Certainty

Consciousness is an idea I explore with joy. That’s thanks to Professor Hilbert. During a month-long J-Term in undergrad, now over a decade behind me, I took a class called, you guessed it, Consciousness. In the dead of winter at a liberal arts college in Minnesota, a professor on the brink of retirement carried out a final piece of pushing-the-limits pedagogy, a class that could hardly stand up to inspection, so richly vague and ambiguous was the syllabus. 

Professor Hilbert introduced a bunch of hungover teenagers to the concept of consciousness by delivering a bizarre lecture about his childhood memory of laying in his crib, thinking to himself, “I am thinking. But who is this I? Now I am thinking about myself thinking about myself. How do I ever come to capture the “I” that is me? Now I am thinking about myself thinking about myself thinking about myself.” So on, so forth, exponential selves radiating like a funhouse mirror, never able to close the loop. How do you capture consciousness, the observer itself? 

It was a terrific class. We watched 2001: A Space Odyssey and episodes of Twilight Zone. We read the most seemingly random books. What does Temple Grandin’s Animals in Translation and a (very unfairly, don’t get me started) dismissed feminist theory of evolutionary biology have to do with consciousness? Well, it’s all about perspective. Professor Hilbert was interested in locating consciousness, and you can’t begin the search until you first become aware of the edges of your own point of view. We walk around with a lot of assumptions of who we are, but when we try to pin it down, the self turns out to be a pretty slippery fish. 

The class had one assignment: we were to write “The Theory of the Sentons.” 

“What are Sentons?” we asked. 

“No idea,” he said. “Smaller than quarks, I’m sure. Very small. But I don’t know what they are, or what they have to do with consciousness. That’s why I need you to write the theory.” 

We all agreed to the terms: we would each turn in something titled, “The Theory of the Sentons” and sharing our fate, we would either all get an A or all get a D. In our desire to have an interesting January while rebelling against the typical standards of what constitutes a class, the students and professor were united. 

Some folks took a real stab at quantum psychics research. Some people wrote memoirs or poems. I turned in a children’s book about little tiny particles, smaller than quarks, which carpeted and connected the entire universe and from which consciousness sprung. Everyone got an A. Like I said, terrific class. 

It was the environment our professor created: by establishing early on that we were exploring an impossible question, we let down our analytic guards. We opened up to imagination. We cheerfully accepted in advance that we had no idea what we were talking about. That kind of silliness and humility replaces frustration with fun. All the while, we were developing more awareness for the fact that, for all our supposed scientific and provable certainties, consciousness was a gigantic, glaring mystery that no discipline could answer satisfactorily. We discovered that we were, by our own existence and experience, undefinable. There is liberation in that idea. 

A few years later I emailed that professor, by then enjoying his retirement, to say how much I loved the class.

“Oh, I remember that class,” he wrote back. “That is the course where the course evaluation asked only one thing: Did you experience anything, yes or no? Point of fact, Molly, EVERYBODY checked ‘yes,’ which of course means that everybody experienced something since that is how surveys work in official Social Science. I copied every response and sent the whole pile over to the Associate Dean’s office, the one who tried to block this course from happening in the first place...That’s the course where someone asked how to tell the difference between an A and a D and I said, correctly, ‘Nobody knows.’”

Maybe it’s helpful to note that this professor specialized in ethnomethodology, the study of how everyday interactions construct the worldview and reality of a group. The reality of grading, having measurable ways to determine what student work is better than other student work, is obviously very important to the shared reality of an institution of higher education. To an ethnomethodologist, it can all become a bit silly. 

Anyways, that’s the door that first led me to try to articulate something about consciousness.

~

Ever since I first had access to my own boombox I’ve fallen asleep best when listening to something. Books on CD or the radio or television. I’m one of those people who needs a background lull to busy my brain with so that my own thoughts don’t get distracting. Now the obvious irony is that, if I don’t pick something familiar or boring enough, I’ll end up staying up even later learning something new. 

Lately I’ve been falling asleep to lectures on relativity and quantum physics, and the other night I was listening to an interview of physicist Frederico Faggin, the inventor of the first microprocessor. He spent a good deal of his career in Silicon Valley, developing microelectronics and co-founding Synaptics. If you’ve ever used a computer with a touchpad, you can thank Frederico. He became interested in consciousness through working in artificial neural networks and was exploring creation of a conscious AI before coming to the conclusion he presents in his theory, which is the subject of the video: Quantum Information-Based Panpsychism (QIP).

