Therefore Give Thanks

Last night I found a present on my pillow: the December edition of Vogue magazine.

That’s definitely a first. I’ve never had my own copy of Vogue.

The only newsstand magazines we buy are the ones we put in each others’ Christmas stockings.

And Vogue? If you know me at all, you know I’m not a Vogue sort of person.

But my husband had seen press about the cover story,  Michelle Obama: the first lady the world fell in love with.  He’d gone out once before to buy it, tried several stores, but no one had it.

So yesterday he went on a secret mission to try again.

He and I have had some great conversations this election cycle.

About what it’s like to be a woman in a world eager to shut women down, happy to see them fail.

About the double standards of behavior, performance, appearance, voice that too often hem women in.

About that feeling of smashing one’s head, once again, on the impervious, invisible glass ceiling.

He’s heard my grief that the best prepared candidate – a woman – lost to the least prepared ever – a man.

And he’s come to share my admiration for Michelle Obama and her mature, measured contributions to the discourse of the day.

I voted for Barack Obama in part because of his relationship with his wife.

I respect men who dare to show they love and respect their wives. And I admire men who aren’t threatened by their wives' accomplishments, who aren’t afflicted by our culture’s narrow view of beauty or femininity.

Michelle Obama is her own person: smart, wise, determined, lovely in a way all her own.

Despite horrible insults hurled toward her and her daughters, despite dehumanizing comments, ugly malicious memes, vile and vicious critiques of every female feature, she has danced her way through eight difficult years and made it look almost easy.

  

The Vogue cover story is a tribute to her courage, grace and beauty.

I’ll be savoring it, sharing it, keeping it – a reminder of her witness.

We lost another important witness this week: Gwen Ifill.

She came of age, as I did, during the passage of legislation opening doors to both women and people of color.

She learned, as I did, that laws and reality don’t always coincide.

She spent her life sliding her toe into invisible cracks in the structures of privilege, prying the door wider for those who came behind her.

Her advice is instructive to many of us now:

You can't spend a lot of time assuming the worst about why people do things. It almost always has nothing to do with you. It has everything to do with them. It has to do with their biases, with their constraints, with their inability to imagine anything more and so rather than — and I tell this to young people all the time — rather than going around saying, 'Aha, they didn't give this to me because I was black or I was a woman,' you stop and think — they didn't give it to me because they couldn't imagine me in this role and it's my job then — it's a tougher job than my white counterparts have, but it's just what it is — my job is to force them to see me in a different role and then you act on that

I been considering that challenge: to help others see something they haven’t yet seen. To help them imagine things they can’t quite imagine.

In a narrative of scarcity, to imagine and live abundance.

In a binary world of us vs. them, to imagine and live a broader “we.”

In a culture divided by anger and fear, to imagine and live compassion.

I’ve been spending time this week in the book of Hebrews.

Written to Jewish Christian facing opposition and growing persecution, the book urges its audience to pay attention, to listen more closely for God’s voice.

It calls its listeners to perseverance:

Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful. And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds. (10:23)

Chapters 11 and 12 are familiar anchors when times feel troubled or my heart starts to sink.

I do not have time to tell about Gideon, Barak,Samson and Jephthah, about David and Samuel and the prophets, who through faith conquered kingdoms, administered justice, and gained what was promised; who shut the mouths of lions, quenched the fury of the flames, and escaped the edge of the sword; whose weakness was turned to strength; and who became powerful in battle and routed foreign armies. Women received back their dead, raised to life again. There were others who were tortured, refusing to be released so that they might gain an even better resurrection. Some faced jeers and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were put to death by stoning; they were sawed in two; they were killed by the sword. They went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, persecuted and mistreated— the world was not worthy of them. They wandered in deserts and mountains, living in caves and in holes in the ground.

Here are the words I keep resting in, when I hear of another act of racism or hate, when thoughtful observers describe disaster gathering:

Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.

The book of Hebrews reminds me: We are not the first to encounter a time of political disruption.

