Joan and I were sitting in our hot tub last Monday night, staring up at the stars and wondering when -- if ever -- the rains would return to the B.C. interior, that day being our 66th without perceptible rainfall, when a brilliant flash lit up the eastern sky.
“Lightning?” Joan wondered. “The weather isn’t supposed to change until the weekend.”
I started counting for the boom of thunder. Years ago, I learned that sound travels at roughly a thousand feet per second. If the boom follows the flash by five seconds, the centre of action is safely about a mile distant. (For a kilometre, about three seconds – a little closer.)
I quit counting after ten. Joan claims she heard a rumble, about ten minutes later.
Which would be about right. Because the flash, we learned the next morning, had occurred more than 200 km away, directly over Kootenay Lake. A hunk of rock left over from the formation of our solar system had smashed into the earth’s atmosphere over the little town of Boswell at the south end of Kootenay Lake; it blew up over Meadow Creek, slightly beyond the lake’s north end.
It blew up because it entered the upper reaches of the atmosphere at up to 250,000 km/hr. That’s about ten times faster than a space shuttle’s re-entry. You may remember that overheating destroyed the Columbia shuttle, in 2003. Imagine the effect an entry ten times faster.
The sonic boom caused by its explosion shook houses in Kaslo and Nelson.
Flying one-ton couch
Technically, the flying rock was a meteoroid. If it burns up in the upper atmosphere, it’s called a bolide; colloquially, a “fireball.” It becomes a meteorite only if it survives long enough to hit the ground.
Jaymie Matthews, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of British Columbia, estimated that the object was about the size of a living room couch. Alan Hildebrand, geoscience professor at the University of Calgary, estimated the couch’s weight at several tonnes.
If a mere flying couch can make that much bang and flash, I can only imagine what an asteroid ten km in diameter would have done 66 million years ago, when it smashed into what’s now the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico.
Apparently thousands of these space fragments hit the earth’s atmosphere every year. But few of them are seen. They’re too small to light up the sky. Especially during daylight hours. Or they arrive over under-populated regions like Canada’s far north. Or over the oceans, which cover three-quarters of the earth’s surface.
Guilt and judgement
A fireball in the sky creates awe and wonder. A fireball that hits the earth causes fear and terror.
Especially if it smashes through a roof. Or hits a human being.
Devastated victims wonder, “Why us? What did we do to deserve this?”
The dinosaurs might have asked themselves much the same question – if their minds were capable of formulating it – when their asteroid created a 180-km crater. Its fireball caused massive fires all over the world; the impact threw so much debris into the atmosphere that climate change killed off three-quarters of the earth’s species.
Including those bemused dinosaurs.
And what’s the answer? There isn’t one.
We humans don’t like to accept that things can happen by chance. We’re predisposed to believing in cause and effect. Long before Isaac Newton formulated his Third Law of Motion -- “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction” – our ancestors attempted to placate the gods of nature, hoping to ward off disasters like floods, earthquakes, volcanos, and hurricanes.
If things go wrong, we reason, we must have done something to deserve it. Or perhaps failed to do something, like offering enough sacrifices. Or prayers.
Probabilities
Modern science tells a different story. The universe is not a machine. We’re not dealing with cogs and gears. We’re dealing with probabilities. Among which is the infinitesimal probability of being hit by a meteorite.
There is no master plan.
There was no master plan to wipe out the dinosaurs.
There was no master plan to predestine that a particular chunk of rock, orbiting in empty space for five billion years since the formation of the solar system, should fall into the earth’s atmosphere at 10:14 p.m. PDT on Monday September 4 to flash the length of Kootenay Lake before exploding so that some of its meteorite fragments would fall into an unpopulated area and kill a specific earthworm in the forest floor.
There is no master plan. There are only probabilities. Which include chance.
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Copyright © 2017 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups encouraged; links from other blogs welcomed; all other rights reserved.
