Faith is Indomitable

Life is full of times that we will be unable to accurately interpret the evidences around us. There will be times when we are forced to make decisions about the future and in that choice no proven outcome will be guaranteed. This is where the rubber meets the road, and we can be either paralyzed by uncertainty, or we can adopt an indomitable spirit of faith. Faith is possessing the will to reach higher than our circumstances said we could, to push further than the limits said we should, to climb over what was seemingly insurmountable, and to overcome what no one in their right mind thought was possible. When we see these kinds of things happen in our world, we call them great. They are the product of the highest order of thinking available to us – faith. Faith is indomitable. 

Great men and women have led the way for us. When the skeptics and the nay-sayers said it couldn’t be done, some kept pushing with an indomitable faith and they did it anyway. When the evidence indicated there was little chance for survival, fireman James Drouin of Boston swam 200ft. across a broken ice shelf to rescue a young boy and win the Medal of Valor for his indomitable faith. When Dietrich Bonheoffer was told that returning to Germany to advocate for justice for the Jews would mean a death sentence for him, with indomitable faith he walked straight into the hangman’s noose. When oil rig driver David Morrison was told he’d never walk again after a massive head injury in a car accident, he recovered and went on to win a 10K marathon within five years.

When we hear a person try to convince us that faith is a belief in something that has no evidence, we need to stand up and tell the truth: that faith is the mechanism which proves itself worthy of our allegiance by creating its own evidence. The wheels of progress and innovation are greased by the indomitable faith of those who refuse to believe what their eyes are telling them, refuse to follow what the system has laid out for them, and refuse to abide by the futility of trusting what they think they know.

Evidence and empiricism are important like iron is important to your blood, but consume too much of it and you’ll have a poison running through your body and your mind that will end up squeezing the very life out of you. And we are being poisoned by a worldview that day in and day out tries to convince us that a belief in God is no better than a belief in Bigfoot. It is poison to our system and has led to a decay of our everyday decency.

Faith is not a blind leap in the dark. It is a hopeful step into the light.

The writer of Hebrews says, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.” That’s a definition of faith we should all be able to agree with. First, that faith is the product of hope. Lose all hope and we lose faith. Did you know that suicide rates among American teenagers saw their largest single year increase in fifteen years as reported by CDC last year? Did you know that 50% of American boys report feelings of hopelessness? Is it any wonder that we’ve seen such a massive increase in recreational drug use? There’s a vile poison infecting our well. It’s a poison that seeks to shackle our highest hopes by claiming that they are inherently misplaced because ideas are not real unless we can prove them scientifically.

Faith is itself evidence.  One day, I’m going to finish my book entitled, “Invisible Pink Economies.” The premise of the book stabs straight into the heart of this subject today: ideas are proven in their utility. A primary argument from unbelievers with regards to faith is that belief in God is akin to belief in invisible pink unicorns. It is an utterly ridiculous argument, because Invisible Pink Unicorns lack utility. They serve no function in our society or any other that we know of. Such refusal to be even remotely useful to us enable us to successful categorize IPU’s as a nonsensical idea.

But some ideas are in fact quite rational to hold, because they have a function. Our economy is one of these ideas. The concept of money isn’t real, but believing makes it so. I carry around a five dollar bill because I believe that I can get a gallon of gas a coke with it. I trust in its unreal value because it serves a real world function. By participating in banking, investing, and bartering I provide evidence that the economy is real. Our collective actions are evidence that this immaterial thing called “value” is real. But suppose we all decided that it wasn’t real, and we all took our money out of the markets and out of the banks. Suppose we refused to barter at all, what would happen to the economy? We’ve already seen what happens when you make loans with money that you don’t really have. Banks collapse from the failure to deposit more than is withdrawn. The sustainability of the markets depends on our faith in the system. In a sense, we are the evidence of the unseen.

God is more than just an idea, for sure, but faith works much the same way in our own lives. Our faith is the evidence of the unseen. As we work together and fellowship together, we stimulate each other to love and good deeds. The value of these things increases our hope and our confidence in the system by making faith deposits. Our greed, selfishness, and doubts make massive withdraws from the system and our hope begins to fail sending the market of our spirits into a tailspin, ready to crash and burn. 

So then, faith is the assurance of what we hope for, and the evidence of what we can’t see. These two truths work together to grease the wheel of the world. Without them, things come grinding to a halt.

