What Would Thomas Merton Have Thought of Facebook? On Being Unplugged in a Digital Age

I would have really liked to have gone to the recent Catholic Media Conference which took place in Sydney last week, but a few different commitments made that impossible.  I’ve heard a few reports from friends who went, which were largely very positive.  And it got me thinking…

As a Catholic priest who blogs regularly (well, semi-regularly) I am clearly an advocate of the Church’s presence in the new(-ish) world of social media.  To say that the Church shouldn’t be a presence on the Web is to turn our back on one of the key places that people gather today.  As Pope Benedict XVI has pointed out, the new means of social communication are one of the new areopagi – one of the new sectors of society – that ought to be the focus of the Church’s new evangelisation.  We don’t want to disregard the potential of a wonderful tool for the communication of the Gospel.  In fact, the Church simply cannot ignore these new means of communication, because like it or not, this is the way people today will want to communicate with us.

At the same time, we cannot afford to be naive about the various concerns and questions raised by the new media, including matters of privacy and safety and the narrowing sources of our information as we are increasingly selective about what and who we read.  I’d also like to highlight a different concern.

In a world where everyone is always online and always connected, the Church may be, in fact needs to be, a ‘place’ where people are able to experience community ‘unplugged’.  I’m reminded of a comment by Thomas Merton, who suggested that watching television was the antithesis of contemplation. The gaze that the television produces is the polar opposite of the contemplative gaze.  What would Merton have made of Facebook?  I cannot help think that he would have thought that  it was an ersatz form of the community that is produced by the contemplative gaze.  Connecting all the time with friends on Facebook is like people forced to drink chicory in deprived, post-World War Europe.  Sure it’s a drink, but it isn’t really coffee.  Facebook isn’t a substitute for embodied relationship, or what we simply used to call friendship and community before the advent of ‘friends’ whom you never see face to face.

The link between contemplation and genuine community is critical, and being online for hours on end militates against both.  And without wanting to deny the human being’s virtually endless capacity for distraction (I’m recalling Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death here) I truly believe that the ersatz form of community to be found online will ultimately prove to be as unsatisfying for people as chicory substitutes for coffee.  Which brings us to a magnificent opportunity for the Church… to be the Church.  To be a ‘place’ which provides a space for genuine contemplation and which produces genuine community.  Our necessary presence on the web can and must meet people in their ‘world’, but it needs to invite them into a different one: the world that is opened up by the Gospel, that is incarnated especially in liturgy, and which produces an alternative and distinctive way of being human.  I’m completely aware of the apparent irony of using a blog to make this argument, but it is only an apparent irony.  It actually reinforces my point that we should make extensive use of the new media in order to connect with people, but we will do that in order to direct them to the contemplative and embodied community of the Church.

In particular, this means that we need to be careful of uncritically importing the practices of the new media into our lives and into the Church’s life.  Let me offer one example: the Facebook timeline encourages us to offer a chronology of our lives online in words and pictures going right back to the moment of our birth.  I am sure there are parents who are even now diligently adding to their infant’s Facebook page, getting them ready to present to their child when they are old enough to read or even see the pictures.  The timeline concept clearly raises questions about privacy, but the deeper reality is that it is also a liturgical practice in which we tell ourselves who we are – we form our own identity – through what we post about ourselves.  The Church offers another kind of liturgy, which cannot compete with the Facebook timeline for being slick, glossy or initially attractive.  But the liturgy of the Church and the other practices of faith like contemplative prayer offer a different account of who we are: that our deepest identity is that we are the beloved of God.

This does not mean dispensing with the exciting avenues that the new media offer for proclaiming the Gospel.  It means recognising that these avenues are subordinate to the Gospel and not the other way round. The evangelical task for the Church is not to mimic the practices of the new media, but to be authentic to her own identity as the community that is formed by gazing at the face of Christ, who is the face of God.

Beyond QandA: Insights into Atheism and Faith with Nikki Gemmell

So last night we had the so-called great debate between Cardinal Pell and Dr Richard Dawkins, and of course today the social media has been atwitter with the postmortems.  I don’t intend to offer such a post- QandA analysis, but rather would like to direct you to Nikki Gemmell’s latest column from the Weekend Australian’s magazine (p14, April 7-8, 2012).  It’s obviously not an analysis of last night’s debate, but it might better serve people who would like to genuinely explore some of the issues around belief and unbelief today.

