AI and the Responsibility of Stewardship

Back in February, I posted a few thoughts about artificial intelligence on Facebook. I found myself somewhere between the optimism of Star Trek and the anxiety of The Terminator.

I ended with a little apocalyptic humor: “No matter how smart it gets, we’d better be the ones holding the kill switch.” (Feb. 2 FB post)

The joke carried a serious concern. We are developing tools of extraordinary capability, and we need to retain responsibility for what we build and how we use it. A few months later, I am still thinking about that responsibility.

I understand the reluctance surrounding AI. Questions about jobs, creative ownership, privacy, infrastructure, and human control deserve a hearing. So do the concerns of parents and teachers trying to understand what these tools will do to children who are still learning to think.

I also understand the excitement. I have experienced some of it myself.

What troubles me is the possibility that people with serious moral convictions will conclude that their only faithful response is to leave the conversation. If good men and women surrender their place in the discussion, who will speak for the people whose dignity and well-being ought to govern it?

We need to remain engaged. And our engagement needs a purpose deeper than keeping up.

What stewardship requires

I have often said that technology is essentially neutral—raw potential waiting for human intention. I still believe that human intention matters enormously. A tool can help us serve a neighbor or exploit one.

But that statement needs qualification. Technology comes to us with choices already built into it. Let's not be naive about that..... Someone has decided what information it collects, what behavior it encourages, what success looks like, and who retains control. Responsibility begins before the user ever touches the keyboard.

Stewardship reaches across that whole process. It asks what we should build, how we should build it, who should benefit, and what limits we should accept.

It also requires us to hear objections fairly. A community questioning a data center may be asking reasonable questions about its resources and infrastructure. A musician concerned about the use of creative work may be defending something valuable. A teacher questioning an AI assignment may be protecting the learning that assignment was supposed to produce.

The International Energy Agency projects that global data-center electricity consumption will roughly double between 2025 and 2030. These tools have a physical footprint, and their costs belong in the conversation alongside their possibilities. www.iea.org

Calling every objection “fear of progress” would be a failure of stewardship.

So would using the word “inevitable” to end the discussion. AI may continue to develop, but that does not make every application, business practice, or classroom use inevitable. Human choices still matter. We must insist that they do.

History gives us questions

We have encountered disruptive changes before.

The printing press helped carry the Protestant Reformation through pamphlets and other printed works that reached audiences far beyond a single pulpit. It also carried competing religious campaigns and polemics. Expanding the reach of words did not settle which words deserved belief. 

Industrial machinery presents another complicated example. The Luddites are often remembered as people who simply hated technology. They were skilled workers protesting machinery used to replace their labor and drive down wages. Their grievances deserve more respect than the label usually receives. 

A development can increase production while imposing severe costs on particular people. We ought to remember those people when we speak enthusiastically about progress.

There are also examples of participation that included deliberate restraint. In the 1970s, researchers working with recombinant DNA confronted risks arising from their own discoveries. A voluntary pause in certain experiments, the 1975 Asilomar conference, and subsequent NIH guidelines helped establish conditions under which the work could proceed. (see note at the end about this conference)

That example matters to me. People involved in developing a technology accepted responsibility for questioning and limiting it.

History cannot promise that AI will turn out well. It can help us recognize that curiosity, criticism, caution, and responsible development all have a place in the discussion. Staying involved sometimes means insisting that a particular project slow down—or stop.

The Princeton Response

There is a related lesson in the Christian response to Darwin.

When On the Origin of Species appeared in 1859, Christian responses varied. Some opposed it, some sought ways to accommodate its findings, and some supported it. The familiar picture of a single confrontation between “science” and “the church” leaves out a much more complicated conversation. 

Charles Hodge, the Princeton theologian, published What Is Darwinism? in 1874. He examined the arguments and distinguished evolution and natural selection from what he understood as the exclusion of divine design. That last issue stood at the center of his objection. I remember the 1st time I read Hodge's response- it was full of retrained respect and logical analysis- we miss that so much in our drama filled bantering today!

Asa Gray, a devout Presbyterian and botanist, reached a different judgment. He engaged extensively with Darwin and argued that natural selection need not exclude divine purpose. 

I am not trying to reopen that entire debate here. What interests me is the willingness to understand the argument, identify the assumptions, and bring Christian conviction into a serious exchange.

Hodge and Gray did not agree. Both participated.

That is a useful reminder for us. Faithful engagement will not produce identical conclusions. It should produce better questions, more careful distinctions, and disagreements that address what someone actually believes.

We need that discipline when discussing AI. A demonstration of what a system can accomplish is one thing. A claim about what that accomplishment means for human identity, moral responsibility, or the future of civilization requires further examination.

We should understand the capabilities and examine the promises being attached to them.

Babel and the Garden

The biblical framework that keeps returning to me is the relationship between Babel and the creation mandate.

In Genesis 1, humanity receives the command to fill the earth and subdue it. Genesis 2 places the man in the garden to work it and keep it. Human beings have work to do in God’s world: cultivating, discovering, ordering, and caring for what has been entrusted to them.

That responsibility gives me reason to welcome discovery. It also places discovery under an authority greater than our appetite for achievement.

Genesis 11 gives us another picture. The builders of Babel are organized, cooperative, and technically capable. They know how to make bricks and construct something impressive. Their stated ambitions include making a name for themselves and avoiding being scattered.

Read alongside the command to fill the earth, their project raises questions about self-exaltation, control, and resistance to God.

Those questions reach into our own ambitions. We can build something remarkable and still build in the wrong direction.

The creation mandate does not give blanket approval to everything we can invent. It gives us responsibility before God for what we do with His creation.

That is why purpose and limits matter. Does this use of AI help people flourish? Does it serve the vulnerable? Does it preserve accountability? Are we cultivating what has been entrusted to us, or seeking a kind of security and significance that leaves no room for dependence on God?

Those questions apply to the companies developing AI. They apply to me when I use it.

My own experiment

I cannot discuss this subject as a detached observer. I have used AI in making music, improved research into many topics, editing and discussion of ideas and I have enjoyed the process of bringing lyrics and musical ideas into something people can hear. If anything, I do it for me- healthy messages make a more healthy disposition. And I can't find new music that has a lot of good messaging.

That enjoyment gives me a stake in the argument. I need to acknowledge it. I should be willing to examine a practice even when it helps me do something I love.

The responses have been interesting. So far, I have experienced a warmer reception on SoundCloud than on Spotify. I have wondered whether differences in the audiences contribute to that response, but it is too early for me to draw a conclusion. Discovery, genre, audience size, and many other factors could be involved. And I have to affirm that I understand REAL musicians distaste for it- but I do firmly believe I am creating things that would not exist without my initiation and work- but I digress....

What I can say is that the experience has made the questions personal.

What is the listener seeking? Some people are moved primarily by what they hear. Others place considerable value on knowing that a person physically performed the music. Both deserve honesty about the process.

I need to respect other creators, describe my own contribution truthfully, and remain open to criticism. Making something meaningful to me does not settle every question about the tools that helped me make it.

That willingness to examine my own enthusiasm is part of the stewardship I am asking others to practice.

How do we know? My drum beat for an updated "Epistemology"

As an educator, I think one of our most urgent responsibilities is to teach students how to judge what deserves their trust.

I have written about epistemology—the study of knowledge and justified belief—for years. I have also found it difficult to generate much interest in the subject. (here is the start of a series here- Epistemology series intro )

Perhaps the word sounds too academic. The problem is immediate. 

A student encounters an answer that is polished, confident, and apparently well supported. What should the student do next?

AI gives fresh urgency to questions education has always needed to address. What is being claimed? Where did the information originate? Does the evidence support the conclusion? What is fact, what is interpretation, and what remains uncertain?

In my earlier writing, I called for these habits to be woven throughout education, along with metacognition: examining our own thinking. We need to investigate the information in front of us and the reasons we find it convincing. www.jayopsis.com

Am I accepting this because the evidence is strong? Does it agree with something I already want to believe? Have I mistaken confidence for competence? What would lead me to change my mind?

An updated application of epistemology should make those questions practical.

In history, students can trace a claim to its source and consider its context. In science, they can distinguish observations from proposed explanations. In literature, they can defend an interpretation with evidence from the text. In a Christian school, they can learn to examine theological claims carefully and read Scripture in context.

These habits require subject knowledge. Students need enough understanding to recognize when an answer is questionable. Reading, writing, calculation, memory, and sustained attention give them resources with which to assess what a tool produces.

We should protect the effort that develops those abilities.

A student might use AI to explore a question and then verify its claims, identify omissions, and defend a revised conclusion. The teacher can assess the reasoning and correction alongside the finished answer.

