In “Among the Disrupted,” the cover essay for the New York Times Book Review (January 18, 2015) Leon Wieseltier laments how devices are often valued over books, technology seems ascendant over the humanities, hunger for instant information has replaced the long search for wisdom, and the meaning of humanity has been reduced to the mechanistic. All worthy concerns, I would say, even if you or I would parse things differently in places from Mr. Wieseltier.

You can read his essay here.

And to get you started pondering the ideas Wieseltier raises, here are few quotes from “Among the Disrupted”:

            “Journalistic institutions slowly transform themselves into silent sweatshops in which words cannot wait for thoughts, and first responses are promoted into best responses, and patience is a professional liability. As the frequency of expression grows, the force of expression diminishes: Digital expectations of alacrity and terseness confer the highest prestige upon the twittering cacophony of one-liners and promotional announcements. It was always the case that all thing must pass, but this is ridiculous.”

            “The distinction between knowledge and information is a thing of the past, and there is no greater disgrace than to be a thing of the past.”

            “Aside from issues of life and death, there is no more urgent task for American intellectuals and writers than to think critically about the salience, even the tyranny, of technology in individual and collective life.”

            “The processing of information is not the highest aim to which the human spirit can aspire, and neither is competitiveness in a global economy. The character of our society cannot be determined by engineers.”

            “Every technology is used before it is completely understood. There is always a lag between an innovation and the apprehension of its consequences. We are living in that lag, and it is a right time to keep our heads and reflect. We have much to gain and much to lose. In the media, for example, the general inebriation about the multiplicity of platforms has distracted many people from the scruple that questions of quality on the new platforms should be no different from questions of quality on the old platforms. Otherwise a quantitative expansion will result in a qualitative contraction. The new devices do not in themselves authorize a revision of the standards of evidence and argument and style that we championed in the old devices.”

From the usual definition of fear—a distressing, unpleasant emotion evoked by the dread of or threat of imminent harm—we’d assume people don’t line up to pay good money to be frightened. But the lines outside haunted houses and theaters showing horror films prove us wrong. We don’t like being afraid but somehow are attracted to fear.

I wonder if this love of being scared isn’t hardwired into us as human beings. Created as finite we exist as tiny creatures in an expansive cosmos, and so live on the edge of a greatness that shocks our imagination. Called into existence by God’s word, if God were to withdraw his sustaining word we would tumble back into the nothingness from which we came. And in a fallen world we live knowing that death shadows us, and every glimpse into that abyss once again underscores our finitude. Not surprising then, that biblical incidents where people experience the presence of God and his angelic warriors find them struck down with fear (Isaiah 6:5; Daniel 8:17; Revelation 1:17). Nor is it surprising that a healthy fear of the Almighty is a sign of wisdom and maturity, demonstrating an ability to rightly discern reality (Proverbs 1:7; 1 Peter 2:17).

Thus the yearning for spirituality, for God, for meaning that transcends the narrow confines of time and space includes a search for a proper fear. We find this unpleasant response somehow strangely attractive, needed to jolt us into a sense that we might after all exist.

Perhaps this explains the attractiveness of places like The Nightmares Fear Factory, a tourist attraction at Niagara Falls, Canada, billed as “The World’s Most Frightening Experience.” It takes fifteen minutes or less to walk through it, and at the corner in which the fear peaks The Factory has installed a camera. They post pictures online (which you can see here).

My question is: why are these pictures so funny?

[Source: Thanks to Andrew Sullivan on The Dish, where I first heard about The Nightmares Fear Factory.]

This past week my best friend and wife and co-worker launched a sub-set of Ransom’s web site called Margie’s Stuff. You can find it here.

On Margie’s Stuff there are essays, short pieces, recipes, audio recordings, and a link to her blog, Toads Drink Coffee. She has an uncanny ability to tell stories of ordinary life while showing the extraordinary ways grace reveals itself in humor and suffering and bright glimpses of glory. That is something we were taught by Francis Schaeffer back in the Sixties—that faithfulness in the ordinary things of life is where true significance is found—and Margie is better able to tease out the truth of that better than anyone I know.

There is something refreshing about someone who publishes a Bible reading program “for Slackers and Shirkers,” while insisting the title refers to herself. Or who finds glimmers of grace in an infestation of moths in her pantry, or who insists that cooking with cast iron can be glorifying to God even if you aren’t doing it for a church potluck, or who finds simple hospitality a chance to bring a measure of healing and rest into busy people’s lives. The sort of person who can read the Christmas story and find this:

From the Advent story one of the characters we don’t hear much about because she’s such a minor player is Anna. What attracts me is that she’s old, like really old. Luke tells us “she was advanced in years, having lived with her husband seven years from when she was a virgin, and then as a widow until she was eighty-four. She never left the temple worshiping with fasting and prayer night and day” (Luke 2: 35-37). It seems she never forgot the memories of her young husband and his untimely death which could have left her angry and bitter. Probably her joints ached, her skin sucked, and her eyes got gunkier each morning. From a modern perspective she didn’t have much of a life, although her contemporaries called her a prophetess. One morning in walks this couple with a baby, one among hundreds, maybe thousands she’s already seen, but she has the clarity of truthfulness and purpose that helps her recognize something different about this baby—he’s The Christ of God. She walks over to touch this child that all the world is waiting for, and there in front of everyone she blesses him and thanks God.

In the Gospel of Luke in the chapter just before we hear about Anna, Zachariah, the father of John the Baptist, says a profound thing, and I think it captures exactly what Anna was doing with her life. He says that the Messiah is going “…to rescue us from the hand of our enemies, and to enable us to serve him without fear in holiness and righteousness before him all our days…” (Luke 1:74,75) Which is exactly what Anna was doing, right there in the temple with corns on her toes and moles on her neck.

