To Sleep, Perchance to Dream

There’s a good reason why if God, if he really exists, is offensive to everyone. A God that is extra-dimensional and personal will transcend human culture and understanding. If God is perfectly in sync with the values and understandings of a single culture then there’s a good bet that that particular God is not real at all but rather a power play of that culture to dominate other cultures.

But if God is a real personal God, then he will contradict all cultures in some way. There will be something offensive to each culture because such a God transcends culture.

So to Western culture, the idea of grace and love will be embraced but the idea of sin and judgement will be rejected as “backward” and offensive. 

To Eastern culture, the idea of communal church and judgement for wrongs will be embraced and the idea of pardon for sins and forgiveness will be rejected as “corrupting” and offensive.

If your God doesn’t offend you, then perhaps He isn’t real at all.

My oldest son is learning how to whistle. He’s also learning how to snap his fingers. Also, the monkey bars. And riding a bike. And he wants to be good at them all, yesterday…

I keep telling him to be patient. That he just needs to practice. That he should be okay with failure, and it will come with time. But it doesn’t help. There are so many milestone to hit and everything is extremely urgent for a little boy.

It’s startling to be reminded of how many milestones there are for young children. Counting to 10 is a milestone. Learning your ABC’s is a milestone. Riding a bike, packing a good solid snowball, being able to catch a bouncy ball on the first bounce. When you’re small the milestones are small and closely packed. Each week brings a new life marker to traverse and each challenge at first insurmountable and then quickly passed by.

As we grow older, our milestones come further and further apart. High school to college. Your first job. Marriage. Kids. Retirement. We have a much more difficult time surmounting the obstacles that keep us from our goals and maybe we might never reach that next milestone.

It’s stressful and unpleasant. 

Maybe we look back with nostalgia at our youth and how easy and commonplace the markers were to achieve.

But that would be a mirage as nostalgia always is. I can see in my son, the strain of the next milestone. Wanting to whistle, to draw, to read, to climb, to swing - is a tangible stress. It is no less unpleasant than my struggles reaching my larger and harder milestones. It is no shorter for him than it is for me - he just perceives time to be much slower than me.

So I keep whispering to him that I love him. That no matter what, we can come back tomorrow and try again. I tell him through the tears of frustration that it’s okay to fail - because I love him no matter what. I remind him of how long it took him to learn how to ride his scooter. How we went out, just him and I, into the summer sun and practiced and practiced till he could glide like a bird on wing. I remind him about how he had to slowly and painstakingly build up hard callouses on his hands so that he could conquer the monkey bars. Sometimes I help him. Sometimes I let him struggle. Sometimes I urge him on. Sometimes I dry his tears.

Most of all, I stand by him, as he tries his hardest. 

If there’s one thing Hurricane Sandy has reminded me of it’s that our great civilization is just a thin veneer over humanity. Disasters such as Katrina or Sandy expose civilization for what it is - a complex inverted pyramid which we all rely upon.

As I’m writing this, my friends in Long Island still are without power. The lines for gas are running a mile long and the subways are just now coming to life.

Modern life is predicated on complexity and specialization. The food we eat, the power we get from outlets relies on a series of specialists all dedicated to a singularly focused job. Food is grown in industrialized farms, it’s harvested by machines and trucked in by a distribution pipeline. It’s packaged at a wholeseller and shipped to distributors and collected at supermarkets in a packaged form. 

Our power is generated from miles away and carried over a fragile spider’s network of power cables down to step-down transformers which convert this power over a web of cables to our homes and apartments. Specialist engineers and technicians watch over this network and repair their specialized portion when they need to.

Society is based on complexity but disasters strip away that complexity and leave us with the simple factors. Heat. Food. Water. Shelter. 

It strips away pretension as well and leaves us with very human emotions. Greed, envy, anger, love, charity, despair and hope.

My power-less friends talk about simple things - a hot shower, candles, warm blankets.

