The Halfway House

Ariel Castro lived an adolescent dream. For over a decade, he got sex whenever and however he wanted. His three female slaves were so dependent on him for food and clothing they nearly gave up all thoughts of escape. 

Castro’s dream ended the day he forgot to lock his door. Perhaps on an impulse, one of his prisoners tried that door and discovered it was unlocked. Carried away by joy and fear, she walked to a neighbor’s house. That's where she claimed her birthright: freedom and dignity.

God established human government, or so Christians believe, to deal with such matters. So policemen came and brought the full force of the law on Castro's head. Castro's neighbors might have hung him before sundown.  The due process of law produced the orderly sentence of 1,000 years without parole.

Castro didn't accept the sentence. He hung himself. Delighted to be a jailer, he would not adjust to being a prisoner. Relishing the sexual services of his prisoners, he found no delight offering those same services to his fellow inmates.  The controller refused to be controlled. And so, his fantasy being ended, and finding reality too difficult to bear, he gave himself the death penalty.

This story offers a lot of lessons.

Poverty is a prison. Some are born into it. They cannot imagine life outside it. The poor man's fellow prisoners watch the doors. They warn him when he checks the locks. They tell their friend there is no escape; that the world out there is cruel; that he must make the best of things inside this hell hole.

Ignorance is a prison.  Fellow prisoners guard the exits. They keep saying that it is impossible to escape. "Science is not for you," they say. "Art is a foolish toy for rich people. Questioning the meaning of life, or honestly evacuating the convictions held by people in this prison leads to nowhere. You are trapped. You must adjust."

Mindless religion is a prison. Jailers tell prisoners they must believe what they are told. When prisoners ask why, the jailers explain that what they teach is true just because it is.  They say that digging deeper is a terrible crime against God. In the religious prison, no one is allowed to examine the foundations of his faith. Discussion about such things only detracts the inmates from cleaning the prison and getting supper on the table. Pragmatic matters drive real questions away so the jailer can have some peace. The mind, which we are told is "a terrible thing to waste," becomes one's enemy.  

Imagine the joy of Castro's unfortunate prisoners had he occasionally allowed them to go to Wal-Mart. He might have done that had he been certain his prisoners would not try to escape. His prisoners would probably have been grateful. They might have even wept, or laughed, for joy. They would have likely come to love every aisle in the store. They would have come to know the name of every employee.  To them, Wal-Mart would have felt like the entire world. So Castro's prisoners might have filled their days at home anticipating another visit to Wal-Mart. They might have conversed endlessly about their last visit there. They might have said to one another, "surely this is what we have been longing for, this wonderful place of freedom and delight. This is the life well-lived! Who could ask for more?

However, if, by chance, some employee had realized that despite the women's joy, something was amiss --  had that employee decided to keep watching the women, visit after visit, he might have perhaps finally helped one of them escape. 

Her heart racing, she might have ran next door to Starbucks or to Toy's R Us. She might have plunged into a world much larger than Wal-Mart.

We think the prisoner would have just keep running on to freedom. However, studies on the effects of long confinement suggest otherwise. It is entirely likely she would be feel undone by this sudden awareness of all the opportunities and challenges of freedom. 

Unprepared for freedom, it is entirely possible that she would run back into her half-way house, back to that place where she has experienced the degree of freedom possible for her. She might even use her fearful experiences to warn her fellow prisoners – “life before Wal-Mart was truly horrendous. Now that we have Wal-Mart, lets just count our blessings. Let's not endanger the joy we have discovered by reaching for things we just can't understand."

It is even possible that this woman, having tasted for one brief moment the chaos of the outside world, would warn her children against looking for freedom. She would do this not because she would want her children to be slaves. She would do it because she fears for their safety. She loves them. She doesn't want them exposed to danger. Although her motivations are not malicious however, they are nonetheless damaging. She unwittingly becomes an accomplice in helping the jailer maintain control.

This is not an unlikely scenario, by the way. People within any given social system rarely bring themselves to question it. The more curious might work to enlarge it but they will rarely challenge its legitimacy. That is how social systems perpetrate themselves. That is how how they become viruses that influence the limits of our thought and courage.

