Divine Plagiarism

The Road goes ever on and on / Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone / And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet / Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet / And whither then? I cannot say.
- Bilbo Baggins

It is probably for the best that we cannot go back and advise ourselves on the merits of one course of action or another. I imagine doing so would be much like driving back to the starting line of a marathon after finishing it yourself, and then expecting another runner to take your word on what the finish line looks like; even worse, that may content himself with your description and miss out on the run entirely. Of course, if the course runs right off a cliff, you would probably be doing a good thing to thwart the would-be runner, but precluding such a poorly engineered path you are doing them no favor at all. The whole point of the run is the running of it; the finish line becomes yours only in the course of those 26.2 miles. Life is this way, I think… we become alive only in the process of living. This is true even when life doesn’t turn out the way we planned or hoped, perhaps even more true then: we sometimes find things that we never would have thought to hope for when we first set out. And sometimes, we become someone new along the way.

This is, of course, not entirely theoretical for me. I remember, or at least I remember remembering, how this whole thing began. I was descending the stairs of the Kennedy School, my mind already off at pilot training and wanting nothing more than to take my overpriced piece of paper and leave Cambridge behind forever. Walking outside, I see my good friend Nika talking with a strikingly attractive girl who I had managed to miss entirely during my previous two years at this school. We have what seems to be an interesting conversation, which results in a plan to have more conversation over coffee in a few days. I’ll skip the blow-by-blow… if you’ve been my friend for an appreciable amount of time, you’ve already probably heard the story. If not, here’s the synopsis: it ends very poorly. It doesn’t matter anyways; the two people involved in that story have long since become ghosts of time and memory. I’m no longer who I was then; I imagine the same is true of her. Not that I would know on the latter account… I’ve known nothing of her for three years now.
That last fact is one of the most fascinating aspects of the story. Three years ago, when all hope was lost and I was praying at the top of my lungs and wrestling with God on my floor and I decided that I would fight to the end nonetheless, I thought that this was about her. Looking back, I’m not sure it was about her at all. In fact, as far as I know, she played no role at all in the events of the last few years. Yet, in her absence, she played the foil perfectly. I prayed for her every night for the first two years… I still pray for her from time to time. I prayed that she would be strong and brave, that God would break her heart and make her whole; I prayed against all the demons and ghosts in her past, I prayed healing over the pain of childhood scars, I prayed that she would find wholeness. I prayed with passion and fury and fire and determination and a hundred other things. I prayed as I would never have prayed for myself. And perhaps, that’s why I had to pray for her; I could never have prayed those things for myself. Somehow, it feels like God took all of my prayers for her and applied them to me.

Over the course of the last three years, I’ve been around the world three times looking for an answer. I’ve chased that answer through time and space, through the wars and peaces of the present and the past. I’ve chased it through the recesses of my heart, through my hopes and fears and dreams and nightmares. I’ve chased it through my own history, chased it as I was making more history. And I’ve found a thousand things. She wasn’t one of them. Knowing this, had I to do it again, I would have gone nonetheless. I don’t think I would have understood when I set out. I still probably don’t. That last fact was probably the most important thing I found. I’ve heard it called brokenness. That’s what it felt like, at least.

I think somewhere in the back of my head, I once believed that the world, or at least my world, rested solely upon me doing all the right things at the right time. I had decided at some point that I was Atlas, and if I missed a step, the universe and causality and everything would go spinning off into chaos. (Of course, even then I was not foolish enough to formulate my assumptions in those terms. Or perhaps I was more foolish not to… I would certainly have been disabused of them much faster had I done so.) As a corollary to my Titanic pretentions, I seemed to believe that if something wasn’t working out right, then I was doing something wrong; hence, if I just figured out how to do it right, I could bring anything to its right and preordained conclusion. This story proved this assertion wrong, quite visibly; I believed and believed hard that she and I were meant to be together. (My heart was telling me things that I still can’t place in some higher plan, and as a negative consequence of its undying faith in that story, I still haven’t totally recovered my trust of my own heart.) Yet, there was no magical combination of words I could say, nothing I could study and master in order to put all things in their right place. I at long last came face to face with the realization that the world was wrong and I couldn’t fix it. And I began to realize that this universe was much, much bigger than I had thought, filled with a multitude of wills that were just as sovereign as mine. Further, the one Will that held it together was not my own. My duty was not to the Sisyphean task of righting all wrongs in my little world, but to my Creator who called me outside of my world and into His universe. Realizing this was the first great discovery of this journey.

Here was one of the greatest miracles: once I left my world behind, He began to bind up all the wounds of that world. The last words she gave me were meant as weapons; they were intended to wound. Perhaps I deserved them, it doesn’t really matter anymore. But I do remember the way they tore the breath out of my chest as I read them at the library’s public computer. And I remember the way they rang in my ear the three days after that, three days when I held on to the words of a Shane & Shane CD, replayed twenty times at least, as I felt every hope I had pour out onto the floor. It felt as if every fear was realized all at once, every reason to abandon all hope was vindicated, every accusation that had ever been made about me was confirmed. In that existential earthquake, where every defense was cast down and every vulnerability laid bare, the only safe place I could find was in the arms of Christ. I held to Him for dear life, and I hid in Him as every fear and accusation crashed down upon His back, and after it all, we were still there.

Joseph once told his brothers that what they had meant for evil, God used for great good. I will not make excuses for her contempt for my heart, just as I will not make excuses for my contempt for her will. But God used it. He turned her dagger into a scalpel, laying open my deep pain so that He could heal it. On some subterranean level, I had believed that I was deserving of the contempt that she had shown me, of the contempt that had been shown to me along the same lines in the past. In that accusation, I taught myself to accept, perhaps even seek out that scorn. I was wrong to do so, and in doing so I did a great disservice to my future wife and my Creator, both of which cared intensely about the intactness of my heart. So, in the starkest terms, I could finally see it. ‘It is wrong for you to treat me this way.’ The words I was afraid to tell her, the words that I should have told her long ago if I cared about her at all. But I learned to say them, and I learned to believe in the value of my own heart. My love and my trust were commodities to treat with care and concern, for they were of great concern to those who cared and would care for me. If someone was unconcerned with the former, then they did not belong in the camp of the latter. In this is a second treasure I’ve found: the ability to tell someone else ‘no.’ I think it’s called boundaries.

Solzhenitsyn once said something to the effect of once you take everything from a man, he is free again for he has nothing to lose. This was the third thing I found: my courage. I remember that people would say she was strong. They said the same of me, and for the same reasons: we shared a certain loudness and a contempt of suffering. I do not think they were right. It was far easier to face death than to face life; far easier to face men who wanted to take my life than to face my own heart. I was armed and equipped for combat, familiar with the emotional armor that had kept me safe for so long. There is no armor that you can wear from yourself, though; nothing that is honest that can protect you from vulnerability. For some crazy reason, when I met her, I had dared to hope and had let my guard down. Perhaps without warrant, I gave her the ability to hurt me. She did not ask for or want that ability, and ultimately ended up using it to the utmost to compel me to reverse that decision. But even this was turned to good: in that crucible of a weekend, when every fear was realized, I came to a point when all hope had failed, and I chose to hope nonetheless. I fought for three years more on that fool’s hope, and if I found nothing else, I found my own heart. A friend had told me at the beginning of all of this that my future wife would get a better husband for all of this. I think this is part of that.

Of course, the story didn’t end with that weekend; really, it began there. I discovered a hundred more things, and my story of Christine (quite different, I’m sure, than Christine’s story) is so comingled with that period of time that I don’t know what experiences belong to that story and which belong to the myriad of other experiences that shaped me. There are a few things that I don’t think would have happened without my story of her, though. For one, learning Spanish has become and remained of great use. Further, I discovered my own fascination with culture and language; as a greater irony, my interaction with military anthropology would probably have never happened otherwise. (In another irony that I am not particularly proud of, she figures a bit into my choice to fly the Gunship… at the time, I found appetizing the prospect of flying the plane that she would hate the most.) Without the culture and language vector, I may not have taken all those Cross Cultural Communications and regional studies classes at the Joint Special Ops University. I definitely wouldn’t have my cool Blackwater Draw hat, or have spent time digging around on the site with the local university’s fieldwork team. I probably indirectly owe my discovery of Spain and my fascination with history to our interaction. Bar-the-lona didn’t explain Christine, but it is a great town nonetheless. And without that vector, I may have missed the significance of Mosul (Nineveh) and Ali (Ur) while flying over them. Scratch that last one, the Genesis downrange Bible study would have probably covered that last count. Anyways, this story provided the catalyst for many avenues of study, and though those studies I discovered a good number of academic passions that might have otherwise gone latent. Even in this, even if I never found the answer I originally set out to find, I found a great number of other answers that proved quite timely. Still, the greatest treasure I found was hidden not in world history but in my own history.

