She called to express her sadness over something she realized. Namely, views do not measure something meaningful about a piece of writing.

That is: A writer can write the story richly and well. She can interview and quote the right sources. She can address the matter thoroughly and accurately, concisely explaining the complex points that are key, conveying the sources’ perspectives and voices, subtracting unneeded excess while preserving an engaging style. But none of this value is considered within the principal measure of popularity used to score atomized digital content.

Because it is the title alone, or perhaps the title plus a thumbnail image, that determines the number of views.

This is obvious, and at the same time it is easy to forget when considering tallies of views. The reader can’t read until visiting the piece. Therefore, the reader is in no position to determine the worth of the piece until after the click, until after the view has already been scored. The choice to click is made entirely or almost entirely on the promise of the title. Indeed, since search returns and aggregation pages present the title as a link, the view was likely registered by the reader clicking on the title directly.

Clicks connote something, but they cannot connote quality.

What are writers to make of this?

The Content Score

To begin, I could tell my daughter this much: You have figured out something many people who lead content creation teams lose sight of routinely. View counts are headline contests, and not anything like the measures of worth by which we regard good writing.

Some might say: The piece could get views because it is good—so good that people pass it along and recommend it.

Fair. This is to be hoped for. But a high view count does not indicate this is what happened, and a low view count does not indicate the piece lacks the worth for this kind of sharing.

Alternately, some might point to different metrics than views that do evaluate quality. Time on page, for example—if the reader spent a longer time on the page, says the argument, then he must have valued the piece.

But even this measure is an inference rather than a determinant. Other factors could keep a page open. The point I am offering here extends more broadly than view counts: There is no digital, numerical score that can give us anything like a sense of the extent to which real human beings are really affected by another human’s real work of writing.

My theory is the day we started calling it “content” is the day we began trying to commoditize the work of writers into something other than writing.

Yet the trouble with that theory is the implication of a better time, the implication that writing had greater respect in the past. Did it? Back when print publications were thick, they found the most economical ways they could to fill the pages they needed to fill. This was commoditization of “content” in the pre-Internet time. There were writers then who developed their voice and craft filling these pages, doing the hard work of being honest and being a writer even as they also did the work of providing the commodity.

The sense of sadness over the paltry meaning of view counts is unique to the writer of the digital age. And at the same time, it is also just a new version of something inherent to the weight of being a writer.

Write the Headline

So I told my journalist daughter something like this: You can move people, and you should exercise this power even as you also use it with restraint and care. You can inform people, and you should aim to do this, aim to be of service and value in this way. You can get it right, which is more difficult than anyone unconcerned about writing understands.

You can persuade people and get them to understand or just get them to pause and see. Therefore, write the article.

Write it like it’s important, because it is important. Write it with a respect for accuracy that cares about untidy facts, and with a respect for dignity that cares about even the timid voices.

Write it and write it that way.

And then, because this is the twenty-first century, write the clicky headline.

That is, make the title a subject-verb statement that summarizes the story in a brash way, with an edgy or clever element if you can find it, to a limit of about 60 characters including spaces.

Do this because there is no successful writer ever who was not a person of her time, going where the eyes of the readers are looking.

There is nothing wrong with views. We need views. The piece will not be read unless it is viewed. While viewership does not measure something meaningful about the piece, viewership itself is a meaningful prerequisite to the piece conveying its meaning.

So, aim for views. Hope for views. And at the same time, do not make the view count itself the goal, because the work that aims for this goal is not the craft at its best.

Be a writer and carry this tension, this weight. Write something worth reading to every eye that views it.

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Photo: “The Reading Room” by Susan Jane Golding

That this post does not have a clicky headline is a fact not lost on me. Here are other posts with one-word titles.

“All the crowds that had gathered for this spectacle, when they saw what had taken place, went home, striking their chests. But all who knew him, including the women who had followed him from Galilee, stood at a distance, watching these things.” —Luke 23:48-49

Try to comprehend the horror and the desolation of the Crucifixion of the Son of God as it was experienced by disciples in the midst of the event.

I am not sure we can. Our world and our history have been so transformed by the Resurrection, I am not sure we can imagine the experience of those who had no idea the Resurrection was coming and no possible conception of what it would mean.

They had no idea. Jesus had foretold his coming death and coming rise from death. But we know this from gospel texts written after the Resurrection. The gospels make clear that the disciples did not understand Jesus’ foretelling at the time he told them what was ahead (Mark 9:31-32).

Immediately following the Crucifixion, immediately following Jesus’ death, the only choice the disciples would have had for their own processing or acceptance of the event would have been to take the failure onto themselves. Blame themselves. How could we have been so wrong? He was not the Messiah; he was not God. They took him even though he was innocent. They took him and killed him, and his body hung there until they pulled it down.

They had to fault themselves. They had to discredit their previous hope, their hope that the One now slain had been God drawing near. If he was God, then God was dead, and that cannot be. They had to lose their hope, be wrong, or else they would have to face losing God.

Hopelessness was preferable to Godlessness.

They could not know, of course, what was coming.

Compare this to the failure, loss, hurt, collapse, or heartbreak of which you might be in the midst. Within suffering, there is a feel of desolation. A temptation to hopelessness.

What follows is not an end or answer to suffering, but a point we have been given to know.

On the day of the horror of the execution of God, hope would yet be vindicated.

On even that very darkest day, God was ready with the new day that lay ahead.

Readers in the United States of America live in a nation founded on the assumption it can be. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” says the opening of the Declaration of Independence. A list of self-evident truths follows. Here is a longer quote from the Declaration:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

“Self-evident” means apparent and clear to all, without the matter needing to be proven. A self-evident truth is a foundational axiom of the world as we know it to be—as strong as a girder even if, like a girder, it is hidden from view beneath the rooms and environs built upon it.

If there is no self-evident truth, then this means the only thing evident is evidence. Truth, fact, knowledge—all of this is derived from what we can argue and defend by piecing bits of evidence together.

You might be able to see the problems on each side:

If truth can be self-evident, then this provides cover for self-serving conjectures. A regime, culture, or movement might falsely say: It is self-evident that men know better than women. Or: It is self-evident that certain people are given to be kings and queens and ought to rule other people.

On the other hand, if there is no self-evident truth, then all assertions are in play. To qualify as credible, an assertion only needs a story that accepts and connects some of the evidence. This is the world of witch hunts, pseudoscience, and conspiracy theories.

I will resist using the term “common sense” to talk about self-evident truth, because this term is less illuminating than it appears. When the authors of the Declaration of Independence referred to truths as self-evident, they might just as well have called them common sense. (A famous pamphlet circulating at the time had this title.) But then, many in the new nation would have considered many other things common sense as well, including the view that a person can “own” another person. We hold “sense” in “common” for different reasons, and we are all aware that the nation began with this oppression and violation unresolved.

But here I see the case for self-evident truth.

The rights of man, the dignity of human beings, the prerogatives of people—this was the nature of the self-evident truth the Declaration asserted.

It is hard to argue that these self-evident truths are not true. Who would assert that there is no right to life, liberty, and/or the pursuit of happiness? We differ on what it means in practice to live these truths. But who, other than a monster, would say my right to my life is a self-serving fiction, and that another is free to take it away from me? Who other than a tyrant would assert the same about my liberty? Who would assert the same about my pursuit of my happiness, whether or not I am able to catch it?

The new nation founded on an observance of self-evident truths would inevitably have to reckon with its disregard for a self-evident truth.

This very fact of history offers—I don’t want to say “evidence”—but rather vindication of self-evident truth.

How then can we see self-evident truth, the real truth, and avoid self-serving conjecture?

In the Declaration of Independence, one figure is present at the origin of the listing of self-evident truths. He flies in and out of the text so fast, you might not give him much thought ahead of the long list of grievances of which the Declaration more fully consists. But look again at the quote from the Declaration I set apart above. In this quote, the Creator makes a cameo. Or, more truly, the Creator is seen at the beginning of the argument.

And there is most definitely an argument within these lines. The self-evident truths are not disconnected nor disembodied. This is the essential point. Even in the self-evident truths, there is a line of reasoning. That line begins with, can only begin with, the one truth which, if it is true, can only be perceived via its own self-evidence: the existence of the Creator.

Here is the argument from that passage of the Declaration quoted above. Here is its line of reasoning:

1. The Creator created people.

2. He made them because he values them.

3. Their value can be seen in their lives, their freedom, and their ability to seek and experience something of worth in this world.

4. These things are all inherent to how the Creator made people. They are rights he made and entitled people to possess. The rights are unalienable. If the Creator endowed these rights as part of what makes human beings so valuable, then it is offensive for man—it is wrong; it is evil—to take these rights away.

Seen in this light, we glimpse a distinction. It is this: All truth is self-evident.

For it to be truth, it must be true in this way, via self-evidence. This point itself is a self-evident truth.

Facts are something different. They are important, but different. Facts can be found, and facts can be defended as accurate, by deducing and arguing from evidence. And credible hypotheses and theories can be constructed from facts.

But truth—in the sense of an unyielding axiom through the world, an axis upholding it, a girder—such a thing can only be bigger than the world it helps to buttress. Thus, truth can only be in evidence through the capacity and divinity we have in being able to see beyond the world.

Evidence can mount. Evidence can pile up until the theory explaining it becomes unquestionable, treated as fact, indistinguishable from fact. But then, truth. We do not get to truth through evidence, no matter how high it mounts. Rather, truth gives meaning to the evidence. What the Creator has made self-evident brings us to what we recognize and see.

Can truth be self-evident? Yes, but even more, it must be this. Truth is superstructure. It anchors on a foundation outside of evidence’s reach. The origin of all truth, all self-evident truth, is found in the one true thing.

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Photo: detail from the Declaration of Independence. Public domain.

All of this is throat-clearing in prelude to say: There are simple, foundational, daily aspects of the Catholic understanding and practice of faith that Protestants could have, but have largely lost, to their detriment. There are more examples of what I mean than the three I am about to list. But each of the following items is a simple part of the wealth of practicing Catholics that Protestants are poorer, it seems to me, for having let go of.

Here they are:

1. The Sign of the Cross

In making the sign of the cross, a Christian gently traces with fingertips the way a cross’s shape is embedded within the very shape of his or her body. It is a way of matching our mind’s appeal to God with a physical appeal from our very bodies, confessing with our bodies that we belong to God, and are made by God with the very deepest and most profound sign of God’s love written into our form. These bodies are marked by the grace of God, and with the movement of a hand we can touch and trace grace’s mark.

And with the sign of the cross, the Christian also affirms the Trinity. We note as we make the sign God’s three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, followed by the only fitting response the human being can give: Amen.

This affirmation itself is revealing. Within the broad theological territory Catholics and Protestants hold in common, belief in the Trinity is at or near the core. There is no affirmation of the Trinity a Catholic Christian might give to which a Protestant Christian would not also give assent. I point this out to say: There is no reason why a Protestant might not also practice the sign of the cross.

The sign dates back far before any notion of a Christian parting between Protestant and Catholic. Something like the sign of the cross was common as far back in time as the 200s, and the sign of the cross as we understand it today seems to have appeared in the 400s, more than 1,000 years before Protestant churches’ beginnings. Christians all could reasonably accept the sign of the cross as a part of our heritage.

The distinction I am drawing here has exceptions. Some Protestant denominations do accept the sign of the cross. But even many of these do not use the sign regularly or lead members in doing so. It is Catholicism that has kept hold of the sign through routine practice, to the point the sign feels almost entirely as though it belongs to this group. I make this sign, I pray with my body in this way, and to do so is to have the feel of borrowing something from a people who, fortunately, I am confident would gladly welcome seeing its practice more widely used.

2. Sainthood

All Christians speak of “saints,” but not necessarily in the same way. The Bible’s use makes clear by implication that all of us who believe are saints (Acts 9:13, among many other examples) and the Catechism of the Catholic Church recognizes this sense of the word as well (CCC paragraph 1475, for example). But the Catholic Church also employs the other definition of “saint,” the one I believe most of us, Catholic or otherwise, tend to feel when we hear this word. That is, “saint” as an exemplar of holiness, saint as a man or woman low enough in his or her submission before God that she or he has now been lifted high in loving authority across God’s kingdom.

