Wondering

My Men In Black Image of God

~ Natalie Hart ~ 4 Comments

Here is something I missed during the recent heat wave: thinking random and occasionally deep thoughts while my brain was occupied with the domestic task of making dinner. The oppressive heat has broken, so I cooked last night. And my random and possibly deep thoughts revolved around God and a character in Men In Black 3 and the future.

Griffin (in the center) is an alien who can see the future: all of them at the same time. There are many possible futures, each one affected by the choices the characters make. He is a sweet, sweet character, wanting the good futures to happen, wanting people to make the choices that lead to the good futures, but he sees all the negative consequences of various actions, as well. He helps the Will Smith character, guides him as much as possible, and gives him a very important gift that could save the world, but it’s up to the players to act and react and make the good future happen.

At a couple of points in the film, he stands outside the action, saying, “I hope this is the one where this happens.”

While grating cheese to go over the mushroom ravioli, I realized that this is my image of God and God’s plan for my life. I can totally imagine God watching me, seeing my various futures arrayed in front of me, hoping I choose a particular path, but prepared to work with me no matter what I choose.

There are a lot of Christians who are earnestly searching for God’s Plan/Will For My Life, as if it were one official plan that each of us had to figure out and then just go along with. This is certainly the point of view of the devotional we’ve been reading with the kids at night (Jesus Calling for kids). As if God has a planner, and if we miss an appointment, we could miss the entire plan. There is an expectation that God’s plan is detailed and specific: you need to find the one right college God wants you to go to, the one right career path, the one right spouse, the one right church, etc. If you ask my best friend, Mr. Google, how to “find God’s plan for my life,” you will find millions of posts with authoritative directions and multi-step processes.

I don’t see it that way, but I can see how people get there. After all, Jeremiah 29:11 says, “‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ says the Lord, ‘They are plans for good and not disaster, plans to give you hope and a future.'”

I was going to go into a paragraph about my understanding of Hebrew ideas, that they are less fixed than Western ideas of the same term, but Skip Moen already did it for me, and much better. He says the Hebrew word for plans in the above passage means, “thought, plan, or invention”:

“I know the new ideas I have for you.”  God’s plans are never cast in concrete.  They are flexible, adjusting to our lives as our circumstances change.  It is easy to think that God has only one perfect plan for your life and that if you make a mistake or sin, the plan will be forever destroyed.  Then you will have to live with second best, then third best and so on each time you fail to meet expectations.  But God does not have one perfect plan for you.  He has one purpose – one goal – that you become all that you were meant to be through conformity to the image of the Messiah.  The goal never changes.  But the plans are new ideas every day.  God is full of surprises.  An eternal inventor.

This makes me grin. The questions about “what should I do” become not, “Am I following God’s Plan for Me?” but “Will this help me conform to Christ’s image?” and “Can I be a faithful follower and servant here?” maybe even “Can I learn more about serving God here?” It could even be, “Which choice will bring me the most joy?”

My family is facing a church decision. We left our previous congregation a month ago, and while we’d prefer to wander around a variety of churches this summer and make a leisurely decision, that doesn’t seem to be where things are heading. My husband is being courted for a possible part-time job at one church. It feels too soon, but we’re pursuing it, praying about it, not putting up any roadblocks yet. Letting this surprise play out.

With my Griffin from MIB3 image of God, God is watching us on the cusp of this new direction, giving us bits of guidance and encouragement, and hoping we will make the decision that will bring about the most glory for God’s kingdom. For some people, God will give them very direct instructions: turn here, go there. give that person a specific amount of money. For others, it will be a piling on of circumstances, a layering of “coincidences” that all point in a specific direction.

The most direct message God has sent me is “Serve where you are planted,” which could mean a few different things: serve in the neighborhood you live in, no matter where you are you will serve, I will plant you somewhere and you will serve there, stay where you are and serve. It wasn’t a clear answer to the anguished prayer I had at the time, but I have served wherever it was that I was planted, and I’ll continue to do so.

However, the Griffin analogy breaks down, because he doesn’t make this promise: “And we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them” (Rom. 8:28).

Whatever we decide about this church, God will work it for good. Not necessarily for pleasant or for perfect, not always for fun, but for good. And God is with me however this plays out. My favorite promise of the three I’m quoting here is this one from Jesus: “I am with you always, even to the end of the age” (Matt. 28:20).

