Eating, Praying, Loving (Part II): Saying Grace

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One of the most memorable moments in my early days of being a pastor was the time I was meeting with a young couple, relatively new to the country and completely new to the church, who had recently decided to follow Jesus. Their experience in our church was their first introduction to Christianity, and I was discipling them in their newfound Faith.

This was one of our first meetings, and part way into it, the wife asked me, "How do you say grace before a meal?" It occurred to me that this simple act of thanksgiving was entirely foreign to them, but that they had seen folks in our church doing it, and wanted to know more.

So I explained the basics. Before you eat, someone says a simple prayer, thanking God for the food he has provided and asking his blessing as you eat it. It could be as simple as speaking to a good friend who has invited you over to dinner, thanking the host for his hospitality, so to speak.

And in one of the tenderest moments I’ve ever experienced in my pastoral work, the wife turned to the husband. “Ok, then,” she said. “You’ve been doing it right.” I call it tender because in that moment I was suddenly teleported to their dining room in my mind’s eye, and watched as this husband fumbled his honest way through this most basic of Christian tasks. Something I have been doing since childhood and taken for granted all my life, was to him a profound privilege and a beautiful mystery, something he knew Christians ought to do but was not sure if he was worthy of the task.

I’m sharing this story as the second stop on our journey through this “biblical spirituality of food,” because that moment with that couple gave me a brand new appreciation—even a new thankfulness—for the act of giving thanks before a meal. If you’ve been saying it since childhood, that God is great and God is good and so we thank him for our food, it may begin to feel somewhat rote, but if you can see it with the fresh eyes of a new disciple, you will discover how fundamental this simple prayer really is for Christian spiritual formation.

Because food, of course, is life. Literally. If we couldn’t eat we would die, and if we don’t we will. It is really that simple. And by pausing briefly to thank the Creator before we dig in, we acknowledge that we don’t just depend on him for our food, but for the very life it sustains. In doing this we adopt that singular posture which is the proper, natural, and necessary posture of the Christian: one of utter thankfulness.

Scripture actually enjoins God’s people to be thankful more than it does almost any other command. “Give thanks to the Lord for he is good, his love endures forever,” says the Psalmist. “Give thanks in all circumstances for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus,” says the Apostle. And in another place, speaking about food specifically he says, “Everything God created is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving.” It’s not for nothing that the central act of Christian worship, the Lord’s sacred meal, is often called the Eucharist—Greek for “thanksgiving.” After all, the only thing we could ever really “give” to the Almighty Creator of everything is simply our “thanks,” and then open our hands to receive as an unmerited gift everything that comes from him.

What better way to practice this most fundamental attitude of Christianity, than to do it literally, three times a day, whenever we sit down to devour the concrete physical gifts he has provided to keep our concrete physical bodies alive? After all, like all the rest of his creatures, we too look to him to give us our food in due season (Ps 104:27).

This is where any spirituality of food must start, I think: with a deeper appreciation for and greater sincerity in the act of saying thanks. This has always been so, but it is more important than ever, in our modern age where human ingenuity has increased our ability to produce food beyond the wildest dreams of generations past, and it’s easy, maybe, to pretend that we’re our own providers, that we could feed ourselves without God’s help, thank you very much. Because of this, it’s perhaps all the more urgent for us to pause continually and renew our thankfulness, not just for the food we receive, but for the very privilege of getting to say thanks for it.

Another term for the prayer before the meal, of course, is “saying grace.” This is because when we thank the Creator for our food, we are saying the truest truth of all: that it’s all grace. The food that keeps us alive, yes, but also the table it’s set on, the good friends we have to share it with, the love of God, the mercy of salvation. It really is all grace. And the discipline of saying it’s so, three times a day before we eat, teaches us not just to be thankful for the food, but for every good and perfect gift that comes down from above—from the saving grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, to the simplest gifts of air to breathe and food to eat.

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The Years the Locusts Have Stolen, a song

For better or worse, I was raised on the glam metal of the 80s. My first ever album was Def Leopard's Hysteria, and I played it till the tape was worn through. Listening back to some of that old music, I'm a bit chagrined that my taste was so clearly that of a 14-year-old boy, but then again, I was just a 14-year-old boy. 

One of my favorite bands of all time, actually, was a somewhat obscure metal band called White Lion. You may know them from one or the other of their two big radio hits, "Wait," and/or "When the Children Cry," but they have a whole treasure trove of musical gems in the vault, just waiting to be discovered. This is owing, primarily, to the fret-board wizardry of their lead guitarist, Vitto Bratta. Bratta was probably the best guitarist to come out of the glam metal era, and had White Lion's star burned a bit brighter for a bit longer, he may have earned a spot in that league of guitar legends that includes the likes of Hendrix, Clapton and Van Halen. As it was, I always felt that he was both more melodically tasteful and more technically accomplished than Eddie Van Halen, the guitarist who was, undoubtedly, his biggest inspiration.

Anyways, I'll never forget the day I first heard the opening riff of the opening song of Pride, their break-through second album. I am a bit of a synesthete, so all I can say is that before the song was done, I was awash in rich waves of majestic purple, darker than the sea is deep, and spangled with bright bursts of Roman candle silver. After that came "Don't Give Up," "Lady of the Valley," "Wait," and each song was like nothing I'd ever heard before but had been listening for all my life. Bear in mind, I was only a 14-year-old boy.

All this is by way of introduction to this week's cut from my "Three Hands Clapping" album. The day I started writing it, I'd recently listened to White Lion's Pride for old time's sake, and had it in mind that I wanted to write a song in homage to this band that had played such a prominent part in my musical formation. I'd also had it in mind for a while that I wanted to write a song based on Joel 2:25, but I didn't know where to begin. I did my best to put these two ideas together, and this is what came out. I ain't no Vitta Bratta, of course (not by a long shot), but the opening riff and the solo is the nearest I can come to approximating his awesomeness.

I hope you enjoy!



