Extraordinarily Ordinary | Janie B. Cheaney

July 13, 2018July 12, 2018

Always In Between

Do you have a “trip from hell” travel story? Mine occurred over ten years ago, when I was trying to get from Vienna to Missouri using my status as a USAirways employee next-of-kin. It’s too convoluted to recount in full, but it began with an accidental upgrade on the train from Vienna to Frankfort (that I didn’t pay for) and ended with me on a plane to DesMoines, which was not my destination. (I got off before the plane left the ground.) The forty-odd hours of delays, close or missed calls, deprivations and misunderstandings didn’t seem funny at the time. But from that experience comes one solid piece of advice: when you are stuck in an airport for several hours because of a missed connection due to a delayed flight, find the chapel, open a Bible, and get a grip.

Chances are your place of refuge will be an inter-faith sanctuary that tries to accommodate everybody: the chapel I found in the Pittsburg airport scheduled Mass every morning, marked off a special praying area on the carpet for Muslim knees, and asked nothing of visitors but silence, so that fellow travelers could commune with their personal spiritual reality in peace. But the deepest imprint on the chapel was left by Christians, as I discovered while paging through the prayer journal on the lectern. Most of the entries expressed faith in Jesus Christ while sharing their burdens or giving thanks. Reading over them was like traveling alongside for a while.

In fact, we’re always traveling alongside: these are the people crammed three abreast on Boeing jets, sharing processed air and hugging their bit of private space. We know them, because we are them. The prayer journal revealed their hearts:

“Thank you Father for this peaceful place and this beautiful day.”

“Lord, please show me if Michelle is the one for me . . .”

“Please pray that this last visit with my dad will be special. I love you Dad–thanks for everything.”

Amid the outcries and the gratitude, I found this fleeting prayer: “. . . and bless those who are in between where they need to be.”

It’s the cry of travelers the world over–I’m here and I need to be there. Oh for wings like an eagle, that I could soar above all that unyielding space that stands in my way. Or a divine bow to shoot me straight home, piercing the hours and the miles.

That’s our wish, even while acknowledging that we’ll never truly arrive. In between–thought and deed, fact and expectation, doubt and assurance, heaven and earth–is where most of us spend our lives.

Abraham was never home. The Israelites wandered for years, and after settling in Canaan, travel became part of worship. Psalms 120-134 is the songbook for such journeys (and more edifying than “Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall.”) Most of the teaching in the synoptic gospels takes place after Christ “set his face to go to Jerusalem”–including the story of the youth who traveled to a far country, squandered his inheritance and made his painful way back home. Paul, that epic traveler of the New Testament, set out for Rome and found himself seriously “in between” on the island of Malta.

We know we are strangers and exiles on the earth, and our journeys from here to there are metaphors for a life lived in expectation of heaven. Of course we tend to forget it, but on that trip I was blessed by a timely reminder.

While I was still reading the prayer journal in the airport chapel, the door opened and an airline employee entered with a guitar. He nodded to me in the wary way of strangers, then took a seat, turned his instrument and began singing praise choruses. After a moment I joined in on the ones I knew, and just like that, we were no longer strangers. Soon three more employees joined us, then two other travelers. The songs gained energy and conviction, especially “This love (joy, peace) that I have–The world didn’t give it and the world can’t take it away.” At the end of the song service, before continuing on our separate ways, we took a moment to shake hands with special warmth. Like the pilgrims of Psalm 84, “in whose heart are the highways to Zion”, we had passed through the Valley of Baca and found it a place of springs. And the very place, providentially, where we needed to be.

February 17, 2018February 17, 2018

What Is “Color”?

Close your eyes and count to three. Then open them and focus on one stationary object.

Where’s the light coming from, and how does it reflect off the object? Where are the shadows? What is the object’s depth—could you calculate it in inches or feet? How accurate do you think your calculation is? How are you estimating it? Would the object still be recognizable if you reduced it to two dimensions (in other words, if you drew it)? Can you imagine how the object would appear if you are looking straight down at it from above?

Finally: What color is it?

Are you sure?

These appear to be questions about perception, but actually they are questions about philosophy. In fact, one of the very first philosophy questions is, if we perceive the world around us through our senses, can our senses be trusted?

The “Problem of Color” has plagued both scientists and philosophers for centuries—or that’s what Mazviita Chirimuuta says, in a provocative piece called “The Reality of Color Is Perception.” At first the title proposition seems obvious: Why, sure. Light reaches our eyes in wavelengths and the brain perceives those various frequencies as color. But . . . does that mean there really is no such thing as “color”? That color is not a real property of the things we see, but it’s all in our head? Or does color consist of some objective quality of the light? What is color?

