Breaking news: Ascension date miscalculation blamed on Common Core math

By GSM News Staff

Vatican City, May 30, 2019 - A five-year old using an old fashioned abacus earlier today discovered what appears to be a discrepancy of three days in the Catholic Church's calculation of the commemoration of Our Lord's Ascension into Heaven.

The Ascension of Our Lord
Juan Rodriguez Juarez, 1720

"I was moving the abacus beads one at a time," the precocious, unnamed math scholar explained. "I started on April 21st, this year's date for Easter. Then I counted, 'one, two, three, four...' on the calendar. When I got to 40, my finger was resting on May 30th."

This left the young math scholar troubled and confused. "I read in my parish's bulletin that we will be celebrating the Ascension on Sunday, June 2nd," he explained. "But that would be 43 days after Christ's Resurrection, not 40."

Yet according to the first chapter of Acts, Christ "presented himself alive to [his followers] by many proofs after he suffered, appearing to them during forty days..." Then he "was lifted up, and a cloud took him from their sight."

Thus, since the young scholar's concern seemed justified, GSM News reached out by telephone to the Vatican for clarification.

The Rev. Antonio Spadaro, SJ, editor of La Civiltà Cattolica, picked up the phone. After the discrepancy was explained to him, there was a long pause, and the beads of an abacus could be heard clicking in the background.

Finally, the flustered priest could be heard picking up the receiver. "Theology is not mathematics," he said in an irritated tone. "2+2 in theology can equal five. Similarly, 43 is the new 40."

GSM News also reached out to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, where an official confirmed suspicions that Common Core math had been incorrectly deployed in calculating the date of the Ascension. "We threw out our abacus to comply with the new math standards," he admitted. "Ultimately we just had to guess."

Yet the USCCB official became defensive at the suggestion that faithfulness to Scripture necessitated transferring the date of the Ascension to its correct date, Thursday, May 30th. 

"Folks are so busy during the week surfing the internet and shuttling their kids to soccer games they can't possibly be expected to make it to church for something so minimally important as commemorating the Ascension of their Lord and Savior into Heaven," the bureaucrat said. "I think that having the Ascension on Sunday will help people to celebrate it with more festivity,"

However, the same precocious child who originally noted the date discrepancy for the Ascension also expressed skepticism at the official's claim that people could celebrate the Ascension with more festivity on Sunday. 

"That seems to violate the Pauli exclusion principle," the five-year-old explained. "Two identical things can't occupy the same space at the same time and in the same manner. So if Sunday is already occupied by the festivity of the Seventh Sunday of Easter, how can you possibly expect to add the festivity of the Ascension to an already festive day? It seems that one would have to displace the other."

Reached again for comment, Father Spadaro sounded exasperated. "I'm telling you, if mathematics doesn't apply to theology, then surely physics doesn't either."

The USCCB bureaucrat was equally frustrated. "I have no idea what the Pauli exclusion principal is," he admitted. "I decided to take underwater basketweaving instead of physics in college."  

A homesteading manifesto

We have twelve taps in the maple trees around the house right now. Plastic tubes run from the taps into large glass bottles wedged securely with pieces of wood against the tree trunks. With the sun shining and the temperature hovering in the low-to-mid 40s, the sap runs intermittently. The past few weeks I've been boiling down the sap, the result so far being nine quarts of rich, amber-dark syrup. And we're probably not done yet, since the temperature dipped into the upper teens a few nights ago, probably "reseting" the trees for one last "run."

In my experience, five or six gallons of propane are needed to boil down enough sap for three-to-four quarts of syrup. That's roughly $20-25 per gallon of syrup, which isn't bad considering that high quality maple syrup retails in the grocery store for $20 per pint. Yet when you consider that we frequently use maple syrup in place of sugar, which is dirt-cheap at the grocery store, the financial benefit evaporates more rapidly than the excess liquid evaporates from my kettle of boiling sap.

So why bother? Why bother raising our own meat and cultivating our own garden produce, as we do? Why spend all those hours starting seeds and weeding plants; all the evenings during the summer and fall canning, pickling, and preserving? We produce our own milk, turning it into kefir, and cheese; we process our own pigs, rendering their fat for our own lard and and brining and smoking their bellies for our own bacon. I make my own wines and ciders, fermenting apples, pumpkins, rhubarb, grapes, currents, raspberries, even dandelions. All of this comes at great cost-- I mean literally, since these activities take a great deal of my time, and time is money. I could be working more hours. If I devoted my time and energy to it, I could be making far, far more money than I do. It would be so much more efficient, and likely cost effective as well, simply to buy things.

