Glass Cathedral: A Novel that Faces Deep Religious Questions, with Humor, part three.

Now, in the final sections of the novel Glass Cathedral about which I have written previously, Misty and Emilio have to figure out how to tell the world that God appeared in the sky. They decide to build a glass cathedral out in the desert, near the site of The Appearance of God, and invite people to come and find out about what happened. This undertaking is more humorously difficult than either of them had guessed it would be. Misty and Emilio ended up with lots of money and had to figure out what to do with it. They planned a religiously-themed restaurant that served Jesus Pizza with lamb, tomato sauce, and Ezekiel 4:9 crust. They also planned to make their glass cathedral a giant tropical greenhouse. Both Emilio and Misty—now pushed far outside her comfort zone of shyness—went on speaking tours.

Dan went out into the desert to visit Misty. They meet in the desert springtime and see the flowers that grow rapidly in the rain then die a few weeks later. Misty realizes that Dan is in fact doing what Jesus said to do, but what few Christians do: to consider the lilies of the field. Dan realized that just one of the little wildflowers was more beautiful than all the works of man. Job had asked why God put beautiful flowers out in the desert where nobody can see them. Both Dan and Misty realize that this is a very good question.

But mainly they organized a gigantic opening ceremony with hundreds of high school bands and choirs. They supposed they had thought of everything, but with a hundred bands (several hundred tubas) playing the fundamental note of the resonant frequency of the building, the cathedral shakes from its foundations and blows away in a storm like a jellyfish in the surf. In the ensuing chaos, Misty gets trampled and disabled.

Once again, it’s not supposed to happen like this. But Emilio remains ever bubbly in his faith. No more giant cathedrals. He runs a homeless shelter in L.A. along with his nearly unresponsive wife Misty. When all the main characters unite at the end, including Margaret who has married Dan, they all agree that what God wants us to do is just to help make the world a better place.

You all knew this, of course, in principle. But in this delightful novel, you can watch diverse characters discovering this simple truth for themselves.

Biblical Deserts

There are many references in the Bible to deserts, none of them good. One of them is an Old Testament prophecy that Handel used in The Messiah: Make straight in the desert a highway for our God (Isaiah 40:3).

Clearly, Old Testament deserts are things that we should get rid of. And the Old Testament describes the reclamation of desert areas as the work of God. One of these passages follows immediately after the above quote.

When the poor and needy seek water, and there is none, and their tongue is parched with thirst, I the Lord will answer them, I the God of Israel will not forsake them. I will open rivers on the bare heights and fountains in the midst of valleys; I will make the wilderness a pool of water, and the dry land springs of water. I will put in the wilderness the cedar, the acacia, the myrtle, and the olive; I will set in the desert the cypress, the plane, and the pine together, that men may see and know, may consider and understand together, that the hand of the Lord has done this, the Holy One of Israel has created it (Isaiah 41: 17-20).

The deserts, or wilderness areas, are not to be confused with thriving, highly-evolved desert ecosystems. In natural deserts, the plants have many exquisite adaptations to deal with heat and drought. Succulent plants store water, desert bushes have very deep roots, and desert plants even have special forms of photosynthesis that allow them to make food under all but the driest conditions. Some desert plants are small and tender, and have astonishing flowers, and they appear totally out of place in a dry desert. The way they survive is by living their whole lives, from seed to seed, in the brief rainy season. These are the deserts we need to protect, such as in Saguaro National Park (Arizona) or Anza-Borrego State Park in California. These are not the deserts to which the Bible refers.

 

The deserts of the Bible are the lands that have been corrupted by human civilization. Poor farming practices swept away the natural plant cover and caused soil erosion, leaving a barren landscape. That is why cities that were once thriving consisted only of collapsed walls surrounded by bare soil. This is what the earliest Sumerian cities looked like even at the time Isaiah wrote his prophecy. There was plenty of degraded land even around Jerusalem that everyone who heard Isaiah’s prophecy could readily see. To this day, most of the land around the Mediterranean remains partially degraded from millennia of human abuse. Today we think of Italy and Greece as dry shrublands; but they used to be, according to ancient writings, covered with thick forests.