With QIP, Frederico argues against the widely accepted physicalist view that consciousness is an emergent property of a complex material brain and therefore something that can be reproduced if only we can make a complex enough computer. Instead he makes the claim that consciousness is a fundamental aspect of reality itself; he describes our experience as a conscious quantum field operating a body, a “quantum-classical machine.” From this perspective, it is not that the brain matures into consciousness, into thinking, “I am,” but rather that the “I” exists prior to and outside of physical reality. 

It helps to keep in mind that there are planes beyond the dimensions we perceive. This theory would say that in a dimension beyond our 4D perceptions (the 4 being 3 spatial dimensions, with the additional dimension of time itself) there is a quantum field that is or houses the conscious “I” we call ourselves. It is this “I” which we experience in our 4D perspective, like a force putting on our puppeted meatsuits, moving and experiencing in our limited way through time and space. Relative to the proposed quantum field of origin, our physical experience is like a hologram. 

I listened and thought, “Oh yeah! The good ol’ Theory of the Sentons.” 

Frederico concludes that it’s therefore impossible to create a conscious AI, because consciousness is does not emerge from material systems. He reiterates a more widely discussed spiritualist claim that consciousness is underlying in the universe, and we are the universe observing itself. He then begins to argue that, if consciousness is not emergent from the material, death is not the end. 

Now I certainly don’t know enough about quantum physics to form a real opinion on this theory. As someone who enjoys thinking about consciousness, I find it fun. Plus, the theory that AI can never be conscious sure helps me sleep at night in more ways than one. 

What I really enjoyed about Frederico’s interview was the source of this idea. In 1990, Frederico was, by all worldly standards, very successful. He was also deeply unhappy. People who are very successful by the world’s standards but unsatisfied internally are primed for a certain kind of realization, that the promises of the world are not as fulfilling as they are sold. Existing in this state of seeking, laying in bed, waiting to fall asleep, he had an experience of “unconditional love.” 

“I am the observer and the observed simultaneously,” he said, describing the sensation of energy emitting from himself, love like he’d never experienced before. “The feelings were love, joy and peace, because this stuff felt like, that’s me, I’m at home, I’m finally home.” 

This encounter changed him. From here, his work shifted to focus on understanding that source of unconditional love. What’s striking about this sort of epiphany is not the soundness of the argument (“unconditional love” sure doesn’t look like much of anything under a microscope) but the tone: listening to him speak, the truth of his experience is evidenced in the way he becomes animated, nearly speechless, struggling for words to describe what he encountered, and so his theory is born from the backwards effort of trying to make sense of what he has recognized but cannot yet articulate.

In The Idea of Holy, Rudolf Otto writes, “I recall vividly a conversation I had with a Buddhist monk. He had been putting before me methodically and pertinaciously the arguments for the Buddhist ‘theology of negation’, the doctrine of Anātman and ‘entire emptiness’. When he had made an end, I asked him, what then Nirvana itself is; and after a long pause came at last the single answer, low and restrained: ‘Bliss - unspeakable’. And the hushed restraint of that answer, the solemnity of his voice, demeanour, and gesture, made more clear what was meant than the words themselves.” 

The edge of comprehension and articulation; what an exciting place. 

~

Many years ago I was prescribed a reading: in the course of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to combat anxiety and depression, my therapist recommended I read portions of Dr. David Burns, Feeling Good. 

When I began therapy, I had been living under the impression that my feelings were not only valid; they were more true than anything else. Feelings were the purest, most personal experience of my existence. At the same time, my experience was quite unhappy. Therefore, my life was an unhappy one. 

I was ready to prove this. Surely I was going to go into that office and convince my therapist that I was the first case of totally valid misery and all my troubles were so much more real than those lucky but totally other curable people. Depression had me committed to the idea that my suffering was not only unique and valid but permanent, tied to my identity, a part of the self that is me. But as I discovered, thoughts, feelings, and behaviors have a much more nuanced relationship. 

Thoughts cause feelings, not the other way around. Example: I can’t feel offended by something unless I first think that something is A. offensive B. directed at me and C. coming from a perspective that matters to me. The thoughts come first, we believe in the thought, and then the feelings arise. And it turns out our thoughts are not always valid. 

