Trust Issues

One year, when I was in Elementary School, there was a poster contest for a carnival in town. It was a thing the city was putting on, so they had the kids in each school make posters to promote it, and each school chose a winner for best poster. If you won, you would get free tickets to the carnival, yada yada yada. So I went home and drew up a poster. It was Donald Duck, telling the kids to go to the carnival because it was going to be so much fun. Yada yada yada. And it turned out pretty good. I won the contest.

So the posters go up on the wall of the school, in the big hallway near the office, and they did some little ceremony with me. I can’t quite remember the details, but the principal shook my hand and such. Which was all cool. But then this one lady, she was a teacher or a secretary or something, I honesty don’t remember why she was there, but she turned to me and asked me a question. She said: “The picture is really great, but why did you spell the words all wrong.”

I was a little dumbfounded because what I had done was obvious. Or, at least, it should have been. Donald Duck has his peculiar way of speaking. A kind of scratchy duckese. So I had spelled whatever it was I had him saying on the poster phonetically to reflect that. No one had questioned this, all the way to the victory circle. And that’s what I told the woman. “I just tried to spell it like it would sound if Donald Duck said it.” It was, let me say it again: obvious. But the woman seemed surprised. She said, “Oh.” Then she looked at the poster for a second and looked at me and said, “Well. I think it would have been better if you had spelled the words correctly.” She said the word “correctly” as if it was a word I would have a hard time understanding. I remember that the principal gave her a look, but he didn’t say anything. After all, she was a grown up like him. He just gave me a pat on the head and sent me back to class.

Now. I mention all this because, in a small way, it was a life changing moment. For the first time in my life I looked at an adult and thought to myself: This is a stupid person. I wasn’t thinking mean about it. I didn’t look down on her. I just realized that she didn’t get something that was simple. Something I understood, and I was just a kid.

Seriously. I thought about it all that day, and again and again over the years. Grown ups CAN be stupid. Grown ups CAN be wrong. Some grown ups MIGHT not know more than kids, let alone other grown ups.

Can you see how this could change one’s world view? Can you see how this one little incident could undermine a kids trust in the adult world?

I’d like to say that the adults of the world have regained my trust. You know, in general.

I’d really like to.


Peace to you.


© LW Publishing 2011

Definition

Pilot asked Jesus, “What is truth?” It seems to have been a rhetorical question. Pilot’s answer to his own question would have probably been, “Truth is whatever I need it to be” or “Truth is what works for me.”

How about...
    “Truth is what is.” Given some contexts, you might say, “Truth is what is, independent of what we think or know about what is.” Einstein would have agreed with that, I think. If and/or how we know what is, well, that’s a different subject. But if something is, then its existence isn’t shaped by what we think or know about it. If it’s physical, and we touch it in some way, say to measure it, or whatever, then maybe it is shaped by our touch. But to measure it in our minds doesn’t change anything except, maybe, our minds.

So I think about God. God said, “I AM.” Jesus said, “Before Abraham was born, I AM.”

We can talk about God being there or not, but in the end, it doesn’t matter what we think or say about it. Our “experience” of God (or non experience) may be subjective by degrees, but God is not subjective. God is either real or not.  God exists or does not exist as a person or a thing (though not a physical thing, unless some people are right, thinking the universe is a "god"). If God is “there,” then God isn’t shaped by our opinions anymore than the Grand Canyon is. We can talk subjectively all day long about whether or not we think the Grand Canyon is a beautiful thing or a big, ugly hole in the ground. But arguing about whether or not it’s there wouldn’t change whether or not it’s there. That would be the kind of empty philosophy that makes people want to stay as far away from philosophy classes as possible. It’s either there or it’s not. Opinions don’t matter. It’s not subjective. It just is. Or it isn’t.

I remember once (and I hate to admit this), I was watching the old Sally Jesse Raphael show. She had some overbearing “religious” people on with some carny show types who were completely over the top and she just let them at each other. The conflict was the point of the show. It was quite entertaining in a despicable sort of way. But Sally herself became frustrated with the “religious” people. They were, after all, kind of idiotic. And, in her frustration, Sally put her face right up in the camera and said something like, “I will NOT believe in a hateful, vengeful God.”