The educational goal is a person capable of responsible judgment.

Teaching students to operate a powerful tool while neglecting that judgment would leave some of our most important work unfinished.

Remaining responsible

My Facebook joke about the kill switch still expresses something I believe: human beings must retain meaningful authority over the systems they create.

But I also recognize the limitation of the image. A complex technology spread across many institutions will not necessarily have one accessible plug. We need responsibility built into its development and use long before an emergency arrives.

Someone must remain accountable for a decision. Someone must be able to hear an appeal, investigate a failure, correct an error, and stop a harmful practice. “The AI recommended it” cannot be the end of the explanation.

There must also be room for conscientious refusal. A person who declines a particular tool may have reasons we need to hear. Staying in the fray can include principled opposition. I am asking us to remain responsible participants in the conversation, willing to understand and willing to challenge.

I do not know how this technological transition will unfold. Its pace makes prediction difficult, and uncertainty should make us humble.

I do know that greater capability brings greater responsibility.

We need good men and women who will learn enough to ask informed questions, speak for those bearing the costs, protect the development of human judgment, and insist on limits when limits are needed.

As Christians, we can approach that work with hope rooted in God, with an honest understanding of human fallenness, and with care for the neighbors our choices affect.

We have a garden to tend. We also have a tendency to build towers for our own glory.

May God give us the wisdom to examine what we are building, the courage to remain involved, and the humility to receive correction along the way.

End Note: The 1975 Asilomar conference leaves a question that technical safeguards cannot answer by themselves: Who should help decide what risks are acceptable, and who bears those risks?

For AI, that would mean bringing educators, artists, workers, families, and other affected communities into the conversation alongside developers. A laboratory containment plan has a relatively concrete purpose; deciding how AI should influence learning, livelihoods, creativity, and trust requires a broader moral conversation.

The Knights Templar: A Cautionary Tale

I first became interested in the Knights Templar while watching the History Channel’s The Curse of Oak Island. I watched diligently for seven or eight seasons before finally realizing that the actual curse of the island was the show.

For the last three or four seasons of my viewing, I had another reason to tune in. A group on X called the “Oak Island Cursers” supplied a running commentary that was absolutely hilarious. Watching the episode and reading their snarky observations became its own form of entertainment. Another piece of wood. Another suggestive rock. Another discovery requiring a meeting in the War Room.

It was a riot.

Eventually, even that drifted away. But something the show introduced stayed with me. I started reading more about the Knights Templar, and their actual history became more compelling than the treasure theories.

There was courage in it. Faith. Discipline. Wealth. Political maneuvering. Betrayal.

And there was a cautionary tale that eventually became a song:

  Every Holy War Ends This Way

The Templars emerged around 1119 to protect Christian pilgrims traveling in the Holy Land. They combined religious vows with military service, and the church formally recognized their order in 1129. Their identity joined two demanding callings: the discipline of the monk and the responsibility of the soldier.

That is where the song begins:

Under the Cross, they rode with vows,
To guard the path through scorched lands and towns.

I wanted the opening to allow some admiration. It is easy, centuries later, to reduce people to the final verdict we have formed about them. But these were men who endured hardship, faced danger, and buried their brothers. Whatever else we say about the Crusades or the world they inhabited, their sacrifices deserve to be taken seriously.

The first verse moves through armor, swords, sand, and stone before arriving at the graves:

Of brothers lost beneath the sand,
With hope and purpose took their stand.

That phrase—hope and purpose—matters to me. A warning about compromised devotion has more weight when we acknowledge that devotion can begin sincerely. People give themselves to something they believe is worthy. They accept a cost. They make promises.

Then time tests what those promises actually mean.

The chorus brings that change into view:

What begins with fire can falter and fall,
The knight’s sworn vow is a name on the wall.
Rust on the armor, blood in the clay,
Every holy war ends this way.

The shining armor of the opening has already begun to rust. The men who rode with purpose have become names in a memorial. Their convictions may have felt permanent, but their bodies were mortal, and the institutions they built were vulnerable.

There is something sobering about putting rust and blood together. One suggests the slow work of time; the other reminds us of the immediate cost paid by human beings. Both remain after the speeches are finished.

As the Templars grew, they developed a network of lands, fortifications, and financial services. They held deposits, transferred funds, and served powerful patrons. An order whose members took vows of poverty became an institution with considerable economic influence.

Verse two compresses that expansion into the language of a song:

They built the banks, the towers tall,
And cities rose at their beck and call.

The cities line is poetic enlargement. I am reaching for the feeling of an institution discovering how much it can command. The verse moves from guarding a path to holding keys and claiming prizes.

Then comes the danger:

But silvered coins can darken souls,
And dreams of power exact their toll.

Money can support a mission. Influence can make good work possible. The difficulty is recognizing when those things begin to govern the mission they were supposed to serve.

An institution can continue using its founding language long after its priorities have shifted. The vows remain in the story. The symbols remain on the walls. But preserving position can gradually become more urgent than honoring purpose.

That is the warning in the second verse. It also requires some historical care. The Templars’ destruction cannot simply be explained as corrupt men receiving their deserved punishment.

In 1307, Philip IV of France ordered their arrest. Charges of heresy followed, supported by confessions extracted through torture or its threat. Their prosecution was deeply entangled with royal power and the struggle with the papacy. Clement V suppressed the order in 1312; its last grand master, Jacques de Molay, was burned at the stake in 1314.

The bridge carries that betrayal:

Once sworn as brothers, now betrayed
By hands once clasped in prayer—and blade.

To me, that is the most troubling image in the song.

Hands can pray. Hands can wield a weapon. The same outward language of faith can accompany courage, ambition, loyalty, or cruelty. A religious gesture does not settle the question of what a person is doing—or why.

The Templars had fought in the name of defending Christianity. The campaign against them also claimed to defend the faith. Looking at that history, I have to ask how readily human beings enlist God’s name in struggles for control.

Then verse three turns the question toward us:

For every soul that dares to rise
Must guard the light or compromise.

The song has moved beyond the medieval knights. The listener now (and all of us) has something to examine.

I believe there are things worth defending. As a teacher, coach, and administrator, I have spent much of my life asking people to commit themselves to something larger than their immediate comfort. Conviction matters. Courage matters. There are moments when remaining quiet is a failure of responsibility.

But I also know the satisfaction of being right, and I know how easily that satisfaction can crowd out patience.

I can become more interested in delivering the winning response than understanding the person in front of me. I can excuse behavior from people I support that I would immediately condemn in their opponents. I can let protecting a reputation become more important than telling the truth.

Those are compromises worth noticing while they still seem small.

The title uses the word every, and that is a strong word. I hear it as a warning sounded with the force of a chorus. Human beings should be cautious about declaring their own campaigns holy. Once we believe our cause places us beyond correction, we have given ourselves a frightening amount of permission.

My Christian faith requires me to examine both my convictions and the manner in which I carry them. Jesus told Peter to put away his sword. Paul reminded believers that their struggle was not against flesh and blood. James described wisdom from above as gentle, peaceable, open to reason, and full of mercy (Matthew 26:52; Ephesians 6:12; James 3:17).

I need those words when I am angry. Especially when I am certain my anger is justified.

Can I stand firmly and still listen? Can I acknowledge wrongdoing among my allies? Can I accept correction without treating it as betrayal? Can I remember that the person who disagrees with me also needs the grace I depend upon?

Guarding the light involves that kind of daily attention.

The outro leaves us with a charge:

For every soul that fights for right,
Beware the shadows that dim the light.

I like that the song ends with beware. It asks us to stay awake to what can happen inside a worthy effort—and inside ourselves.

God’s sovereignty gives me room to act faithfully without believing I must control every outcome. I can speak, teach, make difficult decisions, and accept responsibility. I can pray over what I do not understand. And I can leave the final judgment with Someone whose knowledge and righteousness are greater than mine.

I started watching Oak Island hoping somebody would discover what was buried in the ground.

The Templar story left me examining what can take root in a human heart.

That is what I hope the song teaches us: to take our vows seriously, to examine what power is doing to us, and to keep seeking the grace that makes faithfulness possible.

We still have to guard the light...... in love.

One last thought:

The Knights began by protecting people. At some point it became protecting property.

There is an eternal difference between the two......

Nets to Catch the Wind

This morning I read a short poem by John Webster, “All the Flowers of the Spring.” It occupies a little space on page 79 of an anthology containing 551 pages of poetry. I wonder how often that book gets opened, or how many readers pause over his contribution before moving on.

But I paused. The poem made me smile, made me think, and sent me looking for more about the man who wrote it.

