I had the tremendous pleasure of watching my youngest brother, Andy, graduate from high school last week.

People are usually surprised when they find out I that have a brother of graduating age. This is ironic, since it is also not quite rare for me to receive ribbing for my youthful appearance, or even my outright youth. (I will be 31 next month. This is no longer all that youthful in my view, and happily for now, the age jokes are on the decline.) Even so, a reproductive span of thirteen years–and the actual maximum in my family of origin was fifteen years, as I have an older sister–is pretty large these days. So whether the surprise is warranted or consistent with other jokes at my expense, it is usually the case anyway.

Andy was five when I left the house. I think I could fairly say that his first five years were perhaps not my most attentive to family life, as I was between the ages of thirteen and eighteen. I was much too concerned with my friends, later my girlfriend, and later my fiancée to be highly involved with a toddling/video game-playing baby brother. After Kari and I married and moved away, I saw my younger brothers and sister only during a few summers until the time Andy was ten. I have spent the last eight years of inhabiting the same city with my brother getting to know him.

Enter my son, Zach, who was born when my brother was nine, and who himself will be nine five days before I turn 31 next month. Key milestones in Andy’s life have given me occasion to reflect on Zach’s future: his voice changing, dating, prom, graduation, learning to write (I mean really to write, not just draw out letters), analyzing literature, doing calculus, writing software. But being a brother, even a thirteen-year-older brother, is not being a father. I do not provide for Andy’s basic needs; he does not live under my roof; and I have a much smaller responsibility for his upbringing than I do my own son’s.

However, neither is it quite being a brother in the way we normally think. It is certainly not being a brother in the same way boys born 18 months apart are brothers. Andy and I never got in a fistfight over whether to watch Thundercats or Transformers (or Speed Racer or Underdog). We never had a crush on the same girl. We never had the same teacher a year or two apart, who called the younger one by the older one’s name and imputed the personality and work ethic of the older to the younger.

So I am left without some of the attachments that come from a very closely shared fraternal context, and without the responsibility and authority that come from being a parent. Without either one, yet clearly with both to some degree.

Which brings us back to graduation, and forward to it: seeing a young man enter adulthood–one with whom I did not exactly grow up, and whom I did not raise, but in whose life I still have the kind of ownership which normally would be occasioned only by one or the other of these–is thrilling. This middle perspective is a rare opportunity: most people only get to grow up themselves (having, by definition, no perspective at all in the process), then raise their children, struggling to relate the experiences of their youth to the lives of their children in the high-stakes game of forming their children into adults.

A much younger brother is the same kind of tertium quid. It gives me a taste of the kind of pride I will feel when my own son and daughters pass this milestone, but in advance and through a person who is not himself my offspring. Andy’s graduation isn’t any real kind of predictor of Zach’s graduation ten years hence, but it is a dry run of sorts. We don’t normally get even a hazy glimpse at the outcome of our very most important life undertakings, but sometimes Providence is good enough to us to give us a taste.

And if you think that’s something, my baby sister is getting married in August.

The Vulture
A Poem by Zach Berglund (age

A vulture is a gigantic bird
That once saw a field with a cows [sic] in a herd

He got shot by a gun
Directly below the sun

He fell on a huge, scarey [sic] cow
So the cow said, “Ow!”

And then he went to Spain
And there it did rain
So now he has no pain!!!

Since The Matrix is on everybody’s mind this week (don’t argue; I said it was on your mind), this article by Dr. Phil Chalmers of the University of Arizona at Tucson should prove to be of interest also.

Dr. Chalmers argues that brain-in-a-vat hypotheses are not skeptical after all; they may imply surprising and counterintuitive metaphysics, but can potentially leave most of our other beliefs about the world intact. I found the comparison between the Matrix and Cartesian mind-body dualism to be the most compelling of the article, even if I don’t embrace the Cartesian scenario outright. But them I’m not a philosopher, and it’s embarassingly easy to put one over on me. (I provide an outstanding example of Proverbs 18:17 in this regard.)

Okay, The Matrix Reloaded. Now, I am really, really not a very good film critic. I’ve only seen the movie once, and I didn’t take notes. There’s a lot to say about it, but first, the theology:

Hopefully this Matrix movie will disabuse evangelicals of the notion that the first one was somehow Christian. I have been fairly vocal (when the topic came up) that the first movie was most certainly attempting to provide answers to questions of Christianity, and was doing it with our symbols and types, but I’m pretty sure I have been clear that its answers were fundamentally incompatible with ours. Believe it or not, there are some people who are worse film and literature critics than I am, so this actually took some explaining on a few occasions.

