Monday, May 7, 2019
Dear Aidan,
It was a blessing and a curse watching you compete Saturday.
Yes, it was Bible Quiz (of all things), but it’s the same emotions any parent
feels watching their kid play a weekend sport. I hoped you would take to this,
and you have beyond any expectations.
So it was a blessing watching you remember words
precisely and play the little parts of the game expertly, especially when you
guess right and gain a lot of points.
But your high-risk strategy has a necessary downside,
when you guess wrong and lose a lot of points. You take a lot of three-point
shots, and the percentage is worse, but they’re worth more.
After that one prelim round, when your losses clustered
all together, I saw my own reaction mirrored in yours. You couldn’t talk. You collapsed
into yourself and walked away. I tried to put a hand on your shoulder but I
don’t know if you even felt it. I could only let you be, and wait for the next
round, if there was a next round.
There was, and you brought it all. You sailed through it
with a tight precision. Then you went on, climbing step by step to take the top
prize, winning a trophy so big it can only be classified as baggage. The trophy
shows in its own ludicrous size that it is not the point. Who wants this chunk
of wood and “gold” paint?
I wasn’t happy to have to make space for that thing in
the trunk, but I was happy because it culminated months of your hard work. You
wanted this, you considered the cost, planned a path, executed a strategy, ran
into an obstacle, and overcame it.
I thought about why you were doing this, and I recalled the
musical version of Percy Jackson that we had seen two nights before. The first
song was all about the young demigods trying to catch their distant god-parents’
attention by accomplishing something big, something that the distracted gods just
HAVE to notice. Did you notice how even their camp schedule was based around
competition, and how the daughter of Athena honed her own battle strategy so
that her god-mother would notice her? That’s the natural consequence of a world
of competition: winning forces people to take notice. It was true for the
Greeks, it was true for the Egyptians, and the Norse, and the soccer moms
today.
Percy Jackson is missing his god-father, and that aspect
to his character fits with the Greco-Roman world. All the powerful people
believed this 2000 years ago: a god was a powerful man who gave you life but is
off on business now and has left you to make a mark. Make some noise and maybe he’ll
notice.
Jesus contradicted all this. He said God is near, God is
love, God scatters life through a world like a sower scattering seed through a
world of obstacles -- but God doesn’t just leave it there. God makes every seed
grow, even the tiniest mustard seed, without us knowing exactly how. God gives
Godself, overflowing as the Spirit, a bubbling stream to anyone who asks.
This is very different from a world where the person who
captures the flag or wins the quest might get his father’s attention. Jesus was
building on a foundation of Hebrew prophecies, laws, and songs showing that God
is the good creator and sustainer of all things. Jesus took it farther by
saying God is so good at giving gifts that God knows not just what you want but
what you need. What we need is, ultimately, the Spirit of the Good Giver, who
made us to need that Spirit.
Since it’s the week after Easter, I’m reminded of John’s
picture of Jesus, risen from the grave, giving the disciples the Spirit by breathing
on them. Kind of weird -- not the kind of image that has been repeated in
Western Art that often -- but deep and resonant in its weirdness. That action
means a lot:
First, don’t miss the obvious. Jesus had breath, a
physical body that does the one thing physical, living bodies do all the time,
in that it exhaled air.
Second, he gave that breath away, emptying himself to
lift them up.
And he did so in a deliberate repetition of what happened
thousands of years before in the Garden of Eden, when God breathed into Adam’s
nostrils the breath of life, and he became a living soul.
This last image is from Genesis 2. It takes place in the
same Bible as John 20, but many pages before, written at a different time in a
different language. The Genesis verse doesn’t have much detail beyond a few
solid, earthy words: “blow”; “nostrils” (they were face to face); and the
mysterious term “soul.”
At this point in the story, God had formed Adam’s body
from the dust, but that wasn’t enough. God was the good father to the first man
and gave the gift of breath, and Adam started to move. I like the Latin term
for soul best: “anima.” (Knowing the many sides of this word is why you’re
learning Latin!) God blew on Adam and Adam became ANIMA-ted. “Soul” is an
earthy term like “dust” and “nostrils,” and can be applied to all things that
move. But in Adam’s case it was a special gift of God, reflected in the special
phrase “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.” God
only knows precisely how that worked, but somehow something thin, active, and
without parts flooded the physical, soulish body of Adam.
I can take apart an animated thing in the lab and learn
something about how it works. The amazing thing is how much I can see. Living
things are built from an untold number of chemical cycles, in which food comes
in, is broken down, is used to build new cells, is breathed out as carbon
dioxide, which a plant can “breathe in” and build up. The atoms are constantly
cycling. As you breathe in and out, some atoms get lodged in your body but
others fly away. I read once that 98% of the atoms in your body are replaced
every year.
But you’re clearly the same Aidan who competed in Bible
Quiz last year, right? So whatever it is that makes you “you,” it’s not the
atoms. And whatever made Adam Adam, it wasn’t the atoms. The point of Genesis 2
is not to trace the atoms, it’s to show God giving the soul, face to face with
the first man. (The point of chemistry is to trace the atoms, and that’s so
relatively unimportant that we could wait a couple more millenia before
learning it.)