Webster begins with flowers gathering to perfume our burial. Spring is there, with all its beauty and promise, but even the flowers have only their allotted season. So do we. By the end, he has turned his attention to kings who hope their trophies will leave a living name behind. His final image is the one that stayed with me: “And weave but nets to catch the wind.”

There is a lot of work in weaving a net. I picture the patient handling of the threads, the attention to each connection, the confidence that eventually this thing you are making will hold something. Webster seems to understand the effort we put into securing a name for ourselves. We build, accumulate, accomplish, and hope some of it will keep us from disappearing.

Then the wind passes through.

Someone might point out that Webster himself has been remembered for four centuries. Here I am, after all, reading his words and writing his name. But how well known is he? A poem on page 79 of a thick anthology that relatively few people may read is a modest version of immortality. His words have survived, though I wonder whether survival looks anything like what an ambitious writer might imagine.

And then another thought occurred to me: so what?

His poem spoke to me this morning. I enjoyed it. It awakened something in my mind that might otherwise have gone unexamined. Why should that encounter need a larger audience to justify it? I cannot see that its value to me would have increased if a million other people had read it over breakfast.

I remember Coach Bryant saying, in effect, before the Iron Bowl that there were a billion people in China who had never heard of Alabama or Auburn. In a state where that game could seem to determine the emotional condition of an entire year, it was a useful reminder. The world was considerably larger than the thing occupying every inch of our attention.

I think that helped us understand how easily we make something into a bigger deal than it is. You could still prepare, compete, and care deeply about the outcome while remembering that most of humanity would go right on with its day.

I need that perspective in other parts of life, too. When I write something, teach something, or release a song, I naturally hope it reaches people. There is pleasure in knowing that work has found an audience, and disappointment when it seems to pass unnoticed. But I can let the question of how many people noticed consume the pleasure that led me to do the work in the first place. Somewhere along the way, a good experience becomes a referendum on my significance.

Webster gave me a little distance from that this morning.

I do not know how many people will read these words, or how long anything I make will remain of interest. I do know the pleasure of finding a thought expressed well, of sharing something with a student, of hearing from someone who connected with a song. Those moments are available to me now, even while the larger question of what will endure remains unanswered.

On page 79, a man I knew very little about gave me one of those moments. I closed the book with more stirring in my mind than when I opened it.

That seems like a good morning’s work for both of us.

Behind the Song: “Measured”

Song is live now on Spotify: Measured

There are poems you read, appreciate, and leave behind, and there are poems that seem to keep an appointment with you. You return to them years later and discover that a line you once admired has become a little more personal than you intended. T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock has been that kind of poem for me. Somewhere along the way, the man wandering through those streets became someone I recognized.

“Measured,” which comes out this Friday, has a long history in that recognition. The coffee-cup imagery reaches back to my own writing in the early 1980s, and I returned to Eliot in a 2022 post about the English poets. There have also been earlier musical versions of this idea. Apparently, I have been trying to finish this cup of coffee for a very long time.

The line that keeps bringing me back is familiar:

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.

It is such an ordinary object to carry such a devastating thought. A coffee spoon belongs to the small rituals of a day, something you reach for without thinking. Yet Eliot makes it an instrument for taking inventory of an entire life. You can almost hear the spoon touching the cup while another morning passes.

I love the image, though I don’t think the ordinary routines themselves are the problem. Some of the best things in life happen over coffee. What unsettles me is the possibility of moving through those routines half awake, always preparing for a life I keep postponing. The calendar fills up, the years acquire names and dates, and somehow the thing I meant to say remains unsaid.

Prufrock is painfully aware of himself. He imagines how other people see him and rehearses their judgments before they have a chance to make them. Even a small act begins to feel like an appearance before a jury. I find humor in him, but the humor gets uncomfortable when I recognize how much energy a person can spend managing the possibility of embarrassment.

That became one of the central concerns of “Measured”:

I measured my life with empty days, cocktails, and fear,
Held my breath, played it safe, and the years disappeared.

The fear is the part that troubles me most. We usually recognize the danger of doing something foolish. We are less likely to notice what it costs to keep waiting until we feel completely safe. Caution can sound remarkably wise, especially when I am the one explaining it. There is always a reason to wait, another detail to consider, a better moment that ought to arrive eventually.

Meanwhile, time continues without asking whether I am ready.

The song also moves into the language of Ecclesiastes: vanity, toil, life under the sun, chasing the wind. Those images belong naturally beside Prufrock’s coffee spoons. Both bring me to the uncomfortable business of asking what all this activity amounts to, and whether I can actually hold on to anything I have spent so much effort pursuing.

I wanted that feeling to inhabit the verses. 'Dust in a beam of light', 'roses wilting in a glass', 'perfume fading from a room'—each carries the trace of something beautiful that cannot be made to stay. Even the wrinkles in the mirror become a kind of record. The narrator looks at his face and begins reading it for opportunities he believes he has lost.

That is his perspective, and it is a severe one. I don’t believe every wrinkle represents a failure, any more than I believe every quiet day is empty. But regret has a way of becoming an unfair historian. It remembers the unopened door and forgets the good that happened in the room where we stayed. I wanted the song to let that voice speak honestly, even where I would want to question its accounting.

The bridge brings the pressure into focus:

The weight of others’ eyes, each step a tighter coil,
Chasing after wisdom, finding only toil.

There is something exhausting about trying to live while continually watching yourself live. Words get examined until they cannot be spoken. Decisions get revised until the opportunity has passed. Eventually, the narrator reaches the phrase “the sum of my fear,” and the title takes on its fullest meaning. Fear has become the unit by which he measures everything.

I recognize that possibility in myself, but I don’t want to give it the authority to explain my whole life. My Christian faith gives me reason to believe that even the days I cannot make sense of are held by God. I can acknowledge wasted opportunities without assuming that I know the final value of every hour. There is grace for an imperfect life, including the parts I keep returning to with a red pen.

Still, I let the song end with Eliot. The coffee spoons remain on the table, and the listener has to sit with them for a moment. I didn’t want to hurry past the ache that brought me to the song in the first place.

After all these years, Prufrock still gets my attention. I hope “Measured” carries some of that discomfort into a melody—enough to make me consider the conversation I am putting off, the kindness I could offer, or the work I keep waiting to begin.

Friday brings another song into the world. For me, it also brings an old question back to the kitchen table: what am I doing with the time still in my cup?

BTW- as earlier version of this song was the 1st on my SoundCloud catalog to get a larger audience. To date- all versions of this song have over 3,000 listens.

Thoughts on "Absence of Malice" (part 3 of 3)

 

I ended my last reflection with an uncomfortable thought. A person can act without malice and still cause great harm. A person can possess integrity, stand courageously on principle, remain consistent with everything he believes and still be wrong. If both of those things are true, then there is another question that eventually has to be asked.

How much confidence should I really have in my own judgment? (important note: that is why big decisions need to happen in a healthy group- husband/wife- an Executive team- a coaching staff- young people with parents- but the group dynamic has to be set up with an understanding that pushback is encouraged and then once a decision is made, it is a unified group to support it)

That question has become more difficult the longer I have lived and especially the longer I have been in positions that require decisions affecting other people. Experience is supposed to produce wisdom, and I believe it often does. You recognize patterns more quickly. You have seen decisions succeed and fail. You have accumulated enough scars to know that some problems are not nearly as simple as they first appear.

But experience can produce something else as well. It can produce confidence, and confidence can quietly become certainty.

The phrase that started these reflections was absence of malice, after watching the old Paul Newman movie by that name. Initially I was interested in the fairly obvious distinction between intention and consequence. We can cause harm we never intended. But the more I have thought about the phrase, the more difficult even the claim of good intention becomes.

How exactly do I establish an absence of malice?

The law has to make judgments about intent, of course. We distinguish an accident from negligence, negligence from recklessness, and reckless behavior from something deliberately done. Those distinctions matter enormously. But a courtroom never actually sees the human heart. It considers evidence, listens to testimony, examines conduct and circumstances, and from those things reaches a conclusion about intention.

In ordinary life we do much the same thing with one another.

The uncomfortable difference is that when I judge myself, I tend to assume that I have access to better evidence. I know what I intended - Or at least I think I do.

One of the more sobering lessons of age is discovering how capable human beings are of assigning noble names to complicated motives. Pride can coexist with principle. Resentment can find a home inside a legitimate concern for justice. Fear can influence what we call prudence. Self-preservation can mingle with responsibility. Loyalty can distort judgment while still feeling exactly like loyalty.

I don't say that cynically. I don't believe every good deed conceals some darker motive or that every principled person is secretly acting from self-interest. There are people of extraordinary integrity who make genuinely sacrificial decisions at considerable personal cost.