This is the way poverty, ignorance and mindless religion turn into something like the invisible fences we use to shock our dogs into acceptance of the boundaries we impose on them for their own good. It’s why those robbed of dignity and delight by the systems in which they live accept and defend those systems. It is the reason we fight to preserve the structures of economy, political life and religious control that gives pleasure to the few at the expense of the many.

If Castro could have taken his prisoners to Wal-Mart, they might have never left. When people have nothing to lose, they eventually revolt. But if they have the smallest bit of joy – if they can only be allowed to enjoy their halfway house, even occasionally – they will eventually imprison themselves. They will even grieve when the season of halfway measures comes to an end. They may even lose sight of what freedom means.

Freedom can be scary. Although we hunger for it, we also spend a lot of energy avoiding it. And, we work hard keeping our loved ones from looking for it. 

So we can be thankful for that neighbor who didn’t fool around with halfway measures. When the prisoner knocked on her door, she called the cops. The cops didn't offer the prisoners a halfway house. They put an immediate end to Castor's hell. They set the prisoners free.

Sometimes, however delightful it seems at the time, our halfway house is a trap. We end up clinging to it our entire life. We never get to know what it would feel like to experience our own life. 

May God give us good neighbors, courageous cops and righteous judges. But even if we don't get those things, may He at least grant us the courage to think. 

A World Without Narritive

"We have entered a world without narrative."

That’s what  Douglas Rushkoff said in an interview about his book, Present Shock.

In all fairness, I haven't read the book. Since I know full well how people misunderstand an author when they comment on a something he says out of context, I won’t pretend to know all that Rushkoff meant by that sentence. It's probably a very good book. Lots of people think so.

All l I know is I find that sentence disturbing. In fact, when he said it, it brought tears to my eyes.

By ‘narrative,’ Rushkoff meant ‘an unfolding story.’ He means our way of thinking, writing, experiencing life and understanding the world. Narrative is a story, something we process from a beginning and keep moving toward an end. In between that beginning and that end is a plot. There are some characters, a few events, some emotion and an underlying meaning that gradually becomes clear.

Mr. Rushkoff’s believes the digital age has pushed us out of narrative and into an eternal present. In the digital world, the past collapses into the present and becomes one with it. One’s second grade friends magically reappear on Facebook along side of his college roommate, his third cousin, a work colleague from a previous job, and his old girl friend. All one has said, done, or reported to have ever said or done is now present, all at the same time. The times and places of one's life populate the same digital space, world without end.

So, we are in the eternal now. Time shall be no more.

Well, how can I argue with that? Rushkoff is indeed on to something real. And, its not so unpleasant after all. I rather like Facebook.

I have never, ever gotten used to modernity. I've hated the suburban, dislocated, purposeless, eternal migratory ways of modern homo economicus ever since I left home, years ago.

When I was a boy, my extended family – including my cousins, great-grandparents and distant relatives, were all within walking distance. The graves of our ancestors from the last two hundred years were either up on there on the hill, or a few miles further back in the mountains.

Then, life removed me from my village. That old way of life nearly disappeared for me. Oh, the village still there. Its just that most of the people I would like to see are not.  When I go there now, people don't know who I am. They mistake me for an aging gentleman walking slowly in front of their house looking longingly at a tree. They can't see the little boy who is looking for his old kinfolk.

But then, all of a sudden, the graves opened! The ghosts reassembled. Oh, they didn't come together out on the streets of Chesapeake. They gathered on Facebook! I look at their pictures, once closely guarded by a great-aunt in an old scrapbook but now available to everyone. All my relatives are just a click away. Should I wish to find them – and I sometimes do – they are ready to be found.

Oh the wonder of digital magic that erases time and space!

So this is ‘progress,’ a word that apparently means little more than ‘the next thing’ but which is all we have to describe the movement toward something good.

But wait a minute! How can I use a word like ‘progress’ if there is no narrative?

The concept of progress implies movement toward a goal – presumably a goal involving some sort of human improvement.  However, without a shared story, a narrative, the word ‘progress’ loses what little meaning it had.

Rushkoff said that we have been living within a shared narrative for at least a thousand years. But surely he downplays his point. Where has civilization of any kind ever existed without narrative?

