Do not Fear; Fear God

If there arise among you a prophet, or a dreamer of dreams, and giveth thee a sign or a wonder, and the sign or the wonder come to pass, whereof he spake unto thee, saying, Let us go after other gods, which thou hast not known, and let us serve them; Thou shalt not hearken unto the words of that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams: for the LORD your God proveth you, to know whether ye love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul. Ye shall walk after the LORD your God, and fear him, and keep his commandments, and obey his voice, and ye shall serve him, and cleave unto him. – Deuteronomy 13:1 [Moses]

Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man. – Ecclesiastes 12:13 [Solomon]

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.
- Proverbs 9:10 [Solomon]

“Do not be afraid,” says the angel to Mary when he appears to her with the news of Jesus’ birth. “Do not be afraid,” says Jesus to the apostles as they stare at him in abject terror when he walks past their boat on the Sea of Galilee. “Do not be afraid,” says the angel to the women who are shocked to find an empty tomb three days after Jesus’ death. “Fear not,” says Jesus to John in Revelation, when he appears to him in a vision in blazing finery, causing John to fall down “as though dead”.

Is there a contradiction between the fact that Christians are called to be bold and courageous, are told repeatedly in the Bible not to fear when they are in the presence of God, and the fact that King Solomon, the wisest man in the history of the world according to the same Bible, says that fearing God and keeping his commandments is the chief end of man? It may seem perplexing, but I think there is really no contradiction. The people who are told not to fear were fearful – that’s the whole point. In the face of the full glory of God, seeing Him in person, the natural response is fear. Just as the natural, and right response to a hurricane, a tsunami, a lightning strike, is fear. Why is it natural and appropriate? Because a hurricane or a tsunami is incredibly powerful and has the potential to wipe you out entirely. It has the potential to destroy you. It is big, huge, overwhelming, and there is absolutely no way you can placate it. Almost anyone, faced with the immediate prospect of being snuffed out by a natural disaster, prays a prayer of some kind. It’s some feeble attempt to placate a thing bigger than you. On a smaller scale, you would be very frightened if a powerful warlord came round and held you at gunpoint, or even simply controlled an area near yours. Because he could, at any time, take a liking to your house or your children or your possessions, and he would have the arms to back him up if he should decide to seize it. In the absence of law enforcement, he could get away with murdering you. In those situations, fear is an appropriate response.

Penitence, acrylic on bamboo plate. By Larry Poncho Brown.

So why shouldn’t it be the appropriate response to THE power behind the universe – the one who gave life, the one who takes it away, the one who sets the rules, the one whose standards matter? If He indeed exists, and is all-powerful, omniscient, and just, and you have done something to hurt another human being, and that human being is precious to him, wouldn’t you be scared? What more, if apparently your wrongdoing was responsible for the utter humiliation and murder of this great monarch’s son – what if the King Himself had disguised himself as a commoner for an evening, and you had kicked him on the side of the road and spit on him for a laugh, not knowing who he was? What if, to your horror, you are called up to the court, and you recognize the face of the beggar in the face of the monarch? Wouldn’t you fall down on your face and beg for mercy?

The people in the first paragraph – the disciples, Mary, John, the women – they were counted as the “righteous” – people who walked with God. Mary was even the wisest woman in the world – the one chosen to bear God’s son. And yet they were afraid, because they knew that before God, they were all sinners, completely unworthy to be in His presence. Yet God, in His mercy, condescends to speak with them, and He gently tells them not to be afraid. Why? Because He loves them. This is an overwhelming message. It’s improbable, counter-intuitive. Why a great power should care about you, not to mention love you, has nothing to do with His greatness – it is an unexpected attribute. After all, wouldn’t you be surprised to hear that your president or prime minister has a personal interest in you and loves you, even though you’ve never met them? God is bigger than that – and yet He has revealed that He does love us.

