To See or Not To See, That Is the Question

To understand the world we live in, we must first see it as it is. Not as "trained" or manipulated to see it. Where do our ideas come from? Our ideas about God, about right and wrong, about how we should live... are they chosen, or... what?

                                                                         Journal note, Aug. 25, 1985

A long lost friend sent me this verse, with the follow up explanation:

I looked to see
What I thought I saw,
But what I saw
I did not see.

"How many times do you think you see something, then turn to look and what you thought you saw wasn't what you were really looking at; in the real sense of it. On a more philosophical angle, every day we see past what's real to what we want to see, but only when we make efforts to truly see things for what they are we realize it's not what we wanted to see. Our minds and hearts trick us every day into believing what isn't real." ~ S.P.

 

In the end, the question is not merely “To see or not to see,” but whether we possess the humility and discipline to look again—especially when the first glance flatters us or confirms what we already believe. Every inherited idea about God, morality, politics, or human purpose arrives pre-loaded with the fingerprints of culture, fear, comfort, and desire. The verse from my friend reminds us that our minds are masterful editors, cropping out inconvenient details and airbrushing reality until it matches the story we prefer.

The longer I live the more I've come to distrust the popular narratives we're all supposed to accept and believe.  The "Big Bang" theory? The Population Bomb? The global warming apocalypse? That we're descended from monkeys?

True sight is not a passive act but an act of rigorous reconsideration, and a willingness to admit we were wrong when or if it leads to that. It's uncomfortable, yet it is the only path that leads out of the hall of mirrors and into something solid enough to build a life upon.

And once we have tasted that unfiltered view—even briefly—we cannot unsee it without doing violence to our own integrity. My friend’s words linger as both warning and invitation: keep looking, keep turning your head, keep questioning the comforting shapes your heart insists are there. In a world drowning in curated illusions, the most radical thing any of us can do is to see what is actually in front of us, accept it for what it is, and then decide, with open eyes, how we shall then live.

Hans Rookmaaker’s Modern Art and the Death of a Culture:

After philosophy, much of my college study (1970-74) was dedicated to the fine arts. I immersed myself in painting and drawing, as well as continuous rummaging of the art books housed in the school library, which was almost the nearest building to  my dorm. Though captivated by much of what I saw, and at times sought to emulate, there was plenty that I wasn't really attracted to. I did, however, have a great love for the process of laying paint on canvas. I found the process of creation magical.

During that time I had a friend who periodically told me, "The artist is the vanguard of the revolution." His meaning was clear. Art was to be subservient to political ends. My friend Walter Urban created powerful works of this nature, a life-sized soldier on a cross (protesting Viet Nam), a family in the future taking a walk in the park wearing gas masks.

I myself saw many ends that art could serve. After the death of a best friend in high school art served a therapeutic function for me. There were dark things in my heart that words seemed inadequate to express. Beyond the grief there were other emotions and art was a means of working it out.

As one stepped back and surveyed the previous 100 years, one could see that art also served as a mirror of the culture. This is the theme tackled by Dutch author, professor and Christian scholar Hans Rookmaaker.

 

Hans Rookmaaker’s Modern Art and the Death of a Culture (1970) explores how the development of modern art reflects the spiritual and philosophical collapse of Western civilization. Writing as both an art historian and a Christian thinker, Rookmaaker argued that art is never created in a vacuum—it mirrors the worldview of its time. As Western society drifted from its biblical foundations, art, he says, became a visual record of man’s alienation, fragmentation, and loss of  meaning, themes taken up by mid-century existentialists like Camus and Sartre.

Rookmaaker traces the story from the harmony of classical and Renaissance art, where beauty and order reflected divine creation, through the Enlightenment’s turn toward human reason, and finally into the modern era, where faith in transcendence eroded. Artists like Van Gogh, Picasso, and Pollock emerge as prophets of a disintegrating world: their work cries out with spiritual yearning but lacks the hope once rooted in a Christian understanding of reality.

For Rookmaaker, the “death” of culture meant more than a shift in artistic style; it pointed to a deeper moral and spiritual drift. When God is no longer at the center, both art and life begin to lose their unity and meaning. Yet he did not fault the artists themselves. In their confusion and despair, he saw an honest reflection of the human condition. His response was not condemnation, but invitation—a call to recover beauty and, through it, a renewed sense of order and purpose.