Of course, we can choose wrong. We are sinful and often stupid, selfish and self-justifying. We can make cascading bad decisions. But God will keep throwing new ideas at us, plopping some miracles in our path, giving us chances, trying to nudge us into better decisions and more faithful futures.

In this way of looking at it, God doesn’t send us bad things, either. It might just be the spiritual toddler in me, but I can’t think that God “sends” cancer, rape, pulmonary embolisms, drowning, etc. These things happen and God works with them to wring as much good as can come. From this point of view, God didn’t give my cousin cancer so she could be more secure in her father’s love and esteem than she ever was when she was healthy. But she got cancer and that was one of the goods God wrung out of it before she died.

So those were my deep thoughts over the stove last night. And I didn’t even burn anything. What are you thinking about these days?

 

 

 

Wherein I Win at Relaxing

~ Natalie Hart ~ Leave a comment

A couple of months ago, the family and I took a trip to Chicago, to the Museum of Science and Industry for the fantastic MythBusters exhibit. While there, we played Mindball. In this game, two opponents wearing headbands sit opposite each other. Sensors in the headbands detect each person’s brainwaves, and the most relaxed person moves a little ball towards the less relaxed person. As the MSI says, “Compete to Relax … Relax to Compete.”

This is how NOW Magazine describes it:

Mindball is “an experience product.” Players use their alpha and theta brainwaves (two of four major brainwave types) to control the rubber-coated steel ball and move it across the 4-foot-long game table. Each player wears a headband equipped with electrodes that act as biosensors to measure their brain’s electrical activity as recorded from the scalp – similar to how a neurophysiologic electroencephalogram(EEG) machine is used to assess brain damage and epilepsy.

The person with the stronger alpha and theta brainwaves will be able to “push” a magnetic carriage under the table (visible to players and audience as a ball on the surface) into their opponent’s goal and score a point.

On the face of it, this isn’t a game I should win, especially against my husband. One of the major ways we complement each other is that his steadiness and general relaxedness balances out my excitability and general high-strungedness. If you were to try to give him a neck/shoulder massage, you’d find the area pliable; he never needs a massage. I’m always in need of one; the area between my neck and shoulders is constantly tense.

Yet I beat him in the game of relaxing. This was even more odd because I was not relaxed. My heart was pounding and there was a small crowd around us, watching, so I also felt like I was performing. I love to perform, but it makes me tense and nervous, especially when I could hear them comment on our competition.

So how did I win?

Alpha brainwaves are strongest when a person is relaxing, when the brain is neither actively working through something nor engaged in an activity that requires thought. Meditation or yoga often brings on alpha waves. Theta waves are slower than alpha, and can occur when a person is daydreaming, or when engaged in an automatic and repetitive activity, such as driving on the freeway (all those times you can’t remember the last few miles) or exercising outdoors.

My husband was trying to empty his mind, which is what the MSI worker told us to do. I couldn’t empty my mind if you paid me serious money, so I closed my eyes, worked to control my breathing to a steady four beats in and four out (no matter how shaky those breaths were), and I mentally counted those 4 in and 4 out.

I won, not because I was the most relaxed, but because I was concentrating on something utterly repetitive. One line in the NOW Magazine article allows for this: “What adds an unusual and exciting twist to the game is the fact that alpha and theta waves are strongest when a person is calm and relaxed, or concentrating intently.”

It’s no surprise that my powers of concentration are stronger than my brain’s ability to relax, but I sure was amazed that I beat my husband in this game.

It should also be noted that he made the mistake of opening his eyes and peeking at where the ball was. Maybe all the above is hogwash and he defeated himself. But every now and then, I like to gloat that I won at relaxing.

Hearing Their Story

~ Natalie Hart ~ 1 Comment

According to this great TED talk by Andrew Stanton (of Toy Story and WALL-E fame), Mr. Rogers carried this quote around in his wallet: “There isn’t anyone you couldn’t learn to love, once you’ve heard they story.”