When I left Cambridge the first time, I had no desire to return. The battle of First Christine cemented that intent. It took this story to give me cause to return, yet in the course of this story, God retroactively redeemed my two years at Harvard, giving me the joy that I should have known at Harvard while I was actually there. I had always seen myself as a bit of an outcast, a script that I seemed born to play regardless of where I went. Being a member of all the unpopular categories in Cambridge served as an easy segue way in this regard. In the midst of my war with the town and the school, I doubt that I was really open to the idea of community; cross this with my previously mentioned former Titanic pretentions, and I was pretty much sold on the idea that it was my destiny to be on my own during my sojourn there. In the fallout from my collision with Christine, I think I held that on some level that the town picked sides. And, true to the outcast storyline, that side wasn’t mine.

Strangely enough, I think I’ve gained some empathy with Pastors’ Kids in this regard. When dad isn’t perfect, you have no recourse: God sides with him and the church sides with him. So you might as well make your own way in the world, because all the other sides are already spoken for. In reality, your grievance may be legitimate, but in reality, the church and God never picked sides. This was how I felt about Christine and InterVarsity. She used Christian-ese words, invoked her position, and when things got ugly, she treated me as if she was a spiritual leader lecturing a slow student. When things got really ugly, she flung accusations ex cathedra at me. (Rather than repeat the mistakes of the Garden again, I’m not assigning blame. Scratch that. I am assigning blame. I am a man, and honoring Christine, a sister in Christ, was my duty… I failed in it. And I am thankful for grace in that regard.) I had assumed that I had no recourse in that world; to question her rightness was to face a multitude of fingers pointing at me. I had believed at a very deep level that the Cambridge Christians, at least the ones who were read in to the situation, picked her side. I was wrong to assume there were sides in the first place.

At some level, I think I was seeking vindication. ‘You were right and she was wrong.’ What I ended up finding was far better: validation. ‘It is okay to feel the way you do. It was okay to like her, and it was okay to feel hurt when she treated you the way she did.’ I was wrong. She was wrong. What happened was a tragedy, and who is more to blame is not a useful question. Redemption and reconciliation were the only questions of consequence. Remarkably, I found that redemption and reconciliation in a way I didn’t expect. I never did find it with the girl, but I did find it with the whole town.

I am deeply, deeply grateful to some people from that town that never gave up on me. I am grateful for their patience as I flailed through working these things out; I am thankful for their kindness and openness and a hundred other things. And after I had pounded my fists against Harvard’s walls long enough, I realized that there were no grievances that I had that grace didn’t cover. I still can’t totally explain how, but I now have a wonderful community of Harvard-affiliated friends, most of which I met after my time as a student. Had I not been chasing an answer in this story, this would not likely have happened. But it was not Christine, nor my stubbornness, that produced this miracle; it was by grace alone that God redeemed my time at Harvard and invited me into community. That grace was expressed primarily through three spiritual mentors: Jeff, Andy and Kelly. And if for no other end whatsoever, this whole journey would have been worth it for the three of them and the community that had been available all along. This was the greatest treasure I found, and in this treasure I am contented that this has been a path of great blessings.

Each journey comes to an end at some point. In the interests of presenting my future wife with a whole heart, this journey must as well. The Christine I knew is long passed, as is the Dave she knew. There is one thing that remains, I feel. One last attempt at reconciliation, in the hopes that who I’ve become and whoever she’s become can somehow reconcile as brother and sister in the light of our Redeemer. Perhaps we could even meet each other again for the first time and sort out some sort of a friendship. Or perhaps not. Either way, it feels like the right thing to do, a final exam of sorts. Leave your heart at their feet and walk away whole. I think this is Agape, or something like it. I don’t think I could have found it any other way.

As something of an epilogue, I recall Lewis’ Till We Have Faces. If you haven’t read it yet, I commend it to you in the most glowing terms possible. One of the most memorable phrases is spoken by the God-figure to the heroine-of-sorts. Oural, the jealous and controlling older sister of Psyche, who spent so much time suffering for what she believed was love, finds herself confronted with the reality of her own selfishness. So little of what she called love really resembled love in any meaningful way. Nonetheless, Oural is told that ‘you, too, shall be Psyche.’ This comes true; though her idea of love was distorted, Oural carries many of Psyche’s burdens, even when she didn’t know that she was doing so. Further, Oural is discovered by love in the same way that Psyche was found; in the last accounting, she became the most true parts of her sister. In a way that I cannot totally explain or understand, this feels true of me. I do not know if the Christine I thought I knew ever really existed. Perhaps what I saw of her was a picture of her true self polished by eyes of love. Perhaps I only saw what I wanted to see, remaking her in my mind into a canvas for all my hopes and fears. Probably somewhere in between; human reasons usually end up somewhere between the angelic and the diabolical. Either way, in a way that I don’t totally understand and can’t really explain, I think that in a way, ‘I, too, have become Christine.’ The most beautiful parts of the picture of her that existed in my mind and my heart have now become parts of me. The darker parts of that picture, the parts that were in all likelihood my own deep fears, I’ve faced and found myself all the more whole. I’ve been found in the same way I wanted to find her. In a better way, really, by a much greater Lover. And I hope, I truly hope, that the second half of Oural’s prophecy holds as well. I pray that at the end of all of this, when this broken world is past and long ago, I find that somehow I’ve borne some of her burdens. I know I’ve added to them. But I know this one thing: love has conquered death. Perhaps an there was an ember of love in the twisted mass of selfishness that I gave her. If so, may that ember live past the death of our friendship-or-whatever-it-was, past the death of hope, past the death of this world and the death of death itself, and may it make its way into eternity as a gift to her in the sight of her Father. I did love her, and I do love her. But I am content to wait for a world where hope never fails and love abounds unburdened to be able to tell her. I’ll have better words with which to tell her there. And in that contentedness, I let all of this go and declare this story complete. Which is a good thing entirely, for new journeys begin at the end of concluded ones. Regardless, ‘The woods are lovely, dark, and deep, but I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep.’ I have much to do yet.

May this stand as a marker mourning what was lost, as a banner streamer commemorating a hard fought battle, and as a beacon long burning in the hope of a new beginning.  I cannot think of a better way to end this story.  I am contented. Berroguetto - Cantos De Monzo. - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8qMaRsQSUM

This seems tremendously obvious in retrospect. Most of these sorts of things do, I suppose. You can’t go back to the people who hurt you and expect that they’ll give back what they took from you. The way home, the way toward whole is always forward, never back. Even if sometimes that forward takes you through the past.

For one, the people who steal parts of your heart out are not typically the kind of people who would treasure that which they steal. The chunks of flesh that they took from you they’ve already discarded, the pieces of you they tore away were treated with the same measure of contempt they displayed toward the rest of you. There is little you can reclaim from a thief if he’s already disposed of the goods.

We all have our ancient wounds, daggers from adolescent arguments and grown-up lovers and a thousand other things. But daggers are not scalpels: they come to steal, kill and destroy and that’s all. There’s nothing in cold storage, nothing that they could give back even if they wanted to. Still, a part of our heart seems to think we could find the things we lost in the places where we lost them; if we could prove our interlocutors wrong, or if we could become the person they said they wanted, or if we were in some other way vindicated, then we would be whole again. We forget that there is only one Creator, and He is not our enemy; we are unmade by our interlocutors only as far as we choose to be.

Redemption is not amnesia, and in this is the deeper reason that we cannot go back. Jesus loves who we are, and part of who we are is what has happened to us. To obliterate the past is to remove part of a person that He loves. Redemption is not a return to a golden age, but the construction of a golden age from the rubble of the past. This is the magic of redemption: our tragedies provide the mortar for our future joy. So we move forward, reclaiming the past as we move ahead into Him. The One who made our hearts in the first place is the only One who can restore them to completeness.

There is nothing that Christine can give back to me, any more than the girl who called her a ‘white girl with a tan’ can declare her incontrovertibly Latina in the light of her achievements. There were parts of my heart that she tore out, parts of me she beat numb with her absolute contempt, parts without which I could not feel whole again. But words cannot be unsaid any more than daggers can be unstabbed. I have no illusions that she treasured anything she kept… there is nothing she could return even if she wanted to do so.

This expectation, I believe, poisons many of our efforts of reconciliation. If we believe that the other side is still holding onto the things we lack, then we cannot meaningfully restore relationship save its return. This is the simple truth: the things that were stolen cannot be given back. Reparations cannot restore shame and humiliation. But that which was lost can be mourned, and if it is mourned by both parties, then the relationship can be healed. Be it the Truth and Reconciliation Commission or arguments between once-friends, relationship can only be restored when both sides abandon the idea of getting something back and both enter into the idea of making something together.

Sometimes reconciliation is not an option, though: it has to be wanted by both sides. Both sides have to be willing to mourn what was lost on all sides; both sides have to want a better relationship than the one that exists, even if better is nothing more than a distant peace. But reconciliation is not a prerequisite for healing. We were made by God’s hands alone; we can be remade by His hands alone. No one else gets a vote. So from the crumbling bricks of the city of man, He makes the City of God; from the wreckage of our past He builds for us a glorious future with Him. The way home is forward. We reclaim the past in the process.

