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Abstract

worse. It has made for an epic story.Here is the central trick of the storytelling trade. Each scene begins with a state of conflict. You want to exit that scene with the conflict ratcheted up to an even higher state. It forces a series of increasingly impossible choices on the main players. In this case, us. The storytelling gets wrapped tighter and tighter as we work our way toward the climatic event.Kinda of describes 2020, doesn’t it.So it’s easy to think of this wretched year as an inflection point in the grand arc of human history. You could even make the argument that the story of us is hitting its endpoint. Everywhere you look there is turmoil and pestilence. Huge hunks of the landscape are on fire. The poet William Butler Yeats nailed it with his lines from The Second Coming:<blockquote id="b4e6">Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer Things fall apart; the center cannot hold</blockquote>Humankind has spent the decades since Yeats wrote his poem feeding our most tornadic impulses. Maybe civilization is indeed making its final circles around the drain.There may be fanatical death cults that find this exciting, but not me. I’m in the camp that hopes we haven’t arrived at the apocalypse just yet. If there is some future left for humanity, it’ll be because we see 2020 as an epic cautionary tale.That’s why I’m reminded of opera. The artform is so full of dark spectacle. Operas tend to play out as tragedy. In tragic storytelling the players are blind to their own hubris, and it pulls them in

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to an exorable current of events leading to their ultimate demise. Those of us in the audience can see the clear path that leads away from doom. The characters bound up in the story are unable to make the choices that would save them.Those choices are still available to us. Because I’m religious it’s not so hard to imagine it all as a cosmic storyline authored for our instruction. You can give it your own philosophical bent if you’d like. The lesson is the same either way.We need to be more humble and loving of one another.Translated into the realities of these final months of 2020, that means being more mindful of the public health measures that are the only real way we can keep each other safe from a deadly contagion. It means making society more just because this year has shown us the tragic downside of our failure to do that. It means being so, so much more careful with the the planet we all share. Because it’s the only home we have. You don’t need a bishop to tell you these things. Just look around you.This is the only sane response to an insane year. Certainly more so than all the other options you see people trying on for size. Pandemic fatigue. Rage. Grievance. Blame. It’s the only one that sees us through it.We live in strange times when the most important contribution one can make to the greater good might be simply staying home. But here we are, and who can say how long it will last. I spend my days reading and writing like a hermit in his cave. I’m reminded that the Trappists, who rarely spoke or went out, managed to perfect beer.</article></body>

God Writes an Opera

Some fathomless span of time ago God created what, for lack of a better word, we call creation. Heavens rose. Angels fell. Prophets prophesized. A child born in a stable offered redemption.

We spent the better part of the next millennia arguing about what, exactly, it all means.

There’s a lot of pain and tragedy in all that history. But for the most part the big catastrophic events were spread out. A population-erasing plague came as the Roman Empire was beginning to crumble. Another arrived about the time the late Middle Ages were giving rise to the Renaissance.

The Hundred Years war was in the 14th Century. The Thirty Years War in the 17th. Even World Wars I and II were separated by a generation.

But in this merciless year of 2020 the calamities have all come in a jumble. We don’t get a moment to breathe.

It feels like God picked up the pen of creation and decided to write an opera.

I’ve always thought of God as a storyteller. That is admittedly a biased opinion. My occupation is storytelling.

But it’s the best explanation I can come up with for why a God the old texts describe as loving and all-powerful would preside over a creation that so relentlessly pits evil against good. All the world is indeed a stage, populated by you and me with our freedom to choose our own course of events — for better or for worse. It has made for an epic story.

Here is the central trick of the storytelling trade. Each scene begins with a state of conflict. You want to exit that scene with the conflict ratcheted up to an even higher state. It forces a series of increasingly impossible choices on the main players. In this case, us. The storytelling gets wrapped tighter and tighter as we work our way toward the climatic event.

Kinda of describes 2020, doesn’t it.

So it’s easy to think of this wretched year as an inflection point in the grand arc of human history. You could even make the argument that the story of us is hitting its endpoint. Everywhere you look there is turmoil and pestilence. Huge hunks of the landscape are on fire. The poet William Butler Yeats nailed it with his lines from The Second Coming:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer Things fall apart; the center cannot hold

Humankind has spent the decades since Yeats wrote his poem feeding our most tornadic impulses. Maybe civilization is indeed making its final circles around the drain.

There may be fanatical death cults that find this exciting, but not me. I’m in the camp that hopes we haven’t arrived at the apocalypse just yet. If there is some future left for humanity, it’ll be because we see 2020 as an epic cautionary tale.

That’s why I’m reminded of opera. The artform is so full of dark spectacle. Operas tend to play out as tragedy. In tragic storytelling the players are blind to their own hubris, and it pulls them into an exorable current of events leading to their ultimate demise. Those of us in the audience can see the clear path that leads away from doom. The characters bound up in the story are unable to make the choices that would save them.

Those choices are still available to us. Because I’m religious it’s not so hard to imagine it all as a cosmic storyline authored for our instruction. You can give it your own philosophical bent if you’d like. The lesson is the same either way.

We need to be more humble and loving of one another.

Translated into the realities of these final months of 2020, that means being more mindful of the public health measures that are the only real way we can keep each other safe from a deadly contagion. It means making society more just because this year has shown us the tragic downside of our failure to do that. It means being so, so much more careful with the the planet we all share. Because it’s the only home we have. You don’t need a bishop to tell you these things. Just look around you.

This is the only sane response to an insane year. Certainly more so than all the other options you see people trying on for size. Pandemic fatigue. Rage. Grievance. Blame. It’s the only one that sees us through it.

We live in strange times when the most important contribution one can make to the greater good might be simply staying home. But here we are, and who can say how long it will last. I spend my days reading and writing like a hermit in his cave. I’m reminded that the Trappists, who rarely spoke or went out, managed to perfect beer.