Hear a rattle of wings
Like a whisper of death
In a wilderness bleached by the sun
And the stubble is dry
And there’s nothing else left
When the black cloud is lifted and gone

When the bones are picked clean
And the heart has been turned into dust
You can’t unsee what you’ve seen
And there’s nobody left you can trust

I’ll pay you back for the years the locusts have stolen
I’ll pay you back for the tears that fell in the dark
When the sun has turned black
And the stars from the sky are fallen
I’ll pay you back, I’ll pay you back

And you’re not who you were
And you’re not who you are
And you’re not who you’re gonna be
And you can’t get it back
And you can’t let it go
And you can’t find a way to get free

Like a stone in your heart
It’ll weigh you down, regret
And it’ll tear you apart
All the things you can’t forget

I’ll pay you back for the years the locusts have stolen
I’ll pay you back for the tears that fell in the dark
When the sun has turned black
And the stars from the sky are fallen
I’ll pay you back, I’ll pay you back

Conspiracies Exposed (Part II): But then again, Conspirators Do Conspire

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Many years ago I knew a man who had lived all his life in South Africa before immigrating to Canada. He was a highly successful, well-educated professional, a committed Christian and a respected member of our community. He was also adamantly convinced that the Catholic Church was the anti-Christ, the public face of the Freemasons, and part of a sinister plot to dominate the world.

I disagreed with his theory, and he and I had many long, intense conversations about why. He had, after all, oodles of reasons to make his claim. He shared with me a whole library’s worth of video tapes, lectures, and talks that laid it all out.

Why, for instance, was there the image of a winged lion depicted on the floor of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, when the winged lion was notoriously the symbol of Babylon?

I tried in vain to explain that the winged lion also happened to be the traditional symbol for St. Mark the Evangelist, based on John’s glimpse of the four living creatures in Heaven (Revelation 4:7) and Ezekiel’s glimpse of the creatures with the head of a lion and the wings of an eagle, surrounding the throne of God (Ezekiel 1:10). I then tried to explain that St. Mark’s Gospel is traditionally associated with Peter, since Irenaeus (ca.180 AD) calls him the “disciple and interpreter of Peter.” It therefore makes sense that in St. Peter’s church in Rome there would be the image of Mark’s winged lion.

Doesn’t it?

My friend was decidedly unconvinced. We batted “evidences” back and forth more furiously than two ping-pong masters in a championship match. At one point I asked him, somewhat exasperatedly, why was he so convinced that his theory had to be true. Where, I asked, did all this suspicion come from?

I’ve never forgotten his answer. It’s because, he explained, he had lived in South Africa during apartheid. And when that oppressive system came to its final, inglorious end, many ordinary South African citizens were shocked, appalled, and flabbergasted to discover all the secret, even diabolical government conspiracies that had been festering for years under the surface of their presumably civilized society. People were disappeared in the dead of night; extrajudicial killings were carried out by government sanctioned death-squads; propaganda was printed in papers; lies were taught as fact in schools.

"I’m suspicious," he said, "because I’ve lived through a conspiracy before. I know that they are possible."

This brings me to the point of this second post in our series on conspiracy theories. Simply put: people sometimes conspire. This is both the draw, and also the great danger of a conspiracy theory.

I’m making this point in particular because of some of the feedback I received from my last post. I was surprised, and even a bit perplexed, by how many readers pushed back on my basic premise, that conspiracy theories are a “hole you don’t want to fall down” (to borrow a phrase from another blogger). I heard comments like (or to the effect of): “Even so, I don’t think you should just blindly accept the mainstream narrative.” Or: “Just because an idea isn’t accepted by the general public doesn’t mean it’s crazy.” Or: “I expect there were a lot of ‘conspiracy theorists’ rounded up under the regime of Hitler because thy spoke up about their ‘theories’ that the Nazis were ‘conspiring’ to take over the world.”

Without unpacking each of these comments, I would suggest that all of them touch in one way or another on the same thing that my South African friend was getting at.

History shows that people do, sometimes, conspire. Sometimes disastrously. Sometimes diabolically.

But if I may, let me suggest that even so, a conspiracy theory is not a helpful way to process, or respond to this truth.

And let me suggest this by clarifying some terminology. I have noticed in the discourse surrounding the recent Covid-19 conspiracy theories, a certain imprecision, even sloppiness in the language that is especially unhelpful when it comes to something as psychologically complex and epistemologically subtle as a bona fide conspiracy theory. People seem to be using the term to refer, on the one hand, to any suspicion that “we’re not getting the whole story here,” any hunch that people in power may have ulterior motives we’re not hearing about. On the other hand, of course, it’s still being used to refer to (and often to ridicule) the most egregious instances of neurotic paranoia, the tin-foil hats and chem-trail fears of the Info-Wars variety.

I call this imprecision unhelpful because it has two equal and opposite effects. First, it allows us to silence dissenters with scorn—next thing you know they’ll have us wearing tin-foil hats, right? But second, it closes us off to the possibility we might be wrong-- after all, no one wants to discover they've all this time been the dupe of a conspirator, right? Both these effects together leave us less likely to ask probing questions, less likely to hear ideas we don’t already agree with, and more likely to be manipulated.

Given that, it may be helpful to distinguish a “conspiracy theory” from a “conspiracy hypothesis,” and to use these terms more precisely in our discussions. The word “theory” itself comes from the Greek word theoria, “to look” or “to see.” As far as I can tell, this is because a “theory” is an abstract, generalized way of thinking about a set of phenomena that allows you to “see it all,” in a sense, as a whole. The value of a theory is its explanatory power. It accounts for “all the data” and it allows you to make comprehensive predictions about the world. The challenge of a theory is its “completeness.” The theory has already, in a sense, settled the question, and so any data that doesn’t fit the theory is either ignored, over-looked, or pounded into the round hole of the theory until it’s no longer square.

A hypothesis, by contrast, is less generalized, less abstract, more of a “working model” for explaining particular phenomena. Consequently, hypotheses are much more responsive to the data as it is. A hypothesis doesn’t have to “see it all as a whole” the way a theory does, and so any data that disproves it doesn’t create cognitive dissonance, rather, it simply suggests adjustments to the hypothesis are necessary.

Any real scientists in the room may argue that I’m butchering the use of these terms as they are used in the laboratory. Fair enough. But in epistemological terms, I think this is an important distinction. A “theory” must explain all the data, whereas individual data suggest “hypotheses.”

