19th century at the time the abolitionists were claiming the meta-narrative warrant to argue that slavery was anathema even though specific biblical verses permitted it.

I started reading the Percy Jackson series last night just out of curiosity to see if those books might have the same sorts of structure as Rowling’s books. So far I’m not optimistic. But they do seem better written so far. I’ll let you know.

(Phoenix Comicon starts today. It’s a busy weekend but I’m looking forward to geeking our with a bunch of people who are also interested in mythic themes and doing philosophy and theology in a narrative way rather than a propositional way. A whole generation of young people are being raised on a diet of that sort of writing. Seems like we have a really good chance to do some serious proclamation in their midst doesn’t it?)

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Bikes making a comeback in cities

Posted on May 17, 2012 by

The Atlantic has a piece about the ways that more and more people are discovering the bicycle as the perfect urban transport.

“New York City isn’t known as a biker’s paradise, with its overcrowded subways, pedestrian-packed sidewalks, yellow taxis snarled in traffic, and noisy buses. Yet even New York City is heading in the direction of places like Portland, Paris, and Copenhagen, which have embraced and promoted bike culture and bike sharing in the urban environment. Over the past four years, the Bloomberg administration has rolled out more than 250 miles of bike lanes. And this summer NYC will introduce its own bike-share program with 10,000 bikes and 600 docking stations around the city.

While New Yorkers pride themselves on always being first, the city is just catching up when it comes to bikes. In fact, the bicycle is the most commonly used mode of transportation around the world. Think of a bike as a tool, a toy, a connector and a mode of expression with a low barrier to entry. It’s probably the most hackable (and hacked) simple machine on the planet. Bikes not only get us from place to place, they are the focus of a number of conversations about how we organize communities and define and share social boundaries, and how we can harness human power to recycle energy back to the grid. Most importantly though, bicycles are an intrinsic part of how we imagine and design the city of the future. They will play a significant role in shaping identity and communities and influencing social dynamics in urban areas, because they are the next great technology platform.”

More here.

When I first arrived at the Cathedral in Phoenix six, almost seven years ago, nobody talked about riding their bike to church on Sunday. This city wasn’t set up at the time for biking. The streets were narrow, drivers were hurtling around in huge SUV’s and the places people wanted to go (Shopping Centers mostly) were too spread out to make bicycling practical.

But that’s changed. A few years after I arrived the city finished the construction of the light rail system. And each light rail train has at least one if not multiple places to put your bike while you’re riding. There’s been a renaissance in the local restaurant industry downtown with a whole host of small places springing up within an easy ride of the light rail stations. The only real estate that’s being developed at the moment is located along the light rail.

We weren’t a bike friendly city, but we are becoming one that is increasingly so. I can personally imagine getting by with a bike and a membership in zip car. I live about a mile from a light rail station – an easy bike ride. The Episcopal Cathedral where my office is now is right next to the busiest station on the light rail. In the fall through the spring it’s not even all that hot – so I don’t have to worry about cleaning up when I arrive at work.

And I’m not alone. Most of the staff, and a surprising number of Cathedral members are starting to talk about riding to church.

We have a lovely parking garage right next to the Cathedral. (Bless my predecessor for doing that!) There’s plenty of places, shaded even!, to put your car when you come to church. But there’s no place for bikes. At least not many bikes.

We do have two bike stands on Cathedral property. But only one is shaded, and neither is very secure. Because of that people who live close enough to the Cathedral or to the light rail to ride to church are not really interested in doing so at the moment. Even the staff people who do ride to work complain that there’s no space in the building to park after they arrive. Our offices aren’t big enough and we use pretty much all of the space in the building on a given day.

We’re going to solve this problem. It’s becoming enough of an issue that we just have figure what to do.

It wasn’t a problem I ever expected. I’ve always been concerned about parking for cars. There’s only been one parish that I’ve served that was built with sufficient parking from the get-go. All the others, primarily historic buildings, have had postage stamp sized lots that could handle maybe two dozen cars. But now bikes are important.

The reason this is worth mentioning is that it’s the first direct consequence of the massive demographic shift underway as young and old adults are returning the city center again. Salon has a piece on how even places like Cleveland and Pittsburg are starting to burst with new young residents around the city centers again. (H/T to bls). High fuel prices, dense urban living and a desire to something differently are all contributing. And now churches are going to have to respond.

What a great problem to have! As the neighborhoods around our historic buildings are being revitalized, we have got to think of ways to make our buildings more accessible for the people in our neighborhoods. (Which is why most of them were built in the first place after all.)

Heh. Everything old is becoming new again. Peter Allen was right.

Maybe it’s time to start blessing the bikes annually in downtown Phoenix.

Posted in Peak Oil, Religion | Leave a comment

Explaining Emergence!

Posted on May 7, 2012 by

As I’ve gotten more intentional in looking at the connections between science and religion, I’ve been reading more and more discussion about the principle of emergence. It’s taken me a while to get my head around the idea, given that in Physics we tend to focus on the simple and not the complex with the hope that by reducing everything to simple fundamental ideas, we can explain the complicated ones later on.

