80 Seconds

I recently saw an ad about an “earthquake bed” - a high-tech bed whose bedframe is actually a sturdy metal box. It has built-in sensors so that, if it detects an earthquake, it quickly drops you into the box and seals shut, protecting you from any falling debris.

There are actually two series of earthquake beds - one from Chinese inventor Wang Wenxi, and one from Russian company Dahir Insaat. Some of their iterations include built-in safety gear - food, oxygen, a fire extinguisher, etc. - to keep you safe while awaiting rescue. I can’t find the specific ad that I saw, but this CNN video shares Dahir Insaat’s concept video:

Neither creator’s bed appears to be commercially available; however, based on their specialized construction, limited development, heavy steel, and complex safety-critical devices, I’m guessing they’d cost tens of thousands of dollars if they could be purchased.

I’m sure that the ad I saw was making the rounds because of February 6’s earthquakes in Turkey and Syria. I don’t begrudge the ad or the inventions - I’m not sure how workable they are, but the goal of saving lives is commendable, and invention and research involves pursuing ideas that may or may not pan out, and trying to implement an expensive, impractical idea is often the first step toward making something cheaper and practical.

And yet there’s something so… human… about responding to tragedy by offering safety through technology, if only you can afford it.

My own response to the earthquakes is a bit closer to this song by Kimya Dawson, written in response to the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake tsunami. (Warning: sensitive content.)

The earthquakes lasted 80 seconds. Over 50,000 people were killed. Since February 6, 9,000 aftershocks have been reported. Over 170,000 buildings - some of them centuries old - have been destroyed or severely damaged. Millions of people have been affected. As of Saturday, nearly 240,000 rescue workers continue to dig through the rubble, looking for victims, so they can at least give them a proper burial.

What’s an earthquake bed supposed to accomplish? Tens of thousands of dollars, times tens of thousands of people, just to be buried for weeks in the rubble of what used to be your home?

We’re quite good at controlling our environment and protecting against misfortune. Insurance, vaccinations, the Federal Reserve, building codes, sprinkler systems, irrigation, deep freezers, weather radar, floodwalls, and - yes - earthquake beds, to protect against disease, economic loss, famine, drought, fire, flood, storm. But 80 seconds shows the limits of our power.

What can we do? We call earthquakes “acts of God,” and there are rich resources within the Christian faith for developing our understanding of when and how God acts, why God allows these things to happen, and how we should respond. (“Those 50,000 who were killed when the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria fell on them, do you think they were worse offenders than all the others who live in the world? No, I tell you! But unless you repent you will all perish as well!”) But so much of the tragedy is human. From The Dispatch:

In 1999 an earthquake in western Turkey killed more than 17,000, setting off a nationwide push to demolish old construction and rebuild earthquake resistant buildings. Except many pre-1999 buildings in the poorer south remained, and many new buildings weren’t built to withstand the tremor.

[Turkish President] Erdoğan’s political rivals say shoddy new construction—encouraged by the president and his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP)—is in part to blame for the disaster. A recently resurfaced video from 2019 shows Erdoğan touting new construction in Kahramanmaraş following the passage of a law allowing contractors to pay a fee to spare their unlicensed buildings from demolition. “We solved the problem of 144,156 citizens of Maraş with zoning amnesty,” he said of the housing projects, some of which were destroyed in the quakes.

And some are blaming the Turkish government for playing politics:

In [Erdoğan’s] first public remarks [after the quakes], he threatened legal action against those who criticized the government… The day after the disaster, Erdoğan blocked access to Twitter, where criticism of the government was proliferating. Rescue workers quickly condemned that decision, because victims trapped under the rubble were using social media to communicate their locations to rescue teams… Demolition crews have been dispatched to destroy public records office buildings that housed building permits, along with the names and records of contractors and the public officials who approved such projects… Various aid workers also told press outlets they were pushed out of the way just as victims were being brought out of collapsed buildings, then replaced by government-affiliated aid workers who wanted to take the credit for the rescue in front of television cameras.

In Syria, the disaster has been complicated by the decade-long civil war, with the White Helmets, a volunteer group that operates in opposition-held Syrian territory, shouldering much of the burden of the rescue work.

There, too, leaders are choosing to play politics:

The United States Treasury announced a six-month freeze on sanctions against the Syrian government involving “all transactions related to earthquake relief.” Though U.S. officials insisted none of their existing penalties on Damascus targeted humanitarian aid shipments, the move followed finger-pointing from [Syrian dictator Assad’s] regime officials who wasted no time in blaming Western sanctions for their own deficient response to the catastrophe…

While his government complained about sanctions, the dictator of more than two decades has been stalling the delivery of life-saving relief for political gain. Until last week, the regime had insisted that all international assistance be routed through the Damascus government, delaying aid shipments to some of the hardest-hit areas in the country’s rebel-held northwest.

80 seconds would be devastating under any circumstances. But it’s made so much worse when profit-seeking or short-sighted politics leave infrastructure unprepared; when tyranny and war decimate a region for a decade; when protecting yourself becomes more important than open, honest information; when aid becomes a tool in bolstering someone’s political position.

Human response, therefore, becomes important: people who are willing to build strong communities and social ties that can be ready to bear the weight when disaster hits. People who help out, who volunteer their time and donate their money, even at personal risk and sacrifice. (Over two hundred White Helmets have died performing their duties over the last ten years.) People and countries who send aid rather than put their own country first, who seek to protect the poor and powerless.

Last year, singer-songwriter Nick Cave wrote,

We must love each other. And mostly I think we do – or we live in very close proximity to the idea, because there is barely any distance between a feeling of neutrality toward the world and a crucial love for it, barely any distance at all. All that is required to move from indifference to love is to have our hearts broken. The heart breaks and the world explodes in front of us as a revelation.

There is no problem of evil. There is only a problem of good. Why does a world that is so often cruel, insist on being beautiful, of being good? Why does it take a devastation for the world to reveal its true spiritual nature? I don’t know the answer to this, but I do know there exists a kind of potentiality just beyond trauma.

A Tragedy of Kings

Last month, we looked at David. His life can be viewed as a tragedy. He was Israel’s “beloved,” a man after God’s own heart, possessed of military, musical, and poetic skill, with an unbroken stream of success. However, after a single grievous sin and his further attempts to cover it up, everything seemed to go wrong for him, and he died a greatly diminished figure.

