Passing Through Darkness

A Wrinkle in Time is a weird book. It’s theological children’s science fiction. It’s about good and evil, angels that look like old women but are also something like pegasuses or stars, different planets, and giant brains. I love it. Like all really good science fiction, it’s much more about the power of love than it is about aliens.

There’s this moment in A Wrinkle in Time that I think about a lot. Meg passes through the Black Thing. The Black Thing is evil—literally, it is the physical form of evil, and by touching it, she is hurt. The wise people of a new planet treat her and help her regain her physical strength, but she is still wounded. When she lashes out at her most important people, her alien caretaker says, “Don’t judge her harshly, She was almost taken by the Black Thing. Sometimes we can’t know what spiritual damage it leaves.”

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Sense of Scale

In the story of Babel that I was taught as a kid, the Babelites were not sure they were going to earn their way to heaven and were uncertain of God’s grace, so they figured they’d just climb. They built a tower that punctured the clouds, hoping to find where God lived.

I love this image. It’s so literal and graphic. It’s also wrong. Robert Alter, my favorite Biblical commentator, says no one was trying to build a tower to get to heaven. The text says that the tower’s top was “in the heavens,” but that “is a hyperbole found in Mesopotamian inscriptions for celebrating high towers” (Alter 39). The Babel built tower is the linguistic and literal equivalent of our “skyscrapers.”

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When Stones Glow

The Brother of Jared (known only by this epithet in scripture, because apparently his name was Mahonri Moriancumer, and that’s not a fun name to carve into metal plates) was on his way to the promised land. He’d built boats that were “tight like unto a dish” so that its residents could live entirely below deck for those times that water will cover them, but it occurred to him that it was going to be very dark in there, which, in addition to creating what must have been a horrendous vitamin D deficiency, would make it hard to steer.

The Brother of Jared went to God and posed this problem, to which the Lord answered, “What will ye that I should do that ye may have light in your vessels?” (Ether 2:23). No windows, he specified, and no fire. But other than that—what can I do for you? (This always reminds me of my dad, whose favorite mantra while I was growing up was, “You’re smart, you can figure it out.”)

The Brother of Jared reflected on this for a while and then went to work making sixteen shiny stones of glass. He took them to God, saying, “Look, I know this might be a stupid idea, and don’t be mad at me, but here’s my pitch: what if you touch them, and fill them with your light, and we’ll use that to cross the sea” (Ether 3:4). The Lord, invisible behind a cloud during this whole conversation, reached out and touched the stones, and they were filled with light.

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On Hobbits and Happiness

Often, when one of my friends is off to do something exciting or unknown, I’ll ask them, “On a scale from Bilbo to Gandalf, how do you feel?

Bilbo, of course, is the main hobbit in The Hobbit. He likes the comfortable life—good food served promptly at meal times in warm, dry, comfortable spaces, preferably home. Gandalf, of course, is the wizard who tramps around inciting adventure and danger and general excitement everywhere he goes, convincing others to tramp along with him. This, of course, is how Bilbo ends up hungry on the other side of the world, in lots of cold, wet, uncomfortable spaces and has a lovely adventure.

Sometimes I am the wizard, sometimes I am the hobbit. Sometimes I spend days on AirBnB or hop last on a last minute flight, go on sporadic six hour hikes or wander around unknown cities looking for speakeasies. Other times, like a few weeks ago when I was on a plane to Aruba, my inner hobbit kicks in.

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Mastering the Elements: Avatar Conflict Analysis

Last year my family was rewatching Avatar: The Last Airbender. (I know it’s a kid’s show, but it also has some of the best character development on TV and a surprisingly developed stance on colonialism and intergenerational trauma, and one day I will write a post about repentance primarily by talking about Zuko and it will bring you to tears.)

If you haven’t seen it, the general plot is that there are four nations, each characterized by different “bending” or control over the elements (fire, air, water, earth). One hundred years previous to the beginning of the show, the fire nation began taking over the other nations, which it was able to do partly because the Avatar, the one person each generation who was able to do all four kinds of bending, disappeared. In the first episode, Aang, the Avatar, comes back and begins his quest to restore balance to the world.

One day, my mom and I were analyzing an encounter she’d had earlier that week, and I said, “I think the problem is that you were trying to firebend, but you’re an earthbender.”

She stopped what she was doing. “Say that again,” she said. And thus, Avatar Conflict Analysis (ACA) was born.

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