You see, Fear in itself is not a bad thing. Fear is a reaction to power. We know we are limited in our power, and so anything that has greater power is worth fearing. But the thing about the Christian is she does not need to fear anything other than God, because nothing is greater or more powerful than God, and if we fear Him and keep His commandments – if we have thrust ourselves under His protection by accepting the sacrificial atonement of His Son, then He is on our side. To have the all-powerful, omniscient and victorious God, the one who made everything, preserves everything, permits everything and will redeem everything, on our side truly means that there is nothing that we need to be afraid of. And that is the source of courage and boldness – “And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose. For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren. Moreover whom He predestined, these He also called; whom He called, these He also justified; and whom He justified, these He also glorified. What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us?”  says Paul, in Romans 8:28-31.

Am I trapped by fear of other things – of the future, of potential sin, of loneliness, of rejection – sometimes? Of course! I am often seized by fear – it comes out of nowhere, a sudden wave of it, and I feel completely thrown for a loop. But the thing is I know I should not fear those things – my fear should be reserved only for the Lord. The thing about the emotion of fear is, like all other emotions, it comes and it goes. I cannot control my emotions, but I can control my response to them. And I can choose to respond: No. I will not fear you. I fear God, and I will keep in lockstep with him, as faithfully as I can. I am more afraid of being apart from Him than I am of any of those terrible scenarios, and if He decides to thrust me into those valleys, I know He will be by my side, and that Jesus has endured them to a far greater extent than I can imagine, and He knows that we can bear them together. I can choose to believe in the God who has been nothing but good to me. I can accept humbly His promise that He loves me and wants only the best for me. I can accept that what I want isn’t necessarily what’s best for me, and that I will eventually come round to His point of view, even if it takes a while, even if it doesn’t happen in this lifetime. I have been bold to Him, I’ve wrestled with Him. I haven’t treated Him with reverence – I argue with Him and disagree with Him. But whenever I demand that He show Himself, I am always struck by fear, and accept that that isn’t really what I want. That it would be like annihilation to see the face of God as a mere mortal. And most curiously of all, whenever I get to that point, I feel at peace. It is an answer from God: it’s a demonstration of His power. And I am so glad that this infinitely powerful, infinitely merciful God is my God.

The Great Pleasure

“Learning is perhaps the only pleasure that might replace increasing consumption as our chosen mode of enriching experience. Someday, the joy of recognizing a pattern in a leaf or the geological strata in a cliff face might replace the satisfactions of new carpeting or more horsepower in an engine, and the chance to learn in the workplace might seem more valuable than increased purchasing power or a move up the organizational chart. Increasing knowledge of the ethology of wolves might someday replace the power savored in destroying them.”

- Mary Catherine Bateson, quoted in Courage and Calling by Gordon T. Smith.

image from Wikipedia

I love learning, was filled with an insatiable curiosity from the moment (according to my mum) I opened my eyes. In my home country, people would never ask me a question like, “Why did you choose to go to Harvard?” – our attitude in Singapore is that you don’t choose Harvard – Harvard chooses you. If you get into Harvard, you’d better jolly well go. Not that I didn’t fret over it though – I was a little insecure and intimidated, wasn’t sure whether I’d thrive in a cutthroat environment, etc, etc, but really those were fears that were quickly overruled, and very soon the little envelope was mailed back and I started to prepare myself for the adventure that would be attending the Big H. Sure, I do still kind of suffer from the occasional useless counterfactual, but five years later, I have a fistful of regrets but a large sloshing bucket of gratitude.

I guess I’m revisiting my decision because the question resurfaced again this past month, when I was traveling in the Midwest, while staying with some family friends in Indiana.

When I first got to Harvard, I realized immediately it wasn’t the place I had thought it would be – in both good and bad ways. But because it was freshman year, I guess, and because I was suffering from a good dose of culture shock, at first it seemed primarily bad. To me the name of Harvard always called to mind the Ideal University – that is, the best university in this world and age, and therefore desirable in and of itself. It didn’t matter what its underlying principles were; or even who its faculty were. The very fact that it was the best meant it was some kind of platonic University, where all truth and knowledge of the ancients and the accumulated wisdom of the world today resided.