This distinction sheds profound light, I think, when we bring it to the issue of conspiracy theories. What makes a “conspiracy theory” more than just a simple “suspicion that something’s afoot,” is not that it expresses skepticism about generally held beliefs. It’s that it requires the adherent to fit all the evidence—even the evidence that disproves the theory—into its framework, however ruthlessly you have to distort reality in order to get it all in. A conspiracy theory, you might say, is not so much about “what you believe” as “how you believe it,” a certain way of holding one’s beliefs, more than it is any specific set of beliefs, per se.

If I’m on to something in this definition, I would argue that many of the ideas that get dismissed in public discourse as “conspiracy theories” would probably turn out to be a “conspiracy hypotheses,” if we could sit down and discuss them at length; and if they weren’t they would certainly be more healthy and helpful if they were expressed as one.

How would you know the difference? I think a simple litmus test would be: A) how open are you to humbly engage with perspectives that disagree with your own? B) how willing are you to hear facts that disprove your hypothesis and modify it accordingly? and C) (this one is the hardest) how much does your skepticism emerge from the darkest flotsam of the human heart—pride, ideological obstinance, rebellion against authority, xenophobia, paranoia?

If I answered “very closed,” “unwilling,” and “mostly” to those three questions, chances are that I’ve bought into a conspiracy theory, the way I’ve been defining it here.

And chances are, too, that instead of becoming less likely to be duped, I’ve actually made myself more likely to be.

I say that because of the premise I started this post with: that history proves that people do conspire.

It’s true; but fascinatingly, history also proves that one of the methods the conspirators have used to get away with their conspiracies, is to convince the public to buy in to a “conspiracy theory” of one sort or another. Speaking precisely, Hitler did not round up and kill “conspiracy theorists” during Nazi Germany. He rounded up and killed political dissenters (among many others). But one of the reasons he was able to do this with impunity was because he had convinced the German public to believe a conspiracy theory, in the fullest sense of the term: that a secret cabal of Jews was conspiring to take over the world, and the only thing that stood between them and Jewish domination were the horrific “solutions” of the Nazi regime. If we did some digging, we could probably think of more examples, both historical and contemporary, of times when the real conspirators used the epistemological shell game of a conspiracy theory to distract the public from what was really going on.

After all, the lesson of history is not just that people conspire. It’s also that people are often far too willing to let a political ideology, a xenophobia, a paranoia, a fear of honest dialogue, or some combination of all these things, do the thinking for us, sometimes with disastrous results. The solution, of course, is not blind naivete, any more than it is blind skepticism. The solution is actually opening our eyes. It's to look at the world with a earnest desire to know the truth, however wrong the truth might prove us to be on this or that assumption, and in so seeking it, to let the truth set us free.

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The Kairos of Gaming: Of Games and God, Part II

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Last night I opened the “Minecraft game saves” folder on my laptop, dropped my latest Minecraft world onto a flashdrive, and then proceeded to clean out the whole folder, every save, every backup, every screenshot. All of it went to that great digital recycling bin in the sky.

Then I gave said flash drive to my wife and told her to hide it somewhere in the house, with strict instructions that, however much I might beg her to do otherwise, she should not return it until Christmas.

I feel—and probably sound—somewhat pathetic making this confession, but it’s true. I have been wanting to focus more of my energy on writing, have felt called to do this in fact, and the plain truth of the matter is this: that left to my own devices, I would pour far more time than I have to spare into the enjoyable, but otherwise unproductive business of mining and crafting, leaving far too little left over to do what I really want to do, which is to write.

I am not sharing all this simply for absolution, however. It’s more to point out our first landmark in the “theology of gaming” we started journeying towards in my last post. It is, I think, both the best starting place for discussing video games from a theological perspective, and, interestingly, the strongest theological objection to gaming as a human activity, at the same time.

I’m thinking here of the way video games consume time.

Let me start with the theological objection. I mentioned in a previous post that the two main games I’ve spent my time playing over the last decade have been Minecraft and Skyrim. Skyrim, if you haven’t heard, is a Tolkeinesque fantasy role-playing game, set in a vast and intricately detailed open kingdom known as Skyrim, a province of the imaginary world of Tamriel. It’s basically a living, breathing Dungeons and Dragons fantasy, complete with elves, orcs, giants, and demons. Your main job in Skyrim is to advance through the story-line, completing quests and conquering foes, until you acquire both the skills and the spells necessary to defeat an apocalyptic, world-eating dragon named Alduin, and so become the fabled Dragonborn.

Skyrim is available through a video game distribution service called Steam. This is handy, because whenever you log onto Steam, it tracks the number of hours you’ve spent playing any given game in your account. Consequently, I can tell you with great precision that, since embarking on my very first quest in Skyrim, I have logged no less than 539 hours playing the game.

539 is a lot of hours. If I had played them all in a row I’d have been playing for 22 straight days. If it was a full-time career, I would have already been 3 months on the job. And that’s only counting the hours I played over Steam (you can also play off-line), and it’s only counting the hours I spent playing Skyrim—who knows what my stats would look like if I included all my Minecrafting into the equation.

There is a place in the Psalms where the psalmist cries out to the Lord, “Teach us O Lord to number our days.” The idea, of course, is that the number of our days is, in fact, remarkably small. Three score and ten years—or, 613,200 hours—is all the Psalmist gives us. Subtract 8 hours a day for sleep, and that leaves us with only 408,800 left over. If I kept going at my Skyrim rate, I would burn up almost 10,000 of those playing video games.

This would probably be tragic, because after 539 hours of play, all I have to show for my efforts in the world of Skyrim is a series of pointless achievements in a video game, a fully levelled-up wood elf warrior, and an imaginary chest full of digital treasures that I can literally do nothing with.

Enthusiasts would want to pump the breaks here, and argue that there are all kinds of benefits that come from gaming-- social, emotional, intellectual, and so on-- but even so, from a strict "productivity" point of view, time spent playing video games is, in fact, time mostly wasted.

But that, as I say, is not only the greatest objection to video games, it is also the greatest starting place for thinking about them theologically. Video games, after all, remind us that time need not always be spent productively in order for it to be spent well. There are some activities, actually, that are inherently valuable and intrinsically worth doing.

