The Spectrum of Creation and the Transition of Divine Love

Something that stands out to me when I read Genesis 1:1-31 is the recurring theme of spectrum, gradation, and transition.

The passage is bookended by the distinction of day and night, and then by that of male and female, but it's interspersed with a spectrum of creation and the transitory refrain of “evening and morning.” Furthermore, God's declaration of mankind being made both male AND female punctuates the narrative. While the binaries “day and night” may be the primary elements, the spectrum and transitional gradations are persistently mentioned, rhythmically repeating throughout the passage.

The passage opens with the elemental dichotomy of day and night, but this stark contrast is harmonized by the gentle transition of evening and morning. It proceeds to explore the realms of water and sky, echoing the motif of a harmonizing transition. Next, it delineates the boundary between sea and land, an interaction that naturally fosters a spectrum of flora. We are then presented with the spectrum of lights, embodied by the sun, moon, and stars. This is followed by a portrayal of the diverse spectrum of life—fish, birds, land animals, and all manner of fauna. These stanzas are rhythmically punctuated by the transitional refrain, “there was evening, there was morning…” This refrain eschews the notion of a stark dichotomy, favoring instead the concept of a gradual, harmonious, seamless transition.

The culmination of this creation narrative comes when God says, "Let US create mankind in OUR image." Here we now see the spectrum, gradation, and transition of male AND female within the very nature of God being imparted directly to mankind, not as a binary dichotomy, but as a unified, if graduated, whole. Interestingly, the text does not proclaim that humans are made in the image of God as male OR female, but rather, as male AND female. This suggests a spectrum within the divine image itself, and by extension, within humanity.

Expanding on this idea, it might be argued that this vision of the divine reflects an understanding of God that transcends strict dichotomies. It provides room for a God who encompasses the full range of existence, from one extreme to the other, and everything in between — the entire spectrum, as it were.

The notion of transition, spectrum, and gradation within humanity could be seen as a mirror of our own experiences and identities. Our lives are not characterized by stark, unchanging binaries, but rather by dynamic, fluid spectrums. In this light, Genesis could be read as a celebration of the diversity inherent in the world and the divine image within us all.

The idea that this passage would suddenly veer from the overarching themes of spectrum and transition, so evident in all of creation, to confine the understanding of humanity to a stark binary, is not one that can be readily accepted. To me, such a jarring shift seems at least unlikely, and arguably absurd. When we consider the human condition in all its diversity, the ideas of transition, spectrum, and gradation seem to reflect our lived experience much more accurately.

It's important to note that within this concept of spectrum, the binary concepts of male and female continue to retain their significance. These are epitomized in Christian tradition by Christ and the Theotokos, as well as by the various saints whose lives embody a wide range of human experience and virtue. These figures stand as archetypes of identity and spirituality, giving shape and meaning to our understanding of gender in its most profound sense.

Similarly, the concept of spectrum does not undermine the sanctity of marriage. Rather, marriage exists as a wellspring pouring life into the spectrum. Marriage, within this understanding, continues to be a sacred covenant that serves as a microcosm of divine love, mirroring the relationship between Christ and the Church. It is the cradle of life, the nexus from which the full spectrum of creation springs forth. Sacramental marriage can still be celebrated as the union of male and female, without needing to exclude or belittle other relationships of love and commitment within the spectrum of human relationships. The sacrament's nature is simply to highlight the procreative and symbolic nature of the union between two polarities of the full spectrum of life.

The sacramental view of marriage, particularly in Christian traditions, understands this union as a profound symbol of the relationship between Christ and the Church. Within this sacred bond, two distinct individuals come together in a covenant of love, fidelity, mutual support, and the potential for new life. This mirrors the spiritual covenant between Christ and His followers, the Church. Furthermore, the potential of this union to produce new life symbolizes the life-giving and transformative power of Christ's love.

This is a picture to be celebrated by all, whether sacramentally married or not. It's a celebration not merely of the union itself but of the truths it embodies: selfless love, unity in diversity, and the capacity to bring forth new life — physical, emotional, and spiritual. This sacramental understanding of marriage resonates powerfully with biblical teachings and offers a profound metaphor for the divine-human relationship.

However, embracing the sacramentality of marriage does not necessitate the rejection or condemnation of non-sacramental relationships. Every relationship, whether sacramental in the traditional sense or not, holds the potential to manifest love, mutual respect, and growth.

Why can’t non-sacramental marriages still bear the fruit of love, understanding, and mutual growth? Can they not still contribute positively to the broader community, nurturing values such as tolerance, compassion, and empathy? In essence, they are another expression of the diverse ways in which love manifests in the world.

While these relationships might not be sacramentalized, they are not devoid of sacred worth. They reflect the broad and inclusive nature of God’s love. Therefore, rather than being subjects of rejection or condemnation, non-sacramental marriages can still be acknowledged for their unique expressions of love and commitment, contributing to the beautiful diversity of human relationships. When we interpret Genesis as capturing the vast spectrum of life, our perception of the divine image within us all becomes profoundly sharpened. This perspective doesn't simply encourage tolerance for its own sake, but rather it invites us to appreciate the nuances of life, recognizing that it doesn't flicker in strict binaries, but instead glides across a broad spectrum of possibilities. Observing these graceful transitions should serve as a gentle reminder to extend this same grace to each other in our shared journey.

