Shakespeare, Childlike Faith, and the Social Construction of Reality: Part Two

In my last post, I began exploring the inescapable correlation between reality and perspective, between truth and experience.  A discussion like this inevitably brings to light the age-old question of the nature of truth:  is there absolute truth, or is all truth relative?

In short, my answer is YES.  But that’s not good enough, now is it?

To go a bit deeper, let me return to my previous analogy of children.  Kids understand the world as they experience it.  This can cause embarrassing moments for parents when their kids expect that everyone has the same experience that they have.  But children are also very moldable.  It takes a pretty sheltered childhood to prevent a kid from having his reality shaken up by change.  When your life amounts to less than a decade, even small changes can stir up the soup.  In spite of this, or perhaps because of it, they have an uncanny way of adapting to changes, usually quicker than adults, stuck in our worlds of routine and predictability, are able to.  Perhaps it’s a survival tactic—when you’re little, you’ve got to develop ways to cope with a big world.

So our little Ecuadorian girl from Part One packs her bags and moves with her family up to Greenland with our other friend (probably not likely, but run with me here), and suddenly the world isn’t so blistering anymore.  She gets to build snowmen and go sledding and experience that painful feeling your fingers get when you walk into a warm house from the cold.  To her, it’s a different world.  It’s a different reality.  And it’s just as true as it is back at the middle of the globe where the sun burns all day long.

Let’s be clear:  there are absolutes involved in all of this.  It is absolute truth that the sun casts more rays onto the region around the Equator, making average temperatures hotter there than anywhere else on the planet.  It is also absolute truth that the areas closest to the Earth’s poles receive the least direct sunlight, keeping things pretty darn chilly (though our polar bear friends would remind us that it’s not quite as chilly as it once was).  These are truths that are beyond questioning.

They are also truths that reveal themselves in varying levels of significance to different people.  Their meaning is certainly relative to those by whom they are experienced.  Consider this:  even the definition of the word “absolute” itself is relative.  Humans invented language.  Somewhere along the way, I imagine there was a primordial debate about the meaning of life and someone suggested a concept that involves an unchanging reality that is the basis of our existence.  What to call this idea?  And so the caveman word for absolute was developed.  Over lots and lots of time, languages died, were created, and evolved, and eventually there was one called English.  English included a word for this concept, “absolute,” and through the centuries, the meaning of that word was refined and reshaped by the culture of which it was a part.  Today, there’s nothing truly absolute about the word “absolute.”

Relativity is scary.  It means that what we believe might not always hit the nail on the head.  It means that the dude we’re vigorously debating with at the coffee shop could actually be right.  I think that’s okay.  Why be afraid to encounter more out there than what we’ve already found?  Why shy away from a groundbreaking discovery?

Is there absolute truth?  Yeah, I believe so.  Have we absolutely uncovered it?  I truly doubt it.  That’s why the heart of life is a search for the truth.  We claw our way to the mountaintop, only to find that there’s another peak to scale.  Now and then, we find a piece of truth that moves us from Ecuador to Greenland.  How do we respond?  We sell everything we have and invest our whole selves into that nugget that will shape the next leg of our journey.  We adapt.  And we keep on living.

Shakespeare, Childlike Faith, and the Social Construction of Reality: Part One

A movie came out last fall that caused a stir in the literary world.  The premise of Anonymous suggests that the 38 plays and 154 sonnets that are generally credited to William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon, England were actually written by a man of the gentry known as Lord Oxford.  This is not a new idea; in fact, it’s at least a century old.  Scholars have long noticed reasons to question Shakespeare’s authorship and have found connections with Oxford and others.

Among these revolutionaries who straddle the fence that sections off a possibility that is dangerous to the way we view history, there are of course the stalwarts who refuse to go near the fence—that is, if they even acknowledge the existence of land on the other side.  These folks would never stoop to entertain the idea that Hamlet’s struggle to be or not to be could have come from anyone but the beloved Bard, that someone else was comparing a lover to a summer’s day.