So, I used to be the girl with the 10 year plan. I was insatiably ambitious. When I was 7 or 8, I asked my elders and teachers what the best university in the world was (at the time, they answered “Oxford or Cambridge”), and decided then and there that I would work my ass off to get there. I don’t think I was primarily motivated by arrogance; when I was 7 I had barely any notion of ranking. In fact I was bizarrely innocent of the fact that my good grades meant that I was ranked highly against my peers – I had not made the connection between doing well and “winning” in some sort of race against everyone else. I guess my parents had taught me well not to compare myself with others. Of course, the moment the school rankings were published at the bottom of our report cards my innocence was completely and ruthlessly shredded to bits.  But my point is, I didn’t aspire to go to the best university because I thought I was the best – I aspired to go to the best university because it was the best.

Of course, I was disappointed. You see, I had always imagined universities to be beautiful floating islands with ivory towers and turrets in the clouds, where knowledge was pure abstraction, freed from the dross of the quotidian. I thought of professors as rootless sages, repositories of knowledge, without interfering backgrounds or personal tics that may bias them towards one field or opinion rather than the other. I don’t know where I got that idea – perhaps I thought my small country was provincial, and that in the big countries history was taught differently, or that with a full breadth of literature (or at least the Western canon) at my feet, I would have a better grasp of human nature than from 6 literature texts for the ‘A’ levels. I was actually stunned when I realized that in the department I was interested in, the best professors were Americanists, that they all approached their fields from personal interests (I was bewildered why black professors were teaching African American studies rather than being part of the history or literature departments) rather than from some Archimedean fulcrum from which they could leverage the world. I didn’t understand why Asian American writing had to be taught by Asians, why the Shakespeare professors were white, or why I had an American Literature requirement to fulfill. I was pretty devastated, actually.

Until I realized that there was no such university as the one I had been pursuing – that there is no objective standpoint to all knowledge, at least not one which any one human being can teach. And that there IS no objective standpoint that one can arrive at, either, no matter how good a student. And that the question, “Why did you choose Harvard?” is a totally valid one. I chose Harvard because I wanted to learn, and to learn from the best. I chose English because it was my comparative advantage, and also my passion. I chose to stick it out because too many people had invested in me, from the scholarship boards to my parents to my schools to my peers to my country, for me to just quit when the going got tough. I wasn’t just representing myself here – there was all this honor at stake.

There were people in my church who warned me against going to university to study literature because I would “lose my faith”. I was so annoyed I didn’t even answer them, I just smiled and nodded. But in my heart the remark stung, and I vowed to myself, if literature makes me lose my faith, then it wasn’t a faith worth having. Because, ironically, literature has, on more than one occasion, saved my faith. And because being put through the gigantic ego-wringer that is Harvard has been more purging, more cleansing of my soul than any other institution could possibly have been. The most important thing I learned in Harvard, in fact, was that I could hold a deep-seated, decades-old belief with all the intense fury I could muster, and still be wrong. I still remember, when I was faced with fulfilling my Science B (biology/chemistry) requirement, tiptoeing rather shamefacedly into the “Human Evolution” class for the introductory lecture, wondering if my church auntie was right. She wasn’t. I didn’t end up taking that class because I was too chicken, but I ended up taking Steven Pinker’s Human Mind class, which had a lecture on evolution. It was one of the most enlightening moments of my young life. I felt like the scales were falling off my eyes.

All my life when I picked up the children’s encyclopedias that lie around the house, and stared at the ethereal pictures of the planets in them, I was struck by their beauty and wonder. And then I would look at the dates scientists had labeled on them – however many billions of years, and I would be repulsed by what I thought was a lie, constructed by (what must have been) the infernal conspiracy of world scientists which I had learned about in church, to deny God’s creation. (Yes, I was surrounded by young earth creationist propaganda in my childhood). It bewildered me how the noble white-coated scientists of my imagination, whose science and technology had put a man on the moon, could simultaneously concoct such lies to fool small children, when they daily gazed through telescopes to see such heavenly beauty. It did not make sense to me, and now I see why.

