Just Check The Thermostat

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One night last week, the furnace went down. There was an error message on the thermostat telling us to call for service and not try to fix it ourselves. I called. The receptionist walked us through a couple of first steps: does the filter need changing (did that last week), turn the power off and on to reset the controls (tried that with no effect). A service call was set for that afternoon. Meanwhile we kept ourselves warm with the fireplace, space heaters and ovens.

Let me explain. We have a hybrid heat-pump/gas-furnace. The heat pump works down to -10° C outdoor temperature. Below that the furnace kicks in, until it kicks out. It kicked out some time during the night leaving the house cooling to 17° C by morning. 

That's all I knew or want to know. For control, we have the thermostat, filter, power switch, and the telephone connecting us to service. That's enough. The jungle of tubes, wires, switches and valves inside the furnace is up to the technician. He says the high temperature kill switch was thrown for some unknown reason, and if it happens again they will replace the switch. Thank goodness he knew how it works and what can go wrong. We are warm again without needing to take a course in furnace repair.

The equipment, which is warranted by the manufacturer, has parts made who knows where on the planet. The materials from which the parts are made come from remote mines and refineries. The minerals which aggregated from space rubble 4.5 billion years ago, came from stardust, and we could trace their origin back to the inflation of the singularity 13.8 billion years ago, a year being the time required for one revolution of the earth around the sun. Note that there wasn't always an earth to serve as a cosmological clock. 

You get my point? It's complicated, but you don't have to know where it all came from or how it works or what the evidence is. Just check the thermostat and do what it says.

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We called a taxi to go to the optometrist last week. The driver said it was a slow day because it was March break, and he was wasting time when he should have been earning fares. Our fare came to $19. I gave him $25. He said, "God bless you", and we departed mutually happy with his fee and our ride. 

God bless you? I appreciate the gratitude. But what's God got to do with it? Is God going to fix things so I win the lottery as a reward for my generosity? Well, no. I am pretty sure reality doesn't work that way. But yes, we participate in reality and we can make it more generous.

That's my inner theologian being hyper-vigilant. If you've followed along, you know I have been thinking of God as two things: reality (complex and mysterious), and also our simplified understanding of reality (metaphorical, incomplete and fallible). We don't all have to be theologians (trained existential technicians), but we do have some control over how reality plays out. We may need to repair things and clean up our messes (reset the mechanism and change the filter). Experience is our thermostat, showing us how we are doing.

We can choose (within limits) the warmth of the world we  live in. We have a hybrid furnace, more or less passionate and rational as needed.

Let us be generous, passionately and wisely.

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The Good Life Was Never Mine: Jessica Böhme

The Last Illusion: Deconstructionology with Jim Palmer