Bruce’s Thoughts

It’s been ages since I received a real Message in Meeting, but today it happened like this. A Friend stood to speak to an internal struggle he is having: “If I’m a convinced Quaker, just what am I convinced of?” He delivered his message at some length, and it spoke to my condition. But the part that really grabbed my attention was his distress at not having an answer to this important question. These words were in my mind and mouth within an instant, and I only waited a decent Quaker interval before rising to deliver them.

Answers are overrated. When we have an answer to a question, we tend to dust off our hands and say to ourselves, “Well, that’s settled.” But often there is more than one answer, or a series of deeper questions to explore, and if we think that the answer closes the question then we’ll never have the chance to discover what lies beyond the first answer. So by all means seek the answer to important questions, but keep the questions in your heart, and explore it further, until it feels resolved. And then don’t be surprised if it recurrs in a few weeks, demanding still more answers.

I just finished listening to an old American spiritual named “Angel Band”, featured on the soundtrack of “O Brother Where Art Thou?”. (You should listen to it before you go on, then go buy the soundtrack). It got me thinking about the idea of angels in general - do they exist, what are they, and where do they fit into our mythology. This isn’t an academic treatise, just a collection of my thoughts, so proceed at your own risk.

The old man singing the song has seen a lot of life - maybe more than he bargained for - and is contemplating his death, and what he expects after. His vision is glorious - a flight of angels on “snow white wings” who will personally escort him to Heaven. The usual term for this is an “apotheosis,” but I like the old man’s language better. Clearly, he isn’t dreading his death because he has a cast-iron conviction that he will be met by a welcoming committe, and won’t have to wander across the desert alone.

But why angels? Why doesn’t he expect to open his new eyes on God’s glory? I think it’s because we and God are of different orders of creation - except for mutual love, there is an infinite gulf between His reality and our ability to comprehend. So, God needs angels as intermediaries between Himself and mortals. The Catholic church has a very sophisticated theological model for angels, and angels of different degrees of potency, and angels appear in the theology of an amazing number of disparate religions: Christianity, Islam, Bah’ai, Zoroastrianism, Latter Day Saints, Sufi, and maybe more. I’m no expert on Eastern religions, but it seems to me that the notion of the Bodhisatva, a perfect soul who has chosen to return to Earth to minister to the rest of us, is a rough parallel to the Western idea of angels. So it seems that the concept of angels as an intermediate being resonates deeply with some chord in mankind around the world.

So do angels really exist? Can we weigh and measure them? What do they look like in the real world? The most common answers seem to be either that angels are glorious beings of unbearable brightness, winged and clothed in shining white robes, or that they are immaterial beings who can be known only by their works. Personally, I find both of these unsatisfying. The vision of brilliant beings is too grand - this kind of angel is designed to overawe and intimidate humans, and I don’t think that God intended them for this. But the notion of an angel as an immaterial, intangible being who can somehow cause effects in our world without being detected offends my physicist soul.

So I’d like to propose a third vision: that angels look and behave exactly like us, live among us, and touch our lives in perfectly ordinary, unremarkable ways. The fireman who rushes through flames to save a family might be a union member, family man, and, incidentally, and angel. The teacher whose passion for language kindles the soul of a poet might be an angel. Certainly both of them perform miracles every day when they reach out and make the world a better place. How would you know?

I know that this vision of “angels among us” isn’t original with me, but it’s my blog and I’ll carry on regardless. Think what it means if we can’t distinguish the angels among us from our human kindred: to a physicist that means that there is no real difference - that either angels don’t exist, or we are all angels. Since the first part of that dilemma is of little interest, let’s go with the second. What if you, reader, are part angel? You will undoubtedly say, “Steady on, I would know if I were an angel, and I’m not.” Well, how would you know? Perhaps that bit of you that wants to do the right thing, and to help people when you can, and to choose order over chaos (you know the bit that I mean) is really your angel nature, created by God to carry out His work on Earth among your fellows. In Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, he spoke of the “angels our better nature,” and he was no fool. I find that notion very attractive because it allows for the effects of angels without requiring miraculous apparitions or mysterious uncaused events.

