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07 March 2007
Calibration.
Once upon a time, people used to tell time from a device called a sundial. The sun’s rays would strike the timepiece at a certain angles at certain times of day. Judging from the shadow on the sundial, you could tell exactly what hour it was. There was, of course, a slight problem: at night, it is remarkably difficult to find the sun. So we thought of a solution. The planets turn on the wheels of their orbits though the gears of gravity, so we captured of those wheels and gears in a little metal case that we could put on our wrist. While this solved our sunlight dilemma, it created a new problem. Our microcosm of the solar system was not exactly perfect. While the rounding errors were never great from moment to moment, they summed over time into huge discrepancies. Fortunately for us, we found a better answer than buying new watches every week. We could resync our clocks from time to time with a master clock, which was in turn synched to the sun. That way, our watches would never be too far off of the true time, and they would be trustworthy as timepieces.
Compasses have a similar problem. A magnetized needle will always point North, so we attached a card to the top of the needle to tell us what direction we are facing. All of this is well and good if we are planning on walking a couple hundred meters to find a road. It is neither well nor good if we are planning on finding the Azores on our way across the Atlantic. You see, our compass cannot perfectly represent the magnetic fields of the Earth any more than a clock can perfectly represent the Earth’s rotations or revolutions. Changes in magnetic declination, nearby concentrations of metal, and slight imbalances in the compass itself will all conspire to skew our reading from our true heading. Maybe just one degree, but one degree off over three thousand miles is fifty miles of error, more than enough to miss an island port. From one hour to the next the compass will rarely lead you astray, but over two weeks you may become completely lost. So we must resync our compass to our true position in space, just as we resync our clocks to our true position in time.
Imagine you are Cristobal Colon, about to set out in the Nina (or the Pinta, or the Santa Maria. I forget which one was his ship.) Sailing beyond the limits of the known world, you must place a great deal of trust in your navigational instruments. In the modern world, we take precision chronography (telling the time) for granted. Early mariners did not. They needed to know the exact time in order to effectively navigate, as they determined their position from the relative position of certain stars at certain times. (This tradition is carried on with the Naval Observatory‘s atomic clocks.) So before leaving port, you prudently calibrate your instruments. You set your clock according to the master clock, you reference your compass against a known heading. You synch your chronological instrument with a more accurate chronological instrument, and you synch your magnetic instrument with a more accurate magnetic instrument. And here is the point of this whole exercise: you cannot synch up a watch with a compass, nor a compass with a clock. The instruments exist in different spheres, and while those spheres interact, they must be calibrated with something from their own sphere.
When creating man, God saw fit to give him both a heart and a mind. We were made to have the mind of Christ, and made to have a heart in the image of God. We were made to think and feel. So in the garden, we were the sundial, in the forever noon of a never-setting sun. In God’s presence, our minds were constantly calibrated with the mind of Christ. We were a compass in the presence of the strongest of magnets, our hearts forever pointing to Him. And we loved Him with all of our hearts and all of our minds. Well, for a time, at least.
On this side of the fall, we look quite different. We are the wristwatch that hasn’t been wound in ages. The needles still point to numbers, but those numbers have little to do with the true time. Our minds are fallen, corrupt and untrustworthy. They will lead us off into nowhere. We are the compass that has lost its magnetism. We may still move from side to side whenever something rocks our case, but we can no longer tell North from South. As the Scriptures tell us, nothing good comes from the hearts of man. They will lead us off into nowhere.
The clock cannot wind itself, neither can the compass regain its magnetism through its own power. So we are lost at sea. That is, until Christ comes along. He rewinds our mind, He remagnetizes our hearts. He sparks in us the mind of Christ, He ignites in us the burning heart of God. But even a rewound watch needs to be set to the correct time, and even a remagnetized compass needs to be recalibrated to true North.
Paul tells us that we have been given the mind of Christ. In a way, we have been given it back. When we were originally made, our minds were made in His image. Our words reflected The Word, and in that Word, the outpouring of our mind was good and trustworthy. When we forgot The Word, that outpouring became toxic in the darkening of our minds. Since it was the One Word that kept our thoughts true, He gave us the many words of Scripture to keep our minds fixed on Him. Like the watch, we need to constantly recalibrate our mind with His Word. He gives us the Bible in order to reshape our thoughts back into His. The good news is that, like the watch, once properly calibrated our minds are trustworthy again. When our mind is true to His Word, we should listen to it.