I simply no longer believe that sincerity gives us perfect access to ourselves. And this is going to sound cruel and judgemental :  

I have known some people in my life whose very DNA is "Integrity"- to give voice to even a little bit of "compromise"... they would rather you cut off their hand. But in reality, I personally don't believe that world exists... it isn't ever that clean... in my opinion.

There are situations you can be so right, you are actually "Dead right" that you kill people with "truth".

That brings me back to something I wrote about some time ago in Invidious. Long-term leadership creates its own peculiar environment for judgment because history accumulates. Relationships, disappointments, loyalties, previous conflicts, institutional memory and personal investment become intertwined with present decisions. You try to separate them. Good leaders have structures and trusted people around them precisely to help identify what they may not be seeing. But no leader ever becomes a completely disinterested observer standing outside the story.

We are always somewhere inside it- again- that is why the wrestling matters.

I found myself thinking about this again through Captain Vere in Billy Budd. Whatever judgment we ultimately make about Vere's decision, Melville does not give us a man casually dispensing justice. Vere understands the gravity of what is before him. He knows Billy. He knows the law. He knows the circumstances aboard the ship. He understands that his decision will have consequences beyond Billy, and yet none of that knowledge gives him the one thing he would need in order to judge perfectly.

He cannot see everything. Neither can we.

There is something healthy in admitting that before making a consequential decision. It does not mean refusing to decide. Leadership cannot function that way, nor can parenting, teaching, courts, churches, organizations or families. Sometimes the information available is all the information we are going to get, the deadline arrives, and somebody has to act.

Perhaps the goal, then, is not certainty. And even though integrity is absolutely necessary...Perhaps it is 'faithfulness' that is the priority

Gather what can be known. Listen carefully. Question the convenient version of events, particularly when it happens to confirm what I already believe. Examine my own motives without assuming that I understand them perfectly. Seek counsel from people willing to disagree with me. Pray. Wrestle. Make the best decision I can make, and then retain enough humility to admit later that I may have gotten it wrong.

That sounds reasonable enough until we confront the burden underneath it. Because some decisions cannot be retrieved.

A reputation may already have been damaged. A relationship may have changed. An opportunity may have disappeared. A sentence may have been imposed. Words cannot always be called back, and consequences rarely remain confined to the boundaries we imagined when we acted.

The "retraction" in newspapers is always buried in an obscure place in the back of the paper. Apologies are never offered. But there is still hope if you keep reading.....

If the moral order of the world finally depended upon human beings possessing enough wisdom to anticipate every consequence of every decision, despair would seem like a fairly reasonable response.

This is where, for me, the question eventually leaves philosophy and enters theology.

The Christian claim is not that human beings, with sufficient prayer and integrity, eventually become reliable judges of everything. Scripture is far less optimistic about our powers of perception than that. The claim is that our inability to see the whole does not mean there is no whole, and our inability to govern every consequence does not mean that every consequence is finally governed by chance.

Joseph's words to his brothers near the end of Genesis have always been remarkable to me: “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good” (Genesis 50:20).

That sentence becomes particularly interesting in the context of these reflections because there actually was malice in Joseph's story. His brothers did not accidentally sell him into slavery. Their motives were hardly innocent, and Joseph does not sanitize what they did. He calls their intention what it was.

They intended evil. Yet somehow their intention was not the final intention operating in the story.

Years later, looking backward over betrayal, slavery, false accusation, imprisonment, political upheaval, famine and eventual reconciliation, Joseph could see a pattern that would have been impossible to see from the bottom of the pit. None of the individual evils had become good. Betrayal was still betrayal. Injustice remained injustice. But those events had somehow been gathered into a purpose larger than the intentions of the people who caused them.

Paul makes an equally audacious claim in Romans 8:28 when he writes that God works in all things for the good of those who love Him and are called according to His purpose. I have sometimes heard that verse used too easily, almost as though every painful event needs only enough time before we can explain why it happened. Life has made me much less confident about that.

There are things I cannot explain. There are outcomes I would never call good. There are losses for which I have no satisfying answer, decisions I would change if given another opportunity, and consequences whose purpose remains completely hidden from me.

Providence does not require me to pretend otherwise.

Maybe that is why I increasingly think of providence as mystery rather than explanation.

It does not provide a neat answer for every tragedy or convert every mistake into something we would have chosen. It certainly does not excuse carelessness by allowing us to say that God will work everything out anyway. If anything, our limitations should make us more careful with the lives entrusted to us, not less.

But providence does allow me to relinquish a burden I was never capable of carrying.

I am responsible for faithfulness, not omniscience.

I should pursue truth even though I will never possess all of it. I should examine my motives while acknowledging that God knows my heart better than I do. I should act with integrity without confusing integrity with infallibility. I should wrestle before consequential decisions, remain humble afterward, confess error when I recognize it and repair what I can when my decisions have caused harm.

And then there comes a point when I have to release what remains beyond my control.

That may be the final lesson for me in this strange trail that began with an old Paul Newman movie. Absence of Malice made me question the adequacy of good intentions. Billy Budd made me question whether integrity and law are sufficient to guarantee justice. Both eventually forced me toward the same uncomfortable recognition: human beings must make judgments while possessing only fragments of the truth.

We wrestle because our decisions matter. We remain humble because we may be wrong.

We act because responsibility sometimes requires it. We pray because we know our vision is limited.

And after all of that, there remains something we cannot calculate, control or completely understand.

Providence.

I don't pretend to understand its workings. Perhaps calling it providence while insisting that I can explain exactly how it works would contradict the very thing I have spent these pages trying to say.

I know only that Joseph could eventually look backward and see that the evil intentions of men had not been sovereign over his story.

Most of us do not get Joseph's vantage point. At least not yet. Job went to heaven never knowing the cosmic spiritual war raging in the background. The lens we walk in still has that dusty glass.

So we do the best we can with the light we have, remain suspicious of our own certainty, ask forgiveness when we fail, extend mercy to others who are judging with limited sight as well, and trust that there is a wisdom beyond ours at work in places we cannot see.

For now, I think I am content to leave it there—in the mystery of providence.

Critics will moan and say that is just a "God in the gaps" flimsy retreat. And they may be right. But it is the only choice we have- He is the only one WHO can judge in perfection. And because of that, His rule stays consistent through all eternity. That is all we have.

Looking Backwards

Thoughts About "Absence of Malice" (pt. 2 of 3)

 

A person can be sincere, principled, courageous, consistent—and wrong.

That possibility troubles me more than hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is relatively easy to understand. Someone professes one standard while knowingly living by another, and once the contradiction is exposed, we know where the failure occurred. Integrity presents a more difficult problem because the person may actually believe what he says, live according to what he believes, accept the consequences of those convictions and still arrive at a judgment that is unjust.

I have been thinking about this since watching Absence of Malice, which prompted an earlier reflection on the difference between intending no harm and bearing responsibility for harm nevertheless caused. 

But the question has followed me into another work I have returned to many times over the years, Herman Melville’s Billy Budd. The connection between the two initially seemed unlikely. One is a twentieth-century film about journalism and prosecutorial power; the other is a nineteenth-century novella set aboard a British warship. Yet both place decent people inside systems of law and responsibility and then ask those systems to handle circumstances more complicated than their categories.

The central event in Billy Budd is brutally simple when reduced to fact. Billy, a young sailor, is falsely accused of mutiny by John Claggart, the ship’s master-at-arms. Billy has a speech impediment that becomes pronounced under emotional pressure, and when Captain Vere orders him to answer the accusation, Billy cannot get the words out. In frustration he strikes Claggart. The blow kills him.

The facts are not especially difficult. Their meaning is.

Billy has killed a superior officer aboard a British warship during wartime, when mutiny is not an abstract concern and discipline is considered essential to the survival of the ship. Captain Vere understands the legal implications immediately. He also understands Billy. He has witnessed the accusation, Billy’s inability to respond and the spontaneous blow. He knows this is not a calculated murder. In one of the great tensions of the story, Vere possesses enough knowledge to recognize Billy’s moral innocence while simultaneously possessing enough knowledge of military law to recognize his legal guilt.

And then he has to decide. (now you know where part 3 will go- back to "Invidious").

This is where I have become increasingly reluctant to make Vere either hero or villain. He is much more interesting than either designation allows. He does not casually sacrifice Billy to an impersonal rule, nor does Melville allow him the comfort of pretending the circumstances are uncomplicated. Vere wrestles because several genuine obligations have collided. He has a responsibility to Billy, but he also has a responsibility to the sailors under his command. He has obligations to military law, to the preservation of order aboard the ship and to his own conscience. Relaxing discipline in wartime may carry consequences well beyond one sympathetic sailor; enforcing it may require condemning a man Vere knows did not act with murderous intent.