If I can be a bit vulnerable, the specific thought pattern that we uncovered was the belief that “I am a failure.” I’d graduated right into the pandemic and my lifelong self-esteem supply fed on academic achievement was cut off at the same time the already slim job market for my field became even narrower. I was worse than broke, weighted down with student debt, apparently unemployable, and without purpose. Years of hard work weren’t paying off. The world didn’t want what I was selling. I was failing. 

This belief began  dominating my thoughts, tinting my emotions, filling me with self-consciousness and self-doubt, stunting my behavior. I didn’t want to try anything new because the evidence was mounting that I was not capable. I would just keep failing. My life became stagnant. It was an awful loop to be stuck in. 

“But these abnormal emotions feel just as valid and realistic as the genuine feelings created by undistorted thoughts, so you automatically attribute truth to them,” wrote Burns. “This is why depression is such a powerful form of mental black magic.”

Feelings are always valid in that they are actually experienced. Anyone who is in the midst of depression knows how true and consuming it is. Depression is a real experience. The feelings are real and all we can do with a feeling is feel it or try to suppress it. Often the sources of our negative thoughts are also, to an extent, valid: we can point to concrete things like our personal finances, our difficult relationships, the rude comment our coworker made, the idiot who cut us off in traffic, the very real traumas we face, systematic greed and oppression. If we want to support the cause of unhappiness, there is plenty of evidence available to get us there. We can think miserable thoughts and inspire miserable feelings and that misery will be our experience. 

But thoughts we can examine, test them for validity. Behaviors we can change, whether we feel like it or not. It sounds, as I write it, so much more simple than it is. This is hard work. It took months. A lot of the time, it sucked. But that’s how we resolved my anxiety and depression: by examining beliefs, by risking new thoughts, by pushing behavior beyond what my mood wanted to permit, by taking each recurring, unhealthy thought and interrogating it for validity. We didn’t go around the problem but through it. 

We’re all carrying around beliefs, some helpful, some heavy. I believe persistent misery is not an acceptable state for a human being, and any beliefs that bind us to distress ought to be interrogated. There are real, serious, disturbing troubles in the world: we must fight them. There are forces that benefit from our unhappiness: we should work as we can not to give them a home in our own perceptions. There are lies we come to believe about ourselves and our capabilities: we need to help each other dismantle them. Once we lay these distorted thoughts out in the open, and interrogate them for truth, suddenly they aren’t just invalid; they aren’t just unhelpful and distorted; they’re boring. 

Certainty, the belief that I was rightly unhappy, was a dead end. It invited no questions, it called for no action. It went nowhere. Take, for example, the dead-end road of perfectionism. 

“‘Perfection’ is man's ultimate illusion. It simply doesn't exist in the universe. There is no perfection. It's really the world's greatest con game; it promises riches and delivers misery. The harder you strive for perfection, the worse your disappointment will become because it's only an abstraction, a concept that doesn't fit reality. Everything can be improved if you look at it closely and critically enough—every person, every idea, every work of art, every experience, everything. So if you are a perfectionist, you are guaranteed to be a loser in whatever you do.”

Perfection, achievement, it’s a watery illusion just ahead in the desert. We arrive at where we dreamed of being and it’s all so…normal. Ugh. Turns out there is no box we can finally check that makes us whole and perfect forever. We chase these illusions of finality because we want certainty. We want labels that stick. When certainty is the goal, the process feels like a chore.   

In this work I found that I am not my thoughts; I am not my feelings; I am not even my behaviors. These are tools, reflections, expressions I can adapt to experience and interact with the world, but I, myself, am something else. In letting go, I had more agency than I’d ever experienced before. I discovered I could exist comfortably in the space created by meeting uncertainty with openness. It was, for me, a paradigm shift. This wasn’t a magic wand where all my troubles disappeared: this was an invitation to reengage with life. My circumstances didn’t have to change; I did. 

“You must first consider that a human life is an ongoing process that involves a constantly changing physical body as well as an enormous number of rapidly changing thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Your life therefore is an evolving experience, a continual flow. You are not a thing; that's why any label is constricting, highly inaccurate, and global.”

Once an openness to change begins to connect as a practice, it is nearly addicting. You begin to experiment, to play. It felt like a miracle, that I could tweak my experience of the world, that I could change. Things that before had crushed my spirit now rolled right off of me. Things that had felt impossible months before were now easy, even delightful. I was trying new things. I was seeing results. 

