Haiku for Road-Cyclists

I have delusions
of vehicularity
when I ride my bike ... 俳句

Irony of Position --- "Pro Life"

Nothing quite so profound this week -- nor "on time". For one thing, I feel less "fired up" to share widely the rest of I've been writing.
For another, there's really so little of it that if I gave it out at the speed of the last few weeks consistently, it would all be gone in six to ten months -- and it took years to compose, in between other things I do (almost all mundanities, of no interest to any but my nearest and dearest), so it would be a quick burn even if not particularly bright nor hot.

And on top of that, this week the death of someone I won't name, (iykyk) with whom I once worked closely and have known off and on since we were toddlers, passed on. I'm not rocked with grief over his passing but it was a surprise. We're beginning to be of that age when one can't honestly say, "oh! he was just too young!" which if you're older than he (even just a little, as in my case) it'll feel a bit like that. But I feel for his family and I'm thankful to have had the chance for the tangents of our trajectories to touch at all. He was certainly, to me, everything gracious and complimentary that is being said of him elsewhere. He didn't "bury his talent", I can tell you.

But I did have a thought go rattling through my head in the aftermath of last week's apologia for "the Parade". It's not long. There wasn't a lot I had to compose. But I thought it worth sharing. 

There are a couple of musicians whose songs have formed a spine to the torso of my development, through adolescence, young adulthood, to the present. Some have been great lyricists, some have been great instrumentalists, some have been great arrangers, for some it’s what I could see of their character, for many it has been more than one of these attributes.

Back in the beginning of those days, ALL of these musicians, if they said anything at all about the abortion issue, spoke against it passionately, often backed up by eloquent songs.

One of these – I’ll call him Jeff, though that won’t really guard his identity much – along with passionately singing against abortion was also brutally candid about the trail to parenting that he and his wife walked through. They had three miscarriages, followed by a hard birth. Mom wound up in one hospital, the young child in a NICU 1h40 drive away. Dad went back and forth between them, ultimately lost the child and then wrote a heartrendingly beautiful song of farewell and grief. Eventually they welcomed three healthy children, each celebrated in songs shared with all of us by Jeff, and each song sweet in its own way, each one raising my own anticipation about how cool it would be to be a dad one day, too.

Their kids have survived into adulthood, several of them continuing in music or the arts one way or another, but in watching a post-Dobbs America, a thought hit me this week.

In a post-Dobbs America, how many of those mis-carriages would have happened before the lack of “abortion” care would have led to his wife’s death or loss of fertility?

And if this had been in El Salvador -- or perhaps a US of the near future (avert!)-- in which instance might she have come under suspicion of having caused the miscarriage?

You think I’m making absurd allegations?

Miscarriages as “crime scenes”: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-61995250 (the rhetoric in the US is ominously similar)

American women who have died or lost fertility because of state anti-abortion laws:

deaths: https://msmagazine.com/2024/11/04/women-die-abortion-ban-elections-vote/

loss of fertility: https://people.com/texas-woman-miscarriage-sent-home-twice-hospital-abortion-ban-12005748
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65935189

https://www.texastribune.org/2024/08/12/texas-abortion-law-ectopic-pregnancies/

If ever there were an issue about which the law of unintended consequences had a field day, a commitment to life “from conception to the grave” is definitely one of them.

Why the Parade?

So, why did I think this was so important now? This is what drove me. And I may be just as deceived as anyone I would disagree with but hear me out.

In the North American political milieu, we Christians are a Fifth Column against the "responsible government" (Canadian term) and "republican government" (US constitutional, not the partisan term) that, until recently, has done so much to make it so much more possible for so many of our neighbours to survive and thrive. This traitorous orientation must end. Now.

I have described myself, in part, as a Vineyardized Anabaptist, and in that Vineyardized context, I have seen too much willingness to adopt the leaders from the "right wing" in the US (increasingly with an autocratic bent) because they have been touted by leadership of one kind or another as God's man for the hour, whatever that hour currently is, and then approved of no matter what they do. This habit extends before that time to the ascendancy of Guatemala's Ríos Montt who was praised then as God's man for that place at that hour. He has since been contestedly convicted of being the cause of genocide of indigenous folks there. At the very least his leadership style allowed the military to commit the crimes, that much seems incontrovertible and something he admitted to.

Again, in my memory, this happened with Bush 43 being called a "Burning Bush" a symbol of God's blessing, and many American friends voted for him. In the present times, too many of the people I loved and trusted in non-political-matters have similarly been univocal in support of the criminal kleptocracy to the south. And they have come out against effective civic response to a pandemic (in the name of FREEDOM! and becoming super-spreaders and adherents of various quack-cures -- to the detriment of others that I also love). They continue to dismiss the unfolding global catastrophe of anthropogenic climate change both there and here in my own country -- earlier that it was even happening, now often just as vociferously that people aren't causing it.

Folks, we're being stupid. We're being consistently stupid. We're being invincibly ignorant (even if we're of the party that accuses everybody but themselves of that folly). Since the first days of the New Deal, the rich and powerful, who resented that imperfect implementation of a people's policy agenda (it reinforced certain sexist and racist harms), they have done everything they could to scuttle it and they turned us into a fifth column from the beginning in order to accomplish that.

They started by injecting anti-New Deal ideas into Christian preaching (I heard my own father expound their injected themes in a call to a serious and holy life).

In the days of Nixon, they turned the whole Christian world against abortion (before that time, the Baptists came out in support of abortion, and groups of nuns performed abortions so that the poor women around them would not die in the rooms of incompetent back-lane "clinics").

They called themselves pro-life while accelerating the nuclear arms race and fluffing capital punishment. (Recognizing this structural contradiction in High School was the first nudge away from the conservatism I was raised up in. As more and more such structural lies were exposed, it was only a matter of time before I rejected the whole agenda)

And they've kept pushing ever since: for instance promoting toxic masculinity in the name of God-ordained authority structures. Because it suited them. Because the ascendancy of these doctrines made us easier to hold in their sway.

These things are not a matter for debate. They are well documented in

• Kevin Kruse's "One Nation Under God?"
• in Kristen Kobes du Mez's "Jesus and John Wayne"
• in Robert Jones' "White Too Long".

And we leavened this toxic mess further with the three preceding follies that built up an expectation of a hero-deliverer. I'm not saying Jesus isn't our deliverer (as Christians, individually, or as his people, or for the whole of humanity) or that he isn't our hero. He's just not a nationalist hero, nor a temporally violent deliverer.

I'm asserting that he is the same today as he was when he walked the earth the first time. When he said, "don't you know I could call down 12 legions of angels" but he did not; when he made sure the disciples had swords in the garden but barred them from using them further, how can we find a "no more Mr. Nice Guy" future iteration remotely credible?

Here's how: Because lifelong, centuries long, history and pre-history long, in culture before it could be called culture we've had hierarchy and domination and we don't know how to accommodate or expect something different. And this must change.

Peter Thiel likes to quote/invoke René Girard and Tolkien in his philosophy but he misapplies them both. Jesus, in embracing being the victim and not exacting revenge on us opened the way for humanity to escape from the pattern of redemptive violence that Girard documented and described. It continues, to this day, and indeed, the church uses it as well -- but it ought not to; when it does, it resembles the beast from the earth in Revelation 13.11. And where it does, there it grows least quickly, it is in danger of dying on the vine in the long haul.

Where it does not embrace this madness, it grows even if it must do so from seeds that have been slain and buried (John 12.24).

Either way, the fruit, whether bitter or nourishing endures.

Where the price is not death itself, but rather the laying down privilege and position, we fail to do that at risk of losing the plot of the story we claim allegiance to. And in North America, many whom I love dearly, 'neath whose roof I have sheltered, at whose tables I have been refreshed are doing just that.

