In search of tranquility

Not everyone seems to be in search of tranquility. At the Y recently, I have resorted to reading Outside magazine while on the elliptical machine, when I can’t find a new issue of one of the magazines I prefer, and the intended readers apparently are looking more for excitement than tranquility. But even they probably find some kind of peace of mind and spirit while battling the elements and the limitations of their bodies rather than the stresses of modern life.

I’ve been thinking about tranquility lately, not because life has been particularly hectic, but because of a verse in 1 Peter. At Bible study last week, we looked at 1 Peter 3:1-7, where Peter gives advice to women who are Christians and whose husbands are not. (There is no corresponding advice to men with non-Christian wives because in the culture of that day, the head of the household determined the religion for the entire family.)

I found myself wondering about verse 4, where Peter commends “the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God’s sight.” I understand what it means to be gentle, but what is a “quiet spirit”? We agreed among ourselves (the half-dozen women at the study) that it probably did not have to do with how talkative a woman is or how loudly she speaks.

I’ve always tended to be quiet, but I’m not so sure I have a “quiet spirit,” so I wanted to know what that meant. Later I looked it up, and found out that the Greek word would be better translated tranquil. It means neither disturbing others nor being disturbed.

Do most people cheat?

Yes, most people are dishonest, according to Dan Ariely. Not all the time, or in big ways. It’s the widespread minor lying and cheating that really hurt society, however, he says.

Ariely is a professor of behavior economics (a field I never heard of before), and his examples tend in involve cheating for monetary benefit. I suppose a large amount of cheating is done for that reason, and certainly it would be easier to measure if you’re trying to quantify people’s tendency to lie and cheat.

I wonder whether his results would change any, however, if he were dealing with lying that was aimed primarily at influencing others’ opinions. I assume it would be even more widespread, but would it show the same patterns in terms of what does and does not dissuade people from lying?

And what about lying that does not affect us directly, but affects someone else? Do people lie more readily to gain something for themselves, or to make someone else look bad? (And of course we don’t usually think of it as lying, just selective use of the truth.)

I also can’t help wondering whether Ariely’s results are skewed by the fact that his test subjects are usually college students. I can’t imagine that I would have cheated on his matrix test then or now, because I just don’t cheat on tests. But I know that in other areas, I was less honest at that age than I am now.

As a college student, I would keep extra change that a store clerk gave me by mistake. Now I promptly return it. As a young adult in the workplace, I would not intentionally cheat but I would not readily admit a mistake as I would now.

I don’t know whether it’s having children and feeling a need to be a role model, feeling more responsibility to society in general, or just the overall process of maturing. But I would not think that the behavior of college students can be fairly extrapolated to the population at large.

It’s not that I find it hard to believe that most people cheat in little ways from time to time. That’s just one manifestation of people’s fallen nature. If I am scrupulously honest with money now, it is in part because of a couple of instances of minor dishonesty as a college student that convinced me that the guilty conscience was not worth whatever small benefits my dishonesty had gained me.

I think his studies show some interesting insights into what measures are more effective in preventing cheating. I have read elsewhere about the effect of being reminded of moral codes, whether by directing seeing/hearing them, or simply by talk about God or the Bible. I am somewhat surprised that the prospect of getting caught doesn’t have more of an effect – I think it would for me.

Perishability and value

I’ve been studying 1 Peter lately, and I keep noticing the words perishable and imperishable. We have an imperishable inheritance (1:4), we are born again of imperishable seed (1:23) which is the word of God, and a gentle and quiet spirit has an imperishable quality (3:4).

But gold is considered perishable (1:7), as is silver (1:18). At first I didn’t think much about that, other than to notice that it is just one more example of the way spiritual values are the opposite of worldly values. But when I started thinking about, I had trouble coming up with a sense in which gold or silver is perishable. Objects made of these metals can be melted down, but the metals themselves retain their value.

When I mentioned this to someone at Bible study last week, she pointed out that gold can be stolen. That fact is one reason that we want to invest our lives in setting aside “treasure in heaven” that can’t be stolen, but stolen gold doesn’t lose its value. It’s just someone else who gets to make use of its value.

