I've been reading Tale of Two Cities recently, and while I think I will prefer Great Expectations by the time I've finished, the struggles of Charles Darnay and Sydney Carton are beautifully realized. Likewise, choose a random painting by Thomas Kinkade, undoubtedly a scene with some combination of cabin, woods, sun, stars, flowers, snow, and hearthy blaze emanating from windows (perhaps all at once), and I find myself admitting that the piece does demonstrate capability in its technical execution. So what makes the difference between the greatest English novelist of the 19th century, and the most popular living artist of the 20th/21st centuries? In other words, why should we forgive the sentimentality of Dickens but not of Kinkade? In a word: sin.
One interesting feature of Dickens's books is his constant reference to Christianity; though it's typically simplified into a moral system from the complex religion it truly is, Christian values are the driving force behind most of Dickens's heroic characters. Though my brief research into his actual religious values makes him more likely a universalist than an honest Christian, his core values seem clearly and solidly rooted in the New Testament. Kinkade, on the other hand, is a self-professing Christian who apparently had the good taste to give each of his four daughters the middle name "Christian", and who has referred to his work at times past as painting "the world without the Fall". For comparison purposes, then, Dickens is a lousy Christian who produces great Christian art, while Kinkade is a professedly serious one who produces kitsch.
Kinkade is perhaps the easier to assess. His paintings are instantly recognizable; all one has to do to describe the bulk of his oeuvre is to throw a random collection of bucolic, down-home-y elements on a canvas that may or may not make sense in the frame together. This produces paintings which are often difficult to describe in normal ways. Look at one of his paintings and ask yourself what time of day is represented. Easy, it's daytime, because there's Mr. Sun, smiling down on the cottage that has... light pouring out of its windows to the extent that it completely obscures the scene inside? Either the woodsman's house is on fire, or Kinkade is in love with a good "hearthy glow". Then ask yourself what season is represented. Aha! That's an easy one; the forest is drenched in snow. Yes, but there are also flowers in the windowboxes and deciduous trees with leaves nearby. I could go on, but this painting speaks for itself. Try to understand what's going on without reading the commentary beneath it. Good luck.
Ranting aside, I want to make it clear that I have no theoretical problem with his subject material; fantasy settings intrigue me: castles in the distance, mountainous landscapes with roads winding up their sides, cliffs with the sun setting behind them. Scenes like these can evoke powerful feelings and encourage the imagination. If I contrast Kinkade with someone like Allen Lee, who created art for The Lord of the Rings that has become almost canonical, I find their compositions superficially similar, yet Lee's are compelling and Kinkade's are flat, Lee's alive and Kikade's dead. The primary difference I can see is that Lee paints the dark side of the story, not just the happy ending. Lee paints the mountains and the cottages, but he also paints the monsters and the danger. With Kinkade, happiness is all that is ever on display, and as a result, his art feels handicapped; catharsis isn't cathartic if it isn't preceded by distress.
Looking at his art from its stated objective, to "paint a world without the fall", I'm left wondering if this goal is inherently flawed, or if Kinkade is simply a poor example of it. For reference, I turn immediately to Perelandra, a book which does effectively the same thing, but with far greater effect. Lewis tells the story of a man who travels to Venus to find it unfallen. It's an alien world, all rolling seas and floating islands, but what makes it truly different from Earth is the native woman's lack of corruption. She sees her world simply; the categories of "good" and "bad" don't seem to exist for her. She does what God tells her to do, and she lives a happy life. And if this were the entire story, it would likely be as boring as anything Kinkade has produced. Luckily, it's not; Ransom brings the devil with him, and the story follows Ransom's struggle against him to keep Perelandra unfallen. While the native woman remains sinless, and thus the happy ending does in some sense pervade the entirety of the work, there is the threat of a Fall throughout the story, and thus there is resolution and catharsis. Essentially, the threat of sin is enough to give the story weight, but I do think its complete absence would do harm to Lewis's work.