We Protestants are poorer for not holding to this aspirational sense of the word “saint,” this sense of a state of holiness few of us earthly saints know today, but that we can attain through humble submission to the Lord working in us that humans before us have shown. Because of the aspirational meaning of the word “saint,” Catholic philosophy professor Peter Kreeft (in this book) is able to express the human purpose and mission this plainly: “The meaning of life is to be a saint.”

Perhaps we Protestants believe we cannot mention saints, or ascribe to the second definition of saint, because this then inevitably leads to the questions of what the eternal saints do today and how we should respond to them—do we pray to them? Do their relics have power? And so on. Maybe.

What I find myself missing in this, in not thinking of the exemplary saints, is the very sense of an example. There is a sort of loneliness in not seeing or looking to such saints. I am going somewhere with this faith, or I ought to be. There is a way ahead, a way of the Spirit. And to be sure, the Spirit is with me in every step. The way is hard, and I get waylaid and confused, and yet, importantly, other human beings have gone this way. It is the direction of joy and purpose, along with pain, and it is not abstract—the way is real, with human saints ahead of us to light the path.

3. Belonging

This third item in the treasure chest of Catholic wealth is the gift it gives even to those who reject or refuse other riches of the faith. To one baptized and confirmed as Catholic, the statement, “I am Catholic,” remains true and valid as an expression of identity even if no practice or belief of the faith holds any current sway. Human beings want this even when they scoff at it. They want to belong, and Catholicism offers sufficient strength and definiteness to give people this belonging. To the extent that, if one ever turns back toward this faith, they know what the faith is that has never turned away from them, that has held them all along.

The statement, “I am Protestant,” certainly cannot offer that same belonging. “Protestant” is an umbrella category covering denominations and independent churches. In the past, I get the sense that a denominational affinity might have offered something like this belonging. “I am Methodist” might once have told people something about the speaker and told the speaker something about himself in a way the statement does not seem to today. I do not know; so much has changed about American Christian practice that the feel of, say, mid-twentieth-century Christianity, which was before my time, is hard to piece together clearly.

It is ok—this wealth is not as lost as it seems. My hope, and indeed my confident belief, is that “Christian” still does, and always will, offer something like this same belonging. Not with the majesty, definiteness, structure, and form that belonging to the Catholic Church suggests. But for the one who once had easy contact with the Christian faith, even long ago, even as a child, the sense of possessing it and having a claim to it remain, such that “I am a Christian” is the statement of belonging this person might yet say, with full confidence in the truth and power of the declaration.

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Photo: Saint Peter's Church (Mansfield, Ohio) - nave, view from the loft in 2017 by Nheyob, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

And at some point last year, I began adding something new to this document: notes of gratitude when the Lord gave an experience that felt unequivocally like a gift.

So. This document now captures the better part of a year’s worth of Pleases and Thank Yous.

A few observations from this:

1. Gifts are ample.

I have no rules for how often I must find or note a gift to appreciate—only when I feel moved to do so. Looking back, I discover I am moved in this way often.

For so long, I somewhat superstitiously resisted recording joys in my personal journals. My fear was that each pleasure would reveal a dark side I would rue—some cost or consequence yet to come I was too naïve to foresee—or that the recording of a joy would darken its memory in my mind.

I discovered something like the opposite. The past year or so has been rich, marked by large joyous experiences and seemingly small experiences that brought large joy regardless.

Was the year or so that came before that one, in which my joys went unrecorded, just as rich? I do not know. Will the year ahead be just as rich in its own way? Stay tuned.

2. My appeals in prayer range from too small to remember to too big to understand.

My prayers during past year have involved situations that must have seemed perilous or desperate at the time, though now that the time has passed, I struggle to remember what the concern was about.

My prayers during the past year have also involved situations so big, all I know is my feeling within them. My prayers turn vague because I do not fully understand the scope or nature of the problem, and therefore do not even know precisely what intervention I am praying for. (The consolation: Romans 8:26-27. Hear the prayer I do not know to pray.)

3. God is not exasperated by my need.

So many of my Pleases in the past year have come to Thank Yous. The Lord has given what I prayed for. Fears, in various cases, have been answered or put to rest. My temptation in this is to stop, as though I have credits with God, as though I know what my credit limit is, as though I know the threshold of presumptuousness past which it is impolite to ask the Creator for more.

How curious this is. The experience of a hoped-for joy brings with it the temptation—even the inward argument—to retreat from the very source of joy.

I can fairly readily develop a conclusive argument that God is not exasperated by my asking. An infinite God would not reach a limit to his patience. The miracles he let us see during the time of the gospel accounts (such as water into wine, and feeding the thousands) portray abundance. He asks us to ask (Matthew 7:7). He asks us to come to him like children (Matthew 18:3). Scarcity, or the expectation of scarcity, is the hang-up of grownups.

Indeed, the unasked-for gifts I recorded are far more numerous in my document than the Thank Yous for gifts sought. The Lord has more to give than I am asking.

It is difficult to see the right conclusion in this. I have loss ahead of me in some fashion; we all do. Trouble will come. That God litters the path with gifts is not the principle to see or the expectation to draw.

But there is something more good in the life he makes than what I am apt to see or find in the life I make myself. I darken the way with my austere and throttled hope, shaded by fear. When I simply try to look at what comes, honestly, and take note of it, I am heartened to observe how often I find some surprising reason to give thanks.

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Photo: “Thank you card” by -l.i.l.l.i.a.n-

See other posts with one-word titles.

To grow older is to be in this predicament more and more. The years offer a view to a longer arc of human endeavor, hope, and folly. Ideas that seem new are ideas that have come before, and seemed just as new at that time. To see more is to see more of the way ahead when something is heading toward ending and failure.

The elders in the Old Testament’s book of Ezra saw this, saw in this way. The book’s story is seemingly one of hope. The Lord “put it into the mind of Cyrus” (Ezra 1:1), the king of Persia, to fund and support the rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem. Descendants of Israelites were called out of exile in Babylon to join the rebuilding. Then there was this detail:

But many of the older priests, Levites, and family leaders, who had seen the first temple, wept loudly when they saw the foundation of this house, but many others shouted joyfully. The people could not distinguish the sound of the joyful shouting from that of the weeping, because the people were shouting so loudly. And the sound was heard far away. —Ezra 3:12-13

The older men and women (one imagines the former but the passage also leaves room for the latter) were not just softly sobbing. They were crying. And these were not tears of joy; the passage makes clear the joy was a different and parallel cry. These people cried with anguish so loud that the shouts of joy were rivalled.

What were the elders crying about?

I do not know if I am as old as the average age of this group of priests, Levites, and leaders. Yet I am sufficiently old that I think I can see the answer to this question more plainly than I once might have. Plus, our knowledge of history (the temple falls in 70 AD) makes the answer plainer still. Why were these people crying? Because just such an effort had failed before. The temple was lost before. It was destroyed. And this new effort was no purer, no better. This whole immense, hopeful, expensive effort, just getting started, was going to be dashed upon the rocks of devastating loss. It was all going to happen again.

“Unless the Lord builds a house, its builders labor over it in vain,” says Psalm 127. I think the elders were crying out of the spirit of this Psalm. The text of the book of Ezra takes care to credit the Lord as the source of Cyrus’s idea, but all we see from that point on is the will and machinations of Cyrus—decrees, commands, money, effort. Where was the Lord? We don’t see or hear from the Lord any further in the text of Ezra. The rebuilding is a work of Cyrus. (And then, of King Darius who follows him.)

Where is the Lord?

A sense of the futility of the project settles over Ezra, the priest leading the rebuilding, toward the end of the book bearing his name. As the exiles gather in Jerusalem by the thousands, Ezra comes to understand they are so intermixed with pagan peoples in their marriages, families, habits, and ways that even the very sense of there being a people of God seems to have dissolved into failure. God chose and called out a people, and even what God did seems to have not lasted or held.

Writing part of the book in the first person, Ezra gives this account:

After these things had been done, the officials approached me and said, “The people of Israel and the priests and the Levites have not separated themselves from the peoples of the lands with their abominations, from the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Jebusites, the Ammonites, the Moabites, the Egyptians, and the Amorites…. And in this faithlessness the hand of the leaders and officials has been foremost.” As soon as I heard this, I tore my garment and my cloak and pulled hair from my head and beard and sat down devastated. —Ezra 9:1-3

Where was the Lord? Where even were the Lord’s people?

Here again, an old man crying.

We are on the other side now. We know much about these questions that Ezra could not know. It turns out even older people, with their perspective and view, are limited in the extent of what they can imagine and foresee. And it turns out that—greatest surprise of all—there is a fuller, final, more comprehensive way to sanctification and life. Futility itself is futile. Hope is vindicated after all.

About 500 years after Ezra is when Christ lived, died, and lived. History pressed on: The temple begun under Ezra had only decades left until the Roman siege. But the bigger questions were resolved.

Such as: Where was the Lord? Answer: He had been at work all along. He was preparing to build a temple not of stone, but of people (Mark 13:2, Acts 17:24, Ephesians 3:17).

And: Where are the Lord’s people? Answer: among all nations. The blending of tribes and their ways no longer matters. A temple of people, not of stone.

There is no solution to any of the world’s fundamental problems, no answer to the loss that is coming, except for one solution, one answer, and it is this: that the very Creator would die for the world, would die to make it new.

How far beyond fortunate are we to know something Ezra and the elders did not know. This is the story we get to see: not rebuilding the temple, but rebuilding all creation.

The relief is worthy of weeping in the rare moments we can perceive something like its depth. We cry with gratitude that God sustains the world. We cry, because we know we cannot do it.

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Photo: “Shut out the world” by Neil Moralee

1. Swirl Cookies

It was Christmas not that long ago. My two daughters were baking cookies. They make sugar cookies and gingerbread cookies, each shaped using cookie cutters that come out once per year, each decorated with frosting and candies. And then, of course, there is some leftover dough. With this remaining dough, in the absence of anything better to do, they smash each of the two types of dough into one last big pancake, place one flat cake on top of the other, roll the two dough cakes together into one cylinder, and then they slice the cylinder into discs that make an additional batch of cookies.

And everyone loves them! They have come to be called swirl cookies. They are visually interesting — two types of cookie coiled together. They taste interesting for the same reason, the interlocking flavors. These cookies could only come about this way, as an after-project following the “main” cookies. Otherwise, why would anyone set out to make two different and separate types of dough, only to smash them together into one? Yet the swirl cookies are the unforeseen payoff of the cookie-making endeavor, to the point that now some dough is made solely for swirl cookie production.

Question: How far do you need to get with the thing you think you are doing before you discover the big thing you are actually doing?

2. Muddy and Icy Trails

With one of my daughters, I share hikes. We are working through a list of hikes in our area —whenever we can, we go to another hike on the list. “Whenever we can” gets lean during busy times, so seizing opportunity means we sometimes hike in sub-perfect conditions. Recently, we took to one trail just after rains, only to discover the trail was deeply muddy — each step took forethought to keep from sinking in; the three or so miles we had planned would be a long way. I seriously proposed we consider giving up and not doing the hike that day.

But we kept going. And we discovered a rhythm of striding through and around the muddy stretches, as well as the peace of walking in muddy shoes once you accept you have muddy shoes. After a time, and I do not know at what moment that time came, we were walking briskly and happily without a care about the muddy trail.

With my other daughter, we are not sharing a hike adventure, but we have a more established and consistent weekly appointment to take a long walk. Recently, during a winter day, temperatures had risen then dropped, so that the snow on the walking path had briefly liquefied then turned to ice — each step took forethought to keep from slipping; we would have to proceed more slowly than expected. I seriously proposed we abandon our walk that day.

But we kept going. And we discovered that the way was easy if we just walked slowly enough to avoid the slippery spots. We simply reduced the distance we expected to walk before turning back.

Question: When you resist the way before you, and want to back out, is this because the way is not right, or not a fit with your plan? Maybe. Or is it instead because you fail to account for your capacity to adapt? Or is it that you do not see the extent to which your plan can adjust, and still be good?