In the last twenty years, readers have definitely grown to love all kinds of characters who’ve traditionally been villains: vampires, thieves, werewolves, etc. I certainly found this to be true while writing the first David and Saul book: writing Saul, the “villain,” the “failure” of the piece, made me more sympathetic to him. In the first book, anyway, I find him a more interesting character than the upright David. (David gets more interesting in the 2nd book, when he has to compromise his very high principles in order to survive.)

Saul “fought against his enemies in every direction — against Moab, Ammon, Edom, the kings of Zobah, and the Philistines. And wherever he turned, he was victorious. He did great deeds and conquered the Amalekites, saving Israel from all those who had plundered them” (1 Sam. 14:47-48). Yet he’s remembered as a failure. The book of Chronicles (the point of which is to detail the reign of the kings of Israel) contains only the story of his death, nothing about the 42 years of his kingship.

The more I wrote in his point of view, the more compassion I felt for him. His main qualification for being king, other than God choosing him, was that he was tall, head and shoulders taller than everyone else. He seems to have been a good son and a hard-working farmer, but when he and his servant went out looking for some lost donkeys, the servant was the one who thought of seeking out a seer and who had silver to offer Samuel. After Samuel privately anointed Saul and told him the Lord was appointing him leader of all Israel, God had to change Saul’s heart (1 Sam. 10:9) to get him with the program.

Even after this and after all the signs Samuel predicted came true, after prophesying (and being made fun of for prophesying) and having the Spirit of God fill him, he didn’t tell his family what had really happened. The next time he’s anointed, it’s going to be at an official ceremony, but Saul hides in the baggage. And I don’t blame him. Who else gets to start his coronation by hearing how upset God is that the Israelites wanted a king, how God felt it was them rejecting him? Not exactly a rah-rah endorsement.

At first, Saul does the smart thing. “When Saul returned home to Gibeah, a band of men whose hearts God had touched became hi constant companions” (1 Sam. 10:29). There were some haters, but Saul ignored them. When there’s a threat to an Israelite town, he answers in dramatic fashion: cuts up the oxen he’s plowing his father’s field with and sends it around Israel as an incentive to get people to come and fight. They do. There’s a tremendous victory and another public ceremony to crown him king.

Depending on what the “then” in 1 Samuel 12:1 means, it could be that right after Samuel re-re-re-anoints Saul, Samuel gives a long speech detailing precisely what is wrong with the Israelites for the extreme offense of asking for a king. (Or it could take place at some unknown time later in Saul’s reign. Storytelling in the Old Testament is not necessarily linear.) Samuel gets the Lord to send thunder and rain and the people are terrified and cry out, “Pray to the Lord your God for us, or we will die!…For now we have added to our sins by asking for a king.”

No matter when the above scene happens, Saul is most likely standing right there. No matter what kind of character you bring to the situation, that’s a lousy position to be put in.

So I feel for the guy. He was given a job that he didn’t want, that he was unprepared for and that the people were unprepared for. No wonder he so often responded to situations out of fear and insecurity.

At the beginning of this post, I put quotes around “villain,” because I don’t think of Saul as a villain. I write him more as a foil for David because I have pity for him.

So the quote Mr. Rogers carried with him is true from the positive side, but also from the negative side. A couple of years ago, my book club read Mudbound, by Hillary Jordan. It takes place in post-WWII Mississippi, telling the story of a landowning white family and an African-American sharecropping family who each have a son who comes home from the war. There are a half-dozen points of view, half white, half black. It is a deep and gripping story. But there is a villain. The father of the landowner is evil. He isn’t given any redeeming characteristics that I can recall. He makes everyone’s lives miserable and sets into motion horrifying events. As we were discussing the book, one of us noted that the author had originally included some passages in that man’s point of view. My reaction was immediate and visceral: I was glad she took them out. I didn’t want his point of view, because that would make him human. I didn’t want to know his motivations or how his upbringing and experiences brought him to where he was at the time of the story. I just wanted to be free to hate him.

Are there stories you can think of that got you to feel sympathy for the villain? How about villains you’re happy to be free to hate?

 

 

 

Failure to be Grateful For

~ Natalie Hart ~ Leave a comment

My friend, Chris Robertson, who works at the Acton Institute, posted this line on Facebook this morning: “Our greatest fear should not be of failure, but of succeeding at things in life that don’t really matter.”

I felt that one in my gut. A conviction in the true sense of the word: I had been tried and convicted of succeeding at things that don’t really matter.

