Findings

Kent Desormeaux really wanted his son Jacob, 9, to see him ride across the finish line to a Triple Crown victory. Besides needing cochlear implants to hear, there’s a good chance Jacob is headed for blindness by the time he’s 21. “He’s lost his hearing, but his memory is profound,” Kent Desormeaux said. “I’m hopeful that if he’s having a bad day, he’ll just think about that day that Dad won the Triple Crown, and hopefully, that will make him smile.”

Instead, Jacob saw his father meet adversity with grace and maturity. Perhaps that’s a better sight for this child to hold forever in memory — even better than a victory lap.

Still feeling sorrow for the Chapmans. Still praying for them. Still tearing up as I try to think straight about unthinkable things. Descriptions of little Maria Chapman’s memorial service are here and here.

The automatic question is always, “Why?” Why this family? Why this child? Why this way? Why with such devastation to other family members?

But even if I could understand the answer, that’s not where the comfort is. “Why” is a reflex question, but not the heart of the matter.

The real question is impossible to articulate in words, but it grows out of the troubling awareness that I can’t fathom God’s purposes. The real question is less “Why?” than ”Who are you, God?” What do you mean when you say you have plans to prosper, and not to harm? What do you mean when you say all things work together for good for those who love you, and are called according to your purposes? 

And alongside the absolutely breathtaking ache in my heart for the Chapmans is a more selfish thought: if this unbelievably faithful family must suffer this… what are you going to do to me, God? Tragedies, even when they belong to others, show up the faultlines in our knowledge of God. I love him; there’s no question of it. The fragmentary understanding I have of him is the avenue of my deepest joys in this life. But I fear him too. 

This morning I reached the book of Job in my daily reading. I’m not sure I’ve ever responded like Job to my own suffering, or someone else’s. More often I’ve been like his friends, or even like Satan in the story; both these parties equate a blessed life with deserving it. They make God a mathematical law: do this, get this. God shatters their paradigms, and offers only himself as a substitute — not a checklist, not a cause-effect concept, certainly not a platitude. 

With Job, I say, “Teach me, and I will be silent.” Mind, be silent: no arguments, no reasoning or theology. God, please, meet me where I live. Come again into this world in a form I can comprehend in this moment, somehow face-to-face and not mind-to-Bible or whisper-to-air. You taught the twelve with a warm hand on the shoulder, a hearty laugh, a searching gaze, a piece of cooked fish. I long for that kind of immediacy and roundedness – none of the merely rational arguments can contain you.

This is my prayer for the Chapman family, too. 

645

Bereavement in their death to feel
Whom We have never seen—
A Vital Kinsmanship import
Our Soul and theirs—between—

So writes Emily Dickinson here. Her words capture a rhyme and reason behind the grief we feel over the children killed in last week’s earthquake in China. We mourn with these families we’ve never met because their story strikes at the heart of our shared humanity. 

That sorrow was reinforced by the news of another Chinese child, this one the youngest adopted daughter of singer Steven Curtis Chapman, tragically killed. I’ve liked Chapman’s music for quite a while, and went to one of his concerts a few years ago. It wasn’t just a show. He spoke out eloquently for the cause of adoption, and had set up a foundation to help interested families with the costs. Here’s a video of his acoustic performance of ”Cinderella,” written for his two youngest adopted daughters. (This is the more polished version, but I prefer the other, which includes his personal introduction.)

My prayers go out with those of many others for the survivors of the earthquake, many of whom lost their one and only child, and for the whole Chapman family.

Becky has the Friday poetry roundup today. I see that she’s posted another Chapman song, one that gives his perspective on tragedy. It’s well worth a listen.

Edited to add:

• Here is another article worth reading.
• Here is a special blog set up for people to express their condolences to the Chapmans.
• Here is the website for Shaohannah’s Hope, the adoption foundation set up by the Chapmans.

I listened to this story on NPR while making supper last night. It’s about a Chinese couple waiting while excavators dig out the building where their 2-year-old was staying with his grandparents. I wanted to somehow recognize their story, out there beyond the self-indulgent bubble of my blog with its books and ideas.

Frantic voices in another tongue
break the stillness of my kitchen.

They wait
for what is lost
to be found.

Long days, they wait –
propping one another up –
tossing the unraveling spool of hope back and forth
a gossamer thread
stitching them together.

The lost are found.

The child,
cradled in the arms of a grandfather,
his last vision the face of a grandmother
standing behind
steadying hands resting on Grandfather’s shoulders.

“Mommy is here” she moans into the rubble –
Another language, but an anguish that pierces me
stitching me to them
here in my kitchen half a world away.

Lost.
Found.
Lost.

I’ve never been much into horse racing, but I usually watch the Kentucky Derby, largely out of nostalgia. (I used to live in Kentucky.) Saturday’s was my last. Eight Belles’ death was just too heartbreaking.

