Means of Grace

At church I serve on the communion team. Communion, also known as the Lord's Supper or the Eucharist, is a ritual instituted by Jesus during the Passover meal with his disciples on the night he was arrested. He broke bread for them and told them it was his body given for them. Then he took a cup of wine and told them it was the new covenant in his blood, concluding, "Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me" (1 Corinthians 11:25).

So that's what we do, every Sunday. Every third week or so I serve. That means arriving early and tearing loaves of bread into bitesized portions and pouring wine and grape juice into lots of tiny little plastic cups set in trays. After the sermon we bring the trays up to the front and set them on the table. The pastor institutes the sacrament and then we stand at the front with the food as the church files past, telling each man, woman and child that this is "the body of Christ, broken for you," and "the blood of Christ, shed for you."

The small portions may be a little silly, but they mean that everyone can partake in the meal at the same time (followed immediately by the clink of a hundred plastic cups being set down). Then the pastor prays, we sing a song, we're blessed, and that's it. We on the team clean up the supplies and put them away for the next week.

Sometimes we do special things for the bread. Lately the first Sunday of every month we pray for another country specifically, and to go along with that we eat the bread of that nation. Sometimes too people in the congregation bake the bread, as I like to do being a hobbyist baker myself.

The precise nature of what happens at Communion can be hard to pin down, and different Christian groups hold different ideas. Roman Catholics and similar groups hold that the elements of bread and wine literally become the body and blood of Christ. On the other side, some groups of more recent vintage hold the elements are merely symbols intended to call Jesus to remembrance. The Reformed tradition in which my church stands holds a yet different idea. We believe the bread and wine are really just bread and wine, and yet that in their giving we truly and literally receive Christ and his grace for forgiveness of sins. God communicates his riches, riches greater than all the world's reserves, to us via these humble items. They are a means of grace.

Our position may seem like a fine distinction to draw but it makes a big difference. That we should receive the King of Glory through such ordinary means highlights that God is not limited; he can convey himself by whatever way he pleases. It also highlights that the initiative is all his and not ours. It is not through riches or feats of strength or moral piety that we reach God, though such a transaction would come naturally to us. Rather it is through the utterly common things around us that he has chosen.

It is also crucial that he is really there for us week after week, caring for us until such time as he shall actually return to claim us. We say during the ritual not only that "Christ has died," but also that "Christ is risen" and "Christ will come again." A mere memorial of his death will not suffice.

For today's bread I followed Jeffrey Hamelman's instructions for pain rustique, a French name for a simple bread. Indeed it requires no ingredients other than flour, water, salt, and a little bit of yeast. As is unfortunately my wont I arrived late to set up, and I was greeted by a small tide of nervous energy due to the delay I caused. In response I opened up the plastic bag and released a different kind of wave, the creamy aroma of the still-cooling loaves. As we tore them into pieces others came by the table to take in the smell, and one of us joked that we didn't need to tear everything up, that we could eat some of it now. We did, prompting others to come over and share.

As we cleaned up after the service we munched on extra bread in the back room. An older gentleman on the tear-down team named Bob asked if he could have some, and we gave him half of the small loaf that the pastor breaks in front of the congregation. He sat and ate it, and he marveled, saying "This bread is just so good. Does anyone know where it came from?"

"Well, yes," I said. "I made it."

"Get out of here."

"Really, I did. There's nothing special in it."

Bob had the rest of his bread in silence, and then even some more of the remaining fragments. On his way out he thanked me as the rest of us continued eating while washing, drying, and sipping wine from the little cups.

My takeaway from the experience was not that I must be a great baker. As the baker, I know that is not true. There is nothing special in the bread, and nothing special in preparing it. The ingenuity belongs to Hamelman and to centuries of European bakers. It is freely available. What amazed me was that despite the common nature of the ingredients and the practices, that the flour and the books are just sitting on shelves waiting to be made much of, my bread was received as something wondrously new or rare, as an awakening to taste buds that did not know they had missed it.

