Reconcilliation

Pity the Pope. His job is to explain the mind of God to 1.2 billion people most of whom trust him, and to convince another few billion that he has it right when it is clear that his predecessors sometimes had it disastrously wrong. 

Short pause while you close this file, scratch your head, or stop laughing. You may think, as I do, that "mind of God" is a metaphor, albeit an engaging metaphor. Consider an alternative. What if mind is a property of matter that emerges from approximately 86 billion neurons organized in a densely connected network with nodes and modules performing various specialized functions. The work of mind is figuring out how to improve the odds of survival and keeping track of what works. Beyond that, each individual mind communicates with similar minds through language in a social network that transcends time and place so that what is learned by an individual may inform others. Knowledge evolves just as mind evolved.

The principle behind the evolutionary metaphor is found in a book by Douglas Hofstadter "Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid" published in 1979. His idea may avoid some of the dark consequences of the Mind-of-God metaphor. 

According to Hofstadter, a chaotic system may organize itself by a recursive process involving incremental changes and selection. To find out what recursion is, click here. If you don't get the joke, click here. Joking aside, don't pretend that what you know is God because the next turn of the wheel may prove you wrong. Thanks to the church for providing yet another convincing example of that. 

The Mind-of-God metaphor supposes that God has done the thinking for us, and if we can get a look at God's answers we don't have to think it through on our own because God's answers must be perfect. Knowing the truth, why would you keep looking? But if you are wrong about the answers being perfect and you take another look, what are the implications for the inevitable next cycle of revision. Letting go of trusted truths must be painful. Remember all those people questioning the moral authority of the church in light of the obscenity of residential schools. Who will show the way when nobody knows the mind of God? So much better to admit that God is what is, and all of us are going to spend our time here trying to figure it out recursively. Then let us forgive each other and our predecessors because none of us is sure what we are doing while we keep trying to do better.

The church failed, in its ignorance, but it wasn't alone. Kings and countries failed; explorers and settlers failed; our parents failed, and we continue to fail. We imagined that conquest justified plunder and oppression. We thought that knowing the mind of God justified suppressing indigenous culture. And now that we have suppressed that culture, we would like to ignore the victims because they are in the way of logging, mining, pipelines and golf courses. 

We dishonored the memory of the Jewish teacher who accepted instruction from a Syrophenician woman when she showed him that his duty of compassion went beyond his tribe (Mark 7:25-30). Forgive us; we didn't know what we were doing. We confess that we still don't know. But we will try to do better.

It remains for us to turn the wheel. That's what our big brains are for. When you contemplate life using the recursion metaphor, knowledge raises questions, imagination hints at what is possible, faith is the courage to choose when you aren't sure, being wrong is a chance to learn and an invitation to do better, question seeks understanding and the wheel goes round.

How to reconcile is the next question. I imagine it might include an indigenous education, we grandchildren of settlers at the feet of native elders to reform our proud ignorance. There isn't room for all of us in native school or the sweat lodge. However, there is a new cohort of indigenous authors who can help us turn the wheel. Native lore inspires humility looking to plants and animals for wisdom to replace our anthropocentrism. It teaches generosity rather than possessiveness, reciprocity with the earth rather than exploitation, restorative justice rather than retribution. Three indigenous authors have been my mentors so far. I am anticipating the fourth.