Last words?

Columbarium, State College Presbyterian Church

The writer of this blog -- my beloved husband John Roe -- left behind his earthly life on March 9, 2018. He was confident that he was beginning "a more focused time of peace and joy" with his Lord, and that he would rest close to our child Eli, as they both awaited the resurrection (see his Dec. 11, 2017 post: Waiting close).

In the last week of John's life, as his body was weakened by cancer and his mind was affected by pain medication, we had some brief but touching interactions. His words as he was dying reflected the focus that he had in life: his relationship with God, love for me and our family, and (of course) thoughts about mathematics.

In his last days, John spoke out of the fullness of his heart and his mind, even as his connection to them was slipping away. It occurred to me to wonder: When I myself reach that state and the thoughts of my mind come spilling out, will my words be as joyful, gracious, and God-centered as his?

I wanted to share a few of John's last words here, in the hope that they will give inspiration to others as they do to me. In another sense, these are not his last words, because his writing and blogs continue to speak with his unique blend of insight, passion, and humor.

Monday, March 5, 2018: John called me to his bedside, and wanted to pray aloud together. That was unusual, because his prayer life was usually intensely personal and private for him. But he prayed "Lord, it looks like I’ve reached the end of my life on earth. But we know that for your people, this doesn’t mean the end of life. We know that you hold me in the palm of your hand, and you also hold Liane. In the last minute of our lives, you will not be any different to us than in all the other minutes."

Tuesday, March 6, 2018: At 8 am, I asked John if he wanted any breakfast, and he replied that he needed "circular fruit". I asked why he needed that, and he replied "to reflect on the shape of our joy together". For John, his faith and his mathematical mind were intimately connected, right until the end. Fortunately, there was an orange in the kitchen; I peeled it and he ate a few bites. Later that morning, John asked for some paper and wrote "Everyone! Hello, Hallelujah" and then said to me "Tell everyone 'Hallelujah'". When I asked why, he responded "Because God is good and deserves being praised by everyone”.

Wednesday, March 7th, 2018: John's mind was meandering and he was musing about theology. I asked myself (aloud) "Are you leaving me?" and was surprised when John answered "No, I feel closer to you, not further away". I affirmed to John that his body was giving out and that he would be leaving the earth but would be with Jesus. And John replied "A new beautiful land appears -- a new world".
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Rest in peace in that new land, beloved, until you and Eli are raised with healed bodies.

Stairway to Heaven

Or just a journey to work?  Job requirements: a priestly calling and climbing ability up to 5.7.  

In the remote mountains of northern Ethiopia, a lone priest scales a 250m cliff each day to reach his church and study ancient books containing religious secrets.

Sulitest

Sulitest report logo

I received an e-mailing from an organization called "Sulitest", which stans (I think) for SUstainability LIteracy TESTing.  This is in fact one of the many ideas that are related to the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development held in Rio de Janeiro, 2012, and known as Rio+20 because it was a 20-year follow-up to the original Earth Summit also held in Rio - in 1992!

Specifically, Sulitest is part of the Higher Education Sustainability Initiative (HESI). The website says, By joining the HESI, Chancellors, Presidents, Rectors, Deans and leaders of Higher Education Institutions and related organizations, acknowledged the responsibility that they bear in the international pursuit of sustainable development. They agree to teach Sustainable Development concepts, encourage research on sustainable development issues, make their campuses greener and more sustainable, support sustainability efforts in their communities and share results through international frameworks. 

Thy Word Is Truth

Starlight

I was having my afternoon nap when my phone rang. Usually I remember to set it to "Do Not Disturb" during my nap, but this time I had forgotten.

"Hello, is that John?  This is Matthew" began a bright, cheery voice, obviously launching into a script of some sort. [Name has been changed.]

I grunted something incoherent, in the way one does when one has just been woken up. But "Matthew" was unstoppable.

"I'm a financial advisor.  I work with several of your neighbors and I'd like to help you too."

I grunted some more.

"Let's get some things straight. Tell me, do you have any investments with X or Y [two well-known mutual fund companies}?"