Even in a land of abundance such as our own there is a famine for true bread, though it is for anyone, anytime, for the asking and for the taking. It is truly common. Nothing need prevent all from having it.

Such is the bread of heaven.

We make our own sky.

All photos courtesy skabat169. Check out his photostream!

Ben was talking about the sky, so I thought I would talk about a sunrise I saw this week. But first, some cultural context.

When I was in high school I attended a camp called Night Camp for one week every summer. The premise of Night Camp is simple: you stay up all night and sleep during the day while camping out in the woods. The consequences of that premise are many and profound, but those are for another post. Suffice it to say that Night Camp was the defining experience of my high school years, and I worked at Camp Innabah where the camp is held for three of my college summers and volunteered there again last year. This week however I merely went to visit, on bonfire night.

It's not just bonfire night. This night also involved looking at Saturn through a telescope and 2 a.m. Ultimate Frisbee with glow necklaces. But after all that and a Bible study, we had a bonfire.

Ultimate

By now it was after 4 a.m. and getting on toward sunrise. I had already succumbed to a nap on a picnic table bench (I worked a full day; what do you want from me?) and I saw the first lightening of the horizon, though others denied it. We began with a prelude of bamboo, large masses of tender green-leaved shoots dropped unceremoniously on the fire ring and ceremoniously ringing out with pops resembling fireworks and high flames that threatened the tree branches fifteen feet above. Then a pallet was dropped on, not quite so spectacular but with more staying power.

bamboo

Then, worship. A few Bible verses, a few songs, and a few words generally constitute worship at Night Camp, but the glow of the burning pallet mandated more mirth. We sang what was planned, then we sang what could be called the classics of the camp canon. Another pallet on the fire. Now singing and dancing, now the Funky Chicken, now dosey does for the refrain of "Lord of the Dance," now swaying shoulder-to-shoulder for "Pass It On."

Then the picnic table, the old and wobbly picnic table donated by Steve's church for just this purpose. On top of the fire and burning with surprising speed,  the first little licks of flame in a circle near the center, then the entire length of the boards leaping into the chorus. But we were not singing now; this must be watched.

picnic table graciously donated by Epworth UMC, Cockeysville, MD

Overhead there was no longer any denying that the night was ending, and it is to this moment that Ben's reflection returned me. The waning crescent hung 75 degrees in the sky against a color somewhere on this guy's face:

photo credit: Kevin Bolton

David claimed to awaken the dawn with the harp and the lyre; surely we had kindled the horizon with our fire and roused the sun with our voices. It was not only our moods that were lightened by the blaze, our inhibitions that gave up the ghost; the whole theater around us was literally shifted along the visible spectrum.

This difference in perception was not just a sentimental imposition of the imagination. The colors really did look different to our eyes. When the time came to extinguish the fire (there was still a boat picnic and a polar bear swim to be had, after all) and the buckets of water became sizzling clouds and the orb we had created yielded to another which had not yet shown its face, the spell broke. The sky no longer looked mysteriously indigo, but kinda paleish. With the adjustment of our eyes illumination did not seem to emanate from within our circle, but was shed equally from all directions. Though no one else was around, I suddenly felt observed.

Later on my stepbrother jokingly harassed my mother for allowing me to go to such a place as a kid, insinuating pagan dances around the fire. I don't think he knew how close his description was to reality. There was no influence of substance stronger than s'more, no shameful act committed by firelight, no rash oath sworn, and no stupid tempting of the flame. The God who was blessed and who blessed it was none but the Lord of heaven and earth.

But that was revelry.

Grand Randomness

First cousins, all 25% Puerto Rican in theory.

Given that this vacation in the North Carolina Outer Banks may be the biggest confluence of my family ever, I have been thinking a lot about family and how it forms us individually. It's amazing to see all of the parts of the great machine in motion together over an extended period of time.

One thought I had concerns genetic inheritance from grandparents. We know that half of our DNA comes from each of our parents, and their DNA comes equally from their parents. It might seem reasonable to assume that we therefore get exactly a quarter of our makeup from each of our four grandparents, but I realized that assumption is not quite accurate.

