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Stop by often to see what Kelly Monroe Kullberg and Lael Arrington, the editors of A Faith and Culture devotional, have to share about faith and our culture. Download our Small Group Discussion Guide.
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Lost-Three ultimate endings: All is black. All is one. All is well.
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| May 24th, 2010 |
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| Jimmy Kimmel touted his three comedic alternate endings to Lost. The following may not be story arcs for a blockbuster cast reunion, but what about these slightly more realistic alternatives:
All is black
Jack closes his eyes (or eye) and breathes his last. The chemical and electrical impulses in his brain fade and stop. Rigormortis sets in. His body decays there in the bamboo arbor. Dust to dust. It is the same end as the man in black. Same end as Ben. And Hurley, Kate, Sawyer and the rest. The choices they made in this life have no ultimate meaning beyond the experience of this life. The fellowship and community that means so much is lost forever. As is each individual. All is lost.
All is one
Jack closes his eyes and breathes his last. Wakes up in the sideways reality. Oceanic flight 815 has landed safely. He reconciles with his son, heals Lock and, touching his Father’s coffin, recovers the memories of his life on the island. All the choices he made to lead and love and sacrifice flash before his eyes in scene after scene of heartache and joy. The richness of the person he became through loss and love flood back into his soul. He is so much the deeper for it. Transformed by suffering and good choices, his joy is so much greater than that of the smaller life he was living.
Ben is outside. His selfish choices have made him a poorer person. The broken trust in all his relationships separates him from the loving fellowship of the community. Forgiveness is offered, but what happened happened. How does a lifetime of choosing self over others finally dissolve into choosing a loving, sacrificial community? That’s just not the person Ben has become. He’s not ready to join the community yet. He is in limbo? Purgatory? How will he reconcile or work out the consequences of his choices made from both great wounds and self-centered choices? We don’t know.
After the grand reunion the door opens. Christian Shepherd, Jack’s Dad, steps into the light. Reminds me of the eastern leaning The Fountain with Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weiss. “Death is the beginning of awe.” But in that movie as well as all Eastern thought, death is also the end of individuality as each one finally transcends individual pain, selfishness, willfullness and desire to become one with the all.
What might happen in this sideways story line as each individual steps into the light? Perhaps, as in The Fountain, if the Source of all things is impersonal, then he or she ceases to exist as a person but is transported into an impersonal oneness with all others, with everything in the Universe. All the memories they have recovered of their individual lives are poured into the ocean of collective memory. Ultimately, all individuality is lost. There is no loving community of richly different individuals. Everything is connected and the unity eventually obliterates/subsumes the individuality. For to create is to choose. To choose is to have a will. How does creation or a collective will exist without the loss of individuality?
They step through the door and become one with the light and the water at the heart of the island. Golden and glowing and ??? bubbling? Existence ends in impersonal being. All is one.
All is well
Jack closes his eyes and breathes his last. Wakes up in the loving community of friends, some who died before him, some after. As each one steps through the chapel door they step into the light that radiates, not from an impersonal wellspring, but from a Person. The greater which has created the lesser. (How can it be the other way around? How can an impersonal source of light and water create the richness of human love, life and complexity we’ve seen on the screen?
The recovered memories and the richness of their heroic acts and choices go with them. They remain the individuals we have come to know and love. Nothing of their individuality is lost. Not even their flaws. Their poor choices have been redeemed. They don’t have to work them off or be separated from the sacred circle. Forgiveness has been freely offered by the one who waits for them and loves them far more deeply than they love one another. Who became the evil and selfishness of their own lives and died in their place, but who was resurrected from the grave to offer them forgiveness and life. Even Ben. All is mercy and grace for those who choose to be reconciled with their Creator in the way he has provided. By his stripes, the scars from the whip lashes, all their wounds are healed. It is a beautiful mythology, a true myth, as CS Lewis has said. One that mirrors and yet transcends our own experience of how suffering and sacrifice and choosing others over self bring richness, life and joy. (In mho far more beautiful and meaningful than the mythology of impersonal electromagnetic light holding all things together and turning greedy, selfish people into smoke monsters.)
As Jack and Kate, Sun and Jen, Sawyer and Juliette step into the light of eternity, not simply one person awaits, rather a loving community of three persons, whose individuality and community are mirrored in these lives. The end of all things is co-participation—with each other and with the Father, Son and Spirit who protect and make good on promises and yet offer real choices with real consequences that ripple out into eternity. And if Ben remains on the outside, never ready to go in, that is Ben’s choice to be truly and deeply lost.
