The Tyranny of Skepticism

July 20, 2011

This afternoon I put on the audiobook for The Believing Brain by Dr. Michael Shermer for my drive from Helena to Missoula.  I hit play on my way out of town and hit stop when I crested McDonald Pass.  I'm sure there's a metaphor somewhere in that about finding truth on top of the mountain, but I'm not going to scramble for it.

From the half hour that I listened, Dr. Shermer made it clear that he is a skeptic.  Dr. Shermer's marketing materials refer to him as "the world's best known skeptic and critical thinker."  He is a true disciple of scientific method and did not have a high regard for anyone who holds beliefs that cannot be proven through scientific method.  The remaining twelve and a half hours of the audiobook appear to describe Dr. Shermer's reasoning for why people hold these beliefs without standard evidence to back them up.

I wasn't in the mood to listen to anymore or take potshots at Dr. Shermer's arguments.  In part, he's right.  I am a puppet to my faith and belief system.  I analyze the world according to those guidelines and try to act accordingly.  My faith and belief systems have the capacity to change but that requires a serious dose of education, lived experiences, reflection, and/or grace.

But, Dr. Shermer doesn't realize that he is just as much of a puppet to his faith and belief systems as I am.  It's just a different variety.  While I too believe deeply in the scientific method and gathering as much evidence as possible to guide beliefs and decisions, I feel that eventually the scientific method runs aground upon the limits of humankind's ability to perceive the compexity of existence. 

The attempts to use the scientific method to push beyond those barriers while intellectually courageous is similar to trying to teach a lizard (or me) to appreciate the opera.  At best, all you can hope to achieve is to have heads nod up and down to the right beat.  At worst, you've wasted a lot of time playing Vivaldi when the lizard (or me) should have been doing something more productive like catching flies.

It's hard to challenge Dr. Shermer's argument for this skeptical belief system in the present context, because we don't know what we don't know.  It's easier to analyze this system based upon how it would have interpreted the past based upon the evidence available at that time period.

• For the majority of human history, a scientific method-based belief system would have ruled that the world was flat.
• For the majority of human history, a scientific method-based belief system would have held that the Sun rotated around the Earth.
• For the majority of human history, a scientific method-based belief system would have ruled that it was impossible for humans to fly.
• For the majority of human history, a scientific method-based belief system would have ruled that it was impossible for people to create light at night without a fire.
• For the majority of human history, the scientific method-based belief system would have ruled that there was no such thing as atoms, molecules, or genes.

The list could go on and on.  When examined through a historical lens, it becomes pretty clear that our ability to gather evidence of massive, complex, or mind-blowing concepts is pretty limited and therefore relying upon skepticism as a tool to navigate through these challenging issues can almost guarantee failure to comprehend them.

As Thomas Aquinas described it.  "We can't have full knowledge [of complex isssues] all at once.  We must start by believing; then afterwards we may be led on to master the evidence ourselves."

On the other hand, evidence contrary to our beliefs cannot be avoided.  It must be grappled with and faced or spiritual seekers risk giving the fields of science and reason away to the Dr. Shermer's of the world.  As Aquinas counseled Catholics faced with scientific challenges from Islamic scholars, "The truth of our faith becomes a matter of ridicule among... [non-believers] if any... [believer], not gifted with the necessary scientifc learning, presents as dogma what scientific scrutiny shows to be false."

Creating a rift between science and religion would be a two-sided shame.  First, because the religious would lose the natural grounding of scientific thought and discovery.  Second, because the scientific would lose the spiritual seeker's appreciation of the divine.  They're meant to compliment each other.

"There are two ways to live your life.  One as though nothing is a miracle.  The other as though everything is a miracle." Albert Einstein

R-Day and the Eclipse of Self-Confidence

Note: A friend sent me a message after my last post on humility.  She said that she struggled more with a lack of self-confidence than she ever did with humility.  In some ways, it seems like two sides of the same coin of self-reliance.  I thought I owed it to her to look deeper into that nexus.

June 2000

Reception Day (R-Day) into Beast Barracks for West Point's Class of 1999.  A matter of hours ago, we were civilians.  Then the loud speaker echoed these words through the tense gymnasium, "You have one minute to say goodbye to your parents and report to the cadets at the top of the bleachers."  From there, it was a blur of yelling, head shaving, and the issuing of uniforms, canteens, soap, etc.

Eventually, I stood in a line of "new cadet candidates" on a painted yellow line on the black asphalt of Central Area.  Granite buildings surrounded us.  Locking me and my classmates into the Long Gray Line of cadets that stretched back to 1802.  The sun baked down on us through the muggy air of the Hudson Valley.  Excitement mixed with terror.  As the day went on, somewhere around a dozen of my potential classmates cracked and quit.

I looked out upon the scene through my thick Army-issued glasses. My head was shaved and covered with issued sunscreen.  My classmates and I all wore gray t-shirts, black shorts, black socks, and black leather shoes.  The green duffel bag on my back held all of my belongings.  Sweat seeped through my clothes.

The line inched forward toward the "Cadet in the Red Sash" to report in to our new cadet company.  I'd heard of this storied tradition.  I tried to peer over the new cadet candidate's shoulder in front of me.  All I could see was towering man barking out orders to the new cadet candidate at the front of the line. 

I was scared, but I was also cocky.  I'd been an All-State Football player in high school and had won a state championship.  I held school wrestling records for the most pins in a season and the most pins over a career.  My grades had been honor roll or better for the last four years.  These past accomplishments straightened my spine and reminded me that if anyone was equipped to master this scenario it was me.  I'd been through the process of the wheat separating from the chaff before and I knew that was only a matter of time before I demonstrated my worth.

That self-confidence began to run low as I approached the front of the line.  The, the new cadet candidate in front of me was getting grilled by the Cadet in the Red Sash.  Everything he said and did was wrong.  He saluted wrong, reported wrong, and even stepped up to the line wrong.  My own nerves were rattling, but I knew that I'd get it right.  Maybe not the first time, but defnitely the second.

