Tag Archives: Knowledge

April 22, 2013 · 12:36 pm

On Living Longer Than Dad

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Jim Berryman

I have now lived ten days longer than my father.

As we flew to Hawaii on Friday, April 12, I was thoughtful of another date: July 23, 1988, was Jimmy Joe Berryman’s 19,707th day, and his last.

April 12, 2013 was Jeffrey William Berryman’s 19,707th day.  All that day, I reflected on the fact that my life’s length equaled that of Dad’s, who died just shy of his fifty-fourth birthday back when I was twenty-nine.  Acute leukemia killed him one month and three days before Amy was born.

This is the question I kept asking myself out over the Pacific Ocean: what should I make of this period of time neither my father nor his father got?

Anjie and I have been talking about the future a lot lately.  Our lives have changed in recent years.  Though we remain strongly connected to our children, they’ve each gone off and begun the process of doing just what we wanted them to do, which was to build solid, independent lives built on foundations of faith, dreams, perseverance, and service.  “The kids are gone and the pets are dead”—we once heard that was the true definition of freedom—and as thankful as we are for our lives thus far, we have grown a bit restless, agreeing together that we need to make new patterns of meaning, behavior, rhythm, and service.

So we’re in the process of praying, thinking, talking, and dreaming just like we did years ago, and though we’re both in the middle of jobs and projects well in motion, we’re trying again to discern the larger picture, and get a sense of which way the wind might be blowing for us over the next 15-20 years, assuming (knowing that it might not be true) that God’s going to grant us this next period of time.   We often say—with a twinkle in our eyes—our lives are just barely half over.  True or not, that’s the way we’re approaching the conversation.

For those of you who know me, you’ve noticed by now that I haven’t said much lately, via blogs, Facebook and Twitter posts, or in performance.  Frankly, there is much to talk about with me, and I hardly know where to begin.   The writing’s been as warful as implied in Pressfield’s The War of Art, and there are days when it’s pretty damn discouraging.   Regrets related to some professional decisions early in my career have been having a field day in the back of my mind as I struggle to make my script work, and the mistakes I’ve made relationally with many old friends creep into play as well.  But back of all that is a growing and changing understanding of life and—most importantly—faith.

In the coming days, I’m going to be blogging a bit more. (“Yeah, we’ve heard that before.”)   How much more is hard to say.   I think about the following things a lot: the meaning and practice of love; racism; playwriting; church; poverty and wealth; theatre; the role of criticism in the theatre; the making of meaning; water (those who have it and those who don’t); injustice’s root causes and the various battles groups engage in to define it and fight it; Christ; art; Islam (I am ¼ of the way through the Quran); the stories we tell ourselves; LGBT issues; the nature and essence of religious experience; brain science; imagination; creation; current events (Boston, the new pope, the theatre I see, pop culture); the list goes on.  Plainly, focus is a problem.

The difficulty of knowing lies at the heart of my journey.   I’ve blogged about that before, and so it’s old news.   But for whatever reason, complexity will not yield in my thinking, and I am reluctant to launch into the sound-byte infested waters, but reluctance can one day give way to cowardice, and with so much at stake in this life of ours, silence does not serve.

It would not be false to say that I come with uneasy voice and a quivering membrane of a spirit as I begin to talk again about my questions and the particular shape of my changing understanding.

I hope you decide to follow along.

And now, back to the question:  what should I make of this period of time neither my father nor his father got?

Something beautiful…

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August 11, 2012 · 4:31 pm

On Being Overwhelmed

I haven’t been blogging because I haven’t known what to say.

I still don’t.

There are multiple conversations in culture that demand attention (just cruise your Flipboard for awhile), and to most of them, I simply say this:  I don’t know the answers to the questions we’re facing.

But not long ago, I read a post over at Stephen Pressfield’s blog that accused folks like me of simple cowardice.  Ouch.  To be an artist is to choose a point of view and go after it.    To sit on the fence on anything is to have a yellow streak.  Choose what you think and get on with it.  The writer went on to say that if you don’t choose where you stand on issues, you won’t have anything to say. There’s also the famous enjoinder that reminds us that all it takes for evil to triumph in the world is for good people to do nothing.

And this blog has been silent.