***

It's a funny thing, because modern society promises to free us from the supposed slavery of making our own food, building and repairing our own house, etc. All these things are available at the grocery store, over the internet, or at the hands of an expert who would be happy to do it for us. It's more efficient that way. But more efficient for whom? Certainly not for the individual, if it only frees a person from work so that he can do other work. It seems to me that it's efficiency simply for the sake of efficiency, or, worse, efficiency for the sake of industry moguls whose wealth is in the billions-- which is why I am speaking of efficiency-worship. The irony is that we've traded the tether of meeting of our own basic needs for the tether of making the money that we need to pay for our basic needs.

To be clear, this is a complicated matter. For many folks, careers are vocational, not merely a means to the end of making money. Freed from menial tasks to some degree, many people have the time to pursue careers of importance to the community broadly speaking. I'm thinking of lawyers devoted to the pursuit of justice, teachers to helping students to learn, doctors to healthcare, etc., etc. This sort of specialization is only possible when folks are freed from the obligation to spend long hours cultivating food, and mending clothes. The rewards that follow from deep immersion in an area of specialty are likewise great. Humanly speaking, we desire not only to know, but to know deeply.

Yet again, I'm suspicious that what is good has been made into a god, because, humanly speaking, we also desire to know broadly. But why bother knowing broadly when there are experts to handle pretty much anything, and when we're often tired out from whatever specialized task we've been trained to perform on the weekdays? What results, therefore, is a sort of infantilization, a sort of communal forgetting of the sort of basic knowledge that it was once taken for granted that a person would possess-- knowing how to feed oneself, how to cloth oneself, how to shelter oneself. It instead leaves a person at the mercy of the "experts," and it hardly seems like freedom to me.

***

I'm convinced that our modern society has us worshipping its god, efficiency. Think about it: Our modern highways permit us to commute longer distances, and our technological advances lead to more things rolling off assembly lines more quickly than ever before. Yet we work as many hours as our parents did. And if our paychecks are at all larger, the extra money evaporates with the purchase of the supposed time-savers that make it possible to work those long hours-- the washing machine and dryer; the dishwasher and microwave; the packaged, pre-processed food; the clothing that is replaced rather than repaired; the smart phone that keeps us tethered to the job 24/7.

And so, the cycle repeats itself, and life passes us by while we're busy raising the money to live. Maybe we get a weekend here and there, and maybe retirement, too, if our health holds out. Yet a sure sign of our societal slavery is that fully four-fifths of the American workforce is living paycheck-to-paycheck. Like gerbils running on our wheels, we work more and more. We make more money, yet the things we need to pay others to do for us because we're too busy working to do them ourselves is endless. We pay somebody to grow our food because we're too busy to weed a garden. A person's yard may be full of maple trees, but he's too constrained by work obligations to tap them and boil the sap. Somebody else will have to grow his food, cure his bacon, change the oil in his car, repair his leaky roof...

As for me, homesteading, and all the work that it entails, most of which is wholly unnecessary in this day-and-age, is a conscious non serviam. I will not participate in efficiency-worship. I will not serve that god.

America's Dairyland, no more

La Crosse County's Dairy Breakfast has been cancelled this year. Apparently nobody stepped forward to host the annual breakfast, which would ordinarily draw thousands of people out into the countryside to eat breakfast and tour a working dairy farm. The dairy breakfast's FB cancellation announcement is a muffled cry for help:

"We have lost a large number of dairy farms in the past few years, and especially in the last year alone. Those that remain are busy putting their efforts into getting through each week-- one day at a time." 

Wisconsin's license plate reads America's Dairyland. Yet nearly 20 percent of the state's dairy farms ceased operations in the last five years. Last year, a whopping 10 percent of those that remained did the same. There are now fewer than 8,000 dairy farms remaining, down from-- if you can believe it-- 100,000 operational dairy farms in the state of Wisconsin in 1960. Why? Because dairy farmers-- conventional farmers, at least-- are presently earning only three quarters of what it costs them to produce their milk. They haven't made enough to cover costs for five straight years now.