We are not the first asked to live as agents of light in a world wrapping itself in darkness.

We are not the first called to listen more closely, speak more clearly, stand more firmly, love more courageously.

Remember the cloud of witnesses and don’t grow weary and lose heart.

I’m thankful for the witness and example of women like Gwen Ifill and Michelle Obama.

Thankful for my own grandmother, Elda Capra, who insisted on reading Scripture for herself, insisted on living her own gifts and calling when every authority told her she was wrong.

Thankful for voices from the past, for witnesses like Sojourner Truth, Corrie ten Boom, Watchman Nee, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King.

I’m thankful for a church family committed to making a place at the table for any who come through the doors.

Thankful for an online community gently probing conflicts and contradiction, sharing posts about standing up to bullies, creating spaces of welcome, envisioning ways forward.

I’m thankful to know this season of unrest is not the end of the story.

Thankful to remember every chapter is an invitation to grow in faith and wisdom and greater compassion.

We are called to engage – fully – in the world around us. 

Called to weep with those who weep, to care for those in need.

But we are also called to live in light of a reality greater, deeper, higher, more lasting.

As the writer of Hebrews say, “Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful.”

Therefore, dear friends, give thanks.

As I give thanks for you.

Are You Rich?

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)
how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any–lifted from the no
of all nothing–human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?
(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

    (e.e. cummings) 

Last Sunday, sitting in my yard, I saw a Pileated Woodpecker, a beautiful Hooded Warbler, two Hermit Thrush. A Tufted Titmouse hopped around the stumps I use for side tables, then landed briefly on my head: a bucket list moment I didn't even plan.

A young friend asked me once, with incredible seriousness: are you rich?

It depends how you define rich, I answered.

By the standards of Main Line Pennsylvania, where I live, no, I’m not rich.

My husband and I are nowhere near the $450,000 that would put us in the top 1% of U.S. household income (or the $155,000 for the top 10%).

But apparently we have enough annual income to qualify in the global 1%: the cutoff for that is $52,000.

So yes, by most standards, except those of my immediate community, I am rich, rich in ways my great-grandparents would not have imagined.

A recent report described the sharply differing life expectancies for the wealthy and poor in America: 

for men born in 1920, there was a six-year difference in life expectancy between the top 10 percent of earners and the bottom 10 percent. For men born in 1950, that difference had more than doubled, to 14 years. For women, the gap grew to 13 years, from 4.7 years.

For most of the factors that contribute to that gap, including quality health care, clean air and water, access to a reasonably-priced healthy food supply, I fall on the side of the wealthy.

Yes, I’m rich.

But my wealth goes far beyond that: I have Internet access that puts the world at my fingertips, even in my green backyard, and allows communication with friends and family continents away.

I grew up in a state (New York) that believed in educating all its children well and provided funding for college for anyone who cared to go: I can read, write, think, analyze, dream in ways not available to those who grew up with inadequate education.

I am phenomenally wealthy in family and friends: I know people who know people. If I need help, advise, backup, resources, there are friends I can ask, family I can call.

Today is May Day: a day marked in many places with celebration of spring festivals and Maypoles.

It’s also International Workers Day, begun to commemorate and continue the effort of the Haymarket affair of May 4, 1886.   

 

Never heard of it?

You’re not the only one.

Hundreds of thousands of American workers went on strike on May 1, 1886 to demand “an eight hour day with no cut in pay.”

In Chicago, strikes and rallies continued in the following days. On May 4, a rally in support of the eight hour work day escalated into violence when a home-made pipe bomb was thrown into the path of heavily-armed police. Shots were fired wildly in the dark leaving seven police officers and four strikers dead.

Eight men were arrested. Five were sentenced to death. One man committed suicide in his cell; four were hanged. The remaining three were sentenced to life in prison, but pardoned just years later by a governor who described them as victims of  “hysteria, packed juries, and a biased judge.”

We don’t learn much in school about the workers’ movements that bubbled through American and international politics from the earliest days of the industrial revolution.

We forget the great hardship experienced by mill workers, men and women in production lines, coal miners, farm hands.

