Welcome to Groundhog Day

"We have entered a world without narrative."

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

In all fairness, I have not read it. Since people often misunderstand authors when they read a single sentence or concept out of context, I won’t pretend to know all he meant by that shocking phrase.

All I know is I found it. In fact, it brought tears to my eyes and a flash of grief to my heart.

By ‘narrative,’ Rushkoff means ‘an unfolding story.’ He means our historical way of thinking, writing, experiencing life and understanding the world. Narrative is a story. It has a beginning and an end. In between there is a plot, some characters, a few events, and various emotions.

Mr. Rushkoff says that the digital world is an eternal present. The past collapses into the present so that it is no longer even the past. Nor is there any sequence. One’s second grade friends magically reappear along side of one’s college roommate, his third cousins, work colleagues from previous jobs, and the in-laws of his in-laws. These all populate the same digital space as his present acquaintances, world without end. One's past self and present self merge into a single undifferentiated collage of images and eras. 

A world without narrative is the eternal now, and time shall be no more.

Well, how can one argue? Rushkoff is describing a new reality that is not so unpleasant. I, for one, rather like Facebook.

And, the digital world is indeed magical. 

When I was a boy, my family – including my cousins, great-grandparents and more distant relatives, were all within walking distance. The graves of our common ancestors from the last two hundred years were either up on the hill or a few miles up the mountain where even older graces were located.

My life’s journey took me away me from that village. For awhile, it disappeared as a living reality. Oh, still exists and I love to visit it.  It’s just that most of the voices I hear in my head as I walk its streets  are long gone. Few of the village’s present inhabitants even know this aging gentleman who walks so slowly in front of their house and keeps staring at an old apple tree.

But then, all of a sudden, the graves open! The ghosts reassemble, not on the streets of Chesapeake but on Facebook. I see images,  once closely guarded by a great-aunt in an old scrapbook but now available to everyone. Not only that. The descendants of these old relatives are just a few clicks away. Should I want to find them – and sometimes I do – they are close once more, thanks to the wonder of digital magic.

This is wonderful. It may even be ‘progress.’ That word, which means little more than ‘the next thing’ is what we have used to describe wonders like our new digital community. If progress means anything at all then surely the Internet represents progress. 

But wait a minute! 

Can I use a word like ‘progress’ in a world without narrative?

The word progress implies movement toward a goal – presumably a goal of some sort of human improvement.  However, without a shared story, or 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 the point. Where has civilization ever existed without narrative?

I have had the pleasure of living in Stone Age communities for extended periods of time. Those who lived in them already exist in an eternal present, a feat they accomplish without technology any more complicated than machetes. When the sun rises, they 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 the lucky ones found.  It teases those who came back empty handed.

After eating, old people tell stories about ancestors and spirits that appear in their dreams.

Young people tell dirty jokes. Adolescent boys brag about their hunting skills to adolescent girls. After a while, the people all wonder off to find a place to sleep. The next day they get up and do all of this again.

It’s delightful until you have an appendicitis attack or need a root canal. Then you have to call a shaman to shake some bones over your belly and hope for the best.

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 …”

Civilization continually develops because of sentences like this: “and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, neither shall they learn of war any more.”

Those are Jewish and Christian sentences, of course. I might have used “the Tao that is named is not the eternal Tao,” but that is not my accustomed narrative.  That narrative creates another kind of community than mine. I can learn a lot from studying other narratives, but if there is no narrative, that one isn’t of much benefit.

Art, science, love and hate, war and peace, family and vocation – all these are the products of narrative. Indeed, personhood itself, which is the unfolding story I tell to myself about myself is the product of narrative.

So yes, I recognize my baby pictures and all the other images of the self I once was. In some sense, that self remains in me and with me. But a few things have happened since then. There has been an unfolding story since my beginning. I have had some character development, if you will.

When my old childhood friends call me by an old childhood nickname, it jars me for a moment. I am not offended, certainly. I am just surprised when someone from my past does not recognize, and in some cases refuse to recognize, my present reality or my developed personhood. They see me as I once was, frozen in time, undeveloped, unformed.