This whole thing, ultimately, has been about God reclaiming my heart so that I would have something to give to my wife, something from which to fight for hers. It is then appropriate, perhaps, to document here my battles with the one last dragon that would claim my heart: my lust and my selfishness. My less personal writing is on my Facebook. From now on, until this war is won, this will be me at my most personal. From here on out, this will be my journal to my wife, as a matter of public record in the name of accountablity, and in the hope that one day I will present this to her as an accounting of deliverance and victory for her in His name. I fight for her. Jesus, please give me the victory. I can't win this without You.

18 Apr 2009. - Knock it off... Reset... Fights on. // Four days of complete purity so far... 10% to 40 days. SEALs were wrong... the next day is easier than the last. Press.

21 Apr 2009. - Seven Days. Fighting. Press.

"For a moment, she re-discovered the purpose of her life: … to call each thing by its right name.”
- Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak

"How can [the gods] meet us face to face till we have faces?”
- Till We Have Faces, C.S. Lewis

It seems so much longer than five years ago, but I remember everything nonetheless. Two years of my life are pressed into these streets and carved into these chairs. Yet this is the strangest thing: I remember so many of the things that were said, but I hardly remember the boy who said them. I retrace my own steps, but not as a man reminiscing upon his own memories. I am my own historian, and with the intimacy of studied expertise I survey a long-quiet battlefield where other men fought.

As my mind fills in the gaps, I see these empty chairs filled with agitated students, elbowing into the millisecond gaps between competing monologues, desperately trying to add their own voice to the fray. Though the hum of the air conditioner is the only true sound in this sterile room, echoing in their silence, those arguments still ricochet off the walls. Like the serene green hill of Little Round Top, this room whispers to passersby of battles long ago, fought between men who have long since left this place. Anymore, I am more passerby than combatant.

But fought we had… bravely, valiantly and gloriously. In this vacant classroom, five of us stood against seventy for an entire semester. At this very table, five of us were forced to sit in front of the entire classroom and endure the abuse of student and teacher alike simply for believing in an unborn child’s right to live. A new Thermopylae each Tuesday and Thursday, we faced arsenals of arguments, ad hominem attacks, ridicule, contempt and scorn simply for standing up for our beliefs. We did more than just stand… we held. Of that much I am proud.

From this vantage point, though, I see now that not all the battles were brave. Certainly they were not all necessary. Veering around one of the perennial protests of Harvard Square, it occurs to me that it is not a worthwhile use of my time to argue with a sophomore who knows nothing about the complexities of Kurdistan and yet feels compelled to shout about the war in Iraq. What I have learned and what I know is threatened in no way by his ranting; his doubts about the legitimacy of my service do not diminish its legitimacy in the least. Who I was would have argued, or at least he would have allowed himself to become angry. With hair-trigger arguments in quick-draw holsters, I was more than eager to answer any challenge to the bastions of my identity. But not all challenges need to be answered. My people, I suspect, care little for the opinion of a teenager far removed from the consequences of his choices or any sort of real responsibility. They never needed me to defend them from the likes of him.

What is true of my people is even more true of my God. Like Peter, his sword drawn at Gethsemane, I stood ready with my well-rehearsed apologetics, never picking the fight but all too eager for the fight to pick me. Always be ready to give an answer, the apostle commands us. But love asks the question, and without a question, an answer is nothing. I do not doubt that in that garden Peter loved his Lord. I wonder, though, if the Apostle wasn’t defending his idea of the Messiah, rather than defending Messiah as He truly was. Perhaps if he had understood his Friend and Rabbi, he would have realized that the God of all the Universe was more than capable of defending Himself. And perhaps, had I known more about Him, I would have realized the same.

All at once, a blinding flash of the obvious hits me. I finally understand the feral rage behind my striving; I finally see who I was truly fighting for: myself. Perhaps more precisely, I was fighting for who I thought I was. It never occurred to me that who I thought I was and who I was might be two entirely different things. Rather than asking God to help me understand who I was in Him, I fought to the death defending these cornerstones my meticulously constructed identity. In this moment, I understand the space between who I was and who I am. In the journey of the last half-decade, God has disabused me of quite a few of my comfortable notions of who I thought I was. I had been shouting at the world so loud and so long about who I thought I was that I hadn’t heard Him whispering who I truly was.

It took me five years to run out of breath; five years until my flailing arms had no more strength to fight; five years before I found myself facedown and silent before Him. And in that moment, I could finally hear the things He had been whispering all along. I could at last hear Him telling my true name. In His words, I found the security I had spent so long striving for; with His pronouncement, all my arguments became unnecessary. My idols of identity had always been fragile and brittle, but a heart of flesh, the heart He wanted to give me all along, can be as hard as steel when it needs to be. With God vouchsafing my identity, I no longer feel compelled to defend it; now that I have a face, I don’t need to protect my masks. This is the heart of it all: we are made in the image of God, and the truer we become to ourselves, the closer we will get to Him. Life in Christ is simply the process of becoming real. We are learning to inhabit our true faces. He must teach us who we are.

Here is the space between the Centurion and the Pharisee. The Pharisee wore a hundred pious masks, but he would not face God wearing his true face. He was face to face with God, but he himself had no face. The Centurion put aside every one of his masks, his power and position and everything else he wore, and prostrated himself before a Jewish street preacher for the sake of one of his servants. He faced God in the flesh with his true face, and Jesus saw past the complications of oppression and power and position to find a man willing to face Him honestly. After all, God made both the Centurion and the Pharisee, and He gave both of them their station in life. The trappings of status mean nothing to the One who granted them. He came to this Earth to meet us face to face. We can only meet him when we wear ours.

First, though, He must cast down every false face we try to wear. This is the purpose of the Law. Paul tells us that the law brings death. “With the measure you use, it will be measured unto you.” The law demands consistency of our actions, and consistency is the death of all of our pretense, for we are all entirely inconsistent. Mother Teresa asked once how we could expect peace on our streets when there is violence in the womb. The law applies the same logic to every circumstance. The law draws the trajectory between action and consequence, and inevitably we find ourselves in the cross-fire of a thousand contradictions between our false faces. The holistic integrity of the law reveals our complete lack of consistency. Each of our contradictions flows freely from the first contradiction of fallen man: we are beings made in God’s image and we are trying to live our lives entirely free from Him.

Like an academic deconstructing some hallowed historical event, like a Dadaist describing the insanity of the whole artistic endeavor, the law demonstrates the absolute insanity of this broken world we’ve made. Nothing we make will make any sense, for we ourselves don’t make any sense; we cannot reconcile our actions to each other as long as we are unreconciled with God. The law calls things by their right names. Doing so, it pronounces this world unjust, terrible and cruel, and points out the tragic and terrible contradiction of mankind trying to live without God. The power of the law is paradox: we cannot live in a world where we follow our actions to their logical conclusions.

But we are as inconsistent with the law as we are with ourselves. We celebrate the parts of the law that conform to our dispositions; we discard the parts that prove more challenging. The Pharisees tithed a tenth of their cumin and mint, and neglected the weightier matters of mercy and justice. We are no different. How many times have we claimed desperation’s license in our moment of weakness, yet denied that same license to others when the balance of power shifted? We stand all too ready to wound others in the same exact ways we were wounded; too ready to break promises made in supposed empathy to the powerless during our moments of pain the moment it becomes expedient to do so.

I am no different. Denying the consistency at the heart of the true law, the law of my construction became consistent only through redaction. Cutting fabric from of robes of righteousness, I made a mask through which I strained gnats and swallowed camels. This is the tension: He gives us robes to wear, and we suffocate as we try to wear them as masks. Because He loves us, He must sometimes take them back. After all, He is the same God that both designed and destroyed the Temple, both for the sake of those inside its walls. There is a dignity in causality to be sure, but when we start believing that we can keep ourselves safe simply by doing all the math right, He has a way of keeping the numbers from adding up. And so, at long last I found the errors that kept showing up in my world were less a function of my math and more a function of the mathematician.

Expectations are at the root of much of our issues with relationships. Much of the tension in an immature relationship comes from individuals trying to reconcile their image of the other to the reality of the other person. In order to enter into maturity, you have to leave behind all your notions about the other person and dive into the reality of who they truly are. I believe the same is true in our relationship with God. We resent Him when He doesn’t accede to our demands to keep our world safe. Our world is not tame. Fortunately, neither is He.

When young C.S. Lewis went off to war, he found his already tenuous faith shattered by the reality of the violence in front of him. The god who took his mother from him, the god who took his best friend from him, the god who allowed all of this to happen; surely such a being was not worthy of recognition, much less praise. I wonder what he expected of God, of the universe, and of himself. Perhaps, as the great author would so eloquently refute later in life, he wanted a safe universe where all things lined up and pain was rare. Holding God accountable for the maintenance of such a universe, it is easy to see how young Jack grew disillusioned with his ideas of who he thought God was. It took a decade for him to realize that who he thought God was and who God actually was were two different things entirely. For me, it was less of a moment and more of a process.