I used to camp with my friends on the offshore island of Pulau Ubin, and, away from the light pollution of the mainland, we would gaze at the stars. What we saw was probably a pale imitation of the skyscape that our earliest ancestors gazed at – the skyscape that inspired myth, mathematics, astronomy, exploration, philosophy -  but still, no matter how diminished, there is still something awe-inspiring about seeing light that has traveled so far, light that is so old. Those massive balls of fire are lightyears away – I’d think to myself – billions of billions of lightyears away….They are signals sent from the dark of the deep past, beyond history, beyond mythology, into the retina of the now, from stars that may have long burned out, but which retain, for this split second, in my perception, their luminescent fury. And it just would not latch into place with my idea of a God who is just and constant and beautiful and, above all, True, to mislead his people each and every night with paper-thin lies, lies that those stars were not in fact more ancient than the earth, more ancient than human memory. It was hypocrisy to call God true and then accuse him of purposely setting the earth up to look old when it was in fact new. It seemed like a nonsensical concept to me, and for the longest time it gnawed in the corner of my brain, a thing I refused to think about, as I repeatedly pushed it out of my mind.

But now that I’ve looked it full in the face, I see that it is not so terrible – that in fact a God who used evolution to make us is an even more logical, beautiful, consistent and terrifying God than the one the pages of creationist magazines contained. I guess the moment of truth came to me when I had finished Jerry A Coyne’s amazingly respectful, mild-mannered “Why Evolution is True”, and I walked into the Northwest Labs building for the first time and saw, hanging above me, a gigantic, mysterious skeleton. It could have been a dinosaur, or some sea-monster of Nessie proportions. But then I saw below its ribcage two tiny, unconnected bones, precariously held in place by wire, that (I imagined) must have floated in the midst of fatty flesh and blubber when this creature still roamed the seas and I thought to myself, it must be a whale. Because Coyne had explained in his book the mysterious case of the whale – descendants of land mammals who returned to the water, thus leaving vestigial, unconnected pelvis and hindlimb bones beneath its spine. “Those bones serve no function at all, ” I thought. “It must be the skeleton of a whale.”

Two weeks later, the curators of that space finally put up a plague for the skeleton, and sure enough, it was.

And in that moment, my heart leaped and something latched into place.

For the Splendor of Creation – Gustav Holst’s The Planets

adapted for Harvard Commencement

For the splendor of creation that draws us to inquire,

For the mysteries of knowledge to which our hearts aspire,

For the deep and subtle beauties which delight the eye and ear,

For the discipline of logic, the struggle to be clear,

For the unexplained remainder, the puzzling and the odd:

For the joy and pain of learning, we give you thanks, O God.

For the scholars past and present whose bounty we digest,

For the teachers who inspire us to summon forth our best,

For our rivals and companions, sometimes foolish, sometimes wise,

For the human web upholding this noble enterprise,

For the common life that binds us through days that soar or plod:

For this place and for these people, we give you thanks, O God.

—

The Church of England’s posthumous apology to Darwin:

Charles Darwin: 200 years from your birth, the Church of England owes you an apology for misunderstanding you and, by getting our first reaction wrong, encouraging others to misunderstand you still. We try to practice the old virtues of ‘faith seeking understanding’ and hope that makes some amends. But the struggle for your reputation is not over yet, and the problem is not just your religious opponents but those who falsely claim you in support of their own interests. Good religion needs to work constructively with good science – and I dare to suggest that the opposite may be true as well

source

The Sign and the Thing

There is something about human nature that is inherently awed by big things. I know this because I recently visited the St Louis Arch – this humongous steel sculpture, monumental, towering overhead overlooking the Mississippi. The response to something big – anything big – is always awe. Like the spacemen in Stanley Kubriks’ 2001: A Space Odyssey, the appropriate religious response is to whip out the camera and attempt to capture a sliver of it – not too different from the medieval pilgrim buying a little metal souvenir, or bowing at the feet of the thing and pocketing a little bit of dirt to keep in a small box. This is why the cynical South Dakotans decided to blow huge sculptures of presidents’ faces into a mountain – because they knew we are inherently impressed by bigness.