[This seems to be a good place to insert a couple of comments by my eight-year-old grandson who visited New York's Museum of Modern Art this week. My daughter said, "He was so funny at the art museum with his sort of pithy, harsh reviews of the art: 'So, um ... How did this get so famous anyway?' and (no doubt responding to Pollock)  'Huh. It kinda looks like they just splattered paint on the paper.'"]

Ultimately, Modern Art and the Death of a Culture is not an argument against modernism but a plea for spiritual reawakening. The book invites readers to see that the renewal of art depends on the renewal of belief—that culture can be reborn only when it again recognizes its source in the Creator.

                                         "Red Star"  

Now that we are more than fifty years removed from Rookmaaker’s diagnosis, the story of art has not reversed itself so much as it has unfolded along the very trajectory he observed.

The boundaries are gone. The gatekeepers have loosened their grip. What once required training, patronage, or institutional approval is now open to anyone with a vision—and sometimes even to those without one. From installations and performance pieces to digital art and street murals, expression has multiplied in every direction. In this sense, there has indeed been a kind of liberation.

And yet, with that freedom has come a curious diffusion. Without a shared center—without a commonly held sense of the true, the good, and the beautiful—art often speaks in a thousand private languages. Some works are deeply personal, even therapeutic. Others are expressions of love. And then there is art that is simply functional, enriching us more than endless halls of empty walls.. And we still have the overtly political, echoing my friend’s conviction that the artist stands at the vanguard of revolution. Still others seem to revel in irony, fragmentation, or shock, as though meaning itself were suspect, though what shocks some seems to miss the mark because many of of oldsters have seen it all before and, yawn...

But beneath the variety, one thread persists: art continues to tell the truth about us. It reveals our longings, our confusions, our search for identity and transcendence. If the last century showed us the fracture, the past fifty years have shown us what it is to live within it.

Which leaves us, perhaps, where Rookmaaker left us—not with a neat conclusion, but an invitation.

If art is a mirror, then what we choose to create—and what we choose to behold—matters. The question is not only what art has become, but what it is for. And whether, in the midst of all this freedom, we might yet rediscover not only expression, but meaning… and perhaps even beauty in its myriad forms once again.

Related Links

The Painted Absurd

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2009/05/painted-absurd.html

A Century of Rebellion: Exploring 20th-Century Art Movements

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2025/03/a-century-of-rebellion-exploring-20th.html

Blackbirds: A Metaphor about God and Truth

"Now we see through a glass, darkly..."

~ 1 Corinthians 13:12a

Painting by the author, 24"x 24"

Imagine a flock of blackbirds suddenly rising into flight. A group of friends, catching a brief glimpse, tries to estimate how many there were. One says about twenty-five. Another guesses twenty. A third is sure there were at least thirty. None of them can state the exact number with certainty.

After discussing it for a while, one friend says, “Since we can’t agree on the number, how do we even know there were any blackbirds at all? Maybe it was just our imaginations.”

The others immediately recognize this as absurd. Disagreement about the precise count does not mean there were no birds—or that the number was whatever anyone wants it to be.

Yet this very logic is often used against Christianity today. People point to disagreements among theologians and denominations—differing views on communion, baptism, or the relative importance of certain doctrines—and conclude that Christian truth is entirely subjective. They claim there is no objective truth about God, that religion is just personal preference, and that we can never really know anything for certain.

That conclusion is as mistaken as denying the blackbirds existed.

There was a definite, specific number of blackbirds, even if the observers could not verify it or agree on it. No reasonable person would say the flock’s size was arbitrary or unknowable in principle.

The same is true of God and moral truth. God has a definite nature and specific attributes, whether or not human beings fully agree on what they are. Truth is not whatever we want it to be.

Agnostics often say, “We can’t know whether God exists or what He is like.” Others insist God is simply whatever each person imagines Him to be. But that is no different from claiming the flock contained whatever number of birds each observer preferred, rather than acknowledging there was one actual number.