In order to appreciate this, we need to consider the function of play in human experience. A video game is, first and foremost, just that: a thing to be played; and any theology of gaming, if it is going to explain the phenomenon accurately, will have to first develop a working theology of play. In his study of human play, Dutch theorist Johan Huizinga suggested that there were three specific factors that made an activity playful, anthropologically speaking. First, the activity must be voluntary; second, it must follow a scripted logic; and third, it must stand apart in time and space from all other activities. Video games, of course, meet all three of these requirements, but its this third that I wish to focus on here.

Something happens to time and space when a video game launches—a kind of suspended animation—and the player enters into a time and space entirely set apart. This is why, at the height of my Skyrim days, I could start a quest at 9:00 in the evening, and before I knew it the whole household was sleeping, it was 2:00 in the morning, and as far as I could tell, less than ten minutes had passed. There are other forms of play that have this same effect on me—reading fiction can sometimes do it—but few activities, I think, open us up to a “time set apart” the way video gaming does.

In God in the Machine, Liel Leibovitz argues that this is one of the great sociological gifts that video games give us, the ability, as he calls it, to waste time. “Speaking of video games,” he says, “parents, educators, and other responsible adults frequently and often sneeringly label them a waste of time. They are right, but for all the wrong reasons. Video games do waste time, but not mindlessly, never wantonly. They waste time in a way necessary to curb the otherwise rampant industriousness of developed capitalist societies, necessary to solve the central problem of the medium, namely how not to force humans, thoroughly analog creatures that we are, into digital mind-sets, bound by code and devoid of free will.”

In other words, video games allow us to escape the modern utilitarian view of "spending time"—the “time is money” philosophy of the modern world—that operates continually on the assumption that an activity is only worth doing if there is “something to show for it” at the end. To the extent that “to sanctify” something means “to set it aside for a special purpose,” video games give us a sense of what it means to experience “sanctified time.” Kairos is the word theologians sometimes use to describe “sanctified time,” and often kairos is held in tension with chronos, or chronological time. Kairos is time set-apart, time that has no utilitarian purpose, time that unfolds in some way parallel to chronological time, and is valuable not because of what you can do with it, but because of what it does to you.

In pointing all this out, it needs to be squarely faced that there is, surprisingly very little discussion of play whatsoever in the Scriptures. Unlike the ancient Greeks, the ancient Israelites did not seem to have any sporting events; nor are there any depictions of any Bible characters playing at anything. It is true that Jesus pointed out children as exemplars for life in the Kingdom, but that was clearly because of their humility, not their playfulness.

However important it may be for human development and well-being, the Bible largely ignores play.

But that may be because the Bible has in full what all our playfulness can only hint at: the truest doorway onto kairos time, and the only thing really worth wasting our chronos on: the act of Biblical worship.

I use the word “waste” very carefully here. After all, there is nothing at all “wasteful” about worshiping God. It is the one thing we were made for, the trajectory of the Christian life, and that thing we will be doing when time is finally, fully “set apart” and we are with him for eternity.

There is nothing wasteful about worship.

But, in the strictest sense—the capitalistic, utilitarian, means-to-an-end sense—there is nothing “practical” about it, either. The very first sacrifice described in the Book of Leviticus is the whole burnt offering, which the worshiper offers voluntarily, as an expression of thanks and devotion to the Lord. It doesn’t start with the atoning sacrifices, which are “used” to deal with the problem of our sin. It doesn’t start with the sacrifices “used” to expiate our uncleanness. It starts with the one that you give for no other reason than that you want to worship God, and all you get out of it is the joy of having worshiped. With some sacrifices, of course, you got to keep the meat, or at least a portion of it, and eat it with your friends and family. Not so the whole-burnt offering. The goat, or lamb, or bull, or pigeon, went on the altar, and went entirely up in smoke, so that no portion of it could be “used” for any other purpose.

We see this at work, too, in the Biblical command to practice Sabbath. Sabbath time is the most fully set-apart time of all, and it is—again speaking from a strictly capitalistic perspective—useless time. Sure, you could argue that resting one day in seven makes you more productive for the other six, but that is never the justification the Scriptures give for keeping Sabbath. We are to do it simply to mark how God set us free from slavery (Deuteronomy 5:12), and how God himself created the world (Exodus 20:11). Sabbath-time, in other words, assures us that however productive we may think we are, still all the work in the world won’t sustain the world. That’s God’s job; and because he has pledged himself to do this job, he does not exact from us a factory-efficient accounting of what we produced with every second.

Video games, of course, are not worship. A legalist might go so far as to argue that video games can leads us into false worship; and they may have a point. All I am trying to argue here is that gaming is an expression of a deeply seeded desire in us to escape into kairos time, where chronos is suspended for just a moment, and time itself can be well-wasted. However imperfectly video gaming expresses this desire, I think the Bible would say that the desire itself tells us something about human nature before God.

We were made to worship. And when we are worshiping we are entering into that experience which all the video games in the world hint at, perhaps, but none of them ever fully achieve: a time and space fully set apart, where we are doing the one thing that has no capitalistic utility but makes us most fully human: coming to know God, so that we might enjoy him forever.

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Eating, Praying, Loving: A Biblical Spirituality of Food (Part 1)

Last summer I went through a season where I was constantly struggling with this low-grade fatigue that I couldn’t seem to shake. It might have been my ramped-up hours at work, or subtle changes in my bedtime routines; it might have been the fact that I had just celebrated my 46th birthday, or possibly a combination of all three, but after a month or two of seeing me drag myself around, my wife had had enough and sent me off to see her naturopath.

I didn’t know what to expect, but I was willing to try pretty much anything if it would get me back to feeling normal. To my surprise, Dr. Laura spend a great deal of time talking to me simply about my diet. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it certainly wasn’t an in-depth exploration of what kinds of food I was using to fuel my body. She even asked me to spend the next two weeks tracking it, writing down in a food diary every morsel that entered my mouth.

I have always assumed that I was a relatively healthy eater. I don’t have much of a sweet tooth. I do the majority of my shopping on the outside aisles of the grocery store. I eat vegetarian a lot of the time. I mean, I wasn’t no health-food guru or nothing, but I did okay.

And then, two weeks later, I handed in my homework to Dr. Laura and received the painful truth. Turns out I have a tendency to skip meals (mostly breakfast and lunch), power through with coffee, and compensate with all kinds of empty carbs late in the day; then I over do it at dinnertime and go to bed feeling gross.

