The Walk: A High-Wire Act That’s Not About Faith (But Sort of Is)

This was originally posted on my Patheos blog, Watching God.

When I was youngish, a friend of mine and I went to check out the Black Canyon of the Gunnison during a camping trip. It looks something like this.

Photo courtesy Wikimedia

Very pretty, yes? But it’s also a long way down from the ridge of the canyon to its rocky, watery bottom. A really, really long way down. So my friend and I—brave, stupid fellows who once tried to break through the ice on a lake while standing on it—literally crawled on our hands and knees to look over the edge. Heights are not really our thing.

This made me, perhaps, not the best person to see The Walk.

The Walk, for those of you who don’t know, is based on the true story of Frenchman Phillippe Petit’s illegal 1974 high-wire performance between World Trade Center towers. In real life, Petit spent about 45 minutes on that wire, walking and kneeling and lying down on a thin cable of steel 110 stories above the Manhattan streets. In the movie, it felt like a couple of weeks. It’s intended, I think, to be a film saluting Petit’s bravery, ingenuity and sheer stubborn will. Given my mild acrophobia, I just wanted the guy to get caught before he even started his walk. The ground’s not so bad, Phillippe. Really.

Had I been thinking about how this little tightrope stunt would impact me—in 3-D IMAX, no less—I would’ve brought in a bottle of Tums.

This is not a knock on the movie. Really, it illustrates just how effective it is. And even for me, the flick had some pretty beautiful moments in it.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt in The Walk

For instance, the moment when Petit (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) first steps onto the wire stretching between the two towers. Clouds envelop the scene, and the wire vanishes in a blue-cotton haze in the distance. Petit speaks of the comfort that comes from placing his foot on the wire—how it supports him, how the towers support the wire.

And in that moment, it felt like a picture of faith.

Faith and tightrope walking, oddly enough, have a strange, shared history. Nik Wallenda, the tightrope walker who walked over Niagara Falls in 2012, is a Christian whose faith is instrumental in his work. “I grew up in a born-again Christian family,” he told QMI Agency at the time. “That’s the way I was raised and I find comfort and peace in that.” Loads of preachers have recounted the story of another famed French tightrope walker, Charles Blondin, who walked across the falls in 1860. He allegedly performed many great feats on that line, including pushing a wheelbarrow full of potatoes across it.

“Do you believe I can carry a person across in this wheelbarrow?” he allegedly asked the crowd gathered at the edge of Niagara Falls. “Yes!” the crowd shouted. But when he asked for volunteers, not a one of them took Blondin up on the trip.

It’s an illustration, pastors say, of a weak faith: We say we believe, but do we? Do we really?

I thought of that illustration as I watched the end of The Walk—Petit held up by this thin cord. Petit trusted. He had faith.

It was not a blind faith: He calculated the weight of the wire needed, the stabilizers it would require, all manner of eventualities. He’d been a tightrope walker for years, even practicing on wires that his friends would tug and yank, replicating the high winds he might expect 110 stories up. He trusted his skills, his equipment, his friends.

But the stunt required a severe, unblinking sort of faith even so. Any sensible man might still look at the wire—stretched nearly 1,400 feet up in the air—and grow fearful. I mean, how could a sensible man not? But Petit was taught by his mentor, Papa Rudy (Ben Kingsley), that fear and doubt mean death. When Petit feels an inkling of doubt during his training in the movie, the wire shakes and buckles. Sometimes, Petit falls. He has the skills to make it across, no doubt. But if he doubts his skills? Loses heart in the moment? If he lets the wire’s height or length get to him? There’s no way Petit would make it across.

“It’s impossible,” Petit says. “But I’ll do it.”

Joseph Gordon-Levitt in The Walk

I was reading a story the other day bySalon’s Darin Strauss about how difficult it is, in this age of rationality, to have faith. “How, against a contemporary background, do you contemplate the almighty?” he wrote. “Who believes there’s an oasis in 2015’s scattered metaphysical sand?” Some say that it’s impossible to believe in God today. Foolish, perhaps. The ground’s not so bad.