We often look disparagingly on unions: corrupt, coercive, unresponsive to workers’ needs.

But how much of our current wealth is the fruit of men and women who marched, rallied, stood in picket lines?

Not just wealth in money, but other benefits: eight hour work weeks, disability pay, minimum wage, safe working conditions.

If we knew our history better, we’d know that when workers are ignored, inequality grows. Desperation spurs agitation, which spins toward violence, until a course correction affirms the rights of workers and financial reward is shared more evenly.

That’s a ridiculously simplified version of a neglected piece of history.

And a nod to my immigrant grandfather, Carl Consensus Capra, who saw the damage done to unprotected workers and did what he could to run a union shop. 

I am wealthy, in part, because of the work of my grandfather and many more like him.

An Elizabeth Warren video clip went viral several years ago reminding us all that whatever wealth we have is a gift, no matter how much we claim credit: 

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody.
 You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.
 Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

Many of the roads I drive were once routes used by First Nation traders, pushed out of their Delaware homelands. Uwchlan Township, where I live, was founded by Welsh farmers, who bought the land from William Penn. The church where I worshipped this morning was born from a vision shared by a Rosemont pastor and a handful of Paoli families who met to worship in Paoli Inn.

I am blessed, daily, to enjoy the riches handed me by unknown others: roads, buildings, institutions.

I am able to vote because of generations of women who kept that dream alive: writing, marching, rallying, even facing prison time.

In worship this morning I was reminded: my greatest wealth is the grace I receive through Christ’s death and resurrection, mediated through the gifts of the Holy Spirit, the testimony of faithful witnesses, the spiritual heritage of a prayerful grandmother. Even there, Elizabeth Warren's words apply: my faith is not something I made myself, earned myself, gave myself.

 For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich. (2 Corinthians 8:9)

I’m sometimes troubled that I should enjoy such wealth when so many others have so little.

I don’t know why I’ve been blessed to live in a time and place where so much is taken for granted, or why I live in such comfort when so many live as refugees, driven from their homes by hunger, war, persecution. 

I do know that riches can vanish through folly, greed, or recurrent injustice.

Money can be misspent or swept away by fraudulent economies.

Democracy can be swallowed into tyranny.

Family, friends, even faith are fragile, easily damaged by deception or neglect.

The best safeguard I know for wealth of every kind is gratitude, generosity, and the grace that pays it forward: that remembers all we have is gift and looks for ways to make the gift available to others.

The one who supplies seed for planting and bread for eating will supply and multiply your seed and will increase your crop, which is righteousness. You will be made rich in every way so that you can be generous in every way. Such generosity produces thanksgiving to God through us.

So yes, I'm rich. And thankful.  

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)
how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any–lifted from the no
of all nothing–human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?
(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
e.e. cummings

Thanksgiving Three: Communion

I spent time this week in Pittsburgh at a conference on Shale and Public Health, where I listened to doctors, public health officials, environmental chemists talk about the unexpected consequences of unconventional gas drilling.

What happens when more than 750 different chemicals and compounds, mixed in more than 2000 different ways, are shot at high pressure and heat into fissures in the earth? We know the impact of one chemical at a time on adult males over short periods of time. What about multiple chemicals, over long periods of time? On skin? Lungs? Blood stream? Other organs? What about impacts on women, growing children, unborn babies whose organs are still forming?

We are all connected, in more ways than we know. Surfactants shot into the earth in one place can bubble up in another. Fractured shale in one town can increase radon in towns many miles away. Particular matter released in the air can be detected through markers in the next state downwind.

Newtonian physics posited an orderly world with discrete, separate entities interacting in predictable, definable ways according to their own particular traits. Quantum physics shattered that, offering instead a more complex, interwoven world.

In my high school physics class, our brilliant teacher, Mr. Appell, set us to testing quantum particle and wave duality. For weeks we worked our way through detailed experiments attempting to prove matter functions as either wave or particle. In the end, we were asked to defend and debate our conclusions, with mounting frustration: how could both be true?