Insisting on the right to hurl insults and calling the resulting recrimination, or exclusion, or fines or penal sentence "persecution" and it is not: we have lost the plot.

Espousing the least merciful, most vengeful, least generous, most exacting legal, fiscal policies (why the Ten Commandments, when they have been superseded by exactly Two?), we have lost the plot.

Bolstering the chorus of jingo and nationalism mixed with the most vile racist, sexist, classist, ableist, otherizing filters of Who Belongs In, we have lost the plot.

The rich and powerful have had their way with our headspace for too long and we need to turn away from their voices -- never mind the voices of those who want only to sow chaos so as to make us still easier for autocrats to take over entirely -- for their own purpose and not just for those of our rich neighbours.

This self-deception, this choosing to be gaslit must end now. It's hurting our neigbours, it's hurting our world, and in the end it will hurt, even kill, us and our children as well. And turning away from these voices must include returning to caring about character so that whatever political party seems to reflect your values best overall, miscreants like Donald J. Trump and his whole grifting clan, like Jair Bolsonaro, like Viktor Orbán must not be permitted to gain or hold power, and instead of allowing ourselves to be inflamed by Rumsonist<1> diatribes to voting to "get it all back the way it was", we need to vote and advocate for policies and positions that will do the most good to the most of our neighbours (listening to how they see that good with as much mercy and compassion as can justly be granted -- and "unsanctified mercy" isn't as much of a problem as some may make of it), human or otherwise, turning away, as we have been commanded to do, from fear, from greed, from grasping, from trying to hold on to what we view as our own. Everything temporal like that, we only ever hold in trust, anyway. Let's fulfill our trust responsibly and for the benefit of all, not exclusively for our own selfish benefit (James 4:1-4).

This bent toward autocracy Must. End. Now. Before it ends us. That is why I wanted to publish these pieces now,

This enduring mass of madness is the thing that weighs on my mind the most. It has done so my whole life in one form or another, though when I was young I did not understand what it was.

It has done so consciously and increasingly, as I could name it and understand it, and see its tentacles wrapping around so much that I love and tainting all of it to some extent. There is precious little I can do more than watch and pray that we would escape this madness. So asking that it end is, in one way self-serving. Only, I am convinced that ending it will do all of us, and all those around us great good. So I will persist.

When I first conceived of my three answering follies to Wright's widely encompassing set, I did not see that as a potential blow against this scourge, nor when I wrote the initial drafts of the summaries describing what he meant with his two word summaries -- that might not be comprehensible to most of the Jesus Followers of my acquaintance -- as an intro to my three, even more opaque because I am not the scholar that Tom is, I did not see that as a potential blow either.

But that it might be such a blow occurred to me this spring, so I resolved to present them all, although until now, I have kept these thoughts to myself, my family, my closest companions alone.

Against this scourge, all I can do may have no more weight than shouting from a cliff-top could be seen as an assault on the canyon from which the shout echoes. But it is what I can do here. Now. If it encourages others to take up that shout, great. If it fires up others to notice and take a similar stand, then these little motes will have begun to do what I could hope for. That this would be the beginning of the end of the madness, I won't even dare to dream. But I will hope.

Against, this madness, "I will not cease from mental fight, nor shall my [pen] sleep in my hand..." until mind moulder with age or moral fatigue claim me completely. God grant that this shall not be, or at least that it shall not be soon.
---
<1> I couldn't avoid one footnote at least could I? This is a reference to "Bob Rumson" the character decried in the final speech of Sorikin's film, "The American President", who doesn't want to fix things, but to make you scared of them and tell you whom to blame for them.

Parade of Follies -- Imperializing the Parousia

And here comes the last "float" in the parade. Maybe by the end of this you'll see where this is going? I'm still working on composing the "trailer" piece for this. I had it in two pages but once there was a satisfying draft I looked back at this one and realized how much I was repeating myself. "If I'd had more time I would have written a shorter letter" comes to mind. Oh well. I see some serious pondering ahead of next Thursday/Friday. But here goes... or rather after one more note, repeated to some extent but my choices of terse obscure words requires it. "Parousia" (παρουσια) in New Testament Greek refers to "appearing" either as one arriving, or as one who has been present but you only notice them now, and it's used as a blanket term for that portion of "Last Things" (eschatology) around Jesus' return, promised in Acts 1.11 -- so a somewhat specific (but not narrow) slice of a significant slab (but nowhere near all) of Christian theology. So yeah, here goes...

“The first time he came as a sacrificial lamb, the second time he’ll come as a conquering king” (i.e. “No more ‘Mr. Nice Guy’!”)

You won’t find that in Scripture but I don’t know how often I heard sentiments like that expressed about Jesus’ 2nd coming. And it took me a long time to get to this point, to where I became absolutely, adamantly convinced that it’s wrong.

Jesus chides his disciples (in one account) as he is being arrested, that if he’d wanted to, he could have had twelve legions of angels at his disposal – and that hasn’t changed: they’re still there at his beck and call. But where once I might have thought that he would come riding back with those twelve legions behind him, to smite and destroy however many people were still opposing him, now that picture is repugnant and unimaginable, utterly incompatible with that of one who prayed for forgiveness of those who had nailed him to that cross.

Hebrews 13.8 says that Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever. In other words, he is and always has been our shepherd (as his Father is and always has been our Father, too), and one who will go to whatever lengths are required to rescue any sheep no matter how lost. Is it credible that at the end he would initiate a battle to end all battles to bring the whole thing to an end? Is it credible, even, that he would join such a battle if it had been started by human armies on its own terms?

Having this expectation that he would do so at the back of (or shot all through) our minds leads to a kind of prayer that can take escapist overtones: “Christ, come quickly! There’s danger at the door...”<1> as though the parousia will be some kind of Deus ex Machina. When we lean in this direction, I am convinced we are mistaken. Deeply. We have not taken into account what our original commission in creation was: to stand at the junction of the natural and the supernatural realms: reflecting God’s wise rule and care into creation, reflecting nature’s glory back to God. Anything short of this, I believe, doesn’t take account of his ancient intentions: to his image bearers, in his temple, fully restored.<2>

Expecting Jesus to return and fix everything has made us careless about creation. Expecting Jesus to destroy this world and re-create it fails to understand a creator’s heart towards his own works. Expecting Jesus to do all this at the end narrows our focus in “preaching the gospel” to words directed to our fellow humans: his command says our proclamation ought to be broader: to disciple others, we need, ourselves, to be fully discipled, including in how to care for his masterpiece. Expecting him to be the final “fix” lets us off from doing the hard work of being his hands, his feet, his voice, conveyors of his heart, reconcilers by default, toward the world whenever it gets “too hard” to bother with.

And expecting him to advance by violence makes it too easy for us to accept that some other bloodbath we might be inclined to approve of now is right in some way. If “by their fruits you will know them”, then all of these results of this mindset ought to be enough to drive us to shun it with our every fibre.

And I believe changing thus will open the way to better Christian politics than anything we currently practice anywhere.

--
<1> Winter, Sr. Miriam Therese. “Come Christ Jesus”, I Know The Secret. 1966.

<2> The Genesis story can be read as a deity creating a temple, then to complete it, placing his image within it.

Parade of Follies -- Hierarchicalizing Ecclesiology

Okay, I admit it. I got addicted to two-word phrases and as a result some of the words got more and more esoteric. It was either that or make the titles ever longer and longer -- in which case they'd break with Wright's pattern and I didn't want to do that -- or flatten the words down to the point where they reduced the idea to the ridiculous and meaningless. So instead, I choose these $45 words and you can all laugh at that. Comedic potential everywhere! No matter.

