Searching for God # 113

 Recently I read a quote from the coach of the Vegas Golden Knights NHL hockey team that one of his players, Mitch Marner, is “cerebral”! I am sure that such a quote, perhaps in private, has been used to described other professional hockey players. It is the context and the startling depth of the perception that caught my attention.

In the first place, this same hockey player had spent nine seasons toiling for his home-town team, the Toronto Maple Leafs, without demonstrating scoring success in several playoff series. He became so despised by some of his Toronto fans that his life was threatened at his home, and he needed private security. It was not surprising that he signed with the Golden Knights, in the off-season, moving about as far away from Toronto, while still playing in the same league as feasible.

As an integral part of his bravado, about his star, the coach, John Tortorella, extended his comment, indicating that, for Toronto fans who might have missed it, Marner ‘does so many other things so well whether he scores or not’ that it seemed tragic to Tortorella that Toronto had missed his play-making, penalty-killing and intuitive brilliance.

Missing brilliance in hockey is one thing, that perhaps is interesting and relevant to hockey enthusiasts and their professional colleagues. Decades ago, however, the renowned social historian, John Ralston Saul described another hockey player, Wayne Gretzky, in words to the effect that he was always intent on being where the puck ‘was going to be’. Gretzky’s vision and his perception of the state of play on a 200-foot ice pad was such, as Saul perceived it, that he ‘knew’ where the puck was going and positioned himself ready for it when it arrived. Is that ‘vision’ or ‘intuition’ the same or even similar to what Tortorella referred to when he spoke of Marner as ‘cerebral’?

Recently, I listened to an insightful podcast, hosted by Malcolm Gladwell with his guest, Jim Balsillie, one of the original corporate executives of Blackberry, the Canadian digital Roman Candle that blast into the new tech space, and flamed out almost as quickly, after amassing some $20 billions in business revenue. The thrust of the interview was the Gladwell question, ‘Why did it all go off the rails?

These two men, both from small Ontario towns, Exeter for Gladwell and Peterborough for Balsillie, became across-the-hall freshmen at Trinity College, University of Toronto, back in the 1980’s. And both worked, as the interview detailed, hard to fit into the social culture of their college, comprised as it was of graduates from elite private schools such as Upper Canada College. Both Gladwell and Balsillie graduated from public high schools in small towns, and felt considerably overwhelmed by the ‘status’ of their fellow freshmen. As Gladwell describes his guest, Jim was always ‘right’ in his answer to any question. As Jim answered, when asked if he were ever in ‘trouble’ in school, “The grade seven math teacher filled four blackboards with a mathematical equation and turned to his class to ask, “Where did I go wrong?” Jim’s blurted answer from the back of the classroom, ‘When you were born!’

At four years, Jim’s parents had him seen by a psychiatrist ‘because they did not know what to do with me’…as he puts it in the interview. And then, what happened at Blackberry?
In summary, Balsillie had been travelling the world securing commitment from large tech companies to partner with the Blackberry technology, with a view to its becoming the social media platform of the future. This was in the early 20-teens. His assessment of the ‘problem’ when the final vote of the board was taken opposing his projected path for the Blackberry future, (after he had proposed a   future based exclusively on evolving software, as he ‘knew’ that the future of hardware was already ‘dead’), was that he had not spent enough time with the board to bring them up to speed with his software futuristic vision…..a vision which as Gladwell trumpets, was ‘right all along’!

While his assessment is valid, one has to wonder if it is as ‘visionary’ as his ‘cerebral’ assessment of the technological landscape. Was it merely more time and more information that might have influenced the board’s collective mind about the future of their company in the landscape that was quickly becoming global? Was the board, as one might suspect, holding a collective perspective that, innately valued ‘hardware’ more highly than ‘software’ which, perhaps to them seemed ‘too ephemeral’ or even abstract, or poetic, or imaginary? Boards of directors, traditionally, and even predictably, are comprised of men and women whose legacy illustrates an alliance with and even a preference for the ‘traditional’ and the conservative (small ‘c’) and the dependable and the reliable, in whatever field they might have been engaged in developing.

Is there an analogy between the Blackberry board members and the Toronto Maple Leafs’ fans, for the expected, traditional ways of evaluating success. In Scotiabank Arena, that is through scoring or assisting on goals. In the board room, that would be in securing a ‘traditional, conservative, if innovative,’ project’s long-term future based on traditional, predictable measures.

Gladwell’s personal pursuit of ‘intelligence’ or ‘brilliance’ has profoundly cognitive as well as sociological, as well as political, ethical and even religious implications. It is not that one might get closer to God through being intellectually, intuitively and imaginatively ‘outside the norm’ of the culture. Nor, however, is it to abandon one’s intellect, intuition or imagination irrespective of whichever field captures one’s interest.

However, being ‘outside the norm’ in whatever context one ‘operates’ brings with it the spectre of whether one’s ‘difference’ is respected, valued, and honoured, even if questioned, or whether, as it seems to be in more than one arena, devalued, dismissed, and disrespected. In theology, some might call this voice of ‘insight, intuition, imagination and ‘brilliance’ or even ‘cerebral’ the prophetic voice. It is a voice that has been subjected to hours if not years of debate, conflict and even the loss of life, because of one’s views that do not comport with those that prevail in the situation.