My faithful readers know that I started a new job on Monday.

The week went better than I feared, but not so well as I hoped. After all the new employee initiation, I started to settle into the project. The good news is that everyone I work with is smart, talented, and very helpful. And I did need the help as I tried to configure my workstation and get running the software that I’m supposed to be working on. It’s a slow process of working through problems one at a time, and I’m still not done. Next week.

So thanks to all who were keeping me in the light. Don’t stop, but you helped a great deal.

My last post was something of a downer, so I thought to conteract it by telling you about my favorite song, a Shaker dance tune named “Simple Gifts.”

‘Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free,

‘Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,

And when we find ourselves in the place just right,

‘Twill be in the valley of love and delight.

When true simplicity is gain’d,

To bow and to bend we shan’t be asham’d,

To turn, turn will be our delight,

Till by turning, turning we come out right.

You can listen to it here, and then go out and buy the album. “Simple Gifts” was written by Elder Joseph at the Shaker colony of Alfred, Maine in 1848. You can read all about its history in its WikiPedia entry but I’d rather tell you what it means to me.

I was first captivated by the theme when I heard it in Appalachian Spring, by Aaron Copland. In the second movement it starts as a lilting air played by solo clarinet and evolves into a mighty chorus of massed brass with a brilliant trumpet carrying the theme along. Of course the Shakers would have hated an arrangement of their music, because they felt that music and dance were gifts to the Lord and should be given spontaneoously. But the theme stuck in my mind and, fifty years later, it still surfaces when I’m preoccupied. I offer it up to God sometimes, in the spirit of the Shakers, but I wish I were musical enough to sing it for people.

‘Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free,

‘Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,

And when we find ourselves in the place just right,

‘Twill be in the valley of love and delight.

To the Shakers, “simple” had a very specific meaning: not possessing more than you needed, not seeking novelty for its own sake, honoring tradition, and obeying God through the Elders, Similarly “free” also had its own meaning: not being entangled by what the Shakers called “the world:” possessions and passions outside the community. Indeed it is a gift if you can achieve any of these in your life, and the song speaks of Elder Joseph’s striving for simplicity, with an implicit prayer to God for help.

Now, what about the “place just right?” I don’t know that this had any special meaning to the Shakers, but isn’t it a lovely thought, that there is a place where you belong, where God means you to be, and where you are doing God’s will? It feels to me that the “valley of love and delight” is the feeling of centeredness that is your reward for finding the spot in the universe that you are meant to occupy. I’ve been searching for mine for more than half a century; sometimes I feel closer and sometimes farther away, but I’m still searching.

When true simplicity is gain’d,

To bow and to bend we shan’t be asham’d,

To turn, turn will be our delight,

Till by turning, turning we come out right.

In the last verses I’ve alway heard an echo of the Buddhist doctrines (though the Shakers would be scandalized by this comparison). They are a manifesto: that it is possible to leave the world behind and attain the promised simplicity, and that we can find a way to our “place just right” and that, when we do, we will be fulfilled in the way that God intended for us. It may be impiety to call this a Shaker vision of Nirvana, but I don’t care - it’s a useful comparison so it stays.

There aren’t many perfect things in this weary old world, but this short little hymn comes as close as anything else I can think of. Maybe Elder Joseph was a gifted poet and songwriter, or maybe God reached down and gave us this paen of hope through him. In either case, I owe him a great debt.

I suppose that everyone has a favorite poem, and it is a favorite because it puts into words their feelings that are so deep they can’t be expressed. My own favorite is “Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” by Randal Jarret:

From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

To help you with the context a little bit, here’s a brief note from Jarret about the symbolism:

“A ball turret was a Plexiglas sphere set into the belly of a B-17 or B-24, and inhabited by two .50 caliber machine-guns and one man, a short small man. When this gunner tracked with his machine guns a fighter attacking his bomber from below, he revolved with the turret; hunched upside-down in his little sphere, he looked like the foetus in the womb. The fighters which attacked him were armed with cannon firing explosive shells. The hose was a steam hose.”