In the column Gemmell traces something of her own quest for faith, for meaning.  She begins by describing herself in her 20s as “one of those pitbull atheists, a sneerer a la Dawkins”, but she nonetheless would occasionally slip into a church service, a practice which slowly developed into a semi-regular habit in her early thirties. Gemmell no longer goes to church, and now identifies more with the atheism of Alain de Botton, “tipping a hat to the graces within organised religion but not be sucked in by it.  I’ll never be with Dawkins, thumping that believers are deluded, stupid; I’ve too much respect for the mysterious in life, can’t turn my back on wonder”.

Gemmell’s article concludes with a summation of her sense of spirituality:

My spirituality is private, bound by no institution, carved from years of bitsy church-going and from the land and giving birth, carved from the shock of kindness I see again and again in people and am deeply moved by. These attacks of Dawkins and his ilk feel like a violation in some way, but I can’t explain why.  Because my head’s telling me they’re right, it’s true.  Yet, yet…

Dawkins surely has his supporters in Australia, but I can’t help thinking that Gemmell has articulated far more successfully what many Australians feel about the possibility of belief and the seeming inevitability of unbelief.  She has clearly experienced the power of some of the practices of religious faith and the power of sacred sites to engender a sense of peace and invite a return to wholeness.  She is drawn to the values of religious faith: “generosity, compassion and quiet”, as she names them.   And yet her article concludes with her “head”, her reason telling her that the atheists are right; her intellect or reason precludes her from believing, as much as she might in some way like to.

There’s possibly (indeed probably) a whole bunch of reasons running around inside Gemmell’s head making religious belief within an institutional setting implausible for her.  And so there is more that could be said than is possible in a single blog from me.  But in response to her insightful column, I would simply point out this: in the last lines of her article it would appear that Gemmell has articulated a fundamental belief of the age in which we live, namely that the only “reasons” that count are the one’s that belong to her “head”.  As a product of modernity she believes that  empirical proof is the only valid form of knowledge.  But every paragraph of her article points to another mode of knowing that she is not prepared to trust and yet feels so intensely: a mode that has several different names in the Christian tradition, but is probably best known as the way of the heart.  As Blaise Pascal so famously expressed it, “the heart has reasons that reason knows not of”.  The heart’s knowledge is more than emotion or feeling; in fact Augustine and Thomas Aquinas both described this kind of knowledge as a higher part of the mind or a higher reason, distinguishable from the normal processes of discursive thought that we commonly call reason.

Now when the atheist looks in vain for proof of God’s existence, and when Nikki Gemmell’s “head” tells her that the atheist’s arguments are right, they are looking for reasons at the level of discursive thought, at the level of what we usually call reason.  In part that’s because modern epistemology (the philosophy of how we know) has said that such empirical reasoning is the only real way of knowing anything.  But it stands to reason (pun intended) that if God is not a thing in the world, not an object that can be found in the world, but is rather the very foundation of all things and is thus utterly beyond the world, then he is not to be found or discovered by discursive reason at all.  Which is why the Christian tradition has maintained, over and against this modern epistemology, that God is known and encountered by the heart, by the higher form of reason that modern epistemology has excluded or forgotten.  I would contend that Dawkins doesn’t get this.  He is totally convinced that the only form of trustworthy knowledge comes from empirical reason, from the scientific method.  But Gemmell does get it.  She needs to trust her heart, trust the mystery that she intuits within her life experience, the “tugging” that she feels.  Because the heart has reasons that reason knows not of. And they are valid reasons to believe.

Easter Vigil Homily 2012

This is my homily for the Easter Vigil for this year. It was preached at St Benedict’s parish, Burwood, which is the parish in Melbourne that the Missionaries of God’s Love are responsible for. In the homily I explain why the Easter vigil is the night of nights.  I suggest that next weekend may be the atheists’ night of nights as the Global Atheist Conference takes place in Melbourne.  The theme of their conference is ‘A celebration of reason’.  The implication of course is that believers are irrational simpletons. In response to their theme I suggest some reasons to believe that Jesus Christ is truly risen from the dead, and offer some reasons why we celebrate Christ’s resurrection.  Happy Easter. Christ is Risen! He is truly Risen.