Then the Cadet in the Red Sash was yelling at me.  He had to have been six inches taller than me with a gleaming white hat, white shirt with ribbons, gray cotton trousers, and a red sash around his waist.  "New Cadet Candidate, step up to my line, salute, and report into your company!  Do not step on, my line, or over my line."

"Yes, sir!" I said and snapped off a quick two steps.  I was beginning my salute when his voice boomed out.

"New Cadet Candidate, I said step up to my line!  Look at your feet!"

I looked down.  One of my black leather shoes was a half an inch on the line.  The other one was a half inch behind it.

"Go back and start over New Cadet Candidate."

I did.  I looked down to make sure that my feet landed perfectly.

"Did I say you could look down New Cadet Candidate?"

"N-n-no, sir."

"Go back and start over!"

I stepped wrongly up to the line two more times, each time by what seemed like less than an eighth of an inch.   When I finally made it, I forgot how I was supposed to report.  I can't remember whether it was three, four, or even five more times that I tried and failed.

Eventually, I either got close enough or the Cadet in the Red Sash just decided it was time to keep the line moving. 

I turned on a heel and darted into barracks for the first time.  My ego was broken and self-confidence dashed, but it didn't matter.  I was heading onto the next task because it was my duty.  I was supposed to follow orders even if I didn't have the means to get them right.

It wouldn't take three more minutes before I failed at another "simple" task.


May 2011

Out of all of the lessons that I learned in my experiences at West Point, the Cadet in the Red Sash's lesson to continue on in spite of personal failure was the most powerful.  Through Beast Barracks and into Plebe year,  I failed everyday at simple tasks such as memorizing the newspaper, properly calling out the minutes and uniform before meals, addressing senior cadets by the proper organizational greeting, and even cutting cake at a proper angle.

Those failures and the lessons to continue on despite of them were good practice for the years to come when I would fail on varying in importance from landscaping to marriage.  Sometimes, I even failed to save lives.  The sting of some of the failures didn't last for an hour others will haunt me forever.

Somewhere along the line the question of whether I was self-confident enough to complete a task fell by the wayside.  The operative question became was I taking the action or following the path that I believed the Divine had laid out before me.  If I was, then there was no other option but to do my best to complete whatever task was in front of me - regardless of my skill or capacity.  If not, then it was time to alter my path. 

The determination of whether we are on the proper path or taking the right action is a continuing wrestling match between the ego, faith, and reason.  As long as we are breathing, we will struggle with that fundamental analysis.

In contrast, the question at the root of self-confidence is whether we have the capacity to complete the task in front of us.  That question is just a distraction.  If we trust in the Divine to put us on the proper path, the question of whether we can complete the tasks on that path is irrelevant.

We'll attempt them because we're supposed to.  If we fail, we've got to believe either that a higher power is judging off of a different scorecard than the one we have in front of us or that we're being prepared for a more critical future trial.

Proverbs sums it up better than I ever could.  "Trust in the Lord with all you hear, on your own intelligence rely not; in all your ways be mindful of him and he will make straight your paths." Proverbs 3:5-6.

It's a challenging trail but thankfully your success doesn't depend on whether you think you have what it takes to succeed.

If you're still terrified that you're not up to a task, it's hard to been a "Holy Spirit work through me" or "Holy Spirit speak through me mantra."  I wish I would have had that in my toolkit when I had to report to the Cadet in the Red Sash.

A Humble Foundation

May 19, 2011

I had lunch yesterday with my friend Matthew Fischer.  While Matthew and I disagree on some things, he's been a great spiritual mentor for me.  Particularly, helping me put specifics that I'd seen or experienced into the bigger context.

It one of our typical rambling conversations that ranged from fun to sad topics then back again.  But Matthew always leaves me with a something to think about, even if it is just a single sentence to a bigger story.

This time the sentence was "God's power works through weakness and humility."  Matthew continued his explanation saying that the ego was great for building human strength and work ethic.  Tapping into divine power required the exact opposite approach.

I mulled his point around for the rest of the day.  I thought of the five most obvious times the Divine had acted in my life: to save a falling coworker, prevent my suicide, to campaign for better care for veterans, and to stop my family's financial collapse.  With the exception of blocking the coworkers fall, each of those incidents had occurred after I'd failed.  The fight was already lost before victory claimed the day.

I didn't get any help until I gave up my illusions that I could resolve the situation.  I had to admit personal failure in order for my requests for help to be answered.  The admission of my own position of weakness was critical.  As long as I tried to maintain control over the situation, that control was left up to me and I would have walked down a path of failure or tragedy.

It's hard to pull a broader lesson out of this realization.  How do we give ourselves up completely in a world where we are still required to be in control?  What is the proper balance between maintaining personal responsibility and asking for divine help? 

I can't sit on my couch waiting for God to feed my kids.  I can't stand in front of the computer screen all day waiting for zeroes to get added to my bank account.  Yet on the other hand, I can't labor under the illusion that I have all of the answers and brains to solve my family's daily problems.  The world is full of pitfalls deeper than any ladder I possess.  It doesn't make sense for me not to ask to use a better ladder.

I struggled to pull some type of lesson from this paradox.  Then I remembered that Matthew hadn't just said God's power worked through "weakness."  He'd said, "weakness and humility."

Humility might be the answer to the question of how can we balance our own personal responsibility on one hand and a belief system that says Divine help is a possibility on the other.

Humility allows us to be honest about our status in the world and our ability to affect our own situation.  It allows for a strong sense of personal responsiblity, yet removes any internal barriers hat the ego can create to keep out Divine help.
Jesus was clear on the relationship between humility and Divine support when he said, "Whoever exalts himself will be humbled; but whoever humbles himself will be exalted." Matthew 23:12.  Similarly, "The greatest among you must be your servant."  Matthew 23:11.

The words of the Dalai Lama take us further.  "Humility is an essential ingredient in our pursuit of transformation, although this may seem at odds with our need for confidence. But just as there is clearly a distinction between valid confidence, in the sense of self-esteem, and conceit, so it is important to distinguish between genuine humility, which is a kind of modesty, and lack of confidence."