image source

We can laugh at this phenomenon, but the laughter dies away when we are confronted with a big thing – whether it’s a powerful man, the giant Mall of America – the largest mall in America (which I also stood at the feet of), a revered university, or even just a really, really large teapot. I mean, bigness makes us feel our smallness. Monumentality gives the illusion of immortality. We look at the St Louis Gateway Arch, and think, here is something man has achieved with the works of his hands – it looks like some relic of an alien race, left as a cryptic message for conspiracy theorists to decipher – but no, it was made by my race, my kind – and what a wonder and enigma is Man!

It stirs something fundamental in us – it makes us worship. Because we know we are mortal, mere walking, breathing time-bombs with a finite counter pasted across our chests, and that perhaps this thing, whatever this thing is, has a secret of something that lasts beyond time we can conceive – perhaps it is infinity, perhaps it is immortality. And because He made us to be immortal, we long for it – we rage against death, we allow ourselves, one by one by one, to be blindsided by it, unable to look it too long in the eye during our brief lives. But it is there, and it is raging at us, raging at us to find meaning, to find purpose.

And the thing about these big things is they always seem to be symbols – metaphors, similes, patterns that recur in the unconscious, things with unutterable meaning. Things which stand for other things. Things which stand for things which have no form. Things which are empty in themselves, except that they are imbued with heavy meaning.

To me, the Arch is always about infinity – that sweet yearning to encompass the globe, the sky. It always prefigures the rainbow, or is a left echo of the rainbow, that beautiful sign God set in the sky. I saw two rainbows this whole time, and was comforted, feeling a little like Noah, that yes, perhaps the days would be long before I saw floods, but I was on the right track. The first one, over the Atlantic, on a beach at Nankuket, Massachusetts; the second, set right over my train tracks, framing the gateway between Indiana and Chicago. They were little comforts, I guess, to a girl who cannot be sure one minute to the next where she’ll be going. Every time I see a rainbow, I think of my dad’s home remedy, from my great-grandmother. She used to say, if you have a wart, and you see a rainbow, you should rub the wart against the grass, and it will go away. I remember wanting to try this out badly, since I had a wart on my knee. I don’t remember anymore whether it was healed the day I saw that rainbow over the garden in Singapore. But my wart isn’t there anymore. I can’t for the life of me understand why I don’t remember such an important thing.

But I know that rainbows are about pointing the way – pointing forward, and pointing back. They are affirmations of a promise, a covenant God made between Himself and his beloved Earth. It was a cross of His tears and His beaming contenance, sorrow and relief flooding all at once. The St Louis Arch was conceived as  a frame for that golden land – the great (supposedly empty) West – the promised land, which (of course) always lay just out of one’s grasp, just out of reach. That is, if you were the conquering nation, and not the Native Americans who had to march that same route in tears, exiled from their own land. No, promised or not – the land is not the promise; the God Himself is.

For beautiful as they are, when we see the bow, it is only half the story – quite literally. For physics tells us that rainbows are, in fact, not arches but circles – we just never see the ends of them because our view on the ground cannot accommodate their perfection. Before the invention of the twin compasses, mankind spent no small effort trying to draw a perfect circle, imagining that if they could, they would discover the secret to perfection. We’ve all drawn circles now, of course, in primary school math class. But we fail to see the miracle of the perfect form, each point equidistant from the centre, with no edges, no points of division. Perfect equality, perfect harmony, perfect wholeness. Perfection – at the feet, encircling the Lord of Lords, the Prince of Peace, the Mighty God, Emmanuel, God the Three, and God the One. How beautiful He is in Revelation, his flashing eyes, his floating hair! How beautiful He is in my mind, with that rainbow sign, crowning His fair brow! How much glory there is even in ephemeral things, which man-made things only counterfeit, and then not with the delicacy and poignancy that Your touch lights upon the earth! How you love your people, that you should grant Beauty for promise’s sake, Beauty for our sake, Beauty for Your love, your delight, your pleasure.

