It was the coldest of times, it was the hottest of times…
…okay, so in this cute little invocation of Dickens, I may be exaggerating about the heat. But about the cold? It was no laughing matter.
February 2021 hit Texas like a ton of frozen bricks. Wind turbines couldn’t spin, solar panels underperformed, natural gas flows were disrupted, power went out, and many died. The heat came in fast enough after all that: Accusations flew in all directions.
For me personally, it got hot after I replied to a comment some guy had made on a friend’s Facebook post. I wondered about what went wrong, how we might make renewables more reliable in harsh weather, and what was up with natural gas, since gas doesn’t freeze (not on earth, anyway). I jumped into the conversation hoping my interlocutor might have some insight into the matter. Silly me.
Rather than insight, I got a barrage of environmental hubris, denial that renewables had weaknesses, and incorrect assumptions about my political persuasions. Wow, I thought: I didn’t know that in my words one could find — “invent” is the better word — so many hidden meanings. My opponent’s creativity with anything I said was quite active and highly imaginative. With each exchange, I was increasingly confused by how he reacted to my comments.
It all came clear when he accused me of being a devotee of a certain entertainews celebrity, for whom he held great animosity. And I had to ask, “Have you been talking about him this whole time?
BudgetPet
Because I’ve been talking about Texas energy reliability. If you have something to say about that, I’m all ears.” My antagonist posted no further replies.
Frames of reference
How about that? We thought we were having a conversation, but actually we were talking about radically different things. The two of us spoke from different centers of gravity, different frames of reference: energy reliability on the one hand and malign influence of political pundits on the other. My remarks made sense to me because I knew they were exploring energy reliability. To him, my words were clues as to how I was (most certainly from his perspective) under hostile political influence. His remarks no doubt made sense to him in their aim to expose me as a political lemming, but for my part, I couldn’t figure out how his remarks served the goal of advancing energy reliability.
In nuanced ways, our different frames of reference changed the meanings of our words and sentences. We spoke incompatible dialects.
Consciously or not, every one of our conversations, everyday, has a frame around it that controls and defines the essence of what we are talking about.Every one of our conversations, everyday, has a frame around it that controls and defines the essence of what we are talking about. We tend to be not so much aware of the framing. Implicitly, we act as though we needn’t be, because of course there is ever only one proper framing to the conversation: ours.
Wait, the plot thickens
It gets more complex. We may be talking about multiple things at once, and there may be multiple frames of reference in play. But among these multiple frames, one will be dominant. Let’s illustrate with Psalm 89:14, where Ethan’s words to the Lord touch on both law and love:
Righteousness and justice are the foundation of your throne;
steadfast love and faithfulness go before you. (ESV)
If we frame this verse within a conversation about law and judgment and God’s wrath, the first line is more important. We must first wrestle with God’s authoritative demand for righteousness (since that’s the conversation’s focus), and then we can move on to consider how God’s love and mercy fit in with judgment. Even though God’s love will save us, the main emphasis is on meeting demands of the Law. We’d best take seriously God’s purity, and only then hope to see God’s kindness. There’s something to all that, but what happens if we swap the framing around?
Within a conversation about a vibrant relationship with a loving God, the second half is primary. We pursue first an understanding of God’s love and faithfulness, and only then seek to understand how a demand for righteousness fits with love. God's love holds deep credibility precisely because it beckons us out of the mud pits of injustice into the life and peace that goodness begets.Justice remains as the foundation but, before we come under its scrutiny, God comes to meet us with care and compassion and loyalty. And putting love first is not a sentimental movement, rather it is rich and beautiful specifically because God’s love is grounded in the hard demands of righteousness and justice. Even though God loves us as we are, God still cares what kind of people we are.1 God’s love holds deep credibility precisely because it beckons us out of the mud pits of injustice into the life and peace that goodness begets — and yet this love still holds us when we refuse the invitation and continue in our mud-wallowing.
The frame in which we read the likes of Psalm 89:14 colors whether we relate to God more as a meticulous legalist with a soft spot for love, or as a passionate lover and friend who longs for us to find life “to the full” (John 10:10, NIV) as we grow into our better selves.We can see God as a passionate lover and friend who longs for us to find life "to the full" as we grow into our better selves. Taking the Bible as a whole — including the hard parts — I find the framing of passionate lover more consistent with a full picture of the character of God.2 More to the point of this essay, I all too often find opposing frames of reference like these to be speed bumps, or outright barricades, on the road to rich and fruitful conversations and relationships.