It's a powerful realization in a modern world that finds humility as a weakness instead of a virtue.  That realization challenges us to protect our own humility which is under constant attack whenever we are fortunate enough to find success in or approval from the world.






 

"My Heart is Full of Nails"

April 18, 2011

In my job, I have a lot of conversations with people who live with serious mental illnesses.  The conversations range from those about the weather with one of my colleagues who is in long-term recovery from bipolar disorder to phonecalls from callers who are in deep psychosis and in need of immediate hospitalization.

Usually, the individuals on the other side of the conversation fall somewhere in between those lines.  The stories that they bring me vary from tragic to uplifting.  I've talked to mothers desperate to get their children into treatment before something horrible happens.  I've listened to a wife struggling to grasp why her husband committed suicide.  I've listened to people locked in their own delusions and paranoia.

All of the people who call or dorp in want answers or directions to someone that can help.  Sometimes, I can point them in the right direction, other times I have to try and decide whether to tell them that there is no one that will help them until after something tragic happens.  They or their loved one have somehow fallen into an abyss of legal redtape and scarce public funding.

The conversations can be horrible and depressing.  They can also be powerful and uplifting.  The conversations can carry messages more powerful than the greatest sermons.  Today I had one of those conversations.

The woman sitting on the chair in front of me was about sixty.  She'd come into the office while I was trying to organize some receipts.  It was forty five minutes later and she wasn't showing a sign of slowing down.  I tried to focus and not think about the waiting receipts.

The woman is a well respected professional in our community.  In our last few phone conversations, I could tell she was struggling.  She was very agitated and listed off more than a dozen local conspiracies that she had reported to authorities ranging from the Drug Enforcement Agency to the Governor.  I couldn't tell which one or parts of those stories were accurate and which reflected a major drift from the perception of reality.

The woman's eyes were wide. Her head haloed in curls.  She was leading me deeper and deeper into conspiracies, explaining how they tied together.  So far I couldn't see anything we could do to help her.  She just wanted to be listened to by someone that cared.  I tried to focus.

Then she looked up at me and said something completely out of contex from the rest of the conversation.

 "I need to forgive them."  She repeated, "I need to forgive them."

I looked up at her trying to figure out if she was talking about the same group of alleged serial wrongdoers or if I'd missed something.

The woman put her hand over her breast.  "My heart is full of nails.  I need to forgive them.  It's just bringing me down."


The conversation continued for another twenty minutes.  The woman made her way out of the office, but I couldn't get her words out of my head.  My heart is full of nails. I knew that feeling too well.  It was the feeling of a heart full of anger, resentment, jealousy, and the sting of betrayal. 

I couldn't help thinking, "How many nails do I have in my heart?" It wasn't hard to think of five or ten off the top of my head: failed relationships, bad business deals, petty disputes that escalated into something bigger, etc. 

Human beings hurt each other in both minor and major ways everyday.  While we can take steps to protect ourselves, bad things will still happen to us and often someone else's actions will be the direct cause of those bad things.

The question is how do we handle it?  Do we let our wounds fester by filling them with angry thoughts of revenge or do we heal them through forgiveness? 

It's a painful process to forgive those who have wronged us, but it's essential daily step on the path to the divine.  In the words of Jesus, your ability to access the Kingdom of Heaven depends on your willingness to forgive those who sinned against you. Matthew 5:44-45 ("love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you."); Matthew 18: 22-35; Matthew 5:22 ("whoever is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment..")

If we cannot muster up that ability to forgive, then we have no one but ourselves to blame for our "heart full of nails."

I learned a lot more from my expected visitor than I ever would have gotten from those receipts.  Hopefully I was able to pass on something in return.

Footsteps on Beach

October of 2004

I stepped onto the beach in Florence, Oregon.  Late afternoon was turning into early evening.  The dark water of the Pacific surged against the sand.  Gulls cried from the sky above.

I wasn't quite sure why I was there.  Two hours ago, I'd found out that my fiance had left me.  Our final fight had been about faith.  She'd spent almost a year trying to convert me from Catholicism to Evangelical Christianity.  Yesterday, I told her that I just couldn't do it.  I respected her faith, but I couldn't believe in it the same way that I did Catholicism. 

Today she was gone.  I looked around the empty condo and then got in the car.  She was going North away from Eugene.  I went West.  The road stopped in Florence and so did I.


I took off my shoes and socks to walk barefoot.  The sand was cool. I focused on the feel of the sand against my toes and the sound of the rushing waves.  I tried not to think about the painful irony that building into a full crisis of faith.  I believed God is love.  1 John 4:8.  She also believed God is love.  But our differences in approaching that divine love had torn ours apart.  How could that be God's plan? 

The wind whipped my face.  I tried not to think that she was probably on her way out of Portland and heading East down the Columbia River.  Eventually she'd cross into Washington, then to Idaho, and back to Montana.  She's pull onto the same street that I used to walk her down after school and stop at her mother's house. 

What would she do if I called her up and told her I'd become anything she wanted me to be: Born Again, Jehovah's Witness, or even a snappy dresser.  If God is love, wouldn't that somehow be right?

I noticed a set of footprints to my left closer towards the water.  It was the only set of footprints on the beach, excluding the ones trailing behind me.  I remembered a prayer that I began using in the spring of 2002.  I'd envision Jesus on a beach walking in front of me.  His footsteps were laid out and all that I had to do was walk in them.  As I moved through the prayer, my anxieties and stresses fell away as I settled into His footsteps - giving up my worries and trusting in the way.  In those footsteps I knew that I didn't have to understand the plan in order to get where I was supposed to go.

As I daydreamed, the stranger's footprints to my left began to drift right until they were just a few feet away from me.  I continued forward and began to realize how similar my natural stride was to the distance between the stranger's steps.  In fact, there didn't appear to be that much difference in the size of our feet either.