Turning to Dickens, we find another artist that many would consider sentimental. Dickens created characters that at times approach caricatures. There's Wemmick, with his post-office-slot mouth, who slowly transforms the further he gets from work, until he arrives at his home, which has a drawbridge and battlements from which he ritually fires a cannon at certain intervals. There's Scrooge, a grasping miser whose physical manifestation seems to be an outpouring of his inner self, and who moves from being the meanest, most selfish man in London to being everyone's Grampa, literally overnight. Dickens's characters, some more colorful than others, can at times seem one-note, as if they were created to fill a role in the story, and all of their personal details chosen to suit. But then there's also Pip, the young boy who seems reasonable and fair in his dealings with others, but who comes to the end of his story and finally realizes his selfishness. He spends the rest of his life correcting his mistakes, and he never gets what he wants; I dare say he's the better for it. Then there's Sydney Carton, the man with a brain that seems capable of anything, even building a legal case while drunk out of his mind; the man who saves people's lives for no reason he can discern, except that doing so means he wins; the man who makes other people's lives dramatically better, though he's unable to care for his own in the same way. This man speaks and acts with nuance, and when life is on the line he acts the man and finds heroism few might have seen beforehand.
This brings me to my point: Pip and Carton are both good characters because they sin but eventually realize it. The ends of their stories are wonderful and heart-wrenching because they've lived, and life includes a substantial dose of sin. They aren't better because they've sinned, but because they recognize their sin. Dickens could have written both worlds without sin, I suppose, but then there would be no story, and no proper ending. Kinkade's art lacks the contextualizing struggle; it's the happiness that goes forward and backward and has no contrast, and thus is meaningless.
Perhaps what makes a happy ending happy is that it comes at the end of a long struggle; without the struggle, it's neither an ending, nor is it truly happy. And what is a struggle without sin, or at least the potential for it?
Saturday, August 28, 2010
Note to Future Self:
If ever you find yourself in the process of designing a vessel for the purpose of exploring the dark, vast reaches of endless space, promise me you'll do two things.
First, install a metric crapload of emergency lighting; enough to illuminate every square inch of ever part of every area anyone might conceivably go.
Second, design corridors without a metric crapload of dark corners in which creatures, grotesque beyond polite description, can, and certainly will conceal themselves with the stated purpose of jumping out in a decidedly unfriendly manner.
Do this, and you will earn the gratitude of countless future explorers.
Yours,
Past Self
First, install a metric crapload of emergency lighting; enough to illuminate every square inch of ever part of every area anyone might conceivably go.
Second, design corridors without a metric crapload of dark corners in which creatures, grotesque beyond polite description, can, and certainly will conceal themselves with the stated purpose of jumping out in a decidedly unfriendly manner.
Do this, and you will earn the gratitude of countless future explorers.
Yours,
Past Self
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Seeking
"It is the glory of God to conceal a matter,
But the glory of Kings is to search it out."
Proverbs 25:2
Today I took a walk. I've walked this particular route many times, but rarely by myself (a walking companion is a thing to be valued!). If I were to sum up the nature of this route, I would say it is unremarkable; it's paved, much of it parallels a road substantially trafficked, the would-be grasslands on either side are regularly hewn to mere shadows of their natural selves (i.e. mowed), and people sometimes ride skateboards on it (the horror!). All this to say that today's walk was along a heavily traveled, metropolitan (read with disgust!) area designed to give people a taste of nature without any of its inconveniences. I am, obviously, far above such a jaunt (read with sarcasm!), and yet factors* prohibited me from pursuing a more vibrant and natural setting for my ruminations. Thus, I decided that I should make the most of my experience, and thus seek God's hidden matters in the midst of convenience and society.
*Predominantly, I was too lazy to find something more exotic.
Beginning my walk, I prayed a quick prayer that God would open my eyes to see something He has created. I've prayed this prayer before, and in my experience it's one of the few prayers I pray that is answered resoundingly every time. Results vary; times past I've seen things extraordinary (a bald eagle with a groundhog-sized catch, which might well have been an actual groundhog), and things mundane (a creek with startlingly metaphysical implications). Sometimes I've felt God wanted me to learn something particular, perhaps an object lesson with obvious ties to my contemporary situation. Sometimes I've felt God simply wanted me to look, in the manner that people want to show others things that they've done and are proud of. I suppose, then, that this post is my way of saying look to anyone who reads this, in the same way a child runs to show his friends what he's found under a rock he's just dug up.