I remember one of the dearest sermons I have ever heard, about God bringing the cloud, and setting His bow in the cloud – Oh He never spares us the cloud! For without the cloud there can be no dark grey to set the ribbons of light against – and if not for tears we can never see His unpuddled face.

If You Like It Then You Shouldha Put A Ring Onnit

Judith: So, I guess since I’m traveling alone and I don’t want guys bothering me on public transport and such, I’m going to wear this ambiguous ring on my left ring finger – it’s wooden, so it doesn’t look like a wedding ring, but it kind of looks like I’m not available either.

God: You don’t actually need a ring to protect you, you know that, right?

Judith: Yeah, but Let’s Go Mexico suggested it!

God: It’s still kind of lying, you know.

Judith: Oh come on. It can’t hurt! And I’m really not looking.

God: But maybe I’m looking out for you, and you really don’t need a little wooden ring to protect you cos you have the Almighty God who made Heaven and Earth?

Judith: Nope, gonna wear the ring.

….

One week later, I have a large growth on my ring, third and second finger.

Judith: Um, I guess I can’t wear this ring anymore. Ahhh … what will I do? Now people will think I’m single!

God: You ARE single.

Judith: Um, yes.

God: I will send you to an apartment with two medical students.

Judith: Hi, Jennifer and Nike! I have this weird blistery thingy on my hand.

Jennifer: First of all, you should not still be wearing those rings, even on your right hand.

Judith: OK.

Jennifer: I will look up Access Medicine to make sure that it doesn’t get serious.

Judith: You mean it’s serious?

Jennifer: Think about it this way. We are preventing it from getting serious. How long have you been wearing those rings?

Judith: About a month?

Jennifer: Er, and when did it start to get uncomfortable?

Judith: About a week ago?

Jennifer: And you kept wearing the rings?

Judith: Yeah.

Jennifer gives me an argh-laymen-they-don’t-know-anything look

Jennifer (bandaging and anointing my fingers with petroleum jelly) : I’m kind of angry you were still wearing those rings.

Judith: OK I guess I won’t wear those rings.

Sigh.

Moral of the story: Put not your faith in rings!

The PreHistory of Lake Michigan

My cab wove through the midafternoon traffic, tracing an arc along the frozen shore of Lake Michigan. On my right, the buildings of one of the world’s tallest cities stabbed toward the sky, steel and glass growing out of the Illinois prairie like modern incarnations of the grass and trees that once lined the lake. A thriving metropolis of nearly three million people, Chicago boasts and airport that was once the world’s busiest (it’s now second), with over 190,000 passengers a day passing through its terminals – including, on this particular day, me. This sprawling city prides itself on its dynamic, forward-looking culture – the “tool maker” and “stacker of wheat,” as Carl Sandburg called it. Not the most obvious place to come looking for the past.

The lake took me back in time, though – way back, before it was even there. Lake Michigan is actually a remnant of one of the largest glaciers the earth has ever seen. During the last ice age, the Laurentide ice sheet stretched from northern Canada down along the Missouri River, as far south as Indianapolis, with its eastern flank covering present-day New York and spilling into the Atlantic Ocean. When it melted, around 10,000 years ago, the water coalesced into the Great Lakes, including Michigan. Looking out the window of my cab, at the strong winds ripping across the expanse of ice reaching out from the Chicago shoreline, I felt like history might be rewinding itself. The ice age could have looked like this, I thought.