And I wondered why I was always out of vim and vinegar. You could get away with a diet like that when you were 25 and your metabolism could handle it, but at 46? Man: grow up, right?

But this post is not meant to be the true-confessions of a reformed carb-binger. And it’s not even a promo for the value of naturopathy (although, the modified Keto diet Dr. Laura recommended to me did wonders for my energy levels and general sense of well-being). But this post is not about that.

It’s about the spirituality of food.

Because the three or four months I spent paying close attention to everything I ate opened my eyes in a way they had never been opened before to the fact that our diets actually have a profound impact on our spiritual well-being.

We are, after all, holistic creatures. Our spirits and our bodies are intricately connected and interrelated. This is why Jesus enjoined us to love the Lord our God with all our heart, souls, minds, and strength. Because your physical eating, sleeping, breathing, sweating life is lived before the Lord as much as your praying, thinking, yearning, introspective life is.

To put it very simply: you don’t “have” a body; you “are” a body. And the Scriptures consistently assume this, and affirm this, and appreciate this fact. The same God of peace who will sanctify our “spirits” and our “souls," also intends to sanctify our “bodies”  in 1 Thessalonians 5:23.  These are each part and parcel with the other.

Even on a very concrete level, it should be obvious that what I eat affects me spiritually. If I feel like garbage physically, because I’ve been treating my digestive tract like a garburator for the worst kind of junk food, it’s not that likely that I’ll have much motivation for extended prayer, Bible study, or works of mercy. If I have no physical energy because I’ve been skipping meals and carb-ing up late in the day, it’s not too likely I’ll have much spiritual energy either.

The more I meditated on this, during my weeks of diet-journaling for Dr. Laura, the more I noticed how often and how profoundly the Scriptures actually address food as a significant concern in the spiritual life: from Torah’s dietary laws to Jesus’ teaching about fasting, the Bible makes no bones about it that there is some mysterious connection between our diets and our spirits.

Just exactly what that connection is remains to be seen.  Over the next little while I hope to spend some time exploring this topic here at terra incognita, in a series on the spirituality of food that I’m calling, “Eating, Praying, Loving.” So if this post piqued your appetite for more (pun intended), let me invite you to check back in over the coming days.

If you’re still scratching your head skeptically, wondering if I’m not biting off more than I can chew on this one (pun still intended), let me just suggest this, as a starting place for building a “biblical spirituality of food.”

Simply put: it is no accident that the central act of Christian worship (the most famousest Hillsong ditty not withstanding) is, and has always been a shared meal. The Eucharist, Holy Communion, our glorious supper with Jesus, is not merely a metaphorical act. Even if you’re not sacramental in your theology on this point, all but the most ardent of Zwinglians would agree, I hope, that our symbolic meal with the Lord is no mere symbol. (As if it could just as easily have been a bungee jump for the Lord, or something, and it still would have accomplished the same purpose.)

As the primary sign of his presence among us and our spiritual fellowship with each other, as his way of strengthening us and encouraging us in the spiritual life, as an opportunity to encounter him and the mysterious means of our communion with him, he gave—wonder of wonders—food for us to eat together.

Of course Jesus is not only our host at the table, he is also the feast itself (this bread is his body), but in making that spiritual leap to the sacramental meaning of the meal, the bread and cup do not cease to be—all but  the most ardent of transubstantiationalists would agree, I hope—it does not cease to be food for us. Literal, real, life-sustaining bread and wine.

Because the Word of God knew all along what I am just beginning really to appreciate, that there is in fact something mysteriously spiritual about the act of eating, and so, when it reached for a symbol that could mysteriously express our union with Him, it reached, of all places, into the cupboard, and pulled out a loaf of fresh-baked bread.

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Conspiracies Exposed: A Pastoral Reflection (Part 1)

In sound production, a feedback loop is what happens when a microphone is placed too close to a speaker, causing the microphone to pick up the signal from the speaker and send it through the amplifier, so that it comes back out the speaker again, where the microphone picks it up again (a little bit louder this time) and sends it back through the amp, where the mic picks it up and sends it through yet again, until before you know it the paint is peeling off the walls.

Anyone who’s ever been reduced to a quivering mass of deafened jelly by the piercing squeal of a low-fi PA system in a school auditorium before, will know exactly what I’m talking about. Because when feedback happens, usually it’s the worst frequencies in the signal—the sharpest, the most hair-raising, the most soul-piercing—get amplified the most, and so what comes out of the speaker is enough to make the banshee cower in fear.

In this regard, a conspiracy theory is very much like the feedback squealing out of that low-fi school auditorium PA system.

 Let me explain.

The other day one of my favorite blogs, Reasons Why posted a piece on “Reasons Why a Conspiracy Theory is a Hole You Don’t Want to Fall Down.” It covers everything from the Paul is Dead Conspiracy Theory to the darkest holocaust denials of Jim Keegstra, and is certainly worth a read.

Towards the end of the post, the author mentions the fact that “almost 30% of Americans believe the coronavirus was manufactured artificially and intentionally,” and describes a newspaper full of “anti-Chinese and Sinophobic articles regarding COVID-19” that was delivered anonymously to their door.

It all made me wonder: is there is something about a crisis like the coronavirus pandemic that makes us especially at risk of “falling down the hole” of an good old-fashioned conspiracy theory? Conspiracy Theories, after all, give us simple black-and-white explanations for complex issues, where there is a clear (if unseen) villain to pin the problem on and a clearer hero (ourselves) to resist it. They feed the hunger of our xenophobia and scratch scapegoating itch that crises tend to aggravate in us. They allow us to project our anxieties and sublimate our fears in ways that give them faces and names.

But in all these ways, as I’ve said, a Conspiracy Theory is like that awful squeal coming out of the high school PA system. They are, if you will, an epistemological feedback loop.

When I was studying the ethics of education as part of my teacher training in Alberta, in the 90s, we looked at the story of Jim Keegstra as a case-study in what not to do. If you haven’t heard, Keegstra was a High School teacher in Eckville Alberta, who was charged and convicted of hate speech in 1984, for teaching his students, among other things, that the holocaust was really an elaborate hoax perpetrated by the Jewish people as part of a clandestine plan to take over the world. I read a fair bit of Keegstra’s story for that class, and was stunned not only that a teacher could get away with teaching these things, but that anyone could believe such rubbish in the first place.