Neo the Christ Figure continued to differentiate himself from the New Testament Christ in Reloaded. At the beginning of the movie, an irritating young Neo-sycophant thanks him by saying, “You saved me.” Neo replied quickly, “You saved yourself.” A self-effacing savior, he, but in a puzzling way: I suppose all he does is point you in the direction of the Superior Metaphysical Knowledge, and you go get it for yourself. He doesn’t actually do anything to you. Never mind that you are utterly powerless to escape the illusion apart from the agency of freed humans, of whom Neo is merely the most productive and most powerful while jacked in. Somebody saved that kid, or he’d still have been plugged into that high-school-physics-unaware power plant living his illusory life.

The issue of the Power of Contrary Choice, only seriously declared in Neo’s closing phone call at the end of the first movie, dominates this film. On at least three occasions, Neo and others discuss the freedom of the will with various software-people in the Matrix. The machines–even the Oracle–consistently declare that humans lack the ability to choose otherwise than they do. The Oracle tells Neo that since choosing otherwise is out of the question, attempting to understand his choices is his highest reasonable aspiration. The film ends with the feeling that Neo reluctantly accepts this proposition, but will clearly strive against hope (in existential hero fashion) to Make a Choice anyway in the final apocalyptic battle with the machines, which looms in the near future as the credits roll. The precise nature and occasion of the choice are not yet obvious, but the presumed human victory over the machines seemingly cannot be achieved except as a repudiation of the determinism they espouse, determinism which is universally equated by the humans (without being argued by the film) with a boot-heeled kind of control. Evangelicals should find this an unfortunate, if not surprising, view of the freedom of the will.

It was easy for me to get lost in the mystery of the first film and not ask too many questions about the nature of the Oracle. After all, Neo was different, and the metaphysically informed jacked-in humans had superpowers, so the source of the Oracle’s precognition didn’t seem worthy of too much exploration. I mean, hey, it’s the Matrix! You can walk sideways on walls, jump dozens of yards across rooftops, and even dodge bullets. You can be the star of your own Kung Fu movie. Everything is that greenish color. So what’s so big about telling the future?

As the properly religious aspects of Morpheus’ faith in The One and the oracles of the Oracle are developed, the Oracle is unmasked a little bit. It turns out she’s Larry Ellison! (Just kidding. No spoilers herein.) No, but Morpheus even goes so far as to call the unfolding her prophecies “Providence,” yet the movie scarcely allows for that Providence to have any kind of divine author. Moreover, I think the next movie will certify that the apparently supernatural nature of the Oracle was at best misleading. This movie left us with strong (but unproved) suggestions to that end, as if we should prepare to accept a fully naturalistic explanation for her too. Funny how we proudly call ourselves postmodern, and talk all kinds of tough about our appetite for mystery and spirituality, but just can’t bring ourselves to tie up loose ends into anything but naturalistic knots. Remember, we would have gotten away with it, if it hadn’t been for those meddling kids.

We get a brief glimpse of the religion of Zion, which includes a “prayer” which is apparently offered to no one but the crowd, and an all-night Worship Rave to which all of Zion is invited. (This is the art-imitating-life case, since fringe evangelicals are already doing this, God save them.) The rave scene is offered in time-bending slow motion and juxtaposed with a mildly pornographic love scene between Neo and Trinity, so at the end of that painful five minutes, you realize you didn’t even need to bring your own X. Neat. Thanks.

Zion’s is the perfect postmodern religion: enough dumbed-down transcendence to make us feel connected to Something Bigger Than Ourselves and to foster a little community, but not nearly enough to risk exposing us to the terrifying specter of Holiness. It offers a hopeful eschatology; it apparently withholds any ethics that might inconvenience the indulgence of our passions; and it places above us enough authority to feel safe, but not enough to feel put-upon. Oh, I’d guess it features sex, too, what with all that raving and the occasional transparent woman’s shirt. I’ve never been to a party like that, so maybe it just looks like an orgy, but doesn’t actually become one. You know, benefit of the doubt.

Again, a good framework for evangelicals is to realize that the Matrix franchise continues to provide answers to same questions as Christianity, but it provides answers that are utterly incompatible with ours. Somebody is taking our vocabulary and telling a totally different story, but this is nothing new. I suspect all humans everywhere at every time will be interested in the categories of fall, redemption, and eschaton. I leave it to the reader to determine the ideal interaction between the telling of our story and contrary versions.