But yet, those of us who believe in God feel our faith underneath our feet, holding us up. We feel the strength of what our faith is attached to. This is not a strange, frightening place; it is life itself. We believe. And we walk.

“The wire is a safe place for me to be,” Phillippe Petit once said. “It’s a rigorous and simple path. It’s straight. You don’t have meanders like, you know, on the ground, in life.”

Funny how walking as a Christian is often characterized in the same way. Rigorous. Simple. Straight.

I can’t claim to be free of fears or doubts. If my faith is a wire, it sometimes shakes. I sometimes fall. But I do have faith—faith that something special is waiting on the other side.

St. Spock: Some Spiritual Thoughts on Leonard Nimoy’s Greatest Character

Leonard Nimoy died earlier today at the age of 83. He was, according to the obituaries I’ve seen, a man of many talents: poet, photographer, musician. But it was as an actor that most of us knew him first and best—an actor who became famous for one role. Mr. Spock of Star Trek.

A few years ago, I wrote a book proposal that probed spirituality from the deck of the Enterprise—a show created by Gene Roddenberry, one of the world’s best-known humanists (and no fan of organized religion). And no one was more compelling from a spiritual angle than Spock.

If anyone would seem prone to atheism, you’d think it would be Star Trek’s favorite vulcan, he of the eminently logical mind and lover of empirical data. The Vulcan culture banished emotion eons ago, and religion is a deeply passionate impulse. Given how often popular culture and modern media pit science against faith, you’d think that spirituality and our scientific Spock would be incompatible.

But Vulcans, according to the exhaustive Star Trek wiki Memory Alpha, have deeply religious roots. Their famous hand signal is said to b e based on the Jewish rabbinic sign for “Shaddai,” a name of God. Their society is steeped in tradition and ceremony, thoughtful reflection and a rejection of unhealthy passion—which echoes James 1:15: “After desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin, and sin, when it is full grown, gives birth to death.” Any Vulcan could have written this statement from fourth-century Christian recluse (and one of the fathers of monasticism) John of Lycopolis: “Everyone who has not renounced the world fully and completely but chases after its attractions suffers from spiritual instability. His preoccupations, being bodily and earthly, distract his mind through the many enterprises in which he is engaged.” It’s no coincidence that, for a couple of movies, Spock dresses very much like a monk.

Would Spock’s logic keep him from seeing spiritual truth? I don’t think so. In fact, it might be prepare him for it better. In my sadly unsold book, I drew some parallels between Spock and Digory Kirke, the old professor in C.S. Lewis’ classic Narnia tale The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe:

“Logic!” exclaims Professor Digory Kirke. “Why don’t they teach logic at these schools?”

Professor Kirke is a man after Spock’s own green heart. He’s quite old, very kind and incredibly smart, and when Peter and Susan Pevensie need help figuring out how to help their younger sister, Lucy—a girl who has suddenly been blathering about some strange, snowy world called Narnia locked behind a wardrobe door—they turn to the white-haired prof for help. How should they handle these incredible lies? Or what if Lucy doesn’t realize she’s lying? What if she’s losing her mind?

After pondering the situation for a while and clearing his throat, Professor Kirke asked a deceptively simple question in return.

“How do you know that your sister’s story is not true?”

Peter and Susan are flabbergasted, but Professor Kirke swiftly—logically—takes them step-by-step through a process wherein it seems as though Narnia might not be so illogical after all.

“There are only three possibilities,” the Professor concludes. “Either your sister is telling lies, or she is mad, or she is telling the truth. You know she doesn’t tell lies and it is obvious that she is not mad. For the moment then and unless any further evidence turns up, we must assume she is telling the truth.”