How does he fare compared to the other kings of Israel and Judah?

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Saul (1878), by Ernst Josephson; King David, the King of Israel (1622), by Gerard van Honthorst; Portrait of Solomon, the Wise King (1670), by G. Pesaro

Saul, David’s predecessor, often gets a bad rap. We understandably focus on his failures as a king: his disobedience to God in battles, his brooding mental illness / spiritual oppression (1 Sam 16:14), his jealousy and violence toward David, and his final suicide in battle against the Philistines. This is an oversimplification, though; Ronald F. Youngblood notes,

Scholarly studies of Saul, the first king of Israel, have depicted him as (among other things) villain, tragic figure, flawed ruler, naive farm-boy, degenerate madman, fate-driven pawn, reluctant king—the list goes on and on. Such characterizations are at least partially true. Saul was surely one of the most complex persons described in Scripture… Although at times moody, impulsive, suspicious, violent, insincerely remorseful, out of control, and disobedient to God, at other times he was kind, thoughtful, generous, courageous, very much in control, and willing to obey God. (Expositor’s Bible Commentary)

He starts out well. From a human perspective, he appears to be an ideal ruler: handsome, physically imposing, from a wealthy family (1 Sam 9:1-2). He never sought the kingship himself; he acts with humility throughout his anointing, coronation, and early reign (1 Sam 9:21, 1 Sam 15:17); he demonstrates restraint and mercy when people oppose him (1 Sam 10:27, 11:12-13). God “changed his innermost person” (1 Sam 10:9) and gives him a spiritual experience of ecstatic prophecy (1 Sam 10:10-11). After his coronation, he goes back to manual labor on his farm (1 Sam 11:5), rather than seeking to amass power and wealth. When the city of Jabesh-Gilead is threatened militarily, he zealously rallies Israel to their defense (1 Sam 11:6-11), in the style of the judges, thus earning a loyalty from them that lasts even after his death. Despite the Israelites’ wrong motives in asking for a king, Samuel’s speech at the beginning of Saul’s reign offers encouragement as well as warning:

Now look! Here is the king you have chosen—the one that you asked for! Look, the Lord has given you a king. If you fear the Lord, serving him and obeying him and not rebelling against what he says, and if both you and the king who rules over you follow the Lord your God, all will be well. But if you don’t obey the Lord and rebel against what the Lord says, the hand of the Lord will be against both you and your king… The Lord will not abandon his people because he wants to uphold his great reputation. The Lord was pleased to make you his own people. As far as I am concerned, far be it from me to sin against the Lord by ceasing to pray for you! I will instruct you in the way that is good and upright. However, fear the Lord and serve him faithfully with all your heart. Just look at the great things he has done for you! But if you continue to do evil, both you and your king will be swept away.” (1 Sam 12:13-15,22-25)

Saul continues to defend Israel for the rest of his reign (1 Sam 14:47-48, 52). Even after the Lord rejects Saul’s dynasty and kingship, Saul is shown remarkable mercy: he’s permitted to live for many more years, with his eventual successor David as a trusted lieutenant and aide, rather than being immediately judged and replaced.

However, Saul’s fearfulness and distance from God leads him to disobey, offering sacrifice without Samuel at Gilgal (1 Sam 13), then fighting timidly and foolishly against the Philistines (1 Sam 14), failing to follow God’s commandments to destroy the Amalekites (1 Sam 15), growing increasingly jealous and violent toward David, and killing the priests of Nob. It seems that, having failed once due to impatience and insecurity, he compounds those failings at each subsequent step, instead of repenting and growing. He goes from acknowledging the Lord himself (e.g., 1 Sam 11:13) to referring to him as “your“ God in talking with Samuel (1 Sam 15:30), to being completely cut off from the Lord and his prophets (1 Sam 28). His reign and life ended with the military defeat of Israel, the deaths of his sons, and his own suicide to avoid capture.

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Solomon, David’s son and successor, starts out with enormous potential. At his birth, he is named Jedediah (“beloved of the Lord”), in response to a message from the prophet Nathan - the same prophet who condemned David’s affair with Solomon’s mother Bathsheba. He begins his reign with David’s support and acts quickly to secure and strengthen the kingdom, dispensing justice to wrongdoers who had avoided judgment during David’s reign. Solomon enjoys an unprecedented period of peace: vassal states of that time would typically withhold tribute or rebel at the death of a king, to test the new king’s rule, but he experienced none of that (1 Ki 4:21, 24). He marries the daughter of the Pharaoh of Egypt; Egyptian rulers had formerly refused their daughters to any foreign land, and for a descendant of Egyptian slaves to marry an Egyptian princess showed Solomon’s blessings and success. He offers huge sacrifices to God in a display of his dedication to God, and God responds directly in a dream, offering Solomon whatever he wants. In Solomon’s answer, he thanks God for his love and promises, humbly recognizes his own limitations, and asks for wisdom to serve his people. God honors Solomon’s request, making him the wisest man to ever live, and also promising him a long life, wealth, and greatness.

Solomon enjoys a long, prosperous, and successful reign: he dispenses justice, sets up an effective bureaucracy to govern his kingdom, sponsors international trade and exploration, and receives international acclaim and fame. His wisdom goes beyond leadership and legal judgments; he’s known for his psalms, proverbs, and knowledge of animals and plants. His kingdom becomes so fabulously wealthy that silver is viewed as without value. He builds a palace to cement and symbolize his rule; expands the city of Jerusalem; fortifies the strategic cities of Hazor, Megiddo, and Gezer; and builds a network of store-cities to supply his military.

