Notes for Meeting

I learned a new word when I was reading the news this morning. Selenelion. Apparently, on Tuesday morning we may be able to see the fully-eclipsed moon and the sun at the same time, which is called a selenelion. The eclipsed moon is also called a blood moon, because when it ducks behind the shadow of the earth, it takes on a reddish color.

Actually I also learned a second new word, which is one I’d heard before but wouldn’t have been able to explain what it meant. Syzygy, which is spelled s-y-z-y-g-y, which feels like an extremely unlikely spelling to me, but the meaning is just when the sun, moon, and earth are in a straight line with each other.

I got curious about how long we’ve been able to predict astronomical events like these ones and wound up learning about Edmund Halley correctly predicting a solar eclipse in 1715 and then again, even more accurately, in 1724 using lunar tables. But way before that happened, there’s a story that Thales of Miletus predicted a total solar eclipse in 585 BCE, an event that has been called the birth of science. If you want to celebrate it as the birth of science, the exact date you’d celebrate would be May 28th, and this year would be the two-thousand-six-hundred-eleventh birthday, but I’m a little skeptical of the story. It feels to me more like “hey I knew that was going to happen.” I understand that the ancients had a very different model of solar eclipses than Edmund Halley did, although we’re often underestimating them.

One thing we do know is that eclipses were often recorded, and that it’s possible now to pinpoint the exact date, like that May 28th date in 585 BCE, which can tell us the exact day and time that the omen occurred, which by the same account that puts Thales of Miletus there, tells us there was a battle going on, and that the eclipse was treated as an omen.

Recall that solar eclipses and lunar eclipses are both at syzygys, do you like how I used that word that I just learned the meaning of? In a solar eclipse, the order of the syzygy is sun then moon then earth, so the moon is between the earth and the sun, and the moon casts a smallish shadow on the earth, so it only blocks out the sun in a specific place, which as the relative positions of all three of them change, looks like a shadow traveling in a line across the surface of the earth.

In a lunar eclipse like we’re having on Tuesday, the earth is in the middle, and it casts a large-ish shadow on the moon, and everyone on earth who can see the moon sees the same thing. It’s another kind of omen. In the Revelation of John of Patmos in the New Testament, it’s part of the weird prophecy/dream sequence:

When he opened the sixth seal, I looked, and behold, there was a great earthquake, and the sun became black as sackcloth, the full moon became like blood

Now, in this prophecy the next thing that happens is the stars fall out of the sky and the figs fall off the fig tree, and then someone rolls up the sky like a scroll. So, grain of salt.

But it does seem to be a reasonable enough description of a solar and lunar eclipse that we can pretty easily imagine John of Patmos would have at least had some cultural knowledge of what was going on. And that rings true in ancient sources. In the Old Testament prophet Joel, we hear an echo of the same thing:

And I will show wonders in the heavens and on the earth, blood and fire and columns of smoke. The sun shall be turned to darkness, and the moon to blood, before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes.

Even though we know the cause of an eclipse is a syzygy, that’s the fourth time today I’ve used the word syzygy, even though we know it, it still seems pretty remarkable. And we still learn something from it. I’m planning to get up on Tuesday and see what I can see, although it might be a little hard to see from Right Field Farm, but the rest of you should get somewhere above the treeline or skyline and make sure you have an unobstructed view to the west, or to the east and the west if you want to see the full selenelion, the sun and the lunar eclipse at the same time.

Apparently the atmosphere acts as a prism, which is why even though it’s a syzygy, that’s five, you can still see both the sun and the moon, and the earth for that matter.

Before we light our candles and think about all this, I want to read one more eclipse quote from the Old Testament, this one from the prophet Amos, we’re actually going to read two parts of his prophecy. First,

He who made the Pleiades and Orion, who turns midnight into dawn and darkens day into night,

who calls for the waters of the sea and pours them out over the face of the land— the Lord is his name.

Such poetry. It’s not the only time Amos mentions an eclipse, and we know that a total solar eclipse happened where he lived in 763 BCE. We know because we can calculated it, but also because we have contemporary Assyrian sources that mention it.

The meaning, again, was different from what we might ascribe to it today, and we’re going to read a little bit more from the prophet Amos.

For I know how many are your offenses and how great your sins.

There are those who oppress the innocent and take bribes and deprive the poor of justice in the courts.

Therefore the prudent keep quiet in such times, for the times are evil.

Seek good, not evil, that you may live.Then the Lord God Almighty will be with you, just as you say he is.

Hate evil, love good; maintain justice in the courts.Perhaps the Lord God Almighty will have mercy

I was especially noticing the verse there in the middle, “therefore the prudent keep quiet in such times,” but I’m going to have to think on it some more. The closing is really what sticks with me from it - “Hate evil, love good; maintain justice in the courts. Perhaps the Lord God Almighty will have mercy.”

Let’s light our candles and think about syzygy, there’s my sixth lifelong use of that word, and selenelion together, but let’s also not forget that the turning of the seasons and the spiraling of our little planetary system can still inspire us to turn away from wrong and turn toward good.

I love you all so very much, and I can’t believe we get to have all four of you home next weekend, it’s going to be an epic total eclipse of my heart.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit notesformeeting.substack.com

It’s hard to know exactly who to blame for what’s going on with the weather, but I blame the groundhog. I can hardly believe we’re getting another big winter storm and the snow isn’t even completely melted from the previous one. Capital Weather Gang is calling for three to six inches of accumulation for us, which would be fun and cozy if we weren’t just getting over weeks of snowcrete.

There are signs of spring as well, though. I was delighted on Thursday and Friday when the snow cover melted enough that I could see the snowdrops starting their glory run. Every year after they bloom I’ve been carefully transplanting a few, well maybe more than a few, and we’re starting to have a little glade between us and Will and Kelsey that feels magical in the very early spring.

