The End as Far as We Know, Part 2

In my last blog post I was describing how I went from feeling absolutely bereft in the wake of my husband, Stephen’s death to feeling still connected to him through the love that the two of us had established over our 38 years in life partnership. I talked about how I reappropriated my “eternity channel”—the conduit that I have used most of my life to communicate with the higher power that created and sustains my life—into a means of continuing my long-standing conversation with Stephen. And I was telling you about the very provocative three-part PBS series Searching: Our Quest for Meaning in the Age of Science which is hosted by Alan Lightman. Lightman is a committed research scientist who is exploring in this series what, if anything, can science tell us about our very personal and vivid day-to-day experience. The first episode proved to be just the catalyst I needed to begin a more measured and reasoned approach to the very powerful and sometimes painful process of grief that I had been going through since February 7 of this year.

In the second episode of the Searching series, Lightman helps us to get some perspective on how we humans fit into our Universe as described by the results of careful scientific inquiry. He says we are right in the middle of the very big and the very small. The stars are about 10¹⁰, that is, 10 billion times bigger than us. An atom is about 10 ⁹ or 1 billion times smaller that us. Science and technology have helped us to see back near the beginning of the Universe 13.4 billion years ago, and we’ve learned much about the stars and galaxies, their containers. Science and technology have enabled a look inside even the atom, but we are about to the limit of small. At the level of quantum gravity, everything fades into a frothy mist of probabilities.

Still, wonders Lightman, where does our consciousness fit into this? He interviews a humanoid robot and wonders if it is conscious. Probably not, he concludes, but maybe in the future. He interviews the Dalai Lama, who tells him that matter and consciousness are two different orders of things; one cannot come from the other. Lightman doesn’t agree with the Dalai Lama. He interviews a scientist who is a reductionist; the scientist tells us that he believes that eventually we will understand how consciousness is generated from matter. Still, Lightman is not sure; he has such intense personal experiences, and he feels love and compassion. These things are not well understood from a scientific point of view. Also, we hear the scientist quoting data and statistics that support possible connections between what goes on in our bodies and brains and what we experience, but these do not impress us as having fully accounted for what goes on in our “inner” world.

We’re all trying to get it right

One time in my far distant past, maybe I was seven or eight, I asked a philosophical question. I was this skinny kid—skinny due to constant “gastritis,” the doctor called it—standing on the cracked and sloping old sidewalk in front of my dad’s side of this very modest double house on the poor side of town, standing there barefoot and shirtless in my bluejeans. I was feeling the cool summer breeze on my shoulders and chest, really, expanding into that early June morning in southeastern Ohio. Our street was shaded by many old American Elm trees, but they were allowing blotches of sunlight to fall on the sidewalk and on Jimmy. I was all alone on the street that morning.

I don’t know why, but I turned and faced the corner of Fourth and Greene. I bent over and looked between my legs back in the other direction, towards the north part of Marietta, Ohio. As I hung there, observing head-down, I noticed how the street curbs seemed to get closer together, the farther away they were. I knew the street went way beyond Putnam Street, which was two long blocks north of me, maybe five or six more blocks. I’d been up there with mom and dad many times in the car. I wondered how far I could see up that way. And then I wondered “Where does this all end?”

My Metaphorical Christ

I woke up Easter Sunday in a mood. The previous evening, Stephen and I had attended the late service at Trinity Episcopal Church, and everything had come together for me in an exhilarating way. Witnessing the preparation and lighting of the Paschal candle and the passing of the flame to hand-held candles in the congregation, listening to those old familiar psalms, hymns, and readings from Genesis and Ezekiel, and hearing our competent choir, accomplished organist, and phenomenal preacher, I basked in the lovely ambiance that these elements of worship had created. I have for decades been involved in liturgical service. I recently resigned from altar service, where I have held every lay role, but I continue with my sacristy duty. Being in community with my friends and fellow parishioners as we celebrated the First Eucharist of Easter had resurrected some of my old faith.

Combating Commercial Christmas in a Seasonal Church

The Holidays. Some people love them; some people hate them. I, personally, navigate them in much the same way that I navigate baseball, basketball, and football season. Sports and the holidays mean everything to a lot of people. They throw their heart and soul into the appreciation of them. I don’t want to spoil anybody’s fun, not to mention the fact that being critical of these practices can get you quickly dropped from any number of social calendars. I just try to go with the flow, and manage to find some things to enjoy in all the hubbub. So I’m not exactly Scrooge and I’m not exactly Charlie Brown.

What Would Help?