Hierarchicalizing ... by which I mean, bringing in hierarchy where it's not wanted and/or bringing in more hierarchy than is absolutely needed. Two ends of the spectrum: in Lord of the Flies, the boys needed some kind of hierarchy that everyone could accept in order to stay something like safe and healthy (but, if you find the real life scenario where this happened, their humanity and communal care didn't need much -- look for "Tongan Castaways" on Wikipedia) -- versus the hierarchy in "The House" where most of the plot of the "Morrow Days" books by Graham Nix takes place. The main character is assigned an ever lower number (higher status) as the books wear on.

Ecclesiology ... how do people "do" church? From the -ology you see everywhere, as in study of, fronted by a derivation of the Greek word that gets translated "church". Pastors, elder boards, deacons, consistories, conferences, presidents? or rectors, vicars, bishops, deans, archbishops and a pope or popes (they seem to have more than one of these among Orthodox churches)?

With that introduction..

And do not call anyone on earth 'father,' for you have one Father, and he is in heaven. Nor are you to be called 'teacher,' for you have one Teacher, the Christ. (Matt 23:9,10)

Perhaps I have a “spiritual gift of mulishness” – I had that thought in re-editing one of these, where I reported having balked twice along the same lines. And perhaps that mulishness relates here. That it might be a dislike of authority, generally. I’d like to think not – I’d like to think I’m a good toes-the-line-mostly guy but maybe this item says otherwise. When you read the New Testament, it seems to me that Paul is divided on this subject: sometimes it’s “entrust this to faithful men” and choose people of good character as overseers; other times it’s there’s no difference, there’s no status gradient. With Jesus, it seems to me, the picture is much more consistent, culminating in that one verse, “Call none father”.

Of course, parents ought to be honoured as parents, but I have yet to encounter a healthy father who didn’t want, ultimately, to be more peer with rather than lord over adult children. And we have one Father, one Lord, so we definitely have some kind of authority structure. If Jesus, as a human, is that One, and if all humanity were mapped to real numbers, then I see this as a Dirac delta function (δ) which has the value 0 everywhere except at one point, where the value is "impossibly high".<1> If I had claimed this kind of egalitarianism as a young man (when I first felt it), I could rightly have been condemned as grasping for what I hadn’t earned. Now I’m over 60 and I still believe this. My record of co-operating with local norms regardless could open me to charges of hypocrisy, too. I deny them both.

When a family grows too big, it becomes difficult for the grandparently pair to keep track of all the grandchildren or great-grandchildren, though they manage – but perhaps for our Father, it’s different. His care for us is different from our grandparents’ or great-grandparents’ care, anyway: they, freed from the task of day-to-day maturation of the children, from the “difficult” lessons that the parents must convey, can be entirely “irresponsible” – he is not: he continues to be deeply interested in our advancement toward Christlikeness and character, love, compassion, etc. But his attention can be towards all of his children, and except for the practicalities of keeping a regular situation going, or for all the more mature to care for all the less, I am convinced that his view of us contains not one hint of hierarchy. As lovely as the final cantos of Paradiso may be, the hierarchy they (and Inferno, and Purgatorio) convey flow from Dante’s view of earthly structures and not at all the heavenly structure.

But this thinking has tainted other things, too. It has corrupted the meanings of “saint” (every believer, not just some heroes), “apostle” (missionary, emissary of the gospel, initially the eye-witnesses, but eventually more broadly), “deacon” (anyone who serves in any way), and obscures, for instance, how Jesus hijacked and subverted Imperial jargon in “gospel”, “salvation”/“saviour”, “lord” – and it has left room for “priests”: but we have only one Priest. I don’t think his sacrifice needs constant re-enactment.

We, as followers of the one who died and rose again, are already living in the new age to come, whether we are aware of it or not. To impose on the ones living that life, the hierarchical structure of the present age tells structural lies that have repeatedly borne bad fruit and will continue to do so as long as we perpetuate them. If you don’t believe me, ask the ones at the bottoms of those hierarchies how things are really going and be prepared to listen, really listen, aggressively, actively listen.

--
<1> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_delta_function

Ironic unnumbered haiku

On some socials I go by haikujester (Xwitter, BlueSky) -- those who know me will understand what's going on there. I've been posting so many there (as pithy-ish commentaries / slap-backs / summations) that any idea of serialization is COMPLETELY out the window. This evening I started composing a haiku which I wanted to leave unfinished as an expression of having no more words to say than that -- and somehow, I simultenaneously managed to "finish it" -- after a fashion:

I wasn't annoyed
until you said not to be
<incomplete haiku>...俳句

The other party echoed back (with a LOL) the same haiku with the last light, "Now I am livid". At first I thought they were saying THEY were livid, but they were not. The LOL arrived too quickly for that. But lesson learned:

Unless you want that
Others would finish your words,
finish them yourself....俳句

(And I know. These haikus of mine are dreadful ersatz things that nobody should trouble others with, but there it is...)

Another kind of folly

Today, I did something ridiculous. Under a banner ad from some astro-turf group wanting to support the development, distribution, and everlasting expansion of the burning of Methane (CH4, "Natural Gas"), when they wrote, "Natural gas isn't greenwashing -- it's historical accuracy under attack": I laughed. The term may be old but in the current "information-battlespace" "natural gas" is certainly trying to make us feel better about burning more fossil fuels. So I responded, thus:

nope, it's greenwashing. it's cleaner than coal but it's still burning, adding to the CO2 load that's leading to sequential heat domes in Europe this year.

Silly, foolish, I know. And I got two "haha" emojis and the terse reply from someone -- neighbour, troll or agent provocateur? I have no way of knowing: "You have physical evidence of that or do you lie?"

Although I did not mark that with a "haha" of its own, I nearly fell off my chair laughing mixed with pity on the inside: that someone should be slave to such a stark binary? It must be a troll, I thought, but just in case not, I waited until later and then answered:

Huh. that's a stark binary... here's the spectrum I see between your poles

• people who have paper records of long term observations that aren't, individually things that anyone could touch
• people who have no physical evidence may still have a memorial record of details that demonstrate the fact
• "argumentum ad vericundiam" is only an informal fallacy. if the "authority" you appeal to includes the physical evidence
• people who are speaking what is false may be ignorant or misinformed ("do you lie?" --> "yes" demands motivation not just a fact deficit)

I put myself somewhere between the second and third of those two points. I find the International Panel on Climate Change to be a competent and truthful source of a broad range of facts about the climate, several of which are simple enough that I remember them.

As long ago as 100 years, it was known that the more CO2 there was in the atmosphere, the more heat from the sun would be retained in the atmosphere. From the Industrial Revolution forward, humanity has been burning ever more and more quantities of fossil hydrocarbons. We abandoned wood for cooking and horses for moving and started using coal, oil and refined-oil fuels and CH4 instead, for both, in ever greater and greater quantities. The record is there for anyone to read in the Columbia Icefields between Banff and Jasper, Alberta. The record in numbers has been there for anyone with instruments at a purpose-built observatory at one of the highest points of Hawai'i. "350 dot org" took its name from the pre-industrial revolution proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere 350 parts per million isn't much but we've increased it by a significant fraction, to about 430 (between 20 and 25%). This is all a game of millimetres and not inches or miles, and such a small fraction is enough to have retained more heat in the atmosphere than we used to, progressively increasing over time, like a large ship turning in an arc with a radius of miles.

So much for science. Someone has those physical records, but I do not "have them".