Framing life dominantly through love instead of righteousness
Day-to-day, as we relate to family, friends, coworkers, and strangers-on-the-street, framing comes into play not merely as a potential cause of misunderstanding, but more importantly as a path of intentional love. Had I been more alert and aware with my Texas freeze-out friend, I might have suspected mismatched framing. In the name of love and connection, I could have left my framing aside and sought to enter his world and framing. I could have built a bridge rather than a wall. I needn’t have agreed with his framing, nor his conclusions; the love is not in agreement, but in the pursuit of connection with another human heart.
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And who knows? Perhaps I would have learned something by seeing for a time through another’s eyes. Had I loved this way, perhaps my gentleness could have turned away his wrath (Prov 15:1).
The previous paragraph is incomplete, intentionally, so as to protect you from the perils of poor framing. Because even true words, ill-timed, can easily and dangerously change the framing of a conversation. The omitted last sentence would have been, “And maybe he would have come to see things from my perspective.” Although this is true, it has self-serving overtones that would transmogrify the paragraph. Without it, the paragraph is about understanding and relationship. With it, understanding is devalued into a means rather than an end — and a potentially manipulative means at that. And it doesn’t do to try salvaging the sentence by pointing to its tentative nature (i.e., “maybe”). The mere suggestion that our ideas might prevail calls out loudly to the human heart, bludgeoning the beauty of understanding into subservience to the cause of winning.
People, not objects; relationships, not winning
Said more crassly, the sentence makes the other person the object of a formula for transactional success in winning an argument rather than letting them be simply a person with whom we might have relational success at love and connection. Unchecked, it grows into the likes of objectifying someone as an evangelical target, rushing to the transaction of winning a convert to the faith rather loving the person and pursuing relationship. The omitted sentence plays on our desire and our pride, and it would have sat upon the end of the paragraph like a siren, singing the sweetness of our victory in getting people to come to the truth. Now, some would say, “Wait, the truth is what we’re here for, right? What’s the problem?” But if it’s a strategy for winning, it’s not a practice of love.If it’s a strategy for winning, it’s not a practice of love. Love does not seek its own goals, even though it believes and hopes for good as it works toward a better world. Only true and sincere love ever “wins” when pursuing “life to the full.”
As the Men’s Bible Study at my church (St. Patrick’s Anglican) made our way through Romans — that wellspring of many a rigid Christian doctrinal proposition — I found new clues in the text that maybe it wants a different framing than I’ve given it before. Maybe it’s centered not so much on the rules for how to get to heaven, but instead on the rich life that Creator has always wanted for us, even before we messed things up. Maybe it’s about the fact that we are kindly, faithfully, sacrificially, doggedly loved and pursued by a Master who knows that our deepest life and joy is found in the freedom to be good.
In any case, I’m learning to stop my rushed life more often to ask, “Wait. What are we talking about?”
Endnotes
1 This type of demanding love is not unlike the old Cat Stevens song, “Hard-Headed Woman,” in which he sings, “I’m looking for a hard-headed woman, one who’ll make me do my best.”
2 As briefly as I can, here’s how I read it: As with Psalm 89:14, God’s character is multifaceted, so the question is, across the Bible, what is/are the most fundamental characteristics of God that emerge. At the core, God loves goodness, i.e., heart-level alignment with life-giving and beautiful living — in a word, justice. The harsh and judgmental bits demonstrate God’s very high degree of passion for justice. (This is not unfamiliar for us today, as we see very similar judgmental behavior, even violence widely condoned, from social advocates of various stripes.) But a more fundamental direction in which God takes this passion is toward forming us as people of goodness, because humans are wired such that we long for lives lived in goodness. Thus comes the bits about Jesus and salvation and the deeper love of God, which are fundamentally about freeing us, by God’s forgiveness, to pursue goodness freely from the heart, rather than being forced by fear of conviction against the demands of justice. Thus, overall, God’s love for us and joy in our joyful living comes before, but aligns with, God’s passion for justice, and both are deeply intrinsic to God’s character.