The homily is in two parts below:

Easter Vigil Homily 2011

Last week’s post was a reflection upon the Crucifixion of Jesus, so this week I thought I’d  post this homily from last year’s Easter vigil.  It comes from the Light to the Nations Pilgrimage, a biennial pilgrimage to the Redemptorist Monastery in Galong, NSW.  The pilgrimage is hosted by the Disciples of Jesus Covenant Community, and in 2011 approximately 900 people camped out and celebrated the Easter liturgies in a large tent.  Most of the congregation are young people, and they’re pretty rowdy, but that’s because there’s a fair bit of Easter joy going on. Hope you find the homily edifying.  As St Seraphim of Sarov would say, ‘My joy, Christ is Risen’.  Happy Easter.

The homily is in two YouTube clips.

Paul Kelly, Salvador Dali and the Crucifixion of Jesus

Over the summer I read Paul Kelly’s ‘mongrel memoir’, How to Make Gravy.  It was a lot more insightful than many rock autobiographies, mainly because Kelly is a very intelligent and thoughtful man.  I found it particularly interesting because he was raised a Catholic, but like other artists such as Martin Scorsese who have also jettisoned the faith of their childhood, Paul Kelly’s imagination remains baptised, forever shaped as it were by the faith he no longer holds.  That is, perhaps even despite himself, he still sees the world through the prism of the practices and doctrines of Catholic Christianity, even  though he no longer practices his faith or describes himself as a believer.  And then this Catholic imagination is given expression in his music.

One (and only one) of the ways this Catholic imagination is manifest in his music is Kelly’s frequent recourse to Scripture.  In How to Make Gravy Kelly explains that he often opens up the Gideon Bible in a hotel room for inspiration when he is looking for a lyric.  One such example of this is the haunting ‘Meet me in the Middle of the Air’, a song he composed for the film Tom White.  The lyrics of the song are largely taken from Psalm 23, perhaps the most famous passage in the Bible which begins: ‘The Lord is my Shepherd, there is nothing I shall want’.   The refrain that runs through the song: ‘come and meet me in the middle of the air, I will meet you in the middle of the air’ is actually an allusion to 1 Thessalonians 4:17 , but when Kelly uses it he is drawing upon a line that he says has been around for a hundred years in blues, Gospels and spirituals.  Woody Guthrie, Dylan, Led Zeppelin have all used the line, asking God/Jesus to meet them in the middle of the air.  It has become a key phrase in the history of American music for expressing the human being’s desire for God.

This is where Paul Kelly’s use of the line takes a significant twist, because in the past it has been used as an invocation, as as prayer that the singer prays expressing his or her desire for God, his or her desire to be met by Jesus.  But in Kelly’s song, the protagonist is not the human person, it’s God.  It is God who is saying, ‘come and meet me in the middle of the air’.  It is God telling us that he is our true Shepherd, who will lead us home. In this lyrical twist Kelly is being deeply faithful, perhaps more faithful than he realises, to a critical scriptural insight: that our desire for God is superabundantly surpassed and fulfilled in God’s desire for us.

This is because God really does meet us in the middle of the air… he meets us on the Cross, where Jesus is lifted up as the place of union, in his own racked and tortured body, between God and the human race.  ”When I am lifted up”, Jesus had prophesied, “I will draw all to myself”.  This is fulfilled in the middle of the air as he is suspended from the Cross between heaven and earth.  This image of the crucifixion as the bridge between heaven and earth is perhaps most powerfully captured by Dali’s famous painting of the Crucifixion, based on the drawing of St John of the Cross.  In the painting, we are as it were looking down from above Christ as he hangs upon the cross, down to the earth below.  This is the mystery of Good Friday, that our desire for God is surpassed by God’s desire for us, most powerfully manifest in the Crucified.