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YOUR TURN
Doug Giles took issue with my characterization of Robert E. Lee in last weeks column bout monuments and mindsets: “To my mind Robert E. Lee was a hero. He stood for what he believed and refused Lincoln’s offer to head the army of the North. He would not, could not fight against Virginia. He was a gentleman of principles. Removing his statues and monuments doesn't delete the history they represent.
Doug provided a fairly detailed exposition of the American Civil War, pointing out that slavery was endemic to all 13 colonies, not just the southern states. “We're told Confederate statues and Confederate flags should come down because they tend to perpetuate out dated and wrongful notions. These are symbols from an heroic past. These men fought for the preservation of their country's ideals. No matter what we now judge these ideals to be, it was an honest stand in defence of their country.”
“As a side note, Canada had its own little separation wars,” Doug added, noting the Riel Rebellion and the FLQ crisis in Quebec.
Steve Roney also defended Lee: “Comparing Robert E. Lee to Benedict Arnold is a false moral equivalence. Arnold did not just take up arms against the government. That would be George Washington. Arnold was also a turncoat, a saboteur, and a spy. Lee could be accused of none of those things. The only thing that separates him from Washington, or Sam Houston, or Paul Revere, is that his cause failed, and theirs succeeded.
“But even this may not be fair to Lee. It was far clearer in Washington’s case than in his that he was indeed taking up arms against the duly constituted government. After all, in the minds of most Southerners at the time, the states were sovereign. That is pretty much what the U.S. constitution says; and that is why they are called ‘States.’ Lee’s nationality, then, was Virginian. Had he taken up arms against Virginia, only then he would have been a traitor. Defending it, he was a patriot.”
Steve and Jean Macdonald both pointed out that I had spelled Sir John A’s name wrong – it is “Macdonald” not “MacDonald.”
Tom Watson took a reasoned approach: “Some people look at Robert E. Lee and see a hero who did his part to preserve a way of life, while others see a traitor whose principle goal was to sustain and perpetuate slavery, even if it meant tearing apart a nation to do so. Some people look at John A. MacDonald and see an architect of a nation while others see inherent racism.
“It's a relatively easy thing to topple over a … However, it isn't settled. There's this ‘mental monument’ to consider, and that part persists. It should be clear by now that the U.S. Civil War, even though it ended 152 years ago, is not over. So how do we deal with the mental monument?
Similarly, when dealing with mental monuments in worship, to what extent do changes in wording result in a change in how people understand who or what God is? We don't all carry with us the same mental monument to begin with. Most of us no longer understand God as some ancient male father situated high on some lofty perch, manipulating human activities like some celestial puppeteer. However, that idea still comes out in various ways. Often in sayings, such as: "God never gives anyone more than he knows we can handle" or "It must have been God's will."
“I am not for a moment suggesting that we stick with wording that no longer carries meaning for most of us in a 21st century world. In fact, I'm all for changing the wording. But I honestly don't know how to change the mental monuments that persist.”
Bob Rollwagen wrote, “Statues recognize leadership in history. They serve as markers over time. This is why ISIS wanted to destroy historical sites as not being consistent with their objectives and reminders of what had been recognized as reality in the past. Most Canadian statues reflect that position; in our neighboring country to the south we might find many statues have been erected by a few for the benefit of a few and offensive to the majority.”
Isabel Gibson noted, “Monuments are a tricky problem. I could take exception to most of them on the basis that ‘those guys’ were likely sexist.
“But I also think of Psalm 130: ‘If you, LORD, kept a record of sins, O Lord, who could stand?’
“So as we stagger together into our future, it behooves us to have empathy for those of our fellow travellers who feel slighted (even threatened) by monuments and building names, to be aware of how these monuments are being used today, to bolster our historical judgements with some historical understanding, and to have some humility with respect to how we are likely to be seen and judged by our great-grandchildren.”
Ralph Milton usually tackles me on my columns face to face, but this time he felt impelled to write: “I get twitchy about the whole idea of editing history. Especially when we condemn people who were products of their own time. Those that made a mark are often condemned because they acted out of that culture. Is that fair? Is that just?