And then I clicked through to a blog post that responded to that line with the assertion that if Christ is Lord, everything matters.  The author, Jake Belder’s concern is to not let people divide their lives into good = spiritual pursuits vs. bad = everything else. Belder doesn’t want Christians to be so farsightedly focused on their personal salvation that they don’t see their daily lives as opportunities “to demonstrate Christ’s rule over all of life, offering the world around us a foretaste of ‘what is unseen’ – that glorious future when the whole of creation is redeemed and everything finds its fulfilment and flourishing under the consummated rule of the true King.”

I can get behind that. Almost. Except for the headline, “If Christ is Lord, Everything Matters.”

Because everything does not matter. It does not matter that I can get the highest score in online Boggle every 10 or so tries. It doesn’t matter that my new rug is still driving my nuts by throwing off pills and dust creatures. It doesn’t matter that I am not model-thin. It doesn’t matter that I have an unpoppable pimple on my cheek that I have to force myself not to touch dozens of times a day. It doesn’t matter that I haven’t dusted behind my books in at least 4 years.

The last one has a caveat. I’m not inspired by a holy approach to doing the dishes and folding laundry and brushing my teeth. I’m fine with them being mere chores. If the holy approach to chores gives you a more peaceful and godly life, I think you’re awesome. I really do. To me, they don’t “matter” except insofar as I want a reasonably clean, safe, and organized house because otherwise I get anxious and that spills over into areas that matter more to me.

I’m sure we each have a list of things that consume our thoughts or our time that we’re aware don’t truly matter. Even Paul, no slacker when it came to working for the kingdom, does: “I don’t really understand myself, for I want to do what is right, but I don’t do it. Instead I do what I hate” (Rom. 7:15 NLT).

It happens over and over in the Bible: people focus on the symbols of obedience to distract from their disobedience. In 1 Samuel 15, the Israelite army has just defeated the Amalekites. Saul was supposed to destroy everything and everybody, but he didn’t. He and his men kept the best of everything and destroyed the rest. (In a side note, I think Saul was in a tough position: it was a long walk to Amalek, gathering the tribal army along the way, waiting for the Kenites to move to safety, then doing all the defeating. The army would’ve expected to be paid with plunder.) When Samuel confronts him, Saul twice explains that they saved the best of everything so they could do a big sacrifice at Gilgal. Samuel comes back with, “Obedience is far better than sacrifice. Listening to Him is much better than offering the fat of rams” (15:22 NLT).

Moreover, you can succeed at what is called in dance, “marking it.” There are some rehearsals in which you don’t dance full out, but just enough to get a sense of the performance space. It’s boring to watch and merely technical to do. Similarly, you can succeed at living a safe, medium life, never stepping out despite fear, never trying anything new, never risking embarrassment in the Lord’s name. That’s not a success I’d trumpet.

Going back to the quote that started this all, “Our greatest fear should not be of failure, but of succeeding at things in life that don’t really matter,” I want to bring in a different perspective on failure: the scientist’s. They fail all the time. They, like hitters in baseball, might even fail more often than they succeed. Each time they fail, they learn. Each failure is important.

This hits me where I live today, because I feel like I’ve failed at something that matters: I’m leaving the church I’ve loved for nine years.* I’m sad and I’m anxious, but I can’t stay. I’ve learned so much there about serving the Lord and His people, about prayerfully pushing past fear and past the sense that my way is always the right way, about throwing my body, mind and strength into loving the Lord and serving His people. This good failure of mine changed the course of my church life and my faith life. I’ll always be grateful to it.

 

*I apologize to my church friends who may be hearing this for the first time in this venue.

 

Diaries: Should They Stay or Should They Go?

~ Natalie Hart ~ 7 Comments

You know how it is when you’re not thinking about a particular thing, but then it keeps coming up from different groups of people and from different media outlets and then you can’t stop thinking about it? My husband and I had that recently with a movie, and now feel like we have to see The French Connection.

That’s also how it is with diaries lately. Not the writing in them, but the keeping. Which of your old diaries/journals do you keep? Do you keep them all for your loved ones to read after you’re dead? After all, you’re no longer able to be embarrassed by anything in there. Will the people who read them after you’re gone get to know the real you or the you at your most unpleasant (since that’s when we’re most likely to pour our hearts out)?

