Excerpts from Called by Name

• “The video games of the early 21st century were like toy soldiers on a model battlefield compared to the fantasy potential of virtual reality body gear, which came into its own around 2030 — only twelve years ago. Today’s VR players no longer interact with a game; they live a fantasy. Players feel themselves running through a battlefield, skydiving, or making love on a beach. Brain, eyes, ears, nose, tongue, arms, genitals, legs, feet are all connected to the virtual reality computer. The experience, whether a walk in the woods, a superhero adventure, or a passionate lovemaking session with a Hollywood celebrity, is full immersion. Virtual fantasy is now so popular that some Hollywood stars make more money licensing their ageless virtual bodies than they do acting. 

“To those who pursue VR fantasy full-time, the family, school, and work obligations of real life are trivial and boring compared to the excitement of VR fantasy. Thanks to the generous welfare benefits that developed countries offer, hundreds of millions of people can avoid real life. They live in VR cooperatives that have taken over shopping malls and schools made obsolete by online retail and educational organizations. These locations are typically divided into hundreds of tiny rooms that enable residents to make the most of their low but guaranteed incomes. 

• Russell continued. “If you were intellectually consistent, Dr. Delgado, you would respect their choices. People are dropping out of reality because they realize, even if you don’t, that they don’t belong in a world that has little use for unskilled labor. Average intelligence, let alone low intelligence, is maladaptive in the modern world. And nearly two centuries of research has demonstrated conclusively that intelligence is at least 50% genetic. An inhumane society would simply terminate these unproductive people. But we are compassionate. So, we will let them spend their lives in the fantasy worlds of their choice. Maximum pleasure for the maximum number. That core principle, which I’m sure you accept, is honored when we accept their choices. We can afford to subsidize their pleasure for a time. But let us make sure that they do not reproduce. Humanity must increase its average level of intelligence by culling the less intelligent.”

Sounding a bit like the agitated Delgado whom she had just mocked, Russell declared with more passion than usual: “The state must regulate reproduction. We now have the technology to put contraceptive chemicals, not only in VR equipment, but in the public water and food supplies and to give antidotes to those deemed worthy to reproduce. Let us have the courage to do what is logical. Either we take charge of our species’ evolution, or chaos will ensue.”

• By 2060 the number of VR dropouts, none of whom had had children, had peaked and was on the decline, and much of the third world was economically prosperous. Utopia once again seemed to be within reach.

But another technology, developed by Louis Ye of MIT, threatened utopia’s stability. 

• Maria stared at the dirt stains on the fading white walls of the derelict mall. Tears trickled from her eyes. 

She had learned of the final passage VRs in May of 2059, when she heard from a student that several professors in Harvard’s psychology department were working on a government project to develop interview protocols that would steer VR cooperative residents toward a final passage choice. Appalled that the government sanctioned tricking people into choosing suicide, she visited Boston’s Cardinal McCarthy, who, she naively believed, had moral authority. 

• Piotr stared lovingly at his grandson and said with a sense of urgency that stunned the young boy, “Beauty is vital to life. When human beings create something beautiful, even something as seemingly ordinary as a still life painting or a popular song that lifts us up, they reach out to God, whether they know it or not. And when people commune with beauty, whether natural or man-made, God touches them. Beauty tells us that life involves much more than what meets the eyes and ears. Beauty is a port hole through which we glimpse the beyond.

• “Dad, I won’t let you change the conversation. We all know what I’m talking about. Grandma Jane and Grandpa Piotr died of a rare brain cancer. Mom is at risk of getting that cancer, perhaps at a young age, and so far, there is no cure. Your research into consciousness is spurred on by your hope that you could keep mom alive by downloading her consciousness into another body, perhaps a clone of her own, even though mom thinks that is ridiculous. Veronica Scott wants that technology because she is rich and doesn’t want to die.”

• She recalled words from a baptismal service: “‘He calls you by name.’ He calls me. Me. Me. I am more than atoms and the void. I am more than a worldline in spacetime. I am more than ‘there.’ I am also a soul who at every moment of my life is ‘here’—because during every moment, at every point in spacetime, He is ‘here’ with me, calling me by name.”