Yet, my own experience has been a decided warming trend over two decades in the 90s and the 00s and evolution of year-over-year weather patterns since then where I live, from distinct spring-summer-fall-winter cycles to one more closely resembling a square wave, where chilly temperatures last into late springs and then tend to spike up to hot summer temperatures in a matter of days, to remain there until what used to be fall, when they crash back down again to chilly winter highs and lows -- and this in an environment of far less rain than I remember we got when I was a child. (This is supposed to be a rainfores. I start to wonder.)

And the oil companies' own scientists told them this was going to happen -- and so did scientists from the US Military -- seven or eight decades ago. And they buried it. And they continue to pour mountains of cash into sowing doubt that these things are so.

So, no. I don't "have the physical evidence" as you might insist that if I do not have it, I must be lying. But I am certainly not lying. Yet, I do not resent your accusation. I grieve that this systematic disinformation campaign has succeeded thus far with you and I pity your situation as victim of that campaign. I do not suppose this little discourse will convince you but I hope that it might convince some others of those who may overhear what we say.

And should you answer this with another "Haha!" response, I will take it as a badge of honour, not a sign that it is time for rage to awaken for my part. It will only deepen my pity, if indeed I pay it any heed at all. I hope we may meet in a happier hour to compare notes at where each of us are still deluded in some way and laugh at ourselves about it.

and again later:

also... yes, burning methane is MUCH cleaner than burning coal, except in very rare situations, such as the power station at Shearness Lake in Alberta. Again: I don't have physical evidence of that either but I know it to be true from seeing how clear the emission from its stack was against a clear blue prairie summer sky.

As for the heat domes in Europe... here in BC we had such a heat dome in this decade, for the first time since weather began to be recorded here -- a scant 100 years ago. Still, as a child, I remember summer after summer after summer when Lytton was "the hot spot in Canada", at usually no more than 40C degrees. For several days we had daytime highs here in Vancouver at a degree or two more than that and Lytton got pretty close to 50C (has since burned to the ground in the wildfires that have been having longer, more intense seasons than before -- when individuals weren't starting the fires through neglect or malice). Here in Greater Vancouver, over that heat-dome event, our overnight lows didn't drop anywhere near to the extent it is usual, and things were pretty oppressive until the dome passed and dissipated. I was there. I remember how things typically were 50 years before. I know this was nothing like that. Temperatures in India this May have been near the unusually high of 50C for more than a week. Take a look at the atlases I studied when I was a child -- their summer weather was never like that back in the day.

I'm just paying attention.

If any of this helps you to respond to someone in your closer circles, similarly ignorant or mis-informed about the state of these things, feel free to use the foregoing -- only, if you can tinge it with some gentleness, that would probably be well. I can be a trifle too mater-of-fact about these things and relationships are FAR more important even than being "right" about this kind of topic.

Parade of Follies -- Dehumanizing Christology

 So... this is now "me" in entire and not Tom at all. His model inspired me and these, while not as immediately problematic as the ones he called out, have their own pernicious side effects. They flatten some things out that should not be flattened (dehumanizing...), they stack other things that should remain relatively flat (hierarchicalizing...) and worst, they adopt what I see as the wrong kind of imperial structure (violence in its consummation vs. royal proclamation) about the wrong aspect of the event (the return, instead of the message) -- but there, I'm getting ahead of myself, but I'm being egged on inside by the overall purpose I have in mind that I even bothered to publish these half-2-pagers at this time in this way.

A lot of the theological fights in the first 300 years of the church were about Jesus’ nature. And I believe that they got it right: fully God, fully man. The Nicene Creed says the divine half of that most bluntly: ὁμοοῦσιον τῷ πατρί, of the same substance as the Father. They felt no need to say it – being 1700 years closer to the facts it might have felt useless – but they could have added, ὁμοοῦσιον τοῖς ἀνθρώποις, of the same substance as humanity. In the first 100 years or so that would have seemed tautological: “Why mention it? We know his siblings’ descendants, we know the grand-kids of the 500 etc. That’s not even a question!” Eventually, at Chalcedon<1>, some of them at least, did, with a pronoun (us): ὁμοούσιον ἡμῖν; but time and again, as I was growing up and things about Jesus were discussed in Sunday School, sermons and Bible studies, Jesus’ humanity was always under-played.

Occasionally the Bible points out that Jesus knew what they were thinking or understood people, but in those days, we often assumed that Jesus ALWAYS knew what EVERYONE was thinking (“he’s, like, God, right?”), and in many other ways, divine (in the sense of “super-human”) attributes were assumed of him even though the New Testament also clearly says he was “in all ways just like us” or “you made him a little lower than the angels”<2> – not to mention that there are moments when it seems like Jesus asked questions from a genuine need to learn something or broke down in very human ways. And even the church fathers knew better: he became what what we are to make us what he is, wrote Athanasius.

So these things, the thought that “of course he knew what they were thinking, he was God”, and “made like his brothers in every way” can be set at loggerheads. And that always bothered me.

The thinner your view of why Jesus entered humanity the hard way, lived to adulthood, died, was buried, rose from the dead, the less you need to notice the problem, the less important it is not to ascribe too many divine-like attributes to him in the gospel stories – which are so terse that they depend on an active imagination to fill in the details and the blanks – and I think it leads to impoverishing the ways we can look to the example of his life in how we conduct our own.

When exercising spiritual gifts, there’s always at least the thought, “am I right? Is this the moment?” And this thought made a conception of his full humanity more visceral, more of a missing-piece found:

When Jesus was wracked with the anticipation of the cross, what was he dreading? Was it separation from his Father? John 16.32 can be read to suggest, strongly: no. If it were so, would he contrast being abandoned by the disciples against togetherness with his Father? Wright does no more than hint at it in Jesus and the Victory of God, but I think he was onto something more profound than he let himself hint at: that, preparing to finish provoking the various power groups in Israel to hate him to the point of killing him; having predicted the temple’s destruction and promising to rebuild it; having preached, healed, raised the dead, etc, still: the shadow of uncertainty, of self-criticism to the point of potential doubt of what he was about to do, the “what if I’m wrong?” that every mature person about to commit to something as irrevocable and final as that would have<3>. That seems to me to be a compellingly credible possibility and forms one more confirmation to me that we just don’t take Jesus’ humanity seriously enough. And remedying that will enrich us all still more.

--
<1> sadly, this was one of the earliest points at which eastern and western churches began to split; I'd be curious about the east's view of this application of ὁμοούσιον. Their position about all of Chalcedon have been pretty clear since it happened. From something I read in T. F. Torrance, I am inclined to believe they were right about the filioque clause, for what it's worth. But now we really HAVE left the open market for a very particular ivory tower. Personally I prefer the market...
<2> Psalm 8; it's usually taken to refer to humanity generally, but these things often have multiple referents and if at no other time, Jesus' position was "a little lower than the angels" just like the rest of us. (cue up Joan Osborne's What if God was one of us?)
<3> Dickens, Charles: A Tale of Two Cities. What contemplation would Sydney Carton have had before committing to his final scene? 

Parade of Follies -- Continued!

I’m hardly a fit source of an antiphon to N. T. Wright’s pithiest critiques of western theology, but the more I thought about the damage that moralizing anthropology, paganizing soteriology, and platonizing eschatology have done to how we think about our identity in Christ and what it means in this world, the more I thought to answer those three critiques with three echoes of my own:

• dehumanizing Christology: probably in answer to the modernist/fundamentalist divide of 130 years ago, the more-devout-than-intellectual end of the faith (as of a tug-of-war rope) has clung so tightly to the resurrection and Jesus’ divinity that we’ve held less to his humanity than we ought to have. It has done us no good.
• hierarchicalizing ecclesiology: whether it’s a succession of bishops thing, or operating under a covering of authority, or just being loyal to the Pastor or whatever, we have given more allegiance to Paul’s saying “find trustworthy men to place over each congregation” than to Jesus’ earlier “call no one father”. You don’t even have to be a raging feminist to see what damage that has caused. (I suspect this is what Rev. 13.11's  “beast that looks like a lamb but speaks like a dragon” refers to: hierarchical authority becomes beast-like in the end, inevitably; lamb-like refers to its self-identity, largely accepted of followers of Jesus who was led like a lamb to the slaughter; dragon-like: ultimately the agenda is more congruent with the purposes of hell, with all the subtlety of a Screwtape, than with that of heaven)
• imperializing the parousia: we forget that the purity of the figurative raiment we want to claim comes from being dipped in the blood, not of Jesus’ enemies but of Jesus himself, and we anticipate his return as a moment when he will wreak mayhem on his enemies – as if he would forget his own teaching on how to treat ememies.