The hellebores are starting to peek their blooms up as well, they’re not open yet, but they sort of shoulder out of the ground, and when I was out taking pictures of the snowdrops and noticed a few purple shoulders peeking out from last season’s raggedy foliage. Snowdrops are always the start of spring for me, followed closely by hellebores and then daffodils.

This morning I was listening to Pádraig Ó Tuama on Poetry Unbound, and I learned that the word Lent comes from the Old English word for spring, lencten. And even though it sounds like the Modern English word lengthen, it’s not exactly the same, although it is a reference to longer days. Which is perhaps the most visible sign of spring to me.

I really love how mixed up everything gets when any religion meets culture. Lent is the English word for today, but in other languages, but especially in Latin, the period is named for the forty days, and in fact today is known as Quadragesima Sunday, or Fortieth Sunday. We can get a sense of how Lent has evolved since the ancient times - since we count forty days differently now, skipping Sundays and going all the way to Easter.

Today would have been the start of the fasting season in some places, and if you’re not already set on your practice for this year, it’s not too late.

Actually on the topic of it not being too late, I’ve messed up my fast every single day so far. I’ve been keeping a fast with no food and water from sunrise to sundown. Part of what inspired me this year is that Ramadan and Lent started on the same day, which doesn’t happen very often. It’s not impossible this will be the last time in my life, or at least the last time that I’m young and healthy enough for this kind of fast.

It’s a form of fasting that’s got ancient roots, and was for the first few centuries of the Christian church the normal way to do it, actually I don’t know if they did sunrise, they might have only eaten after sundown, but abstaining from food and water during the day for forty days does have a history.

In the book of Exodus in the Old Testament, it’s how Moses communes with God when he gets the ten commandments:

Then the Lord said to Moses, “Write down these words, for in accordance with these words I have made a covenant with you and with Israel.” Moses was there with the Lord forty days and forty nights without eating bread or drinking water. And he wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant—the Ten Commandments.

We’re going to come back to Moses in a minute, but I want to finish a different thought first, which is that during my four-days-so-far of fasting, I’ve found myself mindlessly sticking something in my mouth to eat it at least once every day. On Thursday I went to a cut flower meeting where one of my friends had made lemon poppy seed sourdough, and I remembered my fast just as I was swallowing my second bite. Or on Saturday when I was cooking dinner, I grabbed a bit of fried potato and popped it in my mouth to eat, just out of habit.

Part of the reason I’m sharing this is just to say that there’s no such thing as breaking a streak during Lent, we just start anew with each breath. If you had a hard time with setting your intent or keeping your intent, Quadrasegesima Sunday is a great time to reconnect to it, but so is every following day.

I’m reminded of the verse in Lamentations that says, “Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.” I try to remember that whenever I’m starting over, which your mama reminds me is every time I take in a breath.

We’ve talked about this before, but there are actually forty-six days between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday, which means there are also six feast days, canonically each of the Sundays starting with today. I’m celebrating my fast a little differently, still keeping with the forty days, but I’m being flexible about if the feast day happens on Sunday or on a different day, for instance if Zoe and I decide to brave the thundersnow tomorrow and meet for lunch, that will be my feast day instead of today. Although the weather is not looking auspicious.

I want to get back to the topic of Moses and his forty day fast, though. The next verse after he comes down from the mountain with the tablets, we learn this:

When Moses came down from Mount Sinai with the two tablets of the covenant law in his hands, he was not aware that his face was radiant because he had spoken with the Lord.

I doubt this will happen to me, and I don’t think it’s just because I missed a couple days, but apparently I wouldn’t be the one to notice if it did happen anyway. But I do want to zero in on the end part of that verse, where it says that Moses had spoken with the Lord.

The point of Lent is not only to give something up, it’s the time for Big Renewal. It’s the time to speak with the Lord, to serve others, and maybe even if my face isn’t glowing with the radiance of the shekinah glory, it is indeed my hope that there will be a noticeable change wrought in me, even if I don’t know exactly what it is.

I hope you are all having a good fast, and if it’s not perfect, well, I see you there, and I welcome you to the human race. I love you all so much, and I hope you’re warm and cozy in this snowstorm, which with any luck may be our last of the season, although according to the groundhog we might still have a couple more weeks of this coming.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit notesformeeting.substack.com

What a treat that I got to see all of you this weekend, even briefly. I don’t mean to taunt anyone who couldn’t be there on Saturday morning, but when I got to Zoe’s apartment to pick up Katie after she stayed over to watch the Olympics, there was coffee cake just coming out of the oven, and it was SO GOOD!

Katie and I stayed there at Zoe’s apartment and chitchatted with her and her roommates just long enough for the coffee cake to be ready to eat, and we watched one of them play a couple rounds of Mario Kart in the living room

It gave me such a powerful wave of nostalgia. I told them all that thirty years ago, my roommates and I were doing the exact same thing, playing Mario Kart in the living room of our college apartment, although I will confess that Zoe and her roommates are a little neater than we were. We even had younger siblings visit us!

The apartment my roommates and I rented was the upper two floors of a house, and I lived there until I moved to DC right at the beginning of 2001. This was before the days of ubiquitous wifi connections being fast enough for video games, so when we would play something like Age of Empires, we would string ethernet cables through the hallways and network our computers the old fashioned way. One of my favorite memories of that game was starting a game one Saturday night and getting so lost in it that when I next looked up it was time for me to get to the Sunday School class I was teaching.

Most of the time, watching TV or playing video games was a fun and healthy way to disconnect, and no matter what jokes people make about screenagers and their screens, we had plenty of screens in our apartment, they were just a bigger, and at least one of my roommates watched TV almost all the time when he was awake and at home.

But all good things must come to an end, and I moved to DC, where I was both busy and lonely, well, at least until I met your mama, but shortly after I moved to DC, I started playing a very silly arcade style game I found on the Internet that was, for whatever reason, extremely addictive for me. There were times I would play it for twelve hours at a time, times when I really wanted to be doing work, but it was just hard for me to unplug. I still don’t know exactly why, it just released the exact right little dopamine hit every time I captured some bees inside of a bubble, which was literally the whole premise of the game.