Adam’s body of chemical cycles, reproducing and
repairing, breathing air in and out, it all came from the earth. Each cycle
moves because it is missing something: the atoms bind and the chemicals react
to make something new. Also, each cycle has a hole in the middle. There’s a lot
of empty space in the cycles. Even the atoms themselves, which seem so solid to
us, are mostly empty space, with each dense nucleus relative to the atomic
radius being only the size of a pea in a cathedral. Even the most solid things
and the most dynamic things are open and empty, matter moving in the void. If
this seems inadequate, that’s because it is inadequate. I think this is a sign
that behind the void is a Creator without parts who has non-material,
non-dissectable ways of filling all that emptiness.
Can I reiterate how much I don’t know here? It doesn’t
really matter how long it took for these cycles to build from the dust, because
there wasn’t anyone around to be impatient about it. Adam only became a soul
when his eyes faced God’s (we know that that means on his side but not on God’s)
and God’s breath became his. Whatever atoms were involved would soon leave him.
What would always remain in him was thin, strong, and
without parts: Adam’s memory of the fact that there was once a relationship,
face to face, Creator to creature. God had the same memory. God remembered Adam and his descendants.
The word-picture in Genesis 2 is like the verse in Genesis
1 where humans are all made in God’s “image,” to bring in another mysterious
word. The simplest way to make an image of something is to hold a mirror to it.
When Adam saw God, imagine God’s own image reflecting off Adam’s eyes, being
pieced together in Adam’s brain, and therefore flooding and shaping Adam’s
being. Carefully put Genesis 1:27 and Genesis 2:7 side by side, and imagine
Adam face to face with God, reflecting his Creator, shining for all others to
see.
There’s a lot of questions you probably have about the
rest of Genesis 2, but this letter’s already long enough. In the rest of Genesis
2 relationships are made, and in Genesis 3, they are broken.
The image language shows up in a few other places scatted
through the Hebrew scriptures. In Psalm 73, the same Hebrew word for image is
used for God looking on the proud and mighty, the demigods of this world, but
here something is broken: “Like one waking from a dream, Lord, when arising,
you will despise their image.” We’ve
all warped the mirror and defaced the image in some ways, all of us except
Jesus, the perfect and accurate image of God. Paul uses the word “image” to say
this exact thing in Colossians 1.
Adam’s body was a bottle of flesh, made with dynamic
cycles of atoms with empty space scatted throughout, from the dust of this
world, according to the patterns of this world. God gave Adam a puff of
“breath” that made him a living soul, able to move deliberately, think, and
speak, able to relate. God gave you this same “breath,” through Adam and Eve,
through Cain and Cain’s wife or Seth and his wife, through … … … , through
Grandpa and Nana, through me, to you. You can also move, think, speak, relate,
and choose. For example, you can choose to work hard to win Bible Quiz, and I
respect and admire that choice. I want it to pay off, even as I know it won’t
always.
The gift of God comes from above and is not subject to scientific
study or dissection. It has no parts we can pry open, but a secret center only
you (and God) can detect. The rules of science, worked out over hundreds of
years, apply to atoms, but the soul was forged by a relationship with a God not
made of atoms, or any parts at all.
Science can only dissect what’s below it, so that God’s
gifts of spirit and soul were excluded from it at this beginning. We can hear
the sound of God’s breath with our own God-given minds, but we can’t tell where
it came from or where it is going.
But we have something better than science for studying
the soul. I have my own soul and you have yours. This is the secret place at
the center, the closet where Jesus says only the Father can see. Only God knows
what was going on inside you when you had that terrible round of quizzing, I
could only guess. I couldn’t reach you, but God heard every word you prayed,
however frantically or half-heartedly or even unknowingly in groans too deep
for words.
Others have talked about this mystery: the soul as a gift
of God, embedded in but independent from the atoms of the flesh. Philosophers
like Descartes and Spinoza might have something to offer, some good, some not.
However, my current favorite word-picture for the soul comes not from a
philosopher but from a poet.
That poet is John Davies, who lived around the time of
Shakespeare, when people were struggling with this same question and we started
to learn how to take the world apart. From this struggle, Davies wrote a poem
in which he approached the problem systematically, like a scientist, but with
poetry in the place of the scientific method. Davies tries on eight metaphors
and discards each as not fitting:
The soul doesn’t dwell in the body like a tent;
it’s not like a pilot sitting in
a ship;
or a spider in its web;
or an imprint in wax;
or water in a bottle;
or as a liquid mixed in another;
or as heat emitted from a fire;
or as a voice spreading through
the air.
Each of these has its points (I’m intrigued by the idea
of a soul as an imprint in wax), but each also has a flaw (if the soul’s an
empty imprint, then what is the part that thinks and feels and stays with God,
that part of the dying thief that Jesus promised would be with him this day “in
Paradise”?).
