by Mark Witas—

by Becky De Oliveira—

Shutterfly reminded me yesterday that this past week, 10 years ago, I was on spring break with my children and parents in Kentucky, at Mammoth Cave National Park and Dinosaur World. My kids were ten and six. My parents couldn’t join us for the cave tour since my mother has Parkinson’s disease and would have been unable to manage the rough terrain, tight spaces, and stairs. Later, when we met up with them to stroll around the surface of the park, my six-year-old began enthusiastically explaining to Grandpa everything we had seen and done. When we passed the entrance to the cave tour, where the operator had spent perhaps 20 minutes orienting us to the realities and rules of the experience (he was particularly concerned that we understand just how tight the section called “Fat Man’s Misery” really was so we wouldn’t freak out underground), my son said. “And Grandpa, this is where a man said a lot of words.”

That boy is now 16, and his enduring ability to distill almost anything he sees to its basic and most essential quality occasionally astonishes me. Watching a reality TV show about couples, he will say something like, “This relationship is 99 percent her and only one percent him.” Since we’ve all been in a de facto shelter-in-place for the past week here in Colorado—going out only to take walks and make the occasional dart to the grocery store, or, on Monday, to McDonald’s for St. Patrick’s Day shamrock shakes obtained through the drive-thru—he has had more opportunity than usual to share his insights. “Dad is more religious than you are,” he said.

“How do you figure?” I asked, resisting the urge to demand an operationalized definition of the construct religious. I don’t disagree with my son; my husband is more religious than I am. But I’m not sure why. And I really wanted to know how the difference between us appears to a 16-year-old who has spent his entire life watching us, quietly amassing data.

“Dad reads only religious books,” he offered as his first piece of evidence. “You read things like Fifty Shades of Grey.” (For the record, I have never read a single word of the Fifty Shades franchise. He is thinking of Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, a book I embarrassed him by bringing to school when I substitute-taught his seventh-grade class, thinking I could read it during lunch and gym class, my free periods. I assumed the kids would associate the name with the county in England. This was a grave misjudgment on my part.) He went on to explain that Dad also prays more often than I do, that he encourages prayer as a solution to problems, something I never do, and that he thinks and talks about religion all the time. “If I have a problem,” my son said, “you offer a solution. Dad tells me to pray.”

On the one hand, being the person that I am, I found this assessment quite flattering. I am a rational being—one who offers solutions rather than magical thinking. But in the midst of the crisis in which we find ourselves, I’m not, to be honest, finding solace in much of anything. People are saying a lot of words. Some of them are what I would describe as religious platitudes. (“Let go and let God.” “He’s got the whole world in His hands.”) Others are based on data or reason or common sense or any of a thousand other epistemological models, and they pretty much add up to…a lot of words. I’m adding to those words right here, on this page, as I type. Words are the only thing I know how to do, the only skill I have, and here, right now, they begin to fail me.

We are facing the kind of uncertainty none of us ever expected. I have friends who have lost jobs, lost their salaries for the foreseeable future. Schools and universities closed. If we’re lucky, we are working from home—and wondering how long that will last. Worrying about how many will get sick, about what happens if food runs out. Most of us have lost investments. Some have to put off retirement, like what happened in 2008. One of my clients told me this week he lost just under a million dollars, but he was pretty sanguine about it. He has lost more than money in his life—his wife died suddenly nearly 20 years ago when his daughters were teenagers. “Don’t worry, Becky,” he said. “We are people of faith and we have to believe that God has us, through everything that happens.”

Well, no. We don’t have to believe that. Or anything. We can be skeptical, can let our thoughts go to dark places, thinking of all the people who have had faith that went unrewarded. Anne Frank and her family. The Tutsis in Rwanda. Everyone you’ve ever known who died of cancer. But maybe this is a good time to experiment more with faith—not just words but faith. That feeling of peace that can suddenly wash over you, unbidden, that makes you quite certain that no matter how cliché it might sound, you really do believe that God has us, through everything that happens.

Becky De Oliveira is a doctoral student in research methods working on special projects for the Pacific Union Conference from her home in Colorado.

by Becky De Oliveira—

Who doesn’t have thoughts on toilet paper these days? I grew up hiking with my dad, and he always said, “Toilet paper is mountain currency.” Who knew it would someday be currency off the mountain as well? The United States—along with much of the rest of the world—seems neatly divided into two camps: those who hoard toilet paper and those who make snarky remarks about those who hoard toilet paper. I have staked my claim firmly in the latter camp but mostly with my tongue firmly planted in my cheek. I’m not yet particularly angry about the toilet paper hoarding. People want to feel a sense of safety and control. As a former anorexic, I can’t hate anyone for that. I well know the feeling, the heady sense of euphoria that comes with having your ducks in a row.

Perhaps it’s more accurate to say I won’t hate them for that. Or for anything. To paraphrase Chief Joseph, “From where the sun now stands, I will hate no one else forever.” Last week in Connect Group (what our church calls Sabbath School) my husband tells me they discussed the character of God and a few people argued about it. I was resting from a hard week and Mohs surgery for skin cancer on my face, and it’s just as well I wasn’t there. I would have raised this question: Why are we worried about the character of God? What we need to ask right now is what is the character of me? Because things are not really bad yet—and they don’t ever have to be. They will only be bad if we start to turn on each other, bitter, snarling, taking chunks of flesh.