It’s been a tough 18 months. I’ve been alternatively filled with dread, furious, determined to do something, hiding in Facebook, talking to dispondent friends, reflecting, scanning the news, avoiding the news. It’s been 19 months since Barack Obama left office. Nothing has inspired me to write much about his absence from the presidency or the current state of the presidency. I usually have something useful to say about politics. My useful intellectual or moral contributions in the past year and a half have been restricted to posting interesting articles from various online newspapers on Facebook and Twitter.

Now it’s not that I’ve felt powerless. One of the things I’m very grateful for is my professed Christian faith, lived out for the last 33 years at Trinity Episcopal Church in St. Louis with my spouse, Stephen Nichols. Even though I want this post to speak to a broader audience than my fellow Christians, I think a moment’s reflection on how my faith has impacted my life in the Trump era might be instructive. One thing I like about my faith is that I can practice it without being assured that I can alter the political situation in what I consider to be a positive direction. My Christian life is simple: I have to love God, and I have to love my neighbor as myself. So, a paragraph or two on each of these rules.

On Wisdom in Old Religious Traditions

The other day I came up with what I think is a new idea for the interpretation of the Creation Myth as presented in Genesis. Caveat: my reason for doing this is not to try to establish grounds for any faith, i.e. I am not evangelizing here. As someone who is a practicing Episcopalian, however, I frequently have cause to ask myself, “Ok, what were these old geezers onto, if anything? What ancient insight is buried in here, no matter the  inconsistency with what contemporary science understands about the basis for these old scriptures?”

On Science and Faith

Sunday, June 19, I decided to attend an afternoon public meeting the agenda of which was to explore organizing action in the St. Louis area in response to the killing of 49 queer people, many of them latino, in Orlando last Sunday. We heard an overview on intersectionality and occupying space, listened to stories of oppressed people of color, received training on how to occupy space in a non-violent manner, and ultimately disbanded without setting specific action goals. It was generally speaking a very worthwhile experience, but all of us were shocked when, early in the meeting, a young gay man with an Asian appearance made a brief statement of objection to the proceedings, picked up his backpack and left. His protest was basically, “How can you talk about creating safe spaces where people who are frightened, hurting and angry can share their stories, on the one hand, and have this public meeting in a church sanctuary, on the other? Don’t you realize that the church has been one of the major oppressors of LGBTQ people for centuries and centuries?! I do not find this to be a safe space!”

How can you talk about creating safe spaces where people who are frightened, hurting and angry can share their stories, on the one hand, and have this public meeting in a church sanctuary?

My Strength and My Redeemer (Conclusion)

What do I make of my dream, then, quoting from Part 1 of this epistle?

“I am out on the street in some small town with a woman I don’t know. She is perhaps 35 or 40 years old, and I somehow know that she is a lesbian. She proposes to me that we both take turns putting a nickel in the nearby parking meter, and that as we do this, we offer up a prayer. I am to go first. I rummage around in my pocket, and there are lots of dimes and quarters, and one nickel that I finally discern. I take it out, and as I insert it into the parking meter, both I and my surroundings are suddenly transported. Now the sky is dark and ominous, and I am sitting in a wheelchair feeling very weak. I am struggling to say the prayer that is not yet in my mind. I hear myself, stuttering, hesitant and trembling, say and then repeat, “Lord, you are my strength and my redeemer.” I am crying as I say this. And then I wake up.”

My Strength and My Redeemer (Part II)

Coincidentally, Sunday was the opening of the Trinity “All Things New” art show, containing some of the artwork of our fellow parishioners. I happened to have contributed to this show a piece of counted cross stitch, which you can see below. The text displayed with this piece is as follows: “”The Lord Is My Shepherd” stitched by Jim Andris in 2013, design by Sandy Orton of Kooler Design Studios: Counted cross-stitch, embroidery floss on 14 count ecru Aida cloth, 11 1/4w by 16 1/4h inches, stitch count 154w x 224w. The 23rd Psalm has been part of my strength and my refuge since my father read and explained it to me at age five. When I saw this design of Sandy Orton’s, I knew I had to bring it into being.”

My Strength and My Redeemer (Part I)

This morning I attended Trinity Episcopal Church, where Stephen and I have been attending for the past 29 years. I think it is fair to say that Trinity is at least a center of our lives, if not the center of our lives. I can also say that we are anything but traditional Christians. For one thing, we both are careful in our lives to make room for our non-Episcopalian friends. We have other broad circles of friends of differing faiths, of no particular faith, and of faith in the non-existence of God.