Here’s the funny thing about it all:  four hundred years after Shakespeare breathed his last, it no longer matters who wrote all those classics.  It doesn’t matter because the world, as a whole, accepts Shakespeare as the author.  There are no conclusive documents one way or the other, so we don’t have any overwhelming reason to question it, and thus, we accept it as truth.  Even if Lord Oxford, or Lord Vader for that matter, was the real author, our reality counters the reality that existed at the turn of the seventeenth century.  Our society has decided to give Shakespeare the credit.  So, for all intents and purposes of today, William Shakespeare wrote everything that we say he wrote.

Put your thinking cap on; I’m getting meta up in here.  If I make a choice on the basis that something I believe happened sometime in the past, that event is just real as all of the things that actually occurred.  One’s understanding of reality doesn’t require every part, or even any part, of that understanding to have existed in time and space.  My acceptance of fiction as reality creates a reality within that fiction.

Let’s take a step back.  Children are the best example I can think of to illustrate this cognitive whirlwind.  Kids understand the world as they experience it.  A kid who has grown up in Ecuador and never left her country understands the world as an immensely hot place.  And she’s right.  But another kid who’s never strayed from his home in Greenland would disagree.  It’s freezing out in this world!  And he’s right too.  They both are.  They both know truth as it exists within their realities.  They both live their lives in a way that reflects those truths.  She doesn’t wear a whole lot, while he bundles up to get the mail.  They’re both right.

We’ve seen good in this this, and we’ve seen bad.  Every person who has made a lasting difference on the world has had to exist within a reality that she or he has decided is true.  If Gandhi’s advice was to be the change we want to see, we have to first live in that change.  In Mother Theresa’s reality, no one, not even people bursting with infected puss, should be exempt from love.  It didn’t matter at all to her that most others don’t live in that kind of world; she lived her life in the reality that she saw.  And she was right.

Unfortunately, those with less-than-pure motives also have this world-shaping power.  In the reality of the Crusaders of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, the cross was a symbol of violence towards those who had not accepted their brand of Christianity.  It didn’t matter at all to them that their religion’s founder preached loving one’s enemies; they lived their lives in their own reality.

Our perceived reality is truth to us.  It molds our lives and becomes our tangible reality.  So what reality do we live in?  And what world will we choose to make a reality?

Writing From the Sky

I remember sitting in my sixth grade classroom, going through the morning routine that we followed every day at the evangelical Christian school that I attended.  We would start off with the pledge of allegiance, and then sing that grand, old song, “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee.”  This was followed by the pledge to the Christian flag (yes, there is a Christian flag) and the singing of “Onward Christian Soldiers.”  All of this was rounded out with the pledge to the Bible (notice this was last in the routine) and “Thy Word is a Lamp unto My Feet,” or something like that.  I’m not kidding.  You can’t make this stuff up.  And despite my parenthetical sarcasm, I took this introduction to the school day pretty seriously.  With my hand firmly placed over my heart, I would proudly declare my undying devotion to the United States, the cross, and God’s Word, in that order.

What I remember most vividly is the image evoked in my mind during the final pledge and song.  I would picture one of the Bible-writers sitting up against a rock, stylus in hand and papyrus on lap, scribbling words that were epically and mysteriously spoken through a booming voice coming from the sky.  (The nice thing about this vision is the ease with which you can switch writers.  All you have to do is picture an old man in a robe with a long beard, and you can readily swap Moses for Solomon, Paul for Peter.)  Now, I had always been taught that the Bible is the infallible, inspired Word of God.  The forty-or-so dudes who penned these sixty-six books were simply writing down teachings that were dictated to them by the very mouth of God.  Such ideas come largely from 1 Timothy 3:16-17:  “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

The Greek used for “God-breathed” here is theopneustos, a word that very well may have been coined by Paul in this text.  It combines the words for God and spirit; the last is also understood as breath.  Interestingly enough, when Paul writes about Scripture, he refers not to the four Gospels, or the writings of his contemporaries, and certainly not his own letters, which comprise most of what we now call the New Testament.  In fact, it’s hard to believe that Paul or any of his buddies had the slightest idea that the words they were writing would have any significance 2000 years later on the other side of the world.