The first thing I noticed (and I know it was first because I took notes in a rather 21st-century fashion) is how amazing my feet are. There I was, walking along a path paved and worn smooth by traffic, and my feet felt completely normal. However, I took a few steps on the ground beside the path, and was impressed at the results. My feet were encased in running shoes, with a solid half inch of high-tech rubber and hard plastic shielding them from the ground, shoes designed to cushion impact and support my feet so that ground imperfections are made uniform and my feet are spared resulting damage. And yet despite all of this technology, I was impressed that I could feel distinct items on the ground through the sole of my shoe. Here a pebble that's smooth on top, there a cluster of gravel on the right side of my foot. I could actually feel the texture of the ground, and that could only be because the nerves in the soles of my feet were feeling the uneven deformation of the sole of my shoe, and interpreting that flexing as the shape of the terrain underneath. Even though the artificial barrier I've placed around my body, the body God made for me is able to sense the world, to take in its textures. A neat trick, considering.
Upon looking downward to observe this effect, I was led to a second observation: geometry is a poor substitute for actual shapes. I picked up a rock, roughly fist-sized and with a granular surface texture, and turned it over in my hands a few times. One side of the rock was roughly trapezoidal, but not exactly. Another face was curved, but not smoothly, and tapered into a series of angles, like steps coming down from a miniature throne carved by a race of tiny, hierarchical beings. A third side was almost completely flat and smooth; likely this side was longest on the rock's top, thus worn smooth by the elements swirling around it. My point is that while I can use shape-related words to convey an approximate image of the rock, the only way for someone to truly understand it is to experience it firsthand. I suppose this is true of many things; one can experience thrills vicariously, or go out and find them for himself. Maybe I like literature and poetry because I'm better at the former than the latter. Maybe I'm thinking too hard.
A third observation was made roughly ten minutes later, as I sat watching a stream pass under a bridge I was sitting upon. I stared at the water, and wondered at the strangeness of clarity. Here is a substance that presses back against anything physical, yet permits light to penetrate with only a slight wavering. Remove enough of its energy, and it settles into a crystalline structure, which is a scientific way of saying that it magically transforms into something else under certain circumstances.
RABBIT TRAIL: Isn't it strange how regular we think strange things are, once we can apply scientific explanations for them? Take a tree, for example. It absorbs air and sunlight through countless tiny mouths scattered across thousands of flat, green things mounted horizontally on its many limbs. It absorbs water through countless tiny ropes it somehow puts into the ground for many yards in all directions. It sends the water upward through countless tiny vessels, where it is combined with the air and assembled into countless tiny sugars, many of which are sent back down via another set of countless tiny vessels. Yes, we have wonderfully clever terms for everything, words like "photosynthesis" and "chlorophyll", and I can talk about the tree's stomata, and its xylem and phloem. I can dissect it and label it and understand each part, and if I do it properly, I am respecting the tree and its creator by such acts. None of this changes the fact that a tree is a thing which makes itself bigger using only the air around it and some moisture from the ground; it literally makes itself out of thin air, and it does so without any discernible will of its own. It does what it does because it is what God made it to be. Outlandish, when properly contextualized; beautiful, when properly seen.
But I digress. My final observation came when I stood up and began walking back to the place from whence I came. I noticed that my vision was swimming downward in the middle and upward at the sides, as if the ground in front of me was sinking to form a valley. I was momentarily puzzled, until I remembered an article I once read about the way the human brain interprets what it sees. The main thrust of the article is that our eyes are not really like video cameras, though we typically thing of them as such. Human vision involves layers and layers of interpretation; images from the retinae are sent to the brain, where they are decoded in stages. One part of the brain perceives motion, another attempts to recognize and contextualize items (people, objects, etc.), and so on. One strange feature of vision is that the brain corrects for things. Studies have shown that if people wear goggles that flip all images upside-down, the brain quickly corrects for this, such that soon enough people see everything right-side-up. Once the goggles are removed, the brain converts back after a bit. So while I was staring at the creek, my brain told itself that it wasn't moving, the thing it was seeing was, and applied some sort of image correction, likely to keep me properly oriented. When I looked away, it was a moment or two before it switched this process off.