If you are someone who is involved in any stage of land reclamation, to take a landscape that has been devastated by decades or centuries or millennia of human mismanagement, and turn it into a thriving ecosystem, you are doing some of God’s work. Although I do not believe that the modern nation of Israel is in fact God’s own special country, it is obvious that modern Israel has done a lot of reclamation, making what had been a devastated landscape bloom. They have been pioneers of soil conservation and dry land agriculture. Drip irrigation was invented in Israel. The joke goes: on the cover of the birthday card it says, In honor of your birthday, a tree has been planted in Israel. Inside the card it says, Wednesday is your day to water it.

The lands that have been reclaimed from human-produced deserts do not look like natural deserts. Just read the list of plant species in the passage above. Cedar, acacia, myrtle, olive, cypress, plane, pine. There is no natural ecosystem where you will find all of these trees together. They have to be planted in a garden that has displaced the degraded land.

None of this is miraculous. It is just good, hard work based on scientific studies (many of them Israeli). Isaiah says that God has done this. But it was not miraculous. God works through us, in this case through scientists and farmers. In order to see it as God’s work, you have to do what Isaiah said: to see and know, to consider and understand together. A quick glance at the trees is not good enough to see the work of God through mankind.

Transition from Fundamentalism to Agnosticism, part eight

I will post, with minimal editing, what I wrote on 15 March 2005, during my trip to see desert wildflowers. This was, as close as it is possible to determine, the exact date on which I became an agnostic.

“How can I begin to describe the beauty of the spring desert I beheld yesterday? And the greatest blessings came when I took the time to look closely, to slow down and immerse myself in it, to open myself to the Spirit.” While most people do not look closely at nature, out of a nation of 300 million, there must be a few million who do. “I must keep this in mind to counterbalance my cynicism, even though it is realistic and true…For the moment, I feel good not just about nature but even about the species of which I am a part.” I was reading a book, Evil and the God of Love, by John Hick. Hick “openly admitted ‘the fact of evil [which] constitutes the most serious objection there is to the Christian belief in a God of love.’ He calls it a fact; it is not, as Buddhists might say, an illusion, nor is it merely a form of human behavior. It is evil…Hick rejects an ‘inoffensive but unhelpful agnosticism,’ which provides ‘a perpetual burden of doubt’ to all believers, and has always done so, even back in the so-called Age of Faith. And Job’s answer, to be tremblingly quiet before God’s incomprehensible majesty, is not a solution…If God is intentionally involved in the world (and this may be his entire action), then we cannot expect God to see or manipulate the world from a cosmic viewpoint. Perhaps—I am speculating now—the Spirit Himself struggles to understand this? If so, then the Spirit’s answer is not an explanation but a delicate desert spring wildflower.”

I can remember where I was when I wrote this. I was eating breakfast in a restaurant in Yuma, Arizona. The trip I took out into the desert was spiritual as well as scientific.

The next day I wrote the following. To explore the wildflowers “was like walking in heaven. I also relived the beautiful part of my childhood,” when I walked amidst the spring wildflowers in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada.

But I continued reading and thinking about the problem of evil. The irrepressibly optimistic Harry Emerson Fosdick posed the opposite question to the problem of evil: “why is there so much inexplicable good in the world? Since the time of Fosdick, and of C. S. Lewis’s similar argument, altruism has been discovered. But it does not explain all of the goodness, greatness, our capacity for wisdom, love, science, and (what I now experience) biophilia.” This does not answer the problem of evil, “but what else can I do but stumble amidst flowers and rejoice while I can? I can rejoice in the flow of the Spirit, and say that this is the entirety of God’s work here and now. The Spirit also cleanses away the scabs of anger and the rot of selfishness.