Then, just as I was really getting the hang of it, therapy ended. My quality of life had improved but it wasn’t going to get perfect. We can’t spend our lives pondering and tinkering with our own self-improvement until we reach psychological Nirvana: at some point we just get out there and live. I appreciate the wisdom of my therapist in this practice of getting on with it. 

It is a massive challenge, to be open to change. It is challenging to imagine that all is impermanent, that the hard times really don’t last forever, that what is new and wonderful now will inevitably become stale, that there is nothing we can hold forever.

Well, not nothing. I am a theologian afterall. 

~ 

We’ve been reading David Tracy’s, Plurality and Ambiguity, which lays the philosophical groundwork for how we are to interpret and engage in conversations about religious texts in contemporary awareness of plurality and, you guessed it, ambiguity. It’s a wordy book. Can’t say I recommend it for your summer reading list. But it is valuable. It’s about context and interpretation. 

“The certainty of contemporary positivist and empiricist critiques of religion is well matched by the literalism and fundamentalism of religious dogmatists in all traditions. But besides these more strictly intellectual difficulties, there is another problem: patrons of certainty and control in the interpretation of religion are boring. And whatever else religion is, it is not boring. It is other, different, disturbing. It is not more of the same.” 

Agreed. Certainty is boring. Whether that certainty comes from the idea that the Bible is useless and we are all bundles of random atoms and nothing matters, or the belief that everything in the Bible is literal and repeating that idea over and over without interrogation is a good punchcard into heaven, the source of the certainty matters little: either way, certainty is small. It’s boring. It is the smug clinging to what is surely another illusion. 

That’s what I adore about theology. Good theologians don’t make claims of certainty; they interpret with all their might, all their mind, and then they make the necessary plunge into trust. We do not expect to find certainty. We would be alarmed if we did.

Tracy writes, “If any human discourse gives true testimony to Ultimate Reality, it must necessarily prove uncontrollable and unmasterable.”

There’s a reason we’re still studying the universe, still puzzling over consciousness, still reading the Bible: with all our brilliance, we can’t pin these things down, can’t open them up with our scalpels, can’t capture the one final and complete image that lasts forever. They’re much too alive. Any God we can comprehend is too small. 

“Grace comes as both gift and threat,” writes Tracy. “As gift, grace can turn one completely around into a transformed life of freedom. Yet grace also comes as a threat by casting a harsh light upon what we have done to ourselves and our willingness to destroy any reality, even Ultimate Reality, if we cannot master it.”

~

There was a BBC article out the other day titled, “Tech billionaires seem to be doom prepping. Should we all be worried?” The latest doom to prepare for: the alleged imminent unleashing of AGI, an “artificial general intelligence” the point at which machines match human intelligence. 

Once again, the tech behemoths have promised to deliver us from all our human troubles. From the same billionaire who promised to give $6 billion to end the global hunger crisis if the UN could write up a plan to execute it, and then promptly did not deliver a dime when the plan was presented, comes this incredible quote regarding AGI: “Everyone will have the best medical care, food, home transport and everything else. Sustainable abundance.” 

Sure, bud. Now I’m not a scientist by training, but I think if the motive behind these innovations was improving the quality of every human life, there’d be a bit of evidence to that end. The problems of today are complex, but not so complex as some leaders would like us to believe. There is absolutely more that could be done to improve the quality of life of all people in this country and the world. In fact, as resources are currently scattered and hoarded, there are just a couple people who could make a massive impact, and yet don’t. That’s because the promises of these technological saviors is, as far as I can tell, spin. The public narrative of heroism exists as appeasement, not promise. 

The future tech utopia is just that: off in the future. We will save the world: tomorrow. Today, we have many excuses to maintain the status quo, to deepen the wealth disparity, to put off good works for tomorrow so that we can build our portfolios today. 

But, within this alleged magic wand, there is also, shocker, a dark side. “Could the tech be hijacked by terrorists and used as an enormous weapon, or what if it decides for itself that humanity is the cause of the world’s problems and destroys us?” The same people profiting from increased suffering around the world have concerns that the technology they’re getting rich on might sniff out their bad faith. Funny that. 

The trouble, as Edward O. Wilson said, is that “We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.” We have these exponentially evolving technologies, more and more power, and the minds wielding them are just as selfish, greedy, reactive and small as ever. Without a paradigm shift in humanity’s understanding of self, we’re handing out handgrenades to toddlers. The idea of AGI apparently terrifies these tech billionaires, who are burrowing into their bunkers in New Zealand and Hawaii.