When I hear of the dairy breakfast being cancelled, when I see FB pictures of farmers loading their cows into auctioneers' trailers, when I read the poignant articles like the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinal's from a few months back-- I can't help but detect a pervasive sense of helplessness. In the back of my mind is an interview with a land-grant university ag professor in the dairy farming episode of Neflix's series Rotten. He says something to the effect that the dairy industry is changing, and that farmers will just have to adapt.

It's more of an observation of fact than a prediction, at least for the conventional industry. It's not the dairy industry that's dying. Despite an overall decline in dairy consumption, dairy is still an $88 billion industry here in Wisconsin. It's just that the milk is being produced on fewer, and far larger, farms. The farms that are making it are doing so by getting big. The economy of scale permits them to negotiate better prices on everything from feed to veterinary medicine. Again, it's not so much the dairy farming is dying as it is that dairying is dying as a way of life for a significant number of Wisconsinites. Again, the professor's comment is mainly a statement of fact. Dairy farmers will adapt, at least those few who survive.

***

On the other side of town from us, the Plain-folk, as the Amish call themselves, have small, carefully tended garden plots and greenhouses. Many sell furniture, as well as maple syrup and fresh produce in season. Their signs always say, "No Sunday sales." Their children walk the side of the road barefoot, and there are so, so many buggies, especially on days when the Amish gather for worship, or the evenings when the young couples are courting.

Travel a little further down the road, however, and suddenly the idyllic, pastoral farms of the Plain-folk give way to a massive manure pit and several sprawling, industrial structures with massively-scaled fans constantly circulating the air. It's one of the largest mega-dairies in the region, the dairy supplier to a regional chain of filling stations. A few thousand cows spend their lives confined to these buildings, where they are milked in an 80-cow rotary parlor three times per day. A cow steps onto the platform every 7.8 seconds; 400 cows step on and off that platform every hour.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not contrasting the idyllic little farms of the Plain-folk with the local mega-dairy in order to condemn anybody. It's just such a glaring example of our changing countryside that it haunts me every time I pass by. To emphasize, the family that runs this mega-dairy is in at least their third generation farming the land. They're pillars in the local community. They've succeeded in a changing industry, and they're poised to survive. So I'm not trying to demonize them in any way.

Yet if dairies like theirs are the future (and again, the future is already largely here, since most milk nationwide is already produced in larger-to-mega sized dairies), the question becomes: What exactly are we sacrificing?

***

As far as the answer is concerned, I have lots of thoughts running through my head. There is a thoroughly depressing must-read piece over at The American Conservative focused mainly on Iowa's pork industry, which is now entirely industrialized. The result in Iowa has been the utter decimation of rural communities-- ghost towns, closed high schools, massive increases in rural poverty, crime, and drug addiction. Yet there's more, too. There's the economic divide between the urban and the rural, between the parts of the country that matter politically and the parts that are referred to derisively as "fly-over country." There are the massive-scale recalls, the inhumane treatment of animals, the pollution that results from stockpiling of manure, the total lack of understanding on the part of most folks of what food is and where it comes from, etc., etc.

There are so many reasons why we should want more farmers and smaller farms. It's not just about preserving a way of life for a small percentage of the population or "saving the family farm." Rather, more farmers means that rural communities are not drained by urban flight, and that everybody, whether they're farming or not, is closer to their food. I am firmly convinced the industrialization of farming is the source of many, many woes.

***

By the way, since the dairy farming is already so scaled up, the answer to stabilizing the number of Wisconsin dairy farms is not so simple as drinking more milk. Something drastic needs to change in the way milk is priced that will give preferential treatment to smaller farmers. There have been many proposals in recent years that have failed to gain traction. But the proposal of the NFO featured in this Milwaukee-Journal Sentinel article seems simple enough that it could be rallied around. It calls for a two-tiered system that would add $4 to the pay price per hundredweight of milk, up to one million pounds per month. That would give farms with up to 300 cows a competitive edge matching the competitive edge that mega-farms get due to the economy of scale.

More will follow on these matters, of course, in future posts.

Springtime, the Annunciation, and the 'dearest freshness deep down things'

Here in Wisconsin, the snow is nearly gone. Only fast-receding remnants of the banks along the driveway and stray patches on the shady, downhill corners of the hayfields are holding out. Every day I trek out to the far field, where we planted 12,000 cloves of garlic last fall. I pull back a little of the straw-mulch, jealous for my first glimpse at the tiny, green sprouts that will rise bravely to greet the warmth of the spring-time sun.