Whenever I’ve gotten that obsessed with anything, whether it be a silly video game or something else, it’s always such a strange experience. I want to be doing the thing that I’m supposed to be doing. In my mid twenties the thing I was supposed to be doing was usually writing code, and I did spend a lot of time doing that, but sometimes instead of doing the thing I was supposed to be doing or that I wanted to be doing, I was staring at my screen, capturing flying bumblebees with a bubble wand.

Most the time, an obsession like that one just kind of runs its course. Either it gets boring, or it eventually becomes enough of a problem that it becomes urgent to deal with. Quitting is hard, not quite as hard as it was to quit cigarettes, maybe, but still hard. And made harder by the fact that it was always just a click away.

I’ve been having the same kind of problem with my phone recently, which is a little more dangerous than a single arcade game, because it’s effectively bottomless. And for me lately it’s been the problem of having all these places where I can just scroll through short videos effectively forever. You kids have never experienced this, but it’s not unlike flipping channels in the old days, where you’d have fifty cable channels and a remote and just browse from show to show to show, except the short videos take longer to get boring than channel surfing did.

I’ve tried a few tricks that have helped. I put my phone on black and white mode, which surprisingly makes it a lot less interesting. I use the focus friend app, you wouldn’t believe how nice my bean’s apartment is, it’s like getting obsessed with that almost fills my need to be obsessive. The thing is, I don’t really get much from scrolling on my phone, and almost anything that I could be doing instead is what I’d rather be doing.

As I was thinking about writing for today’s Meeting, I kept returning back to the book of Romans, which has lots of gems in it, but I’m going to read a verse from chapter seven now:

I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.

This is written by the Apostle Paul, and he’s talking about himself, and it might be the most relatable thing in all of his letters. “For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.”

Yikes!

I guess I’m not the very first person who’s had a problem with being able to control my own attentions and desires. Someone else has run into the same problem.

Paul winds up talking a lot about the difference between the Spirit and the Body, which is very much in keeping with a first-century-CE idea, but it’s not too dissimilar to a way we have of thinking about addiction and obsessiveness now. Our bodies can become reliant on something, whether it be the aforementioned cigarette, which I became physically addicted to in my twenties, or if it be a silly video game that titrates out just the right amount of dopamine, or if it be a pocket-based supercomputer that trillionaires have spent ungodly sums of money to make it as easy as possible to flip through short videos.

When I think of the Spirit in this context, the Spirit is the part of me that wanted to not smoke a cigarette, or the part of me that wants to put my phone down. And the part that doesn’t want to is, well, my blood chemistry and my eyeballs and my silly fingers who just aren’t cooperating.

I’m suspicious of mind-body dualism, this idea that there’s a me and another me, and one of them is separate from the other one. And I’m especially suspicious of the idea that is present there in the book of Romans that the capital-f-Flesh is bad. Later in chapter eight, Paul says it like this:

Therefore, brothers and sisters, we have an obligation—but it is not to the flesh, to live according to it. For if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live.

When I think about it with my own modern sensibilities, circling back to what we said before, I definitely have blood, and my blood definitely has chemicals in it, and sometimes that blood chemistry seems… I dunno… determined, if blood chemistry can be determined, that blood chemistry seems determined to get me to smoke a cigarette or scroll on my phone or whatever other thing that my higher desires would like to resist.

How do I know they’re higher desires? Well, because when the higher desires win out, I feel better, I do better, for others, for myself.

Before we light our candles, we’ll end on an even more optimistic note from this same part of Paul’s letter to the Romans. Paul outlines this whole thing about the ongoing battle between the spirit and the body, but then tells them “those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God.”

I love all you children of God so much, and I hope you’re always able to do what you want to do. Katie reminded me earlier that this Wednesday is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent. Seems like it might be a good time for me to give up staring at my phone, I’ll have to think about that a little more. Let’s light our candles and think about it.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit notesformeeting.substack.com

Today we’re going to spend a little time with a parable that Jesus told, the Parable of the Sower. But first we’re going to talk a bit about the genre of parables, and what they’re for.

I can’t remember how many of you were here at the dining room table when Tomi was talking about Plato and esoteric knowledge, but I don’t think it was everyone, so a brief recap is in order. Tomi was mulling over an approach to reading Plato, well, really of reading philosophy, that was advocated by a philosopher named Leo Strauss.

Strauss was born in Germany, and taught most of his career at the University of Chicago, but for his final three years of academic work, he was a scholar in residence at St. John’s. He and his wife are both buried in Annapolis, I think in that cemetery right there where General’s Highway meets West Street, across from the mall.

Strauss advocates for a reading of Plato, where we see both a plain meaning and an esoteric meaning. When you hear the word esoteric, think of something that’s not for everybody, it’s just for the inner circle, or the already-initiated. Strauss argues that this is how philosophy would have been read and understood in the time it was developed, and he strongly dislikes at least some of the more modern readings of these texts.

There are plenty of reasons a person who was thinking and teaching and preaching and writing in the ancient times might have wanted to obscure some of what they were saying, and indeed there were lots of people who didn’t write anything down. Socrates comes to mind, but also Jesus. He never wrote anything down, and everything we know about him was written down by other people, and most of those weren’t first hand accounts.

Jesus certainly did speak in parables, but it’s also worth remembering that the people who wrote about the things Jesus said may have also had their own reasons for being a little obscure with some of the teachings. Still, one important way of reading the accounts in the Gospels is to consider them the way people might have read them when they were written.

In the Gospel of Mark, there’s a nod to the esoteric view, this part of the story is from right after Jesus tells them the Parable of the Sower, and the disciples ask him about it.

When he was alone, the Twelve and the others around him asked him about the parables. He told them, “The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside everything is said in parables so that,

“‘they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding;otherwise they might turn and be forgiven!’”