The cover version of ‘Meet me in the Middle of the Air’, below is by Eddie Perfect and Tripod.  Have a listen:

In Praise of Friendship

Last night a bunch of my friends got together with an old friend of ours who was visiting from overseas.  We had become friends about a dozen years ago, and since then some people married and had children while others have been ordained; some have moved interstate and overseas while some of us have returned to Melbourne. We did what any group of friends does when it gets together after a while: we brought each other up to speed on what life is like now, a wide-ranging conversation of windy career paths, buying houses, study and different ministries in the Church.  Of course we also reminisced about times we had shared in years gone by, which by this stage required being reminded of things we had said and done that some of us had long forgotten.  For a part of the evening the Indigo Girls provided the accompanying sound-track, conjuring up memories of similar soirées in years gone by.  I think most of us realised that there were a few ghosts present too: friends who for various reasons couldn’t be there last night.  They were missed.  Mostly though, we laughed. A lot.

As I drove home I couldn’t help but reflect upon the significance of those friendships in my life.  I had been a pretty lonely kid, wounded by the taunts of school yard bullies, and these were among the first friends that let me feel safe in truly sharing myself.  Our friendships have survived mistakes and conflicts and diverging journeys, and in so doing have taught me a great deal about forgiveness, about myself and about friendship itself.  While I was driving I was reminded of Yeats’ famous poem, ‘The Municipal Gallery Revisited’, in which the poet reflects upon the portraits of his famous friends hanging in the gallery.  My friends will almost certainly never be as famous as Yeats’ friends, but as I revelled in the ordinariness of our gathering, I felt the final lines of Yeats’ poem nevertheless expressed my sentiments too:

Think where man’s glory begins and ends,

And say my glory was I had such friends.

I have recently had cause to wonder about whether young people find friendship more difficult today than in the past.  There seems to be fresh pressures that conspire against deep friendship at work in our culture.  Of course, young people desire friendship as much as they ever have; it is their capacity to forge enduring friendships that I am not so sure about.  Some young people possess a precarious sense of security and self if they have not experienced the love of their parents that can make the levels of trust required to form friendship problematic.  Many voices in our culture are suggesting that the social media can stunt genuine relationships as people spend more and more time online.   The pervasive perception of all relationships through the lens of sexuality can also obscure the distinctive form of friendship from other kinds of love.  And our culture’s obsession with image and success can combine to produce a fear of being vulnerable and a satisfaction with superficiality that militates against the depth and vulnerability that make friendship possible.  Just as the mere sight  of a steak by a starving man only intensifies rather than satisfies his hunger, these impediments only increase young people’s desire for friendship.  And so E.M. Forster’s famous epigraph may well be the most appropriate epigraph for this generation too: ‘Only connect…’

While friendship is one of life’s chief joys, I think it is possible to fall into a certain idolatry of intimacy that paradoxically punctures the very thing it most desires.  Friendship, like all forms of love, needs a little air to breathe, and it can be suffocated when people make it an end in itself.  Our passion for connection, for friendship, actually find its fulfilment in God.  We’re made for communion with God, and in and through him communion with one another.  And so memorable gatherings of friends are signposts to heaven, because they point to the eternal communion we are to enjoy with God and with one another forever.  As C.S. Lewis was wont to say, Christians never have to say goodbye, because we know that our friendships here are elevated by grace to the joys of eternal life.

Lenten Leaves

Here in Australia, the weather tends to connive with the idea that Lent is a time of self-denial and penance.  Or at least that’s true in Melbourne, where I live, and in Canberra, my home town.  The deciduous trees seem to be joining in a communal  ascetical practice as they begin to lose their leaves.  Their act of letting go seems to invite parallel acts of shedding for us during Lent: we too are invited to be stripped of selfishness and pride as we enter into this period of preparation for Easter.

This invitation to self-denial and ascetical practices often seem to some people to capture what is worst about Christianity, and perhaps about Catholicism in particular.  It seems to convey all of the gloomiest stereotypes about Christians: as a pleasure-depriving, joyless, and even masochistic people.  But is that what Lent, and for that matter Christianity, is really all about?

Let’s look to the liturgy to help us get a better handle on Lent.  In the old translation of the preface for Lent we used to say,

Each year you give us this joyful season when we prepare to celebrate the paschal mystery with mind and heart renewed.