So I guess what I found today was myself, in context with the world around me. God gave me a body, and it is fearfully and wonderfully made (not mine in particular, in case that sounds arrogant, but all peoples'). It ages, it hurts, and it doesn't always do what I want it to, but at a fundamental level it is a thing of beauty. It exists so that I can interact with the world, with other people, and most importantly with God, and though it will eventually break down, it will be replaced with one superior in every way. I'm reminded of C.S. Lewis's description of those regenerated in The Great Divorce: "One gets glimpses, even in our country, of that which is ageless-- heavy thought in the face of an infant, and frolic childhood in that of a very old man. Here it was all like that."
Won't that be something?
But the glory of Kings is to search it out."
Proverbs 25:2
Today I took a walk. I've walked this particular route many times, but rarely by myself (a walking companion is a thing to be valued!). If I were to sum up the nature of this route, I would say it is unremarkable; it's paved, much of it parallels a road substantially trafficked, the would-be grasslands on either side are regularly hewn to mere shadows of their natural selves (i.e. mowed), and people sometimes ride skateboards on it (the horror!). All this to say that today's walk was along a heavily traveled, metropolitan (read with disgust!) area designed to give people a taste of nature without any of its inconveniences. I am, obviously, far above such a jaunt (read with sarcasm!), and yet factors* prohibited me from pursuing a more vibrant and natural setting for my ruminations. Thus, I decided that I should make the most of my experience, and thus seek God's hidden matters in the midst of convenience and society.
*Predominantly, I was too lazy to find something more exotic.
Beginning my walk, I prayed a quick prayer that God would open my eyes to see something He has created. I've prayed this prayer before, and in my experience it's one of the few prayers I pray that is answered resoundingly every time. Results vary; times past I've seen things extraordinary (a bald eagle with a groundhog-sized catch, which might well have been an actual groundhog), and things mundane (a creek with startlingly metaphysical implications). Sometimes I've felt God wanted me to learn something particular, perhaps an object lesson with obvious ties to my contemporary situation. Sometimes I've felt God simply wanted me to look, in the manner that people want to show others things that they've done and are proud of. I suppose, then, that this post is my way of saying look to anyone who reads this, in the same way a child runs to show his friends what he's found under a rock he's just dug up.
The first thing I noticed (and I know it was first because I took notes in a rather 21st-century fashion) is how amazing my feet are. There I was, walking along a path paved and worn smooth by traffic, and my feet felt completely normal. However, I took a few steps on the ground beside the path, and was impressed at the results. My feet were encased in running shoes, with a solid half inch of high-tech rubber and hard plastic shielding them from the ground, shoes designed to cushion impact and support my feet so that ground imperfections are made uniform and my feet are spared resulting damage. And yet despite all of this technology, I was impressed that I could feel distinct items on the ground through the sole of my shoe. Here a pebble that's smooth on top, there a cluster of gravel on the right side of my foot. I could actually feel the texture of the ground, and that could only be because the nerves in the soles of my feet were feeling the uneven deformation of the sole of my shoe, and interpreting that flexing as the shape of the terrain underneath. Even though the artificial barrier I've placed around my body, the body God made for me is able to sense the world, to take in its textures. A neat trick, considering.
Upon looking downward to observe this effect, I was led to a second observation: geometry is a poor substitute for actual shapes. I picked up a rock, roughly fist-sized and with a granular surface texture, and turned it over in my hands a few times. One side of the rock was roughly trapezoidal, but not exactly. Another face was curved, but not smoothly, and tapered into a series of angles, like steps coming down from a miniature throne carved by a race of tiny, hierarchical beings. A third side was almost completely flat and smooth; likely this side was longest on the rock's top, thus worn smooth by the elements swirling around it. My point is that while I can use shape-related words to convey an approximate image of the rock, the only way for someone to truly understand it is to experience it firsthand. I suppose this is true of many things; one can experience thrills vicariously, or go out and find them for himself. Maybe I like literature and poetry because I'm better at the former than the latter. Maybe I'm thinking too hard.
A third observation was made roughly ten minutes later, as I sat watching a stream pass under a bridge I was sitting upon. I stared at the water, and wondered at the strangeness of clarity. Here is a substance that presses back against anything physical, yet permits light to penetrate with only a slight wavering. Remove enough of its energy, and it settles into a crystalline structure, which is a scientific way of saying that it magically transforms into something else under certain circumstances.
