The Pastor and Cthulhu

A pastor, from the pulpit this month, mocked young adults who use nouns as verbs: He said a generation of people found the basic tasks of adulthood too difficult, crying over "adulting" because they had idolized youth to the point of mental illness.

Reality Check: New generations face societal upheaval and the loss of social structure and community support like never before. 

Think that's not true? 

Scientific observation reflects that technology alone is advancing at a rate exponentially faster than humankind can adapt to it. That means children are now born into a world to which they will never be able to acclimate: the rate of change is beyond human capacity to understand and integrate in a comprehensive, productive, and meaningful way. 

Want the technical explanation? Our brain development, identity, and survival is based on the creation of schema, categories by which we organize knowledge about the world, and attachment, internalized experience and images of environmental constants. But change - not knowledge - is now our constant, and the rate of change surpasses our ability to create schema or internalize experience on a daily - if not hourly - basis. Authors and scientists writing about this subject warned that mass amounts of humanity would be "left behind" this technology curve. But the truth is, we are now born "left behind," born into a world that the human mind and body is biologically unable to process and adapt to. We cannot process technology fast enough to make a coherent, emotionally and mentally stable whole.

We often think we're adapting. When brains are growing and learning at their most accelerated rate, we can look like we're keeping up, but that's part of the maladaptation: we can only keep up with a sliver of what is changing, and the harder we work to maintain our edge on that sliver - an imaginary edge, mind you - the farther behind we get on everything else.  Thus, we produce the coding genius whose body wastes away, who cannot navigate human interaction, or who becomes less and less capable of empathy each day. Or we produce a crop of CEO's who master momentary economic waves, make more money than they can spend in a lifetime, but all at the cost of human lives, the environment, and their own families. Wealth then creates a buffer for these people until they become less and less connected with reality and more and more driven to recreate the world in their own image, all while sacrificing themselves to the advancement and profit god that swallowed them whole a long time ago.

In fact, technological advancement is the embodiment of Cthulhu in our time: it is an alternate universe, an entity far bigger than we can fathom, and it feeds on us, our time, our attention, our sanity, until we are consumed. Yet we worship it as a god because it mesmerizes us. It is all-encompassing. It is all we know. It is the very structure of our world. And as far as we know, it's what we are here for in the first place: feeding the beast. And the puppet-masters of the world are Cthulhu's priests.

People have long written stories and still mutter about the "dangers of AI."  Our mistake is thinking that AI is a physical or ideological entity, something we can conceptualize and point to, even if what we are pointing to is an abstract like the "world wide web." AI in these stories was only ever a symbol of something we intuited but could not begin to comprehend. There isn't an intelligence, an entity, or even a conglomeration of entities that are going to take over the world and enslave us. No, it is something bigger than that, and we are already enslaved. AI was the icon, the metaphor, the token we used to represent something that was happening but was too large to articulate. AI was our shorthand. We wrote scifi stories to represent a vast reality that was reordering and is reordering our world as I type. The concept of AI was to alert us to an ethic, an ethos, a mythos, one that we made and that surpassed us, creating a world in which we can no longer thrive. And here we are.

Dear Pastor: The mockery is not a generation of people clawing at a world that wasn't designed for their good but devours their hearts, minds, and bodies even while they are alive. The mockery is the man who sits in judgment of those dying all around him as if he is superior, as if he isn't dying, too.

Here, Messiah Comes

Some of us have been waiting a very long time. We have never stopped believing, never stopped looking, never stopped hoping for God. We have been as faithful as we know how to be. 

Will Messiah come? 

Some of us have worked our asses off, frankly. We've done the right things, the necessary things, the hard things. Some of us have had the rug pulled out from under us by the very God we expected to have our backs, and we feel disoriented, betrayed, or confused. We're just trying to make sense of it all.

Will Messiah come? 