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I can’t tell if I’m experiencing a storm, a carnival, or some variation of the two.  A storm-like carnival, a carnival in a storm, or a carnival-like storm…who knows?  All I know is that there’s a lot of stuff—dark and beautiful—whirling around.  And we’re all pointing and saying, “Look at that!”  Not only “Look at that” but also, “Let me tell you the truth about that.”   I watch smart, articulate people I know hold court among friends conversing on a particular topic, and as they speak with conviction and clarity, I wonder, “Why aren’t you as overwhelmed as I am?”

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Here’s what’s whirling in our carnival storm: theology, philosophy, biblical studies, world religion, archeology, symbology, psychology, biology, physics, economics, sociology, neurology and brain studies, sexuality, politics, issues of justice, entertainment, creativity, art, ecology, fiction and literature, poetry, theatre, music, popular mass media, media criticism, history, aesthetics, phenomenology, and…the list goes on.

To say it more simply, what’s whirling are our ideas about what it means to be human, and just what it is that constitutes “the good.”

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A conversation with a very smart friend of mine recently reminded me that I have traveled further down the postmodern path than I ever thought I would.  He mused that perhaps the kind of Christian you became might depend on whether you read the book of Hebrews before you read the book of Romans, or the other way around.  We were talking about atonement theories (exactly how Christ’s crucifixion paves the way for reconciliation with God), and his simple statement reflected my current thinking that so much of what (and how) we think and feel is determined by more factors than we can get our heads around.   It can be as simple as the order in which you encounter bits of information that you eventually come to hold as your most sacred thoughts.

Genetics, the nurture of our family of origin, the specific time of history into which we are born, our economics, our social circles, our exposure to ideas in all domains of human learning and enterprise, our various degrees of intelligence and giftedness, our educational opportunities, our emotional structures and the various ways in which all these lenses are put together to create dynamically changing ways in which we see the world.   And finally, add to it the notion that we are story-telling creatures by nature, and that the brain may not care whether the stories are true or not, and suddenly, deciding where to put your feet down becomes a bit dicey.

All this is to say that the latest version of what one colleague once termed my “ongoing tortured self” (“If Jeff isn’t tortured about something, he isn’t Jeff”) feels more serious than most.   If all those categories of human activity and study listed above are thought of tectonic plates…well, you know what happens when tectonic plates start shifting.

At the end of the day, the starting place is simply this: we are limited, and what we know will always be dwarfed by what we don’t know.   There isn’t much to do about that.  It’s in the design of things.  That is not to say we can’t know anything—there are in fact, amazing things to know and be sure of, but that list of “knowable” things is, in itself, mysterious, and up for much debate.    Will I ever know anything with enough certainty that I will shout down those who disagree with veins popping in my neck?

I doubt it.

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I begin each day with a meditation on the nature of God, and as Peter Rollins reflects on in How (Not) to Speak of God, I’ve ended up not wanting to say anything.  He quotes philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in his introduction: “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.”   Sometimes the not speaking is about knowing your own ignorance, and sometimes its about awe, but either way, no words will come.

That being said, it’s time to start speaking again, though as always with me, it’s going to be mostly questions asked, not declarations made.

Wondering what inspiration means…

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June 26, 2011 · 8:56 am

The Crisis of Knowing How We Know: Postscript

There’s knowledge, and there’s faith.

A final salvo in my rumination about epistemology, or the study of knowledge, and knowing how we know.

Those things that require faith cannot, by definition, be proven to be true in the sense that epistemology demands if a thing is to be counted as “knowledge.”  Faith, by definition, is all about our relationship to things unseen and unmeasured.   We still use the word “know” if reference to things of faith.   By faith we say, “I know I can do it.”  (By which we mean, the outcome we want will occur, which we frankly do not “know” at all.)   By faith we say, “I know Christ.”  (Again, this is not “knowledge” in the sense we’ve been exploring.  And to say that should not cause us alarm, though I can hear people thinking, “I do TOO know that I know it.”  It’s simply acknowledging that the “knowledge” faith brings is a different sort of “knowledge” than that created by empirical data.)  By faith we say, “I know Heaven exists.”  (We have stories and clues, but like Ellie in “Cosmos”, we have no video or voice recordings from the other side.)

And then there’s the knowledge that comes from stories.   It’s a knowledge that’s delivered by one of the basic cognitive moves, that of comparison, more commonly referred as metaphor.  We constantly reference our life experience to find what this moment “is like.”   What is life “like?”  Life is “like” a “man of a social class or race that we don’t like (read Samaritan) on a road accosted by thieves.”  Life is “like” a world called Middle Earth, in which “the smallest of persons” can change the world, even if the only way to do it is to destroy the greatest of evils.   And life is “like” a Southern Civil War reenactor (my play) whose dreams are threatened by a past he’d just as soon forget.