So I present here, in what Tom Wright might view as an unwanted tribute (but his three critiques inspired this from me) my quick list of three “other” baleful influences on our theology. I have no credentials that you should pay attention to what I say but if anything catches and holds your attention, take heed, not necessarily to what I write but to whatever truth Papa brings to your mind in interaction with it.

Of the three, I feel I am on shakiest ground around ecclesiology. The other two ring through my heart as truisms that should be obvious to anyone who has given the matters even passing examination, especially in view of the ways I see them playing out in the ways people calling themselves Christian are behaving in North America these days.

Parade of Follies -- Platonizing our Eschatology

"Eschatology" – the study of the last things – typically this branch of Christian thought is dominated by "heaven", "hell", Jesus' return, the "millennium". Plato's philosophy, such as we understand of it, in broad sketches, held that what is unseen about people is better, more lasting, than what can be seen: mind, soul, heart etc. over body. And that a disembodied bliss was the best people could hope for after death. But enough of definitions:

"We believe in … the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting." (Apostles’ Creed)

This is the last of N. T. Wright’s “three great quibbles” with modern western theology and it may be the hardest to really get one’s head around. What we typically say about final destiny is slightly other than what scripture teaches; and things we are not saying that the authors of scripture might deem essential and are embodied in the creed, what Wright is calling us to uphold, are closely tied to a “vocational anthropology” as opposed to a “moral” one: our final state, if is about a vocation to be restored, requires that our standard expectations about a post-death existence be thoroughly re-worked.

“If you believe in Jesus, you’ll go to heaven when you die. If you don’t, you’re going to go to hell.” That’s the simplistic message I heard when I was a child. Let’s leave hell out of this item for the moment – but I’ll refer you to Jersak’s Her Gates Will Never Be Shut for an intro to that spectrum.

And I grew up with a family story about an uncle I never met, suffering about 100 years ago, at age 15 of Hodgkins Lymphoma. He reported seeing Jesus (whom, of course, he had not seen) coming to him with his older brothers and sisters (who all pre-deceased his birth) just before he breathed his last breath.

So, along with traditional Christian belief, I believe that there is some state where the personality is separated from the body during death, but in some form that allows for recognition and relationship. But the teaching of Jesus and the apostles – as well as  at least some Jewish teaching before Jesus – promises a resurrection of the righteous – a resurrection into new bodies that will not be subject to death and decay, that will be similar to, yet different from, the bodies we have now.

This ultimate fate is quite different, I think, from what is in people’s imaginations with the phrase “going to heaven when you die” or “crossing the rainbow bridge” or whatever. This is quite different from the ultimate hope of many eastern religions of all the human selves being absorbed and dissipated into the divine nature (not even really a “self”) in a way even less differentiated than the “founders” within the Star Trek – Deep Space Nine story: these can join together in a vast, near-planet-wide lake called the “great link”, but individuals can emerge from it at will or need.

Some may claim that resurrected bodies within a renewed universe versus disembodied spirits inhabiting some “islands of the blessed” is a distinction without a difference, and it may in fact be so when push comes to shove and you ask individuals what they mean by these terms and you start driving them towards expressing distinct aspects of what they would desire for themselves in such an endpoint if it were a true account of a final post-death destination.

A TV show such as “The Good Place” makes it obvious how hard it is to imagine what a final destiny might actually be like. I am in full agreement with Wright on this quibble. As I stated in describing “moralizing our anthropology”, the stereotypical description of heaven bears little to no attraction for me. In the same way that Eric Liddell said, “When I run, I feel God’s pleasure,” when I write great software, there’s an affirmation from God that I feel in that act: that good code honours him at least as much as a great worship song or inspiring sermon, or other more traditional endeavours. To say our future “hope” is disembodied bliss makes, to my mind, a mockery of the extravagant promise implicit in, for instance (once again), I Corinthians 2.9. And this distinction is important to me.

Parade of Follies -- Paganizing our Soteriology

This title is a bit more "inside baseball" to the Christian world -- and for readers who do not identify that way, I apologize. My writing conceit is to fit things into two pages -- in this series into one page -- and part of the cost for that is resorting to mnemonic terms which will sometimes make the text a trifle opaque. Sorry, not sorry.

But in this essay title, I'm using two highly compressed and technical terms. By Paganizing, Wright and I mean conforming the Christian message to widespread other-religious forms, outlined for instance in Mimetic Theory by René Girard, where "balance" and "order" (and "proper" hierarchy as opposed to equality -- more on that some other time) are restored by choosing a victim and pouring the community's hate out on that one. The story of the crucifixion in its barest formfits very neatly into that framework but proper understanding of the event from the Christian position points elsewhere.

By Soteriology, Wright and I are referring to the branch of Christian Theology that tries to categorize and understand deeply what "salvation" (σωτηρία -- so-tay-'ree-a -- "Saviour" was, incidentally, a standard imperial title: Julius Caesar was said to have saved the empire from the civil war) is, how it works, operates, what God does, what people do, etc. Wright used it in his three-word phrases because it is such a powerful mnemonic.

The "numbered" footnotes come from my off-web composition. I'm going to re-read this and try to identify the tersest, most arcane elements here for similar exposition as above in lettered footnotes.

It is not hard to invite someone into new life in Christ but it can be tricky to bring up the subject at all. It can be complex to give even a minimally coherent whole account of the matter. It can be painful to navigate around the hurts that someone may have received at the hands of authority figures within church groups in their past – without enumerating them here, nor imbibing in the “No True Scotsman” fallacy. But at some point, one who without external duress offers himself to the most brutal death imaginable and forgives his tormentors is a compelling picture.

It’s relatively easy to express analogies for what Jesus’ death was for from things that the New Testament writers said about it. The thing is simple enough that a pre-schooler can fall in love with it (I did) and follow it for the rest of one’s life.

The difficulty comes in when we try to articulate precisely what was going on in technical terms. This is not to say that the exercise is futile and ought not to be attempted, only that it’s difficult, fraught and has divided more friends over more generations than the years many of us will live out.

Was Jesus human? Was he also God? Did he only appear to be God? Did he only appear to be human? Was he only God some of the time? Did God really die?<a> In the first generation, nobody doubted that Jesus had been nailed to a cross and died, nor that he appeared alive afterwards to easily identifiable people who could give an account of having seen him<1>.

The Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds settled these questions after centuries of arguments and pitched battles over the details. Then there was the running “why?” – was it to store up merits for us all? was it to restore God’s honour in the face of our disobedience? was it a gesture to make it plain he was not angry with us?

The most common western answer has typically settled on sin having incurred a blood debt with God that Jesus’ death was sufficient to cover for all mankind – or at least for the Elect<b>.

This picture, still widely preached, has an unfortunate resemblance to a father requiring the death of his own son for some religious purpose. Given how many other possible resonances are available, and how Jesus’ death is an echo of Isaac’s near-sacrifice by Abraham, which seems in one sense to be saying, “nope! I never meant you to actually do that”, due consideration ought to be given to the possibility that something else is going on here.