He builds a temple to the Lord - the long-time dream of his father David, and the culminating physical symbol of God’s decision to live among his people. At the zenith of Solomon’s reign, he dedicates the temple to the Lord in a massive and magnificent worship service where he expresses his heartfelt devotion to God:

O Lord, God of Israel, there is no god like you in heaven above or on earth below! You maintain covenantal loyalty to your servants who obey you with sincerity. You have kept your word to your servant, my father David; this very day you have fulfilled what you promised…

God does not really live on the earth! Look, if the sky and the highest heaven cannot contain you, how much less this temple I have built! But respond favorably to your servant’s prayer and his request for help, O Lord my God. Answer the desperate prayer your servant is presenting to you today. Night and day may you watch over this temple, the place where you promised you would live. May you answer your servant’s prayer for this place. Respond to the request of your servant and your people Israel for this place. Hear from inside your heavenly dwelling place and respond favorably. (1 Ki 8:23-24, 27-30)

Woven throughout all of this success and splendor, though, are hints of trouble. Solomon’s marriage to the daughter of Pharaoh shows his power and cements a valuable foreign alliance, and Jewish tradition states that she became a Jewish proselyte, yet the Israelites are warned against foreign alliances and relations with Egypt, and Solomon seems to recognize that the marriage falls short of God’s holiness (2 Chron 8:11). He spends seven years constructing the magnificent temple of the Lord - but thirteen years constructing his own personal palace. (The fact that he was aided by David’s preparations for the temple may explain some of this but perhaps not all.) The court and kingdom are incredibly wealthy, but that wealth is created in part through significant forced labor and taxation, which spurs a rebellion after Solomon’s death. His longstanding friendship and trade with Hiram, king of Tyre, helps him build the temple and palace, yet he repays Hiram by attempting to trade twenty towns (even though those should have been considered part of the Promised Land) that left Hiram feel like Solomon was ripping him off (1 Ki 9:11-14). Solomon’s splendor and power are shown through his treasure, his army of horsemen and chariots, and his many wives, and yet Moses forbids kings from amassing treasure, horses, or wives (Deut 17:16-17).

All of this leads to disaster as Solomon’s reign progresses. His 700 wives, 300 concubines, and numerous foreign alliances become entanglements and distractions that pull him away from God. It starts, perhaps, as mutually beneficial alliances and politically expedient nods toward other nations’ religious practices, but Solomon’s emotions become entangled by his many marriages and he starts worshipping other gods himself. Out of mercy, God postpones full judgment until after Solomon’s death, but Solomon ends his reign harried by enemies to the north, south, and within, with Israel only a short time away from rebellion and a division that never healed.

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What are we to make of the lives of these three men?

All started, to varying degrees, with promise, potential, and acknowledgement of God. All showed some measure of success and service to God and his people. David and Solomon in particular showed, for all-too-brief moments, what God’s people could look like, when gathered together in faithfulness to celebrate and worship the Lord and to enjoy his goodness. All three were later brought low - Saul by his insecurities and disobedience that led to a growing darkness and distance from God, David by the devastating choices and consequences that flowed from a single act of adultery, Solomon in a prolonged process of compromise and ensnarement that turned away his devotion to God.

All three are tragedies. Like any good tragedy, they’re good stories - as in tragedies since ancient Greece, we see the tragic heroes’ virtues and flaws, we watch their falls, we experience the catharsis of pity for them and fear as we reflect on the potential for flaw and fall within our own lives.

All three form a critical part of the history of God’s dealings with his people. Saul’s failures set up the path to David’s kingship; David’s devotion to God results in the epochal promise of 1 Samuel 7, that a descendent of David would always be on the throne, that was ultimately fulfilled in Jesus; Solomon built the temple that became the center of the worship of God for centuries.

And there are good moral lessons to draw from the lives of all three. We can see how Saul’s humility and zeal, from another angle or in other circumstances of his life, can manifest as insecurity and impatience, then we can reflect on how strengths can become weaknesses if not tempered and centered in a deeper commitment to the good. David’s affair shows us the necessity of fleeing temptation, the weaknesses that exist even within a man after God’s own heart, and the importance of heartfelt repentance. Solomon’s life prompts reflection on the differences between intelligence, wisdom, earthly success, and faithfulness to God and the paradox of how material blessings can tempt us to forget God. And so on.

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Is that all, though? If we want a good tragedy, we can read Oedipus Rex or Shakespeare’s Macbeth or see Anakin Skywalker’s fall in Revenge of the Sith. The lives of Saul, David, and Solomon give moral lessons, but so do the lives of Abraham Lincoln, Gandhi, Tony Stark. Reading about the Israelite kings has the not-insignificant advantage that they’re part of God’s people and their accounts are divinely inspired, and they teach history in a way that the lives of Stark or Skywalker don’t, but if all we gain is some catharsis and historical knowledge and some moral teachings, we’re not seeing the whole picture.

The Israelites were called to be God’s people. Moses promised that someday they would have a king (Deut 17:14-20). We see that the kings were to represent God as his regent on earth, to shepherd God’s people, to ensure justice, to provide protection and rest so that the people could enjoy the blessings of land and divine presence that God had promised them. Yet Saul, David, and Solomon show that no human is fully up to this task - whether humble beginnings or divine prophecies from birth, unqualified success in battle or unprecedented peace, physical stature or superlative wisdom, talent or wealth or eloquence, all ended in tragedy. If even the best of humans fails, then the only way that God’s people can have a ruler who faithfully follows God and guides his people is if God himself is that ruler.

The lives of Saul, David, and Solomon, give the historical facts around the prophecies and promises of Christ, but they also show our need for Christ. The potential of Saul, devotion and strength of David, and wisdom and splendor of Solomon all foreshadow the greater strength and wisdom and lasting splendor of the Son of David.

Black Dress

Will she walk slowly
Or will she come at all
I can’t believe that I was watching
Can’t believe I made the call

I can’t get a handle on my thoughts
now Guess I’ve already made my mind
He’s a soldier in my battle
I’m the king with too much time

Will she wear that black dress
Will she wear that black dress
As holy as the night
As holy as I want to feel
I want to feel all right

— The Normals, “Black Dress”

The story of David and Bathsheba is well-known. Godly King David sees Bathsheba bathing from the roof. He sends for her, and they have an affair. To cover up the affair, he attempts to induce her husband Uriah to come home from war and sleep with her, but Uriah refuses. David instead arranges for Uriah to be killed in battle so that he can take Bathsheba as his wife without further obstacle.