And then my ethics prof explained something about conspiracy theories that I’ve never forgotten. A conspiracy theory, he said, is psychologically self-reinforcing. First of all, they require a great deal of social “risk” to buy into one, because they set you apart from the vast majority of the public who don’t believe. They may even open you to ridicule, rejection, or, in Keegstra’s case, legal action. As a result, the person who has bought in has a profoundly strong (if sub-conscious) motivation to guard their investment. Too much is at stake to be proven wrong.

And this is where the epistemological feedback loop begins. Since the psychological stakes are so high, once you’ve signed on to a conspiracy theory, you become more interested in “being right,” than you are in “discovering the truth.” And once you’ve made that subtle shift in your thinking, then any evidence that someone might produce to disprove your theory, becomes for you all the more evidence that you were right. The microphone picks up the signal and just sends it through the amplifier of your conspiracy theory, making it louder (and grosser) than it was before.

For the conspiracy theorist, photographs documenting the very real holocaust become evidence simply of how advanced the “Jewish plot” for world domination really is. “See! They have even infiltrated the history books and news media, slipping in their faked photos …”

For the conspiracy theorist, the lack of evidence proving the existence of a clandestine Illuminati pulling the strings of global politics becomes evidence, simply, of how powerful the Illuminati really are, that they could effectively erase all trace of their activities. “Of course there’s no sign of them! That’s how secret they really are.”

And on and on it goes, until the paint is peeling off the walls.

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to participate in a live-streamed theological conversation with Kim Alexander, professor of church history at Regent University in Virginia. We were talking about the theological meaning the church could draw from the Covid-19 pandemic, and the lessons that church history could teach us about it. I was hoping to dig into the ways eschatology, Christology, and pneumatology must illuminate our theodicy at a time like this. You know: the biggies.

But then a question popped up in the chat bar, that asked, in effect:“What should the church do about all the COVID-19 conspiracy theories floating around?”

It was a bit deflating, to be honest, but I have to admit that four weeks later, that's the question I'm still chewing on.  I'm planning to post more about conspiracy theories in the days to come, both in general, and as it relates to the pandemic specifically, so I hope you’ll check back in as I continue to chew it over. But for today let me simply say this: let’s remember that usually when a feedback loop happens, the worst frequencies in the signal are the ones that get amplified; and whatever we choose to believe about the coronavirus, let’s not allow the epistemological feedback loop of a conspiracy theory amplify the worst frequencies in us.

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Of Games and God: A Theological Analysis of Video Games (Part I)

A couple of years ago I was sitting in a coffee shop with a friend of mine who is an avid video gamer, discussing his favorite pastime, and some how or other our conversation took a decidedly theological turn.

I think I asked him what he thought the spiritual significance of gaming was, and from there I wondered out loud what themes he would draw on, if he were to develop a “theology of video gaming.”

My friend was quite a bit younger than I, and had spent far fewer hours reading theology than he had playing video games, so he was a bit at a loss where to begin. I suggested a few starter ideas—the spirituality of play, the theological meaning of technology, the role of community, and so on—and a good hour later we had unearthed enough raw material to write, if not a full-on theological treatise, at the very least a respectable prolegomenon to one.

I’ve thought over that conversation in the coffee shop a number of times since, and have had it in the back of my mind for a while now to write something about the theological meaning of video games. I even started some initial research on the topic, reading Liel Leibovitz’s God in the Machine, and  Craig Detweiler's Halos and Avatars, an anthology of theological essays on the topic. This gave me even more fodder for the theological canon, but somehow I never found the time to sit down and assemble my thoughts into anything cohesive.

And then the world went into Covid-19 lockdown mode in the spring of 2020, all my usual routines were chaotically disrupted, and I suddenly found myself with not only a renewed interest in gaming, but also oodles of time to write about it. Of course, it may be that a series on the theological meaning of video games was waiting for just such a time as this to be written. According to this article by the BBC, gaming numbers have soared since the pandemic started, and across the board the gaming industry is seeing record sales as more and more people are turning to video games to pass the time.

The reasons for this might be obvious—as the world is collectively stuck at home and looking for fresh ways to while away the hours—but the meaning of it, and especially the theological meaning of it, is less so. What, if anything, does our skyrocketing desire to romp in these digital amusement parks tell us about God, and about ourselves in relation to God?

It would be a question worth asking even if the pandemic hadn’t stuck us all inside and glued us to our computer screens. According to this 2018 survey, conducted by the Entertainment Software Association, some 65% of American adults play video games, 75% of American households have at least one gamer in residence, and 79% of these believe that gaming “has a positive impact on their lives.” Nor is gaming mere child’s-play anymore. The average age of an American gamer is 33, and he or she (it’s almost an even gender split) is spending somewhere around 7-8 hours a week playing video games.

Given these stats, perhaps no phenomenon is more ripe for some theological reflection these days than that of the no-longer-nerdy, deceptively facile, and undeniably ubiquitous video game. What is happening to us, from a theological perspective, during all those hours we spend in these magical worlds of our own creation?

It’s a question I propose to explore over the next couple of weeks here at terra incognita, in a blog series I'm calling "Of Games and God." I hope you will join me for the journey.

Of course, if you do, it would only be fair of me to put all my cards on the table. I would describe myself as a consistent-but-not-so-avid gamer. The only games I’ve really played in the last 10 years are Skyrim and Minecraft; but then, I’ve really played them in the last 10 years. I’ve logged more hours than I care to admit questing to become the Dragonborn in the one, and I’ve built entire pixelated kingdoms in the other (Exhibit A: the video walk-through of my latest Minecraft creation, below). So: as I weave together the various threads that together make up my “theology of video gaming,” know that I am speaking as one who—though he is hardly a master of the arcane digital arts—is no untrained initiate, either.

But more on that in blog-posts to come. For today, whether you consider yourself a master or an initiate, let me pose to you the same question that got my friend and I started that day in the coffee shop: what themes would you draw on, if you were to develop a theology of video gaming?

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Thoughts on the Discipline of Fasting

Sometime in the second century AD, the Roman Governor of Asia, a guy named Arrius Antonius, encountered one of the strangest cases of his political career.

A group of Christians asked him to execute them.

