From Up On Frederick's Stone

Typically, Good Friday is for me a day of languishing. It’s a day where the whole ceaseless striving pain of the universe criss-crosses through the worn flesh of a human person bleeding in our memories. Christ’s passion, compassion. It is an inglorious liberation, the orthodoxy finally releasing the mystic into union with God, as Joseph Campbell would put it. The moth leaps into the candle flame. “My Father and I are one.” This year it is not.

There is a problem in genetics, supposedly. According to J.C. Sanford in Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome, we have well-developed theories for how natural selection takes place, but we cannot account for the rate of entropy that occurs in genes due to mutations. If mutations occured according to entropy, we would expect a chronic degradation of the quality of all life on Earth. Now Sanford is a Young Earth Creationist, i.e., he believes the Earth is 6,000 years old; I am an evolutionist. But he has a great point: how in the world can we account for really old genetic information being preserved?

I have now added a new page called “Reflects.” (See upper right hand panel amid the trees, about eight feet off the snow.) There I’ll put little snippets, thoughts, that are too small or that I don’t feel like making into essays. I want you to think of the word “reflects” not just as a verb.

It is a story well known. Jonah: the reluctant prophet. Called by God, an Israelite to preach love to his nation’s rival Assyria, a country rancid with violence, crime, brutality, and disorder. Racist and resistant to the divine impetus—why should those psychopathic monsters be given a second chance, be seen as equal persons?—Jonah flees in the very opposite direction of the Assyrian capital Ninevah (located in modern-day Iraq): he embarks on a journey toward “Tarshish” (which was probably Spain; and if it wasn’t, most biblical commentators agree it was definitely in the opposite direction of Ninevah. Think of the emphasis implied in Jonah paddling straight across the Mediterranean to the Straits of Gibralter and perhaps beyond those gates. Imagine him thinking of retiring to a nice seaside cottage on the Azores, or settling down along the Portuguese coast, or of finding a Morrocan village to recline and hear the sunrise of Edvard Grieg’s famed “Morning.”)

(This is going to be a series I periodically update, within this post. I will critique common blunders within Christian circles. Each entry will be headed with a quote in italics. The most recent entry will be at the top, in reverse chronological order. Note that this is not for the faint of heart.)

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     It was a sunny seaside afternoon. After five months of hunting, I had finally found a shoreline replete with purple sea urchins. Tidepool invertebrate collection has become something I do; if I called it a hobby then I’d have to say buying groceries is one of my favorite pasttimes. I go to the coast to get food. It is healthy, extremely fresh, and usually sumptuous. Of course, there are regulations from the California Fish and Game Department in effect, and these are designed based on a lot of science to maintain balance of the marine ecosystem, as well as to protect you, the consumer.

Foreword

     On a Friday afternoon in May of 2017, during a lull period in my Aircraft Design class, I scribbled out an essay for the journal Aletheia. I gave it the name “Playing with Infinity.” It was to encapsulate an ephemeral moment in my life, when the impassable limits of human experience and the escape from its infinite regress had first crystallized before my eyes.