3. The Worn-Out Recliners

We have a room in our house called “the quiet room.” It features two matching recliners for quiet pursuits such as reading, thinking, and (alas) doomscrolling. I sit in this room at least once per day, in the recliner nearer to the window. One of my daughters I have been mentioning here was away at college, but returned after graduating, and she has been sitting in the recliner farther from the window.

The chair near the window began to crack and peel in its faux leather surface. The other chair, its twin, did not. I believed the window to be the culprit. Specifically, the sunlight — and I faulted myself. I thought: There is something I should have known about treating these chairs to protect them. I even purchased a bottle of protective treatment when I bought the chairs, which I never used. In this, as in so many other things, I thought, I am a poor homeowner. Other, more responsible people must know how to care for their furniture better, how to protect faux-leather chairs from sunlight.

Then my college daughter came home. The chair out of reach of the sunlight began to wear out, too. It wore even more than the first one!

The time came when we had to replace these chairs. They looked terrible. My wife and I went chair shopping. And the salesperson at the furniture store told us something interesting: The material our chairs were covered in (it was the same furniture store — he could see our chairs in the computer) is not sold anymore. That material had proven to be too prone to wear. My chair near the window had worn first not because of the window, but because I sat in it more. The other chair wore as soon as it started to get more use. A lack of protection against sunlight had nothing to do with what happened. The store confirmed: These chairs were unfortunately known to let down their owners. I had not let down the chairs.

Question: Not everything that fails you, or fails near you, is evidence of your personal failure. What are you ashamed of, or faulting yourself for, that is not actually your fault?

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I am referring to a vexing frustration. Or a fear. Or a sense of having been slighted or belittled by another. A regret over something that can’t be changed. A cringe; a temptation down a fruitless path; a comparison with someone else who seems better off in some way. A worry. I am referring to any of the many lines of thought that haunt our minds and rob us of peace, raising emotion we would rather not feel or urging action we are better off not taking.

This question is one of the most pressing we face for navigating life and tacking toward happiness as best we can. Sadness or suffering sometimes directly comes from events we cannot control or the circumstances we find ourselves in. Yet in many other cases, sadness or suffering is less about events or circumstances, and more about the premises or habits of thought we allow to take over our thinking.

But even here—look what I just did—I am already oversimplifying the matter. At the end of the preceding paragraph, I spoke of what we “allow” thoughts to do, as though we grant permission, as though we could simply withhold the permission and thereby fix the problem. Is that true? Is that a useful premise? As everyone knows who has ever lived with a thinking mind, controlling the mind is not so easy.

Thus, I do not entirely know, nor even mostly know, how to stop thinking a thought I do not want. Direct tactics are self-defeating. Determining that I will do X to stop thinking Y means I must draw very close to thinking Y just to formulate this tactic. Resistance really is futile. But the matter is not hopeless. On some level, our thoughts do provide a setting in which we can engineer different and better thoughts, our mental state in a sense bootstrapping itself. How?

Again, I do not know, not entirely. If there was a meditation that would set my mind right, I would do it. Instead, I am apt to sometimes find myself, say, sleepless with troubledness, or pacing with anger, neither of which does anyone, least of all me, any good. So how do I unthink or not think the thoughts that feed these emotions? At best I see pieces of the answer, so this article will unfortunately go only that far and no farther.

How can a mind avoid or evade an unwelcome or unhelpful thought? What follows are portions or fragments. Here are some clues. All of this is true as far as it goes:

1. Tiredness matters

Reason requires will, and will requires mental effort. Thinking takes energy. The mind and brain get tired. This is at one level obvious, and at another level it is difficult to see.

Indeed, the mind can get deeply tired, just as the body does. But because we each live at the center of the mind through every moment, at the center of the self through every moment, we cannot necessarily gauge the self’s responses and capacities as they change from one moment to the next. Unreason washes over me sometimes simply because my reason is too weak to hold it back, and I need to see this.

In fact, the analogy to physical tiredness breaks down only because this analogy does not go far enough. If my body is too tired to carry a weight, I will feel and experience how hard it is to carry the weight. But recognizing that my reasoning is tired is itself an act of reason. In mental tiredness, I am mentally less inclined to recognize how tired I am.

One of the tactics for not thinking a thought, therefore, is to acknowledge in advance that tiredness is a factor. Carry the simple truth that a rested mind will see more clearly, and will more readily trust in thoughts that are positive and hopeful, than a mind that is weary. Look at this simple truth often and check thoughts against it at different times of day. Many of us are weary much of the time, so this simple truth is apt to see frequent use. When darkness pours in, remember that there is a stronger, better, more capable version of this same self who will have enough light of reason to reveal a clearer view of the same situation. The better self, the clearer mind, is probably just one sleep away.

2. There is a quick chance to turn away

The harmful thoughts that rob us of peace or joy, centering on stresses we would rather not worry over or slights we would do better to ignore, are thoughts other than the inklings that flash across the mind in an instant. The harmful thoughts are the ones we take hold of and turn over and over again. A sense of fascination figures in: This thought gives me fear or hurt or anger—just how deep or sharp is it, how far does it go? Our darker thoughts are thus obsessive to an extent, and the obsessing has a mental momentum that is hard to stop. The easiest time to turn away is in the moment before the turning over and over begins, before the rehearsal and repetition of the line of thinking is fully underway.

It is possible to see this early moment. As intimate as we are with our own minds, none of us knows how thoughts begin, where they come from. I do not seem to be choosing which thoughts come to my mind. Rather, our thoughts appear. They arrive. And when they do, there is a moment of agreeing with a thought, of picking it up. This act is, to an extent, optional. I can disagree rather than agree in this moment. To do so is an act of will, and like any act, there is a decisiveness to it that can feel like a stern push.

“Whoa!” I might say or ought to say, within my mind, when I see the first suggestion of a thought that is no good to pursue. “No way am I picking that up!”

Like a live wire, I leave the thought untouched. Like a downed power line, I can see it sparking and dancing even as I back away and demur to touch.

To get free, I often announce to God my intention to not accept that thought. I ask him to provide something else to think about instead. Escape in this moment, when it happens, can be quick and sure.

Escape is also possible later, if I have picked up the line and its currents now course through me. Letting go is harder here, so a different tactic is needed.

3. Outer action shapes inner experience

The life we know and remember is built through actions, events, and experiences that happen on the outside, not in our minds. Think about this and you might agree it is true.

This is not our intuition. That is, this outwardness about the way life is known and lived does not seem to be the case in any present moment in which we are living. “Within” is where we seem to be living instead. The brush with which we are painting life seems to be applying its strokes inside, in our minds, in our feelings, for better or worse. However, the color that lasts is on the outside.

I see this, for example, in my memories of vacations. A vacation is a special time in which my family and I leave work and school, and travel to briefly enjoy a different place. And on every vacation, I take myself with me, of course—my “self,” with all its anxieties and burdens. I leave work and leave my daily life for vacation, but not really, not completely. Generally, my thoughts are rolling over some problem or incompleteness out of daily life that I might need to face, address, or solve when I return. But here is the thing: When I look back on vacations of previous years, I only remember the things I did, or outwardly experienced. Even if I was concerned or distraught about something, I generally do not remember the feeling of concern or distress, and do not remember whatever the issue was that was the center of those feelings at the time. That is, what I experienced internally does not leave a mark, if the experience was entirely internal. I only remember if I took an external action. That is, if I sent an email or took a call in response to the situation. If I did this, then that action imprints a lasting mark, so that in this case I do remember both the action and the concern around it. But outer action like this is needed, or else the inner turmoil passes without having a lasting effect.

That preceding paragraph was a lot, but here is what I see in this observation about internal versus external experience: I see the grounds upon which to deny an unwelcome thought, or turn it away. I can do this by taking action. That is what I should do: Take action—just not the action the thought is urging. Instead, I can go for a walk, fold laundry, run an errand. What the dark or petty thought “wants,” if it can be said to want something, is to spread its darkness or pettiness by leaving a mark that lasts in the form of some step or action in the outside world. Even a little concession, like repeatedly checking something in response to an irrational concern, is an action that can leave an outer mark in memory, time, and attention spent. But taking a productive action in place of the action the thought wants is a way to deny that thought, and do so to such an extent that memories of the future might not even make a record of the concern.

4. “Whatever” makes a life

With all these types of thoughts we are considering—worries, resentments, regrets—the principal thing they ask of us, the condition they ask us to accept, is that they be taken seriously. The thought is not necessarily or inherently grave, but rather it is weighty because we make it so with the gravity of our consideration. In a separate light, the same thought might be seen as ridiculous.

Against this weight that our thinking gives to a thought, the airiness of a different, positive course of thought might seem to be unrealistic. After all, we imagine, the serious thinker gives serious weight to a serious concern—not able to see how we made the concern serious with the force of our own attention. There needs to be a way to change the framing so that peace and happiness can be the serious matter instead.

“Whatever” is that way. Whatever: the adverb of graceful escape.

In the outer world of action and choice, we tend to fault those who have an attitude of ambivalence, perhaps rightly so. But in the inner world where thoughts grow, loom, and seem to be compelling, “whatever” can be the slipping of the trap, the sidestepping to a more peaceful place. Whatever you seem to be saying to me, Negative Thought, I do not care because hopeful and positive thoughts are better—even if I have to pretend to be hopeful and positive until the seriousness of the shadow of resentment or temptation passes.

I began this essay with the recognition of how difficult it is to release or unthink a negative thought, but doing so is not impossible. Among the distortions these thoughts produce is the feeling that the mind, the inner experience, is crowded and cramped. In fact, it is spacious. If we believe this inner space is touched by the eternal, it is infinite. “Whatever” is a tactic that works, when it does, because it leverages the abundance of open space to allow for better thinking to form. In our minds, in this inner realm, particularly if we know or look for the divine, we need never be lacking for a better and higher place on which to make a stand.

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Photo: “Think” by Brian Siewiorek

That is, if I find myself in conversation with a person authentically open, searching and asking about the way of Christian faith and what this way means in the experience of an individual life, the verse I would like to quote as the light on that moment is Mark 2:14.

Here is that verse:

Then, moving on, Jesus saw Levi the son of Alphaeus sitting at the tax office, and he said to him, “Follow me!” So he got up and followed him. —Mark 2:14

Of course, many, many Christians would choose John 3:16 instead, and may the choice be blessed. John 3:16 is a passage of inspired scripture, and in many ways more stirring than the line I have cited above. But as a starting point for Christian faith, to describe the nature of faith and what it means for faith to dawn in a person’s life, I find John 3:16 an awkward fit.

Plenty feel differently. Evangelists use the verse so widely that it is undoubtedly the best-known verse of the Gospels. Here is that verse:

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. —John 3:16

There is no fault to be found with such an eloquent sentence, attributed to Jesus, appearing in what is arguably the most magnificent work of literature ever produced, the Gospel of John. Indeed, that verse succeeds at summarizing in one sentence a profound mystery—the nature and mission of Jesus Christ.

My only point about that verse within this essay is a narrow one: The verse does not offer a description or prescription for the beginning of Christian faith in a person’s life. The message I believe many evangelists seek to convey might be summarized as: If you believe in God who lived as Jesus Christ, you will live on in heaven, and if you do not, then a different fate awaits after this life ends. John 3:16 does not explicitly say this. That interpretation has to be added.

Mark 2:14 says something more directly applicable to one who might be awakening to faith or near to this. Namely: God is moving in people’s lives, and God calls to individuals who hear the call and follow him.

I called John 3:16 an awkward fit for the purpose at hand. Here is more on that:

The verse’s focus is not heaven, nor individual lives. “God so loved the world,” it says. The sentence describes what God gave, the price he was willing to pay, for the sake of forever redeeming the world, so eternal life might play out here. Heaven is not mentioned. Individual belief is mentioned—but the full context of this verse reveals that belief to be something different than we might imagine. The full context, John chapter 3, is Jesus’ speech to Nicodemus the Pharisee. Within this speech, Jesus tells Nicodemus that seeing the way of God is the result of something like a new birth (3:3), and this comes from the Holy Spirit, which moves where the Spirit will (3:8).

Read the entire exchange, John 3:1-21, and the notion of an individual choice to make, a choice to believe, does not emerge from this text. It does not fit with the reason why Jesus said to Nicodemus, “For God so loved the world….”