I have had the pleasure of living in Stone Age communities. Those communities already exist in an eternal present. They accomplished this feat with technology no more complicated than machetes and fishing hooks. When the sun rises, they rise and eat a piece of bread. Some of them wonder off to fish. Others dig for yucca. Yet others hunt for tabor and wild boar. At the end of the day, some return with something to eat. Others don’t. The community pools the food found by the lucky ones and teases those who came back empty handed.

After eating, the old people these tell stories about their ancestors and spirits they have encountered in the woods. Young people tell dirty jokes. Adolescent boys brag about their hunting skills (And other kinds of skills) to adolescent girls. After a while, everyone wonders off to sleep. The next day they all get up and do it again, day in, day out.

It’s delightful too, this whole 'noble savage' thing, until you have an attack of appendicitis or need a root canal. Then a shaman shakes some bones over your belly while you drink something that helps you enter the spirit world. Hopefully, you will recover. If not, you will at least have a peaceful passing.

Every Civilization begins with something like: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep.  Then God said …” A first sentence starts things off. In this case, very clearly: "in the Beginning." You can't begin an eternal present. A beginning initiates a narrative.

Civilization develops because of sentences like this: “and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, neither shall they learn of war any more.” That is a projection of an ending. Wow. This story is headed somewhere --in this case, an end of war. That's heaven for some people; hell for others.

Those are Jewish and Christian sentences, of course. I could quote others. I could have said, “the Tao that is named is not the Tao,” but that is not the narrative in which I live.  That narrative creates another kind of story than the one in which I live. I can learn from it and I most certainly have, but I don't really feel it deep down in my bones. But if there is no narrative at all, then the Taoist story, or Buddhist one, or any other story isn’t much benefit to anyone either.

Art, science, love and hate, war and peace, family and vocation – all these are the products of narrative. Civilizations are products of narrative. Indeed, personhood itself is the product of narrative. My sense of identity is an unfolding story I have told to myself myself about myself. If there is no narrative, there is no self.

All the Buddhist out there say "amen."

So yes, when I get on Facebook, I recognize my baby pictures and all those other images of the self I once was. In some sense, that remains in me and with me. But a few things have happened since those days. I have been in an an unfolding narrative. I have experienced character development, if you will.

That's why, when my old childhood friends call me by my old childhood nickname, it jars me for a moment. I am not offended at them, certainly. I am just surprised. I realize that someone from my past does not recognize, and in some cases refuses to recognize, my present reality. They do not see my developed personhood. They want me to remain as I once was: frozen, undeveloped, and unformed.

So I deny one can experience an eternal now.  If one embraces a world without narrative, he is not choosing to live in an eternal present. He is returning to Genesis chapter one, to a world that is formless and void and in which darkness moves over the face of the deep.

That world, in which there is not yet a narrative to deliver it from the formlessness void, is without meaning. It is a world of eternal ADD in which one’s attention continually flutters from gnats to bees without offering sufficient motivation to investigate why these things differ, why they have such a strange anatomy, what is there their place in the cosmos, or what is their their relation to human life. In this formless void of the eternal present, there is no science, art, philosophy, or theology. There is nothing much more significant than the continual search for food, sex and sleep.

In short: a world without narrative is an uncivilized march. It is a world without form, without purpose, and without any compelling reason to live.

One might call it hell. That's what my narrative calls it anyway.

How Can We Be Sure Jesus Ever Lived?

I just picked up Reza Aslan’s book, Zealot.

It has been selling well and after hearing several young people comment on it, I decided to read it.

I began as I often begin a book, by scanning through it at the bookstore. Naturally, any commentary I offer on the book is premature and risky. Even so, I have a few thoughts about the spirit in which I will read the book as I get started.

First, I know already that we have next to no information about Jesus outside of two sources: tradition and scripture. Since the days of the Protestant reformation, many of us have had little regard for tradition. That has left us with a single source for our information: the Bible.

Unfortunately, it is extremely difficult to separate scripture from tradition.  Since Jesus didn’t write anything of his own, everything we believe about the life or words of Jesus came to us through someone else. The reason we have trusted the writers who told us about Jesus is because the Church said they were the most reliable witnesses about Jesus. However the Church didn’t do that for several centuries. When it did, it made its selection based on – guess what? – Tradition.