Integrity does not solve that problem.

In fact, integrity may make it more painful.

We often speak of integrity as though it were the final measure of moral character, and certainly I would rather deal with a person of integrity than one without it. But integrity describes the relationship between conviction and conduct. A person of integrity attempts to act consistently with what he believes to be true and right. What integrity cannot guarantee is that his beliefs are correct, that his information is complete, or that the principles he is applying adequately account for the situation in front of him.

I wish life was black and white- but we are often struggling to live in a vast sea of gray.

A compass can point faithfully in the direction it has been designed to indicate. That does not guarantee that the traveler has correctly identified the destination.

This is where Billy Budd begins to expose something about the limitations of law itself. Law has to generalize. It cannot be rewritten from the beginning for every person who stands before it. Rules exist precisely because societies, institutions and organizations cannot survive if every judgment depends entirely upon the sympathies of whoever happens to possess authority at the moment.

There is wisdom in that. History provides plenty of reasons to distrust a system in which powerful people simply decide which rules should apply to whom.

But human beings are stubbornly particular - The law sees an act: a sailor struck and killed a superior officer.

Vere sees Billy. Both are true, and yet they are not identical truths.

That distinction reminded me again of the line that first caught my attention in Absence of Malice: something can be accurate without being true. A description can correctly identify every relevant external fact and still fail to capture the reality of the person involved. “Billy Budd killed John Claggart” is accurate. If that sentence becomes the whole account of Billy Budd, however, something essential has disappeared.

Law inevitably performs some version of this reduction. It must translate complicated human events into categories that can be administered: intentional or accidental, guilty or innocent, permitted or prohibited, mitigating or aggravating. Good law attempts to make those categories increasingly sensitive to circumstance, motive and degree, but no category can contain the entirety of a human story.

Perhaps that is one reason judgment ought to produce some degree of trepidation in the person entrusted with it.

I have spent much of my adult life in roles that required decisions affecting other people, and I have never found the most consequential ones to resemble the clean scenarios presented in policy manuals. Usually the policy is the easy part. The difficulty lies in determining what actually happened, weighing accounts that do not completely agree, distinguishing explanation from excuse, considering precedent, anticipating consequences and remembering that the person standing in front of you will continue living with the decision after you have moved on to the next item on the calendar.

There are times when leadership requires decisiveness. Endless hesitation can become its own form of irresponsibility. But I have become increasingly suspicious of judgment that comes too easily.

Trepidation is not necessarily evidence of weakness. Sometimes it may be evidence that a person understands what judgment requires. To make a consequential decision about another human being while remaining conscious of how much one does not know seems healthier to me than the confidence that comes from believing the title, position, policy or law has somehow eliminated uncertainty.

Captain Vere wrestles with it- but you can't detach yourself in the situation- you are in the moment AND your perception of yourself and the consequences live there as well.

He has authority, but authority has not given him omniscience. He knows a great deal about what occurred in that cabin, perhaps more than almost anyone could reasonably expect a judge to know, and still he is forced to make a decision whose moral dimensions exceed the facts available to him.

That may be the deeper limitation we sometimes attribute to law when the limitation actually belongs to us. Laws are written by human beings, interpreted by human beings and applied to human beings. Every stage of the process passes through limited knowledge, experience, judgment and perspective. We try to compensate for those limitations with evidence, testimony, precedent, deliberation, appeals and multiple levels of review. Those safeguards are sometimes criticized as cumbersome, but perhaps they are better understood as institutional acknowledgments of something we are reluctant to admit individually: a sincere person can be sincerely mistaken.

And sincerity combined with conviction can actually increase the consequences of the mistake.

Consider a person whose reasoning is internally consistent. He believes a certain set of facts to be true. He applies a moral principle to those facts. He reaches the conclusion demanded by that principle and then, because he possesses integrity, has the courage to act upon it despite pressure to do otherwise.

We normally admire almost every part of that description. But what if one of the facts is wrong? What if an important fact is missing?

What if the principle is sound but has been applied to a circumstance the decision-maker does not completely understand?

The moral reasoning may remain coherent from beginning to end while the judgment itself has been contaminated somewhere upstream.

That possibility is considerably more unsettling than discovering hypocrisy because there may be no villain to expose and no corrupt motive to uncover. The person making the decision may be trying earnestly to do what is right. He may lose sleep over it. He may accept criticism for it. He may refuse the easier course because he believes principle demands otherwise.

And he may still be wrong.

This is where I find myself returning to Captain Vere. I am less interested these days in deciding whether I would convict or acquit Billy Budd than I am in watching Vere confront the terrible inadequacy of his own position. He has been given the authority to judge, and therefore he must judge. Yet nothing about receiving that authority has made him capable of seeing the whole truth.

Perhaps the danger begins when we forget that distinction.

The most frightening person entrusted with judgment may not be the openly corrupt one. We generally know to guard ourselves against him. It may be the person of unquestioned integrity who has become completely certain that his integrity guarantees the correctness of his judgment.

Quite a pickle.

Integrity is indispensable, but integrity needs truth. And human beings possess truth imperfectly.

That leaves me with a question more uncomfortable than the one I started with. If I can act without malice and still cause harm, and if I can act with integrity and still be wrong, how confident should I be about the one thing I usually claim to know better than anyone else—my own motives?

I am not sure we know ourselves as well as we think we do.

Stew on this one for a few days and then let me present a part 3..... later.

Thoughts About "Absence of Malice" (pt 1 of 3)

A few nights ago I watched the 1981 film Absence of Malice, starring Paul Newman and Sally Field. I had somehow missed it over the years, which is surprising considering my affection for movies from that era and the fact that Paul Newman is, well, Paul Newman. 

I expected to enjoy it as a good newspaper/legal drama, and I did, but somewhere along the way I became less interested in the plot than in the phrase that gives the movie its title. By the next morning, I was still turning it over in my mind.

Good grief .... is this such a relevant topic today!

Absence of malice.

There is something reassuring about the phrase. It sounds almost exonerating. Whatever happened, there was no hatred behind it, no calculated attempt to injure someone, no sinister motive lurking beneath the surface. In ordinary life we make this defense all the time, usually in less formal language. I didn't mean it that way. I wasn't trying to hurt anyone. I was only doing my job. I acted on what I knew at the time.

Those explanations matter. Motive matters. Surely there is a moral distinction between deliberately harming another person and causing harm that was neither intended nor anticipated. Our legal system recognizes that distinction, and so do most reasonable people. But Absence of Malice left me wondering whether we sometimes ask intention to carry more moral weight than it can bear.

One of the central tensions in the movie is the difference between something being accurate and something being true. A newspaper can print facts that are individually accurate and still create an impression that is substantially false. No quotation necessarily has to be invented and no fact deliberately fabricated. Selection, emphasis, placement, context and omission can do plenty of work on their own. The resulting story may survive a technical examination of its individual claims while failing to convey the truth of the person or event it supposedly describes.

That idea reaches well beyond journalism. Anyone who has lived long enough to accumulate a history could probably be portrayed rather convincingly as either admirable or contemptible by someone allowed to select the evidence. Both accounts might contain nothing but facts. Neither would necessarily be true.

This is where the title of the movie began to bother me.

Suppose the person constructing that incomplete picture genuinely means no harm. Suppose there is no personal vendetta, no hatred and no conscious desire to damage anyone. Suppose, further, that the person is operating within accepted professional standards and has every legal right to do what he or she is doing. At what point does the absence of a bad motive cease to answer the larger question of responsibility?

I have spent enough years in positions where decisions affect other people to know how complicated that question becomes in practice. 

(In fact- my recent blogpost on Invidious has gone viral- picked up and re-posted by the Council of Educational Standards and Accountability (CESA). I was blown away from the emails from California, Texas, Georgia, North Carolina.... thanks again for the encouragement!)

Parents, teachers, coaches, pastors, employers, administrators and judges routinely make decisions with incomplete information. Often there is no luxury of waiting until every fact is known. Competing obligations have to be weighed, credibility has to be assessed, policies have to be interpreted, and consequences have to be considered even though many of those consequences cannot possibly be foreseen.

That is simply part of exercising authority. Refusing to decide is itself sometimes a decision with consequences.

Still, there is a temptation after a difficult outcome to retreat into intention: I meant well. I followed the procedure. I acted on the information available to me. I did not intend for this to happen. All of those statements may be completely sincere, and sometimes they may be the best explanation anyone can give. What they cannot do is make the consequences disappear.