Welcome to Newspeak

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is a political satire written for its time (the late 1940s).  Orwell extrapolates the totalitarian direction of the Stalinism of his day, and imagines what would happen if it were combined with ubiquitous surveillance technology. In the world of the novel, truth is no longer a constant, an unchangeable record of how things really are.  Instead, "truth" varies from day to day according to the requirements of the Party.  If the size of the crowd at a certain event was declared, by the Party, to have been the greatest ever - why, then, it was the greatest ever, and any historical record suggesting otherwise needed to be adjusted [this example is not an actual incident from Nineteen Eighty-Four, but a similar though more extreme "changing of gears" occurs at the beginning of the crucial Chapter IX of the book]. In fact, the Ministry of Truth, where the book's hero, Winston Smith, works, has as one of its main functions this continuous 'adjustment' of the historical record. Winston rebels, but by the end of the book he has been brought back into line; he will declare even that 2+2=5 if his Party torturer demands it.

Waiting close

When we lost Eli - nearly two years ago now - a great many decisions had to be made in a hurry.  We quickly decided that his body should be cremated, but  what should be the resting-place for his remains? We are fortunate that there was a natural answer. Some years ago, wise and generous donors endowed our church with a columbarium - a place (actually part of the church building with a little garden) which provides spaces where the cremated remains of church members may be respectfully stored.  I love the symbolism here - that when we currently-living members enter in to worship we do so in the company of a whole fellowship  of believers extended backwards through time. In England one often enters the village church through the graveyard, receiving a similar message about the "communion of saints".

As you can see from the picture, each niche in the columbarium can hold two sets of remains.  When we laid Eli to rest, that did seem as though it might be a problem.  It was not long, however, before we found out that the space we had reserved for the second occupant was going to be needed soon enough - for me! So, once the stupid cancer has its stupid way with me, I will rest close to Eli as we both await the general resurrection.

Manifesto, Part II

A week or two ago I put up a post called Manifesto.   The idea was to ask myself what I - or what Points of Inflection - should be standing for in these serious days.  It looks as though my own days are short - but if they were long, if I were writing a manifesto for some kind of gathering or movement, what would I emphasize as centrally important?  And in such a document I'd want to bring together both the hard-headed mathematical analysis that I've tried to do, and also the spiritual or even "prophetic" critique which tries to understand the 'principalities and powers' that are in action behind the upheavals of recent times and which we can expect in the future.  So, in the first Manifesto post, I revisited the idea that materialism bears responsibility for our woes, and found it misguided: I felt our problem was that we did not revere materiality enough, not that we revered it too much.

My mission statement

I can't remember, to be honest, when I first got the idea of a personal mission statement.  It was quite a while ago - I would say before the word "mission statement" had become part of standard managerial-ese, an idea to dread as much as to welcome.  Nowadays it sometimes seems that a highfalutin "mission statement", heavy on jargon and light on content, is a required component of any kind of planning for something new.  Dilbert, as usual, neatly satirizes the trend:

But wherever it came from for me - perhaps from Stephen Covey's Seven Habits, perhaps from thinking about my impending duties as department head, perhaps somewhere else - I found the idea of a personal mission statement a helpful one.  Not something that would necessarily set objectives for me every day - but something that I could review prayerfully, every day, to remind me what was important.  Various versions of this have lived with me over the years - currently it is incorporated into PrayerMate, the excellent iPad app that I use to remind me about daily prayer items. [Splitting it into daily items in this way has allowed me to add comments - "Move out of the comfort zone" has somehow acquired the comment "When was I last in it?"]  But while tidying up my desk (actually, while rectifying the consequences of near-disastrously spilling my drink around the router) I found an old copy with the nine points neatly listed.  I wondered if I should share them.  Please ignore these if they are of no use to you, but here they are:

John's Mission Statement

All to the glory of God

Succeed at home first

Communicate every day

Seek the heart of worship

Move out of the comfort zone

Teach from the heart

Prepare the ground for insight

Start with what matters most

Love alone endures

It is hard to write these things without being all too aware of how I have failed to live up to the aspirations they represent; but, as I approach the end of earthly life, I do feel that by and large those aspirations were solid ones, worth aiming for, and worth seeking Grace for when I miss the mark.

“Mathematics for Sustainability” sent to Springer

Friends -

I am very excited to share with you the news that Mathematics for Sustainability has been sent off to Springer-Verlag, the publisher, for copy-editing.  During the past couple of months we have been responding to comments from Springer’s readers, and from other friends who have reviewed the manuscript for us, and their input has helped us significantly improve the book.  Now that work is done.