This article by Mike Lopresti asks some good questions about Saturday’s race:

• “In public perception, horse racing sometimes finds itself on a thin line between competition and exploitation. Look at the track and what do you see – the sport of kings, or the arrogance of humans?”
• “Words such as courage and determination and heart are used to describe the animals. It is as if they become human athletes, as if they become family. OK. But if that is the case, is this the way we treat athletes – breeding them for maximum speed, even if it kills a few of them? If they are family, how can an enterprise watch so many of them die?”
• “‘They put their life on the damn line,’ Jones said to the media Saturday evening. ‘She was glad to do it.’ How would he know?”

Lopresti’s conclusion is, “The sport need not be condemned. It is not going away. But some soul searching is in order.” I think that’s probably an accurate description of what will happen, but it’s not the desirable outcome. The desirable outcome would be radical change on a number of fronts.

I resist the label of “animal rights,” because I think sometimes that debate goes off in a wrong direction, making value judgments I don’t agree with. But I am a “living things rights” advocate. I still believe in the vision suggested to me by God’s imperative in Genesis that humankind should “steward the earth.” Stewarding isn’t a self-serving or exploitive discipline.

It’s true that things in the racing industry probably won’t change. But the small change within my power to make – leaving the television off — I gladly make. 

You can listen to (or read) Martin Luther King Jr’s final speech here, at the NPR site. My husband heard the last 5 minutes of it last night, and on the strength of that small excerpt it made a permanent impression.

So I listened to the whole speech. Of course, I’m crying… Partly, it’s the timing, the night before King was assassinated, and the prescience of his words about his own life or death. Partly, it’s the worthiness of the subject. “All we say to America is be true to what you said on paper,” he says. Partly, it’s the ability to articulate the relevance of scripture to life. Partly, it’s the powerful vision and eloquence of this prophetic man.

But also, it’s grief. “Let us keep the issues where they are,” he says at one point. “The issue is injustice.” How the rhetoric has sunken from this “mountaintop.” The perception of “the issue” has been clouded by many things.

His is a name often cited, but we — or at least, I – don’t read or listen to more than excerpts of his vision nearly enough. I’m thankful to live in an age that has the technology to preserve texts and recordings like this, that have as much power now — or perhaps more — as they did 40 years ago. 

This excerpt from last Friday night’s Newshour on PBS illustrates one of the foundational insights of Total Truth: we live in a culture that has split reality into two realms, private and public. Private truth is seen as noncognitive, nonrational, and relativistic, and includes faith and morality. Public truth is regarded as empirically verifiable, “objective,” and rational. Pearcey writes that this split perceptual grid functions as “a gatekeeper that defines what is to be taken seriously as genuine knowledge, and what can be dismissed as mere wish-fulfillment.”

I heard this in action in this excerpt from a Miller Center debate about the role of faith in politics. “How do you think religion is going to creep in, and is that good or bad?” asks the moderator. The first answer comes from Bishop Harry Jackson, who answers that a person’s faith is relevant to their decision-making, and is therefore a legitimate subject in a political campaign. He’s talking about worldview, not matters of religious doctrine:

Well, I think in the final analysis faith will be the spoiler and will determine who doesn’t get in, meaning that people who hold our religious values, as they find out where people are, they believe that someone’s belief system will actually inform their decisions. So we can judge some things by the caliber and the quality of their faith and their testimony.

So I think you’re going to find that, as things progress, that there are going to be a lot folks asking questions about who these people really are. The discussion about their faith and its content is not meant to x people out, but to understand how to make decisions.

EVAN THOMAS: And should each candidate be very explicit about the very nature of their faith, and how they worship, and reveal all about the nature of their faith?

BISHOP HARRY JACKSON: I don’t think they need to go that far, but they do need to talk about the quality of their decision-making, what is going to inform their judgment and their framework, what worldview will they use, what peace-making structure will they use if they want to make peace. And I think all of that comes down to practical worldview and someone’s theological perception of what makes things tick.

The debate continues, illustrating the different terms used by the two sides. This next exchange implies that religion is a private matter, classed with your favorite color or your literary tastes, but not relevant outside of its personal compartment:

EVAN THOMAS: Reverend Lynn, you think religion is going to have a negative effect on the election?

REV. BARRY LYNN, Americans United for Separation of Church and State: I think it already has. I think we’ve already had too many of the wrong-headed questions asked about religion and its role in politics. I don’t think we’ve had the right questions asked.

But I’ve got to tell you, the idea that we’re going to make these judgments on the basis of the faith and the testimony of people running for office just flies in the face of everything that distinguishes this country from every other country that even is moving in a direction of a theocratic state.

We need to judge people — there’s even a Bible verse about this — by the fruits, not by what they say. And I think when we get off the mark and start asking people whether they literally believe in the virgin birth, is this a metaphor or not, the kinds of questions we’ve seen in debates so far, we are on a very dangerous road toward a theocracy. I don’t want a theocracy in America, even if it comes in by democratic vote.