I memorized the poem the first time that I read it - it seared itself into my memory - and to this day it rises unbidden in times of stress. For the longest time I didn’t understand why it affected me so much, and I started concentrating on the most obvious features: the deadly vision of the bomber, the capitalization of “State,” the horrific nightmare of the slashing fighters, and his grim posthumous depiction of casual death.

But then I noticed the maternal imagery, and the vision of birth - separation from the nurturing mother and being expelled into the violent world. And finally I came to the vision that should have jumped out from the beginning - this poem isn’t about a birth, it’s about an abortion. It’s about how the State is organized to kill this small man hunched in the small womb of his ball turret, and the callous, casual way that the State treats his death. I’m still processing this level of the poem’s meaning, establishing how it relates to my own life and why it affects me so strongly. And all the time I’m waiting for yet another layer of meaning to be revealed, and to see new ways that it speaks the unspeakable for me.

It’s 7:41AM, I’m supposed to show up at Lincoln Labs at 9:00 for new employee training, I’m as nervous at a cat, and I can’t honestly tell you why. Part of the anxiety is definitely work related - will I have the technologies that they need? Will I be able to keep up with the discussions? Will I understand all the jargon in the meetings? This part of the anxiety I understand.

But a surprisingly large amount has nothing to do with the technology, or the job itself. Instead, I worry about things like:

“What if I get there and it’s the wrong day, or no one comes to meet me?”
“What if I get off on the wrong foot with my supervisor, or my colleagues?”
“What if I can’t find my office, or the cafeteria, or the restroom?”

As I listen to myself, this sounds like my worries on the first day of school, from the time I was six until - well, until forever. There’s always been a worry, “Will I fit in?” I suppose it’s one of the five great worries of all of mankind, and comes directly from our history as pack animals on the plains of Africa. In the hominid packs, not “fitting in” could be a death sentence, and I have to believe that we have a genetic imperative to find a place in our immediated society.

When I get my rational mind engaged, I don’t think I have much to worry about - people have been gracious through the interview process, I’ve got my background check out of the way, and they say I’ve got an office reserved, so it should be okay. And even if there are problems, I’ve got enough social skills to handle them.

But still, there’s this little ape in the back of my skull who is shouting his worries, and it’s making the rest of me very anxious indeed. I guess the only way to quiet him is to get there, settle in, and get through the transition period.

Wish me luck.

Today’s headlines are full of news about the contractual bonuses that AIG will pay to the very managers who put its balance sheet in the far infrared. Editorial writers seem to want someone to “do something about it,” presumably by forcing AIG to abrogate its contractual responsibilities and refuse to pay up.

I have to admit that part of me likes this idea as a sort of rough frontier justice, but on second thought it sounds more like a frontier lynching. For better or for worse, there’s a binding legal contract in place and, if the government can force its cancellation, then it can step into other contractual relationships at will and then none of us is really safe from Big Brother.

I think that AIG was incredibly stupid in awarding bonuses without tying them to performance, and the Bush administration was even more stupid for awarding bailout funds without tying them to performance, but that’s all in the past and we can only take it as an expensive lesson learned.

But how about this: let AIG pay out the bonuses as they are required, then let AIG shareholders bring civil suit against the company and the executives for breach of their fiduciary responsibility. In the short run, it’s an expensive lawsuit that would only shuffle the money around, but it’s certainly a warning shot across the bows of other companies and executives. And who knows, maybe some of these overcompensated money managers would decide to forego their bonuses as the cost of staying out of the media spotlight.

It’s just a thought, but it warms up an otherwise dreary morning.

I’m getting up at 4AM to get on the road by 5AM, to reach the airport by 6AM to catch a flight at 7AM, and somewhere on the way I’ll get to watch the dawn rise up like thunder out of Boston on the bay. Lemme tell you, compared to a warm bed and sweet dreams, dawn is way overrated.

Today is my last day working for eScription and Nuance.

I’ve changed jobs many times during my career, and left a lot of companies, but this time I’m leaving with real regrets. Of course there were irritations, and I won’t be sorry to leave them, but I’ve grown to love and respect everyone with whom I’ve worked here. I’ve rarely met such a talented, dedicated set of engineers.

I’ll miss you all terribly.