The wind coming from the Charles River was no longer cold to her. It felt warm. It was a gust of...she searched for a word. “Benevolence! A good will! Benevolence permeates the ‘isness’ of the four-dimensional creation with the good will of love. I am infused by something wondrous and transcendent and good. Does a mind-fiber link my soul, my consciousness, my capacity to experience time to another dimension that I can only access by looking inward? Is that why Meister Eckhart said, ‘The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me’? God, you ARE real! And you are so much more good and beautiful than I ever dreamed!”

• In his mind, he was horrified. But he didn’t feel the full panic he expected. Something was missing. He felt his body, but the feeling was incomplete, as though his body were a phantom. He said to himself, “My heart should be racing. But I don’t feel my heart beating, no matter how much I concentrate on it. It’s as though I feel fear without a body.”

Then it hit him. “No! It can’t be! Jesus, please no! The bastards have taken my brain out of my body!”

• Richard walked around, touching everything as though making the acquaintance of the objects in the cabin. Though the electric light was on, there was a tall candle next to his bed. He turned off the light and lit the candle. “God is in the candles,” he said softly, as he thought of the strange feelings that washed over him in the MIT chapel. “Brother Candle,” he said out loud. “Your existence is a gift. The material universe isn’t the ultimate reality. It is a gift from a much greater reality.”

• Notre Dame de Paris and other beautiful creations of humankind pull us toward a beyond that is loving and sublime and transcendent and good. Auschwitz and other infernal creations pull us toward an anti-beyond that is hateful and degrading and dismal and evil. That is what my husband and I felt as we walked slowly and silently through Auschwitz. We stared in disbelief at the gas chambers. We recoiled in disgust from the ovens. We wept when we stared at photos showing piles of gold-filled teeth that merciless hands with pliers had yanked from the mouths of limp bodies. We stood dumbstruck by the railroad tracks and the boxcars that each day unloaded 5000 Jews headed directly for gas chambers. We shuddered with revulsion as we trudged through the streets of this fossilized hell. I do not know how many times we cried in horror, repeatedly sobbing, “no, no, this can’t be.” My father was right. We were in the presence of demonic ugliness. The malevolence taunted us. When we finally left that foulness behind, we said nothing in the taxi that returned us to our hotel. During the ride, I prayed to God with a fervor I had never felt before. Encountering venomous evil and ugliness made me grateful for all the goodness and beauty in the world.

• Unknown to them, during her last two years of high school Rosita visited the Cathedral Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi at least once a week after school. To her the cathedral was the most beautiful place she had ever seen. When she opened the doors and walked into the cathedral, she felt like she was walking through a magic portal to a world utterly unlike the world in which she had grown up. This was not a world of mathematical equations, chemistry labs, fast-paced hologram movies, and sexual pleasure. It was a world of beckoning beauty. As soon as she entered, she would turn around and stare at the rose window above the entry doors. The afternoon sun made the window seem other-worldly. After communing with the rose window for a few moments, Rosita would walk up and down along the walls, entranced by the stained-glass windows, admiring the paintings, touching the beautiful wooden pews. Then she would sit in a pew near the altar and let the beauty of the cathedral envelop her. School, parties, career, status, and everything else that was so important in her other world seemed inconsequential here. The beauty said, “Come to me.” And in time, she followed that call. 

• Lou felt a shiver of uneasiness. A creature far more intelligent than he seemed to be speaking defensively. Hope was afraid. What she said was plausible. But that didn’t make it true. Indeed, Lou felt that Hope was trying to convince herself more than she was trying to convince him. Hope, a superintelligent entity, was afraid, and she was rationalizing.

• At a speed that carbon-based organisms cannot imagine, Veronica Scott roamed about in her cyber mind. Her “I” was like a searchlight that focused on various parts of her mind at different times. She was that searchlight, but she was also the mind pieces that the searchlight illuminated. Endless flows of electrons united all the pieces. The simulacrum could duplicate internal processes as well as external relations.

