I'm not saying the Firecones! are going to have to have to cover this, or anything, but we'll have to have a multi-lingual chorus of it, sometime.

I just saw Mamma Mia! at the cinema and I absolutely loved it.  You should totally go see it (except for Liz, who would detest it).  It made me miss you guys a lot.  

So I'm getting more and more immersed in this whole "health care" thing. It's a little creepy how calloused everybody is, especially since I've frequently heard that to be a nurse you have to be super-empathic. It's chilling to contemplate how much constant exposure to human pain has dulled their emotions, and was even more chilling when I considered what would happen to a "normal" person. If the best, most compassionate of us can't handle this, who can? And what happens when someone not super-compassionate becomes a nurse? I know they must be out there, but I can only hope they all quit before they can do too much damage.

It's actually very calm in an emergency room - nurses move sedately about, even in a code blue (cardiac arrest). I guess because people have dealt with these issues so many times before, they become commonplace. When I was riding along in an ambulance the other day, we went to a nursing home to transport a person in a coma to her nursing home. She was lying there, arms flexed tightly to her chest, a stoma in her neck (so she was breathing through her throat, not her mouth and nose). Her head had a bulge, so it was obvious that she had suffered some serious brain damage, and the look on her face... she looked so young because of that, like a child of six or eight. Her eyes were open and constantly moving back and forth, like she was dreaming with her eyes open, and the only time she moved was when we had to stick a tube down her throat to clear her airway. I was applying suction, and had to put the tube down her throat until she spasmed (the tube started to enter the lungs).

The two guys I was with were pretty jaded, but you could tell they were affected by this call, probably because I was affected. It was just so sad. Nobody really knew her name - there were three different medical charts we encountered, and all of them had a different name. She was 22 years old, and had been in a car accident 3 (!) years ago and had suffered massive brain trauma. She was married too. That's just so strange and tragic. This chick got married young, and it was like... how must her husband feel? Why aren't they divorced so he can move on? Because it was obvious to me that this was one chick that was never coming back. And all she could feel was pain. That was the only sensation she showed any response to.

It was just like, why isn't she dead? Is she really going to have to live the rest of her life like this? At least 40 years of just lying there, sores all over her body and constantly needing suctioning, which hurts her. She's never coming back. She doesn't need life support, so there's no "plug" to pull, but she should be dead. No one should be forced to live like that, constantly in pain and with no way to be anywhere but outside your own head. That's enough to drive a person insane, and if you're trapped in your own head and insane, I'd be willing to bet that you'd enjoy death a great deal more than life. It was just so sickening. It was like, this woman should be dead. It is horrible that we haven't killed her, because what she's living is so... awful. I know that I can't see inside her head and tell what she's really like, but it was obvious that she was in pain, if nothing else, and if I were her I'd long for death. It just makes me so angry that we're forcing her to live in this limbo.

I just finished the last season of Angel, Joss Whedon's spinoff of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  While I didn't get as into Angel as much as I got into Buffy, I was sad that I no longer had any Joss Whedon works to devour.  My TV-related relaxation time was on the verge of dissolving into anarchy, lacking form, direction, or hope.

Two days ago, my little brother and I were driving down to Chicago to meet my mother, when I heard on NPR the words "horrible sing-along" and "Joss Whedon."  I got so excited my brother was afraid I was going to crash the van.  This would be unfortunate because we were nearing our destination after three and a half hours of following computer-generated directions that were at best unnecessarily and at worst sadistically complicated, taking us by the least sensible route it could conceive.  Anyway, it turns out Joss Whedon's created a new three-part musical called "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog," which is only available on the Internet.  Its arrival could not have been more timely.  It's about a scientist who's trying to become a super-villain, and it stars Neil Patrick Harris, whom I totally saw on Broadway in a revival of Assassins.  Nathan Fillion is in it, and it turns out he has a pretty respectable singing voice!  It's really, really good, and I think you all should watch it.           

Philosophical fragments...

Tonight I've been thinking about life and death and eternal life.  I'm not exactly sure why.  Part of it, I think, is because I'm in a transitional space, which makes me think of all the unknowns in my life, and death being just about the biggest one.  In any case, it's occurred to me lately that my body is a very complex world unto itself, in which cells are born and die every day.  They all serve the larger purpose of contributing to the complex functioning and the unique essence that is my body.  When that cell dies, I have always assumed, nothing about it in its particularity persists eternally.  So what if all of creation is like that? 

Catalyzing this stream of thought, this book I've been reading at one point discusses Einstein's philosophy of life, which the author describes as: "we can easily become imprisoned in and blinded by our own thoughts and feelings because they are concerned solely with the particulars of our lives and our desires as separate beings... we all come into and go out of this world as passing gatherings of structured energy... as eddies and waves, our lives do have a certain uniqueness, but they are also the stuff of a larger whole expressing itself in ways that ultimately surpass our comprehension."  If you add God into that equation, then all of creation becomes one large and dynamic force life evolving out of God's imagination.  The matter and energy that make up Steve Hammond says he believes in afterlife because God is a God of life.  But I don't think there needs to be an afterlife for me for God to still be God of life.  The story of creation is not about me.  It's about God.  I'm only a tiny part of that story.  And life endures.  Creation endures.  Global warming could ravage the earth and change what life exists on it, but I believe life would still remain.  It's plucky that way.  And the energy and matter that make up my body and my life will always be a part of that life.  I in my particular uniqueness (is that redundant) will cease to exist, but the matter and energy that make up my life will not.  In that regard, death is not really a loss of life, but a change of life from one form to another.    