It's fascinating to observe how the mulch slows things down. A week ago, while the sun was radiating warmth, the mulch acted as an insulator for the soil below. All around the mulched garlic-field the ground was awash with mud. Yet underneath the mulch, the garlic was still asleep, still locked in the icy embrace of an especially hard winter. Every day I'd check again, and then finally, a few days ago, the sun's persistence proved irresistible. The winter soil had indeed loosened its grip; though icy-cold, the rich, deep-dark loam had softened. Now, ever-so gradually, the garlic will waken this coming week, rousing itself slowly from its wintertime slumber.

A brave shoot of garlic greeting the sun's warmth-- last year.
We're still a week or more away from the garlic waking up this spring!

The trees are awakening, too. Just yesterday I boiled down our second batch of maple syrup. With spring coming so late, it's a tough year for the sap. Nonetheless, yesterday's three quarts brings us up to nine quarts total. The sap trickles slowly, and then some days it suddenly flows. The trees sense that spring is here, and they're eager to waken, to send out their leaves, to soak up the sun's warmth-- to be alive.

It's truly a marvel to watch, each March, as winter's hard grip loosens. I loved living, in turn, in Texas and then in North Carolina. But these states don't have the same sharp delineation between the seasons. Only weeks ago, the ground here in Wisconsin was deeply blanketed in snow, and the potential for life was buried, frozen, existing only in hopeful memory and imagination. Today, the robins are hunting worms, the sap is flowing, and the green things of the earth are beginning to grow.

***

Tomorrow will mark exactly nine months to Christmas. It's natural that the Church should mark the Feast of the Annunciation on March 25th. After all, a full-term pregnancy is nine months, and the Annunciation celebrates the appearance of the Archangel Gabriel to Mary and his promise of the Holy Spirit's overshadowing presence. Feast-day celebrations, however, are oddities during Lent, as this preparatory season is one of prayerful sobriety. The Annunciation seemed especially out of place last year, if I am recalling correctly, since March 25th fell on Good Friday. Last year, the liturgical solution was to transfer the Annunciation to a new date after Holy Week. Yet this year, as is the case most years, the joyous celebration of the Annunciation remains, liturgically, an oddly jarring interruption of the ascetical practices of Lent.

This morning, however, I was thinking of these lines from "God's Grandeur," one of Gerard Manley Hopkins' finest poems:

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.

 It occurred to me that there is actually something quite fitting about the Annunciation's placement during Lent. In just weeks, we will be commemorating Christ's passion, death, and resurrection. Yet it all began with the Annunciation. Christ took up residence in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary specifically so that he could redeem us through His passion and death on the cross.

***

Along similar lines, I am privileged right now to be re-reading T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral with some of my students. Eliot's play is about St. Thomas Becket, who was murdered by agents of King Henry II at the altar of Canterbury Cathedral in 1170 A.D. The play's interlude has Becket preaching in the cathedral on Christmas morning, making the odd point that...

"... it is in these our Christian mysteries that we can rejoice and mourn for the same reasons."

Eliot's Becket is alluding, on a happy Christmas morning, to the mysterious intertwining of life and death. From new life comes death, and from death comes new life. On that Christmas morning, Becket knows that he, too, is soon to die. But he would die a martyr's death, in imitation of the Savior, in full confidence that on the last day he will rise together with all the saints in glory.

The first springtime in the Christian story was Christ's rising from death to new life, and many springtimes would follow, Becket's included. Everything about the spring-- and about Lent, which occurs in the spring-- evokes the impending freshness, to steal Hopkins' word, that is buried deep in the dark, loamy dirt, hidden somewhere amidst last year's dead growth. There is dearest freshness in Mary's womb-- and in the deep-down things of the earth, too.

Satan's icy grip-- and winter's, too-- are being loosed by the radiance of the risen Son.

In the meantime, we await the springtime resurrection with joyful expectation, and contemplate mournfully the passion and death of the Savior. The sweet sap of the maple trees is a foretaste of the sweetness of summer. And from under the straw-mulch, the garlic, warmed by the springtime sun, will bravely rise.

When did we become such ignoramuses?

