What Ender's Game Teaches Us About Orientation

The word orientation was originally a Christian architectural term. Christian churches were designed so that the altar would face east, that is to say, toward the orient. (That's why old churches often appear oddly angled when contrasted with the buildings around them. They seem out of step with their surroundings because they are aligned with Jerusalem -- oriented.)

We have come to apply the concept much more generally, and use the word orientation to describe the central interest of a given individual or community. Thus, an individual or community's orientation can be nearly anything. It doesn't have to be a geographical location.  It can even be an event or a period of time.

As I was watching Ender's Game, it came to me with some force that developing a future orientation is critical for any person or group expecting to survive into the future.

Recent studies suggest that children who enjoy science fiction often develop a passion for science, or at least become technologically creative. Having learned to find delight in an imagined future, they began moving themselves toward that future. We get things like iPads as a result. 

In contrast, an orientation toward the past produces a traditionalist, a person who feels ill at ease with the present and who dreads the future because future can only represent a further deterioration of his or her ideal past world.

Of course, everyone who honors tradition is not a traditionalist. Some people thinks of me as a traditionalist because I treasure tradition. Also, my first degree was in history. However. for me, history is not an ideal world. It merely gives me valuable information about how civilization emerged and developed. Its also teaches me valuable lessons about how society works.

Another important reason we study history is so each generation won't have to start over. 

Young mathematicians study Euclid and Leibniz so they can go on to develop their discipline. However brilliant, young mathematicians they won't get very far if they spend their lives discovering principles already discovered centuries ago. They honor the past by expanding on the lessons of those who lived in the past. They don't label Einstein as irreverent because he moved beyond the knowledge he learned from the likes of Euclid. Einstein knew he would not have made his discoveries without the contributions of people like Euclid. Einstein didn't suppose that living in Euclid's world was the right way to honor him. Young mathematicians study Einstein in the same spirit. 

The same holds true for any discipline, including theology, incidentally.  

The past provides a base, a foundation. However, it is the future that provides the inspiration, the motivating power that pulls individuals toward new understandings of the world. Setting up conflict between history and the future is thus a most foolish and destructive tendency.

That is what Americans have been doing politically, in my opinion. When conservatives grow hostile to the idea of progress and the notion of the common good, and progressives become hostile to tradition and the notion of the private good, we end up losing both history and the future. We become fools, wallowing in our self-righteous sense of ideological entitlement, without either sufficient wisdom from the past or an adequate vision of the future to keep making sense of the world.  

Fortunately, there is a way out of this impending cultural lobotomy. It is a third way, a way that honors tradition without making us into slaves of the past and honors the future without making us addicted to endless novelties unhinged from any context or meaning.

In The Beginning of Wisdom, Leon Kass describes this third way far better than I can. He tells us how the ancient Hebrews founded a culture around their confidence in a teleological universe. That simply means that they saw history as a continual movement toward some good and purposeful future. Like all ancient cultures (and unlike our own) the ancient Hebrews honored their past. However, they focused even more on their promised future and on the duty of parents and community leaders to prepare the next generations to walk into that future. Armed with their deep awareness (and acceptance) of individual mortality, Jews prepared and blessed their offspring to move forward in time toward ever greater understandings of the world. 

Christianity inherited this Hebrew belief. Ours is thus a prophetic faith. It assumes that time is not the result of some past event from which we have been moving into ever greater dysfunction; it is the result of a future event toward which providence has been pulling us into greater levels of understanding and blessing.

God is not in the past then, waving sorrowfully as we helplessly descend into ever greater kinds of evil. He is in the future, waiting for us to grow into full personhood and fulfill the completed creatures he envisioned as one day fully embodying His own image and likeness.

God is also in the present, giving us understanding of the revelations of about the past and hinting about what awaits us in the future. 

These are the implications of what is often called an ancient/future faith. It views Christian orthodoxy as a foundation upon which one builds and matures rather than as a prison from which one transcends at his own peril. Faith is thus a compass more than a map; a formation of character and intellect more than a rule book to hammer us into conformity with the past or uniformity with our peers. It is a prophetic call that assumes that moving into the future is the best way to honor the past.

To use biblical language, after the pillar of fire shifts and moves, it becomes a sin to remain in our old camping place. Canaan is before us, not behind us. Although we honor the dead, we are not obligated to remain with them so we can perpetually venerate their remains. We carry their bones with us as we proceed with them to Beulah. As  the writer of Hebrews puts it, "so they without us will not be made perfect."