These articles always lead me to some eye rolling. By the very nature of being a billionaire, we already have an insight into the kinds of people we are discussing: people who invest, poorly, in permanence. Theirs is a fear-based reality: fear of death, fear of poverty, fear of change that doesn’t directly benefit their known and comfortable reality. They want more of the same: manufactured heaven on earth, just don’t peek behind the curtain. Whatever bunkers they build are just further manifestations of an anxiety that is already abundantly apparent in their lifestyles and bank accounts. They’re not walking around with some high level insight: they’re afraid of being human. 

In the introduction to Jamie Wheal’s Recapture the Rapture, Douglas Rushkoff summarizes the psyche of these ultra rich preppers. “Taking their cue from Elon Musk colonizing Mars, Peter Thiel reversing the aging process, or Ray Kurzweil uploading [his] mind into a supercomputer, they were preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from the real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is really about just one thing: escape.” 

Perhaps the most darkly humorous portion of the article notes that, in regards to these bunkers, “There's a distinctly human flaw. I once met a former bodyguard of one billionaire with his own ‘bunker’, who told me his security team's first priority, if this really did happen, would be to eliminate said boss and get in the bunker themselves. And he didn't seem to be joking.”

It’s so simple, and yet it is constantly overlooked by these so-called geniuses: the way you treat people matters. 

And now, a few lines from  Percy Shelley’s, Ozymandias: 

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Dust, to dust. 

~

I stayed up too late again last night. I was listening to an interview of the cognitive psychologist, Donald Hoffman. He’s on the same train of thought at Frederico. It’s usually a good sign when many minds start coming towards the same conclusion. He describes our 4D experience as a spacetime headset. Like Frederico, he is resonating with the idea of fundamental consciousness. 

“We thought of ourselves in science for many years as little tiny objects in an immense physical universe whose consciousness emerged from unconscious ingredients. And this is turning the whole picture around. Spacetime is not fundamental. We know that. It falls apart at the planck scale. It can’t be fundamental. That picture can’t be right. But Wheeler’s picture is the deeper picture. Observer participancy outside of spacetime gets somehow fashioned into the structure that we call spacetime. But it’s the consciousness that’s first, that’s fundamental, and it gives rise to what we call spacetime.” 

So in this theory, before the world, before physical matter, there was “I.” 

“The spiritual traditions have said for a long long time that we all are from The One, but there’s been no beef: it gives us no technology, while a physicalist framework gives us all the technology, all the miracles. There are no uncontested miracles coming from the spiritual side. So it’s easy for people to dismiss ideas like ‘we’re all one’ and ‘you should love your neighbor as yourself’ and so forth because it doesn’t work. It doesn’t give us technology. You’re just a physical system. Your consciousness emerges from your brain somehow. And when your brain is destroyed you’re gone. And you and I are definitely not connected, we’re separate bits of matter. 

That whole framework changes if we have a theory of consciousness that actually transcends what physicalist science can do…. Now all the sudden the smart money is on the idea that you and I are one. I should love my neighbor as myself, because my neighbor is myself, just looking at me. So whatever I do to you, I’m really doing to myself…The best science does not say you’re just a lump of atoms that happens to have some consciousness and you’re competing with me for resources and I can do whatever I want to you because you’re nothing, you’re just a pack of neurons.” 

If consciousness is fundamental, there will be no theory of everything. Science will not finally pin down the complete, final reality. If our experience is rooted in a quantum level, it doesn’t matter how many measurements we take, how many theories we knit together: there will be exponential frontiers beyond. Reality will just keep getting immeasurably greater and more complex than we can ever get outside of and capture. This is wonderful news. We will never be bored. We will observe endlessly. Fascination without limit.

Whether you prefer to hear it from a pastor or a physicist, I think it’s good to be reminded that there are things beyond what we can capture or understand. 

Believing in this theory, Hoffman then begins to wrestle with what it means to be fundamental consciousness experiencing the spacetime headset, an infinite source experiencing reality as a person, a guy, stuck in a chunk of history, interacting with other people. 

“But I still see myself getting my sense of importance or who I am from what I might accomplish or what I might discover. And so I have to look at that and go okay, to the extent that I get my sense of who I am by what I might discover and how important that might be, then to that extent I still don’t really know who I am because who I am is infinitely greater than that. So if I’m still looking to be important in some way then I don’t realize who I am and who you are.” 