Scientific theories tend to lean in a subjective or objective angle. Color is either a brain phenomenon or it’s a light phenomenon. But there’s another theory, the “relationist” theory, that sees it as both. Janus, the Roman god of time, serves as a metaphor because he looks both forward and back—the two-faced god. Likewise, color relates both to the objective world and to the individual mind.

Ms. Chirmuuta likes that idea: “This is a common thread in scientific writing on color vision and it has always struck me that the Janus-facedness of color is its most beguiling quality.”

She goes on: “Indeed, I argue, colors are not properties of minds (visual experiences), objects, or lights, but of perceptual processes—interactions that involve all three terms.” In that way, color perception is the same kind of process as consciousness itself. “[C]onsciousness is not confined to the brain but is somehow ‘in between’ the mind and our ordinary physical surroundings, and . . . must be understood in terms of activities.”

Let’s say then that color is mind, object, and light. Three perspectives, one phenomenon that we associate with recognize lilacs, sunsets, oceans, autumn.

Consciousness is mind, world, communication. Three perspectives, one process. St. Augustine, without the benefit of an electroscope, defined vision as eye, brain, correlation. Three perspectives, one capacity that most of us never think about.

Object, word, meaning. Frequency, ear, music. Father, Son, Spirit—is anyone seeing a pattern here? Maybe I’m just being philosophical, but once you’ve adopted a Trinitarian Creator you see Him echoed everywhere.

In the comments section below the article, one snarky responder calls out “the arrogance of philosophers who don’t know their place as they are just pseudo scientists filling the valleys and cracks of ignorance until real knowledge makes them obsolete.” As for that plaguey problem of consciousness: “all philosophy has to offer there is confusion as well which will try to persist after inquisitive scientists have solved that puzzle too.”

Might be a long wait.

January 26, 2018

If there’s a Place You Gotta Go . . .

A few days after my daughter’s wedding, I was taking my son to the airport in her car. He had to catch a plane to Nevada from Baltimore, and I would be driving back to central Pennsylvania with my granddaughter. It was kind of a complicated plan, but to cut a long story short: on the way to the airport I remembered my daughter kept no maps in her car and I didn’t recall exactly how to get back to her house. No problem: my son whipped out his smartphone and painstakingly wrote down every step of the Google directions. I remarked that it seemed more complicated than it should be. “Google always seems like that,” he said.

So after dropping him off at the airport I wended my way out of spaghetti-bowl of freeway interchanges and turned off on the first numbered road of the route he wrote down for me. My six-year-old granddaughter piped up from the back seat with one request: she wanted to stop at a Sheetz convenience store and order a snack on their electronic ordering board. No problem—you can barely hurl a chocolate malted in PA without hitting a Sheetz, so I planned on making a midway stop during a drive that should last no more than two hours.

Except that, shortly after making another turn I realized we were in the country. Had Google thoughtfully routed me around the metro areas to save my blood pressure? Had I made a wrong turn somewhere? I could have stopped at a convenience store and asked, but there weren’t any. At least, not for very long stretches of road while looping around hairpin curves, straining up and coasting down hills, and barreling, ever more anxiously, through beautiful bucolic countryside.

I didn’t make any wrong turns; the roads I was on turned out to be the correct ones. Maybe Google was having a little fun with me. At any rate, it took a good three hours to get home, without encountering a single Sheetz, and what bothered me the most was that I had. No. Map.

I understand they’re a relic of the past—who needs ‘em when you’ve got GPS to direct your every move? or you can just punch an address into your phone and the smug presence within will call out turns and remain unfailingly polite when you miss them? (I’d rather she would just yell, “You missed it! Go back!”)

I get that smartphone users can zoom out whenever they want a bigger picture of the terrain, but “big picture,” on a tiny screen is a bit of an oxymoron, isn’t it? The clumsiness of a folding map has been gist for a dozen comedy routines and cartoons, but if you’re prudent enough to pull over by the side of the road, spread out the folds and out and peruse the markings at your leisure, what a marvel of vision and precision is a road map. The subtle county boundaries, the squiggly roads and ruler-straight highways, the towns and cities named in varying font-sizes that should give a pretty good idea of where all the Sheetz stores are . . . most of all, the BIG PICTURE.

.Are we missing that? Maybe we spend so much time focused on a three-inch screen that our thinking is more along the lines of How to I get from point to point? rather than What’s the best route to my final destination? There does seem to be a lot of short-term thinking out there—no doubt a human failing from the very beginning. But how did we decide we could get along without a map?