- Spencer Wells, Pandora’s Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization, Chapter 1: Mystery in the Map

image by Stephen Hudson from Wikipedia – Antarctic Ice Sheet

A friend of mine once spoke to me of glaciers – of the last traces of life in the Empty Continent (the only one left) – Antarctica. Of how it used to be green fields, and of how the ice has taken over, has left trace skulls and abandoned bacteria, of the tenacity of the last traces of life and also the cruelty of the emptiness – of pure abstraction, she said, like something by Bach.

And she also wrote to me (yes, I am a proud owner of a letter written in Antarctica!) about how the glacial pace of great change gave her hope, because the way that God works is skillful, is mysterious, is relentless, is slow – so slow that it tests our patience – but sure. Glacial change can harden the land – can make it so frigid, so cold that it cannot receive or sustain life. It makes the land barren. It begins a little by little – a little drop in temperature, a little formation of ice where water once flowed – but then before you know it, the land is white as snow, like the winter in Narnia – lasting an age instead of a season. And the opposite is true – what we are experiencing today – a little more methane and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, a couple degrees’ temperature rise – oh it’s just a little, it makes Canada more livable, it gives deserts more rain – it drowns the Venetians (who know they have had it coming for a while), it drowns New Orleans. The levees break, the city weeps and leaves yet another Atlantis, yet another mythical advanced city wiped out by pure geography (helped along a little by unsustainable technology…).

Abe

Abe
by Judith Huang

After a year, Abe got sick of the place.
I don’t know about you, he’d say,
But the people around here talk funny.
And sure it’s unclaimed land, but
I can see why it’s unclaimed – it’s
Deserted desert, that’s what it is.
It’s a caravan park, a shanty-town…
I’m more of city person, as you know.
Buildings, proper sewage systems.
I guess it’s a country thing.
And it’s so inconvenient, everything.
Water is a long walk away,
And people get testy when
Water is a long walk away.
The weather decides to suck,
And boom, there goes your harvest.
It’s ridiculous. Sure, you get some
Great views, but when you’re staring
At mountains, and more mountains
There’s, you know, diminishing returns.

They say things will get better
Sort of get used to the pace of life
Sort things out with the neighbours, you know,
This bit is my land and that bit
To the left is yours, draw boundaries,
Mend fences, that sort of thing.
It just takes a while to adjust, right?

There he is again, using my well.
God, why did I move here?
What the hell?

-

photo by Scott Thistle Thwait Photography

A family moved out of the city to Perth, Australia, and their pastor said to them as he blessed them at the airport, saying: You are like Abraham, called out to the promised land, and we send you out with our blessing.

For those of you who remember, the promised land at the time was a bloody desert, and Abraham was impotent or Sarah was barren, or both, and I don’t know about you, but I don’t even like living in a cultural desert, not to mention an actual desert desert.

But they went. And Oh, it was hard! But we must never turn to Egypt, mistaking it again for Eden. We must never pimp out our wives, must never worship their idols, must never despair, must never idolize our son, must never give up on our daughters, must never look back at the cities now going up in flame, lest we melt into a flood of tears or turn into a pillar of salt.

Oh God you blessed Abraham – bless also this family.

-

The Promised Land no longer exists, not in the Singapore Dream, not in the American Dream. We have wrecked it, wrecked it all. There is no Garden of Eden on Earth, at least not right now. But I have slowly come to love tiny facets of the Australian desert – and I wrote this once to a friend

You know, there is nothing quite as moving as the different faces of our world. Can we help communing with places? I am so glad to think that the earth will not simply crumple up like a burnt crisp when God puts the world right, but rather that we will then witness the marriage of heaven and earth. Because this much beauty – the pointing, pointed beauty of your glaciers and my peculiar Western Australian light – this beauty could not bear being destroyed by its Creator. I love the world, G -  . It is a magnificent place to live. I love my body, especially when running and I can feel it humming along at what It ought to do. I love my mind, the way it reaches into my thoughtcloud and links two things together, the whirring beauty of it when stimulated to its peak, the wild surmise when it encounters God in the beautiful idea. Can you believe, G – , that on top of these wonderful things we have been equipped, blessed with, that there is more? That we are, apparently, weirdly enough, perfectible? I shudder to think what a perfect world will look like. Perhaps only then will great art not mean heartbreak.