“I remember seeing a play based on Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn,” which is full of heavily racist language and child abuse. A program note asked whether all that should be purged, but the producers decided not to because that’s the way things were then. Shakespeare reflects the culture and the prejudice of his time. You can find plenty of examples of anti-Jewish sentiment, racism, sexism and classism in his plays that nobody in his day would have noticed.
“The past is a foreign country. We can accept what was and learn from it and grow out of it, but to pretend that the things we object to were not there is to put on blinders. And it’s useful to wonder what our great grand-children will be seeing in the artifacts of the lives we have lived and the things we have written that arise out of the culture we’ve soaked into our unconscious.”
Laurna Tallman told me, “You are not going to ‘get rid of’ a ‘mental monument’ that has been meaningful to the majority of humans for millennia. It appears still to be working in contemporary Canada.
“You might better ask yourself why and how you differ from the vast majority of Canadians. You are not alone, of course. A coterie of the like-minded follow your blog.”
But we’re not all of one mind. Gloria Jorgenson supported the removal of John A Macdonald’s name from schools: “While I agree that racism was much more prevalent at that time (certainly not unanimous as you claim), it is no less offensive. I have no problem with him being honoured as the architect of our country but to place his name on the very institutions that brought so much pain to the indigenous community is, I think, adding insult to injury. Please reconsider the effect of this on the very people, children, that we are seeking to inform and direct.”
Fran Ota shared a disturbing experience: “This week I was told by a First Nations person that I should shut up and follow the lead of First Nations. I asked if all First Nations people agreed that statues should come down and names be changed, and said that I knew quite well there is no consensus. My position was that taking down the statues and changing the names goes further to whitewashing our history. My feeling was that far better education is needed, and that we could recognize what was good, even as we ensure education about the Indian Act, residential schools, the Sixties Scoop, treatment of Japanese-Canadians, Chinese immigrants, Germans, Ukrainians… I stated that I felt we needed to use these statues as teaching tools rather than hide them.
“The next day, Justice Murray Sinclair stated that removing statues and changing names is not what reconciliation is about, that what is needed is education. So after a lot of pondering and discussion, that's where I am. We keep them, and use them to teach all of our history, instead of just the bits which make us look good.”
Dona McGilvery’s comments last week about Donald Trump being the pilot of the plane all Americans are on prompted a number of responses.
Annette Conser wrote, “We have to keep the pilot under control.”
Betty Schilling said something similar: “Criticizing the pilot may help other people from having to fly with a crazy or drugged or incompetent pilot…”
Jean Hamilton was reminded of Martin Luther King's 1963 "Letter from Birmingham Jail: "I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens’ Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action.’”
Of Trump himself, Jean wrote, “He continues to endanger not only their own country, but the world. This impulsive, erratic man has the nuclear codes and a great love for sabre-rattling. Who knows how long it will stop at rhetoric? Yet only Americans elected him, and only they can stop him. So far, they seem to be waiting for Mueller to save them.”
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TECHNICAL STUFF
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PROMOTION STUFF…
Ralph Milton ’s latest project is called “Sing Hallelujah” -- the world’s first video hymnal. It consists of 100 popular hymns, both new and old, on five DVDs that can be played using a standard DVD player and TV screen, for use in congregations who lack skilled musicians to play piano or organ. More details at www.singhallelujah.ca
Ralph’s HymnSight webpage is still up, http://www.hymnsight.ca, with a vast gallery of photos you can use to enhance the appearance of the visual images you project for liturgical use (prayers, responses, hymn verses, etc.)
Wayne Irwin's “Churchweb Canada,” an inexpensive service for any congregation wanting to develop a web presence, with free consultation. <http://www.churchwebcanada.ca>
I recommend Isabel Gibson’s thoughtful and well-written blog, www.traditionaliconoclast.com
Alva Wood’s satiric stories about incompetent bureaucrats and prejudiced attitudes in a small town -- not particularly religious, but fun; alvawood@gmail.com to get onto her mailing list.
Tom Watson writes a weekly blog called “The View from Grandpa Tom’s Balcony” -- ruminations on various subjects, and feedback from Tom’s readers. Write him at tomwatso@gmail.com or twatson@sentex.net