Those who enter find themselves in a new story. An unfolding plot far more exciting than mere existence. They continue to live individual lives of challenge and choices, service and leadership in a community of ever-deepening love. Life together becomes richer, deeper, higher and above all, more joyful. Nothing is lost but pain and separation. All is well.
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Posted by @ 6:55
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| PREVIOUS BLOG 1 |
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March 4th, 2009
From Kelly, Commentary on Science, week 1
Given new discoveries at both the macro and micro levels, scientists at schools like Harvard, MIT, Cal Poly, Texas A&M, Cambridge and Oxford, Cal Berkeley and Stanford are now exploring the Judaeo-Christian Scriptures and faith. Many scientists at these schools are passionate and compassionate Christians.
According to M.I.T. Professor in Affective Computing, Rosalind Picard, “The great founders of science were men of faith who recognized God’s hand in creation. Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, Blaise Pascal, Louis Pasteur, Michael Faraday, Samuel Morse, Gregor Mendel, George Washington Carver, and many others attributed their successes to divine guidance. It should be surprising, in fact, when men and women of science do not acknowledge their dependence on providence.”
A Faith and Culture Devotional contains insights of 21st century scientists Hugh Ross, Walter Bradley, Michael Strauss, Jennifer Wiseman, Ray Bohlin, Michael Behe, Guillermo Gonzalez, Frederick Larson, and Francis Collins.
Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, 2007:
You’d have thought it was a football game. It took twenty minutes to find a parking spot. Once in the Stanford building, I finally found a seat in the aisle of one of several video overflow rooms. 2,300 students, scholars and neighbors came out to hear Dr. Francis Collins, Director of the U.S. Human Genome Project at the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Collins is a genetic engineer and an M.D. dedicated to expanding our knowledge of nature and deciphering the remarkable code language of human biology.
Describing Collins’ life while still Director of the U.S. Genome Project, USA Today observed:
“During his 90-hour work week,” says the reporter, “Collins juggles time among family, church work, four teams of researchers … faculty duties and patients in his genetic diseases clinic. On Sundays, … [in] their small Baptist church …. He plays guitar and keyboards; his wife writes original music.” And then the writer adds, “It is Collins’ religious beliefs that make him keenly aware of the ramifications of his work and of the fact that what he and other gene hunters do in their laboratories directly affects millions of people.” (USA Today, July 24, 1990, 1D).
Dr. Collins began his Stanford lecture by juxtaposing two images: a DNA strand and an exquisite stained-glass Rose window from a Gothic cathedral. Of the two, he saw no contradiction. Only beauty. Artistry. Intentionality. Complexity. Order. Symmetry. Harmony … God.
He spent much of his time discussing the genome and his own journey of wonder and faith as he has in this devotional. Many of the 2,300 were there for the science; however, most questions were about faith – Where is God in the midst of suffering? What of prayer? Evolution? Other faiths? Evil? Justice? Hope? Eternity?
Collins admitted that he doesn’t have thorough answers, and is glad to be learning from friends in other fields, but he does know that God is good, that prayer changes us, that God speaks life into being, that Jesus is the hope of the world.
He said that his mother had died just the previous week. Though grieving, he crossed the country because she wanted him to share his faith with students. He told us that he fully expects to see her again, forever. That God loves us. That heaven is real and the hope of those who love and follow Jesus Christ.
From Ptolemy in the 2nd century A.D. to Collins in the 21st, scientists are finding that God, through the agency of His Son, Jesus Christ, is the author of all life. The apostle John tells us, “All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men” (John 1:3–4). The complex sequencing of DNA molecules tells us that life has an Author who has given detailed instructions that science is only beginning to understand.
Posted by larrington @ 06:40
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February 12th, 2009
 I suspect many Christians take “celebrating Darwin Day” to be an oxymoron, while others join the festivities, but, no kidding, there are things for a Christian appreciate about this world-changing scientist on this, the 200th anniversary of his birthday, even if you believe in creation. Rather than joining the well-orchestrated applause with unthinking disregard for his weaknesses or simply railing at the darkness of doubt his theories have wreaked, we can remember the man for his complexity—his strengths, his flaws and his surprising regard for the gospel.
Reason #1 to celebrate Darwin Day: Darwin took God seriously and wrestled honestly and deeply with his doubts. Raised and schooled in the Anglican church and a student of theology in preparation for becoming a priest before he was invited to be the resident naturalist on the Beagle, Darwin was not the mocking, Richard Dawkins-esque, “God-is-the-most-unpleasant-character-in-all-fiction,” unbelieving sort. Like Etta James’ dim view of Beyonce’s rendition of her song for President Obama, I doubt Darwin would have chosen a belligerent atheist like Dawkins to be the leading voice of his ideas in today’s culture.