So I’ve been thinking more about the word perishable. When I was growing up, I heard it most often in the context of putting away groceries. My mother was adamant about getting the “perishables” put away the minute we walked in the door. I couldn’t hang up my coat (or throw it on my bed or whatever I used to do with it) or go to the bathroom or anything else, until the perishables had been put in the refrigerator or freezer.

Awake, my soul

There are many things I like about Easter, but one of the best has to be the glorious music. When I was little, the older children’s choir at our church always sang “In Joseph’s Lovely Garden,” and I always found both the music and words very moving. (Unfortunately, by the time I was old enough for that choir, the music program had changed and that choir no longer existed, so I never got to sing it.)

Once I was old enough to join the adult choir, I got to sing the Hallelujah Chorus for Easter. As the lone high schooler in the group, I struggled to learn the alto part while the adults easily sang through it from many years of practice. Once I had learned it, though, I was disappointed to discover, over the next several years, that most churches do not perform it every Easter, as did the church I grew up in. (Adults in most church choirs seem to consider it too difficult, and I have to admit that in some cases they may be right.)

Even so, there are several wonderful Easter hymns to sing. There are “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today” and “Jesus Christ Is Risen Today,” two hymns by Charles Wesley that are so similar that unless I have a hymnal in front of me I tend to intermix the words and music of both hymns. I never heard “Low in the Grave He Lay” until I was a teenager at a fundamentalist church, and I have to admit that it has never become one of my favorites, but it provides an effective contrast between the disciples’ grief, and the joy of the resurrection, that few other hymns do.

Today, at the early service (I am reluctant to call anything at 7 AM a sunrise service) at the Methodist church, we finished with “Crown Him with Many Crowns.” Like the Hallelujah Chorus, it speaks more to me of Christ’s Lordship over all than specifically of the Resurrection, but if one is fit for Easter then certainly the other is also. What struck me as we sang it this morning, though, was the first half of the third line: “Awake, my soul, and sing.”

Community and transcendence

I read a very interesting essay in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. Alain de Botton writes about the loss of a sense of community that people once had from church membership and involvement, and how he envisions a secular version of that community spirit.

Identifying community meals and rituals as elements that enable perfect strangers to establish community in the context of religious meetings, he speculates on how those elements might be used without the religious context. He describes  ”an ideal restaurant of the future, an Agape Restaurant” where people come together without regard for social class, family background, professional status, or ethnic background.

Rather than leave people to figure out for themselves how to engage one another in meaningful conversation, there would be written guidelines on how to behave, what happens when, and what kind of things to talk about. People would know that it was safe to open themselves up and talk about things that they usually kept to themselves or their closest friends.

I can’t say it couldn’t happen, but I am skeptical. The basis for community among believers is not communal meals or rituals, though those certainly help foster community. What draws people together from different walks of life, and creates a place where they do not need to posture or pretend, is transcendence.

On competence and wonder

Until recently, I never would have thought of there being any connection between competence and wonder. But I’ve been thinking about them lately because of what I read in a book by Eugene Peterson.

I’ll write more about the book when I’ve finished it, but there is so much in it that I plan to write separate posts about some topics. One is about Sabbath-keeping, which Peterson approaches in a different way from anything I had read on the subject previously.

Peterson makes a fairly common observation that children experience a sense of wonder frequently, but adults much less so. What is different is his explanation. Usually, I think, the reasons given have to do with being too busy, too wrapped up in what we think are important concerns but that often are actually distracting us from what is really most important in life.

Religious art by non-believers

I read an interesting column in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, How Can Skeptics Make Convincing Religious Art? Terry Teachout wonders how it is that a non-believer can create such powerfully moving works of religious art. And for that matter, he asks, why does such an artist even want to make religious art?

It’s a fairly short column, and Teachout doesn’t attempt to give any kind of comprehensive answer to those questions. He only gives a few examples (and I have to admit that I don’t find Édouard Manet’s ”Jesus Mocked by the Soldiers” as “wrenchingly powerful” as Teachout does); I would be interested in a longer and more in-depth treatment of the subject.