Rather, belief in Jesus, or the call into a sense of commitment and belonging to the way Jesus leads, comes by the will and grace of God. It has a way of coming unexpectedly, as it came for Levi during a regular day in the tax office in Mark 2:14.

Can One Verse Summarize the Bible? And What Comes Next After Following?

Can one verse, including either of the verses mentioned, really summarize the gospel? No, it cannot. No verse does this.

There is no elevator speech for sufficiently conveying and explaining Jesus Christ, the incarnate God. This is because the gospel is, to a large extent, the Gospels. It need not be a great deal more than this, but it is also not less. The gospel is conveyed by the New Testament: four biographical works out of the ancient world reporting on the acts and words of Jesus Christ—the Gospels—plus letters from early disciples exploring the meaning of the Lord living among us as a man. Jesus is present in these works and can be known through these works, the Gospels most of all. Therefore, the next step after being called into the way of Jesus Christ is to understand that way, in part by exploring (it is a life-long exploration) the inspired record we have been given about the Son.

Text immediately following Mark 2:14 hints at how to do this. How does one take in and understand the gospel? One method is solitary study like a scribe, but this is not the method many would choose. In the very next verse in Mark, we see a different choice:

While Jesus was reclining at the table in Levi’s house, many tax collectors and sinners were also guests with Jesus and his disciples, because there were many who were following him. —Mark 2:15

“Recline” with guests and disciples of Jesus. How to do this today? A simple answer presents itself: The Bible study group is an opportunity routinely available through Christian churches of many sorts, as well it should be. Any such discussion group need not get every point of theology and interpretation right to be valuable (because which of them can do this?), but rather it simply needs to be devoted to working through and trying to find what the text means, somehow in the presence of a disciple who has come farther with this searching than others gathered for the reclining. One can reasonably expect the Holy Spirit to be present and active in any honest study of the text the Holy Spirit was active in providing.

From here, subsequent verses in the Gospel of Mark reveal themes important for informing the believer’s thinking, ideas that—still today, every bit as much as when the text was written—are difficult for the larger world to understand.

One of those difficult ideas is this: Faith is not for “good” people. Rather, it is for the rest of us. Mark takes this up next.

When the scribes of the Pharisees saw that Jesus was eating with sinners and tax collectors, they asked his disciples, “Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?” When Jesus heard this, he told them, “Those who are well don’t need a doctor, but the sick do need one. I didn’t come to call the righteous, but sinners.” —Mark 2:16-17

Again, faith is not for good people. Faith is a means of healing, renewing, and redeeming lost and broken people. Faith is for sinners.

Also this:

Now John’s disciples and the Pharisees were fasting. People came and asked Jesus, “Why do John’s disciples and the Pharisees’ disciples fast, but your disciples do not fast?” —Mark 2:18

This verse hints at another point so difficult for many to understand: The practice of faith in Christ is not about following rules. Jesus did not bring more religious rules. We expect this and we are conditioned to look for it, but rules are what the world offers. The way of Jesus is about freedom to live.

Faith Comes for Levi

One verse cannot summarize the whole gospel, and a succession of verses by itself does not map the way of Christian faith. But my point is this: A brief moment within the briefest of the four gospels, Mark 2:14, offers a picture of a person newly finding faith in Jesus—notably after Jesus calls to him first. That this moment and this scene are meant to show this is validated by the context and the larger passage that includes the verses of scripture that follow. The lines immediately after Mark 2:14 show the next step for this new believer and the insights contrary to widespread expectation that now become clear.

Levi was ignorant at first. The one Christ calls, the one the Spirit moves, knows little to nothing of the call in that early moment. Levi was sitting in a bureaucratic job, part of the oppressive system of that time and place, when Jesus came to him and called him to follow. Levi did not know the answers at the time of the call, and we have no reason to believe he even knew the questions to ask.

And if this sounds familiar, if you are entangled in a mundane and conflicted life yet somehow feeling God pull or move your heart within that midst, then Mark 2:14 implies you are not alone. This kind of movement or change is what happens. It has happened before. This is the way God calls.

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Photo: “Tax office - County Center” by County of San Mateo

The Creator is who I mean. Because God is greater than creation, including nature, he is (by definition) supernatural.

Yet even here, I know him through natural means. He became natural, became material, lived one human life within history, within time. I know something of God by inference from creation, from nature. But beyond this, and more specifically, I know who God is and what he wants because he revealed these things through a mortal life, his own life lived as a man, as recorded in real documents: letters and gospels we still read today.

And one small part of that revelation is how God, as a man, taught how to pray to God. That is, Jesus Christ taught about the practice of prayer, and about how far prayer goes.

I have no ability or capacity that is miraculous, no supernatural power. Maybe I wish I had it; I am not sure. In the absence of any power beyond my effort and words, I am often helpless. And in the depths of helplessness, I appeal to a loving Creator in the way his mortal incarnation taught human beings to pray.

I am left thinking about my helplessness when I encounter a particular phrase: “thoughts and prayers.” I am left wishing I could express or describe how helpless I am. We know this phrase; it is used in public announcements of sadness or tragedy as a way to offer a response when no other response seems available. The phrase implies an equivalence: You have your prayers and I have my thoughts. But there is no equivalence, because in this presentation, in this phrase, the thoughts are greater than the prayers.

The thoughts are greater. Because if one among us has the power to change things for the better through thinking a thought, has the power to positively address sadness or tragedy through mental focus alone, then that person does indeed possess what would seem to be a supernatural ability. This power, this tool, is more clearly and directly useful as a response to the tragic situation than the helplessness I must accept before surrendering to the Creator in prayer.

Does Prayer Work?

The assumption underlying “thoughts and prayers” is actually more subtle than the equivalence suggested above. I do not think that most people offering or receiving the phrase do directly and concretely experience that their thoughts have an active supernatural effect. Rather, the phrase is an appreciation that prayer, in some sense, likely does “work.” And if it does work, comes the question, then why does it work? An answer: Perhaps thought that is earnestly directed toward a need results in some kind of helpful signal or vibration we cannot detect. If this is the case, then perhaps other earnestly directed thoughts can produce this same signal or vibration without needing to experience it as prayer.

Here again, it is the full awareness of my helplessness that creates the gulf separating me from joining with this assumption. Does prayer ever work? Here is an answer: It does not work. That is, in the sense suggested—positively improving a situation that is prayed about—the prayer is not what works or does the work. If it did, we would credit the power of the one praying if an outcome was attained. But this is not where the power is. Prayer does not work, does not move or change anything, but rather God does.

This is a distinction that even those who pray struggle with, and struggle to understand. God has given us knowledge of God. God has redeemed his fallen creation and, in a different sense, is in the ongoing process of redeeming it. God has illuminated many souls within the world to join him in this work, to be part of, and to advance, what the Bible refers to (sometimes) as his “kingdom.” Those who see this and believe in this join him in the work of creation and re-creation. They pray. That God responds to prayer is astounding, because God knows his own plan. But that same God is changing those who pray; he is within them and working in them. We pray to move the God who is moving in us.

Prayer thus inevitably transcends to a state beyond the mechanics of cause and effect. The “kingdom” is the point. God’s work and plan are the point. God is at the beginning and the end of all of this, including everything I ask in prayer.

I pray for the wants of my children, for example. A certain concern has been on my mind. I pray repeatedly for it to be addressed.

Does this prayer “work”? Will it work in this situation with my family? Yes. And no. Not in the mechanical sense of I hope for A, and therefore I pray for A, and as a result A happens. Even if A occurs, it will not be directly the effect of my praying for it.

Does prayer work? Yes, in this sense: We are eternal beings. We seek alignment with the eternal, greater unity and completion about this truth of who we are. In this world, we are powerless, and should covet no power here. God lets us see where our still-changing aims and hearts flow within the flourishing of what he is doing, and he lets us see where our souls and aching hearts still need expansion or healing to better accord with what he is doing. He lets us see, by slowly bringing us to see, where the kingdom might find better purchase for its advance through us.

And we think about all of this. God gave us minds. They are being clarified and renewed. We pray, and there is a response of sorts, an interaction with the mystery, and we reflect on this. In helplessness, we pray, and in surrendered contemplation, we consider what we may be quietly learning through the effect of the experience.

Does prayer work? We see what we ask for come about, and so the mind is full of wonder and gratitude and praise. Or we ask and do not see the outcome granted, but we do instead encounter clues to the breadth and depth of the purpose God is working and moving to achieve.

Does prayer work? Always, never, only through God: all three of these at once.

The work of God is at work in us if we can come before him helplessly, and that work moves through both aspects of who we are. That is, it moves through the felt needs of my heart that I ask of him. It moves through my mind’s reflections. God is at work in our thoughts, and in our prayers.

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Photo: “Angel’s Prayer” by _Pek_

Yet frequently I do draft works of writing with a pen in cursive across sheets of paper, and there is a reason, a purpose for writing this way.

The case would not have had to be made in the past, of course. In an earlier time, there was hardly a more practical option. Live long enough, and you get to see formerly unremarkable practices become strange enough to be remarked upon. At the office where I work, I was recently called out two times in quick succession by two different coworkers in different encounters who both noted with surprise (or alarm) that I had produced cursive text. It happened once was when I was seen keyboarding a piece from a draft I had written in longhand, then again when I arrived to a meeting with my own discussion points written on a pad while everyone else was there with open laptops. The reactions led me to examine: Why not surrender completely to keyboard composition? Why resist? My PC and the directories connected to it can receive, store, and organize every list, thought, idea, and document I might ever want to compose. When I set the keyboard aside in favor of writing the analog way, why do I do this?

I find it is not a hard question to answer. Why cursive, why longhand, why analog writing with paper and a pen? The reasons include all the following:

1. The effort producing restraint

The physical work of making cursive by hand slows down my writing, and this is good. The effort of dragging a pen across the paper means I must calculate the value of each sentence I draft. Is this next line worth the physical effort? For me, keyboarding is so much easier than cursive that it is often too easy. Excessive writing, elaboration that does not help the piece, spills upon the screen because the cost is so much less. The work of handwriting, and the calculation of this work, produce concise drafts that serve the reader more efficiently than the drafts I produce by keying.

2. The hum I think I can hear

Writing with pen and paper is quiet. Writing with an electronic device might be similarly quiet in terms of measurable sound, but the same sense of quiet is missing. I know the device is running. I know there is activity happening to keep the device active and ready: current is coursing, electrons are moving. As a result, there is a hum I think I can hear whether I can hear a hum or not. My thinking therefore feels clocked, and taxed, because a device has to remain active all the while I am passive in thought. (A retort: But the lights remain on! When you are writing by hand, current courses through the lights. My answer: True enough. On occasion, I carry the sensitivity to that very conclusion—turning out the lights if I feel it will take a lot of thought to work through a particular passage.)

3. The luxuriousness of less

The feel of minimalism is a joy. Writing offers this, and we who are called to this work should relish this benefit of the call. Writing is an art requiring little, and longhand writing makes the requirement almost nothing: just an implement, just a page. I have learned how fortunate I am for this gift. The one who loves dance can only practice her art with a stage or studio spacious enough for leaping. The one who loves equestrian arts can only practice them with a horse. A person is blessed who loves a craft that is so uncostly.

4. The echo of authors past

The feeling of connection to writers in other centuries can be soulful and close. This pausing over the page, this movement of the pen—they all did the same.

5. An enjoyment of the effect

Cursive is sensual. I feel a loss for the writer with no sense of this pleasure—the glide of ink, the give and acceptance of the pillow of pages beneath the point of the pen. There is a lush physicality to this practice of the craft.

6. The authority over space

Writing on a page offers a dimensional freedom in organizing thought that keyboarding still offers no good way to replicate. As I draft in longhand, any idea needing notation or elaboration can be given this support using any open space on the page. Notes on the page far away from the passage they qualify can be annexed to the affected text by drawing an arrow. A page from a cursive draft might therefore have various arrows and various circles, along with lines of stray text along an axis separate from the rest of the work. And it all makes sense; the annotations and revisions are all intuitively clear at a glance in a way that a set of click-to-open digital annotations is not. The page of cursive composition is, in a way, a canvas for ideation.