I remembered the prayer and smiled.  I sheepishly looked around, saw no one, then took a long step with my left foot and dropped it onto one of the footprints.  I put my right foot into the print before me and then stepped again with my left.  It was a clumsy game.  It seemed that the more I focused on getting the stride perfect, the worse I got.

I quit playing and continued to walk.  My mind move back toward theological doubts.  Then on accident, I stepped directly into one of the footprints.  My foot settled in perfectly.  It all matched: length, width, and shape.  Eery. 

Without thinking, I stepped forward with my other foot and landed in the the corresponding footpring.  Again, it fit.  I wasn't playing anymore.  I tried to calm my mind and simply let myself walk.  Each step fit perfectly into the footprints laid out before me.  The footprint and stride were both identical.

I tried not to think of the chances that those prints had been made of by someone my exact height and footsize.  They even seemed to gimp a little bit on the left leg like I do.  A statistician might have been able to come up with a rational explanation, but I'm not a statistician.

I walked for two miles in those footprints.  The waves slid onto the sand and the sky began to darken, but still each stride fit like I was stepping into my own footprint.

Somewhere in that journey, I decided that I didn't have to wrap my mind around the religious implications of my fiance's departure.  For better or worse, she was gone.  There was nothing I could do about it, but somehow the stranger's footprints in front of me had convinced me that it was okay. 

I was on the path that I was meant to be on and really in the end that's all we can hope for.


I developed this prayer after the experience.  It's still the foundation of my daily prayer life.

Jesus, please grant me the wisdom to see the path that you want me to take and the courage, discipline, and grace to take it.

Jesus and the Death Penalty

Note: The passages quoted below are from the New American Bible.  Similar passages can be found in the New International Bible in Matthew 15: 1-20 and John: 8:1-11

I spent this morning in Montana’s Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing on a bill to abolish the death penalty.  I was testifying if favor of the bill on behalf of NAMI Montana’s members who live with serious mental illnesses and their family.

The Catholic Churches, the Assembly of God, and the Montana Association of Churches also spoke up in favor of the bill.  It’s always nice to be on the same side as your congregation and fortunately with this job I usually am.

When the opponents got up to testify, two preachers stated point blank that anyone who was against the death penalty was not a Christian.  One of the preachers pulled out his Bible to demonstrate evidence for his point.

The preacher cited Jesus’s statement in Matthew 15:4, “‘Whoever curses father or mother shall die’” as proof that Jesus was for the death penalty.  In that passage, Jesus is restating the Mosaic Law described in Leviticus 20:9, “And he that curseth his father, or his mother, shall surely be put to death.”

The preacher waved his Bible and made it very clear that professed Christians who did not follow Jesus’s will on the death penalty were hypocrites.  It was a powerful allegation, if true; but if it was true then why would the preacher use that passage of the Bible to illustrate his point? 

In that passage, Jesus described this absurd law from Levitucus and that fact that no one followed it in order to defend from the Pharisees’ ridicule of Jesus’s followers for not washing their hands when they eat a meal. Matthew 15:2.  If the passage was actually a defense of putting people to death, why would Jesus conclude it with the simple statement that “to eat with unwashed hands does not defile”? Matthew 15:20. 

If someone reading the Bible wanted to interpret Jesus’s attitude toward the death penalty, couldn’t they just go directly to John: 8:3-11 where Jesus was asked to sentence a woman for death for adultery?  In this instance, there was no doubt that the woman was guilty or that Mosaic Law required her to be put to death by stoning.

If Jesus was a firm believer in the death penalty, He would have been the first one to throw a stone.  This action would have been recorded in the Bible and made it very clear to His followers throughout history that there was no doubt that Jesus stood on the side of capital punishment.

Jesus reached down to the ground, but he did not grab a stone.  Instead, Jesus took his finger and began drawing in the dirt.

The scribes and the Pharisees who originally dragged the woman before Jesus continued to call for his judgment against her.

Jesus “straightened up and said to them, ‘Let the one among you who is without sin be the first one to throw a stone at her.’” After saying this, He bent down and began writing on the ground again.

Eventually all of the woman’s accusers left leaving just her and Jesus.  “Then Jesus straightened up and said to her, ‘Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”

“She replied, ‘No one, sir.’”

“Then Jesus said, ‘Neither do I condemn you. Go [and] from now on do not sin any more.”

There are some strong arguments in favor of the death penalty.  No one with a heart who listened to victims’ testimonies could deny that.  But the argument that “our government should put criminals to death because Jesus wants us to” is thoroughly debunked by John: 8:3-11.

Fearing Judgment

December 28, 2010

Disclaimer: I write this post because I struggle with the teaching, not because I’ve conquered it.

This afternoon a friend told me about how the Christian members of his family ostracized one of their cousins from the family and family events because he is gay. This family led my friend to faith. He’d often used them as role models to help guide his path towards becoming the kind of person he wanted to be, but my friend was appalled and confused by their professed application of Christ’s teachings.

I hope that there’s more to the story. If there isn’t, then the issue is between them and God to sort it out. I bring it up as a glaring example of the easy way that evil can slip into the thoughts and actions of people that are working to follow the path that a higher power has laid out before them.

A less cringe-worthy example recently played out in churches across the world as the regular churchgoers looked down their noses at the “Christmas Christians” that filled the pews to overflowing. It’s the same act, just a matter of scale. I’m ashamed to say that I’ve been on both sides of that judgment.

Christ could not have been any clearer about His stance on humans judging humans. In Matthew 7:1, Jesus said, “Stop judging, that you may not be judged, and the measure with which you measure will be measured out to you.”

Again in Luke 6:37: “Stop judging and you will not be judged. Stop condemning and you will not be condemned. Forgive and you will be forgiven.”

This simple, point-blank teaching is hard to follow on this side of Eden. The world can be a horrible place. The men and women in it do horrible things. We have the right and even the duty to stop oppressors from taking advantage of and injuring the weak. There are people who are so scarred by life and wrapped up in evil that they can never safely be released from prison.

