I never tell jokes but this one made me laugh. So here goes,
Bush’s advisers inform him that 3 Brazilian Soldiers died in fighting. Bush turns white, trembles and passes out. After a few minutes, he awakes to worried advisers surrounding him. He looks a but puzzled and asks, “So just how many is 3 Brazilian soldiers?”
Today I spent an extra free thought time to consider knowing as I prepared to lead a discussion on ideas tonight. I was thinking through some ideas from NT Wright’s Surprised by Hope where he lightly introduces an epistemology of faith, an epistemology of hope, and an epistemology of love. (I say lightly because NT drops several thought-provoking bombshells and then continues.)
At lunch I tried to immerse myself in an overview of Bernard Lonergan’s ideas on insight (via Tad Dunne). Then after I skimmed a wiki article on Michael Polanyi’s ideas on tacit knowledge.
And oddly enough (and completely unplanned), I drove to and from work listening to a couple Mars Hill interviews that focused on knowing. One interview featured Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmerman discussing their book The Passionate Intellect. One of them used the phrase a “messy knowing.”
I liked that and in some ways that gave me a highlight for the evening. Knowledge is messy (thus requires humility). While we may still use words like “objectivity,” we must let go of notions of disinterested observation and accept that we bring a personal context to knowing. We still can apply a form of critique to our knowing, but we acknowledge our weakness.
NT’s ideas on knowing in relation to faith, hope and love got me to thinking abut the Hebrew understanding and wisdom rooted in meditation and observance of the 10 Commandments. But more on that later. I need some sleep.
G.K. Chesterton’s writings helped restore my eyes to the wonder of this world and the marvel of God’s goodness revealed in this creation. His chapter, “The Ethics of Elfland” in Orthodoxy stands as one of my all time favorite chapters in a book. In Chesterton I disocvered the grace of God working in the imagination to awaken faith.
The gift of Chesterton is the gift of “eyes to see.” Our busy schedules, personal trials, and distracted imaginations can blind us to the wonder of God. Whether telling the story of Thomas Aquinas, revealing Jesus as the “Everlasting Man” or writing poems about an upside down world, Chesterton consistently shouts and sings out as the merry jester that penetrates my heart with delight in the goodness of God.
As his warm love and laughter stirred in my mind and heart, I found my clouded vision finally opening every so slightly to the marvel of creation, the wonder of life, the miracle of love that God pours out continually upon his people. Thank you G.K.
You’re words have been medicine for my soul.
Read all Thank You Notes.
For my inaugural thank you note, I wish to express my deep appreciation for the presence of Kelly Floyd in my life. Kelly is my wife of almost 20 years. Kelly taught me to think more practically. Her questions have often challenged my “ideal theories” and forced me to think in terms of the world we live in right now.
She models constructive confrontation both in the workplace and in her personal relationships. Even though my background is in communication and interpersonal relationships, I’ve learned more about speaking directly from her than I ever did from a class.
While there are more kudos she deserves, I’ll stop for now with those two gifts that challenge and inspire me.
Read all Thank You Notes.
I like reading lists such as top movies, top books, and top songs. Chris Tilling recently linked to Nijay Gupta’s list of Top Scholars that have influenced him. After reading his list, I thought about replicating the list with scholar who’ve influenced and shaped the way I ask questions of the Scripture and the world around me.
But I have such a hard time limiting lists. I started thinking about musicians, writers, and teachers who shaped my life. The quick list that flashed through my head included people who lived presently and who had lived in the past, but it also included people I know personally and people I don’t know. personally. Then an idea occurred to me. Instead of posting a list, I am going to start posting short “thank you notes” to people who have enriched my life in one way or another.
As such, this will be a never-ending list and there is no ranking. I will simply post “thanks yous” to people who have blessed me as a way of recording the rich circle of people who’ve graced me with their words, their talents and their presence.
Read all Thank You Notes.
I do not like seriousness. I think it is irreligious. …The man who takes himself too seriously is the man who makes an idol of everything. – G.K. Chesterton
Our “lifetime” is intimately bound up with the “lifetime” of our people. We have a particular lifetime that moves between our own personal memory and vision, but this movement between memory and vision does not happen in isolation from other individuals. Our memory and vision is bound in with the memory and vision of our family, and our family memory and vision is bound in some way with specific communities.
