The faith philosophy of a movie critic

“I am not a believer, not an atheist, not an agnostic. I am still awake at night, asking how? I am more content with the question than I would be with an answer.”

~ Roger Ebert

The famous movie critic, Roger Ebert, was buried yesterday and I found this quote in today’s Chicago Tribune story about the funeral. As a Chicagoan, news of his death and tributes to him have filled the pages of the newspaper for near a week. I’ve been fascinated with the many quotes attributed to him that go far beyond a critique of Hollywood and its product.

I evoked this very quote today during a discussion of faith, arguing those who question are indeed believers (the reverend who officiated at Ebert’s funeral said as much, too).

God did not create us to be dogs, happy but unthinking beasts who behave according to instinct and do not question their owner. Instead, He gave us intellect, and I believe He welcomes debate. Faith is as intangible as vapor, impossible to fingerprint.

Whether one believes in God or not, it is arrogant to assume we can know anything. Discovery leads only to more questions.

So to label oneself a questioner and to be content with questions instead of answers, as Ebert professed to be, seems wise and humble. It’s amusing to think a man who made a fortune on determining if a thing deserved a thumbs up or a thumbs down would philosophize about his uncertainty this way.

I am not comfortable in gray areas yet I know most of life cannot be neatly organized in containers of black and white.

Let there be gray.

Oh, to have the confidence of Luther

That Martin Luther was bold. Martin Luther? The German monk who spurred the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century? That Martin Luther wrote Luther’s Small Catechism which succinctly sums up the Lutheran faith with tidy explanations and statements like, “This is most certainly true.”

Lutherans everywhere are in on this joke, but the rest of you are probably still thinking about the civil rights movement and “I have a dream.” No, not that guy. You Minnesotans understand.

Good ol’ Martin Luther crossed my mind twice today. During one of National Public Radio’s updates on the cardinals meeting in Rome to choose a new pope, I wondered how many of them are the “Martin Luther” type — the rebels who nail Ninety-Five Thesis to the front door of the church in public complaint of church practices, specifically the pope’s practices. Probably none. Martin Luther was a special sort, one who comes along every 1,600 years or so.

Then, in church this evening … Wait, let me explain that. We Lutherans go to church on Wednesdays during Lent (the run-up to Easter). Strange, I know. It’s Catholics who give things up for Lent and eat fish. We Lutherans practice a different form of sacrifice.

Anyway, in church tonight we read Luther’s explanation of the Second Article of Faith which ends in “This is most certainly true.” Instantly, I was brought back to eighth grade and chore of memorizing such things. In order to be confirmed, young Lutherans must memorize most of Luther’s Small Catechism, no small feat for a sleep-deprived teenager more interested in video games and the opposite sex than religious books written in the 16th century. This practice of rote memorization has phrases like “This is most certainly true” ringing in our ears for the better part of our lifetimes.

I admire Luther for being so bold. Explaining faith and God’s intentions takes some gumption. How does he know? Well, there’s his years of study and solid backing by the Bible, but even as an educated adult with access to Google’s millions of definitions and translations, I don’t know. Yet, we Lutherans confidently say, “This is most certainly true.”

Really, what can I say “this is most certainly true” about nowadays? All that’s certain is death and taxes. This is most certainly true.

Paper or plastic? I don’t know. Even those re-usable bags are suspect if you don’t actually re-use them.

Paperbacks or ebooks? I’m straddling the chasm between them. I read both.

Can I count on Social Security? Who knows. I’m not even sure the current rally in the stock market is good news or bad news.

Life and faith and the future are all so murky.

This is most certainly true.

The story of a wise man and a baby

No matter what else you think about it, a church service is a live performance. Like a lecture, it has a professional speaker. Like a concert, it has music and musicians. Like performance art in a museum, it has burning candles and architecture. Like sports, it has “us” and “them.” Like theater, it has a hero and a villain.

A Christian church service even has food, if you count a swallow of wine and a wafer as food.

If nothing else, these things supply reason for subsidizing the offering plate. Of course, I believe contributing to a church is more than paying for a ticket, but at the bare minimum, the players in the performance that is a worship service deserve some recompense.

Today, my church service had a bonus buy.

I witnessed a moment of humanity.

My pastor, who is battling cancer and has been absent from services for weeks, officiated at a baby’s baptism this morning. I have missed him, and I’m among many members praying furiously for his return to good health. It was so good to see him, pale and thin perhaps, but upright. A fellow pastor officiated at the rest of service, but Pastor was performing the baptism.