Beyond the extremes, what is a sin in the eyes of one person can be an act of love in the eyes of another. How can a person of faith weigh that balance? Or what about in the case of a brain injury or serious mental illness when the person’s injured brain makes decisions that they never would have made when they were healthy.

The short answer is that it’s hard and we are going to get it wrong sometimes. The fuller answer is that we must be truly afraid of our urge to judge in the same manner that we fear our urges to kill, steal, or maim. The fact that it is easier to go through life without killing someone, than it is to going through life without judging others doesn’t change the burden that we bear to avoid judgment.

“[T]he measure with which you measure will be measured out to you.” The warning could not be any clearer.

We have to struggle to come to grip with the basic tenet that it is not our role to determine who is good or evil any more than it is our role to make the sun come up or the tides dance back and forth across a beach. Measuring the good deeds and sins of others is too difficult of a task. Thank God it is not a task that we’ve been given.

A Late Night Lesson from a Screaming Baby

My daughters are only sixteen months and two and a half years old, yet I think they’ve already taught me more than I ever will be able to teach them. It’s not that I’m not trying. I know that teaching them about life, faith, and love is my biggest duty. It’s just that some of their lessons to me have been so powerful that I can’t help but doubt my ability to match them. This is one of those lessons.

The majority of my life has been spent making plans and working to complete them. From elementary school on through West Point and law school; my teachers taught me that you had to define your goals or you would never achieve them. My coaches said that those goals should be taped up on my mirror so I would see them each morning as I brushed my teeth and each night before I went to bed.

I dutifully taped up the goals and eventually achieved some of them. But time and time again my best-laid plans shattered upon the anvil of reality. The complex world swirled by and around my fixed goals. A military career ended by injury at the moment that my country needed me. A business career stymied by technical problems in the product we were bringing to market. A writing career stunted by the brutal realities of the evolving publishing industry. A law career crippled by the fact that I didn’t care enough about the end state of corporate legal battles to ever master the field.

Then tragedy struck, I was in the right position with the right skill set to make a bigger difference than I ever could have imagined. If I had succeeded at any of those other fields, then I would not have been ready when I was truly needed. If I hadn’t had tried and failed at so many random occupations, I would’t have had the diverse skill set necessary to weave my way though the military bureaucracy and legal pitfalls that needed to be overcome along the way.

I had to face the stark reality that I was put in all of those positions by a higher power. My plans were destined to fail before they’d even been concocted. It’s a humbling and terrifying feeling to understand that you’re a pawn in a larger game and that it is a game beyond your comprehension. As one of Dostoevsky’s characters said in The Brothers Karamazov, “since I can’t understand even (Euclidian Geometry)…, I can’t expect to understand about God.”

So much of the world doesn’t seem to make sense. How can we not help but question the greater plan. In a world where a father is killed by an IED on the other side of the world from his children… Where illness or abuse can inflict a child before they’ve even said their first word… Where a man can spend his whole life trying to build up a company only to have it dashed by a world economic collapse… Where people will blow themselves up in a marketplace crowded with their neighbors in an effort to please God…

How do you try to navigate through a world that complex and disastrous?

I received the answer from my two little girls.

I was not prepared for parenthood in general. I was even less prepared for the long nights spent trying to get an overtired baby to quit screaming and go to sleep. I read the books and followed their tricks: everything from setting a sleep schedule, to swaddling, to rocking them in the same room as a running clothes dryer.

Some of these tricks worked to a degree. But they didn’t change the fact that I spent a lot of time with screaming infants in my arms. The longer they stayed up, the madder they became. I felt their frustration at their inability to make themselves feel better. They would struggle to move this way, then that way, then this way again. None of their attempts to improve their plight helped.

I knew that they were just tired. That the only way for them to feel better was for them to go to sleep. I wished that there was someway for me to impart that to them, but their young minds couldn’t comprehend what was really going on.

Each night, they would struggle in my arms until they finally went to sleep. Then I would walk them over to the bassinet and lay them down at total peace. The exact peace that they had wanted all along. They just didn’t know what they had to do to get it.

One of those late nights, I realized that we are all in the same position with God. We don’t understand what role we are supposed to play in this world or what good things can come out of our failures and miseries. We struggle, fight, and rant to try and accomplish the objectives that we think are critical.

We rail against the situation and lose ourselves in doubts, but eventually we have to give ourselves over to the knowledge that there is a higher power and that higher power will eventually drag us kicking and screaming to where we are supposed to be.

Our job is to do our best not to be a complete disaster along the way. I still have a lot to learn before I figure that trick out.

Ranger School and the Ugandan Orphanage

May 2000

The Georgia sun climbed higher in the morning sky. My squad had just finished up our first patrol in the first phase of Ranger School. Of the three leaders, one received a go. The other two got no-go’s.

I was one of the no-go’s. I was the team leader of the team in charge of land navigation. Anybody that knew me probably would have made good money on my no-go. Putting me in charge of land navigation was a little bit like putting a fish in charge of a footrace. Unfortunately, my number two wasn’t much better. We were lucky to stay in Georgia, much less get to our objective on time.

The three of us walked down a dirt road from the grading area back to our patrol base. I was telling a story about high school when one of my buddies found his grandpa’s hang glider in their garage. I checked about a book about hang gliding from the library and we were off. I was just about to the part where the hang glider flipped in the air and dropped Chet into a cactus patch when we got to the trail that led back to the patrol base.

One problem, the Ranger candidate who led the squad the night before didn’t turn down the path. The other team leader and I followed behind asking him what he was doing. He didn't answer, not wanting to tell us that he'd forgotten his rucksack on the ground before we established the patrol base. The other clueless member of our party and I got more and more confused. I didn’t know whether it was worse to leave a fellow Ranger candidate alone or follow him off into the middle of nowhere.

Before I came to the right conclusion, a truckload of Ranger School Instructors pulled up in a Humvee and made it very clear that both options were wrong.