“It does no good, Hick claims, to blame Satan, for now we just have to explain why God permitted Satan to exist, nor does it do any good to appeal to the finitude of creatureliness [only a theologian could come up with this], because even within our limits we could be good but are not. Sorry, John, but we will not reason out a solution. Our only response can be like a visitor to the desert spring, seeing a brief symphony of joy in a hard land, or a visitor to the desert summer, who can see nothing good but who must force himself to admit that life persists dormant.”

I continued to think about my deteriorating health. “There will be no miracles for me. But in the event that I survive, I will be an imperfect conduit of the Spirit, and enjoy it. God “allowed at least one species to evolve the intelligence to appreciate…that though most organisms simply decay, a few re-emerge as fossils, as objects of beauty…”

She Died in 2008

She died in 2008. The years are passing, and at some point she will be forgotten. And what connection could she possibly have for me? A little Mexican girl I never met. I very much doubt she was a saint. She was probably just as worldly and selfish as any other human being. Why, then, does her story bring tears to my eyes?

Josseline Janiletha Hernandez Quinteros was fifteen years old when she joined a group of her fellow Mexicans to cross the border illegally into Arizona. All she wanted was to find her mother, who was in Los Angeles. She sustained an injury, and the mercenary group leader decided to leave her behind in the desert. When the group got out of the desert, her brother asked volunteers for help in finding her. They found her. The first thing they saw was her bright green tennis shoes. The next thing they saw, and smelled, was her rotting corpse.

I realize that there are many issues connected with illegal immigration. These people are breaking the law. Yes. These people may consume resources that are already in short supply for Americans, including legal immigrants. Yes, although one look at a fast food dumpster makes the supply argument look pretty vacuous. I dispute none of these things. But what bothers me is the zeal of moral rectitude that some people take against the illegal immigrants, a zeal that has gotten the federal government to spend millions of dollars. First, the federal government has spent enormous amounts of money to build a high-tech fence to prevent border crossings. A portion of Interstate 8 comes close to it outside of Yuma. Last summer I saw this fence. It reminded me of a Stalag confinement or the Berlin Wall. And it stretched into the distance. Millions of dollars to keep illegal immigrants out. But the zeal has gone further. It is illegal to provide food or water to these immigrants, as activist Daniel Millis found out in 2010. If you see one of them dying in the desert, you have to break the law to help them to survive. At this point I will ask the obvious question: What would Jesus do?

Why do some people like to hate illegal immigrants so much? The Old Testament prophets, from the early Amos to the later Jeremiah, criticized one king after another because they did not do justice and provide for the poor, the widows, the orphans, and the aliens (also called sojourners). The least we can do, to avoid God’s wrath (if there is a God with wrath) is to not hate the illegal aliens. Is that too much to ask? We may have to arrest them and send them back, but at least we can avoid hating them. I assume most Border Patrol officers are professionals and do their jobs without showing disrespect to the people whom they must arrest. I am thinking more about the civilian activists who make illegal immigration sound like the Black Death and illegal immigrants like rats.

And like any government, our federal government exults in its own power. The Border Patrol points to the fact that, since the big fence has been in operation, there have been far fewer desert crossings by illegals. The credit, they believe, goes to our technology and to the fact that the Border Patrol has been kicking Mexican butts. But as a scientist I have learned to recognize the difference between correlation and causation. During the time that illegal border crossings have declined, there has also been a recession. (I know, the recession is officially over; have you noticed?) Many poor Mexicans have weighed the danger of a desert crossing, plus the declining prospects of employment, against the danger of staying home and putting up with drug cartels. Many of them have decided that, at this time, a border crossing is not worth the risks and expense (the mercenary group leaders demand steep payment).

Like anyone else driving through California, I have had to wait in the long lines on the freeways as Border Patrol officers screen each car. They have signs up telling how many pounds of illegal drugs they have confiscated during these searches. I concede this point, and appreciate it. But something is wrong if it is a crime to help a little girl dying in the desert.

This topic is not one to which I have given much attention. So why am I writing this? Just look in Janiletha’s eyes, and you will know.