RABBIT TRAIL: Isn't it strange how regular we think strange things are, once we can apply scientific explanations for them? Take a tree, for example. It absorbs air and sunlight through countless tiny mouths scattered across thousands of flat, green things mounted horizontally on its many limbs. It absorbs water through countless tiny ropes it somehow puts into the ground for many yards in all directions. It sends the water upward through countless tiny vessels, where it is combined with the air and assembled into countless tiny sugars, many of which are sent back down via another set of countless tiny vessels. Yes, we have wonderfully clever terms for everything, words like "photosynthesis" and "chlorophyll", and I can talk about the tree's stomata, and its xylem and phloem. I can dissect it and label it and understand each part, and if I do it properly, I am respecting the tree and its creator by such acts. None of this changes the fact that a tree is a thing which makes itself bigger using only the air around it and some moisture from the ground; it literally makes itself out of thin air, and it does so without any discernible will of its own. It does what it does because it is what God made it to be. Outlandish, when properly contextualized; beautiful, when properly seen.
But I digress. My final observation came when I stood up and began walking back to the place from whence I came. I noticed that my vision was swimming downward in the middle and upward at the sides, as if the ground in front of me was sinking to form a valley. I was momentarily puzzled, until I remembered an article I once read about the way the human brain interprets what it sees. The main thrust of the article is that our eyes are not really like video cameras, though we typically thing of them as such. Human vision involves layers and layers of interpretation; images from the retinae are sent to the brain, where they are decoded in stages. One part of the brain perceives motion, another attempts to recognize and contextualize items (people, objects, etc.), and so on. One strange feature of vision is that the brain corrects for things. Studies have shown that if people wear goggles that flip all images upside-down, the brain quickly corrects for this, such that soon enough people see everything right-side-up. Once the goggles are removed, the brain converts back after a bit. So while I was staring at the creek, my brain told itself that it wasn't moving, the thing it was seeing was, and applied some sort of image correction, likely to keep me properly oriented. When I looked away, it was a moment or two before it switched this process off.
So I guess what I found today was myself, in context with the world around me. God gave me a body, and it is fearfully and wonderfully made (not mine in particular, in case that sounds arrogant, but all peoples'). It ages, it hurts, and it doesn't always do what I want it to, but at a fundamental level it is a thing of beauty. It exists so that I can interact with the world, with other people, and most importantly with God, and though it will eventually break down, it will be replaced with one superior in every way. I'm reminded of C.S. Lewis's description of those regenerated in The Great Divorce: "One gets glimpses, even in our country, of that which is ageless-- heavy thought in the face of an infant, and frolic childhood in that of a very old man. Here it was all like that."
Won't that be something?
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Poem written during a church service
Gap-toothed,
balding,
skin like pumice:
pebbled, mottled, dappled.
Eyes too close,
ears out,
like a shutter in a thunderstorm,
loosed from its fastening.
Coat too long,
pants too short,
socks unmatched.
A foot off the ground,
a fist in the sky,
the biggest smile I've seen all day.
balding,
skin like pumice:
pebbled, mottled, dappled.
Eyes too close,
ears out,
like a shutter in a thunderstorm,
loosed from its fastening.
Coat too long,
pants too short,
socks unmatched.
A foot off the ground,
a fist in the sky,
the biggest smile I've seen all day.
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
All Things for the Glory of God
Yesterday morning, I was peeling a grapefruit for the first time in my recorded life. I remember eating them as a child, but my mom always cut them across the grain. Then we'd douse them with sugar and eat them with spoons.
Anyway, one of my Christmas presents was a box of fruit straight from Florida, and it included oranges (which I like) and grapefruits (which I haven't eaten in years). Having sated myself with oranges over the past few days, I decided to try a grapefruit.
To preface the situation slightly, I was sitting at my counter after trying to read my Bible and coming up empty. I'm a relatively serious reader, so my ability to focus on words that aren't particularly interesting to me is probably above average, but yesterday morning I simply couldn't focus on David's regular evasions from Saul's murderous rage. Being the good Christian I am, I gave up and planned to pray for forgiveness later. So instead I grabbed a grapefruit and decided to eat it on a whim. Normally I would have cut it open and eaten it as in my halcyon days, but all my knives were across the room. Rather than walk across the room to make my life easier, I decided to peel the fruit as God intended: to go hand-to-hand with nature, to seize its bounty and make it my own.