René Girard talks about Jesus’ death being the death-knell to the perfect-victim pattern in human history. Kruger and Young posit that the Father and Jesus (and the Spirit) were never separate, not even in Jesus’ death – that the cry of Psalm 22.1<c> by Jesus on the cross was not of dereliction, but a reference to the whole Psalm<2>. A particularly well-loved modern Christian worship song makes it sound as though “the wrath of God” something like licked its chops at Jesus’ death<3>

Whatever the cross was, I think it’s as much a mistake to cling to any explanation that makes God sound like an ancient bloodthirsty deity as I think it is to dogmatize any other medieval doctrinal tic.<d>
--
<1> I Corinthians 15:3-8 – an interesting run of “Greek-as-a-Second-Language” text within Paul’s acro-verb-ic text. Scholars argue strongly that this text dates back to within 5 years of Jesus’ resurrection.
<2> And they’re not the only scholars to point that out, e.g. N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God
<3> In Christ Alone (Keith Getty/Stuart Townend). Some fellowships re-write that line, the original composers object.
<a> The history of this debate over the first 300 years or so of Christianity makes fascinating reading if you're into that sort of thing, but the best summary of the results of that debate are probably to be found in "The Apostles' Creed", "The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed" and "The Chalcedonian Definition" -- all documented reasonably well on Wikipedia.
<b> In some framings, only some people, the chosen ones, are destined to be saved, others to be condemned. Using that term here, is a reference to those frames. The term itself shows up in a verse that confers no advantage on the elect, Matthew 24:24.
<c> "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
<d> if you're familiar with the pools of doctrinal positions either adamantly held to or adamantly opposed to by churches whose stream of thought stretches back to the 16th century or back through the times when Christendom dominated the west, you won't have to think too hard to figure out some of the things I'm pointing at with my elbow here. "iykyk" is a wonderful mnemonic, too!

Parade of Follies – Moralizing our Anthropology

N. T. Wright has laid three critiques against modern evangelical theology. I heard them and pondered them, and I think he’s right. They are “Moralizing our Anthropology”, “Paganizing our Soteriology” and “Platonizing our Eschatology”. I want to talk here about “moralizing our anthropology”, what it means to me, and why and how far I see it to be a valid critique.

Anthropology in its broadest sense is simply our understanding of people, from ἄνθρωπος (man, as in mankind) and λόγος (word, -ology is a common “study-of” suffix in English). The anthropology conceived of here is not one of the branches of anthropology listed in the Wikipedia article but the theological conception of what a human is.

Ever since I was a child I remember hearing sermons that implied, not even subtly, that the most important detail about any human being was whether they were a good person or not (and none of us are good in ourselves). And in the face of universal fallenness, the next important question was whether we were in a “saved” or “damnable” state. From this flowed all kinds of concern over predestination or not, “perseverance” or not (back-sliding? irreversible back-sliding?), “security” or not and how to relate one to another based on that state. Mix into it the importance of doctrinal distinctives and I don’t think it’s hard to see what kind of problems, in simple human relationships, never mind in Christian to Christian fellowship this could lead to.

Add in the rise of not just Christian pluralism but religious (and irreligious) pluralism, getting so caught up in such a Most Important Question Facing Anyone could distort the ability to relate human-to-human in normal, productive ways.

Even more, if what matters most is one’s moral standing in a “salvation sense”, then it’s possible that the subtler “character” issues might go by the board. They shouldn’t but if preaching is so focused on altar calls that it seldom deals with virtue (much less with civic virtue), that’s another problem. (And civic virtue, the softer skills that it takes to perform well at loving and living with those in the closest parts of one’s community is crucial.) Those are the resonances I hear in “moralizing our anthropology.”

Beyond that, and I think this is where Wright’s emphasis lands harder, on the second touch: what has God saved us for? The stereotype of sitting on clouds and playing harps has never appealed to me, falling far below the vision cast in I Corinthians 2.9 – which feels to me like a divine game of “you’ll never guess” or “top that one”. A better answer is right there waiting for us to see in Genesis 1 and 2.

This world, all of it – not just Earth, not just the Solar System, not just the Milky Way, nor the Observable Universe, but all of it – was built to be a temple to God’s glory. We were placed here as images of God’s person and our calling is to reflect God’s wise rule into creation and to reflect creation’s glory back to God. How big a calling that is, what it will take in its entirety to fulfill it, is not yet known but the possibilities extend far, far beyond what “eye has not seen nor has ear heard nor has it entered into the heart of any man” can possibly mean for us yet. Our moral choices, agency, alignment, repentance are important but are ultimately only one sliver (I want to attenuate not nullify its importance) of all that God means us to fulfill. I am daily staggered by these thoughts and how good the news we have to share is in terms of destiny, how far beyond a simplistic “moral standing”.

Some Theological Summaries

From the professional to the personal, and yet this and the pieces that will follow leading into the summer are of significant public import as well. I have been writing some "two-pagers" but I have a small stack of one-pagers that serve as an intro for something that has struck me as of highest current urgency.

The long version of the thoughts that led to this urgence are not easy to fit into this format, nor would the time required to compose them fit very well into the ways my life is organized. But here is an intro to some pieces I have called a parade of follies, as much as anything because I do not measure up to the scholar that the first half is summarizing, yet I deign to put my notions up beside his here, in the imitation that only a devoted but incompetent fan would dare to put out.

Tom Wright Names Our Theological Follies

This series of eight one page (or-less) pieces cover, first, N. T. Wright’s pithiest critiques of western Christian theology.

While there’s nothing here that corresponds exactly, for instance, to C. Baxter Kruger’s and Wm. Paul Young’s thoughts on “union” versus “separation” (which in one point is almost as important, as a single thought, as Tom’s three points are taken together) these are three of the biggest problems, the deepest ways in which the Zeitgeist has infected how we think about God, about Jesus, about our relation to them and how this present period in the story of salvation is likely to come to conclusion.

Briefly:

We have reduced our interest in who or what people are by being so concerned about moral standing and position in light of eternal things as to set the value of most of what any man or woman is or does to approximately nought. (moralized our anthropology)

We have espoused theories of what Jesus’ death meant which when pared down to their logical minimums make Good Friday look like a case of cosmic child abuse (to which Baxter and Paul would say, “Amen!” and “just exactly as we have been telling you”). (paganized our soteriology)

And we have clung to understandings of our destiny beyond the grave that short-change the hope that the Jews had in speaking of resurrection and painted a picture that bears little resemblance to what must be the secret in the Father’s heart when he had one of his prophets say what Paul quotes in I Corinthians 2:9 (eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart of any man the things which God has prepared for those who love him), a verse which strikes me as Papa saying to us, “Guess! Whatever you can imagine, it’ll be better – not like ‘vegetables’, but like a holiday at a beach – on the other side of the world!”. Instead, under the weight of a memory of “sacred tradition”, we have been settling for the best that the Greeks could imagine. (platonized our eschatology)

In the following single pages, I first summarize each of these ideas, as I understand them, in one page, in a form that should be easier to consume than a 40 page chapter in a monograph might do, yet more transparently than the summarizing three word phrases can. (like in number alone to the silly phrases a Canadian politician has been using to raise his profile)

I follow up with three items of my own that Tom’s items called forth out of my heart – not that he needed (or wanted) an answer from this quarter, but that’s the way his words worked on me.

So here you go: Wright’s Quick Critiques explained, then Arthur’s Add-Ons (also numbering three) as chasers. Truly, a parade of follies (where the folly is all mine)

And I’m going to follow that with another thought about the intersection of religious convictions and how we western Christians are moving in the world that I consider of paramount and general importance.

