Free Stone

One spring after heavy rains had come and gone, my father and I walked the banks of the Sawkill Creek.  It was newly scrubbed by floodwaters that had gouged its banks, sweeping away trees, glacial deposit boulders, and even a few buildings as the Catskills shed the rainfall and shot it down to the Hudson.

The memory of that short walk remains one of the strongest from my childhood.  The river had cut new banks, and had changed its own course.  We walked along the round gravel banks and gazed up at the undercut roots of massive oaks and pines.  We saw the bones of the earth laid bare by the river's irresistible blade.  The river had cut itself a new bed.  Everything in its path was destroyed; everything in its path was made new.

Polished by the river.

Since then I have walked hundreds of miles along - and often in - deep, clear waters over cobbled riverbeds.  The sound of the water is the music of my soul, high sprinkled notes of splashing water and bass tones of massive stones rocking back and forth in the current.  Walking in freestone streams makes me forget my worries, forget time itself.

Mersenne, Education, and Intellectual "Property"

French cleric Marin Mersenne was the academic journal of his day.  I have heard it said that in the seventeenth century the saying was "If you want to tell Europe, tell Mersenne." 

Hobbes mentions Mersenne several times in his verse autobiography - high praise for a Roman Catholic cleric from someone whose antipathy for the Roman church and its philosophy was both deep and wide.  But when Hobbes needed friends during his exile in France, Mersenne was glad to be one of those friends.  Mersenne was a friend to all who were engaged in research.  He was a living example of that idea of Justin Martyr's that Christians need not fear any books at all, since all the truth they contain belongs to the God who made and sustains it.

He was a friend to Galileo, and he passed Galileo's research on the regular oscillation of pendula along to Huygens in Holland, since he knew Huygens was trying to invent a more regular way of keeping time, leading to the invention of the pendulum clock.  He corresponded with Pascal, Gassendi, and Descartes, and what he learned from one he shared with others who could use it.

In his Carnage and Culture, Victor Davis Hanson claims that one of the reasons for technological flourishing in the west is that western cultures treat knowledge as property that can be sold in the marketplace.  I can't say whether Hanson's causal inference is correct, but his observation about intellectual "property" is acute.

But alongside it we should add another observation, namely that universities have long been places where ideas are exchanged freely.  Yes, students pay tuition, but we also give free public lectures, allow free or inexpensive auditing, etc.  What is being sold in the university is not the information but the cost of maintaining a place of intentional colloquy and pedagogy.  We aren't selling ideas to students; we are allowing them to join us in the maintenance of a vital institution, and as members of that institution they participate in its life and share in its learning.

Mersenne was not a merchant of ideas but their curator, a steward ushering them to the places they were most needed.  He was a gardener who made very few original contributions but who shared the best cultivars he could find with others in whose gardens they could flourish.  His approach to knowledge was like that of the church in its earliest years, where "no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common" and goods were "distributed to each as they had need."

Mersenne's model is relevant to our contemporary conversations about the meaning and cost of an education, the value of universities, and the publication of scientific journals.  Some money will be needed to maintain these institutions, but we should resist reducing them to market-based enterprises, or valuing their contributions in terms of revenues.  There is also the shared work of curiosity, and of desiring to see our neighbors, and their ideas, flourish. 

Light Perpetual

My friend Michael Foster died last night.

We knew it was coming.  We saw it a long way off.

It still hurts like hell.

That's what this bereavement feels like: a little piece of hell. Our word "bereave" shares roots with "robbery," "rupture," and "interrupt."  Something has been stolen from us, something has been broken, broken off.  It should not be this way.

The words of Mark Heard's song "Treasure of the Broken Land" are going through my mind again and again:

I thought our days were commonplace
I thought they numbered in the millions
Now there's only the aftertaste
Of circumstance that can't pass this way again.

I knew our days didn't number in the millions, but that's what my heart longed for, Mike.  The loss hurts like hell because the time spent with you felt like heaven, like something that was meant to be eternal.

The realization that he is gone keeps hitting me in waves.  Now, as I write this, I keep having to stop as my throat constricts and my heart pounds, waiting for the tremor to pass through me, waiting for this wave of anguish to roll over me. 

Maybe telling some of his story - our story - will help. 