I remember Mr. Appell twirling the ends of his reddish mustache, smiling with glee, as we argued, scribbled notes on the board, waved our results at each other. Logically speaking, both can’t be true: how can electrons be both particles and waves? How would you draw it? What would that look like?

That’s the challenge at the heart of quantum physics: our binary thinking doesn’t hold. We want to say choose one or the other. Door A or Door B. But somehow, it doesn’t work that way.

One of Einstein’s most puzzling, frustrating experiments revealed something called “entangled states,”a challenge to a core principal of classical physics known as “locality.” According to locality, and our most basic logic, an object is directly influenced only by its immediate surroundings. According to “entangled states,” testing or measuring an object in one place can simultaneously impact an object many miles away. Einstein called this “spooky action at a distance,” and for eighty years physicists have been trying to prove, disprove, explain the phenomenon. 

Physics points us toward a universe where what happens on a plant light years away can somehow influence what happens here.

Microbiologists have been coming to strangely similar conclusions from very different directions. Recent research has made clear that the human body is host to billions of invisible microbes, living on our skin, our hair, our teeth, multiplying in our blood, bones, brains, digestive systems. Since 2007, the National Institutes of Health have been promoting and funding experiments that catalog human microbiota and demonstrate connections between microbes and human health and disease. Depression, anxiety, autism, diabetes and more have been linked to abnormalities in human microbiotic communities.

Other research is showing that environmental changes caused by things like fertilizers, antibiotics, nanoparticles in sunscreen or packaging can impact the microbiome in ways that support or harm human health. 

What happens to a cow on a farm in Iowa can impact the mood of a child in Pennsylvania.

The work of a farmer in rural Guatemala can help or harm an executive in his office in Manhattan.

We are a tangled web of untraceable cause and effect, tied to “spooky action at a distance” in more ways than we’ll ever know.

The news, as I’ve traveled through the week, has been of bombs in Paris, migrants in Greece, airstrikes in Syria, terror alerts in Brussels.

Endless political posturing by our national would-be leaders.

It’s all connected: what’s said in New York echoes in Syria, flares across Europe, ricochets across college campuses, triggers violence in ways we can’t track, foresee, undo.

It’s beyond our control. Most of it.

Invisible microbes. Unknown additives. Planetary movements. Drones exploding houses on unnamed lanes in distant nations.

Two thousand years ago a group of friends gathered around a wooden table in a modest Middle-Eastern house, surrounded by forces beyond their control.

Romans patrolled the city, mercenary invaders wielding deadly swords.

Their own religious leaders were plotting to kill them, partisan patriarchs unable to consider any viewpoint but their own.

Their friend, the only one they’d ever met who spoke to storms, rebuked death and disease, that friend offered bread and wine as symbol and substance of his own imminent death. 

The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.” (1 Corinthians 11) 

For two thousand years his followers have debated what he meant.

Symbol or substance? Real food and drink, or memorial of faith?

Does he become part of us? We part of him?

Particle or wave?

In 1 Corinthians 12, Paul wrestled with the implications: 

“Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ.  For we were all baptized by one Spirit so as to form one body—whether Jews or Gentiles, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink. Even so the body is not made up of one part but of many.” 

We are individual particles bound into waves by the body and blood of Christ.

But more than that, we are bound to all creation by the one who holds it in being: 

[Christ] is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation; for in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities - all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. Colossians 1:15-17 

I follow with interest the studies of gravity, Higgs bosons, forces that hold matter in tension, that bind molecules together. Beyond any force our science can discern lies yet another force, announced millenia ago: in him all things hold together. For in him all things were created, visible and invisible.

There are Christians who object to language like that: only pantheists revere creation, or talk of God in Christ dwelling in every molecule.

And there are materialists who still believe that matter is all we have: nothing beyond it, inside it, before it. Just matter. Physical reality.

We know someday this world will end.

Atomic scientists point to a moment when matter explodes, when the mysterious force in atoms lets go in a blaze of light and fire.