There is a memorable scene in Conrad's most famous novella, Heart of Darkness. The main protagonist, Marlowe, is navigating the Congo aboard a steamer. He has brought on a crew of natives, including one whose job is to watch the ship's wood-fired boiler. Very soon, the native grasps that if the boiler isn't fed, the steamer stops moving. He also understands that if the needle on the gauge goes too high, the boiler will explode and everybody will die. Quickly, he becomes technically proficient at his task, feeding the boiler faithfully and watching the gauge's needle fearfully. And yet, Conrad's description has the native worshipping the steamer's boiler as a god, propitiating its fiery divinity with offerings of wood and constantly in awe of the boiler's wrathful potential.

***

My question is, how are we different today from that native? Embarrassingly, I'm counting myself

among the unwashed mass of ignoramuses, largely ignorant of much of the technology that we use. Think about it, here I sit, typing a blog post on a computer with very little idea of how it actually functions. Sure, I've read a little about computer code and programming, and I studied some of the principles of circuitry and power storage. I'm not exactly worshipping my computer, or my smart phone like Conrad's native worshipped the boiler. But I could not take these devices apart and put it back together again, much less build them from scratch.

Home-school scientific investigations around here these days involve doing fecal parasite egg counts for the goat herd.

What will it look like when robots take over the world? Some sci-fi storylines would have it involving something akin to human consciousness and the subsequent rebellion of the robots against their human "overlords." Yet other storylines would have it being when so many things are done through technology and automation that we've become utterly dependent (aka, enslaved).

These things can be known, grasped, understood. Yet most of us don't bother. Should we be bothered by the fact that we don't know, or that we don't bother to remedy our lacunae? Are we like the frog in a gradually warming kettle of enslaving technological ignorance? Is there a connection, in other words, between our being human, our being free, and our grasp of how things work?

***

In the philosophical tradition, a distinction is often made between techne, or the practical, hands-on knowledge of a certain craft, or art, and the knowledge of first principles, or causes. Gun-smithing, computer-building, portrait-painting, and story-writing are all arts that the determined, hardworking person can master. First principles, on the other hand, answer what makes for a good computer, what makes one portrait better than another, what makes for a good story, etc., etc.

The point is, while the native in Conrad's story has mastered the techne of running the boiler, he has totally failed to grasp how the boiler functions within the parameters of the laws of physics, or what role the boiler plays in the forward motion, the speed, and the trajectory of the steamer. He is wholly incapable of judging whether the boiler is a good boiler or bad, or whether the use of a wood-fired boiler is the best means for accomplishing the intended travel from point a to point b, or even whether it's a good thing to retrieve the indomitable Mr. Kurz.

But what of us? What of we moderns who claim to understand the technology that drives our modern society?

***

One interesting result of having multiple children who've reached the age of reason is that I get lots and lots of questions about how things work. Why is the moon sometimes full and not other times? Why aren't we powering cars with nuclear reactors? Why can't I build a functioning boat out of this pile of scrap wood? Why can't I crush these double-a alkaline batteries, enclose them in a pvc tube, and ignite them? This is an actual sampling of questions I've fielded, or theories I've patiently had to quash, just in the past few days. It's an awful lot of fun, at least most of the time. It's also a humbling reminder of just how little I actually understand in terms of science, technology, and, basically, the way the world works.

Obviously our increasingly complex world makes it more impossible than ever to master all possible arts. If you are good with computers, the question will be whether you are also an accomplished painter. If you've mastered painting, then the question is whether you can disassemble and reassemble the engine of your car. or perhaps whether you can fabricate a hard-to-find replacement part. Whatever our embarrassment is, therefore, it shouldn't be at not having mastered all the arts. Yet the question arises-- Is it enough to be told that your computer doesn't operate by magical principles, or do you have to have acquired at least something of the techne of computer-building in order truly to grasp this?

I'm convinced, in fact, that this is the case-- That our hunger to understand is what makes us human, and free, and that the only way to understand something is to break it down, study its constituent parts, and try to put them together again. Even if we fail to master a particular techne, we've seen the parts, and we've related them to the whole, and that makes us, if not the masters of a thing, at least not its slaves. That is the priority of the first causes that philosophy teaches us. Yet understanding the whole at least begins with studying the parts.

How is a Catholic parent to respond to the sexual abuse crisis?