Half an hour later, I dug my firing position and tried not to think about what the Company Commander was going to do to me and my two squad mates. It was going to be bad. The only question was how bad. In the peacetime Army, it didn’t get much worse than being an Infantry lieutenant that got kicked out Ranger School. Being forced to restart the phase was the better option, but still miserable.

I hacked the little shovel into the ground over and over again. My brain drifted through prayers. Ranger School could turn even the moderately religious towards piety, although the effects usually didn’t hold after the candidate’s first sighting of a woman or beer. I was tired and hungry. I couldn’t believe it could be over.

I asked God to show me something positive: something to carry me through the chain of command’s upcoming decision.

I was answered with an image of an old black woman standing in front of a dilapidated brick building. She had a broom. I could tell it was Africa. There was no sign of kids, but something told me it was an orphanage.

I felt my chin hit my chest and woke up. I went back to digging. Thoughts of the old woman and her orphanage had replaced the feelings of impending dread.

August 2006

I sat in the passenger seat of the SUV as Peter Francis Luswata drove through the streets of the small Ugandan town. I’d been in Africa for two days and I was about to get my first view of the Uganda Rural Fund’s (URF) projects in AIDS-ravaged countryside.

Peter was talking about how a priest had bought a building and turned it over to his sister to run an orphanage. URF provided some of the resources to help keep the orphanage going. I tried to listen, but my mind kept drifting to Mike.

I’d begun volunteering for URF as a tribute to Mike MacKinnon. I’d been friends with Mike since I was five and followed him to West Point. He died in October of 2005 when his Humvee was hit by an IED in Iraq. At his funeral someone from the unit said that they were delivering toys at the time of the ambush.

I was still to gimpy for the military, but somehow I’d fixated on the idea of working with AIDS orphans as a way to honor his sacrifice. An internet search led me to a home-grown Ugandan nonprofit that was desperate for volunteers.

I didn’t know if I was ready for the reality of that pledge. I got out of the SUV in front of an old brick building.

Peter was ahead of me. I heard him say, “This is Josephine. The house mother.”

I looked up and into the eyes of an old woman. She was the same one from the dream that I’d had in Ranger School six years before.

Josephine had tears in her eyes. She said, “I prayed that you would come and now you have.”

I wish that I could say that I turned into some powerful force for good in Uganda. I did what I could when I was there, but I haven’t been nearly as helpful as I’d hoped when I got back to the U.S. The one thing that I did do before I left was to hire Caroline, a twenty year old girl who grew up in the orphanage to help Josephine attend to the children.

It’s been four years since I left Uganda. I still sit on the URF board, but I'm not a stellar contributor. Each month, I send money for Caroline’s salary. It’s a meager sum and I’m embarrassed that I don’t give more. But from all the reports that I’ve gotten back of Caroline’s stellar work at the orphanage, I believe that the old woman’s prayers were answered.

If you’d like to see Josephine and her Nazareth Orphanage, here is a film clip. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpTVTp2C-pc. The organization’s website is now http://www.ugandaruralfund.org/ not the one that is listed in the film.

URF is now in need of monthly donations for teachers’ salaries. At $150 a month, it’s a great opportunity to make a difference in a lot of incredible children’s lives. If you're interested in donating, you can find out more at http://www.ugandaruralfund.org/.

Five Minutes

I haven’t shared this story with more than one or two people. I don’t know if I’d be sharing it today, if someone battling mental illness hadn’t challenged me for hiding my own struggles with depression.

End of November, 2000

I pulled the knot tight in the green rope and then secured it with an overhand hitch knot. I put my weight on the rope. It held strong around the rafter.

The white chair wobbled beneath me. I opened the noose and tested the length of the rope. It would be about an eighteen-inch drop. Perfect.

I shifted my leg brace down and stepped off the chair. I went downstairs to write a note.

A rational mind struggles to comprehend suicide. Those of us with depression or another mental illness struggle not to comprehend it. The sick brain self-destructs by sending out waves of overpowering chemical and electrical signals. It’s similar to how the bone marrow of someone with leukemia creates abnormal white blood cells bent on destroying the body.

My world had collapsed over the course of six months. An injury in Ranger School shattered my military career and left me crippled. My fiancée had betrayed me while I was at the Office Basic Course and Ranger School. It seemed that everyone I knew on the island had kept that betrayal from me.

I’d suffered from depression before and this combination of events more than set it off again. I couldn’t see how I could make it through another day. It felt like being trapped in a dark room where suicide was the only door. I fought not to open it, but eventually the darkness overcame me.

I stopped on my way down the stairs and prayed. “God, I love you, but I just can’t do this any more. If you have some reason that I should stay alive, I’ll give you five minutes to show me a sign.”

I didn’t expect an answer. I hobbled around the kitchen and pulled together a paper and pen. I wrote and then threw out two suicide notes. The final one just said, “I’m sorry, Matt.”

That summed it up. I hung the paper on the wall and went back upstairs

I stepped up on the wobbling white and blue chair. I slipped the noose around my neck and had a few final thoughts. One thought wouldn’t go away.

I needed to pay the rent. It would probably take a week or two for my unit to send the police to my apartment. It would probably take two or three weeks to clean it up and get rid of my gear. There was no way that they could have it rented again before the first of the year. The least I could do was pay them for the month of December.

There was one problem. I didn’t have any checks. I’d ran out of checks the week before and was still waiting for the new ones to arrive. I’d tried to take the money out of my ATM the day before, but had hit the daily withdrawal limit well short of what I needed.

I’d looked through the checkbook multiple times for a spare check that I may have missed among the duplicates. There was nothing. My irrational mind was battling with my irrational mind. Go look again versus get on with it. Go look again won.

I took the noose off my neck and got down to look through the checkbook again. I flipped through the duplicate checks once, nothing. I flipped through them again, nothing. I flipped through them one last time and found a check.

I filled it out and then walked outside to drop it in the mail. The mailboxes were in the center of the complex. On my way there, I said hello to my neighbor Jeff who was sitting on his porch.