Emergence (as a process) speaks about properties that are “emerge” as the subject being studied becomes more complicated. The best example for my little brain that I’ve come across is the idea that pressure as a physical property is an emergent property. It’s pointless to speak of pressure if you have one or even a few molecules in a system. It’s only when you get close to a mole of stuff that pressure starts to make sense in a thermodynamic way. (Actually that’s pretty much true of all of thermodynamics, the whole field discusses what are essentially emergent properties in complicated systems.)

So essentially, emergence would imply that it’s not at all obvious (mathematically) that simple ideas can explain complicated phenomenon. (An important philosophical point, though one that seems somewhat obvious outside the context of mathematical rigor.)

When biologists try to understand how complicated systems rise out of simple ones, they invoke emergence – with the idea that the trajectory of a complicated system is inherently different than that of a simple one, and things happen in the complicated system that can’t be explained in simple ways.

The exciting news today is that a team of mathematicians centered at the University of Vermont have started to describe something that they call an autocatalytic set; essentially a group of things that automatically transform on their own without the need of an external catalytic mechanism.

The implications of what they describe are really important to the study of emergence.

“They begin by deriving some general mathematical properties of autocatalytic sets, showing that such a set can be made up of many autocatalytic subsets of different types, some of which can overlap. 

In other words, autocatalytic sets can have a rich complex structure of their own.

They go on to show how evolution can work on a single autocatalytic set, producing new subsets within it that are mutually dependent on each other.  This process sets up an environment in which newer subsets can evolve. 

‘In other words, self-sustaining, functionally closed structures can arise at a higher level (an autocatalytic set of autocatalytic sets), i.e., true emergence,’ they say.

That’s an interesting view of emergence and certainly seems a sensible approach to the problem of the origin of life. It’s not hard to imagine groups of molecules operating together like this. And indeed, biochemists have recently discovered simple autocatalytic sets that behave in exactly this way.

But what makes the approach so powerful is that the mathematics does not depend on the nature of chemistry–it is substrate independent. So the building blocks in an autocatalytic set need not be molecules at all but any units that can manipulate other units in the required way. ”

More here.

The implications of this new mathematical structure are profound not just in evolution, but in economics, chaos theory, consciousness theory and all sorts of sociological fields.

To paraphrase the Vice President – this is a big big deal.

Posted in SOSc | 2 Comments

Managing the email torrent (for clergy especially)

Posted on May 4, 2012 by

One of the common sources of exasperation for clergy (at least in my conversations with my peers) is that they feel overwhelmed by the amount of email they receive during the day. Truth be told our email load isn’t anything like what people in large corporations get, but unlike theirs which is filled with massive numbers of cya ‘cc’s, clergy email often comes from parishioners, is not an fyi, and has to be acted upon.

It’s hard to manage the deluge of requests, each one legitimate and worthy of thoughtful response, and still be able to find space to pray, read and study; to say nothing of all the other appointments and administrative things that go with the job.

Peter Bregman has some suggestions about how to carve out space in your day:

“Instead of checking email continuously and from multiple devices, schedule specific email time during the day while you are at your computer. All other time is email vacation time.

We are most efficient when we answer email in bulk at our computers. We move faster, can access files when we need them, and link more quickly and easily to other programs like our calendars. Also, when we sit down for the express purpose of doing emails, we have our email heads on. We are more focused, more driven, wasting no time in transition from one activity to another.

I bulk process my email three times a day in 30-minute increments, once in the morning, once mid-day, and once before shutting down my computer for the day. I use a timer and when it beeps, I close my email program.

Outside my designated email times I don’t access my email — from any device — until my next scheduled email session. I no longer use my phone for email unless I’m away from my computer all day.”

More here.

The key point here is that email was originally meant to be mail, not instant messaging. If you don’t answer for a couple of hours, or even a day, that’s okay. If it’s more urgent, or going to be more time consuming than a short note, pick up the phone.

I’ve starting hiding my email application on my computer desktop. I glance every now and then to see how big the backlog is getting, but by hiding it and turning off other notifications, I don’t have this overarching need to respond immediately. And amazingly enough, people still thank me for getting back to them as quickly as I do. A few hours is good enough. A day is okay. If it’s really an emergency, people will follow up if they don’t hear back.

Do read the rest of the article. Any of you have any particular strategy for your email that’s working well for you?

UPDATE: Here’s a study of what happens to people when they intentionally ignore their email during the work day.

Posted in Web/Tech | 1 Comment

Structure in the Episcopal Church

Posted on May 3, 2012 by

A friend of mine on the Episcopal Church Executive Council, for whom I have an immense amount of respect, has been consistently calling on the Episcopal Church to revision its structure by consulting not with voices from within, but with today’s leading authorities on non-profit structure and empowerment. Her point is that we tend to want to tweak an already outmoded system in the Episcopal Church rather than listening to what is working already in the 21st century.

When we talked about the national church structures in our diocesan convention this past Fall, there were voices from the diocese who were calling for the same thing. We even amended our “structure” resolution which was submitted to General Convention to include similar language.