Opposing Bill C22 (yet another security-backdoor bill) with Manly Firmness

Dear Ms. Royer,

I can't remember how many times the government of Canada has introduced bills in the last 2 decades asking for law-enforcement back-doors on secure communications. And I can't remember how many of them I missed the opportunity to speak up against them, as much as anything because every time we do this, it makes us look like idiots; if it were ever to pass it would make us all more vulnerable to bad actors; and really, can we just learn from others' mistakes and the words of experts and just drop this?

Earlier this evening I was watching "Vera" (the "Christmas Special" about a student group reunion on an island only accessible by car at low tide), and once again it struck me how Britain's surveillance state has used that show, Morse, Midsomer, all the detective shows to give good press to their pervasive system of CCTV cameras (which a certain band held up to ridicule on their low-budget music video -- paid for by editing and postage stamps on FOIA requests) -- which episodes always strike me as to how lazy CCTV systems made policing there. This highlights the first problem with legislated back doors in encryption: why do the hard work of human intel and gumshoe investigation if you can just unlock the communication. The automatic comparison to the PRC's Public Security Bureau (公安部) are striking to me -- the last work I did at *****, one of the things that drove me out, was realizing that enabling GRE of IPv6 traffic for routers destined for [Chinese companies] was to aid the surveillance state. Or it reminds me of Russia's Interior Ministry. Our law enforcement should be ashamed to come out in support of things that grant them those kinds of powers.

But it gets worse. If every secure channel is available through keys known only to the participants, the chances that a bad actor will get access to everyone's communication (as happened in 2024 with China's Salt Typhoon attack on American targets) is unthinkably impossible. Force access through a law enforcement key or key infrastructure, and the occurrence becomes practically a certainty -- especially over the long haul. You may be being sold on C22 making Canadians safer by helping law enforcement find the bad guys quicker but the bad guys will use illegal encryption anyway -- and our police will be foiled ---- AND bad actors have a FANTASTICALLY valuable target to hit for: get the right key and you can unlock all Canadians' so-called secure messaging -- and we'll all be walking around digitally naked in a hostile world. Your government should be ashamed to consider in any kind of a positive light any measure that has a finite (and significant) chance of leading to that outcome.

Finally, it's not as though this is new news that a back door is a bad idea. Everybody knew it already even before the Clipper chip was put out as a tentative standard for secure telephony. The security boffins knew it was a bad idea and fortunately mobilized the public to oppose it, so it didn't become a widespread, mandatory-because-everyone-uses-it like gmail or Microsoft Office, standard and it just died.

This bill must die, too, and someone needs to drive a stake through its heart so that it never comes back. Please. Oppose it (to borrow a phrase from our neighbours) "with manly firmness" (read that as "with adult firmness" -- their founding Fathers weren't paragons of gender neutrality). Oppose it in caucus. Oppose it in committee. Oppose it on the floor. And sneer confidently that you're siding with the smart and the good people to mock the proposal to scorn on any occasion when it arrives in the future.

I have been having a stressful week because of all the other things your government is doing that I see ending badly for the welfare of all my neighbours here in Canada, too many to enumerate now -- and then along with the suspension of bicycle travel to work because physics overcame physical structure too many times (not to my injury, thankfully! but to my impediment), this (C22) comes along: the bad idea of escrow or secondary key that will just never go away.

I am not a drug dealer but I treasure the freedom to be private.

I have no vile secrets, neither do I write love letters and last-will-and-testament instructions on postcards.

I want our police to catch all the miscreants, but I am UTTERLY and to my last breath opposed to surrendering one ounce of my privacy to make their job easier. They're already doing a pretty good job and they don't need this kind of a short cut -- or if they feel they do need it, it comes at too high a price in the welfare of myself and all my neighbours that we should even DEIGN to consider the request, let alone to grant it.

And so I will always say, Sincerely and with utmost respect -- despite the straits of tension and inner panic its repeated consideration is inducing.

Arthur N. Klassen

Some Like It Personal, Some Like It Professional

I insist on doing both. Why am I here and not <blank>?

• registering my own domain? I could but I'm not that serious about establishing a brand.
• wordpress? even more work.
• substack? okay maybe this one would be a better fit, but then I'd feel pressure to do this regurlarly. I mean, the first blog I've read that's primarily on substack is that of Heather Cox Richardson and her volume is definitely not something I'm even capable of aspiring to. She's so big she's been typo-squatted! on substack! And there are others. Many others. I'm too busy going back and forth to work (but not driving!), trying to pull my weight on the chores, being a decent human being to all and sundry etc. etc. to try to measure up to any of those

Naw, when it comes to posting, I'm more like that old dweeb who built a myspace page back when they were big, let it rot and then went back and started posting there again later (while family and friends stand around waiting for something awful to happen, hoping they won't be embarrassed by the result). And no, I'm not doing myspace either. I'm way more about the words and ideas than the pictures and hot takes. I'll do some of that because for me, the world is an array of play buttons, on songs, on poems, on phrases, on movie clips and here, I'm gonna let 'em all leak out (in a controlled fashion if I can remember to do that). But I'll do it in text and links, to wikipedia, to the Things themselves, mostly.

This one's going to be more "perfeshunal" if it's possible to do that in a post that's used the words "naw", "dweeb", "myspace" and "perfeshunal".

I develop software. I've been doing that for 40-odd years now. Sometimes, when my employer has been a Canadian subsidiary of an American company, I've been called an engineer internally, but that's not on. I'm not even a lapsed EIT, let alone a full P.Eng. In fact, I'd been doing this for 10 years before I had even EITs as colleagues, let alone full P.Eng's (there were more than two at Dynapro when I was there). But I knew that in order to become what it needed to be, software had to become more engineering and less development (magic). And now I work for a medical technology company and, well, all the software must be engineered so it can do Great Good without egregious risk.

Some time while I was at Creo, I was reading some culture-of-development book (I think it was Steve Maguire's Writing Solid Code but google isn't helping me out on this one) and there were a list of 9 priorities, in two different orders. The one was put up as a straw man, with the other, clearly more correct, beside it. The more correct list stuck in my brain (as such things do), and I've been using it as a byword ever since. I call it "The Sacred Nine" (I think I was reading Stephen Lawhead's Song of Albion Cycle at the same time and I thought being a "code druid" a cool idea. I didn't get any blue tattoos to back it up but I went in pretty deep, at least in my own head, hence the pompous slightly mystical tome).

So here they are (and whoever you are, if you happen to read this, if I've got some of the middle ones in the wrong order, I take the blame on myself alone):

The Sacred Nine 

1. Correctness
2. Testability
3. Global Efficiency
4. Maintainability / Clarity
5. Consistency
6. Local Efficiency
7. Size
8. Personal Expression
9. Personal Convenience

If we work together for more than two months, you'll hear me rattle them off at least once. In some ways this is a motherhood-and-apple-pie list for software but I like having it explicit. I like having the last three on. the. list. In that order. By their true names -- by the time I'd seen this list I had seen those last three cloak themselves as something else more important-sounding, and creep their way up the list to establish themselves as -- if possible! -- Most Important Things (as if that could ever be ANYTHING but correctness).

I came up before things like Test Driven Development, or being Test Infected, before any testing / mocking frameworks were in common use on "PC-class" computers (where I did ALL my development before Infonet). My first source control system was MPW Projector -- before that everything was escrowed floppy disks -- and the next ones I used were MS Delta (discontinued for the dumbest reasons, also known inside Microsoft as SLM or "slime" -- no independent link for this system survives) and MS Source (Un)Safe. I can't imagine what my life would be like now without git -- thank you again, Linus Torvalds (also the creator of Linux).