As he began the rite, he said, as he always says at a baptism and the beginning of any service, “In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”

Only his voice caught on the word, “Father.”

I don’t know what crossed his mind at that moment, but what crossed mine was, “Oh, joy! He is here. He is speaking. He is doing what he was ordained to do — welcoming another child into the Lutheran fold. And I am so grateful to be here to witness it.”

A moment later, another phrase I have heard him utter probably a thousand times had new meaning coming from his lips:

“Whoever believes in Him shall not perish.”

Those moments of being there, of being genuinely present, of witnessing the miracles of health and good work and faith were worth the price of admission.

Pick up the pieces with ‘Unglued’

If you’re looking for a devotional for your book club or just thinking of making a New Year’s resolution about cooling your hot head, check out Lysa TerKeurst’s “Unglued: Making Wise Choice in the Midst of Raw Emotions.”

I appreciate TerKeurst for her no-nonsense, authentic approach to just about anything (her last book, “Made to Crave” was about eating and overeating). She’s real and flawed, just like me. She opens “Unglued” with a personal story about going berserk on her kids when she finds wet towels on her bathroom floor. Who hasn’t screamed at a loved on about an unimportant frustration? Not you? OK, well bravo, you can take a pass on TerKeurst’s book. The rest of us can benefit.

While I am better at keeping my cool in a tense situation than I used to be in my 30s, I have a long way to go when it comes to resolving conflict without raising my voice or exploding with a string of expletives. “Unglued” offers specific, doable approaches to responding to challenges like the godly women to which we aspire.

The other quality I appreciate about TerKeurst is her ability to do laser surgery on a single Bible verse. She does this in Chapter 2 with Joshua 5:13. She’s a rare minister who can get freaked-out middle-age women to relate with an Old Testament prophet waging war on Jericho.

If you take up “Unglued” as part of a Bible study group, the accompanying Participant’s Guide and Study Guide with DVD are worth the extra cash. The DVD, in particular, is awesome. It’s filmed in Italy, and TerKeurst uses tourist attractions to make her devotional points. It’s quite clever, and it’s entirely new content to what you find in the book. Our group felt like we really got our money’s worth.

Post redux: On prayer, a president and a poll

Long ago, in a galaxy far away (OK, if you must be a stickler, a state far away), I was a radio deejay.

I was in college, and the university had its own radio station, and said radio station had dozens of shelves of vinyl albums (for you tweeners and teens, “albums” were those big black round Frisbees that looked and behaved a lot like music CDs — remember those?).

Anyway, back in the dark ages, radio stations didn’t have recorded satellite announcers, so they required live deejays to introduce various music selections, and volunteer college students looking for experience and possibly class credit were perfect for the position. This radio station provided index cards for various songs with the pertinent information for aspiring deejays to recite, but deejays added personality to their “shows” by ad libbing. And as you might imagine, underpaid and overtired college students came up with plenty of clichés to fill dead air.

That’s a long way to introduce this next post, the clichéd “oldie but goodie,” from Feb. 4, 2010, when the presidential election was but a twinkle in Karl Rove’s eye. Enjoy.

On prayer, a president and a poll
from Feb. 4, 2010

Even if you don’t like President Obama, perhaps you will find his words about prayer at the National Prayer Breakfast this morning to be inspiring.

I am trying to be a better pray-er. One of my resolutions this year was to start each day with prayer. I’ve created a prayer journal (that I am actually using!). I’m reading “A Woman’s Call to Prayer” with my book club. Improving my communication skills with other human beings is a lifetime project, so I expect no less effort is required in improving my communication skills with the Creator. But I am working on it, slowly but surely.

So this morning, as I was running on the treadmill without my headphones, which I managed to forget to bring to the gym, I had to read Obama’s remarks on the closed-captioning on the TV, rather than hear them. But perhaps they were sinking in better for me that way.

He mentioned many topics, including Haiti and health care, but about prayer specifically, he said:

“For while prayer can buck us up when we are down, keep us calm in a storm; while prayer can stiffen our spines to surmount an obstacle — and I assure you I’m praying a lot these days — prayer can also do something else.  It can touch our hearts with humility.  It can fill us with a spirit of brotherhood.  It can remind us that each of us are children of an awesome and loving God.”

Indeed. Love that sentiment.

If you want to read his whole speech, try this website here.