I said hi. Jeff said hi back. We were amicable, but hadn’t said more than a few words over the two months that I lived there. Jeff was a Hawaiian native and I was a lily white haole from the mainland. The insider and the outsider. A cultural barrier left over from the island’s colonization.

I dropped the envelope in the mail slot and turned back towards my apartment. I heard a soft whimper from across the street. Jeff was crying.

I walked over and sat down next to him. We began to talk and didn’t stop for the next two hours. Jeff thought he was about to be laid off. His marriage was already on the rocks and he was terrified about what that meant for his children.

I didn’t have any answers, but we talked until he felt better. Somewhere along the way I began to feel better too.

We hugged and I went back to my apartment.

I’d forgotten how much peace can be found through trying to help someone else. It was a lesson I’d learned as a child while trying to help Darcee battle her eating disorder.

It was another door out of the darkness. A door that I wouldn’t have found if something higher hadn’t planted the idea in my brain that I couldn’t say goodbye to this world without paying the rent.

Something Went Wrong

I didn’t plan to cover this part yet. I wanted to describe about ten or fifteen episodes when I was fortunate enough to see things that I couldn’t explain in a rational manner and then pull in other stories to complement them. After describing all of these events that I couldn’t justify rationally, I figured that I’d write about what conclusions I’ve drawn from them.

That idea went out the window sometime around five o’clock this evening. The devolution of my writing process may have begun when I spent forty minutes this morning talking with a woman trapped in a deep psychosis. Her brain is so sick that she can’t realize she’s sick. The woman is lost in a nightmare of delusional immune diseases and conspiracies. Over the years, she’s lost her husband, her kids, her career, and her home. Our society values her “civil rights” too much to force her to take the treatment that will keep her brain from further breaking down. Montana doesn’t have the combined legal and medical framework to help pull her out of that psychosis. As she spoke, I tried not to think of her chances of making it through the winter.

Or maybe it began yesterday, when I talked with a mother of two about her husband’s bipolar disorder-induced suicide in order to help her deal with her unnecessary guilt. Or maybe it was this afternoon, as I mumbled into the telephone trying to find the right words to help comfort a mother grieving her teenage daughter’s suicide. Or maybe it was some of the personal challenges that I’ve faced recently.

Either way, I decided it was time to bring up the biggest question of spirituality. If there is something beyond what we can see that ties us together and even has the power to affect our individual lives, then why can the world be so horrible and unfair?

If this spiritual realm had the power to warn me to catch Shane before he slipped of the building, why didn’t I get the same voice telling me to take Darcee to the hospital for a full examination when I last saw her two weeks before her death? If this spiritual realm had the power to send me a miracle to pay for my family’s bills, then why didn’t it just cure my wife of her devastating illness?

I don’t have those answers and I don’t think any person has them to the level of specificity that would please me.

The best explanation that I’ve heard came from a former Army sniper with PTSD and TBI. He was haunted by his past and struggled with addictions in the present. While we had coffee one morning, he told me about the simple spiritual revelation that helped him make sense of the horrors he’d seen.

“God didn’t create evil. God didn’t create death and He didn’t intend for us to suffer.”

The veteran’s simple and common sense explanation put the paradox in perspective. It was too deep for me to ever understand, but all that I really needed to know was that something went wrong.

Fundamentalist Christians would point to Adam, Eve, and the snaky Devil. To other denominations that story acts as a metaphor that passes on the basic truth that humanity strayed from the path our Maker intended. Either way, the message is that something went wrong in between creation and the present.

To me, it’s the only explanation for how the spiritual world that I’ve seen do so much good can coexist with a natural reality where there is so much suffering and evil. While that explanation leaves a multitude of mysteries about what actually went wrong, it does provide enough of an intellectual framework to help us look beyond some of the horrors of our everyday lives to something much more powerful and good.

Without that framework, it's pretty hard to see the bigger picture.

For anyone looking for a deeper explanation of what might’ve went wrong. I think that Jesus left another powerful clue in parable of the Tenants and the Vineyard. Luke 20:9-19.

Guest Post: A Final Goodbye

One of the reasons I started this blog was because I felt that others had had similar experiences that didn't have rational, scientific explanations. I knew that there is nothing special about me and therefore others must be having similar experiences. I hoped that by sharing mine that others would share theirs. I am amazed that it only took a few weeks for the first guest post to arrive

This guest post is from a childhood friend Stephanie Sampson. It's an amazing statement to how a few kind deeds can bond souls beyond the limits that we see every day. If you've got a similar story that you'd like to share, please send it to me. The only requirements are that: (1) it must be true, (2) it must be 1-2 pages, and (3) it must be generally well-written or close enough that a little editing can get it there.

Thanks Stephanie.

A Final Goodbye

A new family moved into the apartment next to me and my mother in April of 2000. They were from Kazakhstan and spoke Russian. I could tell that they were poor, but my heart broke as I watched them take abandoned furniture from the complex trash and pull it into their apartment.

I knew that I wanted to do something to make them feel welcomed. I was pregnant and single. I had a good job, but I wasn’t about to go buy them a Mercedes. I went to the bookstore and picked up a Russian dictionary.

After learning some of the basics, I knocked on the door. The family looked at me nervously.

I said, “Preeviet.”

That was all the introduction I needed. From then on, the family and I spent the nights on the steps of our apartment complex going over translations from Russian to English.

When it was time for the kids to go to school, I made sure the little girls had a new set of clothes and shoes. They acted like little princesses with their hair ties, little girl lip gloss, and jewelry. The outfits didn’t cost much, but the presents were enough to light up their eyes again.

The boy’s shoes had duct tape wrapped around the toes. I took care of that on his birthday. We picked up a bike that was for sale in the neighborhood. I sunk some more of my waitressing tips into spoiling the kids with a Playstation and covering some of their groceries until they got on their feet.

After three or four months, we may as well have been a family with the tides of people going back and forth between the two apartments.