The Bible promises the opposite: if we sincerely seek God, we will find Him. We can come to know more and more of His true character. In this life we see only dimly, “through a glass darkly,” yet many of us have glimpsed enough—heard His voice, seen His hand at work—to be certain He is there. And we trust that one day we shall know Him fully, just as clearly as we could have known the exact number of blackbirds if we had been given the chance to count them.

Revised from journal note of July 11, 2002 

Proof of Life: Hostage-Taking Is Not A Game

THROWBACK THURSDAY
In light of the current hostage situation in Gaza, still relevant.

Yesterday I was listening to a documentary about kidnapping and hostage-taking on National Public Radio. At one time Colombia led the world in number of hostages being held for ransom. If I heard correctly the program said there were 3,000 hostages being held by the FARC or the rebels at any one time at its peak ten or fifteen years ago. (Somalia, I believe, is now the leader in this enterprise.)

In fact, there were so many hostages held that a radio station in Bogota created a radio program that aired on Sunday afternoons for the purpose of transmitting messages from loved ones whose husbands (usually) were missing. Wives would tell their husbands that they were loved, that they looked forward to seeing them again, that sons and daughters were starting school next week or graduating, etc.

One of the reasons many hostages don’t make it is that they lose hope of ever getting out. As a result, they do not exercise or take care of themselves. This attitude leads to self-destruction when in reality the hostages-takers have it as their aim to keep them alive because they are only worth money alive. This is a ransom situation.

To get someone returned a price must be paid. But the person paying that ransom wants proof of life first. Why give a million dollars for a dead man? Proof of life may consist of videos, tapes, letters… evidences that the captive is still there. At least this is the way it works in the hostage business.

As an aside here, it’s interesting the Bible talks about the human race as being hostages, that God sent his son, Jesus, as the ransom to get us back. One difference between that story and this is that in the Paul’s letter to the Ephesians God did this ransom transaction knowing we were dead. That is, we were “dead to God” or spiritually separated from life, which in the Biblical story began with being banished from Paradise or Eden where the "tree of life" was situated. This is a very unusual notion but a central concept related to the “good news” that Christianity was originally all about. (Interestingly enough, the hero in C.S. Lewis’s space trilogy* is named Ransom.)

But as I listened to yesterday’s program and thought about it my mind latched on to this phrase “proof of life” but I wanted to apply it in a different way. What is the evidence we bring to this world that we are alive? After we’re gone, what have we left behind that proves we have lived? Certainly our children are a legacy. Do my writings count? My art? How about our acts of selflessness?

What are the proofs that you are alive? What proofs will you leave that you have lived?

* * *

Related Links: The Amazing Operation Jacques

*Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength

Originally published 2012

Who Am I? Where Am I Going? Why Am I Here?

Does God have a purpose for my life? How do I know? And how do I find it? These questions asked honestly (more than nearly any others) force us to confront the fundamental realities of who we are, who God is, and the meaning of life.

Though some have suggested that people can bear the sense of meaninglessness, Viktor Frankl argued that humans have an innate need to find meaning in their lives. This need, he stated in his book Man's Search For Meaning, is even stronger than the need for food, water or shelter. 

Albert Camus likewise spoke of our human desire for meaning and purpose. In his view the longing for meaning comes face to face with an apparently indifferent universe. He labeled this fundamental conflict "the Absurd." While the human mind seeks order and meaning, the universe remains silent, hence this sense of absurdity. Thus, in his essay The Myth of Sisyphus, there is really only one question that matters. Does it make sense to go on living once the meaninglessness (Camus' conclusion) of human life is fully understood and assimilated?

Understandably, these are serious issues. For this reason such questions are seldom voiced, though deep inside they niggle and churn, unsettling those who have failed to find truly satisfying answers. It is as if we are living in a dark room with no windows, with no light. 

Ah, but what if indeed light has entered the world? What if indeed there were a living God who has not left us in the dark?

This is what the Bible claims. Light has indeed come into the world.

Thomas Paine, who died in 1809, wrote that the Bible would be a forgotten book in 50 years. I'm pretty sure that a majority of young people do not know who he was. 

I found this the other day in one of my 1983 notebooks. It is a list of various responses to the question. "Who am I?" 