Now, if you've ever tried to peel an orange, you'd know it's pretty easy; you get an edge, and the thing practically peels itself. Assuming a grapefruit would be similar, I set to work. I was quickly frustrated by the toughness of the outer shell. I eventually resorted to my teeth, which left me with a "zest" taste in my mouth, as well as a strange tingling sensation (could I be allergic to grapefruit rind?) in my lips and tongue. Even my teeth failed, and as I could sense the insides of the grapefruit beginning to squish, I decided to opt for the knife, just to get started.
When I finally got through the outer rind and began to peel it off in chunks, it occurred to me that I was handling a piece of God's creation, and I wondered if it was possible to peel this grapefruit for God's glory. I remember a few somewhat-hokey youth group sermons in days past, in which I was exhorted to do all things for God's glory, including (literally, at least once) brushing my teeth and tying my shoes. I figured grapefruit-peeling has more glory-potential than shoe-tying (look at me quantifying glory!), and so to make up for my dearth of Scripture reading, I decided to attempt a substitute with my fruit.
This idea raised questions, though, not least of which was "what does it mean to do anything for God's glory?" For example, how does it glorify God to read His word? Well, in doing so, I'm honoring Him implicitly by spending my time learning about Him and His character, rather than wasting my time elsewhere. Then how does it glorify God to sing songs about Him? Now I'm honoring Him by using what meagre skills I have to say insufficient things about what He's given me in a somewhat-musical fashion.
Then how does it glorify God to eat a piece of fruit? Well, I guess I can glorify Him by noticing the component parts of the fruit. Rather than cutting into it and slathering it with sugar, I can pay attention to its form by peeling it, and savor its taste by eating it "as God intended."
So I tried this. The difficulty of the peeling process became a challenge to overcome. I noticed pieces of the rind that stuck out slightly, and by grabbing these and pulling, the rind suddenly came away much more easily. I imagine I was grabbing some part of the fruit's now-deceased circulatory system, but for my purposes they were easy-pull tabs designed to let animals like me access the juicy goodness inside. When I finally got the fruit out of its rind, it was a round clump of segments that were mostly self-contained. It's marvelous that I can exert that amount of force and wrangling on a thing that soft and not have it be a juicy mess afterward. Pulling the segments apart, I skinned one of them to find it completely filled with little juice-pockets, similar to an orange. I was left to wonder what the point of all that juice might be. The seeds are the reason the tree makes fruit, but the juices around them don't nourish the seeds in any way. The juice is the payout for animals to come and take the seeds to transport them elsewhere, according to biology. That seems believable, but that means the tree spent an enormous amount of energy making sugar molecules just so its fruit would be tasty enough that animals would come and carry it away, and thus make more trees.
This makes me wonder if the proper way to eat a grapefruit for God's glory is to plant the seeds afterward. This being Pennsylvania, I'm sure the tree wouldn't grow, but then maybe God didn't intend for people to ship things like grapefruits all around the world; maybe He would prefer we were satisfied with our own fruit, instead of importing other people's. Maybe the world would be a much, much better place if we were willing to accept what God gives us, rather than seeking after things rightly kept from us. Maybe it's no coincidence that original sin comes to us in the form of forbidden fruit. Maybe in the midst of my silly fruit-peeling-for-God's-glory experiment, God actually showed me something about who He is and what He cares about. And maybe my observations made Him smile, just a little.
Anyway, one of my Christmas presents was a box of fruit straight from Florida, and it included oranges (which I like) and grapefruits (which I haven't eaten in years). Having sated myself with oranges over the past few days, I decided to try a grapefruit.
To preface the situation slightly, I was sitting at my counter after trying to read my Bible and coming up empty. I'm a relatively serious reader, so my ability to focus on words that aren't particularly interesting to me is probably above average, but yesterday morning I simply couldn't focus on David's regular evasions from Saul's murderous rage. Being the good Christian I am, I gave up and planned to pray for forgiveness later. So instead I grabbed a grapefruit and decided to eat it on a whim. Normally I would have cut it open and eaten it as in my halcyon days, but all my knives were across the room. Rather than walk across the room to make my life easier, I decided to peel the fruit as God intended: to go hand-to-hand with nature, to seize its bounty and make it my own.