I have friends who’ve dealt with it differently. One person gave all her journals to her best friend to look through and glean anything that her daughter might want to read. Another tossed all her journals from before she met her now-husband and felt a glorious freedom and recommitment to her marriage after getting rid of all evidence of boyfriend angst.

I’m a keeper. Not of general crap — on the contrary, that I love to throw away. But if something has emotional value or resonance, I keep it. I have every letter ever sent to me, letters I wrote but never sent (I am the queen of good intentions and lack of follow-through), every diary I ever purchased, every poem written to me by a boy. I haven’t decided what to do with it all.

So I’m going to sift through it here, with an audience. To protect the unsuspecting, I’ll type all names as initials. If you wish to out yourself in the comments, feel free. Let’s start with my earliest entries, age 9:

10/1/1977: That afternoon there was a bazzar to raise money for my school. There were cartoons pie’s cookie’s & juice. I bought a couple of plants. That night after supper my father gave me my punishment. It was to stay in my room after our talk. I think now it was a good one, because while I was reading Higher Than the Arrow, when Francie thought about her bad feelings, I thought about mine. Showery all day miserable and dull.

10/2 had a drawing of a horse. My horse-drawing abilities have not improved in 35 years.

10/15/1977: Today day we had quite a nice day. N and R came over unexpectedly. N left at lunch time and didn’t come back in the afternoon. R stayed and we played Little House on the Prairie. We did watch some television. When R was just about ready to go we talked about the unfairness of grown ups to kids. R told me that one day she would run away to her own house that is near ours now. I said I might do some thing like that. But I knew R wouldn’t do such a thing. I started Anne Frank and like it. Even though I never read sombodys diary, I think it is the most exciting I would ever read.

10/16/1977: Dear A: R. came over today. So far she has told at least 2 or 3 lies. At church we spoke into the microphone. M was at church but she has to go back tonight. R and I are now playing house & school.

I’m sure I wasn’t as accepting or conscientious about all my punishments as I was about that one (for what, I have no idea). It’s so earnest. And dear. But, of course, also unfair, as are all grownups. There’s a lot of foot stomping in these diaries, all out of proportion to my actual treatment by the grownups in my life.

 

Travel By Map

~ Natalie Hart ~ Leave a comment

I was watching Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade night on TV. At one point, they document a long plane ride by showing the red line of their journey across a map. They did this in the most recent Muppet Movie, too. When faced with a long trip and not much time to do it in, they decide to “travel by map” so it’ll go faster.

I find myself wishing I could travel by map — not location, but time. My church is in a tough spot. People are drifting away. Those who already worked hard, are working even harder. We’ve gone through this before, and we rallied. Twice. But it’s not clear that we’ll be able to rally this time. I want to travel by map so I can just find out the endpoint.

But there’s no such thing.

In my head, I know that the journey is important. My faithfulness, my trust in the Lord, my patience will be exercised and built up. (And between you and me, my patience can do with some building up.) I have the chance to be obedient, to continue to serve the Lord in the ministries I’m passionate about. Those things can only be good for me.

The unanswered/unanswerable questions still nag me, though. Will we close? If so, when? If not, how will we continue? Who will remain to continue? Will I remain to continue? What will we tell the kids? Where would we go?

I know it’s silly to be made so sad by that speedy line of travel in those movies. But I really want to travel by map.

Anyone else in a situation they want to rush to the end of?

Wondering: Realism and Faith

~ Natalie Hart ~ Leave a comment

In my second year of college, I went on a January term off-campus study program to the Institute for Christian Studies (ICS) in Toronto to take a course in Ontology from my uncle, Hendrik Hart. This was heavy-duty philosophy that  left me thinking so hard I’d be sweaty at the end of class.

As part of the course, we watched the movie, Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance — an often whirling sequence of images without dialogue, accompanied by the repetitive music of Philip Glass. (I’d thought we’d seen the sequel, Powaqquatsi: Life in Transition, but research tells me it came out that same year, and we saw the movie in class, not in a theater, so it must’ve been the earlier one.)

In our discussion afterwards, the teacher asked a question and then a follow-up question that provided one of those moments in which my perspective shifted in a heartbeat.