Some of us have never quite found where we belong. Maybe we thought we had, a few times. We've tried over and over and over again. But it hasn't worked out. It always seems to end up the same way, in failure, disappointment, regret. We feel isolated and perhaps a little jaded in the end. We find a way to keep going, but..

Will Messiah come? 

These are the stories of Anna (the prohetess, in Luke 2:36-38), of Nicodemus (in John 3:1-7), and of the woman at the well (also in John 4:4-30). But, as with many of the stories depicted in scripture, we find our stories in theirs. What did these three very different people with very different experiences have in common?

They all met the Messiah. Jesus came to them all, one by one.

Jesus came to the woman who had been looking for him, praying for him, seeking him her whole life. She recognized him and rejoiced.

Jesus came to the man who already had all the answers, who had worked hard and was doing what he knew to be right. 

It disoriented him.

Jesus came to the woman whose life hadn't gone the way she had hoped. She was judged. She was isolated. She was ... surprised.

Because the Messiah came to them all -- the ones who were ready, and the ones who were not; the ones who had it all figured out, and the ones who did not. 

In the first week of Advent, I was happy to remember that life, hope, salvation -- it comes for us, ready or not!

This second week it strikes me that, regardless of our stories, regardless of the twists and turns our lives take, regardless of our mistakes, our failures, our disappointments or regrets: Christ comes to us. 

In other words, it doesn't matter what kind of mess we are right now, he comes. But it also doesn't matter what kind of mess we've always been, he comes. If we have lived faithfully, he comes. If we have been Pharisees, he comes. If we are living day to day just trying to make things work, he meets with us -- right in the middle of our mundane tasks. Right here. Right now.

Will we recognize him? Will we rejoice? Will we let the disorientation phase us, or will we press in ... and be transformed?

Because it is here, wherever here is, right now, that Messiah comes.

Ready or Not

I'm not ready for "happy holidays," for Advent reflections, cheesy movies, or new years. 

Don't get me wrong, I love this time of year. But it doesn't seem to matter how much I look forward to the season, it sidles in while I'm distracted, overwhelmed, or, you know, still in bed with the covers pulled over my head.

     Wait, what's that noise? Oh, it's just the holidays breaking in through the living room window.

     Eeeeek!

Maybe some of you like the way it sneaks up on you. You're in the grocery store and jingle bells starts playing overhead. You feel a little more cheerful as you drop canned goods in your cart and weave in and out of the egregious number of people standing oblivious in the middle of the aisles.

     DEAR HEAVENS, PEOPLE, PLEASE STOP STANDING IN THE MIDDLE OF THE AISLES.

     *ahem*

But maybe, like me, you feel like Advent is a houseguest who always arrives a day earlier than expected. You haven't made the bed yet, haven't vacuumed, haven't fixed the toilet or finished the laundry or built the back deck or really done any of the things with your life that you wanted to do or thought you would do or planned to do. 

Maybe, like me, if you really got right down to it, you feel a little lost, whiplashed even, like you've been muddling around in - if not the dark, well, the half-light of perpetual dusk, anyway.  

Well, we've got good company.

The people walking in darkness have seen a great light;

on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned.

Isaiah 9:3, Matthew 4:16

The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.

Isaiah 42:16

And, of course, that's the whole point of Advent, isn't it? Christ came for the lost, the lonely, the overwhelmed ... the underwhelmed. He came for the isolated, the addicted, the abandoned, the oppressed -- ALL people walking in darkness. And he comes for us still. Light and love break in on us where we are, in the midst of our stumbling, our grief, our not-knowing, our doubts and fears and longings unfulfilled, our desire for hope and meaning and something more. 

So, kudos to those who are on top of things, who aren't lost or weary or disoriented. I rejoice with the ones who already have their Christmas decorations out, who are listening to holiday music and baking, those who made it to church this morning, those who were ready and more than ready for the promise the season offers. Seriously, we probably all want to be you. And the good news is that the light is coming for us all, independent of us and our efforts and our preparedness, regardless. 

Ready or not.