Now, if you've ever tried to peel an orange, you'd know it's pretty easy; you get an edge, and the thing practically peels itself. Assuming a grapefruit would be similar, I set to work. I was quickly frustrated by the toughness of the outer shell. I eventually resorted to my teeth, which left me with a "zest" taste in my mouth, as well as a strange tingling sensation (could I be allergic to grapefruit rind?) in my lips and tongue. Even my teeth failed, and as I could sense the insides of the grapefruit beginning to squish, I decided to opt for the knife, just to get started.
When I finally got through the outer rind and began to peel it off in chunks, it occurred to me that I was handling a piece of God's creation, and I wondered if it was possible to peel this grapefruit for God's glory. I remember a few somewhat-hokey youth group sermons in days past, in which I was exhorted to do all things for God's glory, including (literally, at least once) brushing my teeth and tying my shoes. I figured grapefruit-peeling has more glory-potential than shoe-tying (look at me quantifying glory!), and so to make up for my dearth of Scripture reading, I decided to attempt a substitute with my fruit.
This idea raised questions, though, not least of which was "what does it mean to do anything for God's glory?" For example, how does it glorify God to read His word? Well, in doing so, I'm honoring Him implicitly by spending my time learning about Him and His character, rather than wasting my time elsewhere. Then how does it glorify God to sing songs about Him? Now I'm honoring Him by using what meagre skills I have to say insufficient things about what He's given me in a somewhat-musical fashion.
Then how does it glorify God to eat a piece of fruit? Well, I guess I can glorify Him by noticing the component parts of the fruit. Rather than cutting into it and slathering it with sugar, I can pay attention to its form by peeling it, and savor its taste by eating it "as God intended."
So I tried this. The difficulty of the peeling process became a challenge to overcome. I noticed pieces of the rind that stuck out slightly, and by grabbing these and pulling, the rind suddenly came away much more easily. I imagine I was grabbing some part of the fruit's now-deceased circulatory system, but for my purposes they were easy-pull tabs designed to let animals like me access the juicy goodness inside. When I finally got the fruit out of its rind, it was a round clump of segments that were mostly self-contained. It's marvelous that I can exert that amount of force and wrangling on a thing that soft and not have it be a juicy mess afterward. Pulling the segments apart, I skinned one of them to find it completely filled with little juice-pockets, similar to an orange. I was left to wonder what the point of all that juice might be. The seeds are the reason the tree makes fruit, but the juices around them don't nourish the seeds in any way. The juice is the payout for animals to come and take the seeds to transport them elsewhere, according to biology. That seems believable, but that means the tree spent an enormous amount of energy making sugar molecules just so its fruit would be tasty enough that animals would come and carry it away, and thus make more trees.
This makes me wonder if the proper way to eat a grapefruit for God's glory is to plant the seeds afterward. This being Pennsylvania, I'm sure the tree wouldn't grow, but then maybe God didn't intend for people to ship things like grapefruits all around the world; maybe He would prefer we were satisfied with our own fruit, instead of importing other people's. Maybe the world would be a much, much better place if we were willing to accept what God gives us, rather than seeking after things rightly kept from us. Maybe it's no coincidence that original sin comes to us in the form of forbidden fruit. Maybe in the midst of my silly fruit-peeling-for-God's-glory experiment, God actually showed me something about who He is and what He cares about. And maybe my observations made Him smile, just a little.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Knowledge and Faith
I like to know things. I like to find them and pick them apart. I like to walk through the woods, looking for bits and pieces of things that maybe nobody else has seen: things that God put there for me to find and think about. I like to read books in which people do strange things for strange reasons and experience consequences that are at times joyous, at times difficult and at times permanent: things that other people put there for me to find and think about. I like to stare into the face of things to understand, to experience, to truly know.
Eye contact is strange and serious and funny and difficult, I think because everyone knows that looking someone in the eye is revealing at a fundamental level. Looking someone in the eye makes it hard to lie, hard to hide. Vulnerability rises to the surface, in the form of weaknesses and imperfections. It cuts both ways, but the field isn't always even.
I think exploration is something like staring God in the eye. Not to challenge, but to see and understand. God displays Himself, if we look. He does it in His world, in his plants and animals, from the towering and the majestic to the humble and pedestrian. He does it in His story, as it comes to us through the fumbling fingers of countless agents, each trying to make his way wherever he thinks best. He does it in His people, who are silly and selfish and sinful and, at times, just the least bit noble.