Perhaps that is the distinction I have been trying to identify since watching the movie. The absence of malice tells us something important about the actor, but it does not necessarily tell us enough about the act. It may reduce culpability without eliminating responsibility. It may explain how something happened without settling whether what happened was right.

There is another difficulty with the phrase, particularly when I consider it from a Christian perspective. Absence of malice describes morality almost entirely by what is missing. I did not hate. I did not deceive intentionally. I did not seek another person's injury. That is certainly preferable to hatred, deception and cruelty, but Christianity sets a considerably more demanding standard than merely avoiding the deliberate infliction of harm.

The command is not simply to refrain from hating my neighbor but to love him. Truthfulness requires more than avoiding technically false statements. Mercy asks more of us than the absence of cruelty. The moral life described in Scripture is not primarily an empty space where the worst impulses have been successfully removed; it is supposed to be occupied by something positive—love, truth, justice, patience, mercy and concern for the good of another.

That makes absence an interesting word.

Maybe that is why the title has stayed with me. When the movie began, Absence of Malice sounded like a legal phrase, almost a defense. By the time it ended, I wasn't nearly as comfortable with it. The movie never required me to believe that everyone involved was evil or even badly motivated. In some ways that would have made the story much easier. What interested me was the possibility that people could operate inside legitimate institutions, follow defensible procedures, possess no conscious desire to injure anyone, and nevertheless participate in something terribly damaging.

That is a much more uncomfortable problem because it removes the villain.

And once the villain disappears, I can no longer keep the question safely at a distance.

I am left instead to consider my own decisions, my own confidence in what I think I know, the consequences I did not anticipate, and all those occasions when I meant no harm seemed like a sufficient defense.

Perhaps sometimes it is.

I am increasingly convinced, however, that the absence of malice and innocence are not quite the same thing.

SO if you will be patient and permit me a few posts about this, I want to mull on it together... ask some tough questions, bring in Billy Budd of all things... and then get your feedback.

But the theme will not change I suspect....

A person can be sincere, principled, courageous, consistent—and wrong.

Of course you knew there would be a song attached- it is on SoundCloud now, but will go live on Spotify on Oct. 23.

We All Alibi

Behind the Song: Three-Quarters Empty

Hear this song now of Spotify: 3/4 Empty

BTW- This song has over 10,000 listens on SoundCloud.

Well.... might as well do them all LOL!

Some songs take a few hours to write. This one took about forty-four years.

The first version of Three-Quarters Empty wasn’t a song at all. It was a poem I started in a notebook in 1982, when I was a student at the University of Alabama taking a creative writing class. I was eighteen years old, which makes some of the existential weariness in the poem a little amusing to me now. I apparently had already grown tired of life before I had done very much of it.

But the image stayed with me.

Quarter-filled cups of coffee.

I’ve always been a coffee drinker. Black. And I have also apparently always possessed the peculiar ability to pour a cup of coffee, drink most of it, become distracted by something else, and discover the remainder much later after it has gone completely cold.

Some habits survive every technological advance. My coffee cups have improved considerably since 1982. They are stainless steel now and engineered to preserve heat for what seems like several geological periods. I can still defeat them.

There is almost always some abandoned coffee sitting somewhere on my desk.

Over time, that became more than an observation. The cup started looking like something else.

There were the projects started but never finished. The proposals written and abandoned. Ideas scribbled into notebooks. Plans that seemed important for a season and then quietly disappeared. Dreams I pursued. Dreams I postponed. Dreams I simply outgrew. A life leaves quite a bit of debris behind it.

That is what the poem was trying to describe.

The Literature Behind It

The original poem carried three literary shadows with it: T. S. Eliot, Edgar Allan Poe, and Ecclesiastes.

Eliot supplied the most obvious one:

“I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”

I loved Prufrock long before I was old enough to understand much of what Eliot was doing with him. There is something haunting about reducing a human life to tiny repeated measurements—coffee spoons, conversations, rooms, routines. A life can be enormously important and strangely mundane at exactly the same time.

Poe supplied another image:

“A hideous throng rush out forever,
And laugh—but smile no more.”

And then there was Ecclesiastes:

“Vanity of vanities! All is vanity.”

Those three voices somehow met in that coffee cup.

The poem kept returning to the tension between activity and accomplishment. We can be tremendously busy without knowing whether we are actually getting anywhere. Calendars fill. Papers pile up. Projects multiply. Years pass.

And somewhere in the middle of all that motion comes an uncomfortable question:

What exactly did all of this amount to?

That question sounded philosophical when I was eighteen.

It sounds different in my sixties.

From Quarter-Filled Cups to Cold Coffee

I kept rewriting the poem over the years. I have handwritten versions scattered through old notebooks, folders, Bible margins, and boxes. The version I eventually considered “finished” probably dates to around 1994, although finished is obviously a dangerous word to use with this particular piece.

When I began turning some of my older writing into songs, I naturally came back to it.

The first attempt became Cold Coffee.

It wasn't terrible. But I never really connected with it.

Part of the problem was musical. The genre didn't carry the emotional weight I heard in the original poem. More importantly, though, I had tried too hard to preserve the old language.

Words and phrases like epochs wasted, unrequited desire’s depth, and watched time belonged to the poem—or perhaps belonged to the young man trying very hard to write a serious poem—but they didn't sound natural coming out of a singer's mouth.

I had preserved too much of the artifact and lost some of the feeling.

So I went back to work on it.

Three-Quarters Empty

The breakthrough was realizing that the title had been sitting inside the poem all along.

Not Cold Coffee.

Three-Quarters Empty.

That changed the center of gravity.

The coffee is still there, but now it is the object through which the larger idea can be seen:

Quarter-filled cups of coffee,
Ring-stains bleeding through the grain.
Cold as all the half-formed thoughts
That gather in my brain.

That feels much closer to what I had been trying to say.

And I particularly like where the song goes from there:

Foam collapses into nothing—
Like the hours I try to save.
Little deaths of small ambitions
Settling in their grave.

The older poem was concerned with wasted potential. The newer song feels more concerned with time.

That may be the difference between writing it at eighteen and rewriting it at sixty-two.

At eighteen, unfinished dreams seem tragic because there is so much you intend to accomplish.

Forty-four years later, you understand something the younger writer couldn't possibly have understood: every life will contain unfinished things.

There will always be another project. Another idea. Another road you might have taken. Another version of yourself you never quite became.

And I'm not sure all of those things qualify as regrets.

Some are simply the cost of having lived one life instead of every possible life.

That is why one of my favorite images in the new version is:

I keep walking, though I’m sinking,
Ash and mud in both my hands.

There is resignation in that line, but there is also something else.

I keep walking.

That matters.

The song is dark. I don't want to pretend otherwise. There is Ecclesiastes in it, and Eliot, and probably more than a little Prufrock. There is the suspicion that much of what we chase eventually turns gray and that some of our grandest ambitions wind up as nothing more than old papers in a box.

But the person in the song hasn't stopped.

Maybe that is something I couldn't have written into it in 1982 because I hadn't lived long enough to know it yet.

The cup may be three-quarters empty.

But it isn't empty.

There is still something left.

And apparently I'm still working on the poem.

Which, considering what the poem is about, seems just about right.

Maybe I'm finally finished with it.

For now.

Behind the Song: Weight of the Absurd

Song is live on Spotify- click on the title to hear:

Weight of the Absurd

The Weight of the Absurd was originally released in October 2024 as an alternative rock song. At the time, I simply described it as “inspired by Camus.”

That was true, but it was hardly the whole story.

In the early 2000's I read  Albert Camus’ The Stranger, a book I found fascinating, disturbing, and more personally uncomfortable than I expected. Camus gets placed under the broad umbrella of existentialism, though he resisted that label and developed his own philosophy of the absurd. Whatever category we put him in, he was wrestling with a question that has followed human beings for a very long time: What do you do when you desperately want life to mean something, but the universe appears unwilling to provide an answer?

Meursault, the central character of The Stranger, seems almost frighteningly detached from the world around him. His mother dies, and he barely grieves. He enters a relationship without much conviction. He drifts into friendships without much consideration of their consequences. Eventually, almost inexplicably, he kills a man.

He doesn't so much choose a life as allow life to happen to him. That was the part that bothered me.

Because beneath the murder, the trial, the famous Algerian heat, and all the philosophical machinery of the novel, I recognized something in Meursault that I didn't particularly enjoy recognizing.

Passivity.

Left to myself, I can drift. I can become mechanical. I can perform responsibilities, complete tasks, solve problems, and move through a day efficiently while remaining strangely detached from the emotional life taking place around me. There is a part of me that can sit back and watch life rather than enter it.

