If you die, we split your gear

Until some major life event draws near (a house move, a death, perhaps a separation) it is hard for one to realize just how much stuff one has accumulated around one's existence.  Much of it has brought joy or has enabled joyful experiences, but as the end draws near one wonders:  what next for this stuff? How can it continue to bring joy to others? How can we avoid it becoming simply a burden, a nuisance, until - stripped of meaning - it just ends up as someone's waste?

Manifesto

I have been posting regularly here at Points of Inflection since 2011, or about six years.  A lot has happened in that time. The intention was to write down my thoughts and reflections about mathematics and sustainability, and especially about the challenges presented by the GreenFaith program that I had just joined.  But our youngest child was just about to embark on a journey of gender dysphoria, a gender which would test their courage to the limit and beyond, a journey to bleak places of mental illness, a journey that would ultimately bring us all to a place of terrible loss.  And that's spilled over onto Points of Inflection, though I've tried also to make a more focused site at Are You Receiving Me?

And then at some point during that awful journey, and during the original thinking process that this blog was intended to document, came the call from the family doctor - "I want you to make an appointment with a brain surgeon". Though it turned out that a brain surgeon was not who I needed (that was the result of some strange appearances on the MRI) I did need some very delicate surgery, which I received at Johns' Hopkins, and when it and chemo and radiation were done there was still some chance of a recurrence.  Guess what? I was in the recurrence group. So I am now looking at life-ending metastatic cancer, and meanwhile I have just finished Math for Sustainability thanks to the wonderful work of coauthors Russ and Sara, and it will, I hope, appear early next year.  I am really blessed by the gift of this team to work with.

So it feels like time to write a "manifesto".  If I wanted to say something for the future, for the next six years, what would it be? Are there ways in which I would want to change the fundamental metaphor of "points of inflection"? Is there something I'd like to add? Some error I feel I should defend against?

Here's a really early post which I still feel hits the nail right on the head.  A new manifesto, if there is such a thing, should start here I think.

American households are drowning in "stuff".  But why?

There's a ready answer that many preachers and people of faith would give.  Materialism! Too much attention, too much attachment to physical objects; not enough to the realm of the spirit. Surely this is the ground for a culture of endless accumulation.

I don't think this is right; or, a least, I don't think it cuts deep enough. When you think of a greedy materialist, you might think of a miser returning every evening to gloat over the beautiful objects he has hoarded.  But that kind of greed is not really characteristic of consumer society.  When I've acquired the IPhone 4, I may gloat for a while; but only until my neighbor gets an IPhone 5. Perpetual dissatisfaction, rather than gloating satisfaction, is what I feel about my stuff.

William Cavanaugh writes, "What really characterizes consumer culture is not attachment to things but detachment.  People do not hoard money; they spend it.  People do not cling to things; they discard them and buy other things...Consumerism is not so much about having more as it is about having something else; that's why it is not simply buying but shopping that is the heart of consumerism."

What if our unsatisfying overconsumption is a symptom, not of materialism, but of a restless and misguided spiritual quest?  What if we're not materialistic enough? 

"Bother", Said Pooh

Last month, a judicial nominee named Amy Coney Barrett appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee for her confirmation hearing.  California senator Dianne Feinstein focused on the nominee’s Catholic faith. “The dogma lives loudly within you” said Senator Feinstein, in a Yoda-like remark which was presumably intended to suggest that Barrett’s Catholic faith might undermine her judicial independence. (For the record, Barrett’s jurisprudence apparently indicates a clear conviction that judges should recuse themselves from cases where their religious convictions might interfere with their faithful and impartial execution of the law.)

I want to use this little story as a peg on which to hang some reflections about my own writing, both here and on Caring Bridge, as I approach my death from cancer. Unsurprisingly, as the end approaches I find myself reaching more often for the language of my faith, talking more about Jesus and the “work he accomplished at Jerusalem”, about God and God’s revelation which, while some demand a miraculous sign and others seek after wisdom, is in fact “Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God”, the one in whom “all the promises of God find their Yes”.  And this talking causes me several sorts of botheration---like Winnie-the-Pooh, another easily botherated sort of guy.  If you wonder where all this faith language is coming from, and perhaps share or at least want to understand my botheration, read on...