Seven Days that Divide the World, Part One

The question of the origins of our earth and the people, creatures, and plants populating it remains as relevant today as ever. What are we, as Christians, to think about all of this? Can we stomach a 4.5 billion year old earth and 16 billion year old cosmos? Does Biblical fidelity require that we take the Bible literally (or literalistically) in its seven day account and withstand the mockery of modern scientists? Can we stake out some middle ground between the two? A sort of god-in-the-gaps theistic evolution or Old Earth cosmology combined with a special creation of Adam and Eve in the garden?

For years I have been noncommittal on this issue. I went to a church in college where the pastor had majored in the physical sciences as an undergrad and was well-known locally as a defender of the Young Earth movement. His enthusiasm never quite wore off on me, but he conveyed the issue as monumentally important and indeed elemental to our Christian faith. He often used Jesus' words in the Gospel of John--"If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe me, how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things" (3.12)--as a sort of prooftext for this idea that the physical claims of the Bible bear great weight concerning the truth of the metaphysical claims. 

So this was my major input for a significant developmental period of my life, one in which I furthermore did everything within my power to escape science altogether. Holla at a business major. But I could never quite escape the feeling that maybe the Bible didn't need to be read that way, and as much as I respected and still do respect my college pastor I could never quite believe that the world's scientists (even a good number of the Christian ones!) were in a secret cabal dedicated to defeating a literalistic interpretation of Genesis 1. So I did what any lazy person does: kicked the can down the road. 

But lately that tactic has been unsatisfying. It might have something to do with having kids now and the prospect of having these questions addressed to me, not in some abstract way, but by an adorable little blond-haired, blue-eyed boy who is deeply inquisitive about this world and looks to me as the Explainer. And I don't want to be a liar to my son and daughter. 

I was talking about this recently with a friend who is in a similar position. Neither of us wants to teach our kids comfortable, well-intentioned lies, but neither do we want to be needlessly unfaithful to Scripture. If Young Earth is true, in the face of the overwhelming testimony of the scientific community, I don't want to be too cowardly to teach that to my kids. On the other hand, I don't want to teach them Young Earth Creationism because I am too cowardly to square with scientific truth. He and I both sort of feel as if we will never be fully settled on this issue. And so his question to me was how, practically, do we teach it to our kids. And we settled, unsatisfyingly but probably prudently, on teaching the confusion. Teaching our kids that it is OK to not know everything for sure, and that Scripture was not given to us as a universal compendium of knowledge. 

But I still wanted to know more, and I wanted to know where to turn for answers to this question. I remember an old episode of the Simpsons where there is some debate between Creationists and evolutionists and the evolutionist is a Harvard PhD and the Christian debater has a degree in Truthology from Christian University. It might be a caricature, but that is how this debate feels too often. I don't believe that anyone--secular or religious--comes to science without preconceived notions of what they might find or what they wish to believe, but it often seems as if Christians start with Genesis as if it were a science textbook and proceed accordingly. As admirable as dedication to Scripture is, it can lead down some wrong roads and end in needless reductionistic/antagonistic thinking when it is read incorrectly.

And you can buy a book that will tell you just about anything. I remember being in a lecture once with my Renaissance lit professor and a student spouted out some nonsense, I forget even what it was now. The professor asked him where he had come up with such a ludicrous notion. He said with confidence that he had read it in a book. My professor lifted his thespian's brow and said, "Well, you need to read better books."

Which is to say, I am hopeful that I have found a better book on this subject. I am reading Seven Days that Divide the World by the Oxford mathematician and philosopher of science John C. Lennox. It is a popular level book intended for an audience such as myself and hopefully like you: a Christian who is inquisitive about these issues and wonders how it might be possible to reconcile the claims of science with the doctrine of Creation. And I therefore intend to do something that I haven't done in quite some time: read a book slowly and blog my way through it. I hope to learn something by slowing down and hopefully this can be beneficial for you all as well. So join me, if you so desire. We may not lay these questions to rest (what, after all, would be the fun in that?), but I hope our understanding is increased as well as our charity for the "other side," whomever that might be for you in this debate.

On that note, as I close I want to say that while it is easy and common for our broader culture to mock the views of Young Earth Creationists, I find it abhorrent when other believers do so. As I have moved away personally from Young Earth views I have often asked myself what I might be losing out on by heeding the scientific discoveries of the past two centuries (and longer), and it has made me understand the tight-fistedness with which Young Earth believers hold on to their beliefs and sympathize with them (the loss feels real). And I want to profess humility on this issue: I am not a scientist nor will I ever be mistaken for one. I have never even watched The Big Bang Theory. Do I believe that God could have created the world in six literal days, resting on the seventh? 100%, absolutely yes. Do I believe that is what science tells us? Increasingly no. Do I believe that is the mandatory interpretation of the beginning of Genesis? Again, increasingly no. There. Cards. Table. Meet.