Reading Meursault was like seeing that tendency carried to its horrifying conclusion.

Without Christ, where does my own tendency toward detachment eventually lead?

That question stayed with me long after I finished the novel.

Later I began reading Howard Mumma's Albert Camus and the Minister, in which Mumma recounts conversations he says he had with Camus while serving at the American Church in Paris. The book presents a Camus who is searching, questioning, and increasingly dissatisfied with the answers available to him.

I found that Camus even more interesting than the novelist I had encountered in The Stranger.

Whether every detail of Mumma's recollection can bear the historical weight sometimes placed upon it is another question. What captivated me was the intellectual and spiritual tension: a man who had spent his career articulating the absurdity of existence continuing to ask whether there might nevertheless be something beyond it.

And that is where The Weight of the Absurd really began.

I admire something about Camus. His honesty.

He refused cheap answers. He had witnessed the brutality of his century—war, fascism, suffering, death—and he wasn't interested in pretending that existence made sense simply because we wanted it to. If the universe was silent, Camus intended to stare into that silence without blinking.

And yet he refused surrender.

That is one of the paradoxes I find so compelling in him. If life is absurd, you still live. You resist. You confront injustice. You love. You create. You push the stone back up the hill even though you know perfectly well it will roll down again.

There is something almost heroic about that.

And something terribly sad.

That tension became the heart of the song:

Can I carry it alone?
Is my heart enough to hold
All the questions, all the pain,
When the answers slip away?

Those aren't theoretical questions for me.

I know my own capacity for rebellion. I know my ability to construct walls with arguments, explanations, work, busyness, and self-sufficiency. I also know that eventually those walls crumble.

So the song doesn't attempt to defeat Camus in an argument.

It walks with him for a while.

It acknowledges the darkness. It allows the questions to remain questions. It admits the attraction of standing alone in the rain with your fists clenched against a universe that refuses to explain itself.

But eventually my road diverges from his.

But there’s a cross on the horizon now— Where the storm rolls in, but grace won’t bow. Maybe strength’s not what we bear alone, But the love that steadies us and brings us home. I’m still walking, but now I know— I’m not alone. No, I’m not alone.

That is the turn.

Christianity doesn't require me to pretend that suffering isn't real or that the world isn't bewildering. Scripture itself is filled with people asking God why. Job does it. David does it. Habakkuk does it. Ecclesiastes sometimes sounds close enough to existentialism to make respectable church people nervous.

The difference is not the absence of absurdity - The difference is that absurdity does not get the final word.

And strangely enough, Camus has challenged me as a Christian because of that.

Camus could envision fighting when there was no ultimate victory coming. He could advocate resistance against injustice without believing history was moving toward some final divine restoration. There is a kind of ferocious courage in that position: fight anyway. Love anyway. Create anyway. Push the rock anyway.

Then what excuse do I have?

If I actually believe what I say I believe—that history has a destination, that death has been defeated, that Christ is risen, that justice ultimately belongs to God, and that our labor in the Lord is not in vain—shouldn't there be more urgency in me rather than less?

Shouldn't I love harder? Shouldn't I fight injustice more fiercely?

Shouldn't I create, teach, serve, forgive, risk, and live with considerably more energy than someone who believes the stone eventually rolls back down the hill for good?

That question still convicts me.

I once wrote that if heaven is rest, we ought to live in such a way that we actually need it. Too often, including in my own life, the American church seems to have about as much need of eternal rest as a narcoleptic needs a sleep aid.

Camus reminds me how embarrassing comfortable Christianity can be. But he also reminds me why I need Christ.

Because ultimately I cannot carry the weight of the absurd alone. My heart isn't large enough. My intellect isn't strong enough. My defiance isn't permanent enough. Eventually my fists unclench.

And for me, that isn't defeat - It is grace.

That is why the song begins with a man standing alone, demanding meaning from the rain, and ends with something very different:

And I hope listeners will stay with the song long enough to hear this part.....

I'm still walking, but now I know.......
I'm not alone... no, I'm not alone!

Maybe that is the real story behind The Weight of the Absurd.

Camus helped me understand the nobility of the struggle.

Christ gave me a reason to believe the struggle is going somewhere.

PS-

For those wanting to get previews of that is coming to Spotify, I have created a playlist on SoundCloud called "Choices"- every song on this list has been approved for play on Spotify. What I haven't disclosed is the ORDER that these songs will drop. Do you have a favorite that you want to move up the list? Just let me know!

Here is the SoundCloud List- CHOICES

The Story Behind “Withstood the Wind”

Thanks for the question- and note: The Song was originally titled 'Hemingway' but responses from others suggesting it complicated  the message- but he was complicated......

You can hear the song on Spotify here:

Withstood the Wind

I taught Hemingway for seven years as part of an American Literature course, and I never quite knew what to do with him.

That probably sounds strange coming from someone who kept teaching him, but maybe that was part of the attraction. I respected Hemingway more consistently than I enjoyed him. I understood why he mattered. I could teach the iceberg theory, the sparse prose, the dialogue, the code hero, “grace under pressure,” and the enormous influence he had on American writing. But I never particularly loved the cadence of his prose. Sometimes the simplicity felt almost too deliberate to me—an impersonation of simplicity rather than simplicity itself.

Still, Hemingway stayed with me.

Really, that whole Modernist period did. It was one of my favorite stretches of American literature to teach because it was fascinating, dark, occasionally maddening, and unusually honest. The writers who emerged from World War I and lived through the upheavals that followed had good reason to be suspicious of easy optimism. The expatriates were especially interesting to me. They seemed to be looking back at America from a distance, questioning assumptions about progress, prosperity, heroism and the good life that an earlier generation had been more willing to trust.

It made for quite a classroom: Fitzgerald and the beautiful corruption of Gatsby; Faulkner digging through memory, guilt and the past; Steinbeck finding dignity among people who had almost nothing; Pound, brilliant and deeply troubling; and Hemingway, determined to strip away anything that sounded too easy.

They were fun to teach precisely because they weren't particularly fun. They were truthful.

And Hemingway may have been the most complicated of them for me.

There is a lot about the Hemingway persona that invites admiration. He was adventurous, physically courageous and seemingly determined to experience life at full volume. War, hunting, fishing, bullfighting, boxing, travel—there is almost a cult of difficulty surrounding him. If life wasn't hard enough on its own, Hemingway seemed willing to go looking for places where it could become harder.

But I was always a little suspicious of that, too.

How much was Hemingway, and how much was Hemingway playing Hemingway?

The public figure became almost as famous as the writer: Papa Hemingway, the tough guy, the drinker, the sportsman, the war correspondent, the man who had been there and done that. Was the mythology simply an extension of the man, or did the man eventually become trapped inside the mythology? Did readers love the writing, or did some of them love the sensational life surrounding the writer? I don't know. I'm not sure anyone can completely know.

There was an evasiveness about Hemingway that bothered me as much as it fascinated me. He could be emotionally manipulative while appearing emotionally detached. He could leave enormous things unsaid and somehow make the silence carry more weight than an explanation would have.

Jake Barnes's final response to Brett in The Sun Also Rises has always haunted me: “Isn't it pretty to think so?”

There is an entire life inside that sentence—a life that will never happen.

That is Hemingway at his best for me. I may resist the style, but I can't dismiss what is underneath it.

And that tension eventually found its way into “Withstood the Wind.”

The obvious Hemingway reference in the song comes from A Farewell to Arms: “The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”

It is one of those Hemingway lines that has escaped the novel and become almost inspirational. Put by itself, it is beautiful. I believe there is truth in it. Life breaks us, and sometimes healing creates a kind of strength that wasn't there before. The scar isn't merely evidence of the wound; it can also be evidence of healing.

But Hemingway doesn't stop there.

The rest of that passage is considerably darker. Life also kills the very good, the very gentle and the very brave. And if you are none of those things, Hemingway says, you can be sure it will kill you too; there simply won't be any special hurry.

That isn't exactly something you put on a motivational poster.

And yet I appreciate the honesty of it.

The world does break people. Being brave doesn't exempt you. Neither does being good. Sometimes we heal beautifully at the broken places, and sometimes we don't. Sometimes the next wind comes before the last wound has completely healed.

That is where the Hemingway hero becomes fascinating to me.

He stands.

He maintains the code. He does the job. His hands may tremble, but he behaves with courage anyway. He accepts that he cannot control the world, so he controls the manner in which he meets it. Hemingway called that kind of courage “grace under pressure,” and there is something undeniably admirable about it.

But after years of teaching those characters, I was left with a question I never completely resolved:

Is standing enough?