And this multi-layered movement between memory and vision helps to shape our understanding of the world and our expectations of the world. Thus it shapes our language and what we mean by using specific words. For example, the word “justice” can mean one thing to a people living on the edge of survival and something entirely different to a people living in comfort.
But there’s a problem with our sense of meaning that grows out from memory and vision. We cannot remember very well. So the movement between memory and vision is skewed in one sense, and this skews our language, our expectations, our lifetime. In my own personal life, I easily forget events and moments that may play a significant role in shaping me.
A photograph of past experiences may remind me of events and experiences that I only vaguely remember. Additionally, my experience in a particular event is limited to one point of view. This experience may cause me to remember certain things in an exaggerated manner. In turn, I may form expectations that are incorrect. I may have one bad memory of a visiting the dentist as a child, and continue to hold fearful expectations of future visits. This skew in memory multiplies through my own life and in the life of my family and community.
I remember some things of my parents’ life and even few things of their parents’ lives. But my memory rarely reaches back farther than two generations. And even in those two generations it can be skewed. This problem only multiples and expands outward as I think about my culture. As a result, I may develop a family memory or cultural that is incorrect.
What I think are long held attitudes or traditions may only stretch back 30 or 40 years. As I look farther back, I may tend to misunderstand or misread the events prior. If I am part of a people and a culture, how can I remember the story of the people farther back into time?
This is the power of words. Words carry the symbolic weight of memory and vision. But like a photograph, words must be captured in a way that spans across generations. Oral cultures carry the words through storytellers. The stories are acted out in celebration through feasting, dancing and other rituals that carry the words into actions to help reinforce the memory.
Unfortunately, without the storyteller the memories can still be lost. And the rituals can become actions with no referent. The people may forget why they do what they do. The rituals may take on meanings that were never part of the story. Soon the span between memory and vision is deeply skewed and the lifetime of the people is askew.
This is the gift of ancient Israel. Their festivals, their laws, their rituals are rooted in Torah: in a written law. The word is recorded and passed down. (I realize that some people reject the written word in ancient Israel and suppose it is all oral, but if I accept the text at face value, they wrote down the words. See Jim Jordan for more on this.) The written word becomes a standard the perpetuates the enacted word.
Every year the people re-enact ancient memories according to prescription (written instructions/law). Using prescribed actions, they rehearse the past. They rehearse the Passover. This communal re-enactment of the deliverance from Egypt helps to forge common memory. Using the written word as guide and interpreter, their actions work memory into their bodies: their eyes, hands and feet.
These festivals of Passover, Pentecost, and so forth do not simply re-enact the past. Gradually, as more revelation unfolds, they begin to realize the festivals are also re-enacting the future. The Passover does not simply point back to the time when God delivered Israel from the hand of Egyptian oppressors, it helps to explain future deliverance as well.
In fact, the Christians will revision the memory as pointing also the Jesus Christ. The full deliverance of God’s people from slavery. For the Christian, these memories become markers of historical events that anticipate an even greater future unfolding. This use of memory and rehearse to interpret or project vision helps to forge a common memory and vision across space and time.
In one sense, we are learning to remember the past together. We are learning to anticipate the future together. We are bound by one hope of calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one Father. This continual reconnecting through the Word and Sacrament binds the people of God afresh into one memory and vision, which in turn helps to interpret and correct our personal and familial memory and vision.
Now to continue with the idea of time in our life.
Each person is born on a specific day at a specific time. Additionally, each person has a unique body and lives in the same body until the day she dies. Thus each of us lives in a particular space and a particular time.
When a person dies, we will speak of his lifetime: life-time. No two people share the same lifetime. So we all have a unique time associated with our life.
Now think of a child. The child experiences the world around him through his specific body. At the earliest stages, he’ll experience the care and nurture from his mother, the voice of his mother, the smell of his mother and so on. As his brain develops, he begins to make sense of the world through these experiences.
These experiences become the foundation of memories. By looking backward, we form certain expectations of the present and future. At her first birthday, a child has no expectation or understanding of what is happening. Each year the ritual is repeated. Additionally, the child experiences a repetition of the birthday ritual at birthday’s from other member’s of the family.