I spent a decade looking for something without precisely understanding what I was looking for. There was a part of me that wanted to walk to right up to the ragged edge of where the clean lines of civilized society met the raw reality of the natural world and gaze out into the abyss, looking for God knows what. Maybe I was looking for something real, something more honest than all the things we have made. I can’t say for sure what I was looking for, and I can’t say for sure what I found. But I found something nonetheless. Where reason and logic fail, there are still pictures and memories. Here is one of those.

Volunteering for a few days in a trauma hospital in Iraq, I would bring linens and saline to incoming critical care patients. One night, a MEDEVAC chopper brought in a half-dozen or so victim of an IED blast. They were mostly Iraqi civilians, amongst them a man with his teenage daughter, and a critically injured two year old girl. The man’s injuries were relatively minor, but his daughter’s were not. She died within an hour. I cannot forget the sound of this man’s wailing as the translator told him that his daughter was gone. The two year old girl had a shrapnel wound through the head. The doctors were able to stabilize her, but they said she only would hold on for a day or two. They were right. And standing over this child, utterly helpless to do anything to make things right, the only thing that made any sense in the world was that Jesus loved this girl, and He was going to take her home. He was going to take her away from this world that had been so unbelievably cruel to this precious child; He was going to take her away from this place so undeserving of such beauty and such innocence. And I prayed over her without any words that made any sense at all, but I knew that He loved her, and that was enough. That one thing made all the sense in the world, and it was the only thing in that moment that could make sense of the world. And here, at the ragged edge of civilization, where the clean lines of the law meet the wreckage of this world we’ve made, one thing becomes perfectly clear: If you know it’s wrong, then it must have been right once. And it will be again. This is the Law and the Gospel all in one moment: this world is utterly and completely broken, and Jesus saves.

With the benefit of distance and reflection, a few more things come into focus. The power of the law is paradox: man cannot live without God and remain man. It demonstrates the insanity of this world of our creation, for we cannot live in the world we’ve made. But if the power of law is paradox, then Jesus Christ is its greatest paradox. If we as fallen men cannot live in a world of our own creation, then the perfectly holy God certainly cannot live in that world. And yet He did. He is the summation of the Law, and it is completed in Him. The contradictions of humanity have never been clearer than in our reception of Jesus Christ. We claim to love God, yet when He comes into our world, we utterly reject Him. If ever a man deserved to be treated as a king, it was this Man, but we treat Him with absolute contempt as we cheer the petty rulers that put Him to death. We put the one innocent Man in all of human history to death as a criminal in a murderer’s stead. The most beautiful person to ever walk this Earth, and Jew and Gentile alike, we hang Him from a tree in the cruelest death we can devise. This is the law, and it calls us by our right name: guilty. Here is its greatest paradox: the law brings death, and Christ died for us.

Just as the power of the law is paradox, the power of Christ is a greater paradox: God is good, and we are not, but He loves us nonetheless. He is the perfect paradox, and every other paradox breaks upon Him. Nietzsche once said that God is dead, and for three days, he was right. But death was too frail to hold Him. It could not reconcile Nietzsche’s contradiction, and it was itself destroyed. This much remains: love is thicker than death. Jesus Christ has one true face, for His face is the face of I AM, and that face is love. We are made in His image. Our only true face is the face of love, but we cannot find it on our own. Jesus Christ loves who we are, not who we think we are. He paid far too high a price with us to be satisfied with our pretense and masks. The law calls things by their right names. Jesus gives us true names. Lose your life and you will find it... seek after Him and you will find you.

As I leave the desert, I realize that masks become robes once you learn to wear them right. Moses was restored to his position of leadership when he was called back to Egypt, and Paul returned to preaching once God was done with him in the wilderness. Now that I no longer need them to tell me who I am, I find that I’ve achieved more than I ever expected within the identities that I once fought so hard to defend. And one last thing was restored to me… the other night, I felt God speaking to me about the two year old girl that I could not help. He told me that she grew up in His presence, strong and brave and beautiful. He told me that she knows her true name.

//


// The Umpire God //

The clockmaker God, they used to say. He sets the rules, and then He lets things run their course. If we just did the math right, we could figure out those rules and build a safe world. But we weren’t totally honest with ourselves; we only did the math half-way. ‘Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,’ but maybe we were already corrupt, and power simply gives us means to express it. Whether on New York’s Wall Street, or some small town’s Main Street, power gives us the ability to act upon the desires of our heart (and the ability to insulate ourselves from the consequences of those actions.) We rarely get better when we get more powerful, but we often get better at fooling ourselves. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus does the math for us. ‘If you look at a woman with lust, you have already committed adultery with her in your heart… If you look upon your brother with hatred, in your heart you have already murdered him.’ If we were free to act without consequence, we would all be guilty of every deadly sin imaginable. Had we done the math all the way through, we would have seen that without God’s mercy, a perfectly just world has no room for any of us. We didn’t know what we were asking for, because we didn’t know ourselves.

Perhaps a more honest term would have been ‘the umpire God.’ We gave Him our rulebook for the universe, and expected Him to keep the peace and enforce the rules that we had made. When things don’t pan out along the lines of our expectations, we blame Him. ‘How could a loving God allow things like this to happen? Why doesn’t He fix it?’ Unimpressed by who we think we are, He knows who we are far too well to entertain this demand. Consider a child murdered in the course of a gang-land drug war. Imagine that God decides that we will be His avenger; we’ll be Denzel Washington’s character from ‘Man on Fire.’ We’ll go shopping for some AKs and RPGs and bring this thing back on the heads of everyone who participated, everyone who was involved, everyone who profited in any way from it. First, the murderers themselves die. Then their bosses, and their bosses. And then the drug lords with their minions. Next comes the consumers that kept the drug lords in business… which includes not a few upper-class white surgeons and intellectual elites, whose recreational cocaine use keeps the supply lines open for the ghetto drugs which created the drug war which claimed the child’s life. After the users come all the people who turned a blind eye to their rich, successful friends’ bad habit; after them, all those who colluded in the legal double-standard between rich and poor, which created gang-land in the first place. Throw in everyone who participated in our culture of violence by buying a ticket to an action movie, and you start running out of people. If we are true to our original plan, at some point we find ourselves in our own crosshairs. Even if we went back in time to undo the original murder, we would have to kill the original murderer for a crime he had not yet committed, making us the murderer. The center cannot hold… we cannot be consistent to even our own rules. God is too honest and too merciful to accede to our foolish desire for an umpire. He knows us too well, even if we don’t know ourselves.

//Law and Nations//

“With the measure you use, it will be measured unto you.” Merely by establishing a standard of consistency, the law points out our own inconsistencies. Mother Teresa asked once how we could expect peace on our streets when there is violence in the womb. The law applies the same logic to every circumstance. Treat those weaker with you with contempt, and they will treat you with contempt when you become weak. Rob the poor and one day they will take up arms and rob you. Worship your lusts and half of your marriages will end in divorce. Treat your children as a curse and those who treat them as a blessing will outnumber you in a few generations. The law draws the trajectory between action and consequence, and inevitably we find ourselves in the cross-fire of a thousand contradictions between our false faces. The holistic integrity of the law reveals our complete lack of consistency. If we truly listen to the message of the law, we would hear over and over again that the center cannot hold; we are not the people that we think we are.

The law is not a road map to a just society; it is a warning sign screaming ‘Bridge Out!’ From Hammurabi to Marx, Plato to Jefferson and all those in between, we’ve been trying to figure out how to make human governance actually work, as if we did all the math just right, then we’d finally achieve utopia and solve all of our problems. “Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.” The philosopher is correct-for-data: we were born free, between the Tigris and Euphrates and two other rivers. We built our chains as we left. The equation simply cannot reconcile until we ourselves are reconciled. “If men were angels, we would not need governments.” But men are not angels, and this is the problem.

There is nothing nearly as unimpressive as the history of humanity’s attempts to govern itself. Yet our infinite unwarranted optimism in the endeavor of human governance continues unabated. We seem to have this irrational hope that if we figured out the perfect system of laws and government, then we would somehow escape the nightmare of all the things we’ve done and continue to do to each other. We forget that we had exactly that, and we still couldn’t fix ourselves. Moses came down from the mountain with the Divine Law written on stone tablets, and with them an entire manual of rules for governing a just society. Tort laws, civil laws, criminal procedure; laws for property, for marriage, for work, for accidents, for war, laws for every imaginable circumstance and we still couldn’t make it work. Surely those who live in accordance with His laws will prosper, but the fact remains: we simply didn’t have it within ourselves to be honest to the Law, just as we didn’t have it within ourselves to be honest to ourselves, each other, or God. The Law points out that dishonesty; its purpose is simply to relieve us of our ideas about who we think we are.