Now, at this point in history, early in the second century AD, Christianity was still an illegal religion. The Christians refused to worship Caesar, so officially being a Christian was a capital offense, punishable by death.  But many of the Roman governors didn’t enforce this law too strictly.  Don’t get me wrong, they found Christianity to be a strange, distasteful movement that they didn’t know much about and didn’t think much of, but still, they didn’t want to shed innocent blood for no good reason.

Antonius was one such governor.  He was pretty lax, it seems, when it came to enforcing the anti-Christian laws.  He must have been, because one of the things history remembers him for is that time, like I say, when a bunch of Christians came to him asking him to execute them.

But, you gotta understand:  the early church considered martyrdom—the honor of actually dying for the Lord Jesus Christ—to be the highest privilege of the Christian life.  They called it “the crown of martyrdom,” and as far as they were concerned, there was no crown more glorious.  So you can imagine if, let’s say, if a governor like Antonius was denying Christians this highest honour, it’s no surprise, maybe, that a handful of Christians came to him and demanded that he do his civic duty and have them executed.

Antonius, the history books tell us, was flummoxed.  He actually did have a few of them executed—I think he was hoping this would maybe cool their jets a bit—but it didn’t so he turned to the rest and said the one line that even Wikipedia remembers him for, 2000 years later:  “You wretches,” he said, “If you want to die, don’t you have cliffs or ropes you can use?”

This would actually become a growing problem for the early church—Christians who were so on fire for Jesus that they went around actively seeking martyrdom.  Eventually the church would make a pretty sharp distinction between Christians who died as a result of genuine persecution, and those who went out looking for death.  Only the first kind counted, they said.

But the problem (if you want to call it a problem) was that, as Christianity became more and more mainstream—I mean, by 313 AD it had become the offical religion of Rome—as it became mainstream, real genuine martyrdoms were harder and harder to come by.

It became such a problem, that sometime around 400 AD, a guy named Saint Jerome suggested that there could be two kinds of martyrdom—a “red martyrdom” where you actually literally died for Christ—but in place of that a Christian could have a “white martyrdom.”  In a White Martyrdom, you didn’t literally die, but you took on some special vow that amounted to a spiritual “death-to-self.” White martyrdoms might include things like joining a monastery, becoming a hermit, stuff like that.

This idea caught on.  One of the earliest recorded sermons we have from Medieval Ireland comes from around the 7th Century.  It’s called the Cambrai Sermon, and it adds a third color to the colors of martyrdom: you could have a red martyrdom, where you actually, literally bled for Christ; you could have a white martyrdom, where you took on some life-long vow of piety.  But, for everyday folk like you and me, who still want to die for Christ but don’t have these options available, you could have a Green Martyrdom.

A Green martyrdom was a particular act of self-denial, where you died, spiritually, in the moment, you died to the desires of the self, so that you could live more fully and freely for Christ.

And this brings me, at last, to the point of this post, because one of the main forms of Green Martyrdom (there were others, to be sure, but this was one of the main ones), was fasting. Intentionally going without food—or in some cases, certain kinds of food—intentionally going without for a limited, specified period of time, so that the body’s hunger teaches us to hunger for Jesus.

This may seem strange to some—that the early Christians would have associated fasting with the highest honor of the Christian life—the honor of dying for Jesus.  It doesn’t to me.  There is, after all, something profoundly spiritual about food.  Practically, it’s the stuff of life.  You can’t live without it; and the body—physically—our bodies are wired naturally to respond to it, to long for it, to need it.  (I mean, all I’d have to do is spray some “fresh-baked-bread” room odorizer into the air, and your body would tell you, wouldn’t it?)  We need it; our mouths water for it; we can’t do without it.

And what if our spirits watered for Christ, like that?

Really: what depths, what heights what lengths of life with God would be discovered if we learned to hunger for him the way our bodies hunger for food?  I mean: that’s what fasting was about for the early Christians—learning to hunger for Christ by dying to self.  And biblically, I think that’s what fasting’s about, too: the life with God we will discover as we learn to die to self.

That has been my experience, anyways.  This month at terra incognita, we've been looking at some of the spiritual disciplines of the Christian Life that don't often get a lot of attention in the practical, results oriented culture of the modern (and somewhat cushy) North American Church.  Last week we talked about silence; today we're considering Fasting.  There are lots of places to look for practical tips on fasting, so I won't share any here (for concrete tips, I'll refer you to this very succinct and helpful guide prepared by my friend, Pastor Derek Spink).  What I'd like to do instead is challenge you to, quite literally, to put your money where your mouth is, when it comes to your witness to Jesus, and consider exploring, if you've never done so before, the practice of fasting as part of your martyrdom for him.

To get you thinking more creatively about how this spiritual discipline might be part of your Christian practice, let me also share a few reasons why I fast (I shared these with my daughter the other night when she asked me about fasting).

1.  To sharpen my spiritual hunger for God. (When I'm fasting for this reason, I let the hunger I feel through the fast point me to God, and, whenever I do feel it, I ask myself if I'm as hungry for him as I am, in this moment, for food).

2.  To strengthen my solidarity with the suffering or the hurting.  (There are times when I've fasted for people, or for specific issues, and during those fasts, whenever I feel hungry, I use it as a prompter to pray, in the moment, for the person or issue I'm fasting for).

3.  To deepen my dependence on God.  (During this kind of fast, whenever I feel weak, hungry or tired during the fast, I use that as a reminder that I am as dependent on God for sustenance as I feel in this moment, for food; like it does on bread and water, my life literally depends on him.)

4. To ignite my passion for evangelism.  (During this kind of fast, whenever I feel hungry for food, I sort of think-- God is as hungry for people to come into relationship with him through Jesus Christ, as I am for a snack right now-- and that thought deepens my own heart for evangelism).

There are other reasons, too, but those have been the most meaningful in my practice of fasting.  I'd encourage you to consider areas of your own spiritual formation that the intentional practice of fasting may sharpen, strengthen, deepen or ignite.

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Practical Tips to Biblical Fasts (Prepared by Pastor Barry Taylor)

Fasting is a spiritual discipline that Christians practice as a way of expressing how “hungry” they are for God’s grace in their lives.  It’s a way of focusing our hearts and minds on God in specific ways.  It usually involves refraining from eating for a specified period of time, though it can take a variety of forms (see below).  Fasting is usually pared with prayer, and most fasts include a specific plan to increase or intensify one’s focus on prayer during the fast.