Analogies: 

Man is a machine. 

Man is a collection of atoms. 

Man is an animal. 

Man is a bundle of habits. 

Man is divine. 

Man is a living soul.

Once we get clarity on this first question, we can begin to get on track with the others.

From my youth I have been interested in philosophy. I remember asking philosophical questions as early as elementary school while swinging on the swings in the playground. In college I was attracted to both philosophy and art, and there's a sense in which the latter is simply a visible representation of the former. Check out this famous painting by Gaugin: 

Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?

Gaugin asked the right questions.

Are you still seeking answers to the questions rattling around within you?
When Jesus said "Seek and you shall find," the original verb meant 
"seek and keep seeking... and you will find."
Don't give up the fight.

Hitchcock's Rope: Morality, Guilt and the Tension of Secrets

Photo by Mockup Graphics on Unsplash

Monday evening the film Rope was on one of the cable networks, and even though I've seen this Jimmy Stewart classic several times I couldn't help but watch it yet again. What makes it a great film isn't just the acting and the dialogue, but also the psychological probing and collision of philosophical ideas that director Hitchcock explores.

Based on Patrick Hamilton's book by the same name, it later became a play before being adapted to film in 1948. It's a story of two young men, Brandon Shaw and Phillip Morgan, who strangle their friend David Kentley and then invite his friends and family over for dinner. The body is hidden in a chest in the middle of the room, and the two men pretend that David is still alive while offering various suggestions for his absence.

One of the guests is Rupert Cadell, a philosophy professor whom Shaw and Morgan admired when they were his students at University. Brandon is proud of what they have done, Phillip is rattled by the terror of being found out. It's one thing to imagine doing something audacious, quite another thing to actually do it. 

When David Kentley fails to show up for the party, Rupert begins to suspect something is amiss. Little by little the pressure is on, and Phillip begins to sweat. As the evening unfolds, Rupert's suspicions feel a little like thumbscrews being applied by a master tormentor. 

Brandon is so proud of his "achievement" that he's not concerned about Rupert's inquisitiveness. Phillip, however, begins drinking heavily to calm his nerves. Like a bloodhound, once Rupert is on the trail he's determined to follow it wherever it leads. When he finally discovers Kentley's body, the story is not yet over. Brandon points out how Professor Cadell's own words were what inspired him. 

And what were these words? Rupert had presented Nietzsche's concept of the Ubermensch, the "Superman." The Superman is not constrained by the conventional morality of the common man. Brandon justified their murdering someone as a philosophical decision, their way of demonstrating their superiority, that they belonged to the class of "exceptional people."

For Brandon, committing the perfect murder was something akin to an art project. The flawless execution of his idea was his way of proving his eminence. Living inside the bubble of his imagination, he assumed Rupert would actually appreciate his achievement.

Both perpetrators fell victim to the self-deception that they could detach themselves from the consequences of their actions. Guilt has a corrosive effect on one's conscience, and as the party proceeded it became increasingly difficult to hold normal conversations. As Neil Young once sang. "How slow and slow and slow it goes to mend the tear that always shows."

In past viewings, I focused on the masterful manner in which Hitchcock built suspense. Also, the way he creates situations in which everything occurs within a tight space. Lifeboat is an example of this, as is Rear Window. In the latter, as in Rope, there is a sense in which the audience is present in the room, watching voyeuristically.

The story explores power and manipulation as well. Paul Tournier's The Strong and the Weak examines how people react differently to external circumstances. Brandon's dominance is clear, and Phillip goes along with Brandon's smooth-talking persuasive arguments. How many people have "gone along" with things they felt uncomfortable with, that violated their foundational beliefs because they failed to be strong, failed to take a stand? Whether it be a gang or a simply a relationship, things get messy when values are at odds. In the end, both characters will suffer the same consequences and be held accountable for their crime. 

We can pity Phillip but in a court of law he was an accessory to murder and likely will not get a break in the courts.