Our hearts are no different. Christ gives us back the heart of God. Once, our hearts burned in His presence. We could taste His goodness; not just see it but feel it as well; our desire was for Him and it was good. When we forgot Him, our desires became choked with our own selfishness. Stagnating in our hearts, they became putrid and evil. Since it was our desire for God that kept our thoughts pure, He teaches us to desire Him first. He gives us prayer and fasting, for in prayer we yield all of our desires to Him, and in fasting we allow Him to re-order our desires. In His presence, we recalibrate the compass of our hearts, and our desires become trustworthy again. When our heart is true to His Presence, in the context of Christian authority, we should listen to it as well.
Trustworthy words check with Scripture. Trustworthy feelings burn in His presence, and in the hearts of other believers. This is not to say that the heart and the mind have nothing in common. A compass used in concert with a clock will help a mariner find his destination far better than either used alone. Nonetheless, you must calibrate the magnetic with the magnetic, and the chronographic with the chronographic. Similarly, we must calibrate our words with His Word, allowing the Scriptures to transform our minds. We must calibrate our desires with His desires, yielding our hearts to Him through prayer and fasting. Then, and only then, will our hearts and minds be trustworthy. But if they are trustworthy, then it is cowardice not to follow them. All of us needs to be conformed into His image. It just happens that different parts of us do so in different ways.
18:00 Posted in Thoughts | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
06 March 2007
Entropy.
The father of a friend of mine makes a quite profitable living by finding slight imperfections on the driveshafts of Big Rig trucks. When my friend first told me about his dad‘s job, I thought it a bit frivolous to pay someone a hefty sum to nit-pick about scratches in steel. (I had the good sense not to mention that particular thought.) I realized my error as my friend explained that those trucks are designed to run for almost a million miles. When you’re building a truck for a hundred thousand miles, microscopic defects don’t really have enough time to grow into major problems. Over the course of a million miles, though, the smallest of scratches will become a catastrophic fracture, eventually destroying the entire engine.
I do not think the rest of the universe is so different. Trickling from melting snow pack, a mountain stream becomes a thunderous rapid before it finds its way to the ocean. Just one neutron hits just one nucleus, fractures it, and releases three more neutrons. A trillion neutrons later, you’ve released enough energy to put stars to shame. And just one word spoken in spite, fermenting for decades in the psyche of an angry young man, becomes genocide. Cracks always start small. One sideways glance, a cruel barb spoken in a moment of weakness, one piece of gossip that makes it back to its victim, brokenness rarely starts with drawn swords. It often ends there. Once time has taken its course, those first words can be taken back no more than the rapid can be tamed back into the stream, no more than the neutron can be calmed from the fury of fission. Entropy multiplies our cruel words until nothing remains but rubble.
There is a cycle to cruelty, a cycle to the curse. Venom and rage are something like Tolkien’s Ring of Power, I think. They wait patiently for the moment where they can inflict maximum pain on others. So a high-schooler spits vicious words in passing to the girl in the honors classes who gets on her nerves. Though the sender forgets the words almost immediately, their venom haunts the recipient for a decade, festering and fermenting. The venom finds its moment when she chooses to rid herself forever of a guy who generally gets on her nerves. She spits that same venom at him, along with fifteen years of compounded interest. Like her own accusers, she could not have known how her words would have been taken. So that guy finds himself in positions of authority. Where justice might have been tempered with mercy, he finds that the venom has sapped his reservoirs of compassion, as it had its previous victims. And in his cold, calculating analysis, he passes on the pain he inherited from her, multiplied many-fold. This is how we pass down the fall. Welcome to entropy.
People like to say ‘what goes around comes around.’ Eastern thought formalizes this idea with the concept of Karma. Certainly there are parts of this concept that hold true. Unfortunately for us, it is all the worst parts. You see, Karma makes a critical and incorrect assumption. It presumes that our actions are graded on a curve. The goodness of your actions can be judged by racking and stacking them with everybody else’s actions. Like in the running of the bulls, if you beat the mean you‘ll probably be okay. The problem is that very little in nature is graded on a curve. You need water to live. Your life span would not be lengthened by even one second if everyone else was dying of thirst. The fallen and broken things of our own creation are often graded on curves. Nutrition is not graded on a curve. Gravity is not graded on a curve. There are a few things graded on curves, I suppose. Like war and envy. But I hesitate to use the average amount of war or the average amount of envy as benchmarks for measuring paradise.