So what if that is all there is to eternal life?  Right at this moment, I think I would be okay with that.  As D. Kamitsuka pointed out once, we will all still be remembered by God, and in that way our particular existence will never be lost.  On the other hand, I'm in pretty good shape right now.  I'm happy and healthy, with a roof over my head and adequate food.  I can afford to say that I would be content if this life is all I have as myself.  I don't know if it's enough for me when I am suffering.  Who says the particular, self-focused viewpoint afforded by suffering is a less accurate lens for understanding creation than the more meditative, emotionally-neutral broader view.  I'm not sure if the view of life as one unified and dynamic force gives adequate due to the power of evil in the world.  For my own justice work, I need to believe that evil is real and God opposes it.  What would evil even be in this schema?  Where is the justice?  I don't know if I could in good conscience tell a parent who had lost a child to try to look beyond their pain and at the bigger picture (which, evidently, is what Einstein did).  The nice thing about afterlife is that it offers justice of the true and divine kind, done by God who knows everything about everyone, rather than the imperfect and often narrow-minded justice that humans can mete out.

The view of life as unified is much easier for my sense of reason to wrap itself around than the idea of eternal life and divine judgment.  It goes much more neatly with what I perceive of myself and of the world.  But who really cares about reasonableness?  But even while reason is important for my evaluation of theology, I also agree with Kierkegaard that reason cannot fully tell us about God and the true nature of things, if it can tell us anything at all.  Because of that, a worldview that's internally cohesive, or one which causes no cognitive dissonance at all, may not necessarily be the best one.

At this point in my reflections, I have not yet come to any kind of conclusion about what I believe is the most adequate way to view death and afterlife.  Between my studies about conceptualizing life after death as bodily resurrection, and my new thoughts (at least, new to me) about no life after death, I am filled with an ever-deepening sense of awe and reverence for life.  There are so many beautiful ways to understand it, maybe it's better that no one has reached a definitive conclusion.  Knowing that is deeply joyful and God-ful for me.  In any case, I am dead set (originally, no pun intended) against having my body pumped full of chemicals and put inside a vault where I will turn into jelly instead of rotting.  As soon as I'm dead, please stick me in a pine box and dump me in the ground in the nearest state where that's still legal.  Soul or no soul, this body is going to compost.     

I preached in my home church today.  I talked about how listening and being open to dechurched people can be really hard but it's also really important, and I drew on reflections that I had reading Mary Hammond's book.

My family and I spent last weekend visiting cousins in rural Missouri.  It was pretty neat.  It's a really different cultural setting there, and everyone was always asking me if I was married or engaged and saying that they hoped I would be soon and stuff.  I didn't make any promises.  The family reunion separated into two conversation groups, one of women and one of men, with me and my little brother, who were the youngest by at least 25 years, flitting back and forth between the two.  At one point, some of the men were talking about their churches, and so I asked them what they thought "evangelical" means.  One of them, caught somewhat off-guard, said "Well, it's about being born again and accepting Jesus Christ.  That's very important."  Another one, who had been a pastor at one point, talked about how he'd visited St. Paul's Cathedral in London and it seemed cold and more museum than church, and evangelical was like the opposite of that.  It was about reaching out to show love to others, and reaching out to God by reaching out to others and showing God's love for them.  I felt like I couldn't have said it better myself, and it was really touching to find someone who had such a similar view of evangelicalism in this small, conservative community.

Later, when I was sitting with the women, I heard one woman proudly sharing stories of her daughters and her daughter-in-law.  She talked about how one of them insisted that the Southern Baptist missionary board accept her years of preaching children's sermons as fulfilling the preaching requirement for being a missionary, which they were not initially inclined to do.  She spoke of her other daughter, who refused to read any books in high school that went against her moral code.  And she talked about her Turkish daughter-in-law, a prosecuting attorney for ICE, who refused to let liberal judges be lenient with immigration laws for Mexican immigrants.  Now, I don't believe in refusing to read books that offer opinions I disagree with, and I tend to be more sympathetic to Mexican immigrants.  At the same time, I felt myself revelling in this cousin, strong woman that she was, and in her pride in her daughters' assertion of their opinions over and against authority figures.

This reunion was deeply affirming to my sense of myself and belonging to a community that is very different than the communities I engage on a daily basis.  We may have different cultural and political opinions, but we share a lot of the same spirit, which is very encouraging to me.  It again reminds me how complicated people and communities are, and how we transcend the labels which put barriers between us.  It's important not to let those labels govern the way I think about my family or anyone else, because it creates separations that just don't exist.

I devolved into preaching a bit there.  Sorry, I guess the preacher in me hasn't quite dissipated since this morning.