Environmentalists posit a world ablaze: drought and wind and warming seas until the atmosphere itself bursts into fire.

Cosmologists talk of an ever-expanding universe that hits the limit of expansion and collapses back into a black hole singularity.

Apocalypse, once hard to imagine, seems closer each day, with war and rumor of war, global unrest and unprecedented population displacement.

John, the beloved disciple who sat nearest Jesus when he passed the bread and wine, saw his own world explode in persecution and war, saw his own closest friends martyred by stoning, beheading, crucifixion.

But he saw something beyond that – a sustaining word that will not leave us. 

A light in the darkness that will never dim. the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. 

Fear not, the angels said.

Fear not, Christ himself repeated.

We are held in communion by a power greater than gravity, greater than darkness.

Greater than death, 

Thanks be to God. 

This is the third in a short Thanksgiving series.

Thanksgiving One: Provision, November 8, 2015

Thanksgiving Two: Creation, Novmeber 15, 2015

Thanksgiving Two: Creation

Last week I set out to give thanks for God’s provision, and found myself tripping over a simple word I use with gratitude: creation.

 

Just the mention of creation sets off triggers in many minds. Creation: images of anti-science legislation, arguments against global warming, accusations that the fossil record is a vast atheist conspiracy, ongoing insistence that the earth was created in precisely six days, precisely six thousand years ago.  Guilt, anger, confusion. Dread at the very mention of dinosaurs.

I wrote several weeks ago about binary thinking: the idea that there are two ways to see things, and if you aren’t one, you’re automatically the other. 

So, to a black-and-white sort of brain, Christians are anti-science, tied to a view of the world that ignores all evidence of change.

And scientists are anti-Christian, teeth set on edge by the very mention of “creation.”

Both views, of course, are nonsense, straw men propped up by sloppy rhetoric and loose ad hominem attacks.

There are many Christians who are well-respected leaders in their scientific fields.

Many scientists who are unapologetic in their expression of Christian faith and praise of the creative mind that set the universe in motion.

As I wrote last week, the fine-tuning of the universe to accommodate fragile human life has prompted a small wave of scientists to lose their faith in chance and converted to Christianity, or more confidently and publicly affirmed the faith they started with. 

In the same way, accumulating evidence in for a Big Bang beginning has narrowed apparent gaps between science and faith in the worlds of cosmology and astronomy.  Less than a century ago, most secular scientists believed in a Newtonian physics, and the underlying assumption of a universe that always has and always will be as it is today.  According to that model, the Judeo-Christian creation narrative was a laughable myth.

In 1927 Georges Lemaître, a Belgian priest trained in math, physics, and astronomy, posited an expanding universe dating back to a single point in time. While many contemporaries dismissed him, Einstein found his ideas “interesting,” and in the decades since, his theories have been tested and refined, to the point that most astronomers and physicists now speak of the Big Bang as a proven moment of creation, or, as Arno Penzia, winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics describes it: 

a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing, and delicately balanced to provide exactly the conditions required to support life. In the absence of an absurdly improbable accident, the observations of modern science seem to suggest an underlying, one might say, supernatural plan. 

According to Robert Jastrow, founder of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies: 

Astronomers now find they have painted themselves into a corner because they have proven, by their own methods, that the world began abruptly in an act of creation to which you can trace the seeds of every star, every planet, every living thing in this cosmos and on the earth. And they have found that all this happened as a product of forces they cannot hope to discover….  That there are what I or anyone would call supernatural forces at work is now, I think, a scientifically proven fact. 

Of course there are scientists who insist the universe began without outside intervention, through events still unknown, with natural causes science has yet to find.

And there are Christians who insist that the days of scripture are twenty-four hours, not unbounded periods of time as Hebrew scholars have long suggested, that God spoke and all was immediately accomplished.

Even so, the discourse between science and faith on cosmological origins seems far less contentious than the questions surrounding life forms and human ancestry.