Like an academic deconstructing some hallowed historical event, like a Dadaist describing the insanity of the whole artistic endeavor, the law demonstrates the absolute insanity of this broken world we’ve made. Through the miracle of exchange rates, the global free market provides us more riches than our actions merit, yet we are surprised when the very same globalization empowers those who hate us to destroy the towers that were its symbols. Irgun claims the license of desperation in their guerilla campaign against the British, and its inheritors deny that same license to the Intifada when they find themselves in the same position. Yet the Intifada, enraged by the image of European-designed bulldozers razing Palestinian settlements, conveniently forgets the iron axes of their Mycean Greek ancestors (called Philistines long before they were called Palestinians) razing the homes of the Canaanite Gazans before them. An Aztec king is captured and killed by an invading army in the name of power and greed, just as his armies captured and sacrificed chieftain and villager alike to gain Quetzalcoatl’s favor. And how many times have the oppressed thrown off their chains only to become the new oppressors? Guilty and guilty, we are wrapped around each other in this tragic drama of human history. This is the world in our own image, and the law shows us just how utterly ludicrous it truly is. We were designed in the image of God. Until we are restored in that image, nothing we make will ever make any sense.

"The world has changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air. Much that once was is lost, for none now live that remember it." - Lord of the Rings.

Once upon a time, I had a Nintendo gaming console. Super Mario Brothers and all of that. I remember that the system used to lock up, generally when you were at some super-critical point in the game. At that point, you'd have no choice other than to press the reset button and lose all your hard-earned progress. The residual charge drained from the capacitors, all the carefully ordered ones and zeros all became zeroes, and all the lives and continues and power-ups you'd accumulated were all consumed in an instant by Ohm's law. As frustrating as it was to restart the game from scratch, it was better than staring at a frozen television screen with Mario stuck forever in midair. After all, the only way to beat a malfunctioning game is to press reset and play it through again.

Of course, Noah's Flood carries with it a bit more gravitas than a locked up game of Donkey Kong (given the minor little detail that 'pretty much everybody died.') It does have this one similarity, though: the post-reset characters know nothing about the progress made before the reset. Any prediluvian marvels of technology, architecture or scholarship would have all been consumed. Yet, with the sole surviving technological marvel of domesticated agriculture and livestock (three if you count boats and clothes,) it took humanity only a millennium or two to re-conquer the Earth. Ferocious tigers and enormous elephants populate our zoos; the great killer Smallpox still survives, but only at our own behest. Not only have we conquered the Earth, we've conquered each other. Families became tribes, tribes became cities, cities became nations, and nations became empires. And all of that only brings us to the dawn of history and the hazy memory of the Kiengir people (named Sumerians by their Akkadian successors.) It begs the question: if we did so much in so little time since the Flood, how far had we gotten before the big Nintendo reset?

What follows is nothing more than a whimsical intellectual exercise; I am not attempting to define any new doctrine. I just find it curious that for all the value we place on progress, the author of Genesis sees no need to record any of the marvels and monuments of the men that lived between Adam and Noah. I picture a Bedouin's humble tent pitched at an oasis within view of Ozymandias' statue. A thirsty traveler approaches the Bedouin seeking water and shelter, and takes no notice of the great and forgotten king who can offer neither. So whatever happened before the Flood is of as little consequence as Ozymandias' reign. Nonetheless, I find the prospect of forgotten marvels fascinating in the light of our triumphalist technological hubris. The very few documents that survived from the library in Alexandria demonstrate a very advanced understanding of mathematics and philosophy on the part of the ancients. The West's Renaissance was born out of the rediscovery of a few works of the Ancient Greek world. Imagine the Renaissance that would have been born from the complete set of ancient works. If that was only the ancient Antediluvian world, how many of Prediluvan man's marvels were claimed by the deep? We'll never know. And it doesn't matter in the least. Progress couldn't save prediluvian man any more than it can save antediluvian man.

Just for fun, though, we'll explore the possibilities for a bit. First, the Noah Almighty scenario. Imagine that God tells you to build a boat, and you and your family (along with all the animals) are the only ones that end up boarding. As a brief aside, notice the dimensions of the Ark. The man lived a long time, and he had his family to help him, but the fact remains that the guy built an aircraft carrier in his back yard. Even if I was in the best shape of my life, and had a couple hundred years to work with, I doubt I could amass the capital to build a boat of that size, much less build it myself. It causes one to wonder what kind of technology was available to Noah. Anyways, back to the experiment. You get to bring with you whatever you want. You can bring your hairdryers, iPods, toothpaste, wristwatches, books and even your espresso machine. Here's the problem. When you land, there's not going to be a 110V power grid, or AA batteries, or gasoline to run your generator. So pretty much you're back to sixth-grade-camp, no matter what you brought. Furthermore, even if you were smart enough to bring along some solar cells, within a generation or so they'll break and your kids won't be able to fix them. Even if they somehow get an entropy waiver and don't ever break, at some point your kids will forget how to use them, and there's no Internet for finding instructions. When you tell your grandkids about skyscrapers and TV shows and air conditioning, they'll have no frame of reference. They'll do well to spend their brain bytes learning how to hunt with spears, or plant barley, because they're going to get awfully hungry and hearing about McDonald's isn't going to make them any more full. Pretty much, if we re-ran the Noah scenario today with modern people, the story turns out about the same.

Now that we've explored the effects of the reset button, let's imagine how far we could have gotten in the game before it froze up. We'll set our constraints using a very literal interpretation of scripture. Adding together all the Prediluvian 'begats,' we set our timeframe's minimum bound at about a millennium and a half. We've got a good amount of time to play with at the very least. Now throw in the demographic differences of the world before the flood. Man lived to about nine hundred years or so, and was fertile between (at a minimum) 50 and 500. That's 450 years of childbearing, which when you throw in the geometrically expanded lifespan pretty much blows the demographic transition model right out of the water. Doing some very rough pilot math, you can easily surpass our present world population by orders of magnitude. Whether that was the case or not, no one can say. But it is at least a possibility. In addition to this, a millennium is a long time to learn. Imagine how much more progress we would make if our Newtons and Einsteins stuck around for a couple hundred more years. Add in the pre-Tower of Babel detail, where man can collaborate and communicate without having to invest in Rosetta Stone software, and the possible advances in knowledge would be staggering. Finally, newly-exiled mankind had fresh memories of the wonders of the Garden, and entropy had only just begun to wear away at him. Fallen man is certainly less than undiminished man; perhaps in the same way, tired long-fallen man wrapped in scar is not nearly as sharp as newly-fallen man with his wounds still fresh. Given just a millennium, prediluvian man could have easily overtaken our vaunted modern technologies.

This is not to say they would have followed the developmental paths that we've chosen. Every society and technology makes a number of largely arbitrary choices about which branches of technology they want to develop. Since technology is self-catalyzing, your next set of choices is determined by your last set of choices, so even one choice can shape your future developmental alternatives. AC power vs. DC power, rice or wheat, Betamax or VHS, oxcarts or human porters, all of these were relatively arbitrary choices in one place or another, and all of these shaped the development of future technologies. At some point, we decided that metal was the way to go, starting with an iron age, and then moving to bronze, and then to copper (or the other way around, I forget,) and then to steel, and then to gears, and axles, and aluminum. And from that construct, we used metal to shape our information technologies through magnetic fields and circuits. From there, we created human networking technologies tied irrevocably to the straight-line constraints of plastic and metal.

Perhaps a mankind with a fresh memory of the Garden would have opted for different choices. Perhaps they would have stayed with biotechnology, and used some mix of life and death (the building blocks of the post-fall world) to vicariously accomplish their will. Having forgotten the Garden, we use all-dead metal and plastic tools and consider agrarian technologies backwards and inferior. For all the wonders of the industrial age, I know of no factory that can convert solar energy, water and carbon dioxide into high grade carbohydrates with anything near the efficiency of the ancient wheat plant, nor of any process that can synthesize high-grade protein from low-grade carbohydrates nearly as effectively as old Bessy (or whatever you call your cows.) The ultra-nouveau field of nanotechnology attempts to build 'designer molecules' and particle-level machines. Cells have been doing that for as long as any of us can remember. The DNA-RNA protein synthesis process creates custom-built molecules perfectly suited for remarkably complex processes within an incredibly complex organism. The Krebbs cycle performs combustion far better than any high-bypass turbofan I know of. The pop-scientist (de-emphasis on 'scientist') Carl Sagan hails nanotechnology as the crowning achievement of technology. Even if we succeed beyond our wildest dreams in this field, all we will have done is recreate biology. Perhaps our forgotten ancestors skipped this whole circular process and found ways to directly subjugate nature to their will, rather than working via proxy as we do. Perhaps they would view our machines as clunky and primitive. The world is not Sid Meier's Civilization IV: there are many possible technological paths, and we choose them together through competition and cooperation. Nothing says that our ancestors had to choose ours. Nonetheless, whatever path they chose, they seemed to fare well upon it. In the course of two generations, Cain's children had already invented musical instruments, ironworking and cities. Given that they had at least twenty more generations before the flood, I venture to guess they would have gone pretty far down the path of technological progress.