I met Mike when I was a grad student at Penn State.  He was a professor at Penn State, and a sub-deacon at our church.  (This means he helped with bread and wine, and looked good in a dress.)  We both attended St Andrew's Episcopal Church in State College, and together we served on the vestry.

Sometime in my last year or two of grad work - I don't remember exactly; odd how the most important things can seem so commonplace - he invited me to go out to breakfast at the Corner Room.  Like so many other kind professors I knew, he insisted on paying.  (I now do the same with my students; the little things that mark our lives often become the lessons we really teach.)

Mike was trying to live the best life he could, using his scholarly discipline to love his neighbor, and trying to love his God to the best of his ability.  He'd begun reading Dallas Willard's book The Divine Conspiracy, a book about becoming an intentional follower of Christ.  I knew Willard's work on Husserl, and I guess Mike figured that made me a good conversation partner.  We started meeting every week; he'd buy me breakfast and we'd talk about another chapter of Willard's book.

I didn't know what to make of Willard, and I was reading a lot of other books (this is the life of a grad student, after all) so the book didn't sink in much.  But Mike's life did.  Mostly we let the book lead us to talking about how we were living, and why we did what we did.  Mike had studied economics, and recently his work had become really important to him as he discovered how to combine the methods of his discipline and of developmental psychology to advocate for poor children.  His field was not mine, but I gathered that this was the upshot: a little money invested in children will pay dividends in their lives forever.

Mike and I stand together in the Dexter Ave King Memorial Church

Mike was a restless soul, like Augustine, only finding his rest in God.  I've lost count of how many times he and Mary and their four kids moved, but I know we've visited them in North Carolina and Alabama since we all left Pennsylvania.  He wasn't afraid to pull up his stakes and move somewhere else if he thought he could do better work there.  He has urged me, several times, to do the same, to be willing to regard tenure as a shackle rather than a privilege, and to move where the spirit moves me. 

A few years ago Mike was diagnosed with a tumor in his brain.  He approached this with the same doggedness he approached everything else.  He poured himself into researching treatments, and flew all over the country seeking good medical advice.  The tumor was removed at the cost of one of his eyes, and he went through some grueling radiation.  (I long for the day when we will look back on our modern cancer treatments the way we now look back on bloodletting.)  A little over a year ago he was at Mayo, not too far from me.  I drove over to see him and Mary, and they gave me the gift of letting me pray for them.  I say this is a gift, because I am at best a fumbling prayer, and they made me feel like a priest.  They were suffering, and here they were, giving me this gift of unmerited affirmation.

Last summer a friend from Australia passed through Sioux Falls while enjoying a long service leave.  He had rented a car and was driving from Seattle to Birmingham.  I took advantage of my sabbatical and hopped in the car with him so I could visit Mike and Mary.  They'd just moved to a new home, everything was in boxes, Mike's tumor was growing again, and yet they took me in and made me feel like I was long-lost family recently found again.

I loved talking with Mike, because his offhand observations were like gold.  And the way he talked to people, and treated people, were always examples of both wit and grace.  He was kind, and that allowed him to talk straight, to say with smiling integrity and southern charm, exactly what he was thinking.  He was a true Israelite, in whom there wasn't much guile, and the guile that was there made him fun, and good company.  I loved the way he loved his wife, and his kids.  He wore that on the outside, not for show, but because his love was too big to keep on the inside.  I'm sure it was flawed, as all loves are, but it was also intentional, the centerpiece of his life. 

A couple of months ago, Mike asked if we could talk.  You never know when the conversation you have will be the last one you ever have; this was ours.  He told me the doctor had bad news: he might make it to Christmas, but not likely past that.

Mike asked me if he had lived right, if he had done the right thing.  Yes, oh yes, Mike.  I don't see as God sees, but I don't see how God could say otherwise.  You made my life better.  You loved well, in everything you did.

He also asked me if it was okay to ask God for healing.  This one was harder to answer, but I decided that after thirteen years of benefiting from his straight talk, from free breakfasts and warm hospitality, I owed him nothing less than that.  "It's okay to ask, Mike," I hesitated, not wanting to say it, not wanting to believe what would come next.  I could hear in his conversation that he was declining, that his memory was being eaten away by the tumor.  "But God's not required to answer those prayers.  Miracles happen, but we call them miracles because they're rare.  Christ died, and you and I will die too.  It's time to start thinking about passing your work on to others."