Agile, Scrum, and the Divine Liturgy

 A lot of working in an organization is about change management.  Getting people to adapt to new ideas and processes is difficult, even if the new idea or process is a really good one.  This phenomenon has been studied in business schools and there's a familiar graph that shows the adoption cycle (picture with this post). The cycle is often given in the context of product adoption, but it also relevant to process and technology adoption within a company.

In the Orthodox Divine Liturgy, I recognized this pattern as well.

The liturgy begins with the Gospels being held by the priests (innovator stage), and then there is a part of the liturgy called "the little entrance" where the Gospel is brought out to the people and put onto the alter (early adoption), it is later read and a homily is given (the priest providing an understandable explanation in order to "cross the chasm"), this is all to prepare the people for the Great Entrance where the Eucharist is brought out through the people and placed on the alter (early majority) and then the congregation is led through its collective preparation to ultimately receive it and incorporate it into their lives (late majority).  And then the skeptics and catechumens are there to watch and learn (laggards).

To me it seems like the Divine Liturgy is a good model to use to think about how to introduce, socialize, and gain acceptance for a new idea into a group of people. 

The Bible says in John 10:2 that "The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep."  To me this can be seen in the liturgy as Christ enters in a way that we can understand, is introduced with authority that we recognize, and in a way that facilitates the acceptance of the faithful and through its consistency, educates newcomers and skeptics.
 

Anyone who has worked anywhere for very long knows that when introducing a new idea, the proper approach is key to socialize the idea and gaining its adoption, and you have to understand the patterns that the people are accustomed to and use those to bring the transformative ideas into their daily workflows.

Many organization focus heavily on creating and implementing rituals that help teams to adopt new ideas and even to understand how to know what to work on for the day.  In scrum and Agile methodologies, these patterns are even often referred to as "rituals".  So it's interesting to me to see the parallels between these very new management methodologies and the ancient traditions of the church.

Why can’t it just be this way?

I’ve been thinking on the whole “In Genesis God made them male and female” statement that is often used as a retort to any kind of affirmation of the LGBTQ+ community.  

But in Genesis God also made “light and dark” and “day and night”.  But then it goes right off and says “and then there was evening and morning, the first day…”. And I’m like, wait, evening and morning, what happened to night and day?  What is this “evening and morning” stuff? 

Tell me, at 6:00 pm in the late fall in Oklahoma, is it night or day?  Dusk you say?  What the heck is that?  Are you trying to say that there is some kind of transitionary spectrum between night and day?

It’s like there’s a spectrum between night and day and nobody bats an eye, but put a spectrum between male and female (I dunno… like a rainbow or something) and everyone loses their minds.

I think this spectrum in sexual biology is well understood by the scientific community and we experience it clearly through the lives of our transgendered friends who exist and live alongside us.  

There are some compelling arguments about how we’ve interpreted the scriptural concepts regarding homosexuality as a concept, and as for transgendered people, just look in particular at the eunuchs in scripture.  Are they not transgendered? often surgically?  Yet there’s no condemnation of them in that regard.

When it comes to the sacrament of marriage, I can still see how the Church would limit that sacrament to being between a man and a woman, and the reason is because of how marriage is a picture of Christ and the church, and in the new creation and the “two becoming one flesh” that comes through having children.  The likeness of Christ and the Church is pictured in heterosexual marriage.  And this mystery is there for all, including people who don’t participate in the sacrament, to see in the sacrament.

But just because gay couple’s marriage isn’t sacramentalize, doesn’t seem to me to mean that they need to be excluded from the community of the Church.  This seems similar to me as to how married people can’t live the monastic life, nor can the monastic person participate in the sacrament of marriage, but neither are excluded from the life of the Church.

Why can’t it just be like this?  Why am I anxious about asking these questions?  

I guess this is why I am just a lay person with a bunch of opinions on stuff…cause some of it I just don’t get.

We lack harmony.

 In the book "The Body Keeps the Score" things like "mirror neurons" and other neurological systems are explained as to how we can experience empathy for others, and how this can help us to gain a feeling of safety and belonging within a group.  People who lack the ability or whose development of these abilities was stunted by trauma experience anxiety, depression, and other negative manifestations in their lives.  

Music, dancing, sports, and other activities that involve a synchronization of rhythm between individuals have shown to help people overcome these negative things and even relearn how to relate and feel safe around others. Many cultures have drum ceremonies, ritual dances, chants, and other collective activities and encourage a communal synchronicity as a part of normal life.  It turns out that these activities also create a sense of safety and well being within the individuals that participate in them as they synchronize with each other.  It's interesting to me that many of these rituals and traditions often are used to memorialize significant and sometime traumatic events within the community.  They are used not only to remember the event, but also to heal from it.