What if she is angry
I know that we’re both scared
Do I look her in the eye
Or do I even dare to care

I’m drowning in desire
I’ve been good for so long
I know I’ve got no right now
But no one can tell me that I’m wrong

Will she wear that black dress
Will she wear that black dress
As holy as the night
As holy as I want to feel
I want to feel all right

Although the story is well-known, the consequences are less so. Before Bathsheba, David appeared to lead a charmed life. As the beloved of Israel (“David” means “beloved”), he won the love of Saul’s daughter Michal, the loyalty of Saul’s son Jonathan, and the praise in song of Israel’s women. He killed Goliath, earned a position as Saul’s armor-bearer and court musician, won multiple battles against the Philistines, amassed a loyal and successful group of fighting men, and survived multiple attempts on his life from a jealous, insane Saul. He was crowned king first of Judah and then of the entire nation of Israel and won many more battles. He became famous for his poetry and songs. At the culmination of his reign, he brought the ark of the covenant into Jerusalem, amidst singing, music, sacrifice, and dance, making a joyous celebration of the Lord as Israel’s God and David as his regent. And the Lord made a covenant with David, promising that his descendants would always rule.

After Bathsheba, everything went wrong. His first son by Bathsheba died. His son Amnon raped his daughter Tamar. His son Absalom murdered Amnon. Absalom led a revolt against David. David’s trusted advisor Ahithophel (Bathsheba’s grandfather) betrayed David and joined Absalom. Absalom was defeated in battle and killed, despite David’s attempts to spare his life. David had hardly returned from the battle against Absalom when the northern tribes of Israel, led by a man named Sheba, started a second rebellion. David ended his life physically weak, seemingly impotent, with an fragile kingdom that his son Solomon had to act quickly to secure.

Maybe I’ll be good
I could be gone when she gets here
I’ve still got a chance to make this one all right

My temptation’s on the stairway
My temptation’s at the door
My temptation is before me
She is standing before me in that black dress

It’s an intriguing thought - what was going through David’s head as he waited for Bathsheba? Could he have “been good”? From my own experience with temptation and sin, I’d guess that the answer is no - “maybe I’ll be good” is true in the abstract, but in practice it’s a lie to silence a conscience that’s still kicking against the impending action, rather than any real possibility.

In 1 Corinthians 10:13, Paul writes, “God is faithful: He will not let you be tried beyond what you are able to bear, but with the trial will also provide a way out so that you may be able to endure it.” (This sometimes gets distorted into the popular but unbiblical saying, “God will never give you more than you can handle.”) Paul writes this to encourage the Corinthian believers, after warning them of the Israelites’ failures and rebellions in the desert: even though the Corinthians will face temptations, like the Israelites did, God will enable them to stand firm. And I believe that this promise applies to us as well as to the Corinthians. In my more melancholy moments, though, I wonder when God provides the way out. What if, by the time David was waiting at the top of the stairway, alone with his thoughts and his libido, the way out was in the past? Maybe the way out was to spend more time writing psalms the day before so that his thoughts would have been more heavenly-focused that night on the roof. Many people have observed that the story of David and Bathsheba starts “in the spring of the year, at the time when kings normally conduct wars” (2 Sam 11:1); if David had been in the battlefield, alongside his men, the affair could not have happened. Maybe David’s taking of multiple wives (polygamy was tolerated but never condoned in the OT, and see Deut 17:17) made it a bit too easy to take one more. Maybe living in a palace that (literally) raised David over his fellow Israelites (see Deut 17:20) made it a bit too easy to view them as merely a means to meet his wants; certainly it made it a bit too easy to spy on them. And all of this - the palace that rewarded his position and success, the wives that were expected of a king of that time, perhaps even the well-earned respite from battle - was understandable, but the consequences were catastrophic.

I’m afraid that many of our ways out are the same. How many of our angry outbursts, petty selfishnesses, white lies, or opportunities for good passed over due to cowardice or laziness or self-absorption - to say nothing of the bigger abuses and addictions and betrayals and failures - can we honestly hope to avoid in the heat of the moment? And how many of them instead have as the way out to read the Bible, to pray, to fellowship with believers, to practice a lifestyle of serving others rather than using or ignoring them, so that we have the strength to stand firm when the trial does come?

As I said, this is a melancholy line of thought. I’d like to think that I’m capable of doing the right thing, that all I have to do is muster enough willpower or find the right technique or make the correct New Year’s resolution. What if, instead, there are trials which I haven’t even dreamed of bearing down in me in the future, and I’ve already missed the way out due to my failure to pursue God in the past? “Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” (Rom 7:24)

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The Normals’ song “Black Dress” ends with David’s crushing sin with Bathsheba. But, in the song that immediately follows on their album, they sing:

Oh, we of little faith
Oh, You of stubborn grace

We are the beggars, we are the beggars
We are the beggars at the foot of God’s door

We’ve known the pain of loving in a dying world
And our lies have made us angry at the truth
But Cinderella’s slipper fits us perfectly
And somehow we’re made royalty with You

We are the beggars, we are the beggars
We are the beggars at the foot of God’s door
You have welcomed us in

— The Normals, “We Are The Beggars”

Cyber Damage

I hurt my back last week. I was carrying a heavy box and pivoted at the waist to try to manuever something else, and my back really didn’t like that. I probably would have been okay if I weren’t still recovering from an earlier back injury that resulted from leaning to move a bag of mulch.

By itself, this isn’t very interesting. “Middle-aged man’s body doesn’t work as well as it used to” is hardly newsworthy; “lift with your legs, not with your back” is not revolutionary advice. What’s more surprising to me is how quickly and easily the injuries happened. The box and bag were heavy but well within the limits of what I thought I could handle, and the actions only took a few seconds each, but the resulting injuries were felt for days or weeks. Engineers design their vehicles, machinery, and tools with safety tolerances to ensure that they’ll be able to withstand the forces upon them, and yet I suspect even a high school physics student could calculate the forces and leverage that I placed on my joints and realize that it wasn’t going to end well for me. It’s surprising how easily my strength to act exceeds my strength to handle the results of my actions.

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Wendell Berry is an American novelist, poet, farmer, and Christian. As an environmental activist, he’s spoken out against nuclear power, coal power, mountaintop removal coal mining, and industrial farming. In his essay “Damage,” he describes one of his efforts to improve his farmland:

I have a steep wooded hillside that I wanted to be able to pasture occasionally, but it had no permanent water supply.

About halfway to the top of the slope there is a narrow bench, on which I thought I could make a small pond. I hired a man with a bulldozer to dig one. He cleared away the trees and then formed the pond, cutting into the hill on the upper side, piling the loosened dirt in a curving earthwork on the lower.