Binary thinking suggests we choose between godless Charles Darwin and the literalist James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, Ireland, who in the mid 17th century added ages and dates of ancient kings to deduce that the first day of creation began at nightfall on Saturday, October 22, 4004 BC, near the autumnal equinox.   

Ussher was not the dunce sometimes portrayed, but a seeker of truth in his own time and context. 

And Charles Darwin was hardly the godless atheist Young Earth Creationists attack. In letters, essays, and diaries of his travels, he consistently expressed belief in a creator who intervened in natural processes in ways beyond human understanding, and confidence that humans are in some way unique: 

Amongst the scenes which are deeply impressed on my mind, none exceed in sublimity the [Brazilian] primeval forests … [for they] are temples filled with the varied productions of the God of Nature. No one can stand unmoved in these solitudes, without feeling that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body.  (Beagle Diary 1836) 

He was troubled that his work was claimed by secular materialists as occasion to jettison belief in God, while attacked by fundamentalists because he was willing to explore natural mechanisms God might have used in creation. In Descent of Man, he wrote:  

I am aware that the conclusion arrived at in this work will be denounced by some as highly irreligious; but he who denounces them is bound to shew why it is more irreligious to explain the origin of man as a distinct species by descent from some lower form, through the laws of variation and natural selection, than to explain the birth of the individual through the laws of ordinary reproduction. The birth both of the species and of the individual are equally parts of that grand sequence of events, which our minds refuse to accept as the result of blind chance. 

In letters, essays, books, Darwin probed the idea that God could use mechanisms he designed to yield results not explicitly determined. Does God ordain every leaf that falls? Every change in every creature in every place and time? Caught by demands that he renounce science in favor of a literal Genesis account, or renounce his faith in favor of a materialistic universe, he wrote: 

With respect to the theological view of the question. This is always painful to me. I am bewildered. I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. … On the other hand, I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe, and especially the nature of man, and to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. … I am conscious that I am in an utterly hopeless muddle. I cannot think that the world, as we see it, is the result of chance; and yet I cannot look at each separate thing as the result of Design. … Again, I say I am, and shall ever remain, in a hopeless muddle. 

Like every scientist who has stretched the boundaries of what we know, every theorist who has struggled to see beyond the easy answers, Darwin was pressured from every side, pushed to flatten mysteries into platitudes easier to understand.

I grew up in a church tradition that saw Darwin as evil, science and Christianity as inextricably opposed, and pursuit of secular knowledge as a common route to spiritual ruin. Yet my grandmother’s Bible holds curious margin notes throughout the book of Genesis, and an interesting little outline listing “literal view,” “gap theory,” “day age theory,” “pictoral day.”

I’m thankful for her example of struggling to harmonize what she learned and saw with what she read in scripture.

Thankful for Darwin’s difficult journeys of discovery, Lemaître’s bold and brilliant challenge to the status quo.

Very thankful God lead me to a Christian liberal arts college that taught and practiced “all truth is God’s truth,” with a robust science department unafraid to grapple with available evidence: the implications of fossil record, the astounding discoveries in physics, biology, archeology, anthropology.

I’m thankful for the gentle wisdom of my college Classics professor, who graciously tried to pry his students from a too-literal view of Biblical interpretation, grieving at the way words of scripture were misread to hold women to a narrow role, misinterpreted and zealously misused to portray God’s actions in simplistic ways that missed the broader point.

I’m thankful for Christian scientists from the days of Copernicus to now who have built on the premise that truth is knowable, universal principles apply, and, as Copernicus said, it's our “loving duty to seek the truth in all things, in so far as God has granted that to human reason.” –

I’m thankful for groups like American Science Affiliation: A Network of Christians in the Sciences xand their faithful work in understanding this amazing universe we’re given.  And BioLogos  “inviting the church and the world to see the harmony between science and biblical faith.” 

I’m thankful for family and faith community willing to live in that “muddle” that Darwin described: confident that there is a Maker, deeply aware there is much we don’t know, can’t explain, may never understand about the intersection of observable fact and the God who says “my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. 