We are an oriented people. However, that does not mean we are stationary. We were created to transcend all that we should continue to honor. We are called to love the earth as we keep heading for the stars.

Spiritual Intelligence

When Steve got home from church, he found his dad lying on the floor gasping his last breath. Someone had beaten his father to death. A week later, the police arrested Steve’s mother. She had hired the hit man who killed his father.

Steve’s mom was then sentenced to die in the electric chair. He had lost both of his parents in the same week.

Steve was only twelve.

He went on with his life, trying to forget.  For twenty-three years, he didn’t write or visit his mother. Then, one day, a church worker told him that his mother had been attending a bible study in prison. Steve should go see her, the man suggested.

For over a year, Steve walked through the greatest spiritual struggle of his life. The scripture says to forgive. But how could he forgive this betrayal of everything a child should to be able to count on?

To make a long story short, Steve finally reconciled with his mother and, her sentence was eventually commuted. You can read the entire story in Steve’s book which friends and church leaders finally convinced him to write.

I know this story because Steve, his wife and his mother were all in our church last Sunday.

What I want to share here is how their story affected me.

The preparation of my heart to hear Steve’s story began the Wednesday night before, in our weekly Bible class.

We had been discussing the third chapter of St. Paul’s letter to the Colossians when Mike Garner, a retired missionary and doctor of theology, made a comment. Didn't Paul’s instructions in this chapter constitute a form of “spiritual intelligence?"

Sometimes, a new label can utterly reshuffle one’s thoughts. That’s what happened to me. Mike’s comment led me to recall something I studied in graduate school, the theory of ‘multiple intelligence.’

Dr. Howard Gardner came up with the idea in 1983. In some ways, it was a just common sense observation. Common sense isn’t really that common however, so Dr. Gardner gets the credit for something we should have recognized all along.

In brief, Gardner said that the IQ test, which educators had used to categorize children and offer vocational counseling, was too limited.  As it turns out, what we have called IQ describes only a certain type of intelligence, namely the ability to process abstract ideas. However, very successful people often have rather ordinary IQs. And, some people with very high IQ sometimes fail to make much of a mark in the world.

Dr. Gardner said that educators should broaden their assessment of intelligence to include things like relational, visual–spatial, musical, linguistic, and other types of skill sets.

Gardner never mentioned “spiritual intelligence” though. What could that even mean? Would it not mea the ability to recognize and move toward those things that encourage heath for the soul and to recognize and move way from those things that create dysfunction and illness in the soul?

Was that what Paul was teaching?

There are times when a fresh idea can reshuffle one’s thoughts. That’s what happened when I heard Mike’s remark.

St. Paul was a rabbi. He studied and taught Torah, a word we often translate as ‘law,’ but which many Jewish scholars say would be better understood as ‘instruction.’  Studying Torah forms one’s attitudes, habits and behaviors. These, in turn, form all aspects of one’s relationships and vocation. Studying Torah therefore involves far more than merely learning abstract concepts. Torah is a deliberate and conscious formation of one’s entire being.  That is the essence of Jewish spirituality.

As Jews have often proved, this living relationship with scripture develops one’s mind in a unique and extremely productive way. Because of that relationship, Jews routinely distinguish themselves in the arts, the sciences and by displaying a financial acumen at percentages far beyond what their population would otherwise suggest.

So the formation of spiritual intelligence involves the intellect, surely. However, from a scriptural standpoint, it involves far more. It requires real interaction with others – sometimes it even involves passionate disagreement that pushes the limits of our relationships until they stretch but not until they break. It requires us to develop the ability to question the very text we study.  For example, Job bluntly asks whether it is possible for a dead person to live again or whether it is true that God rewards good people and punishes bad people.  Abraham, dismayed that God would destroy an entire city cries out - “won’t the Great Judge of the whole earth do what is right?” Scary questioning is part of the process.

Questioning the text, questioning others, and questioning ourselves push us past familiar boundaries and comforting conformities.  It moves us beyond our childhood certainties into an adult world, filled with nuance, paradox, mystery and difference.

Sometimes, Christian communities suppress this process. Professing fidelity to scripture, they actually obstruct the purpose of scripture. Robbed of its treasure of metaphor, poetry, simile, play–on-words, hyperbole, humor, playful allusions to other parts of the text, and other aspects of its unspeakable literary power, the Bible becomes a dead book, filled with concrete rules.