In the new translation which we will use for the first time this year it says:

For each year by your gracious gift your faithful await the sacred paschal feasts with the joy of minds made pure, so that, more eagerly intent on prayer and on the works of charity, and participating in the mysteries by which they have been reborn, they may be led to the fullness of grace you bestow on your sons and daughters.

The intended meaning in both translations is the same: Lent is a joyful time.  Of course, the Liturgy of the Word during Lent will also call us to fasting, to alms-giving, to prayer, to reflect upon the temptations of Jesus, to deny ourselves and take up our cross… So which is it?  Is Lent a season of self-denial or a time of joy?

The answer of course, is both.

Lent is most definitely a time of self-denial.  But it shouldn’t be a case of simply going without something we like for forty days as a kind of endurance test of our wills.  The practices of self-denial that we adopt during this time are actually to do with expressing who or what is really master of our lives.  And who or what is master of our lives is expressed in and through our bodies, which is why Lent is irreducibly physical and tangible.

When we deny ourselves some food during Lent, we are reminding ourselves that there is more to life than ‘eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die’.  When we give alms to the poor during Lent we remind ourselves that the acquisition of wealth is not the goal of our lives.  When we decide to devote extra effort to refraining from gossip or detraction of others, and try to speak more edifyingly of others, or when we fast from always having control of the airwaves around us, we are concretely reminding ourselves that we are not the centre of the universe, that our lives are not about us.

I’m not being dualistic or anti-body here.  We don’t treat our bodies as if they are slaves that must be whipped into shape, or machines that we must master.  If you want that, watch The Biggest Loser.  What we are doing is recognising that it is in and through our body that we  express our deepest commitments: and to commit to the love of God and of others is not possible if our bodily actions are always directed towards ourselves.

Self-denial will usually cost us something, and it can even be painful at some level.  That’s not because we should be damaging our health, but because we often experience withdrawal symptoms from whatever we are trying to cut out from our lives.  The little masters that often have hold of our lives do not give up too easily: it can be very painful to be silent when you would rather hog the conversation, to say no to a drink because you feel you need it to relax or unwind, or to pass up on a movie and give the price of the ticket to Project Compassion.

What we begin to discover as we practice these ascetical disciplines is the emergence of true joy.  Joy is found in the love of God and of others, which is why prayer and almsgiving are as important a part of Lent as fasting and self-denial. The acts of self-denial are for joy.

The word ‘Lent’ actually means ‘Spring-time’.  But maybe we southern hemisphere-dwellers have the advantage here.  Which brings me back to the Autumn leaves. Because before they fall from the trees they change colours, from a fairly uniform green to the most dazzling array of reds, oranges, purples and rich brown shades, with many variations in between.  The streets of Melbourne and Canberra are breathtakingly beautiful during Lent.  The leaves are dying of course, even as they change colour.  But the tree is still very much alive.  Something is dying during Lent.  But that’s so something new can be born.  And even the process of dying is beautiful for those with eyes to see.

Speaking in Tongues: as Silly as it Sounds?

I recently had a conversation with one of the philosophy lecturers at the College where the Missionaries of God’s Love seminarians study.  It was just the two of us in the senior common room, and so he seized the moment to ask me if a strange and worrying rumour he had heard about the MGLs was actually true.  “Do the MGLs really speak in tongues?” he asked.  What a relief!  I had thought he was going to ask something really difficult.  ”Sure”, I replied, and that began an involved discussion where he peppered me with questions about praying in tongues.  Like many people I suspect the philosophy lecturer had some preconceived ideas about it.  So here are some (not so) random thoughts about speaking in tongues.

Firstly, it can be helpful to spell out what tongues isn’t.  When someone speaks in tongues they haven’t gone into an ecstatic trance or an altered state of consciousness.  They are in full control and so can stop and start praying in tongues whenever they want to.

I don’t believe that tongues is the infallible sign of the Holy Spirit.  Some tongues-speakers believe this, but I don’t see how that can be so.  The infallible sign of  the Holy Spirit in someone’s life is whether they are growing in virtue: whether they are becoming more loving, just and compassionate people.