The pond appeared to be a success. Before the bulldozer quit work, water had already begun to seep in. Soon there was enough to support a few head of stock. To heal the exposed ground, I fertilized it and sowed it with grass and clover.

We had an extremely wet fall and winter, with the usual freezing and thawing. The ground grew heavy with water, and soft. The earthwork slumped; a large slice of the woods floor on the upper side slipped down into the pond.

The trouble was the familiar one: too much power, too little knowledge. The fault was mine.

I was careful to get expert advice. But this only exemplifies what I already knew. No expert knows everything about every place, not even everything about any place. If one’s knowledge of one’s whereabouts is insufficient, if one’s judgment is unsound, then expert advice is of little use.

With a palpable sense of guilt, he goes on to reflect on how he caused “a lasting flaw in the face of the earth… that wound in the hillside, my place” that can heal only “in the course of time and nature.” He reflects on how art and culture can make a “map” or “geography of scars” such as the one on his hillside, reflecting the past damage caused by our lack of wisdom, in hopes that future people can learn wisdom and learn their limitations from them. He concludes by quoting poet William Blake:

Blake gives the just proportion or control in another proverb: “No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings.” Only when our acts are empowered with more than bodily strength do we need to think of limits…

But a man with a machine and inadequate culture-such as I was when I made my pond-is a pestilence. He shakes more than he can hold.

As I sat nursing a sprained back muscle, I questioned Berry’s reading of Blake; I’m not even convinced that I can be trusted with my own bodily strength. But this helps prove Berry’s broader point: if we can’t necessarily be trusted with our own bodily strength, then what makes us think we can handle a bulldozer, a power plant, an industrial farm?

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It’s popular to hate on social media nowadays. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that it’s helped make us “uniquely stupid” and contributed to rising polarization; Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen accused Facebook of prioritizing their own profits and growth over their users’ well-being; recent research provides further evidence that Facebook is harmful to users’ mental health; and so on. And that’s before getting into the more partisan debates and accusations (“They spread misinformation and conspiracy theories!” “They’re censoring our free speech!” “They’re helping the far right!“ “They’re pawns of the far left!“); the constant scrutiny, critiques, and foibles of their tech billionaires founders and would-be owners; or various cybersecurity concerns (such as the recent Twitter whistleblower, Peter “Mudge” Zatko, or concerns over the Chinese Communist Party’s involvement in TikTok).

The root problem might be more fundamental than that, though. On a recent podcast, author Cal Newport describes what he calls “Twitter’s cybernetic curation distribution algorithm,“ with “the effect of all of these individuals making retweet/non-retweet decisions, all pushing and pulsing through a power law graph / topology graph… [that] does a really good job of centering or surfacing things that are interesting or engaging or would catch our attention.” When I hear “cybernetic,“ I’m enough of a sci-fi geek that I start thinking of these guys:

S.C.F., by ptitvinc

In sci-fi such as anime, literature, and tabletop or video games, cyborgs are humans who’ve replaced significant parts of their bodies with high-tech equipment. Sometimes this is done to replace body parts damaged by trauma. Often, though, it’s done to enhance their abilities beyond normal human capacity - heightened strength and durability, electronic senses, built-in weaponry, and so on. (I don’t have much need for built-in weaponry, but a cybernetic spine would have saved me some pain.) In many fictional works, the replacements often come with downsides, such as a reduced sense of touch, or a psychological sense of alienation from other humans; some works do this as part of a Serious Examination of What It Means To Be Human, while more gaming-oriented settings might do it just to discourage players from tricking out their characters with every piece of cybernetic gear possible.

Speaking more realistically and more technically, “cybernetic“ is defined as “control and communication in the animal and the machine“ (Normal Weiner). As applied to Twitter, Cal Newport’s point seems to be that Twitter is the result of interaction between the “animal“ (humans decisions and actions to tweet, reply, and retweet) and the machine (Twitter’s servers sharing people’s tweets with each other and analyzing tweets to decide what are most interesting / relevant / shareable / viral, based on what people have revealed of their interests).

Just like a sci-fi cyborg, the result is strength well beyond normal human capacity: an endless stream of engaging, sometimes addicting, content; the ability to view in real time the shared thoughts of society’s elites, friends, strangers from around the world; the potential to have thousands or millions of people interact with what you have to say. And, just like a sci-fi cyborg, there are downsides: a reduced sense of touch and a sense of alienation from the people on the other side of the screen, as facial expressions and nuance and gestures are stripped away, as complex thoughts and discussions are crammed into 280 characters, as the platform’s incentives push people to forget the humanity of those they’re interacting with and engage in increasingly extreme behavior to get likes, go viral, and fit in with their similarly incentivized online peers.

And, if Wendell Berry is right, if we scarcely have the wisdom to handle a bulldozer or a power plant - if our own musculature can exceed what our strengths can sustain - then what hope do we have of handling the power law graph / topology graph of a cybernetic curation distribution algorithm?

Our online world is changing so rapidly; how can we possibly have a chance to build up Berry’s geography of scars to learn our limitations there?

Plenty of solutions have been proposed: Give up social media, get more government involvement, put the right person in charge. Many of these solutions are, I think, a bit facile. Maybe we should start smaller: Practice the humility of recognizing the limits of our wisdom. Don’t overexert our strengths - don’t do something just because we can. Be sensitive to the damage that our strength may be causing to others or to our environment. Be human more. Be cybernetic less.

The Virtue of Strange Service

Since Queen Elizabeth II’s death last month, I’ve seen countless takes and commentaries on her reign and on the British monarchy.

Royal Diamond Jubilee Visit, by West Midlands Police

On the one hand, she was by all accounts extremely devoted to serving her country and the institution of the monarchy. Commentator David French discusses her lifetime of service, as well as the military service of Princes William, Harry, Andrew, and Philip, and concludes:

There is a tremendous burden tied to that kind of role. As Andrew [Sullivan] notes, when Elizabeth Windsor became queen, she “was tasked as a twenty-something with a job that required her to say or do nothing that could be misconstrued, controversial, or even interestingly human—for the rest of her life.”…

Duty and honor without power—that’s the role of modern royalty… There is also immense meaning when a monarch lives the values their role demands. Queen Elizabeth lived with honor and did her duty, and in so doing she helped bind together a fractious people. She helped give them a sense of shared identity.