If we were to buy into this theory, that consciousness is fundamental, there is risk and there is reward. The risk is to decide nothing matters. Hoffman likes to watch Just for Laughs Gags, practical jokes played out in public. He talks about the moment of satisfaction and relief at the end, when everyone is finally in on the joke together, laughing. And he says that’s life. We take it so seriously. Our experiences are real. But in the end we will take the headset off and all of this will appear as it is, small and relative, and we will laugh. 

“But,” he adds, “The thing to take seriously is that you are the source of infinity. And so is your neighbor.” 

If we see the infinite, the sacred in ourselves, in one another, our behavior must change, because we acknowledge that all suffering is shared. 

Then, Hoffman surprised me and turned to religious imagery. 

“This is the big symbol of importance in Christianity: Jesus on the cross, being tortured to death in the most cruel way that people could imagine, for hours. The most utter, cruel pain. And what did he say while he was in the process of watching the people that were hatefully killing him? He said forgive them. They don’t know what they’re doing.” 

~

When I was a kid, I left a note for Santa Claus, asking, respectfully, for some evidence of his existence. On Christmas morning I came downstairs to find, in front of the gifts, my mother’s Bible, open to John, and highlighted: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believed.” 

I knew it was my mother’s Bible. Heck, I knew it was her pink highlighter. But I got the message. It wasn’t, “Don’t ask questions.” The message was, “There is value in trust.” 

This doesn’t mean passivity. As Tracy points out, it’s irresponsible for a Christian to not care whether a man known as Jesus of Nazareth existed in history and then go on to stake the claim that he is their Lord and Savior. Blind faith is dangerous. We are called to engage in faith with everything we’ve got, including our critical thinking, the baggage of our troubled religious histories, the needs of the real world.

Religion ought to invite good questions. Great questions. Christians get to spend a lifetime pondering over what kind of God would enter human history. What could it look like if we took Jesus’ forgiveness of his torturers as a serious assignment? What does it mean that the Ultimate Reality has shown a preference for the poor, the oppressed, the marginalized? In my seminary application essay I referred to the Ultimate Reality as “God of the plot twist.” What does it mean to place trust in a God who is endlessly surprising? 

I think “Thou shall have no other gods before me” includes our own fruitless search for certainty. God made it pretty clear our goal in this life wasn’t to solve all the mysteries but to practice trust. We aren’t called to figure it all out but to accept and believe it when God says he loves us a love and wants us to be kind to each other.

“Whoever fights for hope, fights on behalf of us all,” Tracy concludes. “Whoever acts on that hope, acts in a manner worthy of a human being. And whoever so acts, I believe, acts in a manner faintly suggestive of the reality and power of that God in whose image human beings were formed to resist, to think, and to act. The rest is prayer, observance, discipline, conversation, and actions of solidarity-in-hope. Or the rest is silence.”

~

I started writing this because I’ve been thinking about baptism. Before seminary, I treated baptism the way I suspect many of us do. In my tradition, infant baptism is most common, and it’s right there on the milestone sheet. Step one, baptism. Check. Done. I did not inspect it too deeply. Seminary will wake you up to passive beliefs like that. 

There is plurality in baptism, in that it carries more than one meaning. There is ambiguity in baptism, in that we can define it many ways but never completely; we trust in baptism, we don’t understand it. There is interaction in baptism, an exchange between a human being and God. 

I have been thinking about where baptism is situated in time and space, and I find myself considering the water cycle. The dew in the morning has something to do with the clouds, has something to do with flood waters, has something to do with washing my hands, has something to do with an oasis in the desert, has something to do with the rivers and lakes and streams, has something to do with baptism. 

In the same way, my baptism has something to do with my parent’s baptism, and with all Christian baptism, and with Jesus’ own baptism, and with all life and with all death. Baptism is both a moment when we encounter the water, but it is also a concept which draws us outside of time and space. Baptism is, I think, the closest we get to a certainty. It is an invitation, both a beginning and a lifelong process, a theory of unity, a promise. 

I said, earlier, that there is nothing we can hold forever. This is my exception. Here is an identity we can keep. Not our stuff. Not our achievements. Not our darkest thoughts or our worst behavior. It’s beyond. It’s good news. The best news. It’s not more of the same but something unexpected, unifying, beyond.