I love the movie Empire Strikes Back. My favorite character in all the Star Wars movies is Han Solo. The reason Han Solo is so appealing to us is that he often acts courageously, in spite of his chances for success. "Never tell me the odds," he shouted out when C3PO told him the odds of successfully navigating an asteroid field.  He truly believed he could fly through it and all C3PO was doing was sucking the life out of his attempt.

Those are the kind of people with indomitable faith that I want in my locker room before the big game. They're the kind of people I want at my bedside when I'm given six months to live. the kinds of people I want my children to grow into. Indomitable, regardless of how much the “evidence” is leaning against them. Indomitable all the way to the end.

As for the "evidence" crowd out spreading their poison, please let the grown-ups innovate and overcome. Plug into the hyperdrive C-3PO and let us drive. I subscribe to the belief that a trustworthy idea is worthy of my time, energy, and devotion and I am not to be denied. Ideas are trustworthy to extent they have real and beneficial function. Faith in God meets all these criteria.

The value of science isn't lost on me, nor is the value of faith. I don't have to trade one for the other. I can act on evidence without being shackled by its traps. I can reach for the unproven and reach for my unrealized potential during my stay on this planet. I can do this precisely because I believe I can.

Also, I know who I want in my corner. When it comes to the many unquantifiable decisions I have to make in life, it's always going to be the people who have the creativity, the will, and the indomitable human spirit to reach higher and further than our collective expectations. In short, I want to surround myself with people who have great faith.

Mass Amnesia and My Summer Vacation

When I looked out at the Gulf of Mexico from the bow of the charter fishing boat, I couldn’t help but count the plastic. Old plastic never dies, it is instead broken down into ever decreasing smaller bits. At 5mm broken down plastics begin to coalesce with mirco-flora, sand, plankton, and other basic staples to the ocean’s health. When they get even smaller, they are absorbed through gills or eaten, and can enter the flesh of every living thing in the ocean.

My eyes glance back to the cooler behind me and the stringer of fish that bears my name, then back again to the 11^th floating water bottle our ship passed. I wonder what they taste like. Perhaps worse than my fish, the oceans corals, which provide habitat for ocean life, already have measured concentrations of a whole host of chemicals from plastics with names that most of us couldn’t pronounce. As these reefs continue to absorb our waste products, they recede, and further reduce the amount of healthy bio-matter sea life can consume, thereby escalating the amount of microplastic these organisms ingest.

The whole scene is to me, Macbethian: a downward spiral of betrayal and ego; a betrayal of God’s gift of ocean. This gift provides over 1/5 of Earth’s digestible protein and it is wasting away one plastic piece at a time as the fruit of our conveniences and apathy blend like tiny beads and infuse themselves with the sand.

Back home and on dry land, the summer subtleties of things like “regulation” and “environmental protection” are debated. In my experience, it is not the fishermen debating these things. Fishermen have historically been the planet’s first ecologists because throughout history, their livelihood depended on it. Recreational fisherman today can tell you and probably even take you to specific places where their catches have been impacted by human beings. For fisherman, the life and death cycle of their trade is sketched directly onto the canvas of the water. The old fishermen see it best and most clear.

Jesus chose fishermen to be his dearest friends and closest traveling companions. As I am transitioning into an old fisherman, I am beginning to see that he did so for very good reasons. Fisherman are keen observers with great memories. In the age before GPS marking, fisherman had to know their spots, remember each drop-off or sandbar or hidden stump that held their prizes. Fisherman know when these spots are perturbed; they have learned almost subconsciously to recognize changes and patterns, and adjust their day’s work accordingly.

For micro-plastics to go unnoticed by the average man, or for that strip-mining operation that dumps cyanide into our rivers and streams to carry on unfettered by regulation, a kind of mass amnesia would need to happen to the American people. That mass amnesia would need to be orchestrated by the corporations which benefit and their allies. No amount of damage done to a place matters much to the corporation doing the extracting or building the products. They have no intention of living in places where factories and mines and metals unleash their havoc. Once the resource is consumed or the product complete, they will do what all corporations do, and that is move on to the next money grab.

The wave of amnesia lifts for the average man only when the impacts are felt directly… but the fisherman knows I think, before the rest. She sees it happening season after season after season. She reads the canvas at the end of her fishing line, and in that instinctive space knows firsthand how human and water are meant to interact.

Jesus chose fishermen, I believe, because fishermen know life and are committed to sustain it. Fisherman are more resistant to the mass amnesia and have their own built in immune system to anything that affects their trophy spots. We see it first, and we know it when we see it, just like I could not help but count the plastic in the Gulf of Mexico.