7. My life and heritage

Along with all of this, let me not discount the personal fact that this is how I learned to write. Because of the timing of when I entered the world, I was instructed and expected to write by hand. We are to be whom we are to be. This is in part a product of our choices, and to just as great an extent, it is a product of what we were given. We face and correct whatever we were given that is deficient or harmful, but this is not that. Writing by hand is something I was given as part of a time, as part of an age, and I accept the gift.

8. The experience of peace

The peace I find in cursive writing has a practical secondary effect I sometimes seek. In the quiet, contemplative state of writing upon a stack of pages or a pad, other solutions to other problems apart from the writing sometimes present themselves. To be sure, this is partly a benefit of the physicality of the writing, how movement aids thinking. I think it is also the effect of something more. There is a positive flow that comes my mind and its attention being directed to work, and to a means of carrying out that work, that they were seemingly made to do.

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Then Jesus said to his disciples, “If anyone wants to come with me, he must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.” —Matthew 16:24

At least two simple questions arise from this plain-spoken statement by Jesus. One is: What is a cross? The reference is clearly, to some extent, an analogy. For Jesus, the “cross” was a literal cross. It was placed upon him, he was made to carry it, he bore it through the crowd, he went with it to his execution spot, then he suffered and died on it. And others after him who died as martyrs were crucified as well. But for you and me, no one is presenting us with a literal cross.

What is a cross, then, in this statement?

A reasonable answer: It is the analogy that fits. The cross for you or me is the circumstance or affliction that has many of the same attributes as a physical cross.

That is, it is a burden to carry that is also the means of one’s suffering.

More, it is assigned to the bearer. Your cross is the thing you carry that is seemingly yours alone, that separates you from the crowd around you because none of them are carrying the same burden.

Taking the inquiry further, what does it mean to follow?

This is the other simple question arising from Jesus’ statement. Again, the answer must in part be analogy. We do not have Jesus before us as a man with physical footsteps, walking ahead to lead the way. In the absence of this, what is the nature of following?

The answer connects to the cross, because Jesus’ statement connects them. His call to follow is to one who has shouldered the cross. The way to follow is therefore to proceed as Jesus did after he took up his (literal) cross.

How did he proceed? Where did he go?

Answer: He went through the suffering. He went through it to the other side.

Of course, there is an alternative to all of this. The alternative is to not take up the cross. That is, to resist it, reject it, perhaps even become angry about it. To demand that I and mine should not be singled out in this way, should not have a burden that is so separate and different from the crowd around us.

Is there any possibility to follow Jesus and be with him in the absence of a cross to bear?

Suffering is not needful, let alone deserved. Many things we want to get better do get better. We experience relief and resolution of pain, problems, and difficult situations routinely in the course of a life full of God’s gifts, and we ought to seek and pray for these things. Happiness cannot be owned, but we can borrow it again and again.

Yet then there is the cross, the burden all our own that we find ourselves called to bear.

It is the nature of this burden that it must be different. It is the nature of the suffering it entails that this is distinct—seemingly less than the suffering of many others, while also a type of suffering of which many are ignorant and completely spared. The particular cross laid upon me, which others do not carry, is therefore not a sign of defect or failing. It is instead inevitably what the way of following must look like.

We are created selves. Created individuals, unique. Each of us is uniquely loved and called as such. The burden, affliction, or problem that is recognizable and equivalent to everyone else’s suffering is, in a sense, not a burden at all. To hold back and insist on not being singled out, including not being singled out in suffering, is to not live an individual brave life, and therefore to not follow—not live the fullness of how we are made and who we are made to be. Saying yes to life means saying yes to individual lives, including one’s own, because this is the form life takes.

The assurance (and reassurance) is found in the plain-spoken statement: Carrying is the way of following. Carrying a cross is how following Jesus goes.

The cross is figurative—yours is different from mine. Each of our burdens is different. It is in the following where we start to converge, heading toward the same destination.

Jesus showed the whole way through. The other side of suffering is the point where the crosses come together, the point where the figurative and physical become one. The other side is the point at which all the talk and all the signs about life after suffering are revealed to refer to life after all—real life, physical life, non-figurative life, rising again.

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Photo: Hieronymus Bosch, “Christ Carrying the Cross” (detail), photographed by Frans Vandewalle

By “dormancy,” in this case, I mean something less like the opposite of activity, and more like the opposite of fecundity. Imagine a field that is barren when it ought to be bountiful with crops (ideas) for the writer to harvest.

But this very picture, this way of seeing the fact of the writer not writing, already frames the predicament a particular way. I could have spoken instead of “writer’s block,” but I did not. Is “block” the right word, as in a barrier that the writer might power through with greater effort or strength? I do not know. Octavia Butler (a writer I love) considered writer’s block to be the right term and suffered from it in her writing. I have used “dormancy” because it leaves me more options for interpreting the nature of not writing, more choices for how I might consider the condition.

So why is the dormant field not producing? Why are the ideas not coming? Meaning: Why am I not experiencing ideas of sufficient import, ideas so full of interest that they inspire me to the work (strange and difficult work) of developing them into paragraphs to share with you?

To turn to a different analogy, why is the muse not speaking?

Following are two ways to understand the dormant creative fields. They offer two ways to view what the writer has or has not done, and therefore two ways to view what I ought to do next.

1. Failure

One view is this: The dormancy is an outcome of failing or failure. I have been poisoning the field, and I need to stop.

To write, I do not need just ideas. I also need optimism. Presumably, the ideas worthy of writing are everywhere; there is plenty of seed to be sown in the field. But the field needs sufficiently rich and healthy soil for the seed to grow. A field might be dormant due to neglect or mistreatment of that soil. The muse might be silent due to similar disregard. My dormancy, my lack of finding inspiration, is because I do not have the fertile soil of optimism, of joy, by which to germinate the ideas that fall to me.

How then to stop poisoning the soil? What is the toxin that has gotten into the soil, the opposite of joy? The first answer might be “sadness,” but this can’t be right. Sadness, which makes the mind lonely so that the muse is the only company, might lead to writing.

The opposite of joy I see as more apt to be the toxin is fear. I have been harboring fear, and my creative soil has soaked up too much of it. Creativity is, among other things, an outflow of courage. A writer cannot write unless she believes she can wield her gifts to fully express her idea, to see it all the way through. But the reserve of courage is finite, and fear—the fear of anything that might be going on—saps the reserve until there is too little left. My own fields might be ailing because of any fear I have allowed to overflow, perhaps the fear that produces busyness (my to-do list is long and I must race harder to obey it) or the fear that produces worry (a great threat is before me and I must rehearse it again and again). To end the dormancy, either I must rest from fear, or—returning to the “block” analogy—I must overcome it or break through.

2. Fallowness

But another view is this: The dormancy is cyclical. It just happens. I need to wait through it for the next season of growth to come.

Rather than a failure or interruption of the process, then, dormancy might be fully part of the process: an idleness necessary to inspiration, as unsatisfying as this might be. I think of a scene in a science fiction novel in which earth is sending a message in long, slow, binary on/off signals like Morse code to an alien civilization living far away at a faster rate of time. (The book I am remembering might be Dragon’s Egg by Robert Forward.) The technician sending the message, who feels like he is doing nothing during the long “off” periods, has to be reminded that each of these off interludes is needed for the message to make sense. Similarly, creativity might require periods of dormancy, whether for the rest and the refilling of energy, of for the sake of a new dawn, a new experience of newness essential for creative discovery.

The image I have suggested of a barren field in fact suggests this explanation. Fields that are farmed are periodically left fallow as part of the farming. The fields are plowed but not seeded, allowing a season for the soil to recover.

Before writing this piece, I cleared my drawer of all the partial or incomplete longhand drafts that I am done with, and I began a new list of the seeds of ideas that might lead to new drafts and therefore posts for this site. In this second way of seeing and understanding my lack of inspiration to write, my role is just to wait and to trust for the inspiration to return.

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Photo: “Fallow Field” by Eric Sonstroem

That is, believers lose something when we begin with the premise that faith in Christ or following Jesus will usefully solve problems or provide answers in a person’s life. Maybe it will. But a set of solutions is not what we have been given.

We have history instead. The core of what believers believe centers on the way God entered history, the way he lived and moved as a human being, and died. We have the written record of this, the documents written by witnesses, and confirmed and carried among communities of other witnesses, about who lived and what happened in first-century Galilee, Judea, and surrounding lands. We have the historic movement that spread out across the world and its cultures, starting from the Mediterranean’s eastern shore.

“Useful” has a different starting point than this—it begins with the self. “Useful” means useful to a particular person, one who is as broken as all of us are. This measure makes the standard of evaluation the utility to that particular soul.

Meanwhile, history just is. If the history is true, then it presents a set of facts to be confronted. The story and the history we have in Jesus are so full of the work of something transcendent that the events of this story stretch to the absurd. Prophecy, virgin birth, miracles, resurrection. Plenty do not want to confront this story as history, and who can blame them? The broken self breaks further against these facts. Faith in Christ means peering deeper and farther into reality, and it is too vast. We find answers bigger than our needs, and we find a helplessness opening onto many responses, one of them sorrow.

Jesus was clear on this. Followers came to him and he warned them away. See his words to the crowd beginning at Luke 14:26, for example. Jesus made clear: If you want a tidy and complete life without loss of what you have today, without cracks in the surface of life opening upon fissures in your soul, then follow something that is easier and safer than this way.

A related point arises from this. The one who looks to Christ does not have as much affinity as we might imagine with the one who is avowedly spiritual. We look for connection here, but it is elusive. The spiritual person lifts up the feelings of the individual human spirit. The Bible describes a different Spirit bringing a different experience.

In fact, the Christian’s nearer affinity is with atheists. The atheist is, or claims to be, determined to see only observable or credible facts. I am, or claim to be, determined to do the same. Among the facts I see are those God has revealed through the record left to us of first-century events and the meaning found in that record. The atheist disqualifies consideration of this much, but beyond this difference, seeking the factual truth is nearer to the matter at hand.

The place where all this leads is both logical and anything but; both useful and also rendering utility useless. If anything can gather, move, and lift the scattered pieces of broken human hearts, then it has to be big. And so we have this truth: the story so big and true and full as to be history as well as faith, one imprinted upon the other. Alongside this, mere usefulness to a single human life is a meager, passing thing, and ultimately not nearly enough.

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Photo: “Mediterranean Sea Area at Night (NASA, International Space Station, 10/15/11)” by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center

Of the two terms, “heaven” is the one that is widely understood, even though we know we cannot visualize the place to which it refers. God’s “kingdom” is the term less well understood, and in need of definition. Yet the very fact that there is ambiguity to both terms (even though it’s a different ambiguity for each) leaves room to conflate them. We hear “kingdom of God” or “kingdom of heaven,” and we might imagine heaven itself. But one thing the words of Jesus do make clear is that these two realms are different. The terms have two distinct meanings, different from one another.

This is perhaps most clear in a single sentence of the Lord’s Prayer, the prayer Jesus taught to his disciples. One line of that prayer says:

Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. —Matthew 6:10

God’s kingdom, earth, and heaven are all present in this one sentence. And the logic of this sentence makes clear that Jesus must have regarded them as three different things.

Different how? We can see an answer in this sentence as well. Earth and heaven each appears in this line as a place. One can locate there. One is “on” earth, or one is “in” heaven, according to the prayer.

Meanwhile, the kingdom of God comes. It advances, apparently. It moves, and the directionality of this movement is an approach or an advance from the perspective of one praying on earth. In the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus asks his disciples to ask God to advance his kingdom, the realm he rules, across more and more of the earth.

Many have the Lord’s Prayer committed to memory. Many churchgoers speak aloud a version of the prayer weekly. The fact that the prayer has this information content does not necessarily occur to us. Yet the detail in this one sentence about the nature of the “kingdom” is valuable, because Jesus goes on to reveal how God is answering the appeal from this line of the prayer.

Peter Is Changed

The exchange in which Jesus reveals the prayer’s answer happens much later in the same gospel. In a scene in Matthew chapter 16, Simon Peter, the apostle who must have been one of those to whom Jesus taught his prayer, is suddenly discovered to have been changed. That is, changed in what he sees and understands. Simon so clearly recognizes something about the kingdom—namely, the nature of the one at the center of it—that he shines out as the first in Jesus’ ministry to become a subject or citizen of that kingdom.