Over the years, the child begins to expect a birthday party, a cake, presents and all the other associations of the birthday. In fact, the child will look to the future at an upcoming birthday, anticipating the festivities to come. As the child looks back to past birthdays and forward to a future birthday, the child will ask her parents for a gift. The child will ask her parents for a party. The child may say things like, “I’m four-and-a-half.”
By looking back and looking forward, the child responds by speaking and acting in certain ways. Thus time (the child’s time that includes both past and future) gives birth to thoughts and actions in space. Another way we might speak of the past and future for a child or any specific person is to speak of memory (past) and vision (future).
All of us move between memory and vision. Memory and vision defines the time of each particular person. As we look back and look forward, we make sense of the world. Because we each have a different set of experiences and expectations, we make sense of the world in different ways, or we live in different times.
Compare a young man and an older man. The young man has fewer memories, fewer disappointments, fewer failures. He is more flexible both in mind and body. In this sense, the young man has more energy for ideas and action. Thus he is an idealist. He lives in “ideal times.”
The older man has known crisis. He has watched dreams die and expectations go awry. He has seen friends make wrong choices or he himself has made poor choices. While he may understand the world better than the young man and he may have learned great lessons from his mistakes, he is not as flexible as the young (not in mind or body). He lives in “experienced times.”
The young man and the older man may have difficulty communicating or even speaking the same language (using the same words to mean different things). The young man may say, “I am always going to have passion and I am not ever going to compromise.” The older man may say, “You simply don’t understand the ways of the world.” They are living in different times.
Now I multiply this small picture across a community, a nation, a world of people. People live in different times. As a result, they understand and act on symbols (words and more) in different ways. While each person lives in a unique time, they may share enough similarities with other people to be put into a group.
We might speak of the group in terms of nationality (American, German, Chinese) or we might group by economic class (poor, middle class, rich). Each grouping implies a degree of shared times that allows people within the group to communicate and cooperate in specific ways.
More later.
When you need to know the time, you might look at your life instead of your wrist. We’ve become so conditioned by the wristwatch, that we’ve really lost our ability to know the time. We may be able to recite the hour of the day, but I’m afraid we may have know idea how to read the time and the times.
Yesterday, I considered how a calendar might begin to help us understand time and the movement of people through time. Today I want to specifically consider time in the life of a person. Our life has its own time. Thus we can speak of a person’s lifetime. We have a specific birth time and will have a specific death time. Between those two points in time, we live through many different sets of time.
Instead of simply thinking of seconds, minutes and hours, we might think of other ways to define time. For instance, we mark each day as a specific measurement of time, and then we associate meaning with specific days. People will say things like, “I hate Mondays.” Or “Friday is finally here.” We group Friday afternoon, Saturday and Sunday together and define that unit of time as the weekend.
We mark the passing of years. Each year we celebrate with a birthday. In one sense, every time we pass a time marker the world around us changes. We change our words, our clothes, and even our relations. At a basic level, we change our words. I am 43, but after my next birthday I’ll refer to myself as 44. So we measure changes in years. Then again, decades are even more significant. So people will often reserve special celebrations for the changing of decades such as 20, 30, 40, 50 and so on.
But not all are units of time are equal sets (like the minute and hour of the watch). We look at a person’s life and may divide by time segments such as infancy, childhood, adolescence, teenager, young adult, middle age, and so on. Each of these time units (or epochs) might be used to explain other epochs. For example, the epoch of childhood might be used to explain the teenage period. We may explain a teenager’s poor or unusual behavior by pointing back to their childhood. We looking back to an earlier epoch to understand a current epoch.
But we can also look forward to a future epoch to help understand the present. A teenager might look to the future and dream of being a doctor as an adult. The future epoch will give the teenager direction for study and preparation in the present.
While I’ve used years and development terms (adolescence, teenager, etc) as time designations, there are many more in each person’s life. We might measure life from job to job. Or before marriage and after marriage. All these ways of thinking about world during our lives, provide filters for meaning. Our times help us to define or find meaning in the world. Now there is another way to think about time within a person’s life: memory and vision.
If you haven’t seen it yet, the Frozen Grand Central is a great example of flash mobs organized through Imrpov Everywhere.
In the early 80s, I was part of a small college drama group that performed spontaneous imrpov skits in public. These were some of my favorite memories in college. Watching the Frozen in Central Park video brought back those memories. Hope you enjoy!
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