In the last 48 hours, my oldest son’s university—currently on spring break—asked its students not to return until April 13 at the earliest. They will conduct classes online. My son is on a school trip to Death Valley National Park and has to return to campus before flying home. There was much online discussion over whether the students would be allowed in the dorms at all, with everyone posting different theories, opinions, or reports of what they’d heard. He emailed the rector and asked whether he could spend the night and the rector said yes. Whew.

A few hour later, my university announced it would go online after we return from spring break, starting today. We will not return to campus until April 6 at the earliest. My high school-aged son is out for three weeks. My niece, in Washington State, is out until the end of April. My husband is working from home. So is my brother. My parents, both well over 70, are self-quarantined.

People are stockpiling water, cleaning supplies, tissues, paper towels, rice, beans. My friends are posting photos of empty shelves. One friend had the last packet of toilet paper snatched from her hands by another shopper in Holland, Michigan, which used to be called the happiest place in America. I went to the grocery store last night myself in preparation for having a houseful of males (two of them growing) rifling the cupboards for sustenance, and I found what I needed with a minimum of difficulty. A huge bag of dog food had spilled on the floor and the poor checkout clerk swept some of it out of the way and stepped aside to let me pass. We smiled at each other. “That sucks,” I said. We laughed. This whole situation sucks.

All of you know exactly what I’m talking about. You are living your own versions of the same story: closures, cancellations, shortages, uncertainty. For some of us, the situation is much more serious than for others. If my major problem right now is less toilet paper than I might ideally like, I think I can say I am truly blessed.

When one of my classes met earlier this week to discuss our contingency plans should the university go online for the rest of the semester, the professor said, “Now I don’t want to hear anyone talking about whether or not people should be hoarding toilet paper. I don’t want you to say whether you think it’s right or wrong. Some of you are talking about it (was she looking at me?) while others of you have bought a lot of toilet paper. No one needs to feel bad. It doesn’t matter who is right and who is wrong.”

I take her point but also feel the urge to question it a little. What is a crisis for if not to learn, to clarify your own beliefs, to determine which lines you will not cross? Here’s a line I will not cross: I will never snatch a package of toilet paper from another person’s hands. But if you did do this, dear reader, you and I can still be friends. I have probably crossed lines that you would never cross, done things you would find disgusting, beyond the pale. We can be judgmental—maybe even occasionally snarky—without becoming enemies. We can learn from each other. Can’t we?

Becky De Oliveira is a doctoral student in research methods working on special projects for the Pacific Union Conference from her home in Colorado.

by Becky De Oliveira—

As a child, I was routinely taught that scientists were most just “guessing” about their theories. “They have to have faith just as much as we do,” teachers and other adults said. These adults made scientific-sounding arguments for a young earth, evolution being the primary scientific theory they were eager to debunk. When my children were in elementary school, they came home telling me they’d been informed that dinosaur bones had been placed in the earth by Satan himself, to trick us and cause us to lose our faith.

“Interesting,” I said. “That certainly is a theory.”

My oldest son has gone on to study environmental earth science at university—basically, geology. This sits uncomfortably with certain Adventist church members, who raise their eyebrows and cluck about the “dangers” involved in studying earth science.

What are those dangers?

I suppose the primary danger is that increased knowledge would lead to a corresponding and highly correlated decrease in faith. That is possible. But as many a wise person before me has pointed out, faith that is untested is not faith at all. Faith based on ignorance is…what, exactly?

Skepticism toward the scientific community has led to some foolish and destructive behavior by individuals and leaders, in this country and many others. How many outbreaks of measles have resulted from an insistence—against overwhelming consensus to the contrary from the medical community—that the MMR vaccine is responsible for autism? It is interesting that so many people are convinced of the likelihood that doctors, medical researchers, and other experts are conspiring to cause harm to millions of people (for profit perhaps)—but that the sources they trust that call these experts’ claims into question are blameless and trustworthy with no ulterior agendas whatsoever. Why would that be the case?

Sometimes it is easy enough to see why people reject evidence they don’t like. Certain discoveries may “touch on people’s lifestyle or worldviews, or impinge on corporate interests” (Lewandowsky & Oberaur, 2016). Other times rejection of science appears to be an identity-based decision, a sort of tribal impulse. Perhaps alignment against a much-hated political party?

One interesting factor with climate change denial is its association with low tolerance for ambiguity (Jessani & Harris, 2018). The science surrounding climate change is complicated and messy and contains a high level of complexity. People with low tolerance for ambiguity like familiar explanations and black-and-white conclusions. I am reminded of a person who wrote to me about a year ago complaining that I raise unsettling questions in my writing and, at that time, on the podcast I co-hosted. She did not want to think about hard or uncomfortable things. And fair enough. It’s a free world. But it’s also a complicated world, which won’t get any easier from our collective refusal to see problems. If we truly have faith, perhaps it’s time to stop being so afraid of what we may see if we look. “Gold there is, and rubies in abundance, but lips that speak knowledge are a rare jewel” (Proverbs 20:15, NIV).

Becky De Oliveira is a doctoral student in research methods working on special projects for the Pacific Union Conference from her home in Colorado. This blog will also appear in the spring issue of Mountain Views, the quarterly magazine of the Rocky Mountain Conference of Seventh-day Adventists.

References

Jessani, Z., & Harris, P. B. (2018). Personality, politics, and denial: Tolerance of ambiguity, political orientation and disbelief in climate change. Personality and Individual Differences, 131, 121-123.

Lewandowsky, S., & Oberauer, K. (2016). Motivated rejection of science. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 25(4), 217–222.