The kingdom thus advances by adding him. He transforms into an agent of further advance.

(A giant asterisk before we proceed further: The very first person in the New Testament to recognize the coming kingdom and become an agent of its advance would seem to be Mary. Peter is simply the first in Jesus’ ministry.)

The passage in which Simon Peter has this insight is, like the Lord’s Prayer, also among the better known and often-cited passages of the gospels. I want to quote that passage in full, then examine details. Here is the entire passage:

When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?”

And they said, “Some say John the Baptist; others, Elijah; still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”

“But you,” he asked them, “who do you say that I am?”

Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”

And Jesus responded, “Simon son of Jonah, you are blessed because flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but my father in heaven. And I also say to you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the forces of Hades will not overpower it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth is already bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth is already loosed in heaven.” —Matthew 16:13-19

In short, Simon Peter awakened to the crazy, impossible, meta-logical, once-in-a-universe fact that God was living as a man, and Jesus was that man.

As Jesus made clear, there is no earthly way for Peter to have come to recognize this. There is no way for deductive logic based on perceivable evidence to sum to this conclusion, or bridge the distance to this fact. God gave Peter what Peter knew about God. As Jesus said, “Simon … you are blessed because flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but my father in heaven.”

You are blessed, Jesus said. Peter’s belief was the identifying mark of one who is in the kingdom. The apostle Paul would echo this means of identification in writing to come later. How does one know he or she is in the kingdom? Paul answered: Through belief, through the discovery of a belief that has become plainly apparent, a belief in something others ignore or discount—that Jesus rules creation, and as a man he rose from the dead (Romans 10:9).

Peter was blessed: He was part of the advancing kingdom, seemingly its first new subject among the disciples traveling with Jesus, and this was enough to kickstart the kingdom and get its movement underway.

Jesus said, “On this rock I will build my church.” (Peter is a nickname translating to stone or rock.) Millions of stones would follow upon this first one, building a stone fortification, the moving and growing stone fortification that is the means of the kingdom’s advance. Jesus would later personally and bodily demonstrate the point that the forces of Hades will not overpower it. “Hades,” distinct from hell, is a specific term referring to the realm of death. (The discussion of Matthew 11:23 in this essay has more.) Death, in other words, will not prevail. Death destroys everything on earth, but it will not win against this advancing kingdom—the kingdom that, again, at this point in the history conveyed by Matthew’s gospel, has but a single new citizen.

The Work of the Keyholder

And significantly, that new citizen is not in heaven. We are back to the differences between these realms. Simon Peter is in the kingdom of God, but he is on earth. He is not done on earth—he has work to do. This work, the work of the kingdom of God, brings heaven and earth together, according to the Lord’s Prayer. Here the Lord is now answering the prayer by working through the pray-er. The man who can see the kingdom now also will see how the work of the kingdom should proceed.

The prayer says, “your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Here now is the fulfillment: Jesus says to Simon Peter, “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth is already bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth is already loosed in heaven.”

The way things are in heaven, where God absolutely rules and things are ordered the right way—you will begin to see this arrangement, and you will begin to order things in that same way on earth, too.

Peter will get his specific assignment later. It comes in Matthew 28:19 and John 21:17. But ahead of that, he gets this initial picture of how the work will proceed. Peter has been changed: Flesh and blood, his mortal perception and thinking, could not have brought him to the insight he now has. That insight will continue to serve him in the way he now goes, the work he now performs, the work of advancing the kingdom.

And the worker has these keys, says Jesus, the keys of the kingdom of heaven. A metaphorical key ring is at Peter’s belt, jingling as he proceeds.

As we have seen, the kingdom of heaven and heaven itself are separate. So that means these keys given to Peter are specifically not keys to heaven. They are keys to another divinely ordered realm.

And this realm, the kingdom of heaven, the kingdom of God, is advancing. “Your kingdom come.”

Peter has keys to it. Presumably others after him have similar keys. What do the keys do? Not unlock a stationary place far away, because our prayer to God, taught by Jesus, makes clear that the kingdom is not stationary; it is coming.

The kingdom is coming and the keys unlock it. The church has been given these keys, and they are keys to letting free the kingdom for more of its advance across the world.

These gates that the metaphoric keys to the kingdom open, these keys that release something against which Hades cannot stand: There is something fundamental about the working of these gates that we can piece together from the clues we have been given here, something basic yet profound.

The simple fact is this: It must be that these gates Peter was given the first capacity to unlock do not open in upon a distant, unearthly place. It must instead be the case that the gates of the kingdom of heaven open outward—out upon the world.

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Photo: “CAUTION gate opens outwards” by Gordon Joly

When we talk about artificial intelligence and writing, and how far AI can go to take over the work of writers, this is what we are talking about: the meaning that is conveyed through writing, and where this meaning comes from.

The capabilities of AI have moved fast and are still moving. The question of whether AI might replace writers (among others who work with information or knowledge) is in the air. And rightfully so—AI can certainly write. But whether AI can stand in the place of the writer is a different matter. Addressing this question entails examining what we expect the writer to do.

In the piece to follow, I will go on a journey to explore this question (scroll down and you’ll see this is a longish post). But “meaning” is the one word capturing the heart of where I am headed. A piece of writing must mean something for the reader. It must deliver meaning; it fails if this is not so. Further, that meaning affects the reader—this much follows as well. Aims of writing vary, and what we mean by “meaning” varies according to the intent of the piece. But any given piece of writing offers the chance that the reader might be brought to a new understanding, a new appreciation, or a new perspective or opinion on the topic at hand by means of what the writer has written. Each of these changes in the reader is a response to the piece’s meaning. Indeed, the reader likely undertook to read the piece in the hope of this very experience.

So here is the question: Does this outcome—that meaning is conveyed such that the reader is affected by this meaning—come out of the writing by itself?

That is, does meaning “emerge” out of sufficient complexity and consistency of the composition? Or is there another explanation: Does the meaning instead have a separate origin apart from the writing?

In other words, is meaning created through writing, or is it found?

Here comes the journey. We start with what AI can do, which leads quickly to a consideration of what we have long waited for it to do.

AI Can Write

There is little disputing that AI write. As anyone knows who has played with the AI platform ChatGPT, this tool produces credible composition in response to user prompts and does so almost instantaneously. What now seems apparent is that, if there is any formula to a category of writing, no matter how subtle that formula is, AI can find and follow the formula. The rules of grammar and the expectations of sentence rhythm and paragraph structure are followed. Even more, the formal and informal rules of different styles and formats of writing are followed as well, such that ChatGPT can write in the form of haiku, essay, a technical paper, a campaign speech, and more. That the writing it generates is “credible” does not mean the composition is accurate or useful to the spirit of the initial prompt, but even success along these measures will improve.

That is what AI can do, and that is the track along which it will continue to advance. The matter we are considering explores what that track might connect to, and where it can lead. Is there a straight line from algorithmic composition based on modeling from extant resources (what ChatGPT is doing) to the discovery and articulation of new insights or new frameworks for understanding?

You might have caught that the word “discovery” appears in that sentence. I might have used a synonym, but beyond that, there is no other way to describe this aspect of what we hope for a writer to do. The act of discovery implies a discoverer. To see this, to pose the question in this way, reveals how the question of where meaning comes from lands close to a broader and headier question: Where does consciousness of the seeker come from?

And this latter question is the one science fiction writers and technology futurists have wrestled with in their own earlier imaginings of AI.

Self-Aware AI and the Singularity

“Artificial intelligence” used to have a different meaning. This is worth recognizing. In the way science fiction and futurist writers have employed the term until very recently, “artificial intelligence” connoted computer intelligence approaching sentience or self-awareness. Think HAL9000, Lt. Commander Data, Skynet—famous fictional examples. This is not how we think about “artificial intelligence” today, which refers to a computation-driven tool widely recognized to be exactly that. The same phrase thus describes two different things. The reason this is worth recognizing is because we need to examine whether these two things have any connection. Sentience is something almost universally regarded as fundamentally human and personal: a defining capability of a human person. Can a machine also attain sentience? How would it do so? The question of whether and how a computer could obtain such consciousness begs the question of how we ourselves obtain it. Does our human consciousness “emerge,” naturally and automatically, from a brain that is sufficiently complex in its information processing? Or does human consciousness have an origin separate from this complexity?

The “singularity” is a related concept I will mention here. The term, used by futurist writers of the last decade or two, is valuable to raise because it bridges the AI of science fiction with what we refer to as AI today. The “singularity” refers to the idea or expectation that, at some point in the future, machine intelligence will come to exceed human intelligence in both complexity and speed to such an extent that it will be able to improve its own complexity and speed in ways we humans do not understand. To reach and cross such a threshold would be irreversible—it would truly be a historic singularity, or so the thinking goes—because beyond that point, human beings would never again be able to outwit or even comprehend the machine intelligence continuing to evolve farther and farther ahead of it.

The problem, the missing piece with that idea, is this: The notion of the singularity presumes a change in nature that the idea itself never explains. And this is too big a gap to ignore.

In the singularity, self-guiding intelligence appears. Mind is presumed to emerge from a mechanism.

Yet there is no apparent means or method by which this transformation occurs.

Are Chutes Aware? Or Showers?

I am still writing about writing; this will become apparent at the end. For now, let’s consider a little longer the leap that the “singularity” assumes: the expectation that mind will emerge from machine intelligence. To show how the “emergence” of a self-guiding intelligence requires an unexplained and unaccounted-for transformation, here is that emergence broken down into smaller questions identifying specific elements of the advance:

1. What is machine intelligence?

Answer: It is an algorithm. It is a set of programmed pathways for generating outputs to solve for a desired result, with that desired result specified within the problem input to the algorithm.

2. What is getting more complex as machine intelligence advances?

Answer: The algorithm is getting more complex. In AI, the branches and routings of the programmed pathways are changed as part of the operation of the algorithm itself to better solve the inputted problem.

3. What is getting faster as machine intelligence advances?

Answer: Processing speed is getting faster. The speed of arriving at each potential solution for a given problem is now fast enough to allow for rapid successive computational iteration through the programmed pathways.

Note how, in each of these answers, the input is present. Unavoidably so. The algorithm needs an input to produce its result. If the algorithm is seen as a mechanism, then in the absence of an input, the mechanism is idle. The question is whether the mechanism can make its own input.

We can visualize this. Imagine the mechanism of computation running on mechanical hardware rather than microprocessor hardware. That is, imagine a computer that is one trillion times slower and one trillion times bigger than the ones we know, because in place of deploying electrons for processing, this computer sends physical marbles rolling down plastic chutes. For this hypothetical, impossibly cumbersome computer, the problem under evaluation is defined by the user through the right arrangement of marbles (rather than the right arrangement of electrons). A sufficiently complex and well-constructed system of chutes would then output results expressed in different arrangements of marbles, and these results could even take the form of instructions to the army of workers attending this computer for additional chutes that need to be fabricated and attached to the system to realize outputs that are a better match to the input on the next iteration of marble computation. But even this latter result would arise automatically from the paths of marbles produced by their initial configuration.

This computer would probably fill a solar system. It would probably need two lifetimes of the cosmos to execute a program, but still: This imagined computer offers a fair picture. Machine intelligence is a mechanism of a sort. That mechanism sends signals (electrons, marbles) down paths. Input is needed to start these signals moving. There is no conceivable means by which marbles rolling down chutes—no matter how many marbles, no matter how complex the chutes—could spontaneously fabricate new marbles, or spontaneously alter the momentums of marbles in ways different from where the chutes are taking them, or spontaneously lift marbles out of the chutes to place them at the start of the chutes in a different arrangement that initiates a different input. None of these outcomes could arise simply from sending the marbles down the chutes. Our own real-life, digital machine intelligence is faster and more elegant than marbles and chutes, but the problem is the same: Neither complexity nor processing speed offers a path for enabling these characteristics to transform themselves into purpose or will.