But after we experience a good, brain-altering story telling, what do we “know.”  There is a little “explosion” inside in which a new piece of understanding (that love transcends social class and race, that evil can be overcome, that moral cowardice can have devastating consequences) enters our consciousness.   This new “knowledge” informs our choices of behavior, though of course we do not “know” the truth of the story until we live it into our experience (intentionally overcoming social class and racial prejudices with love, battling evil ourselves, and demonstrating the kind of moral courage that life demands).  And between our “knowing the lesson from the story” and our “knowing the lesson because we’ve lived it” is a bridge that must be walked in faith.

How about this little formula:  Wisdom (or understanding) is knowledge lived out (applied) by faith.

Christ valued the knowledge that comes from stories.   He valued it enough to make it his primary mode of teaching and persuasion.  He was not a Socratic method guy (or was he…someone feel free to instruct me here) nor was the scientific method the knowledge-seeking grammar of his day, nor had he been recently preceded by the Age of Enlightenment, so he did not trust the mind to solve all the riddles of things.   But without doubt, Christ believed that he knew things that no other human knew.  And if, by faith, we believe that the stories concerning the Christ are true, not the least of which is the Resurrection, then he knew something special indeed.

Paul did not say “Whatever does not proceed from knowledge is sin,” but “whatever does not proceed from faith is sin.”

There is not enough time or intelligence or information to gain the knowledge that I need to make complete sense of the complex conundrums that haunt our personal and societal lives.   But somehow, the faith available to us by the gift of God must be enough to allow us to grapple responsibly and vigorously with that truth and knowledge we are able, with our limited resources, to gather.

Bottom line:  complexity and the onslaught of information coupled with the various ways in which our “knowing” anything can be called into question is no excuse for living head-0n into the dilemmas of our day.   We simply must acknowledge that knowledge is incomplete, fallible, and passing away.   But by faith, the pursuit of knowledge–and it’s failures–can be not only survived, but lived out with energy, strength, insight, and service.

This I know…

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June 25, 2011 · 11:52 am

Justified True Belief: The Crisis of Knowing How We Know – 5

From the days of Plato, here’s what philosophers have said knowledge is:

“Justified True Belief”

Interesting that such a jumble of ideas connect to create a fairly solid place to stand.  (Since the 60′s, Plato’s formulation has apparently come under fire, but let’s just stick with that one idea for a moment.)  Simply stated, knowledge as “justified true belief” means that someone that “knows” something has a belief that something is true, and he has a good, verifiable  reason to believe it.   If I say I know that 2+2=4, what I’m saying is that I believe that 2+2=4 is true, and it is justifiable in the real world  in that if I add two cups of coffee to a second pair of cups of coffee, I can easily count there there are now four cups of coffee.

But just for the fun of it, I hopped on Google and asked, “When is 2+2 not 4?”  Here’s a fun example:  if you add two puddles of water to two puddles of water, you still have two puddles of water.  (I think the guy changed the game on me there…that it should say “if you combine two puddles of water with two puddles of water.”  But then that would give you just one big puddle.)   And then there are all manner of physics and math possibilities wherein 2+2 might equal something else, but those are realms I will never grasp, so I have very little hope of “knowing” anything other than the usual rendering of 2+2.

How do you know?

Well, I suppose we know by testing the beliefs we hold to be true, insofar as it is possible.   There are tests of experience, tests of reason and logic and tests of faith.   Can any of these tests give us certainty about our knowledge?  Our knowledge of the brain’s activity clearly shows us that often we are certain of things that simply are not true.   Our essential -ness of story-telling means what we know of facts and what we know of what facts mean are different “knowledges”, the latter far more open to debate than the former.   And in On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not, Robert Burton, M.D., asserts that the feeling of “knowing that we know” or of “being certain” is a sensation deep in our psyche, a tool by which we survive, and no guarantee of anything.

I confess that the question of “how we know what we know” is one of my primary conundrums as it relates to Christian faith.  Moral knowledge, ontological knowledge (the nature of being), knowledge of history, culture, and God–religious knowledge–these are battlefields on which we must hold our ground every day.  But to hold ground isn’t really the goal, is it?  Isn’t the goal to discover truth, to discover as best we can what of reality we can know?   But the Apostle John tells us that Christ’s prayer revealed his perspective on life itself.   “Eternal life,” Christ said, “is to know God and Christ Jesus whom he has sent.”