I like knowledge, of the kind that comes through books and study, of the kind that comes through experience, of the kind that comes from sitting and and staring and listening and talking.
What I don't like is faith, if I'm honest. I don't like leaping when I don't know what's beneath me, I don't like stepping on things that shiver and bend, I don't like having the inability to control my surroundings. Or at least I should say I don't naturally like these things, or, at the very least, that my nature is broken up inside me on this point. I've experienced moments of crystallized certainty, when I knew exactly what to do and how to do it, and carried out my part with efficiency, to my surprise as well as others'. I've also experienced moments of abject weakness, when I've watched a scene play out and been paralyzed by my inability to see all ends.
What's a man to do? Does he leap and fall again and again, until he finally shatters himself on the ruthless rock of poor judgment? Does he sit and wait and hide and calculate and mutter and ask for advice until all his opportunities are safely in the hands of others? How does a man balance the waiting and the plunging, the examination and the action? To quote Eliot:
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
How does a man overcome the shadow? I pray, but that becomes a veil, a shield in time. I get no clear answers so I don't act and claim inaction is God's will. In time, this will leave me with a wonderfully pious life, vacant of danger, but void of color. I'll sit in my living space and be holy, and people will listen to my advice and stand in awe that I could know so much. Some might even be jealous, little knowing how well their feelings match my own.
So sometimes I act. Often in poor judgment (but when is leaping ever really a good idea?), usually with unexpected consequences, always leaving marks. But after everything settles, I find that I like myself just a tick more for those bruises and bloodied knees.
I just hope God isn't laughing. Or if He is, I hope it's in a jolly "I can't believe he's so worried, what a silly, foolish child" sort of way.
Eye contact is strange and serious and funny and difficult, I think because everyone knows that looking someone in the eye is revealing at a fundamental level. Looking someone in the eye makes it hard to lie, hard to hide. Vulnerability rises to the surface, in the form of weaknesses and imperfections. It cuts both ways, but the field isn't always even.
I think exploration is something like staring God in the eye. Not to challenge, but to see and understand. God displays Himself, if we look. He does it in His world, in his plants and animals, from the towering and the majestic to the humble and pedestrian. He does it in His story, as it comes to us through the fumbling fingers of countless agents, each trying to make his way wherever he thinks best. He does it in His people, who are silly and selfish and sinful and, at times, just the least bit noble.
I like knowledge, of the kind that comes through books and study, of the kind that comes through experience, of the kind that comes from sitting and and staring and listening and talking.
What I don't like is faith, if I'm honest. I don't like leaping when I don't know what's beneath me, I don't like stepping on things that shiver and bend, I don't like having the inability to control my surroundings. Or at least I should say I don't naturally like these things, or, at the very least, that my nature is broken up inside me on this point. I've experienced moments of crystallized certainty, when I knew exactly what to do and how to do it, and carried out my part with efficiency, to my surprise as well as others'. I've also experienced moments of abject weakness, when I've watched a scene play out and been paralyzed by my inability to see all ends.
What's a man to do? Does he leap and fall again and again, until he finally shatters himself on the ruthless rock of poor judgment? Does he sit and wait and hide and calculate and mutter and ask for advice until all his opportunities are safely in the hands of others? How does a man balance the waiting and the plunging, the examination and the action? To quote Eliot:
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
How does a man overcome the shadow? I pray, but that becomes a veil, a shield in time. I get no clear answers so I don't act and claim inaction is God's will. In time, this will leave me with a wonderfully pious life, vacant of danger, but void of color. I'll sit in my living space and be holy, and people will listen to my advice and stand in awe that I could know so much. Some might even be jealous, little knowing how well their feelings match my own.
So sometimes I act. Often in poor judgment (but when is leaping ever really a good idea?), usually with unexpected consequences, always leaving marks. But after everything settles, I find that I like myself just a tick more for those bruises and bloodied knees.
I just hope God isn't laughing. Or if He is, I hope it's in a jolly "I can't believe he's so worried, what a silly, foolish child" sort of way.
God's Grandeur
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck His rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: The soil
is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs--
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings
-Hopkins
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