Jesus and Paul warned us of that danger. “Since you think eternal life comes from the scriptures, go ahead and search through them,” Jesus said. “ You will discover however, that they are pointing to me.” We don’t worship a dead letter,” Paul says, “We worship the living God.”

The Colossians passage tells us to take off our old life, like some out-of-fashioned clothes. We must stop using filthy language, stop lying, give up our wrath, and, as the New Testament tells us again and again, we must forgive those who offend us.

Then, Paul adds, must put on love, kindness, and the ability to endure difficult things. We can learn all these things by studying scripture and by singing hymns and praise choruses, he says. However, we must also actually start practicing what we have learned in everyday life.

That sounds like spiritual intelligence to me.

I was thinking about all of that Sunday as Steve Owens told his story. Then he asked his mother to come and stand with him. All of these thoughts suddenly coalesced.

I suppose the best way I can explain what I felt is to recall what the Apostle John said about Jesus, about how our Lord was “the Word In-fleshed.”  There are times when scripture is no longer a book; when it becomes a living, pulsating, thing; something we must either accept or reject.  God gives us the Book so we will recognize the Living Word when it appears before us in everyday life.

“Search the scriptures,” Jesus says, “you will see they testify of me.

In other words, the Bible is God’s outstretched finger. It is not meant to draw attention to itself. It is meant to direct our attention to the Source and Preserver of Life.

St. Paul says when that happens, we become like living bibles in the world, and known and read by everyone we meet. 

Steve and his family were that for me this Sunday. Their lives have embodied redemption, the path to transformation, and a God who is not willing that any should perish.

Dr. Howard Gardner failed to recognize the reality of spiritual intelligence. However, for a believer, it is the indispensable core of all other forms of human growth and maturity. Indeed, it effectively leads our soul through this word and then, ultimately, beyond it.

 

It is the sort of intelligence that survives all things. It is the pearl of great price. It is the thing for which a wise person will give up everything, including his own life if necessary, to obtain it. 

When you see it in the real world it is like listening to the greatest symphony you have ever heard, reading the greatest book you have every read and eating the best food you have ever eaten. You know immediately that it is the way to life and that whatever else you do or fail to do, you must walk that path all the way home.

Be Calm In Thy Soul

Pastors don’t have a fast track to holiness. We deal with everyday issues like everyone else. We have bills to pay, family issues to resolve, and personal faults to overcome. Even the issues of church work is rarely more 'spiritual' than things corporate leaders face in other lines of work.

Pastors have a product. They lead an organization. They manage assets.  They make personnel decisions. They find ways to fix leaky roofs.

Sometimes, they also find time to pray or to study scripture.

In today’s world, congregations rarely evaluate a pastor on the basis of his spiritual life or knowledge of scripture. Congregants tend to evaluate pastors, and pastors tend to evaluate himself, on how well he achieves the sorts of things all corporate leaders work to achieve – a greater market share, a healthier organization, and, above all, happy shareholder’s.

The problem is, the Church rarely acknowledge this. It seeks its future leaders among those interested in spiritual life; among those who love to study and to communicate the Word of God. So, people interested in such things are the ones who respond. They prepare themselves for do the work they believe the church has asked them do. They often end up feeling betrayed by the reality of church work, which may draw very little on the skills and knowledge they have brought to the table.

So contemporary church work can be stressful.  Church leaders get stressed because they offer something different than what many of their congregants seem to really want. Congregants get stressed when they believe their spiritual leaders are disconnected from ‘the real world.’

Like many pastors, I have tried to learn about good business practices and healthy organizational systems. I have tried to put people into place with such skills and experience. I try to give them the freedom they need to do their work on behalf of our church. I have tried to stay aware of the cultural, technological and demographic realities of the world. At the end of the day though, I always drift back to the things that attracted me to this work in the first place: biblical studies and spiritual life. I am especially interested in how these things actually affect the real lives of real individuals, including me.  

Christianity promises, indeed proscribes transformation. Unfortunately, Christians neither agree what transformation looks like nor how it is supposed to occur. Most of us believe that scripture and spiritual life are somehow involved but we are not sure how exactly.

We all agree that Christ has somehow made transformation possible and that the ultimate effects of transformation will occur sometime in the future “when all things are fulfilled.” We also agree that elements of our ultimate transformation ought to become visible in this life. When we think we witness these elements emerge in some individual, we call that person a “saint.”

The problem is we don’t often see the sort of radical transformation that would cause unbelievers to think that perhaps supernatural power was at work. Actually, we sometimes must admit that the evidence seems to point in the other direction.