Here we have a nod to that idea there are some secrets for the insiders that are obscured from outsiders, which is what esoteric means. Esoteric is for insiders. Notably, Jesus is quoting the prophet Isaiah there at the end, giving us a sense of who the insiders might be.

So let’s rewind and read the parable itself.

“Listen! A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants, so that they did not bear grain. Still other seed fell on good soil. It came up, grew and produced a crop, some multiplying thirty, some sixty, some a hundred times.”

The thing that I’m struck by when I read this parable, is that it actually seems pretty obvious. Of course I’ve known the story since I was a kid, and we used to sing it as a song at church camp. But also, Mark records Jesus telling the disciples exactly what it means in the next section, right after he tells them how mysterious it is.

When I was talking to Lina about it, I told her I thought the writer of the book of Mark might just have been trying to make the reader feel smart, or feel like one of the insiders instead of one of the outsiders.

The surface meaning also just makes a lot of sense, and the funny thing about the surface meaning of this parable, is that it’s story about esoteric knowledge. It’s a story about what happens when you tell a story, actually when you tell anything to different people who are differently prepared to hear it. Here’s the explanation Jesus gives in the book of Mark:

“Don’t you understand this parable? How then will you understand any parable? The farmer sows the word. Some people are like seed along the path, where the word is sown. As soon as they hear it, Satan comes and takes away the word that was sown in them. Others, like seed sown on rocky places, hear the word and at once receive it with joy. But since they have no root, they last only a short time. When trouble or persecution comes because of the word, they quickly fall away. Still others, like seed sown among thorns, hear the word; but the worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth and the desires for other things come in and choke the word, making it unfruitful. Others, like seed sown on good soil, hear the word, accept it, and produce a crop—some thirty, some sixty, some a hundred times what was sown.”

Part of what this story is telling us is that we need to look deeper than the surface of stories, that the story might not be just a story, that we actually have to think about it for a little while, we have to let it put down some roots and grow.

That word, Word, is one of the areas we might look a little deeper in the story. The word Word, or Logos in the Greek, is one of the words we use as a synonym for Jesus. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. So here, the writer of the Gospel of Mark is telling us that the Word isn’t going to take root everywhere.

But also, it literally just means word, same as in English. Anything someone might tell us or anything we might tell someone else.

I like this story a lot, but I’m a little suspicious of the idea that it’s esoteric, for two reasons. The first is that for something clever, it’s pretty obvious. The second is that it seems counter to the whole ethic of spreading the word, which Jesus is pretty insistent on. To me, the story isn’t so much about insiders and outsiders as it is about pausing and considering more deeply.

When I was Tomi’s age, I was working for Dale Thiele on his ranch, changing irrigation pipes. Hopefully Dale doesn’t get wind of this, but one of the things he told us to never ever ever do was to drive on any of the fields where crops were planted, and of course we never did, except once I just really needed to turn around in a field with newly sown rye, and so I did.

It packed the soil down just a little, you could hardly see it, but every time I went to go change irrigation in that field for the rest of the summer, you could see the tire tracks. Well, not the tracks themselves, but there was a perfectly shaped pickup-turnaround strip of rye that never grew as well as tall the rest of the rye in the field. At the end of the season when it was harvested, the rye in those tire tracks from the pickup were about six inches shorter than everywhere else, and I thought about the Parable of the Sower every time I looked at them.

The story took root in other ways those summers, too.

One way of thinking deeply about something is to just think about it for thirty years and then tell your kids or your friends about what you’ve figured out in those thirty years, and that’s not exactly esoteric, but it’s still special. I also like that the someone special in this story is a farmer, which I imagine lots of his audience could relate to. In some other parables, the hero of Jesus’s story is a fisherman or a servant.

I like to think the parables were mostly about bringing more people in rather than about keeping certain people out. And what this parable tells me is, maybe think about things like they’re on good, strong, deep soil. That’s what I’d like us to do while we light our cand…

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit notesformeeting.substack.com

It’s kind of hard for me to think about spring right now. It was fourteen degrees this morning when I got up, and that was the warmest morning we’ve had in a week. The ice on top of the snow is especially crazy, it feels like walking on a glacier on Mt. Adams.

But it’s February first, and that means it’s Imbolc, or St. Brigid’s day, which has been a national holiday in Ireland since, checks watch, twenty-twenty-three. That doesn’t mean that people have only observed it since then, but it does mean some renewed interest, I guess. It’s basically the halfway point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, and it’s associated with the coming of spring.

We’re going to talk about Brigid a little more in a minute, but I’ll also point out that tomorrow is Groundhog’s Day, which is our own kinda midwinter thing. Groundhog’s day, the holiest day of Marmotology, also lines up with this idea of spring coming along, although I can only imagine this year that the groundhog will predict six more weeks of winter, because literally will it ever stop being cold?

In addition to St. Brigid’s Day, Imbolc, and Groundhog Day, apparently it’s actually singular Groundhog, singular day, in addition to these auspicious days, tomorrow is also Candlemas, when we can take our candles to the church to be blessed, and it’s something something I don’t even know what, about the presentation or purification or holy encounter or some other such thing. Forty days since Christmas, if you can believe it, and if you haven’t already taken down your Christmas decorations, I guess today’s the day.

So, burrowing a little deeper on this cluster of days, I thought we’d talk a little bit about syncretism today, and about what it means to Christians around the world. Here we are with this religion where the main idea is, we follow the teachings of this Rabbi from Galilee, and for various reasons, it’s a religion that has spread all over the world.

At some point, when it spread to Ireland. And already in Ireland, there was this figure Brigid who people already know about. She’s either in three aspects, or she’s three sisters, and she’s associated with poetry and wisdom and farm animals and other things, can you see why I like her? Anyway, this Brigid is a Tuatha Dé Dannan, and since today’s Meeting isn’t about the history of Irish folklore, and I’m also not a folklorist, we’ll just leave that there as a breadcrumb for anyone who wants to follow, but for now it’s worth noting that this Brigid is associated with the beginning of spring, of Imbolc.