So I deny that one can experience an eternal now.  If one embraces a world without narrative, he is not living in an eternal present. He is just returning to Genesis 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 no narrative, is without meaning. It is a world of eternal ADD in which one’s attention continually flitters from gnats to bees without sufficient reason to investigate their strange anatomy, their place in the cosmos, or their relation to human life. There is no science, art, philosophy, or theology in a world without narrative. There is not anything much more significant than a continual search for food, sex and sleep.

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

One might call it hell. Or, to borrow from Bill Murray's narrative, we could call it Groundhog Day!

A Conservative, a Liberal, and a Libertarian Walked into a Bar

You already know this is a joke and that it will not end well!

      For one thing, Conservatives, liberals and libertarians don’t go to the same bar. Heck, they don’t even live in the same zip codes. If they did meet in a bar and would decide to actually speak to one another though, they would soon discover they speak different languages.

     So their conversation would soon descend into a black hole. They might keep talking but their words would no longer connect with anything.  

            Its like that old joke about a ball player named Who. Every time the announcer informs the audience that “Who is on first base,” his listeners think he is asking a question: “who is on first base?”

            If the audience doesn’t understand that the first baseman is from another country, they won’t know what the sports announcer is saying. If they are close enough to actually speak with that announcer, they will tell him they don’t know who is on first base. But the announcer will simply repeat what he said the first time, perhaps with a touch of frustration, “Who is on first base!”

Once again his listeners will repeat that they don’t know who is on first base. And so on.

It doesn’t take too much of that kind of misunderstanding to bring people to tears or blows. At very least, they will each walk away thinking the other is not quite right, that he perhaps took too many drugs in college or something.

            This is why Aristotle said the first step of a productive conversation is to define our terms.

            The conservative, liberal and libertarian might begin their conversation by asking one another to define “liberty,” “government,” and “common good,” for example.

The same process might help Catholic, Protestants and Orthodox Christians.

            As in political discussions, most arguments about theology and scripture would end before they began if each party would simply stop to define their terms.

            Understanding another's point of view requires getting under the hood of the different way we use language. Undoubtedly, a conservative, liberal and libertarian have real differences. But some of these apparent differences are really about language, not about actual concepts. Once we discover the different ways we use language, examining our other differences can actually be interesting. Sometime, we even learn something by examining a different perspective.

            This works for movies and books too. Once we identify the core principal of a work we can profit from spending time with it. 

When we read a book -- including the bible, by the way -- none of us just read what's there. Before we open the pages of a book, we have already been shaped by the opinions of our family, friends and culture.  Meanwhile, our neighbor, opening the very same book, has already been shaped in a different way. This means we may each read the same book through entirely different grids. Trying to converse about what we have read without understanding the nature of the different grids we read it through dooms most conversations.  

           We end up shouting, “you idiot – WHO IS ON FIRST BASE?????”

And our opponent storms out of the room, mumbling about our mother’s ancestry.   

            So if a conservative, liberal and libertarian actually do decide to converse about something, perhaps national security VS individual rights, they better stop for a moment to define their terms.

            And for God’s sake they must not drink.

            Someone will get hurt.

            It may be poor Mr. Who who was just innocently hanging out on first base. 

            

What If There Are No Miracles?

One of the things I most appreciate about my Pentecostal heritage is the way it teaches people to expect supernatural intervention. Pentecostals are open to the possibility of miracles; to dramatic divine intervention that brings deliverance, provision and guidance to God’s people.

One of the things I like least about my Pentecostal heritage is the way it teaches people to rely upon such supernatural intervention. For while it is healthy to expect a miracle, reliance upon miracles, especially in matters that call for the exercise of human responsibility, is a type of spiritual sloth.

The Old Testament celebrates a God who intervenes. It tells us that Jehovah pierces through the everyday orderly processes of nature to perform acts of deliverance, guidance and sustenance. However, that is not all the Old Testament has to say about spiritual life. Proverbs teach God’s people to cultivate character, and includes instructions about planning, budgeting, negotiating and so forth. Ecclesiastes and Job teach God’s people how to deepen their understanding of God by wrestling with apparent inconsistencies of spiritual life. We learn from those books that challenges to faith are not to be avoided, as though such struggles were hostile to faith, but should be embraced because struggle with faith is the way healthy faith develops. 

Then, there is the Book of Esther.

Esther doesn’t mention God. God doesn’t even seem to be present. The Jews are in real trouble. Nonetheless, no manna rains down from heaven. No Captain of the Lord’s Armies appears to defend them. They are, apparently, left on their own.