More to come.

The Shining, or The Only Thing I Fear is Fear Itself

I don't like scary movies. At all. I never have. I never will. I am intransigent on this score. I remember as a kid--I couldn't have been more than five--being at my Grandpa Leon's house, a man with a bit of a laissez-faire attitude toward what was appropriate for children to watch, and refusing to watch Pet Cemetery with him and my three year-old brother. Tyler, so far as I can remember, was undisturbed. (For those of you who know him this might explain some of his viewing habits and preferences.) I sat in the kitchen coloring pictures with my grandma. I have only seen a handful of honest-to-God scary movies since then. And I have hated them all. 

(It should be noted here briefly that for some reason the zombie genre is exempt from this intense dislike. There is something so implausible about a zombie outbreak that is not shared by, say, Hostel that refuses to allow it too far into my head. Zombie movies to me aren't even scary, so much as gross action movies.)

As such, I have also studiously avoided horror fiction as a genre. I have read Frankenstein and Dracula, but that is about as scary as reading has ever got for me. But for some reason I was looking for something new to read on the Kindle and I searched for Stephen King novels. The Shining was the first hit and it was something like $4, which for 400 pages and many hours of entertainment seemed like a bargain. For some reason, in my mind King has always been a hack writer. Perhaps it has something to do with this clip from an old Family Guy (yes, dear God, I used to watch Family Guy). Or maybe it is because I spent a chunk of one unfortunate afternoon watching The Langoliers. But this was really well-written stuff. And for much of the time, absolutely terrifying.

Was there an episode of Friends where Joey is reading The Shining and he gets so scared that he puts it in the freezer? (Oh, and, yes, dear God, I used to watch Friends.) That is how I felt for a good chunk of this book. "Get this thing away from me. Oh wait, what happens next?" Weird things happened while I was reading the book as well. For example, the family is snowed into the hotel on the 7th of November. The day I read that was the seventh of November. Jack makes his last phone call before the winter sets in to the manager of the hotel who winters in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I had just read the scene at my lunch break at work and we got a phone call from a Florida area code. There was no one on the other end of the line. I Googled the area code. 305. Serving residents of the Florida coast from Miami up to Fort Lauderdale. I couldn't read it by myself at night. I held Clara tight, and kissed my babies with vigor. In many ways it was even scarier than the film version. 

For me it has everything to do with pacing. Now again, I am no connoisseur of horror movies, but I understand that where the scariest films get a lot of their mileage is the pacing. You have to build to that big moment of fright, whether a gruesome death, or a scared jump/scream-inducing thing, or a big reveal. That is why sound is such a crucial element to scary movies. All film has to do that. And all film fails to do that as well as a book simply because pacing doesn't translate as well to the medium of the film as it does in the book. When you have a 100 minute long film, you can only spend so many minutes building up the tension around a scene. When you have a 400 page book that takes the better part of 15 hours to read, you can go slow as hell.

And that is just what King does, time and time again in this book. For me the scariest scene was when little Danny was in room 217 and the naked ghost woman comes out of the tub and puts her hands around his throat (cut scene). That sentence I just wrote takes about ten seconds to read and isn't that scary. The scene in the book took several minutes. Several terrifying minutes. When the visualization is all in your head sometimes it becomes more acute; your brain is not passive and has to do more work and is therefore more attuned to what is going on. As her hands curled around his neck I could feel pressure on my own. My heart was racing, my eyes flying down the page to try to catch the resolution or the next thing or anything to break the tension of that lingering moment. 

I hated it, and I loved it. It was very weird. Maybe that is how everyone feels about scary movies and I am just sort of getting a glimpse. Not that I want to dwell in that world any longer. My Netflix queue remains bereft of horror movies. My Kindle is unadorned with further scary books. I want the scary stuff to always scare me on those rare moments I indulge whatever reptilian part of our brain digs that stuff. I don't want to become comfortable with it or desensitized to its effects. I regard the capacity to be a 30 year-old man reduced to that five year-old at the kitchen table with grandma as a net positive in my life. 