A funny thing about humans is that most of us live on earth, and earth has this twenty-three-and-a-half degree tilt, and this roughly three-hundred-sixty-five-and-a-quarter day circumlocution around our star, which still affects our lives pretty substantially, but you can imagine if you didn’t have that context, say you didn’t think of yourself as living on a planet in a solar system, that you might wonder why spring comes every year, earlier some years and later in others. The beginning of February seems as good a time as any to hope to the dickens that it still works this year, I’m definitely doing it right now.

If you happened to already listen to Dear Hank and John this week, one of their topics was the Division I Saints. I think I told you all already that it inspired me to write my first letter into Hank and John, mostly to “well actually” a mistake they made about St. Joseph of Arimathea, the patron saint of undertakers, apparently, but I also asked them if miracles are real. I wasn’t really wondering, though, I’m just hoping for the miracle that will melt all this ice that we’ve got covering everything right now.

Of course, such a miracle was extremely unlikely, as it would have required the very formation of our solar system to occur in such a way that this planet achieved a reasonably stable orbit around a reasonably stable star at precisely the right tilt for spring to come. And yet, the miracle, despite its unlikeliness, happened already.

As is always the way of getting ready for our meeting, I’ve had a few different threads coming together in my head, and I always wonder when to bring in another thread and when to start plying them all together. So here’s one more for you.

Our family cow came from a dairy on the Eastern Shore called St. Brigid’s Farm, and they describe St. Brigid as the patron saint of dairy maids and scholars. I think they’d know. But wait just a minute, how did we get from talking about a pre-Christian Tuatha Dé Dannan goddess named Brigid to a Christian Saint with the same name?

Well, Brigid of Kildaire, aka Saint Brigid, was born in Ireland. We don’t know a lot about her, but the tradition is that she died on February 1st, which is today, and that’s the day we celebrate her for her many good works. So to recap, this Division I Saint, Brigid, has the same name and the same day as a predecessor of hers whose name is also Brigid, but who is decidedly not Christian. We used to venerate the previous Brigid for the coming of spring and the milking of cows and poetry and wisdom on February first, but now we venerate the new Brigid, who is just like the old Brigid, except she’s not a Tuatha Dé Dannan, she’s a saint, which is completely different, and we venerate her on February 1st as well, for the coming of spring and the milking of cows and poetry and wisdom and whatnot.

So the old Brigid is pagan and bad, but the new Brigid is Christian and good, and otherwise they’re exactly the same.

What a weird coincidence.

It turns out there are actually quite a few times and places in Christianity that it’s come to a new place and that it’s had the flexibility to adapt to local customs a bit. There have, of course, been lots of times in the history of our religion that any sort of pagan connection or the suggestion of celebrating pagan traditions was automatically bad. But suffice it to say that none of Yule logs and Christmas trees and Easter eggs are in the Bible, and neither is the Groundhog or Brigid or the importance of February first or February second.

In fact, in the Roman empire around the same time as Christianity was getting its start, there was a competing festival on December 25th that was called Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, the birth of the invincible sun, that’s s-u-n sun, not s-o-n son, like the Son of God, and wouldn’t you know, just by sheer coincidence, we’ve got a holiday for that day, too! Right around the solstice, wouldn’t you know?

Okay, before we light our candles, because remember, it’s also Candlemas, and what’s Candlemas without candle lighting, let’s think together about what this all means, and whether it matters very much.

Humans have been being humans and celebrating and contemplating our trip around the sun for a long time, certainly long before Jesus was born and we got our religion. For my money, bringing a tree inside, hunting for eggs, lighting candles in the darkness, they aren’t things that should keep us apart, they’re things that should bring us together.

To me, the whole point of being a Christian is that we try to follow the teachings of Christ, which is hard enough all by itself. Finding ways it fits into the rhythm of our lives, and ways that it fits into our culture and history and family and animal friends feels beautiful and poetic to me. The syncretism of it is really an important feature, not an accident.

So tonight, let’s light our candles in the dark, let’s consider Brigid of Kildaire, and poets, and domesticated animals, this one’s for all of you. I love you all so much, and I’m personally hoping the groundhog does us right tomorrow and spring comes sooner than later.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit notesformeeting.substack.com

What a way to end the month of January! As I wrote my notes this morning, we had about six inches of snow and it was still snowing. The sheep, interestingly, slept out in it, and had veritable snowbanks on top of them but still seemed to just want a nibble of corn from your mama’s hand.

I loved having everyone home, however briefly on Wednesday night. When I was driving Tomi back to St. John’s, we talked a little bit about two things I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. The first is a question I’ve been pondering, how can I think of God without imagining a dude in the sky? And having imagined God as something other than a dude in the sky, I then wondered what it would do for my own theology.

Now, on that first question, I’m hardly the first person to rethink how we think about God. I mean, the Old Testament is completely built around this revolutionary idea that God is invisible, and that we shouldn’t worship, for example, a golden calf. Not making graven images is really about this same question, in my mind. How should we imagine God? Or even should we?

There are some more very old hints about not imagining God as a dude. When the burning bush talks to Moses and Moses asks, who should I say you are, the voice says, “I AM THAT I AM.” It’s enigmatic, but also just kind of sensible, right? “I AM BEING ITSELF.” I’m not proposing an alternate translation here, I’m just saying I think there’s room here for a lot space to maneuver, and our way of thinking of God, which is very rooted in Greek and Roman mythology, and which is also very rooted in Jesus, a very human seeming son of God, it’s easy to fall into a rut.

There’s another verse in the book of Numbers that I’ve always liked, “God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent: hath he said, and shall he not do it? or hath he spoken, and shall he not make it good?”