On the other hand, the monarchy - the idea that someone should, simply by accident of birth, be placed into that role for 70 years - is a strange institution, especially to Americans in our belief that all men are created equal. (We even fought a war to end the monarchy - although historian Eric Nelson argues that the early American revolutionaries saw themselves as rebelling against Parliament and weren’t necessarily against the monarchy.)

As part of her role, Elizabeth studiously avoided commenting on political positions. David French explains, “Britain’s constitutional monarchy separates the functions of the head of state and the head of government. The head of state is doing her job when she’s explicitly not political, when she instead conducts the formal affairs of the state and embodies (as well as any human can) certain core national values.” British theologian Alastair Roberts writes, “In resisting entanglement in political conflict and refraining from participation in public political debate, the monarch guards their true character and influence. They stand for something that greatly exceeds political conflicts and party interests, even highly charged ones.”

On the other hand, there are plenty of important political and national issues that may deserve people’s attention. At what threshold does someone with influence decide that something is worth addressing? If the argument is that, in order to preserve your influence for some future need, you must avoid using your influence to address a current need, at what point does that become self-defeating?

Queen Elizabeth was loved by millions of people; the hundreds of thousands of people who stood in queue, sometimes for twenty-four hours or more, in order to pay their respects after her death was a powerful illustration of this. However, the British monarchy and Queen Elizabeth are a reminder and representation of Britain’s history of imperialism, colonialism, and slavery for many others - for example, blacks and Desi who are still dealing with the aftereffects of the slave trade and colonization.

Queen Elizabeth supported numerous charities and helped raise over £1.4 billion for them. On the other hand, she had a personal fortune of roughly $500 million, simply by virtue of her birth, which she was able to pass on tax-free to Prince Charles - in addition to the significant assets of the monarchy itself.

Queen Elizabeth was a devout Christian; in 2000, she said, “For me the teachings of Christ and my own personal accountability before God provide a framework in which I try to lead my life. I, like so many of you, have drawn great comfort in difficult times from Christ’s words and example.” N.T. Wright speaks warmly of her love for and service to Jesus. As “Defender of the Faith” and head of the Church of England in a secular, post-Christian country, she no doubt had an influence for God in her country. On the other hand, as an American Christian, I’m firmly in favor of the separation of church and state: I believe that political power can too easily corrupt the church, and I believe that God gives us free will and we should therefore avoid coercing or compelling others, and there’s an argument that the establishment of religion has contributed to Europe being a post-Christian continent (by allowing Christian churches there to become complacent in government support rather than striving to innovate and reach out).

What do we make of all of that?

If nothing else, Elizabeth’s birth into the royal family reminds me that the American approach of egalitarianism and free individual choice is a relative novelty. Jesus tells a parable which one person might have ten times the gifting of another. Samson, Samuel, and John the Baptist were set aside from birth; Moses, David, Jeremiah, Paul, and others were given huge responsibilities with little say in the matter. The obvious counterargument here is that these people were directly and explicitly chosen by God. Elizabeth, in our understanding, was not (except in the general Romans 13 sense of all human authorities existing under God’s control). For whatever reason, though - whether differences in God’s designs and God-given talents, inequalities from human competition and sin, or the vagaries of a centuries-old British institution - the differences persist, often in spite of people’s efforts to address them, and what you do with your own gifts and powers is often more important than comparing where you stand relative to someone else (Jn 21:22).

It occurred to me, though, that a more direct Biblical reference may be the Rechabites of Jeremiah 35. During the last days of the nation of Judah, when the Israelites were practicing empty formalistic public worship of the Lord, mixed with private syncretism and idolatry, Jeremiah fruitlessly tried to warn his fellow Israelites of God’s coming judgment. In a strange story partway through his book, Jeremiah sent a message to the Rechabites, apparently a small ethnic group descended from Moses’ father-in-law who lived among the Israelites, to invite them to the temple. There, he offered them some wine. They refused, explaining,

“We do not drink wine because our ancestor Jonadab son of Rechab commanded us not to. He told us, ‘You and your children must never drink wine. Do not build houses. Do not plant crops. Do not plant a vineyard or own one. Live in tents all your lives. If you do these things you will live a long time in the land that you wander about on.’ We and our wives and our sons and daughters have obeyed everything our ancestor Jonadab son of Rechab commanded us.”

In response, Jeremiah blessed the Rechabites (Jer. 35:18-19) and contrasted their behavior with the Israelites’:

‘I, the Lord, say: “You must learn a lesson from this about obeying what I say. Jonadab son of Rechab ordered his descendants not to drink wine. His orders have been carried out. To this day his descendants have drunk no wine because they have obeyed what their ancestor commanded them. But I have spoken to you over and over again, but you have not obeyed me.”’

The point isn’t that Jonadab’s restrictions were from God or were, in and of themselves, automatically good. The point is that the Rechabites, out of a desire to honor their ancestor and out of a belief that a simple nomadic lifestyle was worth practicing, faithfully obeyed. As a result, their faithfulness to human instruction, given by one person centuries ago, presented a powerful rebuke to the Israelites repeated unfaithfulness to God’s commandments, delivered repeatedly through Moses and the prophets.

I’ve seen a lot of the takes since Queen Elizabeth’s death, but my opinion on the British monarchy isn’t worth much. On this side of the pond, it doesn’t really affect me, and I can’t change anything. But I can appreciate her faithful service to her country (even if it did come in the form of a strange, anachronistic, human-made institution), and I can appreciate her faithful service to Christ.

High Priestly Garments and Working Steel

The robe is to be on Aaron as he ministers, and his sound will be heard when he enters the Holy Place before the Lord and when he leaves, so that he does not die… These [linen undergarments] must be on Aaron and his sons when they enter the tent of meeting, or when they approach the altar to minister in the Holy Place, so that they bear no iniquity and die. It is to be a perpetual ordinance for him and for his descendants after him.

— Exodus 28:35,43

My first thought when these verses were pointed out to me was of some sort of hazmat or biohazard suit. The sort of thing you’d wear to protect yourself from ebola.