And here is the problem with progress. Whether they used similar or different technologies than ours, they seemed to have used them for the same things that we use our own. We've achieved unprecedented connectivity through the Internet, integrating an incredible amount of real-time knowledge and reference material. We use that technological marvel to more efficiently exploit and objectify women and children. We set out to discover the world, and we proceed to enslave the men we discover. We finally vanquish Smallpox, and then we bring it back to life in order to kill each other. And what technological advancement have we not converted into a weapon? From the Genesis account, it seems the men of Noah's time were not so different from us. For whatever progress they had achieved, they could never progress beyond themselves.

Progress raises questions that it cannot answer. It's like a key. The question is whether you're using it to open a treasure chest or Pandora's box. Progress without an end becomes a monster: "We do what we must because we can." Technology is simply another means of power, and power is simply the ability to do stuff you want to do. But what tells you what you want to do? This is the problem… more often than not, humanity seems to want to destroy itself. Until the middle half of this last century, humanity did not yet have the collective ability to destroy itself. Are we any the better for having it? And were we not out of time, this would segue-way nicely into a discussion on the Tower of Babel. But we are.

"People love you the most for the things that you hate/
And hate you for loving the things you can't keep straight/
People judge you on a curve, and tell you you're getting what you deserve/
And this, too, will be made right."
- "This Too Will Be Made Right," Derek Webb.

This is was most uncomfortable realization: both of us went off to war, at least at first, out of our own hatred. And not only in our wars with each other. Both of us had a war we needed to fight with the world. The two of us sought out that war on two very different battlefields.

In the course of my professional studies, I happened across a book authored by a Middle Eastern studies professor she held in high regard. I was struck by how much hatred was written between the lines of this man's work. Multisyllabic words and scattered citations did little to hide the author's intent. To call him a propagandist for a certain people group would be generous, as it would ascribe constructive intent to his work. Certainly criticism can be constructive, but the constructive critic leaves his joy in malice at the door. This man did not. And for this, like Chomsky and Zinn before him, this man was loved by those who shared his hatred.

Yet, for my one finger pointing out, I find three pointing back in. I kill men for a living. There are a lot prettier words for what I do, and I am glad to use them in polite company, but one can hardly gloss over the intent behind a warbird's design. Yet even if written in starker colors, there are similarities between my world and that of academic critique. There is a world of difference between wanting to protect and wanting to destroy; between wanting to save the day and wanting to kill, even if both sometimes happen at the same time. A man might kill to protect things worth protecting, and a man might kill simply to kill. There are gradations, no doubt. My blood boils when I see pictures of an Al-Qaeda torture facility. I hate what they do, I believe rightly so. And I am glad to draw a line of fire between my enemies and those they show no compunction in hurting. I have killed men with mournful resolve, I have killed with regretless sorrow, I have killed with many things in my heart. Nonetheless, I can say honestly that I have never killed a man with hatred in my heart. This is by the grace of God alone. There was a time when this would not have been the case.

I think of conversations some of the conversations here. "I'm bored… I want to go kill something." "As long as the good guys are safe and we get the mission done… if we're not shooting, nobody's shooting at them, right?" I answer. (I sound like a tool.) I understand the whole 'first rotation' thing. You want to go and do the job you've worked so hard training for. Of course. And that was me once. But in my case, I wonder if my desire to make a difference wasn't paired with some unnamed rage. As a matter of fact, I'm pretty sure it was.

A memory from years ago: driving to my flight training squadron, 'Nightmare' by Eve 6 blaring across the radio, I remember thinking "I want to do whatever she would hate the most." In the aftermath of the battle of Second Christine, these words made sense to a very angry young man. I had been willing to give up my life's dream of flying fighter jets in order to be with her. Since the latter was not an option, then I determined to lose myself in the former, and I infected that dream with my bitterness toward her. I am not proud of these words, nor of who I was then. In fact, I am very thankful that God has redeemed some decisions made with mixed motives. (Were we to count pride, though, I think very few of us have any decisions of pure motives.) It was more than that, though. She became the quick and easy synopsis of all the abuse I endured in Cambridge, the summary of all the people who hated me without knowing me, all the people who made me into the accessible and attackable representative of Sa'ad's "other." These people, in turn, became the most recent manifestation of anyone who had every hated me without reason, cast me out, shunned me, or otherwise treated me with contempt for being different. And since I could not meaningfully answer her contempt or their contempt on the battlefield I was on, I sought out another battlefield where I could answer my adversaries in kind. Somewhere I could shoot back. How dark the heart of man. Once again, I am not proud of who I was then: a boy consumed by hatred and fear. But we are rarely so honest with ourselves; I was a Christian in good standing, and determined to be seen as such. So I hid vicious intents from myself by wrapping them in Christian-ese words. I am thankful that God saved me from me. I am sorry that I waited so long to let Him show me my own heart.

I will not recap the last three years again. Suffice it to say that God broke my fears by letting them break upon me; He broke my pride and broke my heart; He broke my hatred for others when I finally faced another's hatred toward me with love. The angry boy cast off, I have put on the man He has made me to be, and I am proud of what He has made. And this man believes to his very bones the heart of the Christian faith: love is thicker than death. So I have put down hatred, and love has become my new weapon. (All things are incomplete forms on this side of the fall. I embrace this nonetheless, even if imperfectly.) I am still a warrior. Born into a world at war, I left behind as much of my hatred as I could as I went off to war. Because of this, I will never have to live with the guilt that I would have brought upon myself otherwise. For this, I am thankful.

In this, though, is an irony: in a world of hatred, you are loved more for what you hate than for what you love. For all the angry, rebellious kids parading around in their Che Guevara shirts, "The Motorcycle Diaries" gives them a veneer of moralism to cover their hatred for mom and dad. Guevara is exciting far more so for what he hated than for what he loved. He demonstrated well the latter half of the Jose Marti quote about those who build and those who destroy. He is the rebel, and the rebel is sexy. In the same way, I remember conversations with well-meaning near-strangers about my profession. "Kill some hadjis for me" and all of that. Mostly no more than sports team smack-talking, an emotional investment in some far off world where good and bad are defined in terms that are as black and white as they are arbitrary. I'm not judging, nor claiming some sense of moral superiority, but things look a little different when you have to perforate the body of some kid too young and stupid to know what he's doing with thousands of fragments of hot metal because his older brother told him to point his Kalashnikov at the good guys. I've flown x number of successful missions, and brought x number of good guys home safe. But, to the world, I am cool because of how many men I've killed. Don't get me wrong, I'm no pacifist. I just question our assessments of value.

Returning to the story that helped get me here, I've chosen to know nothing about her for more than two years now. But here, on the far side of this change, I think I see one more parallel between who we were. I believe the difference between old Dave and new Dave is the difference between rage and love. Old Dave nursed hidden wounds, shoving his rage far enough down to poison the aquifer of his dreams, and hence he could not be free of the ghosts of his past that denied him identity. Old Christine, from what very little I knew of her, was very similar. Old Dave found a battlefield where his dreams and his rage could co-exist in his choice of aircraft. Old Christine seemed to have found her own battlefield where her dreams and her hatreds dovetailed. Both of us found places where we would be loved and accepted both for the things we loved and for the things we hated. This world loves to hate, and in that hatred we found some degree of acceptance and affirmation. But there can never be peace in hatred.

I heard echoes of her of late. They were not sought for. Apparently, one of her friends described to a mutual friend a person without a name, a monstrous and pathetic and ugly person. Her friend not realizing that the mutual friend knew that nameless person, and my friend realizing that person was intended to describe me, a bit of verbal sparring ensued. I thank that friend for coming to my defense. There was a time when my reaction would have been anger, maybe even hatred. But that time has passed. May she be greatly blessed. If, after two years of knowing nothing of me whatsoever, she still needs to wrap all of her fears and hatred around a caricature of me, then she needs those blessings even more so, and so I give them all the more gladly. If the difference between old Dave and new Dave was found in forgetting how to hate, then may Christine be blessed in the same way. I have no desire to interact with the old Christine… she reminds me of a self I am glad to have left behind. But I would be honored to know a new and free Christine. Regardless, I am forgetting how to hate her, as I have forgotten how to hate my enemies out here.

It started with my war against the world. Men warring against the world is not exactly unprecedented, though perhaps mine has come full circle. Athanasius contra mundum, they said. And rightly so. But there are different ways to pursue a war against the world. Fight against those who have hurt you, and you will inevitably become those same people to someone else. Fight for those you love, for those who are innocent, and for those who have hurt you, and you will conquer even past the grave. The weapon of hatred will do you no good in the higher stakes of this latter war. Love is the only armor dense enough and the only steel sharp enough to conquer hatred and death. But there are many flavors of love. And so, denied any softer expression in this place, I will love the innocents with wrath against their oppressors. But I will not hate those oppressors. A man who fights from love is more dangerous than one who fights from hate, anyways.