Fortunately, ancient people had a higher regard for tradition than we. 

In a letter to Timothy, St. Paul told his young student to “teach faithful people what you have learned and tell them to teach others.” So he was deliberately setting up a chain of tradition through which he could transmit stuff to us.

Copyists did their best to faithfully reproduce the text.

Christians kept repeating the sayings of Jesus and the Apostles in the weekly liturgy. In fact, for nearly fifteen hundred years, that was the way the vast majority of believers encountered the Bible.

So, once again, I insist that all believers know about Jesus came through the Church.  His words and the stories of his life were deliberately passed down to us from antiquity, century after century. This information made its way to us through a network of mentors and apprentices, generation after generation. At an early point in this process, disciples wrote down the most vital portion of that information. However, relatively few copies of that record existed for a long, long time. 

My point: By actively ridiculing tradition, theology and ecclesiastical structure – as many Evangelicals have been doing the past few decades – we have left ourselves without a sufficient reason to defend what we think about Jesus. After all, there are other views of Jesus that are themselves quite ancient.

Jews have an image of Jesus – not usually as disparaging as Christians have sometimes believed. Most Jewish scholars believe Jesus was much like other itinerant teachers in first century Palestine. For that reason, he offers Judaism a picture of and important era of their own history.

Muslims have an image of Jesus. They honor Jesus as a prophet. Some Sufis come very close to Christianity in their views about the Lord, though Islam forbids them to cross over into any confession of His deity.

Secular historians have an image of Jesus. Few of them now doubt that Jesus lived. They believe Jesus at least the central inspiration for the birth of Christianity. They know that Western Civilization is imposable to even study without trying to get to some explanation for the tenacity and passion the reported life and words of Jesus insired.

New Age practitioners have a picture of Jesus. They often like manuscripts about Jesus that the early church decided did not belong in the biblical canon. These sources often depict a Jesus who is more like a Hindu guru than a Jewish rabbi. Nonetheless, they get a lot of press nowadays as “books about Jesus that the Church suppressed.” (Not stopping to ask themselves evidently how those same books happened to get preserved in old monasteries and church libraries.

So, in view of all these alternative views of Jesus, what make us think that the picture of Jesus we formed by reading the words of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John and the other New Testament writers is the right one?

Indeed, how can we not be certain that Jesus even lived?  What makes us think that Jesus is not like King Arthur – a legend generously built around someone who probably once lived but whose existence we cannot prove?

Well, the unthinking believer may respond, “I believe it just because I do!” If that fails, he can shout louder and angrier. Of course, that won’t work in the end, even with our own Christian children.

There is a better response. Paul could already admit in his day, “we no longer know Christ after the flesh.” Nonetheless, he could add, “I have given to you that which I have received.”

The Apostle Peter on the other hand assured us that he and his fellow disciples had not “constructed cleverly devised fables” but were “an eyewitness of these things.”

Can we trust those ancient voices? Can we trust the people who copied the words of those early witnesses in a book? Can we trust the people who assembled their writing and declared the writing to be Holy Scripture? Can we trust the translators, without whom many of us would not be able to even read those writings? Can we trust the long process that brought these words from Jesus and His apostles to us through centuries of barbarism and illiteracy? And, for Evangelicals, do we have the right to trust this book we honor as the Word of God while denying the authority of those who assembled it?  

There were not very important questions for earlier times, even a generation or two ago. In the days when Christian people read their Bibles within a culture that was profoundly Christian, believers rarely thought to even inquire about the Bible’s foundation. Today however, no educated Christian can avoid such questions. At least they can’t do that without committing a type of intellectual suicide.

So we do ask the questions and quickly discover that these questions lead to old, old disputes about canon, creeds, and counsels and, above all, about The Church.

We don’t usually like those questions. Increasingly, Christians like to say that they love Jesus but dislike religion. As it turns out though, there is no way to know who Jesus even was without the structures of religion. If we reject the means though which we first heard and believed about Jesus, we will discover we are left with a confusing smorgasbord of images of Jesus, none of them more compelling or authentic than the other.

I look forward to reading this book, and I may say more after I do. Everyone reads any book through a set of lens. If we are going to honestly share our opinions about an author's words, we ought to first declare the opinions through which we read them.