In 2009’s Star Trek, a young Mr. Spock—a Spock before the whales and Wyatt and all his other adventures—contemplates a seriously pressing problem: How did a Romulan mining ship come to possess a previously unknown doomsday weapon that, just minutes before, destroyed Spock’s home planet of Vulcan? Could such a weapon be hidden? The product of an unknown alien race? Spock quickly discards hypothesis after hypotheses for one that’s merely outlandish: The Romulan craft, somehow and for some unknown reason, must’ve come from the future. And in explaining himself to the crew, the Vulcan does a remarkably cogent impression of Professor Kirke.

“If you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains—however improbable—must be the truth,” Spock says.

I believe in God and Christianity not because it makes me feel good, but because I believe it to be true. I believe it to make sense. I believe it’s logical. I don’t know if I learned that from Spock … but his example sure didn’t hurt.

I could go on. Spock’s near inability to lie. His rejection of excess. His selfless act of sacrifice in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, in which he becomes nearly a Christ-like avatar. Spock is not a Christian. But as embodied by Leonard Nimoy, he embodied Christian values better than most of us.

Have a Little Faith In Our Kids

I’ve been reading a lot about how children raised in religious households have a harder time discerning fantasy from fiction. That’s the word, at least, from scientists involved in a study published by Cognitive Science magazine this month.

The 66 5- and 6-year-olds in the study were told a series of stories. Some were realistic, like this:

This is Jonah. Jonah took a trip on a boat. One stormy night, Jonah was thrown overboard. A nearby whale opened its mouth to bite him, but Jonah swam away just in time. Jonah then climbed back onto the boat with the help of his fellow sailors.

Some were religious:

This is Jonah. After disobeying God’s orders, Jonah was thrown overboard a ship and then swallowed by a large whale. Jonah prayed to God for three days, and was spit out by the whale safe and sound. As a result, Jonah promises to obey God’s orders in the future.

And some were fantastical:

This is Jonah. Jonah took a trip on a boat. One stormy night, Jonah was thrown overboard a ship and then swallowed by a large whale. But Jonah had magical powers, and he was able to jump out of the whale’s mouth and swim all the way to the shore.

The children all thought that the realistic story was, well, real. But once it came to the other two, kids raised in homes without religion were quick to dismiss both the religious and the fantastical story as fiction. The religious children were far more apt to accept the religious story as fact, and some accepted the fantastical one, too.

According to said scientists, young religious kids have a “broader conception” of what reality can encompass, and also have a more difficult time separating fantasy from reality. Some religious critics have naturally used the study as proof that religion is ludicrous and that religious parents are perhaps stunting their children’s grasp of reality. As Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern writes, “When you’ve been told that a woman was created from a man’s rib, or that a man reawakened three days postmortem little worse for wear, your grasp on reality is bound to take a hit.”

But there’s a bit of an irony, here. Setting aside the Biblical story of Jonah for a moment, the “realistic” story is, technically, just as made up as the fantastical one. Researchers made it up. It feels more likely that it could happen, but that doesn’t mean it did happen. It’s just as much of a lie, and not nearly as good a story.

So technically, the study doesn’t suggest as much that non-religious kids have a better grasp of reality as much as it seems they’re being taught that reality is boring.

Whether you’re religious or not, reality is not boring. Inexplicable, even miraculous, things happen every day. Astronomers tell us that there’s a planet made entirely of diamond. Meteorologists pretty much admit that there’s a rare form of lightning that can go about as fast as a good-paced mosey. Sometimes fish fall from the sky. Sometimes rivers turn the color of blood. These things would be rejected out of hand by more serious-minded kids, I'm sure--and yet, there they are. This universe of ours is a fantastical place. The fact that we’re here at all is a breathtaking miracle.

I’m not arguing to scrap realism or science for the fantastic or religious. I have a deep appreciation for science, and it makes me sad when Christians reject it for religious or political reasons without any critical thought. I’m with Augustine when he said:

“If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason?”

But Augustine, one of the deepest thinkers of his day, obviously still believed in miracles. I think one can embrace scientific reason and also believe in the possibility of a God who can do miracles. I think most of us can have a firm grasp on reason while still keeping the door slightly ajar for the completely unexpected. 