You know, without Darcy and Lizzie’s embrace in the final scene of Pride and Prejudice, the rest of the story isn’t worth a hill of beans. The whole thing is, after all, a love story; the entire storyline exists solely to bring the two of them together in to that embrace. Until you understand that, all the literary analysis in the world won’t make sense out of Miss Austin’s book. To us, a love story is a two-hour escape from the day to day drudgery that theoretically eventually sums into the great events of history. I think we may have things backwards.

For all the consternation that the free will vs. predestination debate has caused, I find it fascinating that the Apostle Paul hardly discusses the controversy at all. Far from avoiding the topic, Paul unflinchingly and unashamedly uses words interchangeably that seem to support one side or the other, neither side, or both sides equally. Given the exquisite detail that the Apostle applies to other issues of dispute, Christ’s divinity, the role of circumcision and such, I find it extraordinary that he would introduce such a controversial topic without so much as an explanation. Perhaps we forget that Paul was not a twenty-first century American, steeped in two millennia of the rigid Greek teleological view of history (even the term ‘twenty-first-century’ reveals our hand.) Perhaps time has a different flavor to a Jew living in the time of the Herods. Perhaps through the Eastern eyes of the Apostle, there never was any contradiction to start with.

Sociologists use the terms monochronic and polychronic to describe how different cultures deal with time. Monochronic cultures are the most familiar to those of us in the West: the metronome of the wristwatch propels us from one event to the next. Cause links to effect, in turn becoming a cause itself, linking back in a long, linear chain to the very beginning of the world. Polychronic cultures, on the other hand, see time in a much more fluid manner. Any Westerner who has spent time in the Middle East knows (and has most likely become frustrated by) the phrase Insh’Allah. God willing, I’ll get the airplane fixed today. Or tomorrow. Or the next day. If it doesn’t happen today, it’s not because of some unbreakable chain of causality. It’s because God didn’t will it. Besides, you can’t let the day-to-day nonsense of work get in the way of important things like building relationships (an argument that has some merit.) To the Westerner, relationships are a means to achieve results, a way to get things done. To the Easterner, relationships are an end in and of themselves, and results they achieve are simply positive by-products. With the exception of Luke and Acts, the Bible was written by Easterners.

Remember the two trees of the Garden. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Forbidden Fruit. The funny thing is that the phrase ‘forbidden fruit’ isn’t even from Genesis. It’s from the Mosaic law. You are supposed to leave a tree alone for the first three years, and when it begins to bear fruit on the fourth year, you are to let the fruit fall to the ground. The law commands you to forgo this fruit as an act of humility and submission to God (which incidentally fits in quite well with God’s laws of horticulture.) In the fifth year and every year afterwards, you are free to eat the tree’s fruit. Of course, we never made it to the fifth year in the Garden.

Both of our comfortable Greek theories trip over the roots of the tree. Predestination almost makes God complicit in the fall. Put up the tree, knowing what we’re going to do, and you may as well have done it yourself. A man cannot put booze in front of an alcoholic and then plead innocence for the ensuing drunken rampage. Surely, God can do whatever He wants, but a simple appeal to authority here and you run the risk of defending an Islamic conception of the divine. The God of the Bible is faithful to Himself and to His covenants; there is no evil in Him. Evil must then be a result of an abuse of something beautiful that He made and meant for good. The tree’s purpose cannot have been the fall, yet we brought about the fall through the tree. If hard predestination applies in the garden, then God made a tree intended for its own abuse. But this is a contradiction in terms: a Creator cannot create something intended for its own abuse, as abuse is using something outside of the intentions of its creator.

Hard free will, on the other hand, almost makes God into a tempter. Love cannot be compelled, therefore there must be an option not to love someone. So the tree gives us that option… it stands in the center of the garden with its enticing fruit as the perennial ’road not traveled.’ But there is something disquieting about the whole thing: I don’t know any husband who puts a picture of a competing suitor on the bathroom mirror as a test of his wife’s fidelity. Free will is built into the wedding vows themselves; the couple’s love for each other needs no additional temptation in order to be true. The capacity for abuse need not be engineered into free will, but the possibility of abuse is simply a consequence of the power God gave us by creating us in His image. Boeing is not complicit in the September 11th attacks, even though it was their aircraft which were hijacked from their intended purpose. An airliner harnesses tremendous kinetic energy in order to move people to and fro. That same energy, twisted and applied to a much darker purpose, created the death and destruction that we knew all too well. Boeing did not need to build a red-guarded ‘suicide attack’ button into their aircraft in order to move people home for Christmas; the potential for abuse was implicit in the design by virtue of the power harnessed by the aircraft. I wonder if the same was not true for that tree.

You do not explain to your three year old the intricacies of AC power and voltage. You simply tell him not to put the knife in the electrical outlet. Yet, when your child is older, you will likely introduce him to the uses of electricity, plugs and outlets. We were simply told not to eat from the tree. God is not obliged to explain to us the entirety of His design, nor does He require our concurrence in order to execute His plan. So like Job, He doesn’t have to tell us why. But He does choose to bless us. I believe that His desire with the tree was to bless us at a time of His choosing. Instead, we hijacked His blessing and turned it into a curse. We abandoned our trust in His goodness, and infected the fruit with the venom of that choice. Eating the fruit was fatal, but the fruit‘s poison was our own. God made the tree. We poisoned the tree. We ate the fruit. We died.

The fall was about our failure to trust that God had our best interests in mind, in our choice to make our own way in the world and not in some piece of fruit. This is a story of relationships, and the narrative exists only as an expression of those relationships. You don’t need a tree to demonstrate fidelity. Simply by having a relationship with God, we had the capacity for free will. We walked with Him in the garden. We could have broken his heart there, even without a tree. After all, the Enemy thought of sin all on his own. But the tree is where it happened, no doubt, and in this we are twice the traitor. If the tree was the next step in a scripted tragedy, then we are merely actors playing a role. If the tree was the perennial arboreal tempted, then we simply gave in to the tree’s wiles. But we took a tree He intended as a blessing, a tree He was looking forward to blessing us with when the time was right, and not only destroyed it, but turned it to a means of destroying ourselves. We murdered two things God loved that day, the tree and ourselves, using the very implements of God‘s intended love. No longer the tragic hero, no longer the weak-willed fool, the twice-traitor creature man turns on his Creator and Lover. And the story writes itself to fit his betrayal. This is how history begins: a Lover betrayed by His beloved.

Tragically, the pattern seems to repeat itself. In the Hebrew symphony of polychronic time that is the Old Testament the same melody plays out time and again. God chooses a people, and they fall away. He rescues them from their oppressors, and they turn their back on Him. The Great and Ancient Lover, whose beloved chooses time and again to become a whore. You can hear it in His voice, His anger and His pain as He talks to His friend Moses atop Mount Sinai. The people He chose, He loved and He saved are reveling in their idolatry at the base of the mountain as He looks on with tears and rage. We take Plato and Aristotle up Sinai with us (Moses did not.) To the predestination reading, this is simply one more object lesson in God’s faithfulness. But the thick air of Sinai is not some clinical academic classroom, and God hardly sounds like a teacher here. God sounds as if He is in earnest when He threatens to destroy His people and start again with Moses. To the free will reading, God knows how Moses will respond, so He presents Moses with a teachable moment. But this is no fable of Aesop, and God does not present Moses with the moral of the story when he passes of the test. God speaks as a lover who has been betrayed, who in spite of the pain of a broken heart desires His beloved. Moses reminds Him of His promises and His love, and God relents. So despite the comforting Thomian axiom that ‘prayer changes me, it doesn’t change God,’ I can’t find anything of the sort in the text. God doesn’t ever change His nature, but it certainly looks like Moses changed His mind. I can’t say I understand it. More precisely, I can’t say I understand it with my head. But to my heart, it makes all the sense in the world. And God made my heart as well as my head. Pascal tells us that the heart has reasons the head knows not of. Those reasons of the heart can lead us to Him as surely as any reasons of the head.

History is God’s love story with humanity. Jesus Christ is the Lover. The narrative is nothing more than the outpouring of our relationship with Him. He is the center, the rock in the center of the stream. The water moves around Him, and He is unmoved. To our finite, linear minds, history is a snapshot of the stream and all things are fixed. But the river flows, and we choose whether we will let Him break us or whether we will be broken upon Him. There is no room for freedom within the foreknowledge of a finite mind, but infinite mind of Christ holds every possibility in the universe inside His omniscience.

It is too simplistic to say Plan A vs. redeemed Plan B. Still, human history seems to consist entirely of God redeeming foolish human choices. We were walking with God in the Garden. Which person of the Trinity is most relevant to man? I believe that when the Bible says that we were walking with God, that we were actually walked with Him the same way that we walked with Him on the shores of Galilee and the same way we will walk with Him on the streets of the New Jerusalem. Jesus doesn’t need the fall and the cross to be Jesus. We chose the fall. He made it beautiful. God set out a plan for His Chosen People. Seeking a messiah on their own terms, they rejected Him. Yet, they would have seen those terms met had they trusted Him… even the Maccabees could not have hoped for the victory over Rome that the catacomb Church enjoyed quite unintentionally. He prepares beautiful stories for us, yet we choose to go our own way, and somehow He makes even those ways beautiful.