(I remember the person who led this discussion as Bob Sweetman, who was still, I think a student/Junior Member at the ICS, although he’d later come to teach at Calvin and then return to the ICS. I don’t think it was our Calvin professor, Lambert Zuidervaart, although it may have been; in a funny note, he’s also now teaching at the ICS.)

Anyway, the adult male who led the discussion asked us about optimism. The movie was pessimistic in tone, and so he asked us to raise our hands if we considered ourselves to be optimistic. Very few people raised their hands. Why would we? We were budding intellectuals, and feeling positive about things was not considered an impressive point of view. I may even have sneered a little inside at those who raised their hands, smug in my knowledge that everything was going to pieces.

And then he asked us whether we considered ourselves Christians. We nodded.

He made a half “hmm”/half sniffing noise that said, “interesting.” Because part of being a Christian is believing that God can act in the world and make a difference there — Christianity was an optimistic faith. Did we really think that things were impossible for God?

And bam. Self-righteous negativity took a fatal blow.

I could still take a hard look at how things were, but I could have hope because of God. I didn’t have to default to the negative.

That doesn’t mean I’m all Suzy Sunshine now. There have definitely been times when that promise of hope has felt like a whisper delivered upwind from five miles away — but there, nonetheless.

The real question

So all of this leads me to ask: is realism, at some level, incompatible with faith?

I know churches deal with that question at budget time. Do we commit to a course of action although we’re not sure whether we have the funds, trusting that, if it’s a faithful action, God will provide the funds? Or do we cut programs because we can’t guarantee the money will come?

If things are not going well in a relationship, where is the point at which the hard facts of history trump the hope that things will change?

Does faith always trump realism? Or does realism have to “win” sometimes?

I consider myself a realist who cries out to God for help, hoping for change, even a change of heart. Sometimes the situation changes, sometimes things get unstuck, sometimes I change. Sometimes not. I’m not so much a “God has a very specific and clearly itemized plan for my life” kind of person. I rely on the promises recorded in the Bible: God will always be with me, all things will work together for my good (not for my pleasant, but for my good), and God desires to give me hope and a future. I can make good decisions, and I can make bad decisions, but God will work with me to bring me around.

One of my best decisions was to join a multiracial church. But we’re in a situation with our church now that is tough and we’re feeling the sting of too much reality. We’re having some “listening meetings” this month, wherein we talk about what’s been great and what’s been not so great. These are good and important meetings to have. But the real question is what we do once those are over. What do we go with: realism or faith?

Not looking for an answer yet. Just raising the question.

 

Strange Bedfellows

~ Natalie Hart ~ 5 Comments

Last week, my family and I went on a crazy trip to New York City — crazy because we drove for, essentially, three days to be in the city for one full day, an evening and a morning. Nuts. But fun.

It all started with a Groupon for a hotel in Williamsburg. We were thinking the Williamsburg we knew when we lived there: where our friends lived, where Michael’s band, The Haints, practiced and did weekly open mic nights at the local pizza parlor. We knew the neighborhood had been gentrified, with new hotels and everything, and were excited to stay there.

However, out hotel was in way South Williamsburg, in a Hasidic Jewish neighborhood. We were expecting to hang out with young, rich hipsters and wound up intruding into an old, old world in which we were not welcome.

It was fascinating to walk the same sidewalks (although not always: they crossed the street to avoid us if they could) with men with silky, long curls bobbing on either side of their faces, dressed all in black until Friday night and Saturday morning, when some men sported white knee socks, black loafers, UFO-shaped fur hats, and beautiful black and white fringed prayer shawls. The women were less interesting to look at, but that’s the point of their clothing traditions.

When I run across groups that separate themselves so fully and deal with strangers so suspiciously, I tend see their culture as fear based. Fear of contamination by the other, fear of dilution of belief, fear of female sexuality (which is actually fear of male sexuality, as if seeing the outline of a thigh or unadorned hair will drive men insane with lust). I have no problem with modesty and I appreciate the comfort they may take in their clothing traditions, the pride in expressing their culture so visibly. I admire their determination to be who they are in the face of pressure to conform to the wider society. But fear-based, nonetheless.

