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".