My second thought was that this metaphor would have God in the place of ebola. That seems quite wrong, theologically, so I went with the image of a steelworker instead.

Molten metal can range from 1,200°F to 6000°F. Early industrial steelworkers (for example, in Carnegie’s 19th century steel mills) had minimal safety gear, perhaps just two layers of wool long-johns, but later steelworkers wear layers of FR (flame-resistant) clothing, an apron (sometimes), hood, gloves, and steel-toed boots, all engineered to protect against flames and splashes of molten metal and reflect heat. Depending on the era, clothing would be made of leather wrapped in wet burlap, or asbestos, or aluminized Kevlar capable of withstanding 3000°F of radiant heat and 1100°F of direct contact. Some walking surfaces could be hot enough to melt rubber, so steelworkers could wear wooden shoe guards around their boots for further protection. Melters at the furnace itself would wear cobalt-colored melter’s glasses to let them look directly at molten iron to check its temperature. All of this is to deal with the fact that steelworkers work daily with forces and energy far too powerful for humans to withstand unaided.

Photo by Francisco Fernandes on Unsplash

Reading the Old Testament, it seems that this is an accurate metaphor. God wanted to, and chose to, dwell with his people and walk among them as their God (Lev. 26:11-12). To show this, he placed his presence in the tabernacle and the temple, even though (as Solomon said when dedicating the temple) “heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you, how much less this house that” Solomon built (2 Chron 6:18). Yet God’s power, holiness, and glory, when encountering human sin and frailty, are simply not safe. No one could see God’s face and live (Ex. 33:20); even hearing him speak or seeing his messenger brought fear of death (Deut. 5:24-26, Jdg 6:21-22). When God came down onto Mount Sinai to deliver the Law to Moses, anyone who touched the mountain would be executed; otherwise, God would “break out against them” (Ex. 19:12-13,24). Mishandling the ark of the covenant, which symbolized God’s throne within his dwelling place of the tabernacle or temple, resulted in death (Num 4:5, 20; 1 Sam 6:19; 2 Sam 6:6-7). Even the chosen high priest could only enter the most holy place, the place in the tabernacle or temple where the ark of the covenant was kept, once a year. There’s a story that the high priest would tie a rope around his ankle when entering the most holy place so that, if he was struck dead by God’s holiness, his body could be safely dragged out; this is apparently a myth from the Middle Ages, but the Bible does record several priests and would-be priests who died because they failed to properly follow the rituals laid out in the Law.

Read within this light, the rules regarding the priests’ garments in Exodus 28 and the rituals for consecrating priests in Exodus 29 make more sense. The different elements of the high priest’s clothing - a breastpiece of gold and semiprecious stones, an ephod of woven gold and cloth with engraved onyx stones, a robe decorated with golden bells and pomegranates made of yarn, a turban with an engraved golden plate - have symbolic importance (some of which may be unclear now), but besides any specific symbolism, the details of the precision, artistry and expense that went into the garments served to demonstrate the care and value needed to properly approach God in his holiness.

Reading the Old Testament gives me the impression that the priests were closer to the long-john-clad laborers of Carnegie’s day, one mistake away from disaster, than to the drilled, carefully protected steelworkers of today. This is probably an unfair impression, since tabernacle and temple worship continued for roughly one thousand years, and we see mostly low points from its early days.

It does, however, bring us to the New Testament. Christ, as our great high priest, fulfills perfectly the role which Aaron and his descendants did with fear and trembling.

More than that, Christ let us “confidently approach the throne of grace” (Heb. 4:16). What the high priest could do only once a year, painstakingly clothed in his safety gear, at the earthly representation of God’s throne, we can now do with freely and confidence at the throne of God itself.

More than that, we’re told to clothe ourselves with Christ (Rom 13:14, Gal 3:27). It’s as if the high priest’s safety garments are turned inside out - instead of dressing up to protect and isolate ourselves from God’s holiness and power, God enables us to dress up as Christ, the image of God. As described by C.S. Lewis, “If you like, you are pretending. Because, of course… you are not being like The Son of God, whose will and interests are at one with those of the Father: you are a bundle of self-centered fears, hopes, greeds, jealousies, and self-conceit, all doomed to death. So that, in a way, this dressing up as Christ is a piece of outrageous cheek.” As outrageous, perhaps, as thinking we could sculpt a suit of molten steel. But Lewis continues, explaining what it means to put on Christ:

A real Person, Christ, here and now, in that very room where you are saying your prayers, is doing things to you. It is not a question of a good man who died two thousand years ago. It is a living Man, still as much a man as you, and still as much God as He was when He created the world, really coming and interfering with your very self; killing the old natural self in you and replacing it with the kind of self He has… Finally, if all goes well, turning you permanently into a different sort of thing; into a new little Christ, a being which, in its own small way, has the same kind of life as God; which shares in His power, joy, knowledge and eternity. (Mere Christianity, p. 146-147, 149)

This gets at a truth which we sometimes neglect in Western evangelical churches. We describe salvation and the Christian life as being freed from sin, receiving the promise of eternal life, and being sanctified to be more moral people. And it is all of these things - but not just these things. 2 Peter 1:4 says that we will become “partakers of the divine nature.” Orthodox Christians refer to this as divinization. It’s not that our fundamental nature is changed, that we cease being humans and become divine; instead, through union with God, we are suffused with his grace and holiness. Orthodox Christians use the analogy of a metal in fire; it doesn’t stop being metal, but it’s suffused with the fire’s energy, like molten steel, radiating light and heat to all around it.

A Eulogy for Monoliths

I have an Atlas Obscura desk calendar. Each day, it showcases a different location around the world: sometimes a natural wonder (such as Hierve el Agua, a massive rock formation in Mexico that resembles a waterfall), sometimes unique wildlife (such as the blue ghost fireflies of North Carolina), sometimes human art (such as the House of Mirrors, a private house decorated entirely in mirror mosaics by Italian-Kuwaiti artist Lidia al-Qattan, or Decebalus’s head, a 140-foot-tall mountainside carving of 1st century Romanian king), sometimes just odd bits of local culture (such as a Manhattan collection of items salvaged from trash, kept in the second floor of a garbage truck garage). Each day offers a little glimpse into the variety, beauty, creativity, weirdness, and wonder of earth and its inhabitants.