We’ve elected a President who has hand-picked leaders around him to spread mass amnesia, especially on the issue of the environment. We’re told that environmental regulation negatively impacts business, and I have no doubt that this is true. The right thing is almost always more difficult and it usually requires more from us, than the wrong thing. The wrong thing is usually cheap and easy. Doing the right thing costs, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen it work differently.

In Macbeth, Shakespeare reminds us that “sometimes, to win us to our harm, the instruments of darkness tell us truths.” Whatever truth there may be to cutting corners on controlling pollution, whatever truth their might be in the cost savings of doing the easy thing, there is the overarching question of the harm to which such truths ultimately win our species.

Jesus is again calling fishermen and disciples to his journey of truth-telling. I, for one, cannot tell him no.

  

Trump, Iago, and the Introverted Alpha Male

I used to believe that Shakespeare's Iago was perhaps the most dangerous type of human archetype imaginable: an introverted alpha male. I now know that isn't true and it is solely due to all the conflicting feelings I have about President Donald Trump.

Iago is certainly Othello's worst nightmare and I have a sneaking suspicion that Shakespeare himself was probably much like him. If he wasn't, then he was single-handedly the most perceptive human to have ever lived, which could be equally as true I suppose.

Like all personalities, an introverted alpha male can go one of two ways -- either toward health or away from it. The further he slips from health, the more manipulative and scheming he becomes. The closer he moves to health, the more he leads from the back and from places of privacy or unbreakable conviction.

I used to believe that introverted alpha males were more dangerous than your standard run-of-the mill alphas, who merely rely on brute strength or forceful personality to exert their will. The reason I thought this was true relied on a simple idea: that recognizable aggression would be naturally resisted in the modern era.

Now I believe I was dead wrong. The quality of the male identity has been so eroded in Western culture that we've entered into an age of vicarious "maleness," that makes the more aggressive alpha more desirable. I guess if I had really been thinking hard about it, I would have seen all the clues.

From John Wayne to James Bond, Hollywood has time and time again given us hints as to the things that our society deeply desires, or fantasizes about, regarding its men. I suppose somewhere along the way, I just naively accepted that an external bravado would be very easy to manipulate by an introverted alpha. For the most part, that assumption has proven true in my own experience.

But we've not encountered an alpha like Donald Trump in my lifetime. Some might argue that perhaps it is Steve Bannon, the more reclusive and introverted alpha who is behind the scenes playing puppet master, but I am not so convinced. He no doubt is playing a pivotal role in the ever unfolding chaos, but I've come to believe he is less "the root" and more "the fruit" of Trump's leadership style.

I've had to process my emotions about Donald Trump pretty heavily these past days and I definitely don't mean in the same ways liberals are processing with signs and protest marches. I have always believed that reactions from masses of people were weak because the strength (or lack of) is easily shared, masked, and spread among the numbers. Iago wasn't a marcher, nor a protester. He was Machiavellian, plotting, and in his own sickness, he was never willing to admit to himself that he wasn't in actually in charge of the entire affair.

Equally surprising to me was learning that I share the same enneagram type with Trump and it was probably there that my thoughts about all this were slowly unraveled. We are both Type 8's, fearing weakness and vulnerability. Nevertheless, while Trump takes his core fears public with a show of strength, as an introvert I've always kept my desire to be in charge curled up in a fist, sort of an internal response to perceived threats. We are both wired up as protectors, but whereas the extroverted Type 8 starts a personal crusade to find aggressors, the introverted one is on a constant search for self-identifying victims. The extroverted 8 launches into battle, the introverted 8 is busy amassing soldiers. The former is looking for any fight to prove dominance, the latter is always preparing for one solid, final strike.

In sorting my own emotions, it was eye-opening to realize that my own reactive state stemmed solely from a recognition of my loss of power. Whereas prior to this election, I always felt like I could lead, influence, or even manipulate from the back row, I have needed to wrestle with the fact that maybe that isn't really an option. To preserve personal power, I have been coaxed slowly out of my comfort zone and had to admit that maybe the domain of introverted alphas has come under a new kind of threat... that any perceived victory against such provocative outward strength would only end in a compounded misery for the victor as it did for Iago. The iron hand beneath the velvet glove still wouldn't be enough to break through the open injustices to which the masses of Trump supporters cling and actually support.

