Geoff's Miscellany

Miscellaneous Musings

Geoff

Memories, Personhood, and God’s Grace

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Around this time, I get a bit somber during the days the birthday of a friend who died a few years ago. He was an unusual guy in a good way. And while I feel I’ve never struggled to be clear, I have struggled to be understood as a person (and who hasn’t?). Anyway, my friend [we’ll called him Bradley] understood me and I think I understood him. Many of his life struggles mirrored mind and a great deal of his personal suffering and demons surpassed mine by a long way. While some of his life struggles made it difficult for us to hang out, we saw each other regularly until he disappeared, which led to his untimely death.

I think about Bradley a lot, probably every day. Spontaneously, at this point, I mostly recall the good and the dark spots of his life only come up when I call them to mind. Bradley’s influence on me, particularly in high school, remains to this day. I was a dorky do-gooder with a chip on my shoulder because I was picked on, thought I was funny but nobody liked my jokes, and when I did good things I wasn’t applauded or I was ignored. When I met Bradley, I thought, “Here’s a guy who’s smart enough for me to admire and whatever mischief he cares to get into, he plans a way to do it just for fun.” And so coinciding with my conversion to Christianity, Bradley and I became friends. We were in a band called the Exploding Chaos Parade and had a lot of fun doing it. Our rag-tag group of friends studied scripture together, went spelunking, got in trouble for parading without a permit, learned to write music, pranked the band director, pranked the whole school, and on and on. And so my whole life since, I’ve learned to let social conventions go when they contradict the things that really matter. Strangely, through learning to be more free from Bradley and learning to obey the gospel command to “treat others as you wish to be treated” my social problems disappeared. Since about my sophomore year of high school, I’ve made many friends in all walks of life and I’ve learned to really care about people in their circumstances. Incidentally, at Bradley’s funeral, it was powerful to learn how much he was willing to sacrifice for literally anybody with a need, because he just didn’t care how things looked…unless the appearance of it was part of the joke.

Bradley was and is part of who I am. The Geoff Smith that exists now, as a father, husband, teacher, Christian, son, and brother is necessarily in relationship to Bradley. David Bentley Hart makes this observation more generally, “After all, what is a person other than a whole history of associations, loves, memories, attachments, and affinities? Who are we, other than all the others who have made us who we are, and to whom we belong as much as they to us? We are those others.”

In other words, there is no sense in which I am the person that I am without the existence of the other people I have known, and in the case of Bradley or my wife or my parents, I am who I am even in the sense that approximations of these people are in my mind that lead me to make choices wondering what their input would be or how they would interpret my choices or thoughts. This raises a serious question, “In what sense could I be redeemed from death, the world, and sin in isolation of any one of those people?” And it’s a serious question because what it means to be me is necessarily tied up in what it means for Bradley to be Bradley. If I am to be redeemed, what of my memories of those who made me me, how can those memories and the relationships that form them be redeemed except in the redeeming of the relationship itself? Elsewhere Hart described persons this way, “But finite persons are not self-enclosed individual substances; they are dynamic events of relation to what is other than themselves.”

So here’s a syllogism:

  1. A finite person is a dynamic event of relation to what is other than themselves.
  2. Redemption in Christ is for finite persons.
  3. Therefore redemption in Christ for a person must be ultimately inclusive of the relationships that make a finite person themselves.

If we accept Hart’s definition of a person, I think we have to entertain the possibility that for a person to be redeemed, so too, the persons that made that person themselves must be redeemed. Now, I harbor no doubts about Bradley’s faith or his reception into God’s grace. I just use our friendship as an illustration in this case because the melancholy of the time of year has overtaken me. Now, I do not doubt the existence of hell, the necessity of God’s justice, or the moral prescriptions of Scripture and plain reason. I merely mean to reflect on what it means for an individual to be redeemed. C.S. Lewis imagines even animals in close relationship to saints finding themselves with spiritual bodies in the New Heavens and Earth.

Fun Footnote: Charles Hodge on Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Christocentric Faith

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When in Berlin the writer often attended Schleiermacher’s church. The hymns to be sung were printed on slips of paper and distributed at the doors. They were always evangelical and spiritual in an eminent degree, filled with praise and gratitude to our Redeemer. Tholuck said that Schleiermacher, when sitting in the evening with his family, would often say, “Hush, children; let us sing a hymn of praise to Christ.” Can we doubt that he is singing those praises now? To whomsoever Christ is God, St. John assures us, Christ is a Saviour. Hodge, Charles. Systematic Theology. Vol 2, 400 n1.