This is the next-to-final step in the publication process.  The copy-editors read the book looking for spelling errors, misplaced punctuation, and things like that.  This job will take a couple of weeks.  After that, we get to review and incorporate the copy-editors’ corrections (together with any additional minor changes of our own), and then return the final book version to Springer.  At that point everything is out of our hands and the physical process of printing can start.

It is so exciting to have reached this point! I would like to take the time to once again acknowledge (split infinitive! Don’t tell the copy-editor!) the enormous gift that my coauthor Russ deForest has made in bringing the project to completion, especially in recent months when illness has limited the amount I can contribute.  Thank you!

We were honored to hear a few days ago that as well as listing it in their series Mathematics of Planet Earth, Springer have also chosen our book to inaugurate a completely new publication series, Texts for Quantitative Critical Thinking.  This is a strong push from our publisher and helps convey their confidence in the work we have done.

We were also honored by a most gracious and lovely foreword contributed by Francis Su, past president of the MAA.   Here is part of what he wrote (addressed directly to students):

Here’s what stands out to me when I read this book: there are many math books that will feed you knowledge, but it is rare to see a book like this one that will help you cultivate wisdom.

There is a deep difference between knowledge and wisdom. A knowledgeable person may be armed with facts, but a wise person considers how to act in light of those facts. A knowledgeable person may think an answer is the end of an investigation, whereas a wise person considers the new questions that result. And a knowledgeable person might ignore the human element of a problem that a wise person deems essential to understand. As the authors illustrate, mathematics that pays attention to human considerations can help you look at the world with a new lens, help you frame important questions, and help you make wise decisions.

Amen!  I truly hope and trust that this book will help its readers cultivate wisdom.

Transforming

Cover of Transforming

A sweet gift arrived in my email last month.  It was a PDF file containing a review copy of Transforming, Austen Hartke's forthcoming new book about the Bible and the lives of transgender Christians (#TransformingBook - it is available for preorder: if you have a local Christian bookstore, please support their business by preordering from them, or you can preorder it here from you-know-who in Seattle).  Publication date is early April next year and, sadly, I don't expect to be around to hold a copy in my hands.  But Austen is a good friend and knows how much this project - a project that only he could carry out - has meant to me.  So when he obtained some electronic "review copies" he was gracious enough to send one on.  As it happens, the email arrived just at a moment when I had been feeling sad about not being able to see this book, and it lit up my face when I realized what it was!

That Amazing Photograph

John and Liane in the Ahwahnee Dining Room, May 2016

In my last post, I mentioned that there was a tale to tell about this picture of Liane and me in the dining room at the Ahwahnee, at the beginning of our Yosemite trip in May 2016.

We're both quite down-to-earth people.  Strange, "touched-by-an-angel" experiences happen to someone else - not to us. Yet we'd both agree that the journey that culminated in this picture was one of the strangest we have ever experienced.  There was a message at its heart - a message of grace and tenderness, a message that we were granted at the exact time we needed it.

Ezer Kenegdo

John and Liane in the Ahwahnee Dining Room, May 2016

I've received such a lot of encouraging letters (both the paper and the e-mail kind) recently. Not only letters of sympathy or prayer - though there have been plenty of those too, and they mean more than I can say.  Right now I'm thinking more of those readers who want to express their thanks for the encouragement they have found in the material I've been posting on my blogs, either here, or on Caring Bridge, or Receiving Me, or my math blog, or in other places.  Some want to say "your faith is so inspiring".   Some want to say "I count among my dearest blessings the opportunity to get to know you and to be touched by your wisdom and friendship." Some want to say "It is really remarkable how you combine rationality and science, your faith, and such a positive attitude on the realities of life, in such a beautiful way."  It is great to know that what was written partly as a way to share news and partly, let's be fair, as a kind of therapy for myself, has turned out also to mean so much to so many other readers.  This brings me great joy and thankfulness.  But it's also made it clear to me that I desire to make a public acknowledgment, a "thank you". Read on - this is it.

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...

A Long Silence

There's been a long silence on Points of Inflection.

Some friends and readers, knowing that I am dealing with terminal cancer, might have been wondering whether I am still around.  For sure, this blog will at some point be shuttered when the cancer wins - or thinks it wins.  Not that it really does win. Cancer is stupid. When it kills me, it kills itself too.  But it is then gone forever: while I await the resurrection at the renewal of all things. It is like a tiny parable of  "the death of death in the death of Christ".