That loss of power is unnerving to any 8 and it provokes visceral responses. Living under the reality that quiet strength may in fact not be enough can push introverted alphas away from health rather than toward it. The fear provokes a deep-seated need to assert rather than to rely upon core truths to which we once comfortably enforced by stillness, influence and the power of quiet resolve.

The results bring into question the most treasured of our values and perhaps more poignantly, what constitutes our manhood. I need more time to process those questions, but feel certain that given the fact I am contemplating them at all means that whatever power I once felt safe hiding within is nowhere near as secure as I thought.

All that brings me back to Jesus, or at least reminds me as to why I turned to Him at all. That's not such a bad thing and gives me great pause to rejoice. How those questions play out and how introverted alphas manage their core fears of power loss will require more thought.

Throwing Tomatoes at Watered Down Souls

I was watching the news this week, which does little more than infuriate me these days, and imagine my surprise to learn that Americans are putting our own science to use to reverse a trend that our own science created: addressing taste deprivation in the common tomato due to genomic breeding that has selected size over substance. Only in America!

It seems that as the tomato has grown larger through these past five decades, the water content has been upped at the expense of a tomatoes' taste. It would be much like watering down your favorite 12 ounce pop with a skill set that increased volume without adding sugar -- or more to the point for a coffee snob like myself -- adding an extra four ounces of water to a pot without ever touching the coffee content. Yuk!

Apparently, tomato connoisseurs around the world have noticed the change and are working on a solution in cross breeding. That's all fine and dandy, but what stood out in the CBS report to me was the fact that America was the #2 producer in the world of red, luscious, hamburger goodness. The question emerged regarding who was in fact the #1 producer of tomatoes.

Well, no surprise here when I did my own digging -- it's China.

It only makes sense from a square acreage standpoint, but I was still surprised to learn that they had us beat about 5 to 1 on tomato production. All of that would be but a curious factoid were it not for the Trump administration's blatant war on free trade. On the front lines of that battle is China.

I confess that what any of it means to me as an American is beside the point. It is at the bedrock of reality a reminder of what globalization means to our economy. In a world of import taxes and trade barriers, we're left with the reality that someone else does something better than us.... at least for now. Not only do they surpass us, but they do so at a ratio of 5 to 1, an unacceptable set of odds by any standard in a competitive, capitalist society.

Compounded to the complete and total beating we are taking in the tomato industry comes the importance of a now hyper-aggressive FDA examination of what we're sticking in our bodies. By tightening the noose on trade, Trump stands to affect much more than the auto industry or "Happy Meal" toys. At its root (no pun intended) comes the question of what we put in our bodies by way of food stuff too.

Higher tariffs can easily lead to cutting corners, as anyone in a for-profit business can attest. The overall quality of the tomato stands to weaken, not strengthen, under Trump's alternatively fictitious tutelage. All that really means to me is a weakening of the tomato and the creation of one that is far less worthy of consumption, thereby replacing it with one far more apt to be thrown in the next protest.

Any educated fool can tell you of the benefits of trade. It takes something far more rotten and akin to ignorance to tell us that we'll all be just fine. The problem is I've seen a good many of your thumbs and you grow with about the same commonality that you cook. Unless you're ready to garden yourself and learn the craft, we're on a path as a country to continue the watering down, both literally and figuratively.

But let's be real honest for just a second.

Watering down is what we do best. We've even perfected the task to 140 characters and a little devil we call Twitter. America first, baby!

It's All in the Hip

I haven't written lately. I've reached that point in middle age where one begins to ask, "What's the point?" As the country spirals toward calamity, I only really want to stop long enough to say that I've torn my hip labrum and potentially damaged the tendons along that right side.

It isn't like I can afford to go to the doctor. The affordable health care act saw to that. Not only am I paying $18,000 a year for insurance, I have a $3500 deductible on top that will only then take me to an 80 / 20 match. In other words, about 30% of my family income goes to insurance and deductibles so that I can then purchase the right to pay another couple thousand on a 10K surgery. I'd rather limp to be honest. Another 20% goes to taxes, so our family is actually bringing home less than half what we make annually.

I'm on my third insurance plan in five years, since the ACA was passed. Changed doctors numerous times too, against my wishes. I've watched as my options shrank rather than grew. Premiums grew at 10 times the rate of inflation since the law was passed. Deductibles did to while maximum out of pocket insurance payments dropped.

Whatever. I can deal with it, but let's not for a second assume I am not angry about it.