  

Most gracious God, by whose knowledge the depths are
broken up and the clouds drop down the dew: We yield thee
hearty thanks and praise for the return of seed time and harvest,
for the increase of the ground and the gathering in of its fruits,
and for all other blessings of thy merciful providence
bestowed upon this nation and people. And, we beseech thee,
give us a just sense of these great mercies, such as may appear
in our lives by a humble, holy, and obedient walking before
thee all our days; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom,
with thee and the Holy Ghost be all glory and honor, world
without end. Amen.  (Book of Common Prayer)

This is the second in a short Thanksgiving series.

The first: Thanksgiving One: Provision, November 8, 2015.

Thanksgiving One: Provision

Monarch caterpillar, Marshall Hedin, Wikimedia

At a recent funeral, I found myself talking with friends I hadn’t spent time with in years. The conversation turned quickly to challenges and changes, and to stories of God’s provision in recent times of struggle.

One friend recounted her experience of needing a car. Without one, her job possibilities had been limited. She had saved enough to buy something used, but was having trouble finding a car both affordable and reliable.

“I was praying,” she said, and I felt like God was asking, ‘What kind of car do you want? What’s your favorite kind of car?’” She laughed. “I kept thinking: I just need a dependable car, but the thought wouldn’t go away: if you had a choice, what would you want?”

She finally spent some time thinking about cars she’d had, and remembered one that had been totaled by a family member years ago.  “I loved that car!”

Not long after, she saw a similar car for sale, used, for ten dollars less than the amount she had budgeted. She took a mechanic friend to look and ended up with a far better car than she had hoped for. A car she loves. A car that makes her feel cared for. A car that makes her laugh with joy when she looks at the way God sometimes provides.

Another friend had lost her job and was anxious about how to pay the mortgage on a new home she’d recently settled on. She had had some interviews, but had been waiting too long to hear. Her job ended Friday. On Monday, she’d be on her own.

She called a friend to join her in prayer and together they prayed that she’d hear, very soon, about the one job she’d been waiting on.  That there would be an offer.

That same afternoon the call came. A very good job, for a very good salary. To start the next Monday. She was comforted by God’s care.

Sometimes God provides just what we need, just when we need it. Sometimes in ways that make our hearts sing.

Coincidence, I hear you say (you know who you are, my dearly loved friends, who shake your heads that someone so well-educated could continue to be so naïve).

Cedar waxwing, Putneypix, Wikimedia

The same kind of coincidence that delivers bequests to ministries in need – with just the right amount, at just the right moment.

Or leaves bags of clothes outside a seminary student's door on the very day he and his wife began to pray about how to buy winter clothes for their kids.

The same kind of coincidence that met a seventeen –year old me in the hall of a college administration building and promised “if you come here, you’ll never worry about money.”

Or stepped on the elevator in a crowded hospital, looked at an infant gasping for breath, and said “treat that child for strep pneumonia.” And saved that child’s life.

God’s provision is sometimes so blatant, personal, impossibly precise, that to ignore or explain it away is a greater leap of faith than accepting and rejoicing.

And yet, yes, there are times when provision seems lacking. When what we wanted doesn’t happen, when what we need seems too late, or too small.

I watch the refugees from Syria, the sorrows of our inner cities, and wonder.

Yet I don’t know those stories. And find, on those occasions when I’m blessed to hear from those with experiences far different from my own, that God is at work there, as well. Providing in ways I can’t see, wouldn’t expect, have no way of knowing.

The birds in my back yard are singing this week. High in our aging locust trees, Bluebirds and Cedar Waxwings have been celebrating a wealth of Virginia Creeper berries and the attendant clouds of tiny bugs. Robins, Titmice, Hermit Thrush: it’s a Thanksgiving party, a few weeks early.

The more I know of creation, the more I marvel at the ways provision is hard-wired into the interwoven webs of life.

Red knot © Hans Hillewaert, Creative Commons

Horseshoe crab eggs for migrating Red knots at just the exact moment they’re needed.

Milkweed plants hosting hungry Monarch caterpillars. 