Scripture, to them, is rooted in what we call the Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible.  It’s the Torah, or books of law, that give the history of Israel as a people and the strict regulations they followed to set themselves apart from the rest of the world.  It’s the Nevi’im, or the prophets, that spoke out against the idolatry and injustice that Israel fell into and then submitted to.  It’s the Ketuvim, or the writings, that teach wisdom and principled living as God’s people.  These were the Scriptures that Paul grew up studying, memorizing, mulling over, chewing on, and living by.

And this story—the one that starts with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, moves through Father Abraham as the patriarch of the nation of Israel, continues on to Moses delivering that nation out of slavery and towards the Promised Land, reaches its climax at the height of the reigns of David and Solomon, and winds up with God’s chosen people being continually conquered and ruled by the dominating empires of each passing age—this story contains just about everything that a story can have.  And it’s expressed just about every way that a story can be expressed.  There are ups and downs, victories and losses, Godly-living and horrific sin.  Through it all, the people of Israel are trying to figure out how to live as a people who are set apart from those who don’t know God.  They turn their backs on God over and over again, and they return to God over and over again.

These writers seem to realize the vast significance of story-telling.  Of learning from the past.  So they write it all down.  Some, like Moses, record the oral traditions that had been passed down for many generations and the history of Israel as a people.  Others, like David, capture their joys and struggles in worshipful poetry.  Still others, like Jeremiah, seem to vent through their telling of their own attempts to bridge the gap between God and people.

What if there was no voice booming from heaven as their pens scribbles across the scrolls?  What if God-inspired means that the search for God undergone by these writers led them to create the scriptures we now hold so dearly?  More, what if Paul and the other writers of the New Testament realized this, that God was still in the inspiration business?  That the story continued with them.  And with us.  One more thing:  what if we would understand that God didn’t stop inspiring people after John wrote Revelation—that we have power to continue telling the story today?  I think that would change the world.

Happy MLK Day

Maps are subjective.  I learned that in my college geography course.  It’s an interesting concept for a small-town boy to wrap his mind around:  those rectangular and spherical portraits that I’ve always been told are accurate pictures of the world are in fact mere sketches of someone’s interpretation of what the world looks like.  They’re not satellite photos; they’re drawings.  And they can be contorted too.  They have maps that portray certain countries or parts of the world in all different shapes and sizes to illustrate all kinds of things.  I could draw a map that says pretty much whatever I want to say about the world.  It’s all about perspective.

In teaching literature to Baltimore City students, I’m faced with teenagers who have a very small perspective of the world.  Baltimore is their world, and many of them haven’t gone too far outside of the city.  So when they look at the map of the Charm City hanging in my classroom, they see their entire reality, broken down into the very diverse neighborhoods around the city.  My plan is to direct their gaze to the map hanging right beside this one, a world map.  On the first map, Baltimore fills the whole poster.  It’s massive, and it contains everything the students know—the affluence of Fells Point and Federal Hill and the poverty of Cherry Hill and Sandtown.  On the second, Baltimore is an itsy-bitsy, teensy-weensy dot in the small state of Maryland in the country of the United States in the continent of North America on the half of the map called the Western Hemisphere on the entire map of the world as we know it—or at least as Rand McNally knows it.  Perspective.

I find that my perspective is usually quite a lot smaller than I realize.  My world is not the world, it’s just the world that I’ve experienced.  When I read a book, or travel to a new place, or meet someone with a story unlike my own, my perspective grows.  Borders widen.  The map of my existence gets a little less fuzzy.  And things start to make a little more sense.  Of course, I’m still faced with the crazy obstacle that the way I encounter that new book, place, or person is shaped entirely by my growing but still limited perspective.  As I learn new things, I have to find a place to fit them within my current understanding of the world.