If I am busy considering either my body or time as enemies then I have succumbed to a limited perspective which is informed by my senses and, more subtly, by cultural pressures that determine whether we are good, successful, disciplined, worthy people, thanks to iCalendar, diet, and proper exercise. Both body and time are gifts that enable me to serve God in holiness and righteousness “before him (embodied) all our days.” That means being contented with twenty-four hour days where God says it’s good to live – from babyhood to end the of life. If I understand Anna’s life correctly, this child she blessed has the power to transform our fearful concentration on self (in whatever form), forgive our complaints, and direct us in acts of service to others.

So, I commend Margie’s Stuff to you. Not because I have too, but because on a world wide web crowded with nonsense and knowledge, it is a space devoted to wisdom.

My blog today is simple: just two quotes, both wise I think, that I hope you will reflect on and then leave a comment about what comes to mind.

Both remind us of truths that are often forgotten today in the church, if not heatedly refuted. Both are vital, for the health of our spirituality and for what the watching world sees in us concerning our faith. To believe both and try to live accordingly will perhaps result in criticism from fellow Christians. To believe both and live accordingly is to go against the flow—to resist the most common thought forms and dominant practices embraced by the wider evangelical community. So it takes courage to do so, and care that we don’t slide into a smug pride that we aren’t like all the rest.

What is at stake is the gospel.

“We do not draw people to Christ by loudly discrediting what they believe, by telling them how wrong they are and how right we are, but by showing them a light that is so lovely that they want with all their hearts to know the source of it.” (Madeleine L’Engle in Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art; page 122.)

“To identify the church as the sole locus of God's redemptive concern is badly to misunderstand the scheme of salvation. Indeed, it is to invert it. God wants the whole world back, not just a selection of human beings. And he wants it back not to bask in the eternal adoration of the redeemed saints, as per the vision offered at the end of Dante’s Paradiso and in countless lesser depictions of heaven, but to enjoy the give-and-take of shalom with all his creatures and among them as well. To repeat, therefore: the church performs its distinctive redemptive calling within, and in the service of, the general call of God upon humanity to be stewards of the whole earth God loves.” (John Stackhouse, Making the Best of It: Following Christ in the Real World, p. 237. Thanks to my friend Steve Froehlich for this one.)

I look forward to reading your reflections and reactions in the comments you leave.

I have a riddle for you. Imagine walking to an appointment or to do some shopping and coming across someone you know looking out into an open field. It includes a few trees, say, or perhaps it’s part of a farm or a section of land inside the city set aside for community gardens. Your friend is just looking, quite intently, and without realizing what you are doing you pause and watch. Your friend keeps right on looking. You look at the field and don’t see anything particularly newsworthy. It’s a field. There are a few birds, I’ve already mentioned the trees, and though some of it has been carefully cultivated, parts are quite wild. A shopkeeper from across the way happens by and comments about your friend, “They’ve been there for hours, you know. Came two days last week, too.” The shopkeeper shakes their head and walks on. Your friend is not a biologist, and has no stake personally in this piece of land. They are simply looking very intently at a field.

Here is the riddle: what are they doing?

Of course, there are many possible answers. They might be taking a break from a busy day doing something they find deeply relaxing. They might be thinking about something that has nothing to do with the field but that requires a quiet place where they won’t be interrupted. Since I’m a product of the Sixties, one possibility that comes to mind is that they might be stoned. They might be overwhelmed by secret guilt and are trying to convince themselves not to commit suicide. They might be secretly lazy, this being merely one manifestation of their ability to waste enormous chunks of time. They might… we could, no doubt, fill out the list of possibilities endlessly.

If our minds and imaginations are shaped by the ancient writings of the Bible, however, one possibility should have come instantly to mind. It is possible they are gaining wisdom.

Jesus told his followers to spend time watching birds, considering flowers, and looking at the grass (Matthew 6:25-30). If we did, he said, we would learn something important about ourselves and about God. Solomon “saw” and “considered” and “looked” at a field, and as a result “received instruction” (Proverbs 24: 30-32) that in turn caused him to write a proverb (33-34). When his wisdom was described, his expertise on trees, animals, birds, reptiles, and fish is included in the list (1 Kings 5:33). After Job had lost his family, his wealth, and his health, gone through more loss and grief than I can imagine, suffered so much, God had him stand still and look at the creation (Job 38-41) so that the deepest questions of his heart could find an answer. The Hebrew psalmist David, perhaps when he was out alone caring for his father’s sheep, looked up at the sky and learned of God (Psalm 19:1). St Paul argued that moral responsibility was inescapable because human beings were creatures in a creation that revealed enough about God that order and a sense of right was the only possible sane conclusion (Romans 1:18-32).

“There is a way that nature speaks, the land speaks,” Native American environmentalist Linda Hogan says. “Most of the time we are simply not patient enough, quiet enough, to pay attention to the story.”

Remember my riddle about finding a friend staring at a field? My point—my regret, actually—is not that we don’t take the time to do what they were doing—and that is a great loss—but that when we needed to guess what they were doing we probably did not immediately think, “Of course! They are gaining wisdom.” At least I did not. I am so captivated by my culture’s fixation (the biblical term is idolatry) on productivity and efficiency that the notion seems strange, if not wrong.

Which only goes to show how much I need wisdom.

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Source: Linda Hogan in The Sun (September 2010) page 48.

Images: Green field; night sky; Linda Hogan.