Despite the downward pull, I never felt in the hole enough to vote for a man like Donald Trump. Ten days into this clown's Presidency and both America and the Constitution are poised to be torn apart at the seams. Things are going to get even more nasty before they're course corrected, so I think I will take what I have left of my hip and at least be able to stand up in pain.

As a theologian, I happen to know a little bit about hips. In our tradition, a dislocated hip is indicative of a wrestling match with God as evidenced by Jacob in the book of Genesis. Timely and pointed are truths such as these.

I've said many times before and know it's true that "most men are not good enough to seek the dark, nor vile enough to make our nests there, we instead sit lukewarm in the mouth of that which has been written, quietly disbelieving and hollowly accepting the old familiar blasphemy: the shadow of what we know we could become."

Familiar words to me, long since committed to a place deeper than memory. It seems there is a certain fortitude to looking into an abyss and I've found that most men lack it, or least cannot look long enough without that same abyss looking back through them.

It's no surprise to me that so few in positions of sacred or religious power know the wound of wrestling with God. They honestly lack the stomach for it... but all clergy aside, we really aren't raising men anymore anyway, regardless of profession. That's why it is so easy to take the collective fear of the nation and channel into a series of self-proclaimed gods we don't really understand.

I've also said and written for years that "the entry to damnation always lacks the savage intensity of its content." Whether you're banning Muslims at airports or protesting against the demagogues with signs and banners, there's a "wholly other" degree of pain and despotism awaiting. That's an intensity with a twenty-thousand year old root and until we've wrestled there, we have little inkling as to where the bottom truly is.

Jacob knew. You see, in the sermon I will probably never preach, there is a stage being long set prior to the fight with God and the dislocated hip. Jacob's brother, whom he had cheated outright of his father's blessing and inheritance, is on the warpath. Jacob is nearly shitting himself with fear. He does what any good man does when faced with brute and barbaric strength banging at his gates -- he prays.

We're not a praying people so much anymore. It's too easy to make signs and pussy hats and take to marching, replete with Starbucks coffee in our off-hands (a little antiseptic hand lotion in our pockets) and a secure ride home with a pre-paid plane ticket if things get really physical. God forbid if somehow in all the community organizing, someone drops his friggin' knees and begs God for a little mercy.

Jacob wasn't wired up to anything but pray. His brother was bearing down on him and he knew it. His sins, perhaps more egregious than most, were very clear to him. There wasn't anything about "deserving" a blessing or "being worthy" in his prayer. Read it yourself. Hubris was gone, his hairy brother - the 'skilled hunter' and killer of things - was at the gates.

Jacob was always a momma's boy. The story says as much in multiple places. He would need more than a can of ramen noodles to get out of this one.

After praying, Jacob decided to send his angry brother a peace offering. That's pretty damn important if you ask me. He could have easily sent over a receipt for the soup he cooked and traded Esau's birthright for. Jacob could have reminded his brother in a letter (signed in triplicate) that while Esau was out working and hunting food, he learned the value of being domesticated. That domestication would now become the new birthright is perhaps the most hidden truth of the story. (Lord help me, I hate spelling things out all the time.)

Jacob went to bed that night a terrified, domesticated man who'd made his comfortable living off of the labor of his brother. No wonder he prayed. With swords on the march, his lack of fighting prowess haunted him, as did the hairless comfort he enjoyed as one of his culture's most educated (heck, have you read how he cross bred his animals to increase his wealth?).

Thankfully, God did show up that night for Jacob. But this showing wasn't exactly what he expected. Jacob had to get off his ass and put up a fight. Who could blame him? It all came down to this moment, this thought that Jacob had that he would actually HOLD GOD HIMSELF DOWN until GOD FULFILLED HIS PROMISE. That is a set of balls and Jacob found them. There was no "trickster" or "deceiver" here (which is what Jacob means in Hebrew). There was only a fight for the ages. God vs. Man.

In the end, it seems there was less a reason to fear than Jacob imagined. Esau loved his brother and missed him. Perhaps the two worlds (wild man vs. domesticated man) aren't nearly as far apart as they seem. Perhaps what they need is an opportunity to reconcile. In our current political climate, it is hard for me to imagine much different....

...with only one exception. In today's word, the domesticated man no longer prays. And when he refuses to pray, he refuses to fight in the right ways. And when he refuses to fight in the right ways, he is easily mowed over.

I long for the day to see my brothers join me with a limp. Reveal the vulnerability and know the limp can only come, and peace itself can only come, after a long night of violence with God.

That's the lesson of Jacob. It's all in the hip.