The reason is that our DNA is grouped into chromosomes, 23 each from our mother and our father. This quantization prevents uniform inheritance. Right off the bat since we receive an odd number of chromosomes from each parent, we cannot receive an even number from each of our parents' parents. If I have 12 chromosomes from my mother's father, I have 11 from my mother's mother, and the split cannot be made even.

Moreover, there is nothing guaranteeing an even split. Whether or not each chromosome from our mother comes from her mother or her father is essentially a coin flip, and like coin flips the selection for each chromosome is independent. So, the fact that the chromosome 8 my mom passes on to me might come from her mother has no bearing on whether or not chromosome 9 does. That means it is theoretically possible for her to pass on only her mother's chromosomes or only her father's, though that is only as likely as flipping 23 heads or 23 tails in a row (about one in four million). Such children are genetically equivalent to children of one grandparent, and genetically unrelated to the other!

Therefore consider first cousins. There is good reason to expect they could take after their shared grandparents to differing degrees because they will inherit different proportions of their grandparents' DNA (to say nothing of the fact that they are inheriting from different subsets of that code due to having different parents).

How significant is this variation? Well, if my calculations are correct a full 32% of people inherit the most equitable 11/12 split from a given pair of grandparents, and 91% are no worse than an 8/15 split. So most people are relatively even combinations of their grandparents. But the flip side of that conclusion is that about one in eleven inheritances gets twice as much of one grandparent as the other. Since we inherit from two sets of grandparents, it is almost double that probability that we have at least one lopsided inheritance.

If these assumptions hold (and I don't expect they are changed by higher order effects), 18% of people, almost one in five, has received a lopsided amount of DNA from one grandparent.The effects of that randomness only multiply through subsequent generations, meaning it's even more likely inheritance from great grandparents isn't equitable. After all, we all have 64 great great great great grandparents, but only 46 chromosomes total. Someone (or 18 people) is going to be squeezed out, save for other effects like crossing over.

For me there are two takeaways of this reasoning. The first is that it is indeed possible to take after a particular grandparent more than the others, as far as genetics go anyway. The second is that it would be really fun to get everyone in my family's genomes sequenced so that all of this movement could be charted through the family tree rather than merely speculated on.

Stop worrying and love the road.

 

My stepsister Louise and I drove from Philadelphia to the North Carolina Outer Banks today. Despite typically being ambivalent or downright opposed to hallmarks of American culture like cars and fast food, for me this road trip was unambiguously delightful.

It helped that we took a scenic route, driving through Delaware and the Delmarva Peninsula across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel (it's both!) through Virginia Beach. It was beautiful countryside on a textbook June day. It helped too that the best of those things were on display. The Wawa folks knocked it out of the park with the breakfast burrito; it was all of the sensual gratification and visceral satisfaction that fast food aspires to be. And the road trip is the automobile at its best. I felt real camaraderie with the stranger in the BMW who for thirty miles wove with me past and around traffic that seemed to know nothing of the "drive right, pass left" principle.

Something else was at play though. A big reason the road trip was so enjoyable was the peace that came from living for one day as an American and not as an individual. I did what I was supposed to do, and what I was supposed to do was drive. For a century this ritual pilgrimage to wherever has been more American than apple pie, unless that apple pie was served at a McDonald's drive through. Taking part in it made me feel like a properly turning gear in a precisely tuned clock.

I felt this peace most acutely at a rest stop in Delaware. After getting out of the car I paused to take in the well-groomed lawn and the 1950's classic cars that were trundling into the parking lot at that moment. I continued in past a procession of vending machines each tempting me with a different variety of saccharine, preserved, and caffeinated satisfaction. The bathroom experience with its automatic flushes and antibacterial hand foam could not have been more tranquil if I had been brought through on a conveyor belt. On the way out I paused again to smell the tiger lilies ringing a spurting fountain.

At no point was there any doubt what I was supposed to be doing. I with all others present fulfilled my calling. We sustained America and thus were Americans together. That felt good.