Few read this blog and fewer likely read it for theology. And fewer who read it care about Schleiermacher. But it’s grand to see Hodge put the Scriptures first in his assessment of another’s faith rather than the systematic accuracy of that person’s writings or utterances.

1 John 5:20  And we know that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding, so that we may know shim who is true; and we are in him who is true, in his Son Jesus Christ. He is the true God and eternal life.

 

 

Nil Desperandum

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Vox Day’s new comment policy is based on hope:

Hope, whether it is based on a sound foundation of truth and reason or not, is to be vastly preferred to the incessant pessimism of those who are afraid to hope because they fear being disappointed more than they fear being defeated. Those who always ask of every possible positive interpretation “but could it be a trap?” are narcissistic cravens driven primarily by fear and self-absorption.

Things may not always turn out as well as we hope. They almost certainly will not do so. The world is fallen, after all, it is ruled by an immortal and malignant narcissist, and our vision of the future is very far from perfect. But the one and only way to absolutely ensure defeat is to refuse to enter the ring. It is better, by far, to enter the ring full of false confidence and go down fighting than to refuse to enter it at all for fear of being beaten.

So, this is fair warning being given to those who are inclined towards pessimism, defeatism, and despair: this is not a place for you. You may be right, in the end, but I don’t care in the slightest. If we ride to doom, in any case, we will ride. You are welcome to cringe and hide and attempt to be the last one devoured by the flames of Surtyr. But if that is your goal, then this is not the place for you and you will never be one of us.

In his blog, Vox has always been realist when it comes to pointing out the ugly parts of reality, but he’s also a man of hope. He reminds me of Puddleglum:

One word, Ma’am,” he said, coming back from the fire; limping, because of the pain. “One word. All you’ve been saying is quite right, I shouldn’t wonder. I’m a chap who al ways liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won’t deny any of what you said. But there’s one thing more to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things—trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play-world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia. So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we’re leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that’s small loss if the world’s as dull a place as you say.

Or even like Lewis in Letters to Malcolm:

You know my history. You know why my withers are quite unwrung by the fear that I was bribed—that I was lured into Christianity by the hope of ever- lasting life. I believed in God before I believed in Heaven. And even now, even if—let’s make an impossible supposition—His voice, unmistakably His, said to me, ‘They have misled you. I can do nothing of that sort for you. My long struggle with the blind forces is nearly over. I die, children. The story is ending’— would that be a moment for changing sides? Would not you and I take the Viking way: ‘The Giants and Trolls win. Let us die on the right side, with Father Odin.’

Now, Christianity is true and we have every reason to hope that in the end, God will be all in all, but as to the outcome of this or that conflict or struggle along the way, all we often have is hope that leads to action, or nothing at all for whether we live or die, Jesus will be our good Lord.

 

Four Maxims: A Spiritual Exercise

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Ancient philosophy was characterized by the philosopher’s burden to help individuals and city-states overcome their slavery to the passions through mental and physical exercises designed to strengthen the will’s resolve and aim it in the direction of the good.

To Philosophers like Musonius Rufus, Philo of Alexandria, Epicurus, or Clement of Alexandria, a spiritual exercise was some thought process, physical habit, or specific activity that was designed to aim the practitioner in the appropriate life direction, either by changing bad ideas, removing bad habits, or adding good habits.

Read in this light, the Old Testament is full of such exercises, like memorizing Scripture, reciting Scripture in the morning and evening, designating meal times for prayer, or negative visualization (imagining the loss of everything as in Ecclesiastes). One such exercise I’ve been using is a combination of material from the Old Testament and the Stoics. Solomon recommends memorizing brief sayings of the wise and mulling them over to obtain wisdom, and the Stoics speak highly of this practice as well, though Seneca says it can go too far and recommends making your own maxims as you grow in maturity.

My version of the maxim practice is to just pick four maxims per month to focus your attention. Some could be from Scripture, from a favorite author, or even your own devising to help you measure up to the circumstances that you face.

For this March 2020, I chose:

  1. Squat every day.
  2. Daily office daily. (I don’t quite read it every day, but the point is to remind myself daily)
  3. Write it then do it. (to temper my tendency to be overly ambitious for the day and also my job requires that I be hyper available, so it can be easy to prioritize all the petty urgencies of the day over more important tasks)
  4. Be efficient. (Think Ephesians 5:15-16)

What maxims would help you this month?

