A Walker Percy Formula

A Lover of Man=Thoreau
A Technician of Man=Skinner
A Lover of Man + A Technician of Man=Hitler

John Steinbeck on the Progression of Mystery

I guess we're all, or most of us, the wards of that nineteenth-century science which denied existence to anything it could not measure or explain. The things we couldn't explain went right on but surely not with our blessing. We did not see what we couldn't explain, and meanwhile a great part of the world was abandoned to children, insane people, fools, and mystics, who were more interested in what is than in why it is. So many old and lovely things are stored in the world's attic, because we don't want them around us and we don't dare throw them out.

John Steinbeck from The Winter of Our Discontent

I don't know why, but the religion/science question has heated up in my circle lately. Everything I've been reading has been coming back to the question. Even when I'm just trying to read a novel, there it is.

Today, I was thinking about what I was like when I was a teenager. Regrettably, I was one who knew it all. It wasn't until my early twenties that I was able to make decisions out of my vast knowledge and wisdom...and it wasn't until the last few years that some of these decisions have come home to roost. I wonder if science (I'm talking about the ideology/religion of science that pervades our culture) is in that early twenties phase. The knowledge has been met with resources and now it's on like Donkey Kong.

A list of scientific accomplishments whose conseqences are mostly unknown:

1. Genetically coded plants who only respond to proprietary fertilizer and herbicide.
2. Cell phones vs. brain health
3. The long-term effects of an industrialized diet
4. The internal combustion engine and its possible link to climate change

I'm not saying we throw out science, scientific progress, and cell phones, I'm just wondering what science's 30s will look like. Will we be too far gone?

Goodbye Tree

I expanded my garden this year by cutting down a Leyland Cypress. Cutting down a thirty foot tree with a chainsaw is manly...in case you were wondering.

The Wire

I love morally complicated stories. The Wire plays this line to perfection. All the characters, both the "good" and "bad" guys, are flawed. The story in the first season centers on a police unit trying to take down a drug dealing operation in Baltimore. The show digs in on both sides. You get to know the cops and the dealers. The more you know, the more ambiguous it gets. It's making me think about the nature of good and evil, the reality of moral ambiguity, and the sadness of drugs and addiction. If you like thinking about these types of things, watch it.

Walker Percy on Suicide

The therapeutic rationale, which has never been questioned, is that depression is a symptom. A symptom implies an illness; there is something wrong with you. An illness should be treated...

Begin with the reverse hypothesis, like Copernicus and Einstein. You are depressed because you should be. You are entitled to your depression. In fact, you'd be deranged if you were not depressed. Consider the only adults who are never depressed: chuckleheads, California surfers, and fundamentalist Christians who believe they have had a personal encounter with Jesus and are saved for once and all. Would you trade your depression to be any one of these?...

Percy goes on to describe the true choice for the depressed when considering suicide. You can either become a non-suicide, avoiding the pain, treating symptoms, running, or you can become an ex-suicide, pushing into the pain, searching for your truth, stopping.

The non-suicide is a little traveling suck of care, sucking care with him from the past and being sucked toward care in the future. His breath is high in his chest.

The ex-suicide opens his front door, sits down on the steps, and laughs. Since he has the option of being dead, he has nothing to lose by being alive. It is good to be alive. He goes to work because he doesn't have to.

From Lost in the Cosmos by Walker Percy

I've been in deconstruction mode in a lot of areas of my life--religion and my work in specific. I was taught in school and in the profession at large to help people avoid suicide. I give people suicide contracts which state that they will not kill themselves until X-date. We keep the ball rolling (and protect ourselves legally). While there is merit in this (it is good that people do not kill themselves), I am realizing that it does not get the job done.

Percy confirmed this feeling with his essay on suicide and the way depression and suicidal ideation is treated by therapists. He makes the case that rather than helping people avoid suicide, stepping aside and then walking with them into the despair is the only chance at peace. Instead of asking, "What needs to happen for you to not kill yourself?" What if we asked, "What needs to die?"

Or to put it another way, to gain your life you must lose it.

The Church Business

Something I've heard a lot:
We need to run this church more like a business.
Something I've never heard:
We need to run this business more like a church.

Nothing is Free

You got a feeling nothing here is free
'Cause you grew up in a mall

From "Nothing at All" by The Shins

This is our zeitgeist. This is the story of my childhood. This is the sentiment I'm trying to pry myself from. This is what I fear my kids will someday believe.