Review: "Merchants of Doubt"

(Crossposted from GoodReads) Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming by Naomi Oreskes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've been familiar with the basic message of Merchants of Doubt for some time. It is that much of the (alleged) controversy that we perceive around climate change was and is an example of motivated reasoning, generated deliberately by a small group of aging scientists who had previously employed similar tactics to undermine the scientific consensus on the links between smoking and disease; between chlorofluorocarbons and ozone depletion; and between powerplant emissions, acid rain, and damage to forest ecosystems. Funded to a significant extent by industries that feared the consequences of regulation, this group generated the appearance of controversy, and then relied on reporters' unwillingness to make scientific judgments and respect for the "Fairness Doctrine" to ensure that consensus science was depicted in the media as simply one side of a "he said...she said" face-off.

Why did these people do it? Here is where I found the book helpful (apart from its exhaustive documentation of the story I just told in the previous paragraph). The authors show how many of the key figures had backgrounds in the Manhattan Project or the Cold War physics community that grew out of it. For them, the conviction that communism and socialism were the real enemy never went away; in fact, it hardened into a certainty that any government regulation at all was the first step on a road towards complete loss of freedom. Therefore, any science which identified a problem whose solution seemed to require such regulation had to be blocked. Because it seemed to lead to unacceptable conclusions in a different realm (the realm of politics and governance), the science itself had to be wrong somewhere. When the tobacco industry or the fossil fuel industry or whoever it might be went looking for scientific "hired guns" who would fight the dangers of regulation, these scientists were ready, because of their ideological stance, to hear the call.

Oreskes and Conway don't mention it, but I have often wondered whether creationism has a part to play in this story also. Here again, consensus science (in this case the theory of evolution) led to unacceptable conclusions in a different realm (a certain kind of theology). Creationist authors like Whitcomb and Morris (The Genesis Flood) assured their readers that the views of mainstream scientist could be disregarded because "the evolutionist seeks intellectual justification for escape from personal responsibility to his Creator", a foreshadowing of the climate "skeptics" who similarly claim that mainstream climate science is poisoned by the prior ideological commitments of its practitioners. There is probably no direct connection between Fred Singer and company and the "creation scientists"; but the work of the latter may have prepared an audience to accept the arguments of the former.

View all my reviews

News on "Math for Sustainability"

If it seems as though I have been talking about the "Math for Sustainability" project for years, that's because I have.  I think it was in 2012 that I first proposed something like it  as part of my Fellowship class for GreenFaith.

So it is exciting that in two weeks we should have submitted the "final" version of the book to Springer.  "Final" is in quotes here because their readers and copy-editors still have to make their comments on it, and we then have to respond and incorporate them in the TeXscript, but this is a major milestone.

Part of the project is to build a website to support readers of the book, and I'd like to let you all know that is now live at https://math-for-sustainability.com.   I encourage you to head over there and take a look!

The very last section of the main text, Section 6.4, is called "After Math".  In this section we try to go beyond mathematics and open up the idea that sustainability requires not just numbers, but values: our full ethical engagement.  Readers of this blog will know that, for me, such questions need to be viewed through the lens of Christ's presence as the meaning and as the master of creation.  I can't go that far in a general textbook, of course; but I can (and I hope we do) challenge readers to discern what it is that they value, and how well those values hold up under the challenges that the Anthropocene epoch is sure to bring.

Peace
John

Memories XIII: Eli/Miriam Memorial Site

For the last year we have used the Are You Receiving Me web address (receivingme.net) as a pointer to the series of talks and events on campus that we have helped to sponsor in memory of our dear child.

As time moves on, it is not so relevant to use this address to point simply to a schedule of talks that are past.  Liane and I have decided to use the address to point to a more permanent memorial for Eli/Miriam. This will include the talks and events but also other material like Eli's obituary in the Centre Daily Times, other writing and interviews we have done, and so on.

Thanks for visiting receivingme.net

Ichabod

Moses and Joshua Bow Before the Ark, by James Tissot

So Donald Trump has decided to walk away from the 2015 Paris climate accord.  Count me among those who believe this will make less difference that may at first appear to the ultimate outcome of humanity's battle with climate change - which is, at root, a battle with ourselves; whether the interests of our future selves can overcome the greed and inertia of our present selves.  Aquinas would have called this temperance (before that word became associated specifically with alcoholic indulgence):  "a disposition of the mind that binds the passions".