When I came across this list, it was obvious:

• software has to be correct; no correctness? no value (think Pentium floating point bug, which spawned the "Borg" spin-off: "I am Pentium of borg. Prepare to be approximated")
• if you wanted to say "this software is correct", having extensive enough tests to prove it was obviously desirable, too. So when C++ came of age, and a colleague brought in googletest and googlemock at Teradici, I fell in love with my favourite language all over again
• when you're doing stuff, do the big things the right way (global efficiency) or your users will curse your memory every time your "pessimized" code steals another slice of their lives through waiting.
• tell the obvious truth in your code (maintainability/clarity): computer op code sets are so complex now that the compiler's optimizer will be better at optimizing your code through arcane constructions than you will be
• write new code in the same dialect (consistency) as the code beside what you're inserting is doing -- and do the small things right (local efficiency)
• size used to be important -- I've had colleagues who pushed it up (at least emotionally) to #2 in day to day operations (this was before good test/mock frameworks were available on our end of the market)
• and this is a creative effort (expression) that takes up piles of our time (convenience) so the last two are CLEARLY important to include. At the bottom -- I've had colleagues/managers who pushed them up, in interchangeable order to items 1 and 2 -- but always under different, more important sounding names (I name no perps here). 

So there you go. That's the Sacred Nine and I've finally written them down somewhere independently linkable, something I've been meaning to do for a long time, except mostly my life has been full of life except when I'm trying to sleep, (audible version) so I didn't get around to doing this until now.

(not quite a "Sea of Blue" but edging there... this is one place where I can let the noises in my head bother you without feeling the need to apologize)

It's 16 months old but still topical

I wrote this awhile ago but it keeps seeming topical and I want to put it out there. There may be an up-tick on these in case anyone cares. I've been writing things off in a corner and this, from a series of "two-pagers" that I've come to refer to as "tract-lets" is #22:

As a Guy To Guys

(On Martin Luther King Day, 2025) If what I am about to write doesn’t apply to you, ignore it. But before you ignore it, do me a favour and consider what you would do, what you have done in situations such as these: Today the US could have inaugurated its first woman president, a mixed race black- south-asian woman of more or less good character and a track record of serving the people who elected her at every level so far, on Martin Luther King Day, and instead they inaugurated an adjudicated rapist, felon on 34 counts of fraud in an attempt to subvert an election – with around 50 other counts of state and federal indictments duly rendered by grand juries, not political gangs – but, for a variety of reasons, untried.

The only explanation I can conjure up that comes close to satisfying the facts as I see them is that we guys are a pack of racist, sexist, excrement dispensers (RSED). (I’m sorry. I just can’t bring myself to using a terser, more colloquial term.) And what’s worse, we’ve co-groomed the women in our lives to hold the same prejudices – if not in fact, then at least in effect.

Long before this “Rough Beast”’s<1> first election, David Sedaris compared being undecided in a certain election to this: when given a dinner choice of some chicken dish and a plate of feces and broken glass, asking how the chicken was prepared<2>. I wish the comparison were becoming less topical but it isn’t. And it’s not entirely an American problem, either. Over the course of Justin Trudeau’s term in office, he has treated more than one woman disrespectfully, but I call to mind especially, the case of Jody Wilson-Raybould (J W-R). In every case, but especially with regard to this attorney-general, the loss of standing, of reputation affected the various women FAR more than it affected Trudeau.

I said, from his swearing-in as our Prime Minister, that he suffered from being a performative twerp. I have been shunned by some acquaintances of otherwise good will over that remark, but I stand by it. He knows how to say the right thing. All too often he has no idea how to do it. In nothing did this ailment show up so starkly as in how he treated JW-R, but it affected others, too. With JW-R’s departure, Chrystia Freeland could have – should have – been groomed to take over from Trudeau. She was not. She was loyal – too loyal one could say until almost the end, when she was asked to make a statement on Canada’s finances that she had points of disagreement with, at the same time as she was to be shuffled out of the very high profile Finance portfolio to some other of significantly less standing. It seems to me that Justin felt too threatened by her.

Now, she has a reputation of being “damaged goods” politically and the tar of the later parts of Trudeau’s term is sticking to her, so that

(a) if she were chosen as leader of the Liberal Party she would likely lead it to a defeat similar to the sinking ship that was delivered to Kim Campbell and which she steered to an undignified appointment with an iceberg, but

(b) she’s not likely to be chosen anyway – whether any of the other options has a particularly good chance of keeping government out of the hands of a fascist-adjacent performative twerp who is probably also a foreign asset. (the current leader of the opposition)

To my mind this situation has come about almost entirely because the voters, especially the men (and even in Canada) are largely RSEDs. And it’s not just white guys. I mentioned this idea to a Macao-Chinese co-worker, narrowing it to white guys and he said, “no. We are too.” And I’ve seen more than one article about the state of play around gender and “white-ness” in south Asia: When “eye candy” is “needed”, especially the women being so presented are unvaryingly of more pale skin than not. This situation is intolerable and needs to change. And so, as a guy to guys, I’m going to call it out.

Prove to yourself, in terms that might convince a black or brown woman that you aren’t an RSED, or else. Or else, be willing to assume that you’re probably acting like an RSED some of the time, even if you aren’t actually playing the part 24x7x365. Look at your voting patterns, your preference patterns in politics, in business, in every kind of relationship. Stare them down, each one, like Chuck Norris wearing the last two verses of Psalm 139 like X-ray glasses.

A young man of my acquaintance once thought of spending a “gap year” in Asia and made a passing remark to his Mother about finding a wife among the women he might meet there and asked her (he thought of her as a pretty open-minded and accepting person) what she would think of such a thing. Her response was that she would cry – and that left him stunned.

I tell the story because the “grooming” into racism, and like it, into sexism, is subtle and durable, deep and pervasive, like the extent to which Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown’s neighbours were perceived by him to be in league with evil powers. That story has multiple lessons and resonances to read, but one of them could be this: that when a community has been devoted to any kind of evil for multiple generations, it becomes a structure that is hard to oppose, even if the community loyalty to that evil (as in the case of that young man’s mother) isn’t overt or intentional, but comes clothed in concern and care. In the case of this young man and his Mother, perhaps it was cultural differences, or what would become of mixed race children, or maybe she just didn’t want her grandchildren to have divided loyalties between living nearby or near to their other grandparents. Who knows!? And at some point, what does it matter? The prejudice is still problematic.

And this is not to impugn the Mother – any more than Obama told stories about his white grandparents to impugn them – but as a demonstration of how deep-seated and thorough-going these racist structures are – and therefore how deep-seated and thorough-going the accompanying sexist structures are, too. Nobody is immune from a tendency toward bias. You’re not. I’m not. “This is my trouble, these were my fathers. So how am I supposed to feel, living on the rim of the broken wheel? ... You and me we are the break in the broken wheel, a bleeding wound that will not heal...”<4> Or cue up the better known line from Solzhenitsyn about the line between good and evil going through every human heart.

If you’re unattached and looking for a potential relationship, where do your preferences as to looks run? Whiter? Blonder? “Caucasian”? What does the record look like? Do you put up with mansplaining when you see it happening? Do you mansplain? Are you as ready to follow a woman’s lead as a man’s in work/life? Time to grow up folks, to leave childish things like this behind us, to see with new eyes.

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<1>Olear, Greg. Rough Beast. 2024. referring to "The Second Coming" by W. B. Yeats

<2>Sedaris, David. “Undecided”. The New Yorker, October 20, 2008

<3>Joke line: “Chuck Norris doesn’t read books. He stares at them until they quail and hand over the info he wants.”

<4>Cockburn, Bruce. “Broken Wheel”, Inner City Front.