I once read another analogy that is helpful for thinking about this. (I don’t remember where I read this; write me if you know.) In a rain shower, the path any water molecule takes is complex like the path of a signal in a computer. Each water molecule’s shift from vapor to liquid, its aggregation with enough other water molecules to be able to fall, what that molecule encounters on the way down, how it might be deflected—all these developments represent if-then conditions defining the molecule’s path, and this progression gets multiplied by however many billions of molecules comprise the rain shower. In short, if we believe that algorithmic complexity is sufficient on its own to allow sentience to emerge, then we must believe that thunderstorms become self-aware.

We Are Souls

All of this challenge to the idea that our consciousness is “emergent” is relatively easy for me to offer and to face. Some would say the notion that our sentient intelligence emerged naturally from the complexity of our brains simply must be true, because there is nowhere else for it come from. I have an alternate proposal. I believe I see a different origin for consciousness; I believe I know the more logical possibility for where human intelligence and awareness come from. We are souls.

We are souls. Obviously, I say that as a subscriber to a particular system of belief. But this faith does not invalidate the logical merit of the view within this discussion. The statement captures what might seem to be a vital point, held to be self-evident by many, and I phrased the statement in a particular way. The verb is important.

That is, we do not “have” souls. By “soul,” I mean the self, the divinely created selfhood, which might find a relationship with its creator. To refer to the existence of the soul solves every problem with the fact that physical complexity alone cannot lead to human consciousness. If we are souls, physical complexity does not have to deliver all of this this—and it cannot. The soul, the self, cannot emerge as an extension of the physical brain because this reverses the nature of things. The physical brain is instead the accessory of the soul. In my view, and perhaps in yours as well, we could lose these physical bodies including their physical brains while our personal selfhood continues. Eternal life proposes this very thing. We could not lose our souls and have personal selfhood continue—this would be a contradiction in terms—but we could lose the rest. The soul is the core of selfhood. The self is the soul.

We are souls.

To see the matter this way is to possess a secure footing from which to recognize that our bodies and brains did not spawn self-awareness out of physical complexity. Mechanism does not turn into mind. Complexity does not turn into consciousness. We are souls, and souls are joined to bodies during the passages they make through this world.

And to write, sometimes, is to speak soul to soul.

Now let’s come back to writing, back to the original question of whether artificial intelligence can take over for the fullness of what writers do.

It can take over some of what writers do. But if meaning is no more emergent than consciousness is, then this does not bode well for AI replacing writers.

Finding Meaning

Again, AI can write. The nature and purposes of writing vary widely. Some writing is simple reporting, without interpretation. For this writing, automatic aggregation of the information might work. If the nature of the reporting can be defined and the needed input data are all digitally available, then AI could do a job that formerly it took a human mind to do.

Yet there is certainly more to writing than this. And here is the thing: There is more to experiencing as well, and more to being. With regard to writing, with regard to being, in addition to the rote work of aggregation and composition, there is also the core work, the human work, the fundamental work that all of us are put here to do. We are to live.

We are to live, and we are to understand something about life through the living. We are to learn—about ourselves, about the natures of things, about God. We are to aspire by love through the individual hearts God gave us as he made each one of us unique. To come back to the term with which I began this essay, we are to experience meaning.

Meaning is inherently and necessarily the experience of a soul.

The writers, when they are doing their work well, not only experience meaning but also give words to it. They learn something fundamental about some facet or detail of something in creation that is worth seeing or considering, and they give words and voice to it so that someone—a stranger, another soul—can have and know this meaning also. Writing is this service.

And not just writers. Artists, performers, inventors, scientists—and many others—are in their own ways doing the same.

Composition can be knitted together via algorithms, and in some cases can be the work of AI. But meaning can never be created this way. Because meaning is not something we create.

Looking squarely at the question of whether consciousness can “emerge” provides an answer in passing to the question asked early in this piece. We are already running with that answer, but let’s now look at it directly.

Question: Is meaning created through the writing?

Answer: Meaning is not emergent in this way. Meaning is instead there to be found.

And a mechanism cannot find it. The mechanism computes from knowns. It cannot see what was previously unknown. Finding and expressing meaning is the work of writers. Further, it is the work we specifically ask and expect of writers, whether we recognize this or not.

So, AI can write. And writing will be aided by AI. We can already see how composition will be helped by this tool.

But as for the writing in total, in its fullness, this involves seeing. It involves finding meaning. And because meaning is not emergent and not created by complexity, because meaning has a different nature and a separate origin from what this computation is generating, the work of writing—the best part of the work—will always be by, and for, human souls.

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Photo: “Using ChatGPT” by FocalFoto

[About this piece: I am exploring simple mottos that have helped me as a writer. Here is a preceding post in this series.]

Writers do not like to write. Start there. Writers like it when their writing is done, which is different, and they may like the smoother and easier part of the writing when the piece is getting close to being done, but that’s it. Writers post, and this act of completion can bring a feeling of lightness and victory. But once the work is complete enough to post, there is more writing to be done, more of the struggle to take up, the struggle to serve readers and to forge the thought that is central to the next piece. The work does not end so long as the love does not end that draws us into this struggle.

I am writing about writing. But in order to do that, I must take up the question of why we do the things we do—why we do any of the things we do. As captured in the quote above, it cannot be that it is about fun. We see this even more clearly in bigger roles. Anyone who has ever become a parent knows fun is not the reason. Parents surrender fun, or much of it. Indeed, anyone who has had the temerity to just advance by decades into adulthood, accepting the burdens of this, knows that fun is the casualty of this advance. And yet worth, and meaning, and yes love—all these increase by way of both advancing in years and caring for new life. So there are calls and hopes and possibilities that each of us accepts or pursues or follows, and the reason is greater than immediate pleasure. And that is where we find the writer.

Writers write. The writer is not the person who writes because writing is fun. The writer is practically the opposite: the one who writes even though it is not.

When people have asked me why I like to write, I have searched for ways to express to them how I am not precisely sure that I do. I used to tell them, “I write because it’s the only way I have found to silence the voices in my head.” I will not be saying that anymore, because I have had two different conversations now in which that line did not land at all well. But if you are a writer in the way that I am, then I trust you understand. Thoughts wash up like driftwood on the beach of understanding. They cry out to be whittled and crafted into something polished and self-supporting. So we journal or blog or write letters, or we begin the next article or essay or book. This work is not essential—it can be ignored—but if it is ignored too long, then the result is a sullenness, an incompleteness, from which any other optional pursuit is just a fleeting escape. The beach gets cluttered. To do the work is difficult, but the effect of the work is a clearing away, and perhaps a respite of soulful and thoroughgoing peace.

Writers write. Of all the simple mottos about writing that I carry with me, this one is the simplest and maybe it is the very broadest, because this motto is descriptive and prescriptive both.

It is descriptive: Writers write. By day, I am part of a company that employs writers, and sometimes there are seasons or moments of seeking new writers for this staff. In the times I have looked for a writer, I have learned that this is one of the clearest ways to know I have found one: Writers write. If the person is a writer, then he or she is finding a way, somehow, to give expression to thought through writing, because this is what this person does. It is how she rolls, it is how he breathes. Writing is so hard that why would one do it, except that the person is made this way?

And then the motto is also prescriptive: Writers write. When I bring this motto to mind, to myself, it is as advice, as counsel. When sullenness comes, the gray indifference that tries to blanket and obscure my uncertainty about what comes next or what I should look to next, the answer I know to urge myself toward is to work on the next thing. The next piece of writing. The next article, or post, or literary project, or the next charting of private possibility and worry into the pages of a notebook.

And here is where the motto gets even bigger than writing. Writing is one of the things I was made for—not the only thing, but a thing nonetheless, and perhaps to some extent I have participated in making myself this way through the inclinations I have fed and who I undertook to be. I don’t know. But a writer is who I am now, by love and by nature. And to see this is to see that other people are also themselves. They are other, very different people: working in different ways, breathing in different ways, following different natures. For all of those who have love moving within them, there is a way given to express that love. Our nature is to do that thing. Our choice is to do that thing. The fullness of love is found in the thing we do that is not fun, but that allows the soul to feel its stillness.

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Here is a proposal for a radically different way of understanding the developments, happenings, and outcomes that feature into each and any of our lives. Namely: See these events as information. In a sense, see them as clues.

The reason this is radical is because viewing what comes as information is qualitatively different from the way we often view these events. We tend to view what comes to us through the lens of success and failure; or good fortune versus bad fortune; or gain versus loss. All those continua make life into a tragedy rather than a discovery.

A little seed started the course of my thinking about this. A man spoke to his relative about something missing from his life. The specifics of the situation do not matter here, but I know the relative, and through this person I learned a bit about the exchange. The response this person gave to the man was: Maybe you are not meant to have that thing.

Such a response is, of course, not satisfying. It does nothing to soothe or solve how the hearer might feel about what is missing. But what this response does manage is (potentially) to move the evaluation to a different place, and possibly reframe how it feels to have this feeling.

In short, the lack that is felt does not have to be a deficit. It might be data instead.

Ashamed of Wanting

We all want things. Many of our wants go unsatisfied even within a full life. And we do feel this; the feelings arising from our awareness of what is missing range from yen to yearning, from pining to real pain.

But then, at the presence of this feeling, must we also add shame? Because this is precisely what we are apt to do. In addition to wanting and not having, there is a tendency to give ourselves an additional pain that says, “I failed,” or “I am incomplete,” or “I have lost.”

Maybe you are not meant to have that thing. Maybe I am not meant to have that thing. Maybe we are meant to have something else.

Meaning: Maybe you are meant for something else that is coming, or maybe you ought to look for the solution or the next step in a very different place than where you have been willing to look so far.

Again, there is no answer in this to the pain arising from the wanting itself. Framing the matter this way simply opens a corridor to the insight or intel the pain might be pointing to, or perhaps even the hope the pain might contain.

Thinking in terms like this—what we are meant to have and how to discover it—is, to one extent, an abrogation of the self’s wants. We become analytical where the wanting wants us to feel.

But at the same time, responding this way is a validation of the self. Addressing the wanting in these terms recognizes the primacy of individual experience and destiny. Each of us is made different not just in our bodies and in our minds, but also in our stories. Each of us has a unique and different life, with separate burdens to carry, and each of us is feeling his or her way toward a destiny different from anyone else’s. We know all this. And yet we don’t know it—we need the reminder all the time.

Good and Evil Relative to Me

An angel presumably would not have this problem. Angels have wants, apparently, because we are told the wants of some of them led to their fall. But the unfallen angels, by nature of what they see and know, must be more fully aware than we are of being creatures of God’s cosmos, and instruments of God’s service. And it must be that they therefore proceed without condemning themselves or their fates if something they want is not obtained, or if they are not able to produce a good outcome desired.

The devils fume and rage. But it must be the angels do not—nor do they burst with feeling when something wished for happens. Knowing God is in control, the angel’s reaction to events is unflappable, perhaps with a rationality more like that of an AI.

Meanwhile, we humans are frequently not like that. We are prone to be distraught, anxious, and self-condemning about what comes. And the reason for this goes deep; one can see our confusion about events and the nature of their origins getting started in the early pages of the Bible. Per the Bible’s story of the first spiritually aware people, the power that this man and woman took, the forbidden fruit of which they ate, was the fruit of the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Genesis 2:17). In short, these humans partook of this divine knowledge without any divine perspective with which to make sense of it. The only perspective they had was the view through their own eyes and mind. Therefore, the knowledge of good and evil became something attenuated and narrow: the knowledge of good and evil merely relative to me.

Navigating the world through the lens of this limited view is a curse.

Welcome to the human experience.

Life as Communication

We can’t shake that curse. I will still rage over what I presume I am entitled to. But for those of a spirit at least sometimes willing to humbly seek, this reminder is a touchstone: Your life is a story, and the accurate perspective on that story comes from a vantage bigger than the one your life provides.

Meanwhile, to view the events of life as information is to discover just how much information there is, and how near is the information provider.

These different ways of framing the happenings of life—seeing them as clues rather than scoring them as good and bad—ultimately come down to differences in attention: revering and looking to God rather than revering and looking to other people. If I am stuck in judgement over what my own self seemingly ought to have or seemingly ought to experience, then I am looking to the relative experiences of other selves to construct the basis of this judgement.

