Sunday, February 28, 2010

Stars

If you were in worship at First Church this morning, you got all this already… some “star data” and a true story…

On the clearest of nights, if you’re at least 10 miles away from any source of light like streetlights and cars and lit up houses, and if your vision is relatively good, and depending on the time of the year, you can see anywhere from 3,000 to 6,000 stars in the sky. The closest one to us, Proxima Centauri, is 4.2 light years away, which means that the light we’d see tonight from that star was generated by that star about Thanksgiving, 2005. The brightest star in the night sky, the North Star, or Polaris, is 2,527,808,910,468,952 (2 quadrillion, 527 trillion, 808 billion, 910 million, 468 thousand, 952) miles, or 430 light years away, which means the light we’d see tonight from that North Star was generated about the time Sir Francis Drake was wrapping up his circumnavigation of the globe. The farthest star we’d see on our really clear night isn’t really a star at all, but a galaxy, Andromeda, and it looks like a star because it is so far away, all of its stars look as if they are all one star. It’s 2.5 million light years away, Andromeda is, or something like 14,696,563, 432,959,020,000 (14 quintillion, 696 quadrillion, 563 trillion, 432 billion, 959 million, 20 thousand) miles, which means the light we’d see tonight from the Andromeda galaxy was generated about the beginning of the Proterozoic Era, when the continents became stable and oxygen started to saturate the atmosphere. The star that is farthest from us but still in our own Milky Way Galaxy that we’d see tonight is only about 23.5 quadrillion miles, or 4,000 light years away, which means the light we’d see tonight was generated a couple of centuries before Father Abraham’s vision in Genesis 15.

About the time the 12th brightest star in tonight’s sky, Altair, was generating the light we'd see in tonight’s perfectly clear night sky (that’s about 17 years ago), we had a group of youth community young people staying at the Powder Horn Ski Resort on the western slopes of the Rockies. The last night we were at Powder Horn was a gloriously clear night, and after our worship time several of us sat outside as far away from any earth light as we could and just looked up. Several of the young people with us said they had never seen as many stars. Shooting stars darted across the night sky like fireworks, and one of them said something about how the light we were seeing at that moment was generated long in the past. Then one of the boys, one of the rowdy, always-hard-to-keep-down-on-the-farm-always-knows-much-much-more-than-anyone-else boys who we loved to be around but whom we always had to keep kind of a tight leash on, got up and started to wander off into the dark. Somebody called his name, and he just kept walking, so I went off after him. When I caught up with him, he was sobbing. Shoulders heaving, struggling to catch his breath sobbing.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“The stars,” he said, ‘the stars. The stars might not even be there, and we’re still seeing them. That’s how it’s gonna be for us, you know.”

“No, I don’t know.”

And then I heard one of the most profound things I’ve ever heard, from the mouth of that frightened, distraught boy…

“You’re always telling us, Rob that we have a lot of life to live. Well, we don’t! We don’t have very long, maybe 90 years if we’re lucky. I’m already 16. I only have like 70 some years left. It’s like the stars! When I’m dead, people will still see me. Well, maybe they won’t see me, but they will still be affected by me, by the person I am. They won’t know me, they won’t love me, but they will still see me. And I want them to see me at my best, not as the jerk I am most of the time. I don’t want them to think I’m a jerk. I want them to see me how I really am.”

“I don’t want them to think I’m a jerk! I don’t want to be a jerk anymore.”

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

More on "Fearing Not"

Jim Collins is a leadership and organizational leader who wrote among other things the leadership development books Good to Great and Built to Last. Though a huge proponent of changing processes (he calls them "mechanisms") and being responsive and embracing new technologies, he argues that the whole "change or die" emphasis prevalent in so many organizations is wrong-headed in at least two ways. In addition to not wanting to change for the sake of change, Collins argues that fear can set things in morion, can get people moving, but almost never results in healthy change. In short, fear is a lousy motivator.

In an article in Inc. a dozen years ago, Collins used this story as an example:

Picture the great composer Beethoven struggling to write a perfect Fifth Symphony that will stand the test of time. He starts with a simple theme. Discards it. Starts again. Revises it. Finally settles upon the famous "fate motive" (Da Da Da Dommmmm!). Inverts it. Extends it. Rends, amends, and dissects it. All in the context of a primal thematic struggle: that of light versus dark, hope versus despair, major versus minor. With great discipline he holds back the trombones, the piccolo, and the contrabassoon until their triumphal entry on the downbeat of movement four, when the forces of life and hope blast forth to obliterate the forces of angst and despair once and for all...

Now imagine asking Beethoven during his toil to perfect the Fifth Symphony, "Ludwig, why are you working so hard? Your First Symphony has established you as one of the most popular and successful composers of the day. Your Third Symphony, Eroica, will stand as one of the great cutting-edge creations of all time, having shattered the constraints of the classical style. You've already earned your place in the history books. Why do you continue to push yourself?"

Can you picture Beethoven responding, "Why push myself? Because if I don't write a better symphony, then someone else will. The competition is fierce, and if I don't improve, I'll be pummeled by those feisty foreign upstarts. Change or die. Innovate or self-destruct. Eat lunch or be lunch. It's not that I really want to reinvent and perfect my work; it's just that in this world, only the paranoid survive..."

The next time you encounter..."Change or die,"... remember the words of Royal Robbins, the great rock climber who pioneered ascents of Yosemite's big walls: "The point is not to avoid death - if you want to do that, simply stay on the ground. The point is to reach the top, and then to keep on climbing."

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

God is...

Paul Tillich talked about the limitations of language and the transcendence of the holy when he wrote about "the God above the God of theism." That is to say, whatever God is, God is more than our best description of God. For centuries we have argued some (a lot?!) about which image is better, what symbol set makes most sense rather than seeing what we can learn from images and symbol sets that don't necessarily make sense to us.

In his Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius Loyola encouraged his young Jesuit novices to begin their search for spiritual truth to begin with this exercise. Prompted by one's spiritual director, the novice was instructed to complete as many "God is..." statements as could be corroborated by "scripture or experience." The novice would then create the "God is..." list --

God is love.
God is peace.
God is justice.
God is light.
God is ruler.
God is truth.--
God is... --

and then proceed to the mentor for direction. The spiritual director would listen warmly, intently, patiently as the novice would read one by one the "God is..." list and explain each individual statement. The mentor would press the novice through each rationale to the place where the novice would say "God is not only love, or peace, or light," or whatever.

"What then, my son, is God?" Almost invariable the novice would revisit his list, and his "not only list" and then move to a place of great exasperation and blurt out "God is...God!"

"Precisely," the mentor would reply. "God is God."