Math vs. the Tornado

When I heard that the Coen brothers were making a new film about a physics professor whose life is quietly falling apart, I had mixed feelings. The premise sounded a bit too much like Garden State for middle-aged people, without the indie music. The Coens have been on a bit of a roll lately, though. No Country and Burn after Reading were two of my recent favorites.

In the end (which should be obvious by the fact that I'm even writing this entry) I gave it a shot.

Two elements took me completely off guard, considering the premise: the offbeat humor and the breathtaking spiritual angst. One scene finds our protagonist, Larry Gopnik, sitting in a room with a Rabbi. In a moment of desperation, he asks, "Why does he (Hashem) make us feel the questions if he's not gonna give us any answers?"

The rabbi responds with a blunt, "He hasn't told me."

This may be a bold or foolish confession, but I wake up many mornings wondering if I'm wrong about the things I believe. Much of my upbringing, even through the end of college, bears a stark resemblance to brainwashing. After walking away from my faith for a time, I felt called back, but it's hard to know why you believe when so much of it was forced on you so early.

Anyway, this movie puts us in a world full of people of straightforward faith, and introduces us to a man on a search for something else. As he wanders through the inconsistencies of his stated beliefs, his profession as a physicist, and his complex, crumbling life, Larry grabs at any proposition that might help.

David Foster Wallace, in an essay titled "Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley," writes about his keen sense of mathematics and how it helped him develop a strong game of tennis. At the end of the essay, a tornado builds while he is in the middle of a volley with a friend. The tornado heralds the end of his development, since he cannot move beyond the math of the game.

I had to wonder if the Coens read Wallace's essay. The two seem to pair so perfectly together.

Our maths, the concrete symbols we ascribe to our universe, the bare facts and our ability to connect them logically, hit a wall in the face of life. We must either turn away from the unquantifiable, or we must leap into it by faith. Both positions leave us (or maybe it's just me - I know many people who don't seem to have a problem with this) with plenty of room for doubt.

After watching A Serious Man, I feel (once again) like I'm witnessing a tornado just when I thought I had the math figured out.

Go to Hell, Pop Culture

The most recent cover given to Gay Talese's cultural chronicle Thy Neighbor's Wife has an image of an unclothed woman sitting on some rocks on a beach. While she is sitting at an angle that covers all the odds and ends that would render the image explicit, it is still clearly suggestive.

It didn't really occur to me that this cover would be a problem, considering that the book was the definitive piece of journalism on the sexual revolution, and the image was clearly a relic of a bygone era, revealing less than you would see at the average neighborhood pool nowadays. So I bought the book at borders and dove in.

My dear wife did not see things the same way I did, so out of consideration for her feelings, I went ahead and took some sharpies and drew a modest skirt and T-shirt on the woman. Enjoying this creative coverup, I went ahead and added some Nike sneakers, a baseball cap, a fish in her hand, and a text bubble that says, "mmmm...sushi."

So in this way, I ended up censoring the cover of a book which is essentially about the battle between censorship and sexual liberty in America. That would place me squarely in the same camp as most of the Christians in the book, with the exception of a liscentious cult leader named John Humphrey Noyes.

In fact, I read the book with a sort of perpetual cringe, waiting to find out what kind of cruelty and repression the Christians would come up with next. As Americans from all sectors of society began openly discussing, portraying, and practicing the kind of sexual (mis)behavior that had, according to the Kinsey Reports, been going on for generations, the Church moved in with its giant political claw to smother the movement.

The tactics employed included intimidation, imprisonment, smear campaigns, and various ill-conceived political maneuvers. It's not too difficult to see why people define Christians by their hunger for power and their ignorance.

Where does anyone get the idea that a Christlike response to "sin" is to crush it with all the political muscle we can muster? I think this response is exactly the opposite of Jesus' teaching, which pierces past appearances and deeds to the heart, and addresses pain, need, and perversion that lies there with love.

Although I've only skimmed it, Rob Bell's recent book Sex God seems to herald a changing voice in the dialog between Christians and pop culture on sex, which used to go something like this:

Pop Culture: Isn't sex awesome?
Christians: Sure, as long as you don't enjoy it.
Pop Culture: But sex is wired into us. It's a biological part of who we are.
Christians: Your wiring is evil. Sex is only for making babies.
Pop Culture: You're irrelevant.
Christians: You're perverted.
Pop Culture: F**k you, Christians.
Christians: Go to Hell, pop culture.

That's a paraphrase, but I think it pretty accurately sums up the tone.

I'm a big believer in the idea that our understanding of, and more specifically our relationship with, Jesus gives us a perspective that can be both illuminating and liberating (although some would argue with my use of that word) if we can be a little less spiteful in how we listen to and speak with those who disagree with or don't understand us.

That goes for sexuality and dozens of other issues on the cultural radar these days. It doesn't mean we shouldn't have convictions and opinions. It means we should always let our speech be seasoned with Grace. We should be quick to listen and slow to speak, and we must understand that nothing short of love really makes a difference, anyway.