Muse Sick

For Jonathan.

Is it a good thing or a bad thing that we can record music? Meaning, on balance, are we better or worse off because we have this capability?

It is hard for me to answer that question because I do not know much about what it was like before recording, and it is impossible to picture a world in which all else is the same but for the absence of this one technology. Nevertheless, I think the question is worth asking.

My life has been changed in the last year by my purchase of a high quality set of headphones. I have always spent much of the time at my work computer listening to music, but since getting these headphones the music has started affecting me more. I find the music more moving. It stays in my head longer. I think about it more when I am not listening to it. And for the first time in my life I have actively sought out new music myself rather than just picking up what friends and family pass along. Finally, I have felt that I cannot only listen to music, but that I ought to make some myself. This summer I intend to take up the mandolin.

While those effects are dramatic, the explanation is simple. Recordings have not changed, but the way I listen to them has. I am hearing the music now and I was not hearing it well before. The music is at its core beautiful and wonderful, even divine. It is right that it should awaken latent passions and imaginations within me. But it could not do so beforehand because its nature was lost in transmission through inferior sound equipment.

It goes without saying then that I am very glad for the recordings that I have. Through them I have a richer understanding of what music can be. If there is a downside to our ability to make recordings, it is not that it is impossible to richly appreciate music through them. The problem is that it is far easier to brutalize and cheapen music through recording technology.

Most people do not listen to music on good headphones or speakers. In fact, with the proliferation of portable electronic devices in the last ten years, there are more and more speakers, the large majority of which are low quality. That is because the push has been for these devices to be more portable with a minimalist aesthetic. It is a matter of physics that good speakers cannot be made at the dimensions and power requirements of laptop speakers. Inexpensive earbuds and headphones are likewise of poor quality despite increasing ubiquity.

People listen to music more now than ever before, but it is uniformly crappy, even controlling for tastes. I have been shocked to see kids on buses listening to music as blared from their phones' speakers. It is not primarily that I would not listen to the songs they are playing (though I would not), but that I could not believe listening to music on those speakers was better than silence.

Are we better off with a little of something great, or a lot of a cheapened version of that thing? America has consistently chosen the latter. Are we better off with a lot of something great, or a lot of a cheapened version of that thing? Even when this is the choice we face, too often the default, cheap version is uncritically accepted.

There are other consequences of the widespread use and availability of recording technology. Doubtless our very idea of what music is has changed. Most commercially successful music could never be performed. Recordings are built from fundamental parts and then mixed and processed into a polished whole. It is the same difference as that between a stage play and a film. Human imagination is cut loose from physical constraints. A wholly unremarkable performer can be transformed into a top-20 hit by this artifice, and to ears accustomed to such music, that which can actually be performed sounds unremarkable.

As a result of this inversion, music is elite. People have as much chance of producing successful music as they have of making it in Major League Baseball or in Hollywood, and the ability to succeed in that sphere only marginally follows from talent.

Thankfully, music which is less "popular" is more accessible. Moreover the Internet has disrupted the hegemony of recording monoliths, and for those interested in something different there are abundant alternatives. But such choices remain off the beaten path.

In sum, recordings make excellent music widely available and producible on demand, but for most people music is ever-present and low-quality, and music itself exists only in "recordings" of impossible performances.

As a result are we better or worse off? For me the glory of music is inextricable from performance. It is a mystery that the very possibility of music is hidden and encoded within the laws of physics and of human biology, and it only comes to being through the interplay of human creativity with physical instruments. To me the decoupling of these two represents not the triumph of creativity over physics but the loss of what makes music music. Moreover there is further joy to be had in the production of music and in the shared experience of performer and audience. That this kind of experience has been rendered rare and perceived as elite is likewise to be lamented.

While it need not be this way, I think on balance we are worse off.

The World Must Be Peopled

"The World Must Be Peopled." Such was my favorite line from William Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, which I witnessed for the second consecutive night this evening in Clark Park.