There are many Biblical examples of fasting that we can consider:  the Ninevites fasted after hearing Jonah’s prophecy; David fasted when his son was close to death (2 Sam. 12:16); Jesus fasted when he was tempted by Satan (Matt. 4:2) and Paul fasted after meeting Christ on the road to Damascus (Acts 9:9).

John Wesley (the founder of the Methodist Movement) identified regular fasting as one of the Christian “means of grace” – i.e. one of the spiritual disciplines that God uses in our lives to help us grow deeper in his grace. In the early Church, the first Christians fasted every Wednesday and Friday.

Some suggestions and help:

Fasting is always to be God centered.  Fasting is God-led, and should be the Holy Spirit’s prompting.  Jesus’ counsel to his followers in Matthew 6: 16 – 18 was to be more concerned about what God thinks than what other people think.  Only fast if and as you sense God’s Spirit directing you to do so.

CAUTION:  Though fasting is encouraged no one should risk their life to fast.  Certain groups of people are better to hold off from fasting; pregnant women, nursing mothers, anyone with a heart condition/ heart disease, diabetics. 

Do not binge before you fast or after.  Some people think because of going without food for a time, better to eat a huge meal.  It is better to begin eating lighter meals leading up to your fast and after, especially of fruits and vegetables.  This helps shrink your stomach and get your body used to less food.  After a fast for any period do not eat a big meal, start with juices and soups then move to add milk and yogurt, then fruits and vegetables. 

Drink plenty of water.  We always need to drink water; most of us do not drink enough.  This becomes even more important when fasting.  Be careful of how much caffeine intake you have.  If you drink a lot of coffee/pop, try to cut back before you fast, and while fasting avoid drinking coffee/pop.    

1. Begin with a fasting one meal. If you have never fasted before then start by fasting one meal. If your daily practice is to skip breakfast, then perhaps try fasting lunch or supper. Remember again the point is to sacrifice to learn from the experience.

2. 24 hour fast.  Most people find that starting lunch to lunch works best.  Eat lunch one day then fast through supper and breakfast the next day eating lunch again.  Try this type of fast for several weeks to get yourself used to fasting.  Then try a regular 24 hour period where you don’t eat all day.  Better to walk before you run.

3. 2 or 3 day fast.  Once you have experienced the 36 hour fast for a few weeks try to fast longer as the Lord leads.

4. Daniel Fast.  For some people who cannot go completely without food, Daniel abstained from any meat or wine or “choice” food and eating only things that “came from the ground.”  Much longer fasts can be done eating only fruit and vegetables for prolonged periods, 3 or 4 weeks.

5. Personal Fast.  For some people giving up something that is important, sometimes a food item other times a habit, help to repent draw closer to God and exercise self-discipline.  Giving up things like sweets (chocolate), television, video games (works well for children who want to try fasting). 

Other Notes:

• If you are following a liquid only fast, white grape juice and peach juice are good during fasts.  Citrus juices and apple and tomato juice are more acidic and can be harder for a stomach that has no food in it.
• Vegetable juices and broths are good.
• 1 cup of tea or coffee is fine, but avoid too much caffeine since it is a diuretic (causing you to lose water). 

Whirling Dervish, a song

And I had no rhythm when I first met you
But you called me out onto the floor
Just these clumsy feet and no dancing shoes
And my heart was heading for the door

But you caught my eye with your mysterious ways
And you took my hand and you compelled me to stay
As the music swelled I thought I heard you say
That tomorrow’s gonna be my dancing day

And You, you, you came into my life
Like a whirling dervish
Knocking over everything
And dancing like a ray of light
On the water’s surface
I’ll follow you as you dance

And I had no style and I had no poise
And I kept on fumbling the beat
But you didn’t mind when I kept stepping on your toes
With my stumbling heart and heavy feet

But you caught my eye with your mysterious ways
And you took my hand and you compelled me to stay
As the music swelled I thought I heard you say
That tomorrow’s gonna be my dancing day

And You, you, you came into my life
Like a whirling dervish
Knocking over everything
And dancing like a ray of light
On the water’s surface
I’ll follow you as you dance

Spin around and around and around and around
Spin around and around and around x 2

And they say King David liked to dance before the Lord
Well he must have known a thing or two
A secret step to match his secret chord
For a secret song he learned from you

But you caught my eye with your mysterious ways
And you took my hand and you compelled me to stay
As the music swelled I thought I heard you say
That tomorrow’s gonna be my dancing day

And You, you, you came into my life
Like a whirling dervish
Knocking over everything
And dancing like a ray of light
On the water’s surface
I’ll follow you as you dance

Filthy Lucre, a song

Billy was a big shot on Bay Street
Waiting for his ship to come in
He didn’t wanna miss it when it landed so he stole
His anchor from another man
He said, everybody wants a little bit of sugar
All its gonna cost you is some filthy lucre

Filth, Filthy, Filthy Lucre
Did you get some on your hands?
Filthy, Filthy, Filthy Lucre
Waiting for your promised land
We’re all filthy

Lady couldn’t seem to make ends meet
Wearing down her fingers to bone
She didn’t wanna beg or borrow so she sold
The only thing she had of her own
You could find her working nights until the streets took her
With nothing in her pockets but filthy lucre

Filth, Filthy, Filthy Lucre
Did you get some on your hands?
Filthy, Filthy, Filthy Lucre
Waiting for your promised land
We’re all filthy

Joey was a preacher for hire
Praying over innocent souls
He dressed his Bible up in a bright white suit
So they wouldn’t notice what he stole
He could work the room
Till the spirit shook ‘er
With nothing in the plate but filthy lucre

We’re all innocent
But nobody’s clean
Everybody’s money
Is the same shade of green
We’re all in this tub together
The butcher, the baker
The hooker, the preacher, and me

Wally had a way to get rich quick
Working on a pyramid scheme
He didn’t wanna wake up when the nightmare came
And shatter his American Dream
He didn’t have to go out and commit murder
All he had to do was make some filthy lucre

Filth, Filthy, Filthy Lucre
Did you get some on your hands?
Filthy, Filthy, Filthy Lucre
Waiting for your promised land
We’re all filthy