July 15, 2003
View from nowhere
Ellen Goodman is one of my favorite columnists.
She wrote a piece recently about how one’s biography affects one’s opinions, either as ballast or as barrier or perhaps both. She had the U S Supreme Court in mind and how peculiarly this notion works there among the justices.
She wrote that, for a long time, people believed that the best opinions on every subject were the products of a “detached intellect,” what philosopher Thomas Nagel described as the “view from nowhere.”
Now, I’m impressionable. I’ve been accused of only believing the last thing I’ve read or heard. That makes me touchy. Is the name Out of Nowhere simply a cute stab at humble objectivity or a prideful try at preempting God with some latter-day, ex nihilo, junior-grade?
Frankly, I don’t know what my subconscious is up to. But I do remember a seminary professor’s comment when I apologized for taking issue with a point made in the great William Temple’s Nature, Man, and God. He said, “Denson, on you, humility is unbecoming.”
That said, Out of Nowhere is always out of somewhere, most often from my heavy-handed biographical bias, and thus, grossly misnamed… something like when we speak of The Faith, as if there is no other, or of Holy Orders, as if Baptism doesn’t really matter all that much.
July 14, 2003
Bastille Day
France reneged on Iraq and, like any good friend, said so and told us we were wrong.
Their counsel was not well received. French horns and fries and twists and wine “went south,” as they say, and “freedom” became their new adjective. (The idea of “freedom kisses” somehow didn’t catch on.) Someone suggested we send the Statue of Liberty back. A local automobile dealership caught the fever and held a Francophobe rally highlighted by bashing in the windows of a French-made vehicle.
For some years now in our town, Alliance Française has marked today, Bastille Day, by holding fund-raising fêtes with the merchants in a popular, neighborhood shopping village. This year, they canceled the celebration for fear the auto-bashers might expand their territory.
The liturgical rounds happened upon Psalm 15 this morning: “Lord who can be trusted with power, / and who may act in your place? / Those with a passion for justice, / who speak the truth from their hearts; / who have let go of selfish interests / and grown beyond their own lives; / who see the wretched as their family / and the poor as their flesh and blood. / They alone are impartial / and worthy of the people’s trust. / Their compassion lights up the whole earth, / and their kindness endures forever.” (Stephen Mitchell, A Book of Psalms, #15, Harper Collins, NYC, 1993)
“Vive la France. Vive la différence.”
July 11, 2003
Plumb lines
Plumb lines are the simplest of tools for harnessing a phenomenon so mysterious and so complicated that even the most brilliant astrophysicists are yet to understand it.
We call it gravity. Earth life would be even graver without it. Space cadets, professional basketball players, and ballet dancers seem simply to ignore it and just float.
Aristotle said it’s why stuff falls, and then went on to something more interesting. Newton devised a formula and measured it. Einstein thought it caused by something like a curved-space ball. The quantum folk imagine itty-bitty gravitons charging all about in its service, but they’ve yet to catch one.
A plumb line is literally a string with a hunk of lead (plumbum) or some other heavy object tied to one end. Used properly, it keeps things on the straight and level. Just take hold of the loose end and let the whole thing dangle until it’s still. When it stops, you’re more or less in touch with the center of the earth and on the upright.
God took it for a remarkable metaphor and liked it so much he used it for show and tell with Amos who claimed not to be an engineer but a tree surgeon and that he had no idea what to do with it, but ended up doing it, anyway (Amos 7.7-15).
Lasers have pretty well replaced plumb lines these days, so the metaphor may be lost on this quantum generation. But the church, enamored as it often is with past matters of gravity and even mystery, surely remembers. The plumb line swings ever so gently and purposefully.