Speaking of which, that sounds like a good start to a horror movie. A grown man becomes child-like when confronted by fear, taking solace in the memories of coloring pictures idly at his grandmother's table to escape his Philistine relatives, only it is revealed that the pictures he drew were far more lurid and grotesque than anything in the movies he avoided and the sweet innocent boy was nothing of the sort. Reveal: the man is actual in an insane asylum, having murdered his family with an ice pick and a blowtorch after seeing a dead dog in a cemetery (I still have no idea what that movie is about, clearly), and though his doctors think he is rehabilitated he is getting the urge to kill again. And maybe he can read minds. I don't know yet. And maybe that dead dog talks to him somehow. Or all dead dogs can. I don't know. See Spot Kill, Halloween 2016. You're welcome, America.

Running Log: October 27 - November 9

Well, it happened. It had to at some point, I guess. I have my first running injury. On the first day of this time period, the 27th of October, I took a 10 mile pre-church run. It was freezing cold and given my earlier bad luck with my running tights, I was running in shorts only. My legs felt like leaden weights they were so numb. But I was running fine, accomplishing what I set out to do. With about two or three miles left I started to feel a nagging pain down around my ankle. I figured it wouldn't be a big deal and anyway I needed to get home so I ran it out. Later that day it hurt even worse, right at the Achilles tendon. And it doesn't take a physical therapist to tell someone what a sore Achilles signifies: Achilles tendinosis, a degeneration of the tendon caused by a variety of contributing factors, many of which I am profoundly guilty.

So for the past two weeks my running has been minimal. I took six whole days off immediately after feeling the pain. Since then I have run every other day, never farther than four miles. It is absolutely miserable. To feel as if you are finally getting somewhere and then to have to go back to square one is a terrible feeling. I really need to learn to enjoy lifting weights of riding a bike or something, because my mild depression over not being able to run has led to poor food choices. 

My only consolation is that I am still far enough out from spring races that as long as I recover fairly well from this I should still be able to compete in the spring. I was ahead of pace as far as training goes and my one recurrent problem in running has been peaking before the big races I am training for. Maybe this is my body's way of trying to keep me in line.

If nothing else, there is also a spiritual lesson to be gleaned from this, one that is no less true for its proverbiality: Our bodies break down and fail, and where I need to invest most is not in my physical accomplishments but my spiritual well-being and ambitions. A good lesson, always timely, always necessary.

To a few more weeks of slowly run and slowly accumulated miles.  

Hemingway & Style

My parents were in Paris a few weeks ago and I asked them to stop at Shakespeare & Company, the famous English book store on the Left Bank. I had been to the location in New York and wanted a book from the Paris location as well. My mom bought me a new copy of The Sun Also Rises, plus a collection of Shakespeare's sonnets and narrative poems. Well done, mom.

I went through a Hemingway phase when I first got into literature six years ago in El Paso. I read The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and every story in the Collected Short Stories in about a six month time-frame. Which is a lot of Hemingway. And he connected with 23 year-old Toby in a far different way than he did the 29 year-old Toby who just reread The Sun Also Rises. When I was younger it was easier to see the adventure to the tales: the bull-fighting, the war-time ambulance-driving, the freedom-fighting, the romance of the abundant wine in the Spanish or French cafes, and to gloss over the despair running through every book. These were the works, after all, of a man who committed suicide, a man in anguish over the loss of religion and the comfort it brings. I still enjoy reading Hemingway, but it didn't consume me the way it did the first time around when I stayed up late at night to read through his corpus. 

Since that first flurry of reading I have read some criticism of Hemingway, criticism that seems to focus on his prose first, those short declarative sentences he is famous for writing. Here is an example:

“The fiesta was really started. It kept up day and night for seven days. The dancing kept up, the drinking kept up, the noise went on. The things that happened could only have happened during a fiesta. Everything became quite unreal finally and it seemed as though nothing could have any consequences. It seemed out of place to think of consequences during the fiesta. All during the fiesta you had the feeling, even when it was quiet, that you had to shout out any remark to make it heard. It was the same feeling about any action. It was a fiesta and it went on for seven days.” (p 142)

I choose this paragraph, though it could really be almost any other, as quintessentially Hemingway. Hemingway catches a lot of flack for his terse sentence structure. And it can be funny, especially when read out loud. Corey Stoll, playing Papa in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, nailed the cadence of his speech quite well, as well as the bravado. But there is something arresting about it at the same time.

For one, it is easy to follow. Some authors seem to consider inscrutability as a hallmark of good prose, but Hemingway went for intelligibility. For another, it lays bare the events being described. You might not care to know how many pesetas Jake Barnes paid each night for a hotel room, but you will know and you will know that he thought it too much to pay. So much so that he decided to make up the difference by binging on the complementary house wine. In the excerpt above, Hemingway builds up nicely from the length and atmosphere of the fiesta of Pamplona to the effect it has on the speech and actions of the characters. The seven day party disbands the group, might destroy a marriage, ends in drunkenness and fisticuffs and regret. At the beginning of the paragraph a seven day fiesta sounds like a hell of a time. By the end, you just want the thing to be over already. Enough of the shouting.