* * *

Postscript
In 1979-80 I met a man who had been an accessory to murder. I was in Puerto Rico at the time. His uncle had planned to murder a man in Chicago and the nephew was used to lure the victim into an alley where the uncle took the man's life. Both the uncle and his nephew, whom I will call Antonio here, went to prison. Antonio's wife, a strong Christian, visited him every day no matter the weather. (She had to take a bus and walk miles to get there and home.) Her sacrificial love broke his heart and he gave his life to the Lord. When I met him he had a beautiful spirit and was dedicated to helping others to make a different choice from the one he made years earlier with his uncle. The hardships he'd endure, his wife's love and the mercy of God changed him on the inside. He approached life with humility because of what he had been through.

There's a Middle Eastern proverb that goes like this: The same sun that hardens clay melts wax. We all make mistakes and sometimes especially bad choices. How we respond determines the "what next" of our own lives.

It would be interesting to see how the story of Rupert, Brandon and Phillip plays out. One of these young men may become hardened bitterness whereas the other's eyes are opened and sees things in a new way. Perhaps Rupert will write a book that addresses these issues, that counters the creeping cynicism and amorality fostered by Nietzsche, Existentialism and (later) post-modernism.

What are your thoughts on this?

What Question Would You Like To Ask God If You Were Able?

I was on a Bob Dylan fan site where someone asked the question, "If you could talk with Bob Dylan and ask him one question, what would it be?"

That exchange brought to mind a couple blog posts I'd written in the past. The first, in 2010, had to. do with questions college students were thinking about. I'd titled it Is There A God? The second, from 2013, was titled Life Notes About Nothing.

Life Notes About Nothing started like this.

Everything comes out of something. Nothing comes out of nothing. 

Those were some of my thoughts as I was thinking about the Big Bang Theory. Where did the bang come from? Out of nothing? If there was nothing, how could something happen? In the beginning…

Yesterday I had an interesting conversation on an airplane. At one point the woman I was speaking with (I'll call her Dee to protect her identity) asked, “If you had two hours in God’s presence where you could ask God anything you wanted, what would you ask?"

That question didn't come out of the blue, out of thin air, out of nothing. We'd been talking for quite some time before such personal explorations could be broached. A framework had been established. But now, the question was out there.

Before I share my first reply, I’ll ask you: What questions would you ask God? You have two full hours. (This is for you to answer to yourself. No need to send me anything.)

I only had one question initially and after that my mind was blank. It's been a decades-long recurring theme for me and it always comes back to this: Why am I here?

In that moment on the plane I really didn’t know what else I could ask. Later, while driving home from the airport, other questions began to emerge. Where does beauty come from? Why do we respond to beauty? Or rather, why do I respond to it the way I do? Why is beauty beautiful?

That was the first set of personal inquiries. Many more questions soon followed.

Maybe you have questions for God. Maybe asking the questions will unlock something for you.

I have one more for you. When are you going to get around to taking that personal retreat you’ve always promised yourself? Perhaps it’s time to get re-centered.

The world pushes and pulls us in so many directions. There are so many voices telling us what we should do, who we should be, where we should go. In the midst of all this "noise" there's a still small voice... within. Do you know who you are?

I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine: An Early Dylan Morality Play

One of the themes of Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go is how information discovered later sheds new light on things we experienced earlier. In other words, the past is not fixed but fluid. This notion re-asserted itself as I was reading Agatha Christie's Elephants Can Remember this past week. 

Perhaps this is one reason why many Dylan fans not only appreciate his music but are avid readers of books about aspects of his life and career. The books, written much later, often shed new light on the songs that so moved us, inspired us and sometimes challenged us. 

Daryl Sanders' That Thin Wild Mercury Sound is one such book that brought new light to old memories. In light of how different this album was from the trio of what I would call astonishing studio albums that preceded it--Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde--I'm somewhat surprised it reached #2 on the U.S. charts and achieved #1 in England. 

Numerous writers have noted the quantity of Biblical allusions in the album, from 60 to more than 100 depending on who you listen to. I referenced this detail when writing about this song in 2016. Up until I read Sanders' book I'd always assumed that these spiritual themes and moral probing were a by-product of the motorcycle accident that ended his touring. That Thin Wild Mercury Sound dispels that idea altogether.