Lets do a quick mathematical exercise. 99% is a very good grade on a calculus test. Certainly it beats the mean (unless you are at a grade-inflating Ivy League school.) Say you get three scores in the high nineties. You average out to about a 95%. Not bad. Except for one slight problem: as we have seen, human actions are multiplicative, not additive. My actions are multiplied in you, and yours in me. I do not just take what you gave me and pay it forward; I generally up the ante, as do you. (Fundamental Attribution Error ties in here.) So back to our calc grades. Instead of averaging my three grades, I multiply them by each other. The more times I multiply, the more one simple fact becomes apparent: their product is decreasing, not increasing. Even with great grades, we’re getting worse. Imagine throwing in a 50% into the mix. And here is our problem: we can never climb back up to a 100%. The spiral staircase Karma promised us starts to look more like a twisting slide to a place Dante described quite well. It’s ‘Chutes and Ladders’ in the worst possible way.
You see, we have another problem. We are rarely good judges of our own performance. We have too much at stake. Let’s go back to our calculus test. Imagine that our student attends a highly experimental and highly unpleasant school where poor academic performance is punished by eternal detention, yet pupils get to grade their own tests. Surely our student would always give himself the benefit of the doubt, minimizing any errors and finding all sorts of partial credit for himself in the midst of wrong answers. Under those circumstances, the student can hardly be expected to be objective. And neither can we. We minimize or entirely overlook our shortcomings, while magnifying our perceived successes. We benchmark our actions against the remarkably convenient standard of ‘at least I’m not like X.’ But we only convince ourselves.
Consider the chain smoker. He may himself believe that his vice is harmless, or ‘at least its not as bad as weed,’ or any of a number of things, but Nature is not impressed. At some point, a cell in his lungs will prove particularly susceptible to the chemicals he chooses to expose himself to, and that cell will decide that it needs to reproduce more than it needs to do anything else. The man’s cancer is a consequence of his vices. What is true for individuals is true for societies. A society may decide that in the name of free speech or free expression or whatever, pornography is acceptable. After all, there are rules and restrictions on its sale. And its not as bad as some other things. And, really, its harmless. And a hundred other excuses. But none of them matter when the sexual predator proves particularly vulnerable to the drug, pursuing his addiction without regard for the laws of God or men. His cancer is the consequence of the vice of the society. Mother Theresa of Calcutta once asked how one could expect peace on their streets when there is violence in the womb. Our cancers come from our vices. The Natural Law is a quite objective judge of our actions, and their verdict is guilty.
We need something better. All we can do is multiply imperfections by imperfections. We need Someone else to give us the perfection we can never find on our own. Our hearts are decaying. We need new hearts. We cannot find our way to paradise when there is no paradise within us. We need a Cycle-breaker. We need a Savior.
Christ must breaks our cycles. In the not-entirely-hypothetical example of the girl-guy collision, I remember reading that letter written in venom and rage. As her words burned off the page, I asked Jesus for the strength and love to forgive her. I asked Him to give me words of blessing for her, for I had none. He gave me those words. He still does. I thank God that venom never had a chance to fester in my heart. I thank God that I was freed from inflicting it on another. I would almost sat the cycle ended with me, but that isn‘t exactly true. It ended with Christ. I spat my venom at Him on Calvary’s tree. And it stopped there. All imperfect cycles end with Him, and in Him perfect cycles begin. Praise God that my reservoirs of compassion are still intact, that my desire for justice is still tempered with mercy. It is only by His grace.
In a world of entropy, small actions can have tremendous consequences when given enough time. Words are small things, but so are pieces of fruit, and just one bite landed us in this mess. The fate of a people may rest upon just one word. Ask Hadassah about that. So we must guard our tongues. You never know what you words may become. Words can turn to daggers, and daggers to very real bullets. Kind words cost you nothing. Cruel words, given a hundred years, may cost others their lives. The pen may be mightier than the sword, but the tongue is deadlier than both. Insults, then, are assaults with a deadly weapon. If we considered our words in this light, perhaps we would find the patience to give each other words that are a little more loving. Perhaps we would ask the Word who is Love to give us a better vocabulary.
17:30 Posted in Thoughts | Permalink | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this