"Shakespeare in Clark Park," having now for a sixth consecutive year provided free performances of the works of he who commanded English like no other man has, is becoming an institution in these parts. It is positively delightful to sit out on the grass in the lovely July sunset with the whole community, being challenged by art which is higher than our faculties rather than being sedated by entertainment that indulges our baser cravings, being shown a portrait of the good life entirely different from that which bombards us in most of our lives.

The experience could be a springboard for several themes with which I have been occupied, but I would like to return to the question of Community v. Network as discussed in my previous blog post, more specifically the related question of Past v. Present.

As is a constant delight to me, dear brothers Jonathan and Ben responded with thoughtful challenges to my views. I hope that we may continue to pursue the truth together, even over this great network and on this ethereal forum, not simply for conversation as an end in itself, but for the discovery of an idea of the good life (that is, the life worth aspiring to and fighting for) greater than either Shakespeare or we have known.

In order to return to this question, let us pause a moment and examine exactly what Shakespeare presents to us in this play. Much Ado is a comedy, and therefore presents something like life in the ideal: life in which the designs of evil may cast a dark shadow, but a shadow that ultimately flees before the light. At the end all is well.

As Shakespeare presents, "all" being "well" is characterized chiefly by a right ordering of human relationships. For him to say so requires saying first off that there is a right ordering, and consequently that there are wrong orderings as well. Contrary to Benedict and Beatrice's early avowals, it is right that they marry, and it would have been wrong if they did not. The estate of Beatrice's father must be carried forward after he dies; Benedict cannot happily remain a bachelor forever, nor Beatrice a maid; the world must be peopled.

Moreover, it was right that Hero should have known no man when she married Claudio. Had the accusation against her not been false, it would have been right that she should be ashamed; in such a situation her father went so far as to say:

O Fate! take not away thy heavy hand.
Death is the fairest cover for her shame
That may be wish'd for.

If we take Shakespeare seriously, we are presented with a double offense. The obvious offense is the content of the moral order here presented, which in our day has been rejected in nearly every respect. But before we arrive at the content of that order, we are first offended that there should even be such an order, objective and received, rather than subjective and created.

That I am in favor of an objective and received order over a subjective and created one, and that the order I believe would better make for peace, happiness, truth, and meaning resembles in many respects the one I have described here, is somewhat beside the point I wish to make. Rather, I would like to ask that we engage the question of the good life critically, rationally, and earnestly, with humility toward the past.

I want to emphasize humility toward the past. It is common to hear easy dismissals of past social orders. But I do not think that most who do so have done the intellectual heavy lifting required to make such statements. In essence, I do not believe they make the effort to understand that which they reject, nor do I believe they claim to.

I can think of two reasons why not. First, doing so is work, and there are many pursuits worthy of work. Second, doing so is unnecessary, because we are fundamentally different than those who lived in the past.

I will address the latter impulse before the former. C.S. Lewis called it chronological snobbery. I believe it stems in part from an idea of social progress that comes from the demonstrated reality of technological progress. The story goes something like this: People twenty years ago did not have the Internet, people seventy years ago did not have television, and people a hundred twenty years ago did not have electricity. Likewise, a hundred years ago women were not allowed to vote and what we now call racism was entrenched and accepted.

It is easy and natural to look at such a picture, which is stark and obvious, and to conclude that just as our technological advances have built on all of the best from our predecessors, so too have our social ideas advanced. We even have an idea of an abstract concept of a "civil rights movement," in which a society slowly becomes aware of a grave injustice in its order due to a minority courageously standing for the truth. I do not know how many times I have heard that such and such issue is "the Civil Rights issue of our time." Such an idea is an analog to the scientific method. It is an idea about how to make progress at a faster rate than it has been made in the past.

While the position that social progress is inevitable and self-advancing is completely natural given a naive presentation of contemporary life, it is overly simplistic. Unlike scientific knowledge, social knowledge does not automatically distill itself over time; that which is wrong is not naturally and inevitably corrected by that which is right. Rather, societies may regress as well as progress. Different ages may be peculiarly prescient, and they may also be peculiarly blind. That statement goes for the past, and it also goes for the present.