I get what she was saying. I get what a lot of people are saying when they try to define God. They want God, if God exists, to be a certain way. They have some personal ideal that’s subjective. And on an emotional level this is understandable. If you’ve been hurt a lot, you want a “god” who will stop the hurt. If you’re full of doubt, you want a “god” who will affirm your thoughts against doubt.

But if God is there, if God is, God can’t be defined by what has been created. God can only be discovered in some way. If God exists, and I believe God exists, our discovery of God does not change God’s nature. God is not whatever we want God to be. If God is there, then God is the one who does the defining.

God is not defined by us. We are defined by God.


Peace to you.




© LW Publishing 2010

Hoax

When I was a child, I was sitting in my Grandfather’s living room. He lived in the city of Detroit, where he had come to find work many years before. All of my memories of my grandfather are from after he retired. We would visit my grandparents at their house in Detroit constantly. I would watch my grandpa drink Maalox right out of the bottle, constantly sipping it all day long, to keep his stomach in check.

This same grandfather, so the story goes, was once asked to play banjo and fiddle (that’s “violin” for you arteests) for the Grand Ole Opry in Tennessee, but he refused because it didn’t pay enough to support his large family. But he still pulled out his fiddle and banjo on occasion and played a little something for us kids, which I absolutely loved. But it was hard to get him to do it. He’d say, “My author-rye-tiss is given me trouble,” and that was the end of it.

So. I was sitting with Grandpa, watching TV, and a commercial came on for the brand new Disney World in Florida. I was transfixed. I wanted to head out there immediately and take up permanent residence. But when the commercial was over, Grandpa turned to me to say something, which he didn’t do very often. He just didn’t talk much. But he turned to me and said, “I don’t believe it! It’s a bunch a nonsense! Cain’t be no such thing as that Disney World! They’s a bunch of liars!”

For a moment I was startled, shaken up by the idea that I had somehow been duped by “The Powers That Be.” For a moment I took the word of my grandpa that Disney World wasn’t there and we were all being cruelly misguided by someone higher up than us. Considering that my life’s goal at that moment was to get to the fabled Land of Disney, this was quite disturbing.

But then I settled down and realized, for the first time, that my grandpa was just wrong.

I was not foolhardy enough to try and correct him. But years later I tried to make sense of what he said, and what I think is that Disney World was just too much for him. He had been born in 1899. He had been through the Great Depression. The world he grew up in was just so far removed from the images on the TV of Disney World that he simply could not even imagine a place like that existing. All of the colors and rides and music. All of those smiling people. It was just too much. So he dismissed it.

It seems to me that a lot of us do this with a lot of things. Some people dismiss joy and peace because it’s too far from their experience. Some people dismiss love and hope and forgiveness for the same reason. But just because we can’t imagine something doesn’t mean it’s not possible or true.

I have been to Disney World. It’s really there. Honest. And it’s amazing.

I just wish my grandfather could have seen it.

Ephesians 3:20-21
Peace to you.

And yes, that really is a guy from Kiss singing "When You Wish Upon A Star."


© LW Publishing 2010

The Highest Form of Musicality

I’m reading a new book called “Quantum,” by Manjit Kumar, which I am enjoying immensely. I’m about halfway through, so I can’t say anything about the book as a whole yet, but there is a quote from Albert Einstein in it that has really moved me. It just grabbed me and won’t let me go.

When Einstein read the published papers of physicist Niels Bohr, which explained the structure of atoms, Einstein said that for him it was, “the highest form of musicality in the sphere of thought.”

Man, I love that. It sits well with my soul.

It communicates this truth: some things just sing. Some things just click with us, in our minds, in our spirits — we identify with them both intellectually and emotionally as right and true — and it’s like hearing a perfect song, perfectly composed, perfectly played.


This is how I feel when I hear the name “Jesus.”





Philippians 2:9-11
Peace to you.

© LW Publishing 2010