I live in one of the most self-professing Christian areas of the world – the American South – that, like all places, has many delightful characteristics. The South also has a shadow side, which many of its citizens refuse to acknowledge. Our levels of education, health, and communal infrastructure are abysmal, at least by the standards of modern industrial nations. As one moves into our Appalachian mountain areas, the situation becomes dire. That stressed me out.

There is a disconnect, or so it seems to me, between the promises our faith makes and the actual conditions of our faith-soaked region of the country. If our leaders and citizens did not so loudly and conspicuously invoke their faith when discussing moral and social issues, this disconnect might not feel so obvious. However, people pray in public here and do their Bible studies as Starbucks – which I appreciate, by the way – without seeming to notice the growing disparity, even among Christians, of financial well-being, education and access to basic health services. 

Perhaps then, I tell myself, we should expect individual rather than communal transformation. Unfortunately, the results are mixed here as well. I know several people in our own church who have saintly characteristics. Then there are others, after years of claiming Christian faith, are still a constant source of discontent, chaos and pain. Then there are the masses of people, neither rascals nor saints, who just live life.

Despite these challenges, I remain convinced that personal transformation in Christ is central to our faith. If there is no discernable transformation in those who follow the teachings of Christ, I think we have little to offer the contemporary world. In that case, wee have no other proof that we are following much more than “cleverly devised fables” without the evidence of a changed life. And that stresses me out.

Fairy tales delight but they do not transform. We enjoy them and move on into the real world, where we earn a living. What we do for entertainment and use to escape from the real world are different than we do to affect change in the actual, material world. If  what we are doing in church work is offering an escape from the real world rather than helping people function effectively in it, then our job is no more complicated that discovering what people want and offering a more exciting version of that to them than our competitors.

I, for one can’t live with that. If Christianity has nothing real to offer other than offering fun music and a delightful pep talk to help people get through the workweek, then we should say so. Then, those of us that can stomach managing people who need that sort of crutch can keep on doing what we do.

Ok. That is professional background against which I live out my faith. Yours may look different, but I guarantee you too experience some pressure between faith and professional life. Figuring out how that pressure helps (as well as hinders) your spiritual journey is a vital part of how we develop as Christians and as human beings.

I think the first thing, for me anyway, is lowering the self-imposed pressure. We can deal with the pressures others try to impose on us if we can only learn how to deal with the pressures we place on ourselves.

William Longstaff, in the hymn Take Time to Be Holy, calls us to BE CALM IN THY SOUL. That seems like the first order of business. We must become claim in our soul.  Continual stress, even stress supposedly caused by spiritual life, is not healthy.

After I quoted Longstaff’s lyrics in a sermon, one of our board members offered some observations. Joe Cook is his name and he exhibits some of the godly characteristics I have written about here. Joe is a venture capitalist who strategically aims a lot of money at diabetes.  In fact, Joe is at war with diabetes and like all good worriers, he has learned a lot about his enemy.

“The prolonged release of cortisol kills us,” he said. “It causes all kind of havoc to our body and our mind. We must learn how to calm ourselves.” 

Could is be that the way church leaders ought to respond to the chaos and havoc of contemporary life? Should we not learn to “be calm in our souls?” In the midst of a culture – including a church culture -- that honors the hyperactive, the extroverted showboat, the over-the-top passionate performer – what if a Christian leader is simply someone who is at peace with God and with himself? What if our objective is neither success or failure but is simply an awareness of ourselves as individuals holding a temporary position of responsibility? What if our ‘main product’ is simply the peace that passes understanding? I mean that would be something amazing in today’s world!

Contemporary church work forces me to confront a lot of questions about things I didn’t questioned before. The behaviors of some Christians have done more to unsettle my faith than any thing I faced during my many years of study in secular schools. As a result, I have ceased being a knower. I have become a seeker.

As a seeker, I have come to realize there are questions we will never settle in this life. There are aims we will never reach. We will not only fail to reach some of our past dreams and ambitions but will come to find many of those past dreams and ambitions empty and silly.

In this life, we will always see in part and know in part. Here, we have only this: a Divine presence that haunts the world and comes to those who continually invite Him. If allowed, he will step into the raging seas of our heart, and he will whisper; “shhh, peace, calm, rest.”

Or, in Longstaff’s words:

“Take time to be holy; the world rushes on.

Spend much time in secret with Jesus alone.

By looking to Jesus, like him thou shall be;

They friends in thy conduct, his likeness shall see.”