Plan A: Natural Increase, Not Genocide

“Behold, I send an Angel before you to keep you in the way and to bring you into the place which I have prepared. Beware of Him and obey His voice: do not provoke Him, for He will not pardon your transgressions for My name is in Him. But if you indeed obey His voice and do all that I speak, then I will be an enemy to your enemies and an adversary to your adversaries. For My Angel will go before you and bring you in to the Amorites and the Hittites and the Perrizites and the Canaanites and the Hivites and the Jebusites; and I will cut them off. You shall not bow down to their gods, nor serve them, nor do according to their works; but you shall utterly overthrow them and completely break down their sacred pillars. So you shall serve the LORD your God and He will bless your bread and your water. And I will take sickness away from the midst of you. No one shall suffer miscarriage or be barren in your land; I will fulfill the number of your days. I will send My fear before you. I will cause confusion among all the people to whom you come, and will make all your enemies turn their backs to you. And I will send hornets before you, which shall drive out the Hivite, the Canaanite, and the Hittite from before you. I will not drive them out from before you in one year, lest the land ebcome desolate and the beast of the field become too numerous for you. Little by little I will drive them out from before you, until you have increased, and you inherit the land. And I will set your bounds from the Red Sea of the Philistines, and from the desert to the River. For I will deliver the inhabitants of the land into your hand, and you shall drive them out before you. You shall make no covenant with them, nor with their gods. They shall not dwell in your land, lest they make you sin against Me. For if you serve their gods, it will surely be a snare to you.”

- Exodus 23: 20-33

When Hernan Cortes first arrived in the Americas, the Aztecs he met with thought he was a long-awaited god, whom their prophets had said would come in that very year. They thought he was Quetzalcoatl, the son of god, and honored him in a manner befitting a god. He was received with great pomp and ceremony by Monteczuma II, king of the Aztecs. What happened afterwards is, of course, a matter of dispute, but both sides agree is reeks of opprobium. The European conquistadors and colonialists in the 16th through the 19th centuries claimed they were planting flags in foreign countries for “Gold, God and Glory“. From the accounts of Las Casas, a Spanish priest who was horrified that Spanish soldiers were raping native women and spearing their babies on sticks, and decided to write his harrowing account of the genocide that was occurring, since he believed that Spain would be damned if it continued sponsoring these men, “Gold” and “Glory” seem to leave “God” a far-distant third in their motivations. Though of course there were also people like Las Casas, who had the conscience to be horrified.

The Aztecs believed that they were being attacked by invisible arrows that pierced them and made them ill – not too bad a visualization of the works of virulent diseases. By way of explanation for the rape and pillage and inexplicable interest in the fictional “El Dorado”, they came to tell a story that the white man suffered from a sickness that only gold could cure -  that in the absence of gold, they went mad.

The Igbo people of what is now Nigeria (or so I am told) believed that the white men who came to their shores were dead ancestors come to visit, because their own skins turned pale when they died. The cowrie shells traded for slaves represented the bodies of their ancestral dead drowned at sea – they believed they were redeeming their ancestors, which they bought in exchange for the enemies, who were shipped off to the Americas – an efficient, not to mention profitable way of ridding the land of one’s enemies.

All this is painful history, and doubly painful for those who call themselves Christians – because it’s pretty good ammunition for the argument that Christians are no better than non-Christians; that sometimes pagans treat Christians better than vice versa. And to people who whip out this argument, I guess there’s only one thing to say: it’s true. Nominal or practicing, those who have flown the banner of Christ have behaved no better and no worse at their best and worst at various times in history.

So, all this begs the question: Where was God in all this?

Full Article at the Harvard Ichthus

The Fall of Man: Part 2

Part One can be found here

shoot location: L’Abri, Rochester, Minnesota

personnel: Tony, Judith, Shelley