This is something I've been thinking about, and so I read the article published yesterday in The Atlantic online with deep interest. Obviously the answers of those interviewed varied widely. There are the parents who've elected to move on, and this comment particularly stood out to me:

“I don’t necessarily think anything would happen to him,” she says. “I mean, it could. But I’m just thinking, What would he think of us if we brought him to that church even after all of this had unfolded? … Let’s say he was raised Catholic, and then he learned about all of that—about the sex abuse worldwide that had been going on for decades and covered up—and then came to us and said, ‘How could you have raised me in that religion?’ I wouldn’t have an answer for him.”

The more I think about it the more occurs to me that this is exactly how a parent ought to respond-- at least, it's how a parent ought to respond if the organization were anything other than the Catholic Church. Think about it, if your child were signed up for a civic or sports activity and sexual abuse was exposed, it would be entirely proper to pull your child out. Otherwise, you'd be liable to his questions when he grows up-- "What were you thinking? Why would we want to be associated with that group?"

Yet the Catholic Church is different, and the parent who made the comment cited above has at least a tenuous grasp on this fact. She still understands the importance of raising her son in a faith tradition, as evidenced by their attendance at a Lutheran church. She acknowledges that she misses the rosary and other familiar practices, and she finds that she has to fight the instinctive urge to make the sign of the cross. Yet the fact of the matter is, she is depriving her son of so much more than the rosary and the comfortable traditions she grew up with. Far more importantly, she is depriving him of the grace of the sacraments, particularly a valid Eucharist. But again, if a parent's connection to the Catholic Church is simply that it's the faith tradition that she is most comfortable with because she grew up in it, then the move to a faith tradition with many of the familiar "smells and bells" but without the sex abuse scandal, makes perfect sense. So again, I understand where this parent was coming from. Yet I lament her choice, because it's emphatically the wrong choice.

Obviously I'm not going to be leaving the Catholic Church anytime soon. I was edified by the comment of another parent cited in the article, a blogging mother:

“If you believe that the Catholic Church is the one founded by Jesus Christ, there is nowhere else to go. Jesus asked Peter, ‘Are you going to leave me also?’ and Peter says, ‘To whom shall we go?’ This is how I feel.”

Really, there is no-place else to turn. The Catholic Church is the Bride of Christ. She has the seven sacraments and the apostolic authority granted to Peter and his successors. For years I've taught students the apocryphal line from Hilaire Belloc about the proof of the Church's divine origins being that "no merely human institution conducted with such knavish imbecility would have survived a fortnight." Recently Pope Francis said that the Church has been "surprised in flagrant adultery." I know that many traditionally-minded folks are up in arms, claiming that the Holy Father is denying the indefectibility of the Church. And while Pope Francis is speaking imprecisely, as is, frustratingly, his wont, I think he simply means to acknowledge that the leadership of the Church has failed dramatically, something akin to Belloc's "knavish imbecility."

I guess this is my chance to live really what I've always taught students theoretically-- the heresies of Pope Honorius, orgies of Pope Benedict IX, the nefarious dealings and nepotism of the papacies of the Borgias. These historical scandals each led to great fallings-away among the faithful in turn, and so it is all over again in our own day. But to whom else shall we go? If the parent who left the Catholic Church for the Lutherans really thinks that she is leaving the sex abuse scandals behind, she is setting herself up to be scandalized all over again. Without excusing the Catholic Church in any way, it's worth noting the sex abuse scandals looming on the horizon for these Protestant churches, and for practically every civil youth organization of size-- the Boy Scouts, for example. 

Many other organizations that become corrupted ought to be abandoned. But the Church is surely different. Again, to whom else shall we go?

What makes for a good story? Reflections on the 2006 film Babel

This morning I'm contemplating what makes for a good story. Sometimes we say that we want our stories to be "real," but I'm not sure that we really mean it. Ordinarily a story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. There are some characters who are the "good guys," and other characters who are the villains. Usually the action climaxes, and the

conflict is brought to some sort of resolution. If it's for the good, then we have a happy ending. If the ending is more complicated but nevertheless fitting, then perhaps we have a sad-but-cathartic tragedy. At least, that's the way most stories work.

These thoughts arise from last night's viewing of the 2006 film Babel (starring Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, inter alia), which happens to be available on Netflix right now. It's a movie that, with its four loosely interrelated plot lines, is fascinating for its defiance of many of our common expectations.

In the first plot line, a goatherd in a remote, mountainous area of Morocco acquires a high-powered rifle for his two sons to shoot at coyotes with. But the boys play with the rifle while guarding the goats, taking pot shots at vehicles traversing the road a mile or more in the distance. In the second plot line, a husband and wife on vacation in Morocco are aboard a tour bus that happens to be on that very road, and, additionally, the wife happens to be in the path of one of the bullets that the goatherd's boys are discharging from that very high-powered rifle.