And if you have a thought about prayer, or Obama or Obama’s remarks on prayer, or something else, please comment. But be civil. As Obama said this morning, “Civility also requires relearning how to disagree without being disagreeable.”

Letting go

A couple of experiences in the last 24 hours remind me of this Buddhist concept:

With every breath, we live; with every exhale, we die.

It was nearly 100 degrees again yesterday, and I spent the evening swimming in Lake Minnetonka with my stepson, my Beloved and a new friend (who had access to a great pontoon boat).

The lake was calm, the water was warm, a loon called while we enjoyed the sunset. It was one of those rare well-lived moments when everything was right with the world.

This new friend’s attitude influenced me, I’m sure of it, because she talked about being a caregiver this spring for a friend of hers who died 8 weeks after being diagnosed with ALS, the horrible disease that slowly (or quickly, I guess) robs one of the ability to move, then speak, then breathe. His sudden demise when he said “I have so much living yet to do” was painful. Now, she was vowing to live in the moment and soak up every joy of summer — on this evening, she was soaking with some friends on her pontoon.

At lunch I enjoyed catching up with someone who is having a midair moment — she’s between things. She’s using summer to take care of herself and listen to the universe reveal “the next thing.”

I’m fervently reminded to enjoy the present moment — that’s what the universe is revealing to me — and I want to share one last quote from R.A. Dickey, the baseball pitcher whose memoir I reviewed yesterday:

“I write, too, … about learning to not worry about the next week or month or year, but rather to put all my energy into living the next five minutes well. If I keep living the next five minutes well, I know I’ll be exactly where I’m supposed to be.”

Here’s to the next five minutes and being exactly where we’re supposed to be.

Dream works

Grace is “a powerful force originating outside of human consciousness which nurtures the spiritual growth of human beings,” writes M. Scott Peck in “The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth.”

Among other methods, Peck argues, grace speaks in our dreams, so I have been paying better attention to my dreams since I read his book. Coincidentally, my horoscope this morning said, “Your intuition will be very strong at the moment, and you could even end up having some very powerful dreams.”

Early this morning, I dreamt I was standing at the edge of a swimming pool. The pool was crowded with swimmers and flowing over its concrete borders. It was so full, the water was contained only by the surrounding landscape — piles of snow. Standing there looking down at the water teeming with swimmers, I imagined the water to be icy cold.

A few definitions, according to SmartGirls’ Dream Dictionary:

• To see a swimming pool full of water in your dream is lucky, symbolizing that you will find much happiness and pleasure in friendship, love and marriage.
• Dreams about swimming are related to the need to trust your instincts and look to past situations for answers to problems. They can also signify the need for nurturing or mothering in one’s life (Mom, call me.)
• To dream that you are cold suggests that you are experiencing a breakthrough in some area in your life.
• To dream that you are part of a crowd suggests that you need to start thinking more for yourself instead of following others.

As I ponder these messages of grace, I’m thinking this dream speaks of my career aspirations and my wishes to self-publish my manuscript.

What do you think? How is grace speaking to you?

Shooting stunning holes in Holy Saturday … with a ray gun

Science fiction helps explain away a lot of perplexing theological questions.

Familiar with “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine”? For those of you for whom this is an arcane reference, let me explain. In the episode “The Emissary,” Capt. Benjamin Sisko uses baseball as a metaphor to explain linear time to an alien species known at the Prophets. The Prophets exist in a wormhole, a timeless plain where there are no beginnings, no endings, no befores, no afters.

Sisko: In the end, it comes down to throwing one pitch after another, and seeing what happens. With each new consequence, the game begins to take shape.

Alien Batter: And you have no idea what that shape is until it is completed?

Sisko: That’s right. In fact, the game wouldn’t be worth playing if we knew what was going to happen.

Jake Prophet: You value your ignorance of what is to come?

Sisko: That may be the most important thing to understand about humans. It is the unknown that defines our existence. We are constantly searching, not just for answers to our questions, but for new questions. We are explorers. We explore our lives day by day, and we explore the galaxy, trying to expand the boundaries of our knowledge. And that is why I am here. Not to conquer you with weapons, or with ideas. But to coexist… and learn.

I imagine God to be like those Prophets. He exists in a place without time — every event in all of history occurs at the same time, all the time. This is how He is omniscient — He knows what the future holds because it already occurred and it’s occurring right now and it’s about to occur, all at the same time. It is us humans who experience life in a linear manner, one pitch after another so to speak. God doesn’t intervene in mundane human events, like the Cubs baseball season, because it’s already over.