Clearly, to know God and Christ is something different than Plato had in mind.   Language is so slippery, and frankly, I am butchering this pseudo-philosophical discussion of knowledge.  I mean, who thinks about this stuff anyway.  But still, in our post-postmodern climate, with so much at stage as we act and “be” on the basis of what we know and what we have faith in, the question of how we know what we know must be part of almost every discussion.

Again, what’s the take away from all this?   How about:

  • Study:  To test our beliefs about what is true is going to take some work.  And it doesn’t stop.
  • Humility:  In the end, I’m not sure there’s a ton of stuff we can know with certainty, and what we do know comes to us as grace.
  • Courage:  As in, “the courage of your convictions.”  And be courageous enough to seriously think about what you’re learning.
  • Listening:  This is harder work than most of us want to bother with, but necessary if we are to firmly test our footing.
  • A Willing Heart:  A willingness to allow our “knowledge” and beliefs to be tested, and a willingness (if not a demand) that all ideas wishing to gain access to my knower must be thoroughly vetted.
One final note:  Paul says in I Corinthians 13 that knowledge will pass away, and that faith will remain.
Which would you prefer?  Knowledge or faith?
I’ll take the one that lasts…

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June 24, 2011 · 5:29 am

Choosing Knowledge: The Crisis of Knowing How We Know – 4

Life is hard. There are winners and losers in real time. When competing for jobs, someone doesn’t get hired. When applying for colleges and grad schools, someone doesn’t get in. When vying for federal funding, someone loses out. When applying for mortgage loans, somebody doesn’t qualify. When plays get submitted to theatres, some are produced, some never see the light of day. When sports teams take the field, be they made up of 5 year olds or 25 year olds, some players demonstrate superior athletic ability, some superior attitude, and some superior distractedness. In most areas of life, the hard news is that some succeed, some fail, and all of us will taste both before we’re done.

Lori Gottlieb, in her Atlantic Monthly article “How to Land Your Kid in Therapy“, worries that we’re pumping our kids too full of the notion that everybody wins all the time. Is it true that everyone can do achieve whatever they set their minds to achieve? Is it true that everyone’s dream is possible? Is “follow your heart” truly the best advice we can give these kids? And what about all the coddling we do, protecting them constantly from the rough and tumble of the world, spending way more energy than parents a generation or two ago warding off threats to our children’s happiness–not threats to their safety, but to their happiness.

In a world where “happy” is not only the goal, but the obsession, the facts of life can be pretty harsh.

I’m a little short on time this morning, so let me just throw this out there. Think about optimism vs. pessimism. There’s not much disputing the thorniness of things. People get sick, jobs go away, money runs tight. The middle class gets squeezed, the richest of the rich gets greedy, and the poor folk get hungry and cold. But brain studies are telling us that an optimistic, positive mental environment produces chemical reactions that are the building blocks for energy and mood elevation that generally accompanies industry and hopeful action. “Realistic” outlooks often lean toward the negative, and negative mental environments create, predictably, chemical reactions that lead to depression, less energy, and “what’s-the-use” thinking. We all know how helpful that is.

Ask yourself: Where is the locus of control in my life of “thought-life” and “knowing?” How do I “see” things, and how did I get that knowledge? Which knowledge is more true–that a given individual is capable of greatness of effort and achievement, or that that same individual bears the particularly harsh burden of their lives, and will therefore likely fail to give full effort and achieve little. Which orientation do we “know” in our “knower?”

Mostly likely, you will include in your answer to the question something like this: “Well, it depends. You have to choose.”

We have to choose what we know. Think about that statement. Doesn’t knowledge arrive after careful consideration, simply emerging from the facts at hand?

We have to choose what we know?

Gottlieb suggests that knowing that everyone is capable of anything may be ruining our kids actual shot at living human lives of actual “good-enough” productivity and old-fashioned, regular happiness.

Dashing off this morning, I realize this is a very light take on what Gottlieb was doing. Parents, it’s a good article. Read it if you have time. Gottlieb is a psychologist and a mother, and she’s not suggesting we start telling our kids they’re actually failures, but is worried that we over-protect and over-coddle, depriving our kids of learning the tougher lessons of dealing with legitimate sufferings of all kinds. I’m reminded of one of my friends that counseled me in the raising of kids. “It’s your job to teach them how to suffer.”

All that said, I’m sticking the positive position in my pocket, and heading out.

Choosing faith, cause knowledge passes away…

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