Yet another attraction to me of the style is the almost poetic nature it can take. I chose the above excerpt for that very reason. The cadence you fall into while reading that paragraph sounds very much like a poem, unrhymed of course and with more than a hint of Homeric influence. One of my favorite poems of all time is Psalm 8, which begins and ends “O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth.” We go on a journey in the meantime and when the line is repeated at the end it has new emphasis. Hemingway’s style can provide the same effect as that of the Psalmist, though to a different degree of course. And it can be quite lovely.

So give Papa a break, critics. His style may not be widespread and might have lost our to complex word webs, but he was a way better writer than you are and he understood what he was doing. And he was very good at what he did. And true and brave.

Running Log: October 20th - October 26th

This week in training. . . 

October 20th:

No running. There were certain areas of my body that bore the brunt of my efforts on the long run the day before which required a day of tender care before returning to the road.

October 21st:

5 miles, 40 minutes: Back from the day off to the let the chafing heal. The human body is really something: Saturday I felt like death and had to waddle around for the rest of the day. Sunday I felt mostly fine. Monday I felt terrific. The legs were a little stiff but I opened up at the end.

October 22nd: 

4 miles, 30 minutes: Ran fast today. Mostly unplanned. I run at 5:30 and it is very dark and very unusual to see another person. But this morning I rounded the corner on to another street and there on the other side of the wide road was another runner who had been running straight. And he was running fast. So I beared down a little more than normal to put some distance between us. I felt great. The weather has turned back to gorgeous fall days. It was in the 40s when I ran this morning. Absolutely perfect running weather. I have always said that my favorite conditions require running in shorts, a t-shirt, and with gloves on my hands. I have had two of those days in a row now.

October 23rd:

5.5-6 miles, 45ish minutes: Boy, it will be nice when I have more accurate metrics on these runs. But part of me is convinced that going sans technology is a good thing for my running right now. I am not running to a distance or speed which is probably safer when you are building a base. In any event, today felt good again. Nothing new to report.

October 24th:

No run. Planned day off. My instinct is to run every day, but I need to pace myself. Plus, I got to sleep in until 6. Scandalous. 

October 25th:

4 miles, 32 minutes: Clara worked today which means I need to finish my run by 6:15 so I can shower before she leaves. Cold, crisp morning. Cold and uncomfortable for the first ten minutes or so but then the body adjusted nicely. Saw a gaggle of runners from the university doing some morning easy running. Some mornings the accountability of a partner would be nice. Ran fine, just not much pop.

October 26th:

4 miles running, 10 miles biking: Clara worked today which pushed off my long run for the week to Sunday. I went to the Y with the kids in the morning and tried to run on a treadmill. I forgot how terrible they are. Just awful. I would rather run in the coldest cold than on a treadmill. I ran four miles and then rode a stationary bike. I just can't bring myself to lift weights. People talk about running being boring, but all that weightlifters do is pick something up and put it right back down where they got it. I cranked up the resistance on the bike and let the quads burn.

Weekly Total: 22.5 miles

Ghosts Trying to Hold the World

Any parent in the world will easily relate to the following:

"Parents in love with their kids are all amnesiacs, trying to remember, trying to cherish moments, ghosts trying to hold the world. Being mortals, having a finite mind when surrounded by joy that is perpetually rolling back into the rear view is like always having something important on the tips of our tongues, something on the tips of our fingers, always slipping away, always ducking our embrace.

No matter how many pictures we take, no matter how many scrapbooks we make, no matter how many moments we invade with a rolling camera, we will die. We will vanish. We cannot grab and hold. We cannot smuggle things out with us through death. . .

But this shouldn’t inspire melancholy; it should only tinge the sweet with the bitter. Don’t resent the moments simply because they cannot be frozen. Taste them. Savor them. Give thanks for that daily bread. Manna doesn’t keep overnight. More will come in the morning."