WHAT SANDERS NOTED in his book about the making of Blonde On Blonde was how much time Bob spent poring over the Scriptures, either looking for words and images or inspiration. Charlie McCoy, Kenny Buttrey and the rest of the studio crew had dealt with a situation like this before. By this I mean not the Bible reading, but the hours of having to chill while on the payroll. 

These recording sessions took place before the controversial motorcycle crash, so my assumption of the crash being a trigger that resulted in spiritual reflection was mistaken. This album, and some of the tracks on New Morning were my "evidence" of a turning point of sorts.

The reality is that from his earliest Dylan made no effort to conceal this moral aspect of his belief system. Those early songs about apocalypse ("Hard Rain") and injustice ("Only a Pawn in Their Game") are very much infused with a moral tone that had roots in a spiritual worldview. It was Dylan who in the Sixties told Noel Paul Stookey to "read the Bible." 

When one steps back and looks at the whole of Dylan's life, what one sees is an early seriousness about spiritual things followed by an earnest quest for God that led him to his embrace of Christianity in 1979. The next ten years we see him floundering somewhat as he attempts to synthesize these revelations with the greater whole of his life. The fruit of that period was the marvelous Oh Mercy in 1989 and the Never Ending Tour that was birthed shortly before. 

* * * 

I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine was first performed live at the Isle of Wight in 1969 with the Beatles in the audience and played numerous times during Rolling Thunder Revue. Here's some information from the Wikipedia page about the album it appeared on.

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John Wesley Harding is the eighth studio album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released on December 27, 1967, by Columbia Records. Produced by Bob Johnston, the album marked Dylan's return to semi-acoustic instrumentation and folk-influenced songwriting after three albums of lyrically abstract, blues-indebted rock music. John Wesley Harding shares many stylistic threads with, and was recorded around the same time as, the prolific series of home recording sessions with The Band, partly released in 1975 as The Basement Tapes, and released in complete form in 2014 as The Bootleg Series Vol. 11: The Basement Tapes Complete.

John Wesley Harding was exceptionally well received by critics and sold well, reaching No. 2 on the U.S. charts and topping the UK charts. The commercial performance was considered remarkable considering that Dylan had kept Columbia from releasing the album with much promotion or publicity.

* * * 

I dreamed I saw St. Augustine
Alive as you or me
Tearing through these quarters
In the utmost misery
With a blanket underneath his arm
And a coat of solid gold
Searching for the very souls
Whom already have been sold
“Arise, arise,” he cried so loud
In a voice without restraint
“Come out, ye gifted kings and queens
And hear my sad complaint
No martyr is among ye now
Whom you can call your own
So go on your way accordingly
But know you’re not alone”
I dreamed I saw St. Augustine
Alive with fiery breath
And I dreamed I was amongst the ones
That put him out to death
Oh, I awoke in anger
So alone and terrified
I put my fingers against the glass And bowed my head and cried

Copyright © 1968 by Dwarf Music; renewed 1996 by Dwarf Music

* * * 

Related Links

I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine and Thoughts On Being Human

Seven Live Versions of I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine

Augustine's Confessions (Wikipedia)

The Confessions of St. Augustine (Gutenberg Project)

A Good Friday Reflection

Today the markets are closed on Wall Street because it is Good Friday, the Christian holiday commemorating the death of Jesus Christ on Calvary. It's a holiday observed during Holy Week, preceding Easter Sunday.

It reminded me of a dream I had many years ago, which I recorded in one of my journals. It's possible I've shared it here before, but it's been a while and I present it once more.

On Another World

In this dream I was being held captive on another planet. The people of this planet were in bondage to false ideas about God.

Early in the morning I was taken to a private meeting with the leader of this planet. We were alone in a large, clean unfurnished room. A single guard stood outside the open door.

By some means I had been paralyzed so that I could neither pray nor speak nor think straight. I was standing in the middle of the room in this strange, paralyzed state. I had no consciousness of the passage of time.

In the dream, Dr. Spock (of Star Trek fame) came to the door of the room and requested permission to enter. It is possible that I was captain of the Enterprise, though I do not know this for certain. I do know that I was from earth, as the following dialogue will attest.