I’d guess that before 2006, most people wouldn’t have questioned the qualification of a planet.  Pluto apparently doesn’t cut it anymore.  This change hasn’t been accepted by everyone (http://www.zazzle.co.uk/boycott_pluto_bumper_sticker-128251195418510190).  Stuff like this can really mess with the way we think about things, and some people don’t handle that mess very well.  My very educated mother just served us nine what?!  Several legislators in California dismissed Pluto’s change in status as “scientific heresy” (http://www.space.com/2855-planetary-politics-protecting-pluto.html).

The funny thing is that nothing really changed except some words in a book somewhere.  Pluto is still the same as it always was.  We just look at it differently now.  And while it’s weird to us that our solar system only has eight planets, the next generation won’t think anything of it.  No harm done.

Once in a while, an idea comes along that doesn’t fit anywhere in my chaotic box of knowledge and wisdom.  Try as I might, it just won’t work within the framework that has been set up over time in my mind.  This calls for a paradigm shift.  The borders that have been put into place must fall.  Walls of reason and logic have to be torn down to fit this new understanding of reality, and any time walls start falling, there is resistance.  The fact that there is an opposition doesn’t detract from the authenticity of the message.

Martin Luther King, Jr. changed our perspective on race, equality, and humanity.  Not everyone was on board; in fact, someone was enough against Dr. King’s message to force an early end to his campaign and his life.  Yet, tomorrow I don’t have to go to work because it’s the guy’s birthday.

I hope we never stop drawing new maps.  I hope we keep asking the questions that make people mad.  Shift your paradigm.  It’s the only way we’ll find the Truth.

No More Yellow Stars

I spent the last several weeks teaching a book called Night.  This is a book that I staunchly believe everyone on this planet should read.  It's a memoir written by Elie Wiesel, a survivor of the tragedy we call the Holocaust.  Wiesel takes the reader on a numbing journey from his hometown in Hungary to Auschwitz, and beyond, revealing what went on inside of him.

He had a yellow star slapped onto his arm to show everyone that he was a Jew--that he was one of the "others."  He was forced into a tight little section of town called a ghetto, cast out of society.  He was thrown like an animal into a cattle car, where he spent days with other Jews, packed so tightly that few people could even take a seat.  And these things only scratch the surface.  They are only the introduction to this saddening and maddening story.  My students and I talked about humanity and the ways that these people slowly, systematically had theirs stripped from them.  By the time the Allied troops reached the camp, the few who survived were skinny shadows of their former selves--they barely looked like people.

There's a really little letter in the New Testament that Paul wrote to a friend and fellow Christian named Philemon.  The backstory:  Philemon had a slave whose name is Onesimus, who had run away and at some point, became a Christian, and found Paul.  Paul writes to Philemon to tell him that he has sent the slave back and implores Philemon to not only forgive him, but welcome him as a brother.

Paul's letters often display their author's literary prowess, as when Paul tells Philemon that Onesimus once was useless, but now is useful.  We understand this play on words when we learn that the name Onesimus is Greek for the word useful.  Slaves were commonplace in first-century Rome.  To have a slave, essentially, would be like having a piece of machinery that does work for you.  To be useful in completing tasks is the sole purpose of a slave's existence.  Humanity is out of the question when all you do is complete tasks.

But Paul asserts here that Onesimus was useless as a slave under the dominion of Philemon--such a role is not a use for a human being.  It is now that Onesimus, having pledged himself to Christ, is useful to Philemon, but not as a tool.  As a brother.  An equal.  A human.