N.D. Wilson, Death by Living (107)

I constantly find myself trying to capture moments with Owen and Eleanor. Trying to remember the first time they did this or that thing (the feeling is more intense with Owen since he is older and therefore more active). Yesterday in the afternoon I was putting my shoes on to go out to the backyard and play with him. He already had his shoes on so he ran out back without me. I was watching through the open back door and he took off running after our chickens who had escaped their enclosure. When we first moved into this house and took over care of the chickens he loved to chase them across the yard. He had this sort of manic glee in his laugh as he chased them up and down the yard. It was cute, but not good. Poor girls get flustered easily. I was about to holler at him to stop when I realized what he was doing. He wasn’t chasing them arbitrarily for some sort of sadistic pleasure; he was putting them back in their enclosure. Just like daddy does. He had his arms out to try and corral them and ran down each one and forced them back to the fenced-in area. He shut the gate and grabbed the brick that we prop against it to keep it shut. By the time I got outside the job was done and he was standing proudly asking to play football. He wanted us to have the yard to ourselves.

Even as I write this story, with the event barely 24 hours past I know I am missing things. I know I have lost some of the special grace of that moment. The way he moved, the way the sun slanted into our yard, the look of accomplishment, that perfect running stride.

Those moments proliferate when you are a parent. And you can’t keep hold of them. But you are constantly moving forward into a new moment. This morning he came downstairs and roared at me like a lion (a ferocious lion) because that scares me. Then he said “Hi, beautiful” to his sister and bent over and kissed her. 

"When the dew fell upon the camp in the night, the manna fell with it." 

His mercies are new every morning.

Running Log: October 13th-October 19th

I thought this would be a good idea as far as accountability goes. I feel like for the first time since we left El Paso my running is getting to a place where not only am I not ashamed of how I am running, but it has also regained some centrality to my life. To be a good runner you have to think of yourself as a runner. Otherwise you are just someone trying to keep the love handles at bay. So I thought I would post a weekly training schedule, including some brief thoughts on how I ran and what I can improve on moving forward. All of my distances are estimated at this point. Christmas money will bring a new GPS watch and more accurate data.

So, here it goes:

October 13th

No run today, though an eight hour car ride with two small children is an endurance event in its own right. We were in Fort Collins for a friend's wedding and the weekend included almost no exercise, save for the shock to my heart of the first (two or so) Rio margaritas in many years.

October 14th

5 miles, 40 minutes: Back at it on a Monday morning. So strange to be running in such pitch blackness all of the time. Felt rested and fresh after a weekend off. Springy stride, good even pace.

October 15th

4-1/2 miles, 35 minutes: No bathroom break, an anomaly in my early morning runs, allowed me to stretch out a bit farther away from the house. Beautiful weather.

October 16th

No run. Mama worked and I lost the willpower to get out of my comfortable bed at 5 a.m.

October 17th

5 miles, 40 minutes: Cold, cold, cold. First day wearing running tights. Tears in my eyes from the cold. And it wasn't even that cold. It is going to be a long winter.

October 18th

No run. Planned day off to rest for the Saturday long run.

October 19th

2-1/2 hours. 18-19 miles. This was easily the longest run I have done since the 50k I did in May of 2010 which, for those keeping track, was a long damn time ago. In short, I felt fantastic. I left the house at 7 and ran in the dark for nearly an hour until the sun came up. When it did I was several miles east of town and turned south down a dirt road. The sun was rising to my left and to my right was the full moon. It was perfect. Ecstatic. One of those running moments where you don't feel like you are running. I was just running and smiling and singing. Praising God and soaking in the beauty.

Which, unfortunately, didn't last forever. The following paragraph will relate in some anatomical detail the perils of long distance running. Proceed with caution. I haven't worn running tights very often and never for a long run. In El Paso I rarely ran before work because I didn't come home to kids so I would just go after work and it would be warm enough to wear shorts because, desert. On long run weekends it might be cold when I started, but it would be in the 60s by the time I finished. So I just had cold legs for the first hour or so and was comfortable the rest of the time. This past Saturday it was sub-freezing when I started (we got our first snow on Friday) and wouldn't warm up much as I trucked on. So I wore tights, which, again, I had never done for longer than 5 or 6 miles. Being a novice to tights I neglected to wear underwear beneath them, thinking that the elastic would work fine. Fifteen miles later it felt as if someone had taken sandpaper to my nether region. I was about to cry. I stopped on the side of the road in some trees and removed my tights and ran commando with my high school gym shorts the rest of the way. Which didn't help a great deal. The damage had been done. I ran until I was about a mile from home and then walked the rest of the way in awkward duck fashion.

But instead of dwelling on the negative, I will say that despite the third degree burns on my special parts this was the best run I have had in years. I felt great. Even when the injury was apparent I was still smiling. It felt so great to be out there. Before I about curled up in a ball on the trail I was thinking of extending my run to three hours. I never have done that in the past--made a long run longer. A wonderful feeling.

Weekly Totals: 33.5 miles, 265 minutes