William Golding wrote a book that almost every child in America had to read: The Lord of the Flies. When we are stripped bare of the complexity of modern life, we often see the true character of our lives. Do our chants of “Kyrie eleison” turn into “Kill the pig”? Do our moralities and ideas that are sheltered by the comfortable blanket of civilization give way to the realities of our sin?

Or in the midst of the storm, are our actions still guided by our better angels?

In 1615, most people believed that the universe looked something like this. 

This was known as the geocentric view of heavenly bodies. Basically that all heavenly bodies orbited around the Earth.

There was an astronomer named Galileo Galilei who contested this view and proposed a radical new view - heliocentrism. In heliocentrism, the celestial bodies orbited around the sun and not the Earth.

Mayhem ensued. Did not the Bible point to the Earth as the center of the universe? Was not Galileo being heretical?

The Roman Catholic church investigated controversy and in the end, Galileo was forced to recant and spent the rest of his life under house arrest.

Clearly, this was a case where superstitious religion defeated science and the truth was silenced by know-nothing zealots.

Or so the story goes. The actual machinations and political maneuverings are much more complex but here’s something interesting…

Galileo was wrong.

We now know that the universe is very large. So large in fact that it exceeds our ability to see any border to the universe. So large that the greatest radar telescopes cannot see the border in any direction.

So when you ask an astronomer where the center of the universe is “as we know it” he will have to tell you that the center is Earth.

In fact, all heavenly bodies “orbit” around the Earth because the earth is the center of the known universe.

Perspective has great importance to how we view things. From the early Greek’s point of view, all bodies orbited around the Earth. Their perspective was limited. But Galileo’s perspective was also limited - he said the the heavenly bodies all orbited the sun. Which is true if your perspective is the solar system. But zoom out to the Milky Way galaxy and plainly heavenly bodies do not orbit the sun. 

So is the sun at the center or the earth?
Depends on your perspective.

Was the universe created in 13 billion years or in 7 days?
Depends on your perspective.

Sometimes when we see something we don’t understand, we just need to stand somewhere else.

There’s a nice philosophical illustration that goes something like this:

There once was a group of blind men who were in a room with an elephant. Each of the blind men touched a piece of the elephant and tried to describe what an elephant was really like to his blind compatriots.

One blind man touched the trunk of the elephant and exclaimed “The elephant is like a snake!”

Another touched the foot of the elephant and declared, “No you’re wrong, the elephant is like a tree trunk.”

Yet another, upon touching the broad side of the elephant, declared both his friends wrong, “The elephant is like a wall.”

And finally, one touched the ear and shook his head saying, “You’re all wrong, the elephant is like a cloth.”

The moral of this story is that the blind men are like the world’s religions and the elephant is the objective truth. Each of the religions of the world have a piece of the greater truth and they can’t see that they are all talking about the same thing. We are all blind people groping about and fighting over something they can’t see. If only we could humble ourselves and see how blind we are, then we wouldn’t have these foolish arguments, goes the moral.

Perhaps you’ve heard a version of this tale yourself. But there is one unseen actor in this story that goes untold - and that is the person who sees blind people and elephants. 

The storyteller you see, is someone who can “see” the truth! He knows that the other people are blind and foolish. He can see the truth where they cannot. He has the ultimate truth of the elephant and they are left groping.

But wait. What gives the storyteller the basis for “seeing” clearly? Why isn’t the storyteller just another blind person? By what basis can the story teller say that he is right and the blind men are wrong? 

Nothing other than the fact that he is telling the story.

The very thing that the storyteller decries in his blind actors, he cannot prove for himself. He claims the others are blind and can’t see the truth but why can he claim he sees the truth? What gives him the right to lord over the blind people with his objective truth?

What seems on the surface as a moral tale about humility is actually an exercise in hypocrisy. Better to have said from the beginning that “I take it on faith an elephant looks like this” than to hide behind the cloak of humility and claim “we” are all blind.