Is the Hemingway hero actually a hero, or is he simply an existential man who stands because standing is the only meaningful act left to him? If there is no larger purpose to the suffering, no redemption beyond endurance, then what has he accomplished when he withstands the wind?

I don't ask that as a criticism so much as an honest question. Hemingway himself makes it harder because the mythology of toughness eventually collides with a life that ended sadly. I don't want to use the end of his life to explain the man or judge him. Human beings are more complicated than that. But neither can I read all that language about courage, breaking, endurance and standing without feeling the weight of what we know came later.

That tension became the man in the song.

At first we see the Hemingway hero almost exactly as we expect him:

Through the dusk, the hero stands,
Grace under pressure, trembling hands.

But I didn't want to leave him there.

I wanted to meet him after everyone else had gone home.

So later we find him in a room at two in the morning:

Medals rest beside the bed,
But ghosts still speak of things unsaid.

For me, that is where “Withstood the Wind” really begins.

The medal tells the public story. The room tells the private one.

He stood when he was supposed to stand. He did something difficult. People may even have called him courageous. But now there is no crowd, no battle and no one watching. The medal still shines, but the scar still aches.

Scars don't shine in silver light—
They ache the most when it's this quiet.

So what now?

I don't think the answer is pretending that strong people don't break. In fact, the chorus deliberately admits the opposite:

Let the wind come—we won't bow.
It may break us—not us now.

That phrase matters to me: it may break us.

This isn't a song about invincibility. I don't believe in that kind of strength anymore, if I ever did. The scar itself proves we were vulnerable. We were hurt. Something happened that left a mark.

But we're here.

And that brings me to the bridge:

I almost laid my purpose down,
Almost let the silence drown.
But something in me still won't bend—
A quiet voice that says, “Stand.”

Maybe the most important word there isn't stand.

Maybe it's purpose.

That's where I think I finally part company with the Hemingway hero—or at least where my questions about him become my own. I admire the man who can stand in the wind. I admire grace under pressure. I admire courage that doesn't need an audience.

I'm just not convinced that standing, by itself, is enough.

I need there to be a reason to stand.

And perhaps that is why, after seven years of teaching Hemingway, after admiring him and distrusting him, enjoying him and arguing with him, he somehow ended up in one of my songs.

I still haven't settled the argument.

Maybe I don't need to.

The wind comes. The world breaks all of us eventually. Some wounds heal stronger. Some continue to ache at two in the morning. Courage doesn't mean pretending otherwise.

Sometimes courage is considerably less dramatic.

Sometimes there is no safari, no battlefield, no great fish on the line, no one watching to see what you will do.

Sometimes there is only a quiet room, a scar, a reason you haven't completely surrendered, and a voice barely loud enough to hear.

Stand.

And for tonight, maybe that's enough.

The Story Behind "Ask Me Dangerous"

“Ask Me Dangerous” is now on Spotify, and this one has had an interesting journey.

You can listen to it here:

ASK ME DANGEROUS

The original idea came from something I had been thinking about for a while. We live in a world of shallow talk. We scroll, nod, say “I’m good,” and move on. We know how to have entire conversations without really saying anything, and most of us have gotten pretty good at knowing which questions to ask and, maybe more importantly, which ones not to ask.

I’ve always liked the old Lynyrd Skynyrd line, “Ask me no questions, and I’ll tell you no lies.” It’s a great line, but there is probably more truth in it than we would like to admit. There seems to be an unspoken agreement we make with each other: don’t dig too deeply into my life, and I won’t dig too deeply into yours. Mutual Assured Destruction applied to relationships.

But when I read the Bible, God doesn’t seem to honor that agreement.

God asks questions. Not because He doesn’t know the answers, but because we often don’t.

He asks Adam, “Where are you?” He asks Elijah, “What are you doing here?” Jesus asks the woman at the well about her husband. He asks Peter, “Do you love me?” These aren’t requests for information. They are questions designed to make someone confront something they might rather avoid.

They are dangerous questions.

That was the idea behind the first version of “Ask Me Dangerous.” It was actually a pretty fun song. It had a good tempo and almost a Brad Paisley kind of country feel. I liked it. I especially liked a couple of the lines:

I’m the duke of polished lies,
A thousand faces, none are mine.

And:

Pull that question like a knife,
Cut beneath what you can see.

So I put it out there for my usual test audience and waited.

Not much happened.

People didn’t hate it. That might have been easier. It just didn’t seem to connect with anybody. I still liked the idea, but the song wasn’t resonating.

That is not exactly an unusual problem for me. I can get fascinated with an idea and forget that everyone else hasn’t been living with it inside my head for the last several weeks. Maybe the song was too cerebral. Maybe it was a little obtuse. Maybe I understood what “Ask Me Dangerous” meant because I already knew what I was trying to say.

So I went back to it.

The first change was musical. I slowed everything down and moved it into more of a Southern Gothic sound. That helped. The response was better, and the darker sound seemed to fit the subject better. But the more I listened, the more I thought the problem wasn’t really the music.

For a song called “Ask Me Dangerous,” I wasn’t actually asking many dangerous questions.

I was writing about vulnerability without being particularly vulnerable.

That realization changed the song.

Instead of talking generally about masks and truth and hiding, I started trying to write the questions I might actually prefer that someone not ask me.

Ask me why I need the room,
Why I need to come through.
Ask me who I am when no one
Needs the things I do.

That felt different.

Why do I need to be needed? How much of what I do for other people is service, and how much of it has become tangled up with my identity? Who am I when nobody needs an answer, a decision, a solution or anything else from me?

Then came:

Ask me who I’ve hurt while thinking
I was helping all along.

I don’t particularly enjoy that question either.

Neither do I especially like:

Ask me who I’d be tomorrow
If the cheering disappeared.

But that became the point. If I could answer every question in the song easily, they weren’t dangerous enough.

One line from the original survived all the rewrites: “I’m the duke of polished lies.” I still love that line, probably because I think there is a kind of dishonesty that doesn’t require saying anything factually untrue.

You can tell the truth and still hide.

I can give you an honest answer that reveals exactly as much as I want you to know. I can tell a story about a failure that makes me appear humble. I can confess something while carefully avoiding the thing underneath it. As the newer lyric says, “I can make confession sound sincere and never let you get too near.”

That was getting much closer to what I had wanted the song to say in the first place. Sometimes we don’t need someone to catch us lying. We need someone who won’t let us hide inside the truth.

There was one other idea from the original song that I knew I wanted to keep: “Don’t let me put God in the gaps.”

That one gets complicated for me because faith is supposed to take me toward truth, not protect me from it. But religious language can become another defense mechanism if I let it. There is a difference between trusting God in something I don’t understand and invoking God because I don’t want to examine something I might understand all too well.

The final version says:

And when I reach for something holy
Just to make the questions stop—
Don’t let me put God in the gaps.

Then comes the line I added afterward:

Let God be God.

I like where that landed. I don’t need God as the explanation that ends the uncomfortable conversation. I need Him to be God, even when the conversation gets more uncomfortable.

Once I finally felt good about the lyrics, the song took another strange turn.

I completely remade it as a hip-hop song.

I’m not entirely sure why, other than the fact that this whole music experiment has given me permission to try things I never would have tried before. But something happened in that version. The rhythm changed the way some of the words landed. It gave the song an edge that hadn't been there before.

Then, because apparently I can't leave anything alone, I took what I liked about that version and remixed it again as a country song.

So “Ask Me Dangerous” started as an up-tempo country song, became a slower Southern Gothic song, wandered off and became hip-hop, and eventually came back home to country carrying a few things it picked up along the way.

That may actually be my favorite part of the whole process.

The various versions have now gotten around 6,000 listens on SoundCloud, which is far more than I expected when I started playing around with this song. Friday, the final version makes the move to Spotify, and I’m curious to see what happens with it there.

But whether it connects with a larger audience or not, I think I finally found the song I was originally trying to write.

The first version essentially said, “We should ask each other deeper questions.”

The final version makes me answer them.

That is a much more uncomfortable proposition.

I still think we have an unspoken agreement with one another that keeps most relationships relatively safe: I won’t look too closely at the things you have learned to hide if you extend me the same courtesy. We can know a lot about one another without ever allowing ourselves to be truly known.

Maybe breaking that agreement requires giving a few trusted people permission to ask something dangerous.

Not everybody. But somebody.

So as “Ask Me Dangerous” comes out Friday, that is probably the question I’m left with:

Who in my life has permission to ask me the question I don’t want to answer?

And if they actually did, would I answer it?

Or would the duke of polished lies find another way out?

You can find my Spotify page here:  Jayopsis on Spotify

You can find my SoundCloud page here: Jayopsis on SoundCloud