I would sit with the old sick grandma and the children would translate for her. She was worried about me being pregnant and alone. I tried to convince her that it was going to be ok.

The old woman looked at me seriously and said, “You are my family’s angel.”

I didn’t know what to say.

She continued, “Watch out for my family.”

I didn’t know what she meant. I had a bad feeling, but I vowed to do what I could.

I gave birth to my son Jade and it was the Russian family’s turn to be angels. As a single mom, there are few things better than an extra set of hands. They had nine sets and each one was more than happy to tend to Jade.

One night I dreamt of the Russian grandmother. I awoke to someone shaking my bed. I glanced around the room and there was no one there. The shaking stopped when I sat up.

The phone rang beside my bed. It was one of the little girls from next door telling me their grandmother had passed away. My tears fell upon the covers of the now-still bed.

I don’t have a natural explanation for what happened that night with the dream of the grandmother and the shaking bed. In my heart, I know that she came to say goodbye.

Learning of Darcee's Death

Summer 1997

I walk out of the door of the Regimental Command Center at Camp Buckner. I told staff that I wasn’t feeling well. It wasn’t an excuse that carried much weight around West Point, but I was training to take over for the second detail which wouldn’t start for more than a week. I was redundant this week and today I wasn’t in the mood to be redundant.

I’d woken up the night before in a rage, grabbing my knife before I realized where I was. The adrenalin cranked through my blood as I tried to talk myself down. That wasn’t like me and it wasn’t like me to wake up despondent, drained of all energy with a pit in my stomach deep enough that a someone digging at the bottom would strike his shovel’s blade against the roof of hell.

It didn’t make sense. I was dating a beauty queen that I was wild for and I was about to take over my first major organizational role at West Point. Yesterday I had a bounce in my step and a nervous energy about tackling a job that I wasn’t sure I could handle, today I couldn’t feel my legs as they carried my burdened body away from work and into the woods.

I had a book of Hemingway’s short stories in the cargo pocket of my BDU’s. I would get away and read it in hopes that that Papa’s words would pull me away from the invisible ledge. I trod the trail around Lake Popolopen to a rocky outcropping where I’d fished from during some of the down hours during my summer training the year before. I lay down upon the flat gray rock and began to read.

Three pages beyond my bookmark, Hemingway’s character described a girl that he’d been friends with as a child. A wave of grief ran over me. I set the book upon the granite. I couldn’t move. Despair seized my limbs. I lay motionless for ten or fifteen minutes before fighting my way back into the reality of the warm New York summer’s day.

I walked back to Camp Buckner. The grief hit me two more times along the way, dropping me to a knee. I didn’t know what was happening.

I avoided the Command Center and continued on towards the guard station. I knew that I couldn’t work, but thought that I might be able to catch a ride with the duty driver back to the campus to retrieve some of the gear that I would need the summer. A simple productive task¸ something basic to get me moving.

The cadet on duty looked down at my name tag. He bit his lip, then said, “Matt Kuntz, you’re father has been calling for you. I’m sorry, but a close friend of yours has died.”

I felt the blood run out of my face. My dad hadn’t said who it was. I can’t remember what I said before leaving the guard shack and making my way towards the pay phones.

My stepmother answered the phone and told me it was Darcee. The tears rolled down my face. I hung up the phone as sobs shook my chest.

Darcee and I had been friends since grade school. We swam together on the Lion’s Swim Team as children and through high school. I’d done my best to help her with the anorexia that attacked her midway through her freshman year. I’d written letters to her every day that she was at the treatment center in Arizona and did my best to help her make the transition towards wellness when she returned home.

Darcee lived another handful of summers after her stay at the treatment center. She fell in love with the man of her dreams. Two weeks earlier I’d cooked her breakfast as she talked about moving to Missoula to be with him, hoping to eventually get married and start a family. I’d never seen her happier.

I didn’t know that the anorexia had transitioned into bulimia which was poised to overwhelm her gentle heart. My grief continued through her funeral in Montana and in the years that followed. Darcee was an unbelievable friend. I will always miss her and struggle with questions of why the Lord called her home so soon.

Beyond the loss, I realized for the first time in my life that I’d been shown proof that the universe was more complex that the reality I could perceive with my natural senses. I’d woken up in a rage at the exact time of her death over two thousand miles away from where she’d passed. The grief crippled me before I’d heard that she was gone.

It was my first sign and it was horrible. My only solace in feeling something both bigger than all of us and completely all of us was that I knew she wasn’t really gone. Darcee was gone for today, gone for tomorrow, but whatever I’d experienced had convinced me that the ones who loved her would see her again.

Side Note: On the plane back to Montana for Darcee’s funeral, I swore not to ever fight against mental illness again. It was too complex and horrible. Looking back at my naivety, I can’t help but think of the phrase, “If you want to hear God laugh, tell Him your plans.”

I'm Not Qualified to Write This

Anyone who has known me for more than five minutes can list a handful of things that I've done wrong. If they've known me longer than that, then they'd better get more hands. I thought about providing a list of some of those things, but I've got a feeling that most of you will believe that I've got more than my fair share of flaws and that many of them run deep. Anyone who doesn't believe that yet will eventually.

That flawed existence has scared me from telling a broader audience about some of the spiritual things that I've experienced and seen. I was afraid that my ability to transmit the message would be obscured by my own sins and I know that many of you will not be able to look past my faults. I cannot argue against that judgment. Your heart should always be your guide and if it tells you that I'm full of it, then you're probably right.

This week I had another amazing experience that I cannot attribute to anything other than the act of a higher power. It was powerful and life-changing. After a lot of thought, I've decided that it's my duty to tell the stories about how I've been blessed and what I think I've learned. Although, I'd be lying if I claimed to have even one millionth of the answers. I'm just searching for Truth with dirty glasses.

I know myself and this world well enough to be certain that I'm going to fail and sin throughout the writing of this blog. I ask that you please try and overlook my continued failings to focus on the meaning of what I've seen and experienced. It is more beautiful than the teller is not.

Thank you,

Matt