This is why the Hebrew creation story is so significant.  Amidst so many other cultures with creation stories that paint our beginning as the product of some kind of divine conflict, Adam is carefully formed out of dust, then given a breath of life.  In the words of songwriter John Mark McMillan, "heaven meets earth with a sloppy wet kiss."  To be human means to be created in the image of a god who is love, and to have that breath flowing through our lungs.  So Onesimus is human, not because Paul tells him so or because Philemon accepts his return as a brother, but because of this act by God, represented in Genesis.

Yet, in both much more subtle and just as strong ways as the Nazis did, people strip others of their humanity every day.  The way we live has power to affirm others' humanity.  It also has power to tear it down.  So which way do we live?  Whose humanity are we affirming?  Whose are we denying?  And what are we doing to put an end to the dehumanization that is suffered today in our world?

What is church?

A friend of mine asked me recently how I define church.  Shortly after this conversation, my friend asked me for a written response to the same question.  This is a simple question . . . yet, at the same time, it’s not simple at all.  Writing allows me to sort through my thoughts and reflect as I formulate a response, and I’ve been thinking quite a bit about it.  Let me share with you the way I envision this thing we call church:

Most importantly, church is community.  It’s the collective people of God, coming together to form a unit that has been given the metaphors of a body, a family, a tree.  These images all represent small parts that each have a specific niche within a larger organism.  So the Church is a bunch of unique individuals who are trying to follow Jesus that meet in a common place in space and time and commit to follow Jesus together.  I know that my neighbor has something to offer me and I have something to offer my neighbor.  The point is not where you go to church, but what church you are a part of.  This way of looking at church membership assumes each person’s role in the community she or he is surrounded by, instead of just a service that is being attended.

The Church is intently focused on meeting the needs—physical, spiritual, emotional, whatever—within the church and in  the surrounding area.  In his account of the formation of the Church, Luke tells of a community that has no need because as soon as a need arises, it is met.  And not only is each need immediately met, it is met from within the community, and in a way that requires sacrifice.  People are selling land and using the money to feed, clothe, and shelter those who can’t provide for themselves.  My dad has a friend who served as a leader in the Salvation Army.  Despite his affiliation with this organization, he often lamented that such things ought not exist—if the Church would live like this, there would be no need.

The Church proclaims a message called the Good News that comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable.  This message implies sacrifice, yet is captivating enough to constantly attract others to take hold of its transformative power and become part of the community.  This message isn’t always preached at people, but is often weaved into lifestyle choices that are visible both to the surrounding public and, in a more intimate way, to those with a relational connection.  It is because of this message of hope in Jesus that those within the Church become so focused on meeting the needs of others, and there is no distinction between spiritual and physical needs.  Borrowing imagery from Shane Hipps, the end goal of church is not to simply move as many people as possible from the “unsaved” column to the “saved” column in God’s ledger; the ongoing and ever-evolving goal is centered on emulating Jesus where the church is located. 

The Church is terribly broken.  Not only is this fact readily accepted within the Church, it is actually celebrated that everyone involved is a broken person, made whole in Jesus through a relationship with him that is manifested in our brothers and sisters that make up our church.  As a body, a family, a tree, we grow together, fail together, succeed together, laugh together, cry together, and live life together as long as we are here.

There are mistakes and regrets, but there are also healings and reconciliations, and we share in both lament and praise—this is what makes it beautiful.

Church, then, may take place in a sanctuary or a living room, we may hold services or coffee dates, we may recite liturgy or share what is on our heart—these things are the variables.  The given element is us, the people.

I can’t think of a better way to sum this up than by quoting a beautiful piece of Rob Bell’s parting message to the community that he is leaving.  This, essentially, is his advice for how to do church:

     take out a cup 

     and some bread 

     and put it in the middle of the table, 

     and say a prayer and examine yourselves 

     and then make sure everybody's rent is paid and there's food in their fridge and          
          clothes on their backs 
     and then invite everybody to say 'yes' to the resurrected Christ with whatever 'yes'   
          they can muster in the moment 

  and then you take that bread and you dip it in that cup in the ancient/future hope   
  and trust that there is a new creation bursting forth right here right now and then     
          together taste that new life and liberation and forgiveness and as you look those    
          people in the eyes gathered around that table from all walks of life 
  and you see the new humanity, sinners saved by grace, beggars who have found  
          bread showing the others beggars where they found it 
     and in that moment 

  space

place 

remind yourselves that 

this 

is 

what 

you 

believe.