When the couple is delayed in returning to the States, the Mexican nanny in charge of their children decides to bring them across the border so that she can attend her son's wedding. But on their return trip, the nanny's driver is questioned by the border authorities and ends up panicking. So he floors it, and ends up leaving the nanny and the two children in the middle of the desert.

In the fourth and final plot line, a deaf-mute teen in Japan prevents the authorities from questioning her father, thinking that he is somehow in trouble for a serious crime and worrying that he will be sent to jail. In reality, they simply want to question him because a high-powered rifle registered in his name was used in the shooting of an American woman in Morocco. It turns out that he had gifted the rifle to his Moroccan guide following a successful hunting expedition. The guide, in turn, had sold it to the goatherd whose sons ended up accidentally shooting the American woman.

Babel is fascinating, first of all, because there are neither heroes nor villains. The couple's marriage is on the rocks, and they're not entirely likable. While the Mexican nanny may likable, she makes a series of eminently poor decisions. The Moroccan boys do something that is horribly, horribly irresponsible at the very beginning. There is catharsis in some of the tragedies that follow-- the nanny's frantic pleading with border control that they need to hunt for the children, for example, and the husband's frantic attempts to save his wife, and the goatherd's desperate attempt to flee with his boys as the authorities closed in. But no single character is central enough to gain "traction" in all four plot lines. There simply is no satisfactory resolution to the "whole."

Which is surely the whole point of the movie. Its title, after all, is Babel. It's a fitting title, first of all, because of the miscellany of languages that the various characters use. But it's also fitting because of the incoherent "babble" of the film's structureless narrative. The film merely "tells" what happens without seeking to interpret it. Really, the only interpretation in the film is the decision to present four narratives that happen to be loosely interrelated. Even then, they're not all related to each other except second, or even third-hand. The film is masterfully devoid of all overarching interpretation. There are no truly good guys, no truly bad guys. There is no single climax, and no fully satisfying resolution. Which is all true to real life.

So my thoughts today are about why it is that we expect more out of a story than we expect from real life. Why do we want there to be good guys and bad guys when the people in our own lives are generally more mixed-bags? Why do we want the satisfaction, as Aristotle so astutely noted, of a beginning, a middle, and an end, even if that end is tragic?

I think it has to do with human nature. We need patterns, and we desire to make sense of the data of our complicated lives. Why does something play out the way it did? What does it all mean? Tellers of tales help us to detect the patterns. The character traits they choose to highlight help us to choose the side of the good. Story-tellers share things from a perspective, so that we see things through the eyes of a certain character, or a certain side. The same thing happens in history, by the way. Right now I'm covering the Punic Wars in a class I'm teaching. I find it valuable to point out that Punic means Carthaginian, and using the term implies that the Carthaginians were the aggressors in the epic conflict between Carthage and Rome. I think that the Carthaginians, for their part, would have angrily retorted that they were the Roman Wars, not the Punic Wars.

The question is whether traditional story-telling is truer to real life in limiting the perspective and exaggerating traits to highlight the patterns, or whether doing so is a betrayal of the truth. I'd tentatively argue that if a story-teller is true to his art, it's the former; if he's not, then it's propaganda. But in either case, story-telling is more like painting a picture than snapping a photograph. It is by its very nature interpretation, and while it may necessarily betray some of the facts through the selectivity of what is included and what is omitted, that very selectivity leads to a finished product clear enough to expose the patterns hidden below the surface of our lives.

I have no idea whether the makers of this film were thinking theologically. But obviously the title Babel evokes the Tower of Babel. I think that more was at stake at Babel than a mere "confusion of speech," as Genesis puts it. Rather, it is God's deliberate confusion of a false narrative. The only true narrative is the overarching narrative of Christ's redemptive sacrifice, which gives meaning and purpose to our lives. Yet, when a human story-teller tells his story and captures something of the triumph of good over evil, I think that he participates in that overarching narrative.

So you can call me a traditionalist. I like a good story, and in my mind this includes having a beginning, a middle, and an end, as well as heroes who, though imperfect, are clearly good. Which isn't to say that I don't appreciate attempts to be different. Babel is a strange movie. But it's also fascinating!