Who said anything about individual articles of doctrine, like whether a person “literally believes in the virgin birth”? Bishop Jackson was speaking about worldview, the grid through which you filter all of life; he was pointing out that our decisions come out of our way of seeing the world. He wasn’t suggesting making a litmus test of individual points of religious doctrine. (Apparently someone has, though, and that’s who Rev. Lynn is referring to.)

I also find this statement interesting: “I don’t want a theocracy in America, even if it comes in by democratic vote.” Here is the head of “Americans United for the Separation of Church and State,” presumably a champion of democracy, saying that even a so-called scientific measure like democratic vote wouldn’t enable him to stomach “theocracy.” (I’m not sure I agree that acknowledging the relevance of a leader’s faith constitutes a “theocracy.”) His philosophical assumptions — that science is objective, religion subjective; science is publically verifiable, faith is nonrational – force him to be inconsistent with his own stated aims.

Ahh the joys of living in New York. Splashed across the front page this morning is the speculation about what our illustrious governor will do next, what led him to do what he has already done, and what John Doe on the street has to say about it all. I’ll get to that in a minute.

Beneath that headline pitifulness is a short AP piece reporting that a new study finds 1 in 4 teen girls have a sexually transmitted disease. “Some doctors said the numbers might be a reflection of both abstinence-only sex education and teens’ own sense of invulnerabilty,” writes Lindsey Tanner.

Huh?? How does teaching students about abstinence cause these consequences in those who choose not to abstain? Tanner goes on to quote Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood, who argues that “the national policy of promoting abstinence-only programs is a $1.5 billion failure, and teenage girls are paying the real price.” The assumption seems to be that it’s possible to teach abstinence without explaining the consequences of not abstaining. This is absurd all over the place. Second, it’s simply not possible in our culture for any teen who finds herself in a situation where she’s confronting the choice to have sex to be naive enough not to be aware that there are so-called “safe” measures that could be taken. The non-logic of arguments that use this study to bash abstinence, and to make a case for discrimination against young women, has a dreamlike quality.

Now to Spitzer. Just above this article about the findings of this study was an article exploring the wearying questions, “What was he thinking? How could he be so stupid? Why did he do it?” The only conclusion possible: the delusional nature of sin, and perhaps of power. The so-called adolescent “sense of invulnerability” in the other article is apparently not reserved for teens. Grown men highly competent in their professions subscribe to it as well. It was curious to see these two articles juxtaposed this way.

Further into the local paper was a collection of quotes from people “on the street” who were asked whether they thought the governor should resign. Those who said no — about half of those interviewed — viewed his actions as a personal weakness (”what he does in the bedroom is his own and his wife’s business and has nothing to do with his job”). What about the fact that it was criminal? If he had used taxpayer money to buy drugs, I doubt these people would view it as a personal psychological issue. But when the commodity is sex, there’s a willingness to be blind to the legal aspects involved. Curious indeed.

Since this could be considered a rant of sorts, let me not exclude myself. My reaction when I see sordidness all over the front page is to say, “Let’s move someplace else.” That’s at least as delusional as the lines of thought I’ve just complained about… There is no 51st state called Utopia. And besides being delusional, it’s just plain wimpy. Where better to be salt and light but in this unsavory darkness? For those of us who believe in God With Us in this fallen world, I pray for more backbone, more faith, more love. And less of this stingy curmudgeonliness that I’m wallowing in right now.

This afternoon while icing a birthday cake I listened to this interview with Francis Collins on Fresh Air. Collins, the scientist who headed the human genome project, is a Christian and authored The Language of God. Terry Gross’s interview with him followed one with Richard Dawkins, a scientist who finds religion incompatible with science because it deals with issues of faith.

Collins sees no such incompatibility. I’ll need to listen to the podcast again when I’m not doing 5 other things at the same time, but some things that jumped out at me were:

1. In response to the question, “If religion is about faith, and science is about evidence, how can you reconcile the two?” Collins quoted scripture: “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” There in the definition of faith is evidence. He went on to explain what that meant.
2. Science is the study of nature, so to venture any theory about the existence of God in the name of science is to commit a logical fallacy. To have any meaning, God must be outside of nature. The only honest thing science can say about God’s existence is nothing; it must remain silent if it is to remain in its own province.
3. He touched on Genesis 1 and 2 as well, taking (as Lewis did in The Problem of Pain) a matter-of-fact approach to it as a story not intended to be taken literally. He doesn’t have a problem with common ancestry; it doesn’t go against the idea of theistic evolution. But he thinks it’s clear the earth has been around longer than 6,000 years. I liked the way he pointed out that Genesis 1 and 2 tell slightly different stories, a first hint that they’re not intended as a science book.