But if the life all around me is a sphere of experience providing information, providing clues and direction about the unique way my own life might go, then in effect I am seeking to pay attention. I am even seeking to communicate. Because in acting upon the clues, I am giving my response to the One who is making that sphere.

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Maybe the most perplexing example: Paul, in his Second Letter to the Corinthians, makes passing reference to a man (presumably himself) who had an experience 14 years prior of having been transported to the “third heaven,” with the letter giving no further explanation or detail. What in the world does this reference reveal? Are we to imagine there are three distinct heavens—or three stages to the one place called heaven? And how do these three places, states, or stages fit together and differ from one another? We are not told. It is a hint, and not an altogether illuminating one.

All this reflects the nature of the Bible and how it was written. The Bible is an anthology of the works of many different writers, none of whom imagined the compilation, many of whom could not have imagined they were writing what might later be seen as part of a “religious” text. The contents of the New Testament, in particular, are mundane in their nature if not their subject matter: They consist of reporting, biography, and letters from first-century correspondents all working to process the experience and consequences of the life of the one called Jesus. These people did not write about the workings of eternal life and heaven, because they were writing to human beings about human practical concerns—what happened and what to do next—and because, also, they had no idea. Hints slip out in the recollections they share of the one who did know these things. That is, statements from Jesus appearing in the gospels convey collateral information about the nature and operation of divine reality.

One passage of the New Testament that is particularly rich in this regard is Matthew’s gospel, chapter 18. In this chapter, in close succession, Jesus is quoted as offering two different provocative hints on the purpose of this world and the activity of the realm surrounding and touching it. As you are about to read, neither of these hints is anywhere close to being comprehensive enough to provide answers. Each one instead opens up a different and more specific line of questioning.

Here is the passage, spanning the first 10 verses of Matthew chapter 18:

At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, “Who, then, is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” He called a little child to him and placed the child among them. And he said: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me. If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea. Woe to the world because of the things that cause people to stumble! Such things must come, but woe to the person through whom they come! ... See that you do not despise one of these little ones. For I tell you that their angels in heaven always see the face of my Father in heaven.” —Matthew 18:1-7, 10 NIV

(I skipped some verses in the quote above. Matthew 18:8-9, “If your hand or your foot…,” presents an analogy about hellfire not relevant here, but I get into those verses here.)

As I say, the passage above contains provocative hints. Not complete answers, just hints—but hints that say a great deal. The words Jesus offers here point to two conclusions we would not otherwise know:

1. Our Experience in This Mortal World Does Have a Point

“Such things must come, but woe to the person through whom they come,” Jesus says. “Such things” here refers to the things that cause the innocent to sin. These things “must” come, says Jesus—a decisive statement. He might have said, Such things grieve the Father’s heart, and woe to the person through whom they come, but he did not say this. He instead made clear that innocents meeting with causes of downfall must happen, that a purpose is served in the way this broken world works. We stumble, we sin, we are corrupted and lost; we are found and we are redeemed. Why “must” the world, and human lives, proceed this way?

I do not know. There is a different way: If God wanted us always whole, suited to a world fully right, then he could have made and kept the world perfect and he could have made and kept us whole. He did not do this. It is valuable, somehow—valuable to the life that extends beyond this life and to the purpose we will have there—that we pass through sin and death in this world.

The brokenness of the world is important to God even though it was broken by means of the choices of others. Matthew 18:7 thus resonates with the powerful line near the end of the Old Testament book of Genesis, the words spoken by Joseph about his brothers’ betrayal of him that defined the course of his life, the words that seem to tie a bow on all the evil inflicted throughout all 50 chapters of the Bible’s first book. Joseph says:

“[Y]ou meant evil against me, but God meant it for good….” —Genesis 50:20

Somehow, God has a purpose, his own good purpose, in the brokenness and even in the existence of evil within this world.

2. Angels Are Real and Are Assigned to Individual Humans

“See that you do not despise one of these little ones. For I tell you that their angels in heaven always see the face of my Father in heaven.” There is so much in this statement, much of which is contained in the possessive their.

We have our own angels, apparently. We have heavenly caseworkers monitoring and in some sense reporting on our lives. Angels are real; there is no sense of Jesus making the first-century equivalent of air quotes around his use of the term, and no way for the statement to make sense unless the hearer assumes Jesus knows angels and knows them to be real. Moreover, angels are doing something real and, in a sense, doing something earthly and finite. That is, they have assigned interests in earthly, finite individuals.

Is each angel assigned to just one person? There is no way to know from this passage, but we might make a guess that the answer is no: The caseworker has a caseload. Yet if this is true, then the quantity of lives assigned to each angel must be finite; there must be a limit to how many lives in this world an angel watches. We know this because the little ones (each) have “their” angels, meaning one of them has an angel and this watcher is presumed to be different from your or my angel.

What do the angels do? This is unclear. Whether they take action in our lives and what these actions entail are details not known from the passage. But at the very least they watch and report. And some angels with some assignments have a more direct line to the Father than others.

Jesus notes that these particular angels are different because they “always see the face of my Father.” Other angels do not “always” see his face. We know we are in the territory of analogy here—we cannot possibly perceive literally how God’s rule over heaven or his oversight of creation through his angels works. But on some level, God is the most interested in the innocent. He is staring right at them, or staring right at their angels’ reports, as these innocents make their way.

Indeed, there is a connection between point 1 and point 2, and Jesus is making that very connection. The experience of this world shaped by sin does have a point and God has sent us through it for a reason. God is interested in the innocent hearts he has sent through this world. And part of the population of his creation is the host of unseen beings who manifest his watching to see what these innocents encounter and how their lives progress.

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I played the game in high school and college, during a time when this pursuit—a game that is collaborative and imaginative and not competitive or tactical—was too countercultural to easily defend or explain, so most of us did not try. Playing the game was at best an open secret kept by the players, and that complexity in part made the pursuit too difficult to sustain once post-college careers and relationships began to take over.

Today, the culture has shifted. Adults in my daily life play the game openly; a friend of mine has even made a show out of doing so; and the game’s popularity is such that a D&D movie was recently in theatres. All of this suggests I can now offer a post founded on the workings of the game with a decent hope the piece will land and be understood. This is that post.

I have an observation—an appreciation, really—to make about the game. It is simply this: In my life since D&D, I have discovered that certain aspects of the rules of Dungeons and Dragons are so powerfully descriptive of the operation of life that they have helped me frame my understanding of life even decades removed from playing the game.

I can think of three elements of the rules of D&D that are true to life in this way.

Let me quickly say, most of the game’s rules are not like this. The mechanics are clunky. For those who do not know, Dungeons and Dragons uses various individual numerical scores to rank different attributes of a player’s character in the game, and uses the rolls of different dice (the distinctively shaped dice are a well-known aspect of the game) to determine the success or failure of various actions and the occurrence of various events in the game. Among the clunky elements are the game’s crude simulation of combat: One would never learn anything meaningful about using a broadsword or longbow by pretending to do so within a session of D&D.

And yet, in a few places, the game offers rules that frame clear-eyed truths so plainly that my memory of the game has enabled me to see those principles at work well beyond the game itself.

Here is what I mean—three powerful ways Dungeons and Dragons offers insight into real life:

1. Intelligence and Wisdom (and their difference)

A character in Dungeons and Dragons has separate scores for “intelligence” and “wisdom” (among other attributes), and they can be very different scores. This strikes me as a truer description of people’s inner lives, of their cognitive and thoughtful interactions with the world, and of the differing windows of clarity people possess than the assumption that we tend to make. That is, we tend to understand intelligence and wisdom as overlapping terms, with wisdom at best representing a greater intelligence that comes with maturity. The difference is surely more than this, and D&D gets it right. Intelligence and wisdom are two different things.

We can see a clue to this in a topic much in the news in the past year. Between intelligence and wisdom, only intelligence is the attribute that might credibly be qualified as “artificial.” As opposed to artificial intelligence, artificial wisdom is impossible.

What are the differences, then, between these attributes? Exploring intelligence and wisdom:

One can be intelligent without being wise. Start there. As a term, “intelligence” is slippery to define, because one meets the limits of one’s own intelligence in articulating the scope of intelligence. But the facility this term describes has to do with the speed and confidence of making mental connections, of sampling many ideas, and of simulating the course of an idea before speaking or acting on it. The person who has this facility, but lacks wisdom, might see the logic of an idea but not the reasons why others do not see it. At negative extremes, the one with intelligence but not wisdom might be the overbearing intellectual bully, or might be the overthinking worrier.

Meanwhile, one can be wise without possessing the clarity of making connections we might name as intelligence. There is a different level of interconnection, one that links human perspectives and experiences, and this forms a stratum beneath the more current and urgent world our clever thoughts move in. The wise person perceives and appreciates this level, and thus recognizes, for example, how a given course of action is likely to be futile even when the intelligent minds have calculated all the steps. Conversely, the wise person might see how hope is taking root and preparing to bloom even while the intelligent minds are despairing.

Intelligence without wisdom is cold and might even be ruthless. Wisdom without intelligence can enshrine error and might even revere it.

Intelligence and wisdom are different, and it is worth appreciating how different they are, particularly when they are opposed. Intelligence sees precisely what to do; wisdom knows when not to do that thing.

2. Saving Throws

The “saving throw” is a seemingly arbitrary aspect of the rules of Dungeons and Dragons, yet one that has come to me to feel like an accurate picture of the course of events. In D&D, a character faced with certain devastating or overwhelming attacks, afflictions, or setbacks can try a saving throw: a roll of the dice for the chance that the damage or effect is not so bad after all.

When looking back on the course of my life, how many situations do I find in which I clearly benefited from the equivalent of rolling a successful saving throw? That is, the situations in which I reasonably could have suffered or lost more than I did. One might call this “good luck,” but luck as a phenomenon cannot account for its own nature; something other than luck must describe the tilt upon events by which good fortune can come.

I see instead a protective grace in life. That grace, while not predictable and certainly not manageable, does act to cushion and guide us by sometimes saving us from the worst possible effects of our own foolishness, or the unexpected events that come.

Indeed, if a person has arrived at a certain age and still has some battered but working remains of health, safety, security, love, and happiness, then this is only because of the grace that has helped protect these valuable possessions. Saving throws in D&D are random rolls of the dice, but the very existence of the rule offers a credible simulation of grace in action.

3. Levels

This is the big one, and the observation that led me to write this essay. As I age, it is hard to miss noticing that life has levels just like D&D. In the game, a character rises in “levels,” meaning a character’s abilities and powers advance in incremental steps with experience and success. But then, in parallel with this happening, the monsters get incrementally harder: More powerful foes appear to challenge the character at each higher level. And much the same seems to be true in real life, too.

That is, as we proceed, as we advance in experience, our powers become greater. Yet the monsters we fight keep pace, becoming proportionally more powerful as well.

The description of real life is an analogy, of course, albeit not one that is veiled all that much. Our “powers,” in real life, take the form of connections, skill, resources, perspective, and knowledge earned. These advance. And our “monsters,” in real life, take the form of challenges and threats both real and imagined, notably including worries. These advance as well.

The younger, less experienced person naturally has less of these powers to bring to bear in facing these monsters. The analogy is far from perfect, because certainly there are some who meet with events and afflictions beyond their personal resources to cope with or overcome. However, in the course of a life that proceeds as it should, the advance through life seems to offer a continual escalation of difficulty, a continual deepening of understanding of the stakes, and a continual extension of vision to see what the challenges actually are.

Here again, one meets one’s own limitations. I can feel the extent to which I have leveled up in my sense of the relative smallness of the concerns that might loom large for those who are, say, my children’s age—social mortifications, for example—even though I fully remember how those same concerns were large for me at that same age. I also feel my level in my current dread of monsters I cannot quite name—they loom within the shadow of a mounting experience of loss that comes in this season of life. Yet even so, it is little consolation to me to imagine there must be people at higher levels still who now consider these threats to be small as well.

The monsters must come. They are part of the game, part of life. But in how and when they come, there is a proper order. There is even a sort of restraint.

In D&D, the first-level fighter and the tenth-level fighter each has faced orcs, but the frost giant is something only tenth-level fighter has seen. And life proceeds the same way. The monsters appear when we are at the right place and point of experience to have a fighting chance against them.

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