After obtaining permission, Spock entered the room carrying a bucket of what appeared to be a powdered cleanser. He stumbled and spilled the cleanser on me, pretending to do this accidentally. Immediately, I found myself released from my paralysis and I started to pray, standing by a wash basin with my eyes closed. (It was one of those chrome sink basins that you find in painting studios at college.)

Upon seeing my fervent attempt to pray the leader of the planet was in stitches with laughter. He asked what I was doing.

I said I was praying to God.

"This is hysterical!" he said. "We would never pray to God like that," and he wanted to know how I got the notion that I could talk to God.

"God came to our planet once," I said.

"God came to your planet? What was God like?" The leader was suddenly interested in hearing this new thing. "What was God like?"

"He came to our planet as a human."

"A human? A weak, pitiful thing like that? A human! God came to your planet as a human?"

"He took the form of a human, a man, actually, and lived on our world, on earth."

"And what happened?"

"We killed him," I said.

I woke.

Thank God for "the rest of the story."

SHORT STORY MONDAY

This is a very short story about the origin of the blues. It was inspired by Mark Twain's Diaries of Adam and Eve. I only recently learned that Twain only wrote Adam's diary initially, but then wrote Eve's thirty years later. Or vice versa. The two were blended eventually and you can purchase it at Amazon.

BLUE

Blue began when the world was new, but not so new as the very beginning. The original world was black and white. Eventually, God decided that color should be added to His wonderful creation.

In an effort to protect His integrity (He had already declared all things good) He broke white light up into sections and called it color. This was how the color blue came into being.

At first, Adam and Eve were so enamored by their new experiences with color that they never even thought about why the world was originally created in black and white. But after a while, when they had settled into their new technicolor paradise, they began to wonder. "Why did God originally create the world in black and white? Was He trying to withhold something from us?"

It was at this point that they doubted God’s goodness. Was He really concerned for their best interest? What was the point in making a black and white world if He had been capable of making color right from the start? Had the black and white version of the world been a mistake? Does God really know what He's doing?

Such questionings, it would appear, led directly to Eve's being seduced by the serpent. (Though it may have been that forbidden Red apples are more enticing than forbidden black and white ones.)

After the Fall, Adam and Eve became acutely aware of why God had been so reluctant to give them a full-spectrum technicolored world.

As a result of the apple incident, Adam and Eve were banished from Paradise forever, which put them both in quite a bad mood. Adam sank into a depression. The following evening, (a time of day which he also blamed on his significant other) he lay on his back feeling particularly mournful and low. As he lay staring at the deepening twilight sky it entered his mind to compose a poem, soon to be published in an early anthology called Man's First Poems, Volume One. The poem was rather inferior in quality, but still maintains its historical significance. Whether it was the color of the sky he was trying to name, or the feeling he was analyzing at that moment in time, the word has forever become associated with grief and sadness.

This is the true origin of the blues.

EDNOTE: Unless otherwise noted, the paintings and illustrations on my blog are my work alone and available for sale. If you see something here that makes you say, "I gotta have it," be sure to let me know and we can negotiate a price. Feel free to click on images to enlarge.

Infinity

"To infinity, and beyond!" ~Buzz Lightyear

Been thinking about infinity lately. It's easy to see why mathematicians have had such a troubling time with it. Take, for example, this common conundrum.

You have hotel with an infinite number of rooms. An infinite number of people show up one night because of your Vacancy sign. (Maybe it is Grandma's Marathon weekend.) So, you give them all of your infinite number of even numbered rooms, 2,4,6, ad infinitum. They check in all happy and your clerks are impressed because you still have an infinite number of vacancies, in case you get more business.

Well, obviously, infinity throws a wrinkle in things if you treat it like an absolute number.

Here's one I have toyed with lately. Between any two points there are an infinite number of points. If you have a line segment three inches long, and one that is six inches long, why can't you simply say 3 = 6 since both contain the same number of points?

For the Romans, infinity simply meant a very large number. Galileo later suggested that the infinite does not correspond to mathematical rules in the same way as a common integer. Correctamento, Galileo!

When I was young I used to toy with the idea of time being a "duration" like miles of road, and that between two points in time, let's say four o'clock and eight o'clock, there is an infinite amount of time just as in the number of points in a line segment. (I know that waiting can feel that way sometimes, especially when waiting to open Christmas presents or waiting for relief when going through some personal hell.)