But the more I think about it, the more I’m concerned that a top down approach won’t ultimately work. I wrote this and shared it with others involved in the conversation about structure:

I’d be very happy to try this [sort of top down, expert driven solution]. Seriously. I’ll vote for it if given a chance.

But I’m not really optimistic that it will work. Even with the best intentions and state of the art solutions, it’s going to be an imposition rather than an organic development. And I guess I’m not all that optimistic that such a thing will succeed any better than what we have now is doing.

There’s a story that the groundskeepers at Princeton were growing increasingly frustrated with the way students were walking across the lawns and ignoring the paved walkways. In desperation they asked Prof. Einstein how to solve the problem. He told them to “pave the paths the students were making through the grass”. The students had already found the best solutions to moving about on campus. The University needed to “bless” that and stop fighting it.

What would it look like for us as the Episcopal Church to be willing to give a bit more freedom to dioceses and congregations to find structures for governance that make sense in local contexts? Our context in the center of Phoenix is different than context of our congregation in Winslow AZ, and is different than the context of the native people’s communities on the reservations. Here in Arizona we’re trying to understand what is essential and what is adiaphora in our polity so that we can be part of God’s mission most effectively in those various places.

I’m starting to wonder what that would look like for the Episcopal Church.

So I’m curious, what do all of you think about such things?

Posted in General Convention | 12 Comments

Resources for Arizonans regarding General Convention

Posted on May 2, 2012 by

At the request of a number of lay and clergy voices here in the Diocese of Arizona, the General Convention deputation to Indianapolis this summer have created a blog to share information and gather feedback.

We’ve called the blog “Arizona General Convention News”. Catchy huh? You can read the blog here:

http://azgeneralconvention.wordpress.com/

You might want to bookmark the site for future reference.

A number of folks from our deputation are going to be posting to the blog and will be responding to comments and questions. I can’t promise we’ll be giving it our full attention during the actual days of Convention (we’re not going to be online all the time, and the pace of convention might make it difficult to stay current) but I’m hoping that it will be a useful tool for people from the diocese who want to ask a question or lobby for an idea.

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The entangled Body of God

Posted on April 25, 2012 by

I have a rather large folder of links in my email pile that’s titled “For Post”. It goes back several years now. It’s mostly things that I saw, thought would make an interesting post, and then never got around to posting.

I dug back into that pile this afternoon because I feel bad about being too quiet on this blog lately. My wife and I just returned from the annual conference of North American Cathedral Deans, and while we were in Denver at the conference, I was having too much fun talking to my friends to find time to post.

So, here’s a piece that I squirreled away and never managed to return to. Fr. Richard Rohr writing in Huffington Post about a year ago makes the point that the Abrahamic faith groups make much of the fact that the Holy One created everything that is, and breathed life into all of it, animating it with God’s spirit. And because it is animated by the Spirit of God, it effectively becomes a part of God’s body, a form of the Incarnation. And we Abrahamic faith types often forget that to our peril.

As Rohr writes:

“We must realize what a muddle we have got ourselves into by not taking incarnation and the body of God seriously. It is our only Christian trump card, and we have yet to actually play it! As Sally McFague states so powerfully, ‘salvation is the direction of all of creation, and creation is the very place of salvation.’ (The Body of God, p. 287) All is God’s place, which is our place, which is the only place and every place.

In the 4th century St. Augustine said that ‘the church consists in the state of communion of the whole world’ (Ecclesiam in totius orbis communione consistere). Wherever we are connected, in right relationship, you might say ‘in love,’ there is the Christ, the Body of God, and there is the church. But we whittled that Great Mystery down into something small, exclusive, and manageable too. The church became a Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant private club, and not necessarily with people who were ‘in communion’ with anything else, usually not with the natural world, animals, with non-Christians, or even with other Christians outside their own denomination. It became a very tiny salvation, hardly worthy of the name. God was not very victorious at all.

Our very suffering now, our condensed presence on this common nest that we have fouled, will soon be the one thing that we finally share in common. It might well be the one thing that will bring us together. The earth and its life systems on which we all entirely depend (just like God!) might soon become the very thing that will convert us to a simple Gospel lifestyle, to necessary community, and to an inherent and universal sense of the holy.”

More here.

I think the reason I like this idea of St. Augustine’s is that he’s basically claiming we are all entangled with one another in bounds of love. Quantum particles are entangled in some sort of non-local way that we call “spooky-action-at-a-distance”. I think it’s certainly poetically evocative that the “spooky” Holy Spirit’s love does in Augustine’s thought what quantum effects do in the EPR effect.

Rohr’s caution is well taken too. We are at our best when we keep the interconnections of creation always before us. I am my brother and sister’s keeper. I am responsible for the alien and the sojourner. I am present though God’s love in you and you in me. And I am present quantum mechanically in all things and all time.

When we try to resist that knowledge, we fail at being human because we are trying to withdraw from God. Community becomes something very different and fundamentally important if we think of it this way.

Well, or something like that.

Do read Rohr’s whole piece. It’s worth the time. Then go look at the moon or the sunset for a while. You’ll see what he means.

Posted in SOSc | 2 Comments