None of this is to in any way diminish God’s omnipotence, foreknowledge, or prescience. God is never taken by surprise by anything that we could do. Yet we are still capable of breaking His heart. Like so many other mysteries, this seeming contradiction is swallowed up by the vastness of His infinite nature. God is like a husband who continues to prepare a home for the wife that has left Him, knowing that she will continue to break His heart, but hoping nonetheless.

Perhaps this is the last mystery, and the crux of the matter. God hopes despite knowing all things. So uncertainty is not a prerequisite for hope. Likewise, faith is not predicated on doubt. So why must love be predicated on the potential for sin? With all the free will I can muster, I desire to enjoy Him in the midst of a perfected creation finally free of every vestige of sin. In the new Garden in the New Jerusalem, I believe we will eat from all the trees God has made in His good time. My love for Him never hung upon a tree. But He hung upon a tree out of love for me. This is history… how it plays out is nowhere near as important as where it leads.

The latest Star Wars movie had some pretty amazing special effects during the battle scenes. The latest Lord of the Rings movies, on the other hand, had some pretty amazing battles. Special effects are a lot like spices in cooking… they’re at their best when they’re least apparent. Like too much Tabasco, overbearing SFX calls into question the quality of the storyline’s meat. Conversely, well-measured effects help the viewer overcome their disbelief and hence advance the story. I know that, at least in modern Florida, there is no such thing as a fawn. Still, when I watch Tumnus walk across the screen on life-like goat legs, I don’t have to try so hard to lose myself in Narnia’s storyline. Perhaps, then, this is another way to put it: effects bolster the viewer’s faith in the story‘s validity in order to hold their interest through to its conclusion.

Which, incidentally, sounds a lot like the purpose of signs, wonders and miracles. Jesus didn’t come to Earth to inaugurate a miraculous new vintage for a wedding, nor to make fast food for crowds of Galileans out of thin air, nor to resuscitate the dead only to see them die again. But those things definitely keep you on board for the rest of the story. How many times did the Old Testament prophets call Israel’s attention back to the miracles of the Exodus? The special effects, as it were, illustrated the Producer’s commitment to the storyline and His capability to see it through to a good ending. Even so, we should not take the God of the Universe as some conjuror of cheap tricks. Even the most playful of His miracles serve solely to advance His storyline. This is His elegant universe, and even in the extravagance of His greatness nothing is gratuitous. And certainly nothing is clumsy.

The Ancient Greeks were known for their playwrights. Notable amongst their innovations on the stage was the idea of Deus ex Maschina. Equal parts fast-forward and plot fix-a-flat, a god would appear in the middle of the play to explain away glaring holes in the storyline. While this device may have salvaged a number of otherwise irredeemable works, it is not exactly a highlight of elegance in story-craft. Instead of advancing the plot from within the mechanics of the story, the author has to introduce an outside element to move things along. Perhaps this is the difference between the petty contractor-gods of old and the One True Landlord. Producer, Director, and Chief Protagonist, this was His story from the outset and it is played out upon His stage. I have little difficulty imagining that the Creator made His stage sturdy enough to accommodate the requirements of His special effects.

A good friend of mine is completing her graduate degree in Biology. Her advocacy of Intelligent Design theory stirs up unending controversy amongst her colleagues. One day, another student approached her exultantly exclaiming that the plagues of Exodus could be explained away through natural causes. Apparently, he was a bit crestfallen when he discovered that a naturalistic explanation actually bolstered her faith in the veracity of the miracles. Her response, if more polite, was something to the effect of, “obviously Michelangelo didn’t make this thing… its got paint all over it.” Is it so impossible that Nature’s Creator would use His Creation to accomplish His will?

The naturalistic account of the Plagues goes something like this: a volcanic eruption turns the Nile red, which causes the fish to die, which leads to a spike in the fly population, which in turn provides food to frogs, and so on. Taking this account as given, the timing and the sequencing of the plagues still demands an answer. First, these plagues occur at a particularly propitious time for the nation of Israel, as evidenced by the undeniable historical result of Israel’s first nationhood. Second, the progression of the plagues systematically discredits the entire Egyptian pantheon of the time. What could be a more poetic curse for a culture with a frog god of fertility than an overabundance of overly fertile frogs? The naturalistic explanation points to a cause outside nature. The special effects serve the storyline, not vice versa.

Naturalism is predicated upon a certain view of nature. Hence the name. Unfortunately, our perspective on nature is skewed by the human propensity for overestimating our span of understanding. Like every generation before us, we assume that we are the ones who finally have things figured out. Do we really know everything yet? Is our sample size really large enough to justify the assertions that we are so comfortable making? Is our present encyclopedia of natural processes truly sufficient to explain everything in nature? Until we can answer these questions in the affirmative with certainty, naturalism must view itself with a certain degree of humility. And humility teaches us to look to others for help, especially in our shortcomings.

I imagine it would be remarkably tricky for a person living in a world of permanent eclipse to form a coherent theory of orbital mechanics. What if, for as long as we can remember, we have been living in a world under eclipse? This world is caught in an anomaly of discord with its Creator, and such a rift could cut all the way to the dynamics of reality itself. Our present thoughts on the nature of things would then be tremendously incomplete; they would hold true only for the area of the anomaly and deeply lacking for the rest of the universe. What if all of this is a blip in eternity, a momentary deviation from Things As They Are? All of our theories would then be deeply suspect, along with all of our definitions.

The Old Testament miracles seem to best fit the rules of the anomaly. This stands to reason: they are miracles for a world of Sin and Death, and they are themselves often miracles of death (even if to preserve greater life.) The plagues of Egypt, the selectively fatal Red Sea crossing, the flood of Noah, the fall of Jericho, all of these miracles involved the shedding of blood. The physics of a fallen world seem to suffice in explaining miracles of death. In contrast, the ultimate miracle of Christ’s resurrection defies all attempts at explanation. There is no process within our naturalism that can reverse death. Perhaps the fault lies with our definition of nature.

The ultimate and crowning miracle of death happened atop Golgotha. The invincible Creator dies at the hands of His creation, and this cannot be considered anything but miraculous. The last and most terrible miracle of the Old Physics. And it is followed by the first and greatest miracle of the New Physics. Death itself was turned backwards by love, the first and greatest of all governing dynamics. The resurrected Christ demonstrates in the flesh that the newly inaugurated law of love applies to biology, to physics, to time and space and everything. This is the true physics, this is nature restored to its true self. Thus, the miracle that defies the old naturalism fits perfectly into the new naturalism.

So perhaps it is Deus ex Machina after all. The actors have evicted the playwright and turned the play into a mockery. The stage itself is disfigured, incapable of bearing any story worth the telling. So God enters the play, and patches the holes the actors continue to tear in the plot. He moves the characters places that they could never get on their own, and He somehow crafts a good ending for one particularly bad play. This is the greatest miracle of all: the story actually makes it to its ending. How strange… a magnificent Producer and some spectacular special effects actually makes up for some absolutely pathetic actors.

"Racist" is a confusing word, and it should be clarified. Men have no special rights simply because they belong to one race or another. Whey you say "men," you have already imbued them with all their rights. To insist on racial divisions, on racial differences, in an already divided people, is to place obstacles in the way of public and individual happiness, which can only be obtained by bringing people together as a nation... What right do white racists, who believe their race is superior, have for complaining about black racists, who see something special in their own race? What right do black racists, who see a special character in their race, have for complaining about white racists? White men who think their race makes them superior to black men admit the idea of racial difference and authorize and initiate black racists. Black men who proclaim their race — when what they are really proclaiming is the spiritual identity that distinguishes one ethnic group from another — authorize and incite white racists. Peace demands of Nature the recognition of human rights; discrimination is contrary to Nature and to the enemy of peace. Whites who isolate themselves also isolate Blacks. Blacks who isolate themselves incite and isolate whites... Everything that divides men, everything that specifies, separates or pens them, is a sin against humanity.
- Mi Raza.

There can be no racial animosity, because there are no races. The theorist and feeble thinkers string together and warm over the bookshelf races which the well-disposed observer and the fair-minded traveller vainly seek in the justice of Nature where man's universal identity springs forth from triumphant love and the turbulent huger for life. The soul, equal and eternal, emanates from bodies of different shapes and colors. Whoever foments and spreads antagonism and hate between the races, sins against humanity.
- Our America.

Vale más morir de pie que vivir arrodillado. It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.
- Unsourced (NOT Ernesto Guevara.)

Mankind is composed of two sorts of men — those who love and create, and those who hate and destroy.
- "Letters to a Cuban Farmer."
(Posted on the walls of Gus' Corona Cafe, Hurlburt Field, FL.)

In memory of the forgotten heroes of the Aerea Fuerza de Cuba Libre and the Alabama Air National Guard. Viva Cuba Libre.