That’s my old standby King James Version, but I’ve always liked that. God is not a man. So the obvious question is, “so is god a woman?” Messing around with God’s pronouns is something I am definitely not bothered by, in the sense that “he” already doesn’t work, so why not try “she” or “they,” and even “it” maybe has a place, but none of those options especially land with me either. In fact more modern translations of the Bible translate that same verse as “God is not a human” which makes more sense, although we should look further than just that place for translations that improperly embed our or some previous culture’s gender assumptions in the text, but I digress.

God speaks with many voices in the Bible. A still small voice. A whirlwind, a burning shrub, prophets, donkeys, apostles, floods, winds, the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament shows His handiwork. Another verse I love is God speaking in first person, “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.” And wildly, the first person pronouns for God are sometimes I/me and sometimes we/us! Just like a weird old timey king, I guess? We’re hardly the first generation to wonder how pronouns should interact with names.

I’ve told you all as recently as a few weeks ago that my own idea of God as the eternal, immortal, invisible, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent creator of all seems to be completely compatible with the notion of God-as-Being, and that this in turn seems to avoid the nasty problem described by the Apostle Paul in Romans, “They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.”

When I encounter something in creation, whatever it may be, to worship that thing as if it were the whole thing, that’s a mistake. I’m not saying we can’t marvel at a tree, just that we can’t forget the forest, to borrow a completely different metaphor.

Okay with this all in mind, now I get to the second part of the thought experiment, which is that having de-dude-ified God, what does that do to my theology. I have all these Bible verses knocking around in my head that I’ve been misinterpreting through the lens of God-as-dude-in-the-sky, and when I revisit them without that considerably broken, and arguably theologically problematic theology, they’re all different.

The two verses that have been knocking around in my head are both about waiting, “They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary; and they shall walk and not faint.” What can, what does it mean, to wait on a God who isn’t a dude in the sky, who isn’t separated from us, who is infused in every fiber of my own and of your being and of all the stuff between us? How can I understand those words differently without those scales on my eyes?

Incidentally, that’s a quote about the Apostle Paul, “And immediately there fell from his eyes as it had been scales: and he received sight forthwith, and arose, and was baptized.” I feel like that’s been happening to me for the past forty or so years that I’ve been thinking about this, admittedly I’m a little slower on the uptake than Paul was.

There’s another song about waiting, this is the beginning of Psalm 40 in the KJV again, I love my old poetic translation for some things:

I waited patiently for the Lord; and he inclined unto me, and heard my cry.

He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings.

And he hath put a new song in my mouth, even praise unto our God: many shall see it, and fear, and shall trust in the Lord.

I find myself asking the same question again, what does that even mean, to wait? Why do I wait for anything that is definitively, and definitionally, already present?

I mean, there’s lots of obvious answers. All of language is a metaphor, so the idea that somehow we can’t just understand God through the metaphor of a dude who wasn’t paying attention to us but now is, well, we’re pretty creative with that kind of thinking, so that’s a fine interpretation to me.

But it just doesn’t hit for me personally.

Understanding that waiting differently helps me, although it’s also frustrating. To quote your mama quoting Glinda the Good in the Wizard of Oz, “You’ve always had the power, my dear, you just had to learn it for yourself.” Dorothy had the ruby slippers all along.

In my revised and revisited understanding of waiting, I come to understand that I have always been suffused with God’s presence, and that this waiting is a calming of myself and a stilling of other noise in my head and in my heart. The George Fox Quaker idea, that of God in everyone, is present in me, and must only be heeded.

I love you all so very much, and I hope you’re enjoying this snow and taking lots of pictures. Send all the cute ones for the family photo album. Now let’s light our candles and still those other noises for a moment.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit notesformeeting.substack.com

Lina and I have started to notice, when we go out to feed the sheep and get the eggs, that the sun is finally starting to rise a little earlier. We’re still taking headlamps and flashlights with us, but the darkest days have started to give way, at least a bit.

Then, yesterday evening we went for a walk, and the sun was just starting to set a little after five, another sure sign of the lengthening days. We talk about you kids a lot when we walk together, but sometimes we can drag our attention onto other admittedly less fascinating topics, and yesterday our conversation on the walk came back around to faith.

Our meeting from last week had been turning over in my mind. I suppose it’s not too surprising that I wasn’t able to completely figure out faith in one week, or even in fifty years for that matter, but I do think I got some things wrong last week. Though for me maybe faith is a puzzle to think about. Like Zeno’s Paradox or the Ship of Theseus, it’s not there for us to settle on an answer.

All week this week, I had this line about faith from the Epistle to the Hebrews turning over in my head. I memorized it as a kid in the King James Version, and in that translation it goes, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

Thinking of anything, including God, as supernatural, doesn’t really work in my brain, which means I tend to hear some explanations of faith as, “when you gaslight yourself real hard so you can stop trusting what you really know.” Doing that is probably not very healthy, and I also don’t think it’s a plain reading of the text or the word

This week, I’ve been reading from that book that I told you guys about at Christmas, Bart D. Ehrman’s Lost Scriptures, and it has reminded me that lots of different people have had lots of different ideas about what any of this means. Waves hands. Even inside the canon of the New Testament, some writers had different ideas about faith, but I kept coming back to those words of the anonymous writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews. And with that in mind, this past week I’ve kept thinking about the words substance and evidence there alongside the word faith.

And with that in mind, maybe faith is a sort of a stepping stone to understanding, to knowledge. But it’s not meant to be a replacement for it, and it’s definitely not meant as a replacement for certainty. Knowing why the sun rises a little bit earlier at the end of January isn’t in tension with faith, it’s the logical next step. Faith, in the way I understand it this week at least, is acceptance of my own partial understanding. This acceptance gives me the confidence to move forward.

Looping back for a moment to my own difficulty keeping supernatural ideas in my brain, when I think about God, I think about the eternal, immortal, invisible, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent Existence with a capital E.

Existence itself, all of this, waves hands around again, all of this is faithful to us. God is faithful to us. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still puzzling to me, but I think these ancient writers were onto something when they talked about it.