• Africa changed markedly in the second half of the 21st century. Traditionalists referred to the African Renaissance because the educational system in certain parts of Africa had become a protected space for the study of classics from around the world. An English don of the early 20th century would have felt more at home at a university campus in 2070s Nairobi than in London. Africa was saving, restoring, and advancing the moral and intellectual heritage that had made the modern world possible. In the second half of the 21st century, Africa experienced an explosion of creativity in literature, art, music, and architecture that had the potential to surpass the European Renaissance. 

• More than 50,000 people across the world would die on September 16, 2073. Unknown to them, a small group of privileged billionaires were meeting in an underground North Dakota silo in the hope of avoiding the oblivion that awaited these dying masses.

• Though they had all seen hologram views of the open, communal section of the ark, to view it in person was thrilling. Besides the cathedral and the school, which was about 60 meters square, there was a soccer field, other athletic spaces, a community center, medical center, two swimming pools, a running track that covered the full 1590 meter circumference of the cylinder, a doggie run, a petting zoo with goats, pigs, ducks, and other animals, and several thousand square meters of park space containing an abundance of grass, bushes, small ponds, little hills, flowers, meandering foot paths, scattered sculptures and fountains, dozens of benches, and hundreds of small trees, which when they grew would create a beautiful treescape.

• Roger Chen wasn’t Veronica Scott’s idea of the perfect security chief. Replacing him, however, would necessitate bringing a new person into the still secret world of Forever! Moreover, Chen was loyal and did what he was told. And perhaps most important, he could be completely ruthless if so ordered. 

• In the late 2020s, when the plutocracy was solidifying its power over the world’s governments, rebels collected and hid in many locations two obsolete technologies: manual typewriters and mimeograph machines, which were low-cost duplicators that worked by forcing ink through a stencil onto paper. Even in the 2030s mimeographs and manual typewriters were still used in some less developed countries. In developed nations thousands of machines survived and were locked away in various places. The rebels collected these machines and hid them in secret locations all over the world. Their secret sites had typewriters, mimeo machines, mountains of paper, ribbons, stencils, ink, spare parts, and repair manuals. 

The rebels had realized that digital currency and the implementation of social credit scores would soon give their rulers total control of electronic communication. Electronic dissenters would discover that their electronic communication channels were blocked and their bank accounts frozen, so they could no longer buy food at the supermarket. Rebellion would be impossible to sustain. The more prescient rebels realized that in the decades to come the only way to communicate dissident ideas would be through anonymous paper distribution of information printed on machines that did not connect to the Web or depend upon digital chips. 

• Maria hadn’t thought about this childhood memory for many years. Perhaps it returned to her because it was like her present moment. Before she stopped at the café, she walked through the plaza. She passed a life-sized creche in its center, lit up on all sides. Children sang carols as they circled the creche. Despite Peterstown having only a bit more than a third the number of people for whom the town was designed, the plaza and the cafes were busy with people walking, talking, singing, and laughing, just like the people in her great-grandmother’s home movie. The atomic powered “sun” at the top of the Peterstown dome had dimmed so that it seemed like a moonlit night on earth. To underline the specialness of the season, the life-support engineers had made the air colder than normal and covered the town’s streets and trees and roofs with a few centimeters of chemically modified snow that wouldn’t melt until the temperature returned to normal. Christmas lights and decorations were everywhere in the plaza and along the streets and houses of Peterstown. Lines of lights even extended upward a kilometer to the top of the dome, as though they were ascending to heaven. Maria wore a coat and delighted in the crispness of the air. As she waited for Lou, she thought to herself, “This is Christmastime! This is what great-grandmother Rose knew as a child, a joy that lights up the world.” She realized that her great-grandmother had been wrong. Finally, in her 51st year, Maria was enjoying Christmastime—in Peterstown, sixty billion kilometers from earth!