G.K. Chesterton, the great British author, journalist and lay theologian, had the truth of it in his book Orthodoxy, I think:

“Everywhere we see that men do not go mad by dreaming. Critics are much madder than poets. Homer is complete and calm enough; it is his critics who tear him to extravagant tatters. Shakespeare is quite himself; it is only some of his critics who have discovered that he was somebody else. And though St. John the Evangelist saw many strange monsters in his vision, he saw no creature so wild as one of his own commentators. The general fact is simple. Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion …. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain. The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.”

I loved it when my children asked some deep, even cynical questions about the world around them and the faith I was trying to pass on to them. It’s important to have an active, inquisitive mind. But I’d also like our 5- and 6-year-olds be poets. To be dreamers. To look around the world and feel its full of wonder. Of possibility. Of miraculous beauty.

Because it can be if we let it.

There’s an Alien On My Church

Exploring links between pop culture and spirituality has been my thing for a few years now. And most of the time, it’s sort of a one-way street. I look at a piece of entertainment and try to find a little hint of God or faith at work in them. But it can go the other way, too. Pop culture can sneak into church—sometimes quite literally.

Take the Bethlehem Chapel (Chapelle de Bethleem), a church built in Brittany in the Middle Ages and declared a historical monument in 1911.

Looks like a pretty typical, pretty old church, right? But despite the chapel’s antiquity, it boasts some rather unusual, eye-catching gargoyles on its corners. For example, this one.

And this.

And this.

What, were the original builders time travelers with an affection for 1980s American cinema? If only. No, the explanation is a little more pedestrian (but still pretty interesting). When the chapel was being restored in 1993, there was some question as to how to replace the missing pinnacles at the corners. So sculpture Jean-Louis Boistel proposed to craft gargoyles (or, more correctly, the chimeras) that blended mythological, Christian and contemporary references into a solid whole.

So, in addition to Adam and Eve and symbols of the Four Evangelists, Boistel incorporated the alien from Alien (representing the biblical Leviathan), the gremlins from Gremlins (symbolizing the good and evil in ourselves) and Goldorak—a manga knight that was apparently super-popular in France back in the mid 1990s (representing righteousness). You can see the Boistel’s Goldorak here.

But the Bethlehem Chapel isn’t the only place you can find pop culture iconography on the outside of a church. Take a look at this picture from the National Cathedral in Washington D.C. and you might see a certain Sith Lord staring down at you.

Maybe to some, these entertainment figurines seem like a strange fit with the eternal truth held inside the church. The idea of Gizmo gracing a centuries-old sanctuary might feel a little too flip.

But I don’t think so. Throughout its history, the Christian Church has shown a remarkable ability to adapt what’s popular and translate it into something holy. It co-opted pagan holidays and made them sacred. It adopted popular drinking songs and made them hymns. To me, these carvings are simply another example of the Christian ability to sanctify the less-than-pure stuff in our culture. Which, when you think about it, is really core to the faith itself. After all, we less-than-perfect Christians also believe we’ve been redeemed. Kinda nifty, that.  

A Friendly Response to a Friendly Atheist

I read an interesting little essay from Hemant Mehta, the “Friendly Atheist,” on CNN this morning, outlining some reasons why Millennials are leaving the Christian Church. He suggests that Christianity’s “sloppy defense” (“they’re anti-gay, anti-women, anti-science, anti-sex-education and anti-doubt, to name a few of the most common criticisms,” he writes) is partly to blame. But he also points to the inroads that the atheist movement has made in the culture—the atheists’ large, vocal presence on the Internet perhaps being the most obvious. Of this “impressive offense,” he writes:

Christians can no longer hide in a bubble, sheltered from opposing perspectives, and church leaders can’t protect young people from finding information that contradicts traditional beliefs.

An Agape feast from an early Christian catacomb

I believe Mehta’s right on that score. There is no safe place to hide from ideas in the 21^st century. The Internet has made even traditional notions of privacy feel rather quaint, and certainly we cannot expect our most cherished beliefs to be held without scrutiny.

