Sunday, September 5, 2010

Ignorance

You know how you listen to great music, the kind of song you have heard 38 times before, and then you hear a lyric that smacks you between the eyes? (That's a strange mixing of metaphor, I know.)

I've been paying attention to ignorance lately, particularly intentional ignorance. I listened to a great podcast on the topic today: Maxie Burch from rhinocrash.org. In iTunes, the date is 8/17/09 (and followup on 8/23/09, titled Tensions weeks 3 and 4). Maxie's theme is elephants in the room. He notes the very real spiritual aspect of them and how damaging ignorance is when we avoid issues/problems out of fear, anger, or pain. I highly recommend you listen to them.

So the song. I'm listening to Ben Folds, hoping some driving piano will help me feel motivated to work on my final papers for Amos and Hosea. In the song "Bastard," the relevant ignorance lines play:

Close your eyes, close your ears, young man;
You've seen and heard all an old man can;
Spread the facts on the floor like a fan;
Throw away the ones that make you feel bad.

That's a fascinating insight. While I think age brings valuable observation and experience, I believe it's true that most of us ignore the stuff that makes us feel bad. There are a lot of old men out there who could have become wise, solid characters through facing pain and processing reality. Instead, they anesthetized themselves by any number of means. Intentional ignorance. Ignoring the elephant in the room. So, young man, face the facts as they present themselves. Struggle through the pain, and you will grow into great character that can change the world, or at least the worlds of those around you.

One other line from the song that is helpful is, "It's okay if you don't know everything." That's an interesting juxtaposition with the idea of intentional ignorance. But if we process knowledge and life as they come, the passage of time will yield wisdom. And one of the keys to wisdom is recognizing that we will never know everything, or anything close to that. Know-it-alls (of whom I try my hardest not to be) tend to try to control knowledge. And another theme of life I've been contemplating is how destructive the impulse to control can be.

It's best to hold knowledge loosely, but it's destructive to hold your hands up saying, "No thanks."

Animals and the new creation

In the last 24 hours, I've become much more aware of the coming concord of the animal kingdom. We've been reading Isaiah, and the last quarter of the book treats the topic of the new creation quite extensively. The most famous reference occurs early in Isaiah and at the very end: the wolf and the lamb will lie down together without any chewing on the other, and the lion and the calf will be cool.

So the awareness I mentioned is odd. It comes from popular culture. I saw a commercial yesterday during K-State's sweet win over UCLA that had all sorts of "natural" enemies drinking from a watering hole together. It's a beautiful image. (The commercial was a failure in that I don't remember the advertiser, but at least I'm looking to find out who it was.) The other reference is in Cake's "Frank Sinatra," where they sing "the flies and spiders get along together." It's an odd choice of animals, but brilliant in its freestyle on the Isainic theme.

I eagerly anticipate the new creation, and it's fun that pop culture brings my spirit back to the idea in a moment when I'm not particularly paying attention to it.