• "Psychological motives can also contaminate less dramatic forms of spirituality. Throughout history, well-intentioned clergy and laypersons have enlisted the authority of the Holy Spirit to endorse actions that were in fact contaminated with ego. A minister, for example, once observed that many people are ‘called by the Holy Spirit’ to evangelize in New England during the fall, when the air is crisp, and the leaves are ablaze with color. Rarely, it seems, does the Holy Spirit call people during the cold, damp, dreary New England winter! Is the Holy Spirit so accommodating? Or do well intentioned evangelists sometimes deceive themselves?"

• “As monasticism changed early Christianity, I believe that space arks and the colonies on the recently discovered Planet 9 will change today’s Christianity. When I was a young priest, who would have thought that a pope would ever make such an outlandish statement? People would have said: ‘Space arks? Colonies on another planet? Are you nuts?’ Fortunately, God is more imaginative than we! The space arks and colonies are real. As early monasteries were experiments in the furtherance of holiness, today’s arks and colonies are experiments in Christian social organization. . . . . “Love is preeminent. In the words of Duns Scotus: ‘Creation is . . . a lamp, and each unique created being radiates the light of God.’ There is so much mystery in our God! Let us embrace this mystery with reverence and humility!”

• “To return to the original question about Chantal. Every child above the age of 8 is expected to contribute 4-6 hours per week of volunteer work. The children work to learn, not to ease the burden on adults. Indeed, every adult, such as Moses in this restaurant, is expected to be a teacher. And every such teacher can call upon specialized support professionals if he/she is not sure what to do. We limit work assignments to 8 weeks. Children are regularly rotated through different work areas so that they learn how the commune functions and get some idea about what kind of jobs might interest them when they become adults. Moreover, working with different adults in different settings builds confidence and maturity in children. In a sense, we are returning to the pre-industrial model where children were with adults constantly, learning to plant, harvest, hunt, turn wool into cloth, etc. Our children, however, learn complex tasks. A Lutheran minister friend in one of the space arks told me that if all the adults above the age of 21 suddenly died, the adolescents and children would know how to keep the ark functioning. It is amazing what children can learn with proper teaching!” 

• “Powerful inner experiences are also part of Christianity: for example, speaking in tongues, the ecstasies of mystics, sublime emotions elicited by music, art, and architecture. But such experiences are not central. Having a moving inner experience is not as important as demonstrating one’s love for others through action. After weeks of 20-hour days caring for victims of the Scott epidemic, Christian nurses and doctors were not full of warm and fuzzy spiritual feelings. They were exhausted as they struggled minute after minute to fulfill their Christian duty. Their experience was not a wonderful memory to cherish. It was a hellish recollection, made bearable because occasionally Jesus’s suffering on the cross flashed through their minds and reminded them to pray for God’s help to soldier on. They expressed their love for others through their actions, not their feelings."

• “The ruthless totalitarian society that you encountered in what you call the M81 galaxy also seems to be a common type of stable technological society. These societies are, in a sense, the demonic opposite of our worlds. We value individuals because they are made in the image of God, who wants their freely given love. The rulers of the totalitarian societies value servile obedience to a murderous centralized power, which strategically doles out superficial pleasures to offset the constant fear under which all must live. These societies are troubling because evil appears to have triumphed. Our theologians speculate that God’s plan is cosmic and not limited to one planet, like Sooma or Earth. Creation is a four-dimensional work of art, the full meaning of which only God sees. Since God does not abandon his children at death, His mercy must greatly temper His justice toward the unfortunate people who live their lives in such dark, oppressive societies.”

• The Big Rip was coming.

As space continued to expand, stars would lose control of their solar systems. Planets would speed into interstellar space. Then planets and stars would break into pieces. 

The next stage would come quickly—in microseconds. It would affect the quantum levels of the universe. Matter would no longer be able to resist the spatial expansion. Atoms would come apart. And then even the particles that make up atoms would shatter. The universe would become void and without form, its sameness only interrupted here and there by black holes futilely resisting the spatial expansion. But in time the expansion would tear apart even the black holes that had compressed matter-energy and spacetime to point-like singularities. The universe will have returned to the nothingness from which it came into being.