Nor is praying in tongues usually to do with speaking an unkown foreign language.  The technical term for this is xenoglossia, and while I don’t think it would be impossible for the Lord to perform such a miracle, it isn’t what is normally happening when someone is praying in tongues.

The technical term for praying in tongues is glossolalia, and while it is not an actual language in that the discrete sounds someone is making are not actually words, tongues is like a language in that it is expressive of emotions and desires.  So while it is wordless, the gift of tongues does actually involve communication.  In this way, tongues is not actually so different from many other ways in which human beings communicate without using words.  When you shrug, smile, cry or hug someone you are communicating without using words.  Such actions are often called body language because you are using your body to ‘speak’, to express how you feel.  And as a shrug uses your shoulders, a smile your mouth, and a hug your body, praying in tongues uses your vocal chords.

If tongues is a form of body language then it stands to reason that glossolalia is a latent capacity that everyone possesses.  This is corroborated by the fact that glossolalia is found in the religious practice of non-Christians (including African tribal religions as well as the Muslim Sufi tradition).  In fact, I think that the jazz practice of ‘scatting’ and yodeling are pretty close cousins to tongues as well.  They are all wordless songs or sounds that express the emotions or desires of the one making the noise.  What distinguishes these practices is the recipient of the communication: with ‘scat’ the recipients are an audience, with yodeling it may be oneself, and when you pray in tongues you are expressing your feelings to God.

So anyone in principle can pray in tongues.  But why would someone want to talk to God in this way?  Wouldn’t it be more important to say something rational and intelligible to God than to babble incoherently?  This objection presumes that tongues is unintelligible, irrational and incoherent.  But just as a hug communicates affection and love without words, and just as ‘scatting’ while unintelligible nevertheless communicates emotions such as joy or pleasure, tongues is expressive of how someone feels.  It’s for that reason that Augustine called glossolalia jubilatio, as he compared it to people at harvest or vintage singing at first with words and then breaking into a wordless song:

For jubilation is a sound which signifies that the heart is giving utterance to what it cannot say in words.  And for whom is such jubilation fitting if not for the ineffable God?  For he is ineffable whom one cannot express in words; and if you cannot express Him in words, and yet you cannot remain silent either, then what is left but to sing in jubilation, so that your heart may rejoice without words, and your unbounded joy may not be confined by the limits of syllables.

Some people also think tongues is all a bit noisy and only for extroverts who aren’t afraid to be very demonstrative in public.  I want to suggest that while tongues is a vocal form of prayer it can, like other forms of vocal prayer such as the rosary or the Jesus prayer of the Orthodox tradition, be a valuable aid to contemplation.  Praying in tongues, like the repetition of the Hail Mary’s or the mantra of the Jesus prayer engage the analytical, conceptual side of the brain that is often so busy with thoughts, thereby freeing up the more intuitive, receptive side of the brain for silent, attentive presence to God.  Let me be clear: praying in tongues is not contemplative or mystical prayer in and of itself, but it can be an effective precursor to deep contemplative enjoyment of God.

I also want to suggest that speaking in tongues does something, or indeed three things.  Firstly, because praying in tongues involves a surrender of some of the usual powers of speech it can serve as an effective release of control.  I’d like to suggest that it can be very helpful in the act of surrender that we usually call faith, where we make an act of trust in God with a concomitant letting go of ourselves.  In a world where the self reigns supreme, such a contraction of one’s ego is vital for the obedience that faith requires.  Or to put it more simply perhaps, praying in tongues invites us to let go and trust in God.

Secondly, as an expression of  our emotions and desires, tongues goes a significant way to reclaiming the place of affectivity in the life of faith.  We do not believe by merely thinking our way into faith (which is not to deny the place of the intellect in the act of faith), but by the ordering of our desires to God.  As the quote above from Augustine suggests, praying in tongues or with jubilatio involves the ordering of our  ultimate desire to the ineffable God.

Lastly, in his book Thinking in Tongues, James K.A. Smith suggests that tongues is a language of resistance that expresses a person or a people’s nonconformity with the structures of mass-consumer capitalism.  Tongues defies the logic of the market; it is not a commodity that can be bought or sold, and it resists a commercial value.  It is an act of ‘play’, which is by definition, ‘useless’.  By praying in tongues, then one is saying that the Lord they worship is not the god of material prosperity, but the One who promises that the kingdom belongs to the poor in spirit.