See? Science fiction solves this deep philosophical quandary.

In any case, I was amused by the story “What did Jesus do on Holy Saturday?” in today’s newspaper. Read it here.

Apparently, theologians for centuries have been arguing about where Jesus was on the Saturday between his crucifixion and resurrection.

Seriously. God is the great I Am (Exodus 3:14). The Truth and the Life (John 14:6). The Alpha and Omega (Revelation 21:6). And we, lowly humans with teeny tiny intellect, think we can explain Jesus’ daily planner on the day between dying for humanity’s sins and rising from the dead.

Sometimes, we can be so arrogant.

Apparently, some people believe that on Holy Saturday Jesus descended into hell (it’s a line in the Apostle’s Creed, recited frequently in the Catholic and Lutheran churches I’ve attended most of my life), and some Christians have found little Biblical evidence to this “hellish detour.”

I don’t know where the son of God was passing his time that Saturday (and frankly, it seems so trifling compared to what happened on Good Friday and Easter morning), but I’m content with my science fiction explanation: God is everywhere at once, all the time — in the grave, in hell, in heaven looking down, in my heart.

I am willing to immerse myself in Capt. Sisko’s humanity. It is the unknown that defines our existence. I have faith the answers will all be revealed in due time.

Bonus arcane reference: Part of the title for today’s post comes from “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home”:

Chekov: [picks up his phaser from the table, aiming at the FBI agents] Don’t move!

FBI agent interrogating Chekov: OK, make nice, give us the ray gun.

Chekov: I warn you, if you don’t lie on the floor… I will have to stun you.

Memories as clear as smudge

Music is a powerful catalyst to evoking a memory.

Someday, when I’m 102 and sitting around the social hall at the nursing home, some old fogey who’s retired and out volunteering but not yet old enough for my chair will come in with an antique electric guitar and start playing “Beth” by Kiss, and I’ll start chattering on and on about some short boy named Chris and how I slow-danced with him while he stood on a chair in the junior high cafeteria during a Friday night dance in seventh grade. “Where’s Chris? I don’t want to dance with a short boy. And why are the lights on? Turn off the lights!” And then I’ll start singing along: “Beth, I hear you calling but I can’t come home right now. …”

And the nurse’s aides, who are 20something and standing around eldersitting us, will roll their genetically engineered eyes and text to each other, “God, I hate it when we play the oldies around here and the old ladies just won’t shut up.”

Something like that anyway.

While I was sitting in Ash Wednesday service tonight, we sang “Just As I Am, Without One Plea” and I was suddenly struck with thoughts of my sister. Not sure why that hymn reminds me of my sister who I would describe as a God-loving Christian who is, at best, lukewarm about going to church.

I think she had to learn that hymn as a child for some public event having to do with church or school, and she wandered around the house for weeks singing those lyrics. I called her to get the 411 (“Good for you for going to church,” she said), and she can’t remember either, but she immediately started reciting the lyrics.

Music is like that. I can remember all 50 U.S. states because of a song. I know the words to 1 John 4: 7-8 because I learned the verses set to music at Lutheran Island Camp when I was 12. And I think of a freakishly short kid named Chris when I hear Kiss.

At least I think his name was Chris.

Just as I am, without one plea,
but that thy blood was shed for me,
and that thou bidst me come to thee,
O Lamb of God, I come, I come.

~ Charlotte Eliot

O Christmas tree, o Christmas tree

How often you give us delight
In brightly shining Christmas light.

The Christmas tree is up!

I didn’t put up any Christmas decorations last year because … well, I was probably being Scroogy. Bah, humbug.

This year, however, we’re entertaining my Beloved’s family for Christmas, and seasonal decor is required. Fortunately, I’m a lot less Ebenezer-like this year. God bless us, everyone!

After much deliberation, we sprung for a pre-lighted artificial tree (no sawing, no watering, no stray needles). I dug four plastic bins out of storage, and pretty much every last ornament my Beloved and I have collected since our divorces (plus a few treasures from my mother-in-law) is on the tree.

It’s lovely.

But I think its loveliness comes from neither the tree nor the ornaments. I think it’s the lights.

A friend of mine the other day explained why she went to the trouble of decorating her house for the holidays. She had a lot of lighted decorations and centerpieces in her collection. One of her reasons made a lot of sense:

“At night, the lights light up so pretty. It just makes me happy.”

“The light shines in the darkness,
and the darkness has not overcome it.”

~ John 1:5