Maybe I can understand faithfulness as constancy, walking through uncertainty. Your mama and I are faithful to one another, which means we have made a commitment to count on one another, and there’s that same mutuality to it. Each of us have to be faithful, and each of us have to exercise faith. It’s a great metaphor, and it’s also a great thing to actually do.

Faith is evidence and substance, faith is mutuality, faith is a stepping stone to knowing. We have faith in ourselves and faith in each other and faith in God, and what I think each one of those things mean is that we only know partly, but we let that be okay. Paul said, “For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.”

Before we light our candles, one of the reasons I’ve been thinking about this so much the past week is that tomorrow is the day we celebrate the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. Dr. King taught and talked about faith, and this morning I wanted to spend a little bit of time while I was writing, thinking about him and his ideas on it. So, I typed “MLK faith quote” into a search engine, and then got back a great quote and an AI generated answer about where it came from.

I don’t mind saying that I didn’t have very much faith in the answer, but there was a citation, so I went and followed the breadcrumbs. The quote in question is, “Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.” Following the crumbs took me to a page that pointed me to an MLK speech from 1962. The speech is 26 minutes long, and I listened to it, thinking to myself that I’d like to both hear the quote in his own voice, and that I’d be able to verify it.

Listeners, I bet none of you are going to be surprised to hear that no, it is not real, and that the closest thing that we have of any evidence that Dr. King ever said such a thing is a quote from a friend of his who said she learned that lesson from him. But have faith! There’s still a silver lining in this story, which is that the New York State Museum has preserved both a recording of the speech in question and a copy of Dr. King’s own prepared notes. Dr. King did have something to say about faith in that speech, which I find even more inspiring than the fake quote, in part because it is actually real.

“We must all maintain faith in the future, and believe that the American Dream can and will become a reality. This is my faith.” And a few moments later in the same speech, “And with this faith we will be able to adjourn the counsels of despair, and bring new light into the dark chambers of pessimism.”

Thanks everyone for thinking about this with me. I can’t wait to see you all later this week, but for now let’s light our candles wherever we are and think one more time on faith, and on the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Junior.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit notesformeeting.substack.com

It still feels strange to me when I write 2026 on the top of my notes for meeting, but I’m starting to settle into it at least enough that this week won’t center on time travel like we did last week. This week I’ve been completely obsessed with John Green’s Vlog Brothers video from four days ago, Hope Is Not a Feeling. I don’t always watch Vlog Brothers, but Lina sent me this one in the middle part of the week, and I just loved it.

John’s idea, of course, is that hope is not only a feeling, but also a decision. The quote that sums it up for me, “I think hope is and must be a practice.”

He connects the practice of hope to the practice of love in the video. If anyone hasn’t already watched it, definitely press play, and if you’ve only watched it once, it might be worth watching again, I really think it’s one of John Green’s finest works.

As is the way of such things, a bunch of threads connected together for me this week - that video from John Green, our family FaceTime call when we were all talking about The Symposium, and a podcast called Learning How to See. I was listening to where the guest was Parker Palmer.

What kept turning over in my head was that the practice of hope and the practice of love form two parts of a trio. Faith, hope, and love. John Green covered hope pretty well, and in the podcast, Parker Palmer talked about love as a lens through which we can view the world, I was pretty satisfied with that, too. And in the end, I felt a little hungry to talk about faith. As a side note, it’s Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians where he coins this trio, a passage that Lina and I and lots of other couples have read at their weddings, “And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”

I think maybe faith, by extension, is the least of these, and I got to thinking about why we haven’t talked about faith more during our meetings. Of course, then I searched through all the notes for meeting over the past nine years, and realized we’ve had about forty meetings that at least mentioned faith, all the way back the first one in 2007 when we decided to try out doing it every week.

And here we are talking about it again.

Riffing off of John Green’s idea that both hope and love are both a feeling and a practice, I think the same can be said of faith, and today I want to talk about what kind of a practice it is. What does it mean to practice faith? For that does it mean to feel faith? What does it mean to be faithful, or the most mysterious of all to me, what does it mean to have faith in God? That’s one that has been weaponized by so many churches to mean, “Do what Authority Figure says.”

Needless to say, that’s not what I think faith means as a decision or as a practice.

It’s interesting to note that there are lots of ways that we talk about faith in our day to day language that can give us hints. I have faith that you all will generally make good choices. The King James Bible was described as faithfully translated, I think that’s an interesting one, a faithful translation meaning that it’s true to the original, or at least as true as we can make it. And then there are other ways that we sort of use faith interchangeably with hope, but with a slightly different connotation. “I hope AFC Wimbledon will win their next game” and “I have faith they’ll win” sort of have different implications, right? One makes more sense than the other.

Broadly, I think faith is the one that relies on a bit of evidence. And that’s not always how we use it, is it? I’m trying to square it with the way my own religious sensibilities have at times demanded faith with or without any evidence either before or after it. James wrote it this way in a letter:

What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them? Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.

But that’s really only half of the evidence, the part that comes after the faith. To me, the part that comes before the faith is the evidence of repetition, or the evidence of observation. When I plant tulips or alliums in the ground in the fall, I have faith they’re going to sprout and grow, because that’s what they do. It’s their lifecycle. If I were to plant an African Violet at the same time in Maryland, it would be pretty stupid to have faith that it would thrive, even though I might hope that it will. I think hope is for when we don’t know, faith is for when we do, and love is for both, that’s why it’s the greatest.

I’m happy to admit that faith in God is a complicated one for me, in part because the way I’ve understood it for most of my life isn’t really compatible with my own understanding of God. For a long time, I’ve needed a new understanding, and here’s what I’m circling around.

Just like the faith that the tulips will grow during the winter, I want to have a faith that is based in what is. An absolute confidence to walk in it.

Jesus said to have faith in God exactly one time that is recorded in the Bible.