A Different Kind of Anthropology: Learning from ‘Bones’

From http://www.fox.com/bones/

Over my summer holidays I watched Series 6 of ‘Bones’.  The gooey flesh dropping off  the skeletons is pretty creepy, but I’m a sucker for a whodunnit and it isn’t usually too tricky to guess the murderer.  I’ve also got to confess that it’s the characters that keep me coming back for more: I enjoy the banter between the forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan (Emily Deschanel), and her FBI partner Seeley Booth (David Boreanaz).  The supporting cast is fun too, especially the ‘squint squad’: the lab interns that provide much of the comic amusement in the show.

I think that Brennan’s character is particularly interesting.  Bones is a scientist, and she sees the world solely through the lens of her empirical worldview.  She thinks that feelings are only chemical emissions in the brain, and that relationships can be completely explained by the cultural constructs of mating rituals and inter-tribal dynamics.  She ridicules religious faith as magic and superstition.  And while she frequently misses the pop culture references from her colleagues and friends, she is also often oblivious to the other social dynamics that most of us take for granted.  This provides part of the humour of the show, and it has been fun to watch her learning from Booth even as she continues to dismiss his intuitive hunches.

She is also dismissive of the insights of Dr Sweets, the psychologist on the team.  And it’s through Sweets that we are given a psychological explanation for Brennan’s behaviour.  Sweets diagnoses that Bones has retreated into a hyper-scientific rationalism as a protective mechanism against the trauma of being abandoned as a child by her parents, which also serves as a safeguard against her ongoing fear that someone else that she loves will hurt her again by leaving.

There’s a rich irony in the fact that while Bones is an anthropologist, she often doesn’t understand real human beings.  She is often depicted alone at the lab staring at human remains where she is clearly more comfortable.  And whether Dr Sweets has accurately diagnosed the cause of her troubles or not, it’s clear that the principal issue is that Bones has a myopic vision of the human person.   By believing that all human interactions can be explained by biological processes and the insights of (a somewhat outdated) cultural anthropology she has found an explanation of human behaviour that allows her to retain the illusion of control.  As a consequence she can not only misunderstand what is going on around her, but she maintains an attitude of superiority over others who do not have her intellectual capacity.

But it all comes unstuck in Series 6 because Bones has realised that she is in love with Booth, and for most of the series he is in love with someone else.  And she has stopped explaining that in terms of biological necessity, evolutionary survival of the species or the social dynamics of the tribe.  She’s in love, and she’s having to learn some new categories for understanding her emotions and desires.

One of the central metaphors in the Gospels for coming to faith is of the blind receiving their sight.  Brennan is not having a religious conversion in Series 6, but she is gradually coming to discover that her empirical worldview has left her blind to some of the deeper realities of life.  In some ways she is experiencing an intellectual conversion to a richer, fuller understanding of what it is to be human.  This intellectual conversion does not mean that Bones needs to completely jettison her commitment to scientific endeavour.  It is only the new atheists and the Christian fundamentalists who require us to completely choose one side or another in the so-called conflict between science and religion.  What Bones does need to acknowledge for her intellectual conversion to be complete is the limits of scientific knowledge, and that an all-embracing scientism that excludes the place of faith and love cannot do justice to the mystery of being human.

And (if she wasn’t a character on a prime time tv show),  such an insight could also be the precursor to a conversion of heart.  As Pascal put it, the heart has its own reasons that reason does not know, and so by acknowledging that this is true Brennan is one step closer to discovering that it is only in the God revealed in Jesus Christ that we can truly be anthropologists – people who are discovering in and through Christ what it is to be truly human.  At the end of Series 6 we learn that Bones is pregnant.  If the show were real life we might say that here is a providential opportunity for Bones’ conversion to continue.

A Christmas Reflection

I think that the most important question about Christmas is this: why did God do it?  Why did the Son of God become a man?  In order to begin an answer to that question let me tell you a story.  It’s the story of the eagle who thought he was a chicken.