 North American culture has made a significant shift in how it perceives and values those with what are called intellectual handicaps, as well as those who have physical ‘disadvantages’ as well as those who live under conditions with which none of us wish to see anyone have to exist. There is a public face to growing public tolerance, acceptance, and even appreciation for those who have obvious disadvantages. For that we can all be grateful. Even legislation enabling new supportive technologies, methodologies and foundational philosophies to work with, support and innovate for such ‘social’ disadvantages has received public support and the funds to implement the changes. Well and good!

Back in the 1980’s I had the opportunity to visit the Toronto site of IBM, as a community college information officer, seeking methods of encouraging and motivating staff to contribute new ideas to their organization. Naturally, the ‘proverbial’ suggestion box’ with appropriate follow-up research, as to the relevance, the cost and the applicability of the new ‘idea’ required the ‘promised reward’ for the best and most relevant and applicable idea. There were moments of some ‘success’ in attracting new ideas although, as the culture seemed to prefer, there was also the predictable derision of many who believed, or at least acted, as if those who ‘proferred new ideas’ were merely sucking up for a promotion. The idea had serious limitations.

Both Marner and Balsillie are, according to reliable sources, replete with new and imaginative, cerebral, and creative visions that are directly related to and applicable to their specialty. Balsillie has also attempted to purchase an NHL franchise and locate it in the Hamilton area, and has been opposed consistently by the governors of the NHL, who fear interference and a watering down of their profit likely in both Buffalo and Toronto where teams are already established. As Gladwell notes, there are some 14 million people in southern Ontario, and there could be 14 financially successful NHL teams in that area alone. He actually calls the governors ‘dumb’ for their lack of what he would term, pragmatic vision.

We all, in North America at least, know of religious sanctuaries that are being converted into community theatres, community centres, or sold for multiple housing units. Pews and plates are emptying at a rate that, for some, is dizzying. Others are less surprised.

It is not only in hockey and in business that vision, prophecy, imagination, intuition and change have a legitimate place. It is true in science, medicine, and even law, as well as in communication, education and, (and here one can only hope) also in Christian theology.

The Christian church has revered, sacralized and made an idol of ‘biblical stories’ interpreted in a manner and with a perspective that may (and even that is only a may, not a certainty) have had relevance at the time the words were inscribed. Such relevance, and such sacralizing and such worship merely upholds those whose teachings and beliefs have been deployed to retain and to support and to apply the teachings of, for example, the parables.

Much of the approach has been a literal, empirical and especially a moral and ethical one. Indeed, the church has found itself burrowing a circle with its own ‘uroborus snake-like body’ in the trench created as it circles with its head in its tail. In decades in the church, I have never heard a single clergy, professor, musician or even administrator referred to as ‘creative, cerebral, imaginative, intuitive or even innovative. However, as might be expected, I have heard many described as ‘relatable, successful for bringing in both bodies and dollars, and occasionally, some homilies have been referred to as thoughtful, or perhaps even challenging and provocative.

Considerable opposition, from predictable institutional authorities, has been raised in objection to such theologies as ‘liberation theology in South America,’ as well as to Vatican II, as well as to the work of the Jesus Seminar. And, naturally, in the spirit of holding and revering what one ‘knows’ to be good, and right and biblical, (as we were all taught in Sunday School), we collectively cling to the reading of those stories, those myths, all of which are open to, ready for and welcoming of new ‘imaginative and intuitive and scholarly and cerebral’ thinking, exegesis and application to the lives of those who are searching for a God, whose full identity and meaning and relationship to each of us is beyond whatever we are capable of imagining.

Even these words from Robert Funk’s, Honest to Jesus, will startle many traditional Christians:

We need to cast Jesus in a new drama, assign him a role in a story with a different plot. The creedal plot in which Jesus has been cast is the myth of the external redeemer. In that story, the protagonist leaves a heavenly abode, enters the human space, performs a redemptive function and returns to the heavens. The movement is from and to an alien space. The plot is the essence of the Christ hymn in the second chapter of Philippians, the prologue to the Gospel of John, and the Hymn of the Pearl preserved in the Acts of Thomas, a third-century pseudepigraphical work……

The redeemer hero in this plot comes from beyond and belongs to a reality not our own. The hero is not one of us; he or she ….is qualitatively different from us. Thjis feature of the redeemer suggests that the created world is basically flawed and must be redeemed from without. In this flawed world, evil is stronger than human powers and cannot be overcome without superhuman aid. Mortal men and women are powerless within the framework of the myth because evil itself has cosmic dimensions. Spectator religion, morality and politics are the inevitable result. Human beings are pawns in the cosmic drama being played out on a stage wider than their own. We are encouraged to rely on the powers above us, alien to us. Myths in this category tend to tranquilize, the function as escapist fare. (Funk, Op, cit. p.307-308)

How would these words and ideas and perceptions be received in a theological graduate school or in a diocesan convention, or in a Sunday Christian education class? Would they be dismissed as were both Marner and Balsillie?