MindSpinner

A couple of weeks ago, I prefaced this post with another (Scop talk - I), but between those introductory notes and this continuation, holiday travel intervened, along with the beginning of a new semester at school. That’s life, no?

My initial and limited foray into brain science has netted an understanding that we human beings are, among animals, uniquely storytellers. Our ability to construct elaborate beliefs and stories - of how things work, mean, and come to be - offered survival advantages to us over the course of human history in our families, tribes, ethnic groups, religious faiths, and nations. Evolutionists would say that the edge our mindspinning brains gave to members of our species led to the refinement of those capabilities. Creationists would say that our creator endowed us with these capacities - that we were made in God’s image. (Into that argument I am not headed. Why? Because at this point I’m interested in a different argument with compelling significance for all of us, whatever our belief systems.)

The nature of our relationship to others and to our environment has changed in essential ways because of globalization and because of the unfolding impact of human activity on the planet. Consequently, the stories we use to shape our perceptions of self, group, relationship, economics, government and the whole of reality must also adapt - otherwise the stories that served us on a smaller scale may doom us on a larger one.

There’s no end to the damage flawed stories and beliefs have done in the course of human history or can do in future on an ever larger scale. Certain powerful stories that have worked for some of us some of the time aren’t going to work for all of us for the rest of time. As a species we’ve got to take inventory, to think together, and to embrace stories that will sustain us. Or, simply put, we’ll reap the consequences of our inadequate perceptions and prove that we were not up to the challenge of living sustainably together on this earth.

This is an intimidating thesis, actually - just huge - and I am only one small chronically sleep-deprived person with too many other jobs and a thimbleful of spare time, so I haven’t a prayer of unfolding it the way it should be unfolded. The old, now unworkable stories pile up like a granite mountain, and I know I cannot move them or even erode them much.

I’ve just told myself a story about how things are, and that story shuts down possibility and comes close to bringing tears, so I take a deep breath and start over. I’ll write a few paragraphs about one thing and let it loose to do whatever work in the world it can do, because that is what each of us is given to do. It is not stewardship of a life to be passive and to cave in, to fail to say what needs to be said. I can steward a few paragraphs into being today, a few more next week, and so forth.

Almost three weeks ago I flew to DC. I don’t fly often, but I always ask for a window seat, and I look and look at the cities, the clouds and the land through the window, all the way up and all the way down. I see what I cannot see from the ground – how much is still forest, how much is city, how much is a patchwork of fields bounded by thin seams of darker green or threads of roadway. My thesis about our stories is big like that. I can’t garden the land from the plane. I can’t change the world with an idea too big for one person to voice effectively and authoritatively or to bring the world to hear. But I can come home and pull up the blackberry briar that sprouted in a crevice of the stone path, and I can write what asks to be said, one bit at time.

Last fall there was an afternoon when tornado warnings were predicted. After-school activities were cancelled, and students were allowed to pull out those cell phones we teachers are never supposed to see and use them to tell mom or dad, or in some cases, grandma, that there would be no ball practices or club meetings or academic competitions that afternoon. The students were abuzz, excited, apprehensive and totally unfocused on their assignment for last period. They chattered and playfully wrote their wills, and said, “We are preparing to die.” After all, a tornado had come through their town in 2004 while they were huddled in the basement hallway and smelly locker rooms. It tore up great trees, cleaved houses in two and decapitated rooftops; it ripped up the football field across the street, narrowly missing the school itself. Who was I to say their anxiety and nervous energy was unreasonable, given their experience?

Some students, the exceptions, diligently did their work. “What are you doing?” the writers of wills asked the doers of the assignment. “Don’t you know we could die today?”

I joked in return, “You are preparing to die, and they are preparing to live. This assignment is due tomorrow.”

“Yes, we are preparing to live!” chimed in the diligent, delighting in the retort.

Sure enough, we lived, and those who had prepared to die instead of preparing to live didn’t have their work the next day.

When I think about our beliefs and our stories, it occurs to me that we must as a species focus on business of preparing to live. Apocalyptic thinking tends to undermine that project, so the notion of impending apocalypse is the first story that’s got to adjust to the possibility of future and the desirability of making what future we have livable for ourselves, our children, and grandchildren.

According to a Newsweek poll, fifteen percent of American Christians believe Jesus will return in their lifetimes. (Thank you, Tim LaHaye. For an interesting read on LaHaye’s Left Behind series, see Joe Bageant .) My own son assures me, “The prophecies have been fulfilled; the end is soon.” Explanations follow, courtesy of a local Baptist church he attends with his father.

But anyone who knows anything of history knows that people have been believing that the end is at hand for a very long time. Jesus’ disciples interpreted the words of Jesus as meaning that he would return within their lifetimes. A Brief History of the Apocalypse offers a timeline of apocalyptic thinking sure to suggest that those of us who are sure we know what scripture says no one will know have a record of being wrong. And we are all still here. (I’ll speak within the Christian perspective here. No one who speaks outside Christianity is going to be readily heard within it.)

Let’s just suppose, for the sake of argument, that we who believe that end times are upon us are a little off in our calculations, and that Jesus doesn’t show for a hundred or two hundred or a thousand years. What then? What about the lives of our children and grandchildren on this planet?

I do not believe that preparing spiritually for the second coming of Christ need preclude preparing practically to make the world a sustainable and livable place together generation upon generation until Jesus shows up. Even a belief that Jesus may come back soon shouldn’t prevent or excuse Christians from taking care of a creation God pronounced good or facilitating peace on earth or taking care of the poor or the sick or simply trying to understand each other instead of branding each other infidels and getting more of God’s children, Christian and otherwise, killed in the process. In fact, preparing spiritually for the coming of the kingdom of God involves taking care of what God made and loves. When we do this, a measure of the kingdom of God arrives in our midst. It has no other way of finding meaningful expression in our world.

My word to those who believe end times are upon us is simply this - we will do best to prepare for the possibility of earthly tomorrows as well as the possibility of imminent Rapture. Else God may say to us, “Where is your homework? You haven’t prepared. I placed this creation in your hands, and what have you done?”