And so... if there is an infinity between a few hours, what about a few minutes? Or between two moments? And how long is Now? Is it infinitely small or infinitely something else? Or is Now only an illusion that occurs between the infinite past and infinite future?

This leads naturally into questions about the nature of time itself. Why do some days go fast and others slow when they all have the same number of hours?

What about space? Is outer space infinite? Or does our universe have an "outer wall" or some kind of endpoint? What would the end of the universe look like? How would you know when you got there?

And then, what about inner space? Maybe this is what Blaise Pascal was talking about when he wrote, “There is a God shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God, the Creator, made known through Jesus”

Between This and That

“The boundary is the best place for acquiring knowledge.” ~ Paul Tillich

Life has many challenges. Transitions are always fraught with challenge, for example. Whether from adolescence to adulthood, employment to retirement, or geographic relocation, every transition stirs up things within us that can cause emotional upheavals.

There are many other kinds of challenges, of course. The struggle against temptation (a word one hardly seldom hears in a post-Christian culture) is ever with us, simply because we live in a broken world and none of us is exempt from its influence.

There are also matters that do not pertain to ethics per se. Year in and year out complications beset us as we strive to understand who we are and how we fit together with others who are often so different from us. In many respects we even get caught in the middle between polarities that divide our own selves. If it is a challenge knowing ourselves, no wonder we occasionally scratch our heads when we try to read others, and are in turn misread.

Theologian Paul Tillich’s book On the Boundary is an autobiographical exploration of the polarities that were at war within himself. In his attempt to understand his life he discovered that there were many parts of himself that were at odds with other parts of himself. One chapter describes the tension that he experienced between the temperaments of his two ancestral heritages. Each of his parents came from different kinds of backgrounds. As a result one part of himself tended toward the melancholy, contemplation and consciousness of personal duty. His counter-temperament tended toward a zest for life that was at odds with that other part of himself which sought composure and harmony.

Another chapter addressed his struggle between city and country. City life has a different character than rural. He found a part of himself in each, but occasionally they were at odds with each other.

Social classes also present issues. The family of humankind flows through all walks of life, from doctors to beggars to everything in between. Often we find tensions created by these differing backgrounds and experiences. Tillich experienced this within himself, but churches and communities can likewise experience it.

Another area of conflict is the tension between idealism and realism. It is good when young people are idealistic. Such idealism makes us discontent with the status quo and can motivate us to try to change the world, to make it a better place, to bring it into conformity with higher values. Idealism empowers us to take action. But realism does not mean we have abandon ideals. As we get older we see that there are more variables than we initially recognized, and perhaps that the world's brokenness is more serious than we could initially comprehend. Yes, it is possible to overcome, but are we willing to pay the price to get there? It might be a higher price than we originally expected and, perhaps flippantly, paid lip service to.

In another chapter Tillich wrestles with autonomy and conformity to an imposed dogmatism. It is very difficult to think for ourselves. It takes courage to question what we have been told we should believe and to discover for ourselves the truth through honest inquiry. For many, who grew up being “told” what to believe, it is almost feels like sin to question, to break free from the safety of acquiescence. Once free from imposed systems of belief, such persons react strongly against being corralled.

My mother used to always say, “A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.” Truth emerges from within and cannot be imposed from without.

From my earliest days I have always pictured God like an enormous chandelier of cut jewels. God, who is light, is in the middle of the chandelier, but we do not see Him because He is “immortal, invisible… in light inaccessible from our eyes,” to quote the hymn writer. What people see are the jewels and diadems, each of us different, and in different locations on the chandelier. We each reflect God in a different way, yet contribute to the whole in a unique and beautiful way. What we forget is that those jewels began as rough stones that needed chiseling and polishing. They did not “just happen.”

Paul Tillich affirms that the places where he has grown most are in those places where he experienced conflict and upheaval, often within himself. This is the chiseling that turns us into diamonds. Our suffering is not in vain.

It's normal to try to avoid conflict. It feels dangerous, but is often essential to growth. As the psalmist once wrote, “weeping may last for a night, but joy comes in the morning.”