That said, “hiding” has never been exactly high on a list of Christian virtues, anyway. While keeping a low profile has sometimes been necessary for Christians during the faith’s long and bumpy history, Christianity has always thrived best out in the open, facing the future—whatever it might hold—with a certain boldness.

And well we should be bold.

I’ve seen a great many stories over the last several days that track Christianity’s declining influence in the culture. According to the Pew Religion and Public Life Project, nearly 20 percent of all adults claim no religious affiliation, with nearly a third of people under 30 being unaffiliated. Author Nigel Barber claims in an e-book that atheism will replace religion by 2041.

Numbers like that can fuel a lot of angst among the faithful. We see church attendance dip year by year and congregations grow older. Folks who feel that the country should reflect traditional Christian values lament the tide of secularism. Mehta, with his “offense/defense” imagery, suggests we’re locked in a battle, and Christians can often feel that way, too—a battle in which the best, most persuasive ideology will eventually prevail. We feel like we have to fight.

But Christians must remember that this “battle” is, in the end, almost completely moot. We are not championing an ideal as much as we—both Christians and atheists—are searching for truth. And the truth is not dependent on how many people convert to one side or the other.

Man Reading by Candlelight by Matthias Stom

Religion and atheism aren’t warring over the merits of a political ideology or a plot of disputed land. We are simply asking the same question, but answering it in different ways: Is there a God? The answer, while unknowable, isn’t decided through debate. Either He’s out there or He isn’t. Whether religion or atheism wins this 21^st century war of words is beside the point. It’s like fighting over a vacant lot—but ownership has already been decreed by deed, locked away in a mysterious safe somewhere.

Now, if you believe in a God like I do—one who’s in control—that should give some comfort in these uncertain times. That doesn’t mean we should be passive to challenges to our faith. But we shouldn’t get defensive, sloppy or no. This isn’t a war. We’re simply telling the world the truth as we see it—conveying that truth as best we can all its beauty and mystery and paradoxical rationality. Yes, we may be wrong. Then again, so may they.

If we focus in on those big questions instead of getting tangled up in smaller ones, I think we’ll be better positioned to show people God’s love and grace.

There’s no guarantee that the trends we see will reverse anytime soon, of course. I’d expect that the religious “nones” will continue to rise in influence in the United States. But we must not confuse trends with truth. Christianity has often been threatened. It’s often been beaten, quite frankly. And yet, the faith never seems to lose. It’s remarkable. It’s outlandish historical resilience would be enough to give, you would think, some atheists pause.

In The Everlasting Man, G.K. Chesterton wrote:

Christendom has had a series of revolutions and in each one of them Christianity has died. Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a god who knew the way out of the grave. But the first extraordinary fact which marks this history is this: that Europe has been turned upside down over and over again; and that at the end of each of these revolutions the same religion has again been found on top. The Faith is always converting the age, not as an old religion but as a new religion.

I think if Chesterton was alive today, he’d be pretty amused by the Christian hand-wringing over the rise of the “nones.” Yes, Europe is growing more secular—and yet there are more Christians on the planet than ever before. Even as the numbers of the “nones” grow as a percentage of the population, another Pew study tells us that “the unaffiliated have one of the lowest retention rates of any of the major religious groups, with most people who were raised unaffiliated now belonging to one religion or another.”    

Christianity is Cool Hand Luke. It is Rocky. It’s a stubborn cuss. For at least three centuries, atheists have claimed that the end of faith is just around the corner. But we faithful are still here, proclaiming our truth with cheerful boldness. 

Running on Faith: Forced Rest

This year for me will go down as the year of stitches. Not the year in stitches, mind you—which would imply that I’ve had a very funny year. Though I must admit, I did get my last set of stitches in a rather funny (that is, odd) way.