By a series of unfortunate events a baby eagle was left by its mother in the chicken yard. Separated from its mother, and knowing only the other chickens, the little eagle grew up thinking that it was a chicken too.  It would peck the ground like a chicken, squawk like a chicken, and it would eat the chicken feed that the farmer left for the chickens.  Most sadly of all, the little eagle’s world was confined to the chicken yard.  Because the little eagle didn’t know that he could fly.  Until one day a shadow formed over the chicken yard.  It was so large, that from the perspective of the chickens, it almost blocked out the sun.

A wise old chicken screamed out, ‘eagle!’, and all the chickens began a mad rush for the safety of the chicken coop.  Except for the eagle who thought he was a chicken.  He gazed, transfixed, by the sight of the majestic bird above him.  And then the eagle swooped.  He plummeted down to the earth, pulling up metres before the ground.  And the eagle hovered there, above the little eagle-chicken.

‘You’, he said.  ’What are you doing?’

The little eagle who thought he was a chicken stammered, ‘Wwwwhat do you mean?’

‘What do you mean,what do you mean?’ the eagle replied’.  ’What’s a bird like you doing in a place like this?’

‘I’m just here, where I belong, in the chicken yard,’ said the little eagle.’

‘Here?’ In the chicken yard?! ‘  The eagle was horrified. ‘You don’t belong here. You’re an eagle, not a chicken.  See you have wings like I do.  Extend them, come fly like me.’  And the little eagle tentatively extended his wings, until he realised that they were far longer and stronger than he had ever imagined.  And, then he took off, and he flew!

The point of this story is not to say that God was only pretending to be a chook – only pretending to be one of us, when he really in fact, was not one of us at all, but God, who swooped down for a moment, and then left us again to our own devices.

The point of the story is this:  God became one of us to show us that we have an alternative to being a chook.  The Son of God became flesh to tell us who we really are.  So the truth is, you are not a chook – you’re an eagle – a son or a daughter of God, with incredible value, worth and dignity.

God became man in Jesus to tell us that we have been acting like chooks when we are really eagles.  What does it mean to act like a chook? It’s to believe that you and I, and our world cannot fly, that we are trapped in the prisons of violence, despair and hatred.  It is to believe that there is no way out of the cycles of revenge and payback that mark our world.  To be a chicken is to believe that human nature is so flawed that conflict between people is inevitable, unavoidable, even necessary.

To be a chook is also to believe that the chookyard is all there is.  It’s to believe that who we are as human beings can be reduced to what we have, to what we consume.  It is to forsake our true identity as the beloved of God, made for love and called to the high destiny of life with God, in exchange for the belief that I am defined by what I possess.

God became one of us to show us that there is another way: that it is possible to live in peace with each other.  That violence can give way to reconciliation and friendship.  God became one of us to say there is an alternative to excluding and rejecting others, to the situations of injustice that have so damaged the human story.  God became one of us to say there is another way of being human, truly human: which is to say free, happy, and at peace with one another.

This is not to say that Jesus came just to tell us to be good.  He actually came to tell us that we are to be gods – sharers in the divine love, the recipients of the most extraordinary destiny: that we are to be united with God in love forever.  The way in which we are to live out the new life that he offers us – a life marked by peace, by non-violence, by joy, by love, is by believing that God has made us his sons and daughters.

Some might say that if that is so, then it doesn’t seem to have worked.  Two thousand years of failure, violence, murder, and genocide still mark our lives and the lives of many others.  And the logic of our culture defines us by what we consume, by what we own.  If this is why Jesus came then it doesn’t seem to have worked.  And so the conclusion that some, perhaps many draw is that the Christian ‘thing’ is a failure.

I’d respond to that objection with the words of G.K. Chesterton: Christianity has not been tried and found wanting, it has been found difficult and so  it has not been tried.

Christmas is God’s answer to his own question: ‘What do I have to do to get your attention? So that you would know what it is I have in store for you, so you know the destiny you have, which is  to live in love?  So that you would know that my way is an alternative to the cul-de-sacs and dead-ends of violence, hatred and despair? What do I have to do to get your attention?’

God’s answer is this: ‘I’ll become one of you’.