The young man who believed “the strict and literal truth of every word in the Bible” (his words) struggled over the cruelty in nature, the mismatched design of some species and their habitats (woodpeckers who ate bugs in the ground and webbed footed geese living on dry land). His confidence in the theory of evolution and natural selection grew as did his doubts in a God who created fixed and unchanging species (the creationist paradigm of his day).
As Karl Giberson writes in Saving Darwin: How a Christian Can Believe in Evolution, Darwin was a reluctant convert to agnosticism. He struggled over perhaps the question of our day: Is God good? How could a loving God have designed cats to torture their prey for sport before killing them? And theologically, how could a loving God send people to hell? The loss of his beloved daughter Annie finally severed the frayed cords of his faith.
Picture a man who loved his family, regretting the relational distance opened up by his loss of faith, walking the country lanes while they went to church. He eschewed atheism, carrying his doubts and uncertainty to his grave.
#2 Scientists who discovered DNA and it’s many helpful applications stand on Darwin’s shoulders. Without his theory pointing to a mechanism of adaptation and evolution we might never have developed the technology to use DNA evidence to convict criminals, or understand how to protect ourselves against bacteria that become resistant to antibiotics, or create vaccines for mutating strains of smallpox or flu. Even the algorithms for some computer programs have been designed using the insight of random variations and natural selection.
The frustration for believers in God’s design of the universe and life comes when somehow, as in my local newspaper last week, this lock-down evidence of micro-evolution is cited as proof that we all descended from a common single-celled ancestor.
Note: We desperately need two common parlance words for evolution—one for what everyone can observe in the lab and celebrate on Darwin Day and one for the extrapolation of this data to “prove” universal common descent. (Why haven’t scientists made the distinction clear and consistently used the vocabulary to acknowledge the difference?)
#3 To his credit, Darwin, who showed how eugenics proceeded from his own theory of evolution, couldn’t live consistently with his own belief. It is a little known fact that Darwin deduced how his theory of natural selection favored eugenics (for the Read More About It crowd, see Ben Wiker’s Ten Books that Screwed Up the World). In Darwin’s words, when we build asylums and create vaccinations “the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man…” “…excepting in the case of man himself, hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed….” “If…various checks…do not prevent the reckless, the vicious and otherwise inferior members of society from increasing at a quicker rate than the better class of man, the nation will retrograde.”
In his book, Saving Darwin, Giberson exposes Darwin’s “dark companions,” including Darwin’s own cousin, who took the next step suggesting that government policy should encourage more fit members of society to produce more children. Giberson chides those who, in their desire to protect Darwin, are writing eugenicists out of history “like characters in George Orwell’s 1984.” He points out that, in contrast, Darwin maintained his simple conviction that, “People should help each other, even if it meant tolerating legislation that taxed” the more fit to help support the less fit.
Note: When we interviewed Giberson on The Things That Matter Most, I asked him if he was aware of Darwin’s statements supporting eugenics. He replied that he was. When I asked him why he did not include them in Saving Darwin and instead focused only on his “dark companions” as the advocates of eugenics, he replied that it would be “too damaging.”
#4 Charles Darwin recognized the redemptive power of the gospel when he saw it. From A Faith and Culture Devotional, this excerpt from “Darwin’s Surprising Voyage” by co-author Kelly:
“A keen observer of humans as well as botany, Darwin recorded his observations of people and the interactions of New Zealand natives with Christian missionaries.”
[Darwin observed the “uncommon boldness” and “warlike spirit” of the natives living in “filthy hovels” on one island in sharp contrast to the farmhouses and gardens of the island where missionaries had invested their lives and brought the gospel.]
In his own words, from The Voyage of the Beagle: “I never saw a nicer or more merry group; and to think that this was in the centre of the land of cannibalism, murder, and all atrocious crimes!… It is probable that the moral state of the people will rapidly improve.” “I believe we were all glad to leave New Zealand.… I look back but to one bright spot, and that is Waimate, with its Christian inhabitants.”
“Darwin often dismissed the idea of a loving Creator intimately involved in our lives, and, yet, …he was so impressed by the effects of the Christian gospel, and the missionaries, that he contributed financially to the South American Mission Society until his death in 1882.”
Posted by larrington @ 05:31
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