His work was so good, too.  He was at a new hinge-point, a pivot on which his research was ready to swing hard at injustice.  He could see how ten more years of work - even two more years of work - would make a big difference.  "I've got so much more to do; why is God taking me away now?" he asked.  "I don't know, Mike.  I just don't know."

Once again, as his last gift to me, he asked me to pray for him.  It was hard to find the words, but I tried to talk to God the way Mike talked to me, letting Mike's life be a lesson in prayer.  I don't like what you're doing, God.  Make it better, make it right.

I suppose it is better for Mike not to be suffering, but Mike's death doesn't seem better, or right to me.  I want him back, God.  I know I can't have him back, not yet, but I miss him and it hurts.

If I cannot have him back, then give us this: a double portion of his spirit.  The world is darker without him.  I cannot see for the tears in my eyes; I cannot hear his voice anymore.  I don't know how to pray.  Give me his courage, and his wisdom, and his love.  Let him be enshrined in me.  Let all that was good in him live in my life now, and in the lives of his wife, his children, his students.  Oh, this is the hard thing to ask: let us continue his work, with his spirit. 

Mark Heard's words give me some hope:

I see you now and then in dreams
Your voice sounds like it used to
I believe I will hear it again
God, how I love you!

May light perpetual shine upon you, Mike.  May I see you, and hear you, in my dreams.  May the light of Christ that shone in you while you were awake now shine in us while you sleep.  And may we all awake to the same dawn, soon.

*****

Update: If you'd like to attend the memorial service on Wednesday, May 22, you may find details here.  Mike asked that we wear bright colors, not black, to celebrate his life and to maintain our hope for the future.

Hunting, Fishing, and Climate Change

Trout angling in the Black Hills of South Dakota

I've been saying it to my students for years: more than just about any other group of non-scientists, hunters and fishers know the land we live on.  This means that they also are the ones who most notice changes, just as you notice when something in your home is moved to a new place.

This article in Outside makes just this case, with the additional point that we who seek our food in the wild are the people who ought to be advocating for real conservation: not just changes to game laws, but changes in the way we live in relationship to our world.

Visual Art and the Sacred: On The Importance Of Museums

I just finished writing an essay about the day Picasso made me fall down.  I'm sending it off to my favorite editor, and if it's accepted, I'll post a link here.

The event I wrote about took place over two decades ago, when Picasso's Guernica was still housed in the Casón del Buen Retiro at the Prado Museum in Madrid.  (It is now in the Reina Sofia, in a larger but - in my opinion - far inferior room.  You can learn a bit about that here.)

New Acropolis Museum, Athens

Meanwhile, here's the upshot of my essay: education that's prepackaged and canned is not enough.  Education is not the same as transferring information.  It involves informing students, to be sure, but what we tell students should not satisfy them; it should provoke them to want more.  Professors are not conduits of data; at our best we are like guides and gardeners.  As guides we point students in new directions and help them to see what we see.  Just as gardeners cannot make seeds grow but can prepare the soil, so our teaching should be about increasing the fertility of minds and then stepping back to watch what grows.  Also, there is occasional weeding involved.

As an undergraduate I knew very little about art.  Part of this was my disposition: I liked representational art that was easy to look at quickly.  Part of it was a matter of my worldview, and the suspicion that some modern artists who eschewed representational art were trying to undermine something good, obscurantists clouding clear vision.

Time spent in museums has changed me a good deal, as has making the acquaintance of Scott Parsons and Daniel Siedell, who have helped me quite a lot through their patient conversation and what they have written.  (Scott and I wrote a chapter on teaching students about visual culture and the sacred in Ronald Bernier's short but illuminating book Beyond Belief, in which Dan also has a chapter.) Some of Makoto Fujimura's short writings, James Elkins's book On the Strange Place of Religion in Modern Art, and Gregory Wolfe's work at Image have also provided me with clear and helpful education about art that I resisted when I was younger.

Museums are certainly controversial.  Curators make decisions that both expand and limit what we see, and this can be exploited to achieve sordid political ends.  Some ideas and cultures are given preferential treatment while others are made less known by their omission.  They tend to be located in large, wealthy cities, which means that poor people, rural people, and foreigners have limited or no access to them.  But if the alternative is no museums, or all of the world's artifacts in private collections, I will take the museums we have, coupled with ever striving to make them better.