Davies finds a metaphor that exceeds the rest when he finally
compares the soul to sunlight through air.
Specifically, the soul is in the body the same way that morning light fills a
room, which “in an instant doth herself unite / To the transparent air, in all
and part.”
This works really well as a metaphor, especially given
all the empty space inside atoms and in the biochemical cycles of life. Imagine
how the light is independent of the air, how it can be blocked by the air, but it’s
still there. The sun still shines outside, and the sunlight is still given to even
the most clouded room.
In the same way, if the body corrupted by disease or
decay, or weighed down by stress or depression, the soul is still there, given
by its Giver, diffusing every part of the body as the sunlight fills the room.
You can’t dissect or control the sunlight, you can only reflect it. And I read
somewhere that God made the light and Jesus is the light of the world: “God
from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, one in Being with the
Father” as Christians have recited for more than a millennium in the Nicene
Creed.
Another Christian picked up on the same sort of image in
a different way, this one a father of four called J.R.R. Tolkien. You probably
figured I’d bring him into this sooner or later. Tolkien’s metaphor of soul and
body is the Phial of Galadriel. Galadriel, one of the characters closest to the
Creator, gives Frodo a tiny bottle. I remember being disappointed the first
time I read this. Bilbo got a glowing sword, but Frodo gets a fragile bottle?
Of course, this isn’t just any bottle. The water holds
the light of Earendil’s star, from a jewel called a Silmaril that itself holds
the brilliant light of the Two Trees that once lit the world, in a chain
reaching back to the beginning of creation. Imagine it glimmering like the
light of Venus or Jupiter, unwavering in the western sky on our evening walks.
It doesn’t seem like much, but it drives the darkness of monstrous, entangling
evil away.
Your soul is a light filling the bottle of your flesh. You
choose how you hold it up and pour out its light. This is the gift God gave to
you, through Adam and through me.
Jesus reflected and embodied this light, with a hidden,
humble glory that only some saw. Take care of your soul like Frodo took care of
the Phial of Galadriel, and at a moment when “even the memory of colours and of
forms and of any light faded out of thought” you may find yourself
holding it high as you recite ancient words in the moment of need. Frodo found
that “another
voice spoke through his, clear, untroubled by the foul air of the pit.”
This voice can speak through you too.
As you trudge along the path, you might wonder if that
light is even there, but in the darkness it will shine. When you struggled on
Saturday at the Quiz Meet, things got dark and you had to trust that the habits
you formed in secret would return by God’s grace. That’s just a foretaste to
the bigger challenges that you cannot meet alone. Saturday, you met a big
spider, but Shelob herself is out there.
Fear not. Jesus defeated the darkness by standing firm
and taking the worst sin can do – which is that it killed him and stopped all
his motion, all his “anima,” down to the atoms. Jesus stood firm as others
mocked because he knew that all they could do was destroy his body. Jesus
trusted that God would give him a new “bottle” after the old one was destroyed.
Jesus was right. God’s light shines on even when the body
is destroyed by death, and that part of you that perceives and feels and dreams
will be with Jesus always. God will hold you safe, as the good Father who is
better than we can ask or imagine.
Jesus studied his Bible, the Hebrew Scriptures, as you
studied. Those scriptures told him that God has always worked this way: God’s
Messiah would suffer shame and would die, then would rise after three days.
Even study itself is filled with empty spaces and pauses, with times of
blankness that God fills with the light of God’s Spirit. As you work to push
these words into your memory, they shape faith and literally reshape the atoms
in your neurons into windows that light can shine through.
I believe that shaping your brain to follow his words
will open the space to let God’s light fill your body and soul. It’s not about
the words themselves, but the space they open for God to move.
Even if this space closes, and you lose sight of God’s
grace in the heat of competition, and if a fleshly and idolatrous brain drains
the meaning from words by rote repetition, even if the quiz round crashes and
burns and you don’t move on, God is in the failure too, because God himself
failed according to the world’s standards, yet we call that day of failure “Good
Friday.” Trust that God sees in secret and God gives life in secret, even in
the face of failure, whatever befall.
Even in a stuffy Bible Quiz room when you’re hungry and
tired and you have hours to go, and you’ve disappointed yourself after months
of work, you have never disappointed me and you have never disappointed your
heavenly Father, who always runs with open arms toward his prodigal son.
Remember that God’s light shines like the sun behind the
clouds, and that Jesus himself is the reality that made everything and sits
enthroned above and behind everything. Let God’s light be your vision, filling
you and lifting you to see the hidden, generous glory of Christ that has
sustained creation since God first said, “Let there be light.”
On March 25 fifteen years ago God said “Let there be Aidan.”
I held your tiny form and saw that light when I first looked into your eyes,
face to face. The light between us revealed to me that God gave us to each
other. At that moment God created a truth that will never change: that I am
filled with light when I remember you, because I love you. And I love you
because God loved you first, and made you for this.
Love, Dad
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