If true, we are brought more concretely back to the first objection to thinking about the past: it is hard work. If our age does not have a privileged moral position in the social realm, then the legitimacy of the claims of all other ages might seem to leave us in the midst of an indecipherable cacophany.

While I believe we may receive guidance from the past on how to make sense of the past, I will not dispute that we are left with a very difficult task. But I will assert that doing that work is not as hard as collectively going it alone, of soldiering into the terrifying future with nothing about us but our own wits. I will also assert that buried not so deeply in the sands of time are treasures of such richness that were we to possess them we would not think of questioning whether the manual work of digging was worth the opportunity cost. Luke Skywalker was better able to meet the foe with his father's lightsaber, and Frodo Baggins could not have faced Shelob without the light of an ancient star. We do well to carry with us the wisdom of our forebears.

Finally, I would like to respond to Jonathan's comment by acknolwedging the nonexistence of the kind of ideal past presented in Shakespeare's play. No people has ever built the just society or realized the rightness of all human relationships. But we in our time have considerably better heuristics available to us than "change is good" or "change is bad." In fact, thanks to technological advances, we may be better suited than any people has been to intelligently evaluate the past.

Let us set about the good work together. The future needs the past, and if we do not uncover it I do not know who will.

Communities and Networks

I wonder if the word "community" has become abused.

I am no etymologist, but I believe the original notion of the word refers both to a place and to the people who live in that place. My hometown of Phoenixville and those who live there constitute a community.

People in a community have in common that which pertains to their place, including a particular history and particular ways of life foisted upon them by their shared circumstance. Beyond that commonality, people in a community differ in many ways, but in the traditional sense they are more or less stuck with each other, and they must learn to get along. Healthy community life is a story of unity and diversity, running in both directions.

I fear this concept is more or less antiquated. One reason is that people are not tied as much to one place as they used to be. To give a simple example, my father was born in and died in Phoenixville Hospital. Rest assured, I will not be caught dead in my birthplace of Silver Spring, MD.

Along with this increased mobility, in many places there is no there to begin with, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein. In large swaths of the country (including Silver Spring, MD) people are to get where they are going quickly in hermetically sealed containers, with destinations more or less indistinguishable from one another. People in such places are not forced into life with one another, and there are few distinguishing features around which they could build a distinct local identity anyway.

That it is very difficult in the midst of such social forces to keep from becoming alienated from one another and from nature, few will dispute. Indeed, a proliferation of technologies have stepped into the void. Such technologies promise to help us stay connected to those whom we love but who are far off, as well as to forge new and enriching connections.

Whatever the worth of these substitutes, it is important to main the distinction between them and this same idea of a community. They are not communities but networks; not agglomerations of disparate people in a particular place, but organizations of unified people in no particular place. To confuse them as such is to overlook fundamental truths about how human beings are meant to live.

Networks are suitable for organizing people for collective action, for communication about the mission of the group, and to some extent for the exchange of ideas. But they fail utterly at providing meaningful human connection. To take the most basic human relationship, friendship cannot be sustained across a mere network. Through a network it may be kept in stasis for a time, but if a connection is meaningful it will always converge toward life shared in person.

I doubt that these points about networks are very controversial, and yet as the exponentially advancing tide of technological growth drives us into ever more atomized existence, I do not see many making the hard life choices that could make for healthy life in a community. To be honest, I am not even sure how people could do so, short of dropping off of the grid and moving into an agricultural commune. I am by no means exempt from this criticism. I spend in excess of forty hours per week in front of a computer with people with whom I have no stake outside of the workplace, and I spend scarecly four hours per week collectively with those with whom I ostensibly have the closest connections.

Networks are not bad things. In general, I would say they are very good. But they are not communities, nor can they substitute for them. If we intend to preserve a civilization in which people can have meaningful life together, we will have to work very hard, and I suspect we will not receive much help from technology or from the voices of the world.