And then, upon coming home and doing a little reading on Hasidism, I come across this description of their message and lifestyle: they “stressed joy, faith, and ecstatic prayer, accompanied by song and dance.”

That sounds like my church, and like me. The white denomination I grew up in stressed knowledge of God, but my multiracial church stresses experiencing God, hearing from God, freely expressing joy in God, deepening faith and trust in God. I’ve been known to go up front and dance (sometimes planned, sometimes not), to raise my hands and do actions while singing, to twirl my big purple ribbon on a stick, to cry, to immerse myself in the experience of worship in a way that might make people suspicious of emotion in worship uncomfortable.

It’s interesting that a group that stresses joy in following God’s decrees is beyond strict about following them. When I read all those decrees in the Old Testament last year, I was struck by what seemed to be God’s tone: desperation. It felt less like a precise list of what you must do to be holy than a plea to do anything, anything to help you remember the Lord: as in, “Wear my words in a box and tie it to your arm, wear tassels on your garments so you see them flapping and think of me, write the words of the Shema on your doorposts — whatever it takes!”

Indeed, the people we saw in South Williamsburg must find it impossible to ever forget God and the history of what God has done for them. Even the simple act of getting dressed is spiritual. In my entirely modern world, it’s easy to forget God, to slide through my day without taking even five minutes to read the Bible. I’d had a strong almost-daily habit of Bible reading and prayer, but I’ve gotten haphazard again. I need better remembering. Not to the point of shaving my head and wearing a wig and scarf in public, but something. Something joyful.

 

 

 

Confusion and Curiosity

~ Natalie Hart ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been wondering about confusion and curiosity.

A few days after Christmas, the adults on my Hart side got together at my parents’ for dinner and a movie my parents adore: The Tree of Life. My father, especially, loves this movie. He’d seen it three times already, and will see it at least another three. He loves it so much and finds it so deep and affecting that he wants to show it to everyone he knows.

I did not have the same reaction. To put it mildly.

I was alternately bored, confused, irritated, interested, annoyed, impatient, analytical. I spent the entire movie in my own head, and not in any of the characters’ heads. I didn’t experience the story. I observed it. This is not what I prefer. I like story. I learn through story. And Tree of Life is not interested in storytelling.

But that’s not what got me wondering. It was our discussion afterwards, in which I was (see Beginnings for my admission) too negatively passionate. My dad was making a point, based on brain research, that when we are presented with something confusing and tense, our emotions are engaged, to which I may have screeched, “What?!”

Because, for me, when I’m confused, my emotions disengage, and I become skeptical about everything. And if I don’t trust the artist/thinker to lead me out of the confusion, I turn off almost completely.

However, what he said is close to standard writing advice: there should be an overarching story question that fuels the story; when the question is resolved, the story is over. In addition, there should be lots of minor story questions, in service to the overarching one, to keep the tension, and the reader, hurtling towards the end. In fact, I’m organizing the David and Saul story into three books according to this advice. Book 1: Why did Samuel anoint David? Book 2: When and how will David become king? Book 3: Will David be a king after God’s own heart?

This led me to wonder about the differences between confusion and curiosity. Imagine the body language of each of those states. A person curious about something leans forward, their face is open, they’re driven forward. A confused person is frowning, their arms might be crossed, which hunches the shoulders in. Confusion is a state someone is in. Curiosity leads a person to inquire and investigate.

To be fair, my dad explained himself better in a follow-up email:

The book I referenced was Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow by Daniel Kahneman. “Fast” thinking is intuitive, subconscious thinking and “slow” is rational, conscious thinking.  A very good book – full of counter-intuitive findings.

What I recall saying is something to the effect that we are more fully engaged, more alert and more attentive when a situation activates both types of thinking. For example, the Tree of Life film operates on the intuitive level through music and picture. But if it only operates on that level, we might fall asleep. By adding material that puzzles us and motivates slow thinking, we are more attentive, more alert and more engaged.

I can get behind that. With one caveat. Like with everything else, people have differing thresholds for stimuli. My extroverted husband is energized by crowd situations that overwhelm or exhaust me. My physicist brother-in-law understands things I can’t even begin to conceive. And the line wherein curiosity shifts to confusion, wherein a puzzle no longer interests, is shorter for some than for others.

In other words, in art, your mileage may vary.