In the end, Teachout simply concludes that when it comes to producing great art, even on religious topics, belief in God is optional. Belief in the power of faith (which clearly is life-shaping and sometimes life-changing, regardless of what you think of its validity) and in the power of art seems to matter much more.

Thinking it over, I decided it doesn’t seem all that strange that unbelievers should be able to create great religious art. Religious art, like any other art, reflects human experience. It doesn’t take belief in God to feel suffering, awe, fear, delight, zeal, or other feelings common to religious experience.

History, theology, and great men of God

I don’t visit the Parchment and Pen blog all that often lately, but I’m glad I went there this morning. The most recent post was yesterday’s by Tim Kimberly, on Augustine. I was soon absorbed in learning the historical and intellectual context of Augustine’s life and writings.

Based on the post’s title, I thought this was the first in a series about the Top Ten Theologians. But when I finished reading it, I discovered that – like many top ten lists – this one had been written starting with number 10 and finishing with number 1.

The order chosen for the ten of them, and in fact the selection of the ten to begin with, is naturally open to disagreements. But the series is well worth reading, unless you already have a good background in the history of theology and influential theologians.

I’ve read a good deal on the subject of theology, and knew something about all ten already, but I learned more by reading these posts. The writing is clear and direct, and does not require previous knowledge of either theology or history. Each post goes through the historical context, the theologian’s life, thought, and writings, his shortcomings (personal and/or theological), and influence on us today.

I hope you also enjoy these posts and learn from them.

Movies: Veggie Tales: The Little Drummer Boy

I’m always eager to check out a new Veggie Tales DVD, but I sometimes wait until I can borrow it from the library rather than purchase it. When I saw their version of The Little Drummer Boy, I wondered how it would compare to the original. The Rankin/Bass stop-action movie released in 1968 has always been one of my favorite Christmas specials.  

Usually when Veggie Tales retells a story, they change it considerably, not only in the details but in the “big idea” behind it. When I looked at Veggie Tales’ The Little Drummer Boy in the store, somehow I got the impression that it was less about bitterness and forgiveness, and more about what a small boy (or any of us) could give as a gift to the Christ child.

So I was surprised, when Al and I watched it, to find that the story of Aaron follows so closely the one I remember from my childhood. The characters are nearly all the same (the camel Joshua even looks the same), and the major events are pretty much the same. There are some details that are different, both changes that have to do with Veggie Tales style and others that apparently are to make the story less upsetting in certain ways.

One change that I don’t understand is that it is implied that the Romans are responsible for the destruction of Aaron’s home and the loss of his parents. In the original, it was bandits. Either is plausible, certainly, but I don’t see the purpose of the change. I read in some reviews of the original that its portrayal of Arabs is unacceptable by today’s standards, so perhaps it was felt that it was necessary to avoid showing them as bad guys. But those who destroy the farm are not even shown – why would it be wrong to simply say they were bandits?

[Spoiler alert]

What’s merry about Christmas?

I read an interesting essay yesterday by the late Christopher Hitchens, on why he objects to the “forced merriment” of the Christmas season. I agree with him in principle, though I have not experienced the degree of coercion he rails against.

Perhaps he exaggerates for effect. Perhaps his dislike of the religious nature of the holiday colors his perceptions. I don’t recall any “compulsory jollity in the hospitals and clinics and waiting rooms.” But I have heard objections, including from devout Christians, to the monthlong assault on our ears by the seasonal music played at shops, malls, and other public spaces.

I haven’t noticed it much myself. I spent time yesterday in a mall for the first time in months, and if there was music playing I was oblivious to it. Perhaps I tend to tune out piped-in music along with all the rest of the noise that I associate with crowded stores.

I do dislike it when I am expected to act happy when I don’t feel happy. I have never liked it when someone, seeing me walk by with a serious look on my face, says, “Smile!” Whether I was looking serious because I was unhappy or deep in thought, I don’t want to be told how to feel, or at least to pretend that I feel.