I think this collective synchronization is missing or has been corrupted in the white middle class culture that is predominate especially in "Red State" Evangelical America. The caricature of the "Karen" culture, and its male F150 driving counterpart are what I'm talking about.  There is a hyper individualistic focus in this culture that can be seen in everything from politics, religion,  and even sports and music.  The communal component of these activities is often minimalized in preference to a focus on the individual.  

There are sports and music but even in these paradigms, the individual performance seems to be focused on to the exclusion of the collective experience. A simple demonstration of this is the lack of dancing.  In fact in one of the largest Christian denominations in the US, dancing has long been held as something forbidden!

In our Politics it is an obsession with "individual rights", which are of course a cornerstone of western civilization as well as the source of many advancements in our ability to lift humanity out of oppression and misery.  However, taken too far and the concept of community quickly gets drown out.  When we make individual rights the premise of all philosophy, we gain a great deal of insight, however we also lose the concept of community in the process.

Our social interactions, especially in the disconnected times of this pandemic, but it certainly didn't start there, are very disconnected.  Things like playing music together, singing together, dancing, and other forms of collective synchronicity are becoming less and less common.  Even our worship traditions are catering more and more to delivery a message that can be applied individually.  

There is a place in our lives for the corporate, the communal, and these things are realized through activities like dance, music, and other ritual and traditional activities that bring us together to harmonize.

It's OK not to be the priest.

For the record, I'd like to say that I am an Orthodox Christian, I believe in the creed. I trust in the resurrection of Christ. But, I am not a priest.

I support gay marriage, I am pro choice, I am for open borders, I support the legalization of prostitution and all drugs. I realize that some of these positions may be in opposition of the "official" position of my faith, but that's why I'm happy to be a lay-person. In fact I've found a great deal of meaning in the Orthodox's lack of an unspoken expectation for everyone to 'go into ministry'. Growing up the way I did, there seemed to be an unspoken expectation that the only way to be a "real" Christian was to become either a minister or a missionary. If you were just a regular person with a job, then that was "OK I guess", but not really the fullness of your calling. I have found some comfort in being liberated from that expectation after becoming Orthodox.

I do believe that there is a meaningful and important role for the lay believer. God loves people and is going to welcome us all into his presence, and we'll experience that as bliss as long as we can leave our hatred for each other behind. I think that fundamentally, this is the truth of Orthodoxy. Within the body of Christ there is a role for those who must defend the tradition and doctrine as well as for those who are free to act more liberally. We all must trust in the grace of God as we extent love to those who are labeled as "outcasts", even those outside the faith.

The Breeding Ground of Demons

Maybe oversharing, but that's what I do sometimes: In the past 10 or 12 years, by being blessed with positive interactions with some amazing people I've been cured of marijuanaphobia, Islamophobia, xenophobia, and most recently, through a series of events that I regard as almost miraculous, the last vestiges of some lingering trans and homophobia have finally evaporated away

These are real hangups that kept me from being able to relate to people, and they also kept me from knowing myself. They keep a person from self-discovered epiphanies. Instead you mindlessly repeat the dead habits of culture passed to you and accepted by you without examination.

These phobias are the breeding ground of demons, take that figuratively or literally, it doesn't matter. They are the enemy of faith as they cause you to stereotype, stigmatize, dehumanize, and demonize (create demons out of) the people around you that you should be getting to know and loving and learning from. These phobias live off fear, pride, and ego, all of which I have an abundance of. Believe me.

It was not only through reason alone, but primarily my faith in Christ and through the Church that I've been able to finally put these demons down. I could always understand the reasons, but a moralistic fear often kept me from letting those demons die. I can't really explain the mechanics of it, it is a mystery to me how it came about.  But by God's grace I'm glad to finally be free of those oppressors.

I'd recommend everyone do it. The world is a better place when you don't arbitrarily hate people just because you personified them as some kind of demon in your mind based on the group you identify them with.

Painful Symptoms

It seems like the institutionally abandoned, morally devoid, and socially misfit young white male with family problems to mass murdering school shooter pipeline is a fairly specific pathology. Maybe we should figure that out too while we're failing to take everyone's guns again. Is a society that creates people like that really all that better off just because we figure out how not to give them guns? I mean maybe we shouldn't let people like that have guns, but maybe we should try to help people not become like that too? The problem is that these kind of problems typically aren't something you can pawn off to the state, forget about, and go along your merry way. I think there may be something terribly wrong with us if our activism in the face of these now very typified events are completely focused on yelling at politicians and at each other about gun control and none of it is focused on what is wrong with our communities and institutions such that we are repeatedly manifesting this very specific homicidal ideation in young men. The gun control argument is primarily a convenient scapegoat that we all know will ultimately fail, which is OK, because then we won't have to deal with any actual change, and we can still blame it on the politicians instead of taking any real personal and possibly uncomfortable ownership of the problem. Taking the blame like this is one of the reasons a corrupt and perverse political class can persist despite their obvious incapacity to be anything like something we ought to respect. It's the true value exchange, power in exchange for blame. The school shootings are a painful symptom. Blaming politicians is just a pain killer.