Remote Work, Transportation, and SARS-CoV-2

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In the past 100 years, the world has experienced three major technological revolutions with respect to human industriousness and communication:

  1. Mass availability of automobiles for personal travel.
  2. Mass telecommunications for mass one-way messages via television/radio and telephone calls.
  3. Mass availability of personal computers.

With these three technologies, one would think that the American dream would be to work from home or near home, to drive to work to solve in-person problems and work communications would be brief, informative, and useful.

Instead, we’re in this bizarre circumstance wherein traveling to a central location (because it came first) is the primary work mindset and telecommunications and computers are used to make employees more aware of their work bureaucracy from home.

Now, working from home has trials and difficulties, but it also allows for helping family, choosing hours, working efficiently without interruption from lazy co-workers, and so-on. This applies to education, most jobs

My hope during the SARS-CoV-2 quarantine situation is that we can make the family the center of American life with work as the intrusion.

This would be good. Old habits die hard, though.

Of course, the issues raised by a viral spread this large are both practical and speculative, for instance, while a smaller world with more local economies would make local quarantining far easier, having megacorporations like Amazon, for all the problems it causes, makes it easier for people to access things like vitamin C, materials they need for their small business when local supplies are unavailable, and so-on. Is there a way, in the future, to have a world that integrates the resources of a global economy while maintaining the local culture and efficiencies of local communities. Like, why is every building in America made of drywall when it mildews easily in humid areas? Mega-economies are efficient at spreading things everywhere regardless of appropriateness.

Low Hanging Fruit: Weight Loss

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I train clients in basic barbell movement as a side hustle and while I’ve tried some unusual approaches to dieting that make sense to/for me, they are far from the mainstream of dietary practice or science. In other words, they’re not what I would recommend to the general population. That being said, I do think that for individuals trying to lose weight there are some pieces of the puzzle that could get you 50-80% of the way toward your goals without creating a major hassle in your life. These are the low-hanging fruit of weight loss:

  1. Stop drinking calories. No cream or sugar in coffee or tea. No milk, no fraps, no soda, no juice. Don’t do it. When I was a barista, we served a blended coffee beverage that had nearly 1,100 calories in it. People would drink it with a 700 calorie piece of cheese cake. Don’t do this. If you had three of these in a week with normal meals, you could feasibly have gained a pound of extra fat if the frap takes you above maintenance calories.
  2. Pick a number of meals to eat during the day and stick with it. Whether three or two, eat those meals and no more and no less. When you’re losing weight, outside of certain methods, you’re just going to feel hungry, accept that now to make serious progress.
  3. Make your first meal, whether breakfast or lunch, high protein. I recommend eggs, chicken, cottage cheese, red meat, or pork. Protein is satiating. Protein plus fat or protein plus a carb will be even more filling. But if you can eat more protein for your first meal, there is some evidence that this helps your body burn more fat for energy through the day.
  4. Track your meals and snacks (though quitting snacking is wise). Peter Drucker was fond of saying, if it isn’t measured, it isn’t managed. If you want to manage whether you’re following these rules, then you need to measure what you’re doing by writing it down. I recommend getting a moleskine notebook, though you can just use your phone. If you plan, for instance, to only eat dessert on Sundays, you’ll want to know if you screwed up.
  5. Only buy food for your planned meals. No eating out, no snacks at work, not junk food at home (throw it away). If the garbage isn’t there it won’t be eaten. Will you have to cook and store food? Yes. Will it be worth it? Only if you want to lose weight.

There are more things to do. You’ll notice I left of counting calories. Why? It’s not low-hanging fruit because few adhere to it. There’s a progression here. Get discipline in recording meals, cutting desserts, and planning to eat, and counting calories for 2-3 meals a day will be a breeze.

If you decide to pick these fruit, you’ll find that about two days in something will try to interrupt you. You’ll say, “well, I can start tomorrow.” No. Don’t do it, don’t give in. The fact is that every time you start something new, an event that wouldn’t register in your mind as significant will suddenly be used by your brain as an excuse to revert to old habits. Everytime my evenings get too busy to lift weights and I set my alarm for 4:30 or 5am, my daughter has a bad sleep night on the first or second attempt. My thoughts: “I guess this is a bad day to train.” This is false, I wouldn’t have even changed a thing about my day if I was training in the evening. Don’t treat normal events as portents of bad timing on your part.