Last Saturday, my wife and I had just come back from an evening walk and our little pooch, Hoover, was ecstatic—as he always is—that we returned yet again. He was so thrilled, in fact, that he started running around the living room, smacked into my leg … and sort of screeched to a sudden stop. And at the same time, he seemed to pull my leg toward him, as if with some mysterious canine magnet.

At first, I thought that perhaps some of my leg hair had gotten tangled up in his collar. And then I realized that if Hoover was pulling on my hair, it’d probably hurt a lot more than it did. And I quickly came to a rather disturbing conclusion: Somehow, his collar had hooked itself into my shin.

And that is exactly what happened.

The good news is that is sounds way worse than it felt. The pain was minimal, really.

But the bad news was that the wound necessitated seven stitches. Worse, the nurse on call said that the stitches were in an awkward place. Too much activity around the area, and there’d be a threat the things would pop. I’d be unable to run until someone yanked ‘em out … in 10-14 days.

Now, if you’ve read my running blogs, you know that I’m not exactly a runner runner—a guy who can’t wait to lace up his running shoes and dive into the cold, rainy, sleety morning for a jog, singing as cheerfully as Snow White does when she’s polishing furniture.

I don’t like to run. I like to eat, and running allows me to eat and still fit into my work pants. I like to say that I’m a runner, because I’ve never been athletic and it’s nice to pretend every once in a while. The running itself? Yeah, I could do without it.

Or so I thought. But as it turns out, I’ve been running regularly for so long that to not run feels very, very strange.    

At first, the forced break was nice—like a little vacation for my calves. There were many, many benefits. I got home earlier, for one thing. Cut down my showering to once a day without offending anyone (that I’m aware of).

But after about four days, I was missing my runs. My body felt like it was growing ever-more gelatinous. My brain was getting a little sluggish, too, not having a nice, steady regimen to latch onto. I felt like I was grumpier and not sleeping as well. I was turning into Robert Louis Stevenson’s Mr. Hyde without the fun of his scintillating night life.

Yesterday was the worst. I was on deadline for a couple of freelance writing projects and, moreover, had a devotional to give the next morning at work (I work for a Christian ministry, and we have a dizzying number of devotionals).

As I was sitting at my desk, wondering whether I could bum some Maalox off of someone, I thought to myself, “man, I could really use a run right now.”

That might’ve been the first time I’ve ever consciously had that specific thought. But in the moment, it was absolutely true. An hour-long run would give me time to plan my devotional. It’d burn off a little of the stress I felt over my deadlines. A run, I realized, would give me a sense of peace that I, at that moment, sorely lacked.

For me, running has always felt so much like my own experience and struggles with faith. Yes, I appreciate the discipline that faith requires of me. I like the benefits that I gather. I love the relationship inherent in faith—the privilege of communing with God (as imperfectly as that communion may look at times). But for me, the Christian walk can be work, and hard work. It’s hard to be ever mindful of God and faith (even when you work at a ministry). It’s trying to push forward sometimes. There are times, frankly, when it’d be cool to take a break.

And let me be completely honest: Sometimes I do. I know I fall short on what I should be doing to keep my faith up to snuff. I can forget. I can grow lazy. I can shove thoughts of God into the back of my mind and find myself far more mindful of other things: Work. Kids. Fantasy football.

But whenever I forget to pray, or contemplate God, or even when I purposefully shove aside my questions about spirituality, I find that it’s not long before I feel empty. I find that I miss it. I need it. I’m not whole without faith. I’m lost without my sense of God.

I just got my stitches out a few hours ago. All is, alas, not well with my little wound. It may be a little infected, which means another 10 days of antibiotics for me. And it’s not closed yet, which means the stitches have been replaced with some super-sticky tape.

But the doctor gave me the thumbs up to start running again. It can only help at this point, he says. Running will spark better circulation, and the more blood the cut gets, the better it’ll heal.

So after work, I ran. It was a short run. It’s amazing how out of shape you get after just a 10-day break. It was hot, sweaty, exhausting work.

And it felt really, really good.