Photo by Quentin Melson

The Georgia Guidestones are not, to my knowledge, part of my Atlas Obscura desk calendar, but they easily could be. Built in 1980 by a pseudonymous “Robert C. Christian,” representing an anonymous and mysterious group, they’ve been called “America’s Stonehenge.” They consisted of six granite slabs, weighing a total of 237,746 pounds, and are believed to have been intended as a message to survivors of a nuclear war. They were intended as a compass, calendar, and clock and contained the following guidelines in seven different languages:

1. Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
2. Guide reproduction wisely – improving fitness and diversity.
3. Unite humanity with a living new language.
4. Rule passion – faith – tradition – and all things with tempered reason.
5. Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.
6. Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.
7. Avoid petty laws and useless officials.
8. Balance personal rights with social duties.
9. Prize truth – beauty – love – seeking harmony with the infinite.
10. Be not a cancer on the Earth – Leave room for nature – Leave room for nature.

Since their unveiling, they became a tourist attraction (drawing roughly 20,000 annual visitors) and the target of significant speculation (including a documentary) as to their purpose and their anonymous creators’ motivation. They’ve also become the subject of various conspiracy theories; maintaining a world population under 500 million could perhaps be tractable after a nuclear holocaust, but ”guiding reproduction“ evokes dark memories of eugenics and racism, and Christians such as Kandiss Taylor, 2022 Georgia Republican candidate for governor, have alleged that they’re Satanic and related to the New World Order.

On July 6, an unknown perpetrator set a bomb that destroyed one of the six slabs and heavily damaged the capstone. The remaining Guidestones were dismantled for safety reasons. The motives of the attacker are unknown, but it’s likely that they were spurred by the accusations of Satanism and New World Order.

I feel that the world is a bit poorer for their loss. I am, of course, opposed to Satanism, and I do believe that there are malign spiritual forces active in the world. But I believe that Satan is rarely so obvious as to engrave his guidelines on tourist-attraction granite; the consumerism, tribalism, and pressures to compromise one’s ethics and beliefs that permeate modern American society are much greater threats for most of us than eugenics. And, if the Guidestones were intended to promote the New World Order - if they were part of a conspiracy of global elites to establish a totalitarian world government, as understood by some interpretations of the Book of Revelation - then any effort we might make to stop God’s prophecy seems rather misguided. I might even go further and, rather than opposing them, respond with “Maranatha!” (1 Cor 16:22; Rev 22:20); I’m not exactly looking forward to the end-times tribulations as understood by many Christians, but I’m very much looking forward to Christ’s return, and it seems that we may have to pass through the one to get to the other.

These particular conspiracy theories are pretty easy to dismiss. But there’s a deeper consideration here. There’s a strain of Christianity that’s especially attentive and alert to spiritual forces of darkness, to sinister hidden motives, to political or social actions that seem innocuous but may be the first steps toward an evil end. And we should be on guard against such things (1 Pe 5:8, Eph 6:12, 1 Cor 10:19-20, etc.). As James Sire writes in The Universe Next Door,

The New Age has reopened a door closed since Christianity drove out the demons from the woods, desacralized the natural world and generally took a dim view of excessive interest in the affairs of Satan’s kingdom of fallen angels. Now they are back, knocking on university dorm room doors, sneaking around psychology laboratories and chilling the spines of Ouija players. Modern folk have fled from grandfather’s clockwork universe to great-grandfather’s chamber of gothic horrors… While spirit activity has been constant in areas where Christianity has barely penetrated, it has been little reported in the West from the time of Jesus. Christ is said to have driven the spirits from field and stream, and when Christianity permeates a society the spirit world seems to disappear or go into hiding. It is only in the last few decades that the spirits of the woods and rivers, the air and the darkness have been invited back by those who have rejected the claims of Christianity and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. (p. 166, 168, 3rd ed.)

There’s a lot to unpack and evaluate there, and the topic of how we interpret and understand spiritual activity in Bible times and ours is far too involved to get into here. But this sort of “direct,” explicit spiritual activity is not, I think, the greatest risk in modern America. Modern culture instead seems to de-spiritualize, depersonalize, and homogenize everything. We’ve gone from family-owned stores where proprietors and shoppers knew each other, to store chains where we interact with minimum-wage workers whose upper management have done their best to make them interchangeable, to (post-pandemic) curbside pickup and deliveries, as if even the minimal interaction of the check-out line is too inconvenient. We can travel two thousand miles cross country—an unthinkable distance in earlier history—and eat at restaurants and stay at hotels barely different than where we left. Internet and cable TV news lets us obsess over words and pictures from people in other states and cities who we’ll never interact with, while the decline of local news means we often know more about current events in Ukraine than in our own communities. So many facets of our existence—our interactions online, our viewing and reading habits, our purchases—are quantized and aggregated and turned into grist for corporations’ efforts to optimize their efficiency and profits. Social media collapses the distances between people—everyone’s talking to each other all the time, with little space to be alone or to be different or to agree to disagree. Our culture wars further collapse the distances and distinct spheres that people used to operate in; Yuval Levin observes,

Our culture war plainly lacks boundaries. Every realm of our lives has become one of its battlefields. Not only in politics but also in schools and universities, in corporate America, in our places of worship and places of work, in civil society and in our private lives, online and in person, there is often just no getting away from that intense, divisive, and rigidly partisan struggle.

It may sound like I’m bemoaning the decline of Western civilization or pining for a lost past. That isn’t my intent. There are many wonderful benefits of our modern economy, technologies, and conveniences; our culture has improved in some areas even as it struggles in others; past times and cultures have dealt with their own sins and struggles; and, as Christians, this world is not our home regardless.

But, precisely because every culture deals with its own sins and struggles, I want to be aware of this one. I want to celebrate the creative, the quirky, the weird. I want to be reminded of the variety and uniqueness of other people, countries, environments, and cultures. I like pausing my workday of developing and debugging software code to read a bit of whimsy or wonder from the Atlas Obscura calendar on my desk. I like living in a world where people can use their God-given gifts, abilities, and resources to create Internet sites and optimize check-out lines but also carve 140-foot statues of Romanian kings and erect mysterious monoliths in Georgia. And sometimes the results may seem wasteful or weird or questionable, but we can question the bad while still thanking God for the good.