This lack of piety upsets some Christians and for that reason they dislike Esther. 

Too bad.

Esther is a canonical book. When a Christian doesn’t like part of the canon, it says more about him than about the book in question. Besides, it’s a bad habit to read the books of the Bible as though they were not parts of a greater context. The canon is the Word of God. The books within the canon are the Word of God because they are a part of that overall witness. It's like members of a corporate board; although a board has great authority within an organization, it's individual members do not. What they have is influence on the whole. It is the authority of the whole that gives weight to the parts. 

That is my two cents worth about canon, inspiration and all of that!

Anyway, Esther introduces a new idea to Gods people about miracles. It informs us that miracles are not always, or usually, earthshaking. They are not usually paradigm-altering events like walking on water. Esther introduces us to the miracle of providence; the idea that God works through His creation subtly, oozing through nature's pores, to subtly guide, provide and deliver His people. 

Reaping the bounty of providence requires believers to discern where God may be at work. Then they must join God in that work. The idea of providence assumes that God wants us to mature; that although we will always remain God’s children, there a time we should grow up.

The apostle James teaches that maturity requires an engagement with grace through a process James calls synergei in Greek and which Jerome rendered cooperateur in Latin. Neither word requires translation because both are so close to English. We all know what synergy is, or cooperation.

However, even if we are willing to bring our thoughts, talents, attitudes and actions into synergistic alignment with God’s purpose and work in the world, as James seems to teach, how do we know where God is? That is what we learn in the Book of Esther. 

We often stumble into it, by reflecting with others on the matters at hand and how we should respond as believers. There may be no bolt of lightening, or a disembodied voice telling us what to do. If that occurs, what believer won’t obey? In the meantime, we must grow in wisdom and in in community with others to figure it all out.

We must become aware of providence.

Providence was once an extremely important word in the Christian vocabulary. The founders of our Republic peppered their documents with it. They used it to name their daughters and towns. They assumed the presence of God in the mundane and everyday, and tried to train their minds and hearts to discern what God was up to so they could join in.

All farmers believe in providence. They seek only miracles when there is no rain.  Otherwise, they plow, seed the ground, hoe the weeds, and harvest the crops. They cooperate with creation, which God has made but which human hands must prepare.

The Book of Esther assumes the presence of God at work in fallible human beings. There is no Moses or Elijah in Esther. There is only a beautiful woman who has won a dancing contest. The hero, if there is one, is Mordecai, the prom queen’s uncle, who offers an intuition. “What if you won this contest because providence prepared you to be an undercover agent, an influence, a person with just enough significance to tip the scales one way instead of the other?”

Ether subtly teaches us that God is often subtle and prods us to pick up hints about what He is up to.  

Without this portion of the Biblical witness, we might be left believing that believers never need to study, mature, develop, process, plan, cooperate with others, reflect, discern or grow up. It would be virtuous to remain children, “tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine.” We would insist on remaining in that season of life where “I thought as a child and spoke as a child,” and refuse to “become a man and put away childish things.”

Just so you know, I believe in miracles. I anticipate signs and wonders and often see them. In that sense, I am not a modern Western man. I am a throwback, a primitive, and perhaps even superstitious. I have dreams I believe contain messages from God. Al sorts of mystical hair-raising things occur in my life.

However, two things cause me to hold to all of that very lightly.

First, my personal judgment about such things is terribly unreliable.  To come to the right conclusion about supernatural things requires discernment with others, and most of all with scripture, which is in the apostle Peter’s words, “a more sure word of prophesy.”

Secondly, huge parts of scripture inform me that God created the world as He wished. He doesn’t lightly interfere with the order He purposefully imposed upon it. Instead, He calls us to learn from his creation and to cooperate with it so we will grow up. He won’t create a unicorn on Main Street, even if I ask Him to do to impress the heathen that I am His child.

Once you get into it, you see that Book of Esther actually contains a very great miracle. A beauty queen becomes a courageous and wise leader who delivers her people from the work of evil. Not bad. Not bad at all. It’s something that could conceivably happen to you, and to me; even if we are not a Moses or an Elijah.

So chalk one up for providence, that subtle and sneaky way by which our Almighty Father teaches us to become his eternal friends and coworkers.