“Have faith in God,” Jesus answered. “Truly I tell you, if anyone says to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and does not doubt in their heart but believes that what they say will happen, it will be done for them.

I believe I’ve misunderstood this my whole life to be a command from Jesus that we ought to come up with something absurd and gin up enough faith to make it happen anyway, but what if that’s not what he meant at all when he said this. What if what he meant is that we can only have faith in the things we actually believe in? Immediately after this, he makes a weird and abrupt transition to saying that if you’re asking God for something and you remember that you’re holding a grudge, to go find the person and forgive them?

I think faith, hope, and love are connected, all three of them are feelings and decisions, but I think faith is actually the easiest one, not the hardest ones. We have faith in what we know to be true. We have hope when we don’t know. And we have love, always.

I love you all, I have hope for you all, and I have faith in you all, in descending order of importance. Let’s light our candles together.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit notesformeeting.substack.com

It was weird to write 2026 on the top of my notes for meeting today.

I’m not quite old enough to remember when 2001: A Space Odyssey came out, but I’m do have my own version of that date that’s in the future, and it’s from the movie Back to the Future, which came out when I was ten. In Back to the Future, which maybe we should watch as a family, Marty McFly travels to the distant past, to 1955, and then travels to the distant future, which happens to fall on the date of my fortieth birthday, October 21, 2015.

The future was amazing, in an eighties sort of way. When we got to the actual 2015 and we still didn’t have hoverboards or flying cars, lots of us Gen Xers were very disappointed. For my part, the moral of the story is that I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future. Of course, the movie completely missed that in the future I would carry around a hyperconnected supercomputer in my pocket (actually two of them), and that I would mostly use the supercomputer as a way to distract myself and to let other people distract me.

But it is funny, right? We just really don’t know what’s going to happen, not even if we’re really smart about it. We don’t know how the things we do now are going to shape us in the future.

Back to that trillion dollar distraction machine I carry around in my pocket, I started following this rabbi on Instagram, and no, the rabbi isn’t Jesus, and no this isn’t the start of a joke, it’s literally just this rabbi whose videos I sometimes watch on Instagram. As a side note on that, today’s meeting is a little bit about redemption, and there’s something quite redemptive about the distraction machine I carry also connecting me to the teachings of this Instagram rabbi on the Internet.

Anyway, this week, I’ve been thinking about hardship, and a video popped up in my feed telling a story about Moses asking God for help, and God giving Moses what he needed to become. To become what, we might ask? To become Moses!

Moses had quite a few advantages in life, despite being dumped into a space pod and sent from the planet Krypton to be raised by foreigners. Oh wait, sorry, that was superman, Moses was the one who was abandoned by his parents to be raised by a shepherd. Wait, wrong again, Moses was the reed basket in the Nile.

It’s a very relatable story. I wonder how many people have retold the story of Moses as a really good YA story? Abandoned by his parents, but raised in the palace as an outsider, only later to become The Special. I guess that’s probably half the YA novels I’ve read.

So Moses gets raised by the Pharoah or at least the Pharoah’s people, and has a reasonably time of it until he’s like 40, at which point God gives him what he needs in order to become who he must become.

What Moses needs, apparently, is a felony conviction.

I do want to point out that there is a victim besides Moses in this story, here’s a snippet of the story from the second chapter of Exodus:

One day, after Moses had grown up, he went out to where his own people were and watched them at their hard labor. He saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his own people. Looking this way and that and seeing no one, he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand.

That poor murdered guy didn’t even get his name in the story, and even though he was a jerk, he didn’t deserve to be murdered and left in the sand.

Tradition tells us this book was actually written by Moses, but that doesn’t make any sense to me, because by the same tradition, Moses is also alleged to have written about his own death. But my point is, Moses murdered a guy because he was beating up one of his people, and that’s from the most sympathetic telling of the story, so sympathetic that tradition has handed down that it was written by the murderer.

You might recall that the reason the Hebrew children are in Egypt is that Joseph went down there during a famine and got super cool with the Pharoah at the time. And thinking about Joseph for a moment, think of all the hardship that turned him into who he became. His own brothers threw him in a well and sold him into slavery, talk about hardship!

I know that this meeting has felt like a bunch of disparate stories of Moses and Marty McFly, but there is a point to all of it. You are going to encounter hardships in your life, and when you do, one of two things will happen:

* It will kill you, and you’ll be dead,

or

* you’ll overcome it.

Those really are the only two outcomes, I suppose there are three outcomes if you count being in the s**t as a separate one from still being alive, but I think those two are synonyms.

I’ve spent the past twenty years telling you all that I don’t think suffering is redemptive, and I still believe that. I was raised with this theology that Jesus suffered on the cross because I’m a sinner, and that the torture he endured, not the overcoming of it, but that actual suffering, is the reason for my redemption. While I do believe that the teachings of Christ are centered on redemption, that specific tenet is deeply disordered in important ways. It’s led to Christians doing odd things like wearing hair shirts. But it’s also led us to doing horrific things like causing intentional suffering to people accused or convicted of crimes, because, you know, redemption.

That’s some b******t.

But overcoming hardship, there’s something there that’s incredibly redemptive. When I think back on overcoming hardships myself, they’re my most redemptive and formative moments. I think about the time I got depressed and failed two classes one semester in college. That, led to a whole chain of events - moving to Seattle, getting a job, living with my brothers - that in turn brought me here. And specifically, it brought me here as a person who has some understanding of anxiety and depression, and who can use that perspective to help others. Talk about redemption!

Our overcoming hardships is the most redemptive thing in our lives.

We don’t know what’s going to happen, or how it’s going to turn out, anymore than we did in 1985 when Back to the Future came out. But we do know there will be hardship, and overcoming it is what’s going to make us who we will become.

I love you all, and as we light our candles, I’ll be thinking about overcoming and the hardship I’m undergoing right now of still not having a flying car.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit notesformeeting.substack.com

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit notesformeeting.substack.com