Endless supplies of goldenrod seeds for Goldfinch young in the golden autumn afternoons.

Interdependent biospheres alive in human organs.

Yes, some believe that all happened by eons of undirected self-selection, the interplay of chance across endless millennia:

"By chance, of course!" As if
that tied up ignorance with a ribbon.
In the beginning something by chance
existed that would bang and by chance
it banged, obedient to the by-chance
previously existing laws of existence
and banging, from which the rest proceeds
by logic of cause and effect also
previously existing by chance? Well,
when all that happened who was there?
Did the chance that made the bang then make
the Bomb, and there was no choice, no help?
Prove to me that chance did ever
make a sycamore tree, a yellow-
throated warbler nesting and singing
high up among the white limbs
and the golden leaf-light, and a man
to love the tree, the bird, the song
his life long, and by his love to save
them, so far, from all the machines.
(from Leavings, Wendell Berry, 2010)

In recent years a small wave of scientists have quietly lost their faith in chance and converted to Christian faith, or more confidently and publicly affirmed the faith they started with. They affirm that the laws that govern energy and matter - atoms, cells, solar system, light - point to an intellect beyond understanding, that the details of our common life are fine-tuned so precisely that chance is no longer adequate explanation.

Astronomer Allan Sandage, discoverer of the first quasar, converted to the Christian faith at the age of fifty. In a New York Times interview he explained: 

“Science cannot answer the deepest questions. . . As soon as you ask why is there something instead of nothing, you have gone beyond science. I find it quite improbable that such order came out of chaos. There has to be some organizing principle. God to me is a mystery, but is the explanation for the miracle of existence, why there is something instead of nothing.”

A 1998 Newsweek article quoted Sandage and other respected Christian scientists, noting: 

 “Something surprising is happening between those two old warhorses science and religion. . . Physicists have stumbled on signs that the cosmos is custom-made for life and consciousness. It turns out that if the constants of nature – unchanging numbers like the strength of gravity, the charge of an electron and the mass of a proton – were the tiniest bit different, then atoms would not hold together, stars would not burn and life would never have made an appearance.

"When you realize that the laws of nature must be incredibly finely tuned to produce the universe we see," says John Polkinghorne, who had a distinguished career as a physicist at Cambridge University before becoming an Anglican priest in 1982, "that conspires to plant the idea that the universe did not just happen, but that there must be a purpose behind it." 

The Anthropic Principle, first noted in 1961, affirms the fine-tuning of the universe to support life. Density of matter, presence of carbon, strength of gravity, levels of radiation, speed of light: the list of fine-tuned parameters keeps lengthening, gathered under the heading of the “fine-tuned universe.”

In a 2011 interview, Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health and mastermind of the Human Genome Project, said:  “If they (constants in the universe) were set at a value that was just a tiny bit different, one part in a billion, the whole thing wouldn’t work anymore.” 

NASA astronomer John O'Keefe, reflecting on this fine-tuning, marveled at God's provision: 

"We are, by astronomical standards, a pampered, cosseted, cherished group of creatures.. .. If the Universe had not been made with the most exacting precision we could never have come into existence. It is my view that these circumstances indicate the universe was created for man to live in."

These scientists would be quick to say that fine-tuning does not “prove” God, in the same way that evolution does not “disprove” God. God, by definition, is outside the bounds of scientific proof.

I can’t prove that the provision I see in every direction is a gift from a loving God.

Just as no one can disprove it.

Instead, I celebrate, give thanks, and trust myself to the one who has been providing since the first atom was created:

Sing to the Lord with grateful praise;

make music to our God on the harp

He covers the sky with  clouds;

he supplies the earth with rain

and makes the grass grow on the hills.

He provides food for the cattle

and for the young ravens when they call.

His pleasure is not in the strength of the horse,

nor his delight in the legs of the warrior;

the Lord delights in those who fear him,

who put their hope in his unfailing love.

(Psalm 147:7-11)

from In der Provence, Van Gogh, France, 1888