That’s what church looks like.

A 1972 Dime with a Roosevelt Imperfection

I really enjoy a television show called Scrubs.  Maybe you’ve seen it.  If you haven’t, it’s a hospital show, but nothing like ER or Grey’s Anatomy or House.  The series chronicles the life and innermost thoughts of Dr. J.D. Dorian, a young doctor at Sacred Heart Hospital.  There is a unnamed janitor at the hospital who finds significant enjoyment in tormenting J.D. in all kinds of creative and not-so-creative ways.  In one episode, J.D. sees the janitor and his friend from food service waiting to thwart him in some new and ridiculous manner, so he acts quickly and distracts them with a riddle:

“What two coins, when put together, make thirty cents, and one of them is not a nickel?”

So the janitor and his low-IQed buddy spend the remainder of the episode slaving over the solving of this query.  After some research at the local library, they return to J.D. with an answer:  you can make thirty cents out of a penny and a 1972 dime with a Roosevelt imperfection, which today is worth twenty-nine cents.

Or, as J.D. points out, you can avoid searching through United States Mint files and simply make thirty cents out of a quarter and a nickel.  Remember, only ONE of the coins isn’t a nickel.  We never specified anything about the other coin.

Hmm . . . the janitor worked pretty hard to come up with an answer that is correct.  There’s no denying his logic.  Yet finding two coins that add up to thirty cents really isn’t the point, is it?  The point is recognizing and exposing the nuance in the riddle itself.  It could be so very simple, but somehow, the way our minds process things, it becomes so very difficult.

So when a well-known pastor writes a book that asks a few questions that challenge the way we typically process this existence we call life, he gets death threats.  And if not death threats, he gets told that he can’t ask those questions.  No, because to ask those questions is to undermine what we believe, and this would change far too much about how we live our lives, and that’s absolutely unacceptable.

This post, contrary to what it may appear, is not a defense of Rob Bell or Love Wins, though I’m happy to have that conversation in another setting.  This post is a critique of the state of the Church that has been exposed in obvious ways since even before the book hit the shelves.

See, we Christians are pretty quick to pull out our long-winded explanations for how and why everything is the way it is, and these spiels are often quite similar to the janitor pulling out a collector’s book and pointing out this particular dime’s current value.  It’s intelligent, sure, and it’s the kind of knowledge that will get someone his or her M.Div.  But is it the point?  And if it’s not, then what is the point?

When asked what motivates me to be an English teacher, I respond with a quote from literary critic Roland Barthes:  “Literature is the question minus the answer.”  Harriet Beecher Stowe could have released a pamphlet explaining academically why slavery is unjust, but she chose to let readers of Uncle Tom’s Cabin make their own decisions.  Jane Austen could have written a convincing essay on the flaws of the Victorian class stratification in Britain, but she chose to tell several stories in which this struggle was explored.

It is astounding to think that most of the things that are supposedly a part (or not a part) of a Christian’s life or church organization are not discussed in the Bible at all.  They were decided somewhere along the way by church leaders who spent their lives searching for Truth.  Except, for some reason, church leaders can’t challenge the status quo anymore.  We can’t ask those questions, because our beliefs have already been established.  We can’t add to doctrine because doctrine is already complete.  Says who?  Not Christ, and isn't that who we're following?  The truth is the story is still being written.  The question hasn't yet been answered.

Because it’s not really about finding an enigmatic dime worth twenty-nine cents; it’s about knowing that, despite the fact that one coin isn’t a nickel, the second coin may be exactly that.