Because museums are a tangible way we can commit to remembering our history together.  Museums are not safe deposit boxes where we lock away our treasures; they are Wunderkammers and classrooms where we may think and learn together.

I have come to love museums, especially the British Museum and the beautiful New Acropolis Museum in Athens (and I'm aware of the irony of that pairing) but I also love the little museums I find in small towns the world over. 

What Jesus Didn't Say

My latest contribution to Sojourners' "God's Politics" blog.

Some reflections on the surprising encounter between Jesus and the Samaritan woman he meets at the well in the fourth chapter of John's Gospel.  Here's a little taste of the post:

"We can get a lot of attention in the media by self-righteous grandstanding, but wouldn’t it be better to follow the example Jesus sets here? Rather than telling people caught in desperate sin how far their sin has removed them from God, why not invite them to come to worship?"

Pornography and Prayer

A recent Wall Street Journal article talks about the way online pornography quickly develops new neural pathways that are difficult to undo. As the author puts it,

"Repetitive viewing of pornography resets neural pathways, creating the need for a type and level of stimulation not satiable in real life. The user is thrilled, then doomed."

Thankfully, "doomed" may be an overstatement.  As William James and so many others remind us, our habits make us who we are, so we may be able to form new habits to supplant or redirect old ones.  I'm no psychologist, but it seems obvious to me that what we hold in front of our consciousness will synechistically affect everything else we think about and do.   So it is no surprise that the author of this WSJ article reports that viewing porn may lead to viewing women as things rather than as people.

To put it differently, everyone worships something, and what we worship changes us.  This is one of the good reasons to engage in prayer and worship that are intentional. (On a related note, it's a good reason to forgive, too: forgiveness keeps us from internalizing the pain others have caused us, where it can fester and devour us from within.)

(If you read my writing with any regularity you will recognize these as themes I frequently return to.  If you're interested, I've written more here and here.) 

One of the problems of philosophy of religion has been to try to identify that which certainly deserves our worship.  This quest for certainty has often (in my view) distracted us from the more important work of liturgy, wherein we acknowledge our limitations, including our uncertainty.  A good liturgy involves worshiping what we believe to be worth worshiping, while acknowledging our own limitations.  After all, if worship doesn't include humility on the part of the worshiper, it is probably self-worship. 

Another way of putting this is in terms of love.  Charles Peirce wrote about this more than a century ago.  There are many forms of worship, many kinds of prayer.  Without intending to demean the prayer and worship of others, Peirce nevertheless offers what seems to him to be worth our attention: agape love, the love that seeks to nurture others:

"Man's highest developments are social; and religion, though it begins in a seminal individual inspiration, only comes to full flower in a great church coextensive with a civilization. This is true of every religion, but supereminently so of the religion of love. Its ideal is that the whole world shall be united in the bond of a common love of God accomplished by each man's loving his neighbour. Without a church, the religion of love can have but a rudimentary existence; and a narrow, little exclusive church is almost worse than none. A great catholic church is wanted." (Peirce, Collected Papers, 6.442-443)

Notice that Peirce uses a small "c" in "catholic."  He wasn't trying to proselytize for one sect; quite the opposite.  He was trying to proclaim the importance of a church - that is, of a community that shares a commitment to communal worship - of nurturing love.

I am not trying to moralize about pornography.  In fact, I see some good in pornography, just as I recognize goodness in the aromas coming from a kitchen where good cooking happens.  Pornography probably speaks to some of our most basic desires and needs, for intimacy, affection, attention, and love, as well as our simple, animal longings.

Still, like aromas from a fine kitchen, porn stimulates us without nourishing us.  And by giving it too much attention we may be training ourselves to scorn good nutrition.  The WSJ article suggests giving up the stimulation as a means of getting over it.  I think this is incomplete without a redirection of the attention to what does in fact nourish us.  Prayer and worship that refocus our conscious minds on what really merits our attention can prepare us to receive - and to give - good nutrition.  That is, by shifting some of our attention from cherishing need-love to cherishing gift-love - from the love that uses others to the love that seeks their flourishing - we might make ourselves into the kind of great lovers our world most needs.