NOT by me -- an LLM experiment

I was reading a thread about how writers and college writing instructors can detect text that comes from LLMs -- Large Language Models, i.e. AI. So for an experiment I have ChatGPT the following prompt: 

Write a New Year's Day blogpost in the style of the perverse lutheran.blogspot.com. Dismiss the idea of New Year resolutions and instead write about reliance on God's will. Use imagery from anti-Trump folks and the gospel of Matthew.

Here's what it came up with. What do you think? (I'll tell you what I think at the end.)

January 1 arrives like a reset button everyone insists on pressing too hard. Gym memberships bloom, planners open with a crackle of ambition, and the secular liturgy of “new year, new you” is chanted as if enough willpower might finally save us. It’s all very earnest. It’s also mostly bunk.

The trouble with New Year’s resolutions isn’t that they aim too low. It’s that they aim in the wrong direction. They assume the universe is waiting for us to get organized, that history will finally straighten itself out if we stop eating bread or start waking up at 5:30 a.m. They baptize self-improvement and call it hope.

Meanwhile, outside the sanctuary of self-help, the streets are still full. Cardboard signs sag in the cold. Pink hats are stuffed back into closets but not forgotten. The chants echo anyway—against cruelty, against lies, against the cheap salvation of strongmen and red hats promising glory. Anti-Trump folks know something the resolution-makers forget: the world is not fixed by better habits alone. Something deeper is wrong, and something deeper is required.

Matthew’s Gospel does not begin with a to-do list. It begins with a genealogy—messy, compromised, full of people who did not keep their resolutions and were never asked to. It moves quickly to a baby born under empire, to refugees fleeing violence, to a voice crying in the wilderness, “Repent.” Not: optimize. Not: resolve. Repent. Turn. Be re-oriented.

Jesus in Matthew does not say, “Blessed are those who finally get their act together.” He says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” the mourners, the meek, the ones who know they are not in control. He tells us not to worry about tomorrow, not because tomorrow will be fine, but because worrying is a lousy god. “Your heavenly Father knows what you need.” That is not advice for productivity; it is a confession of dependence.

New Year’s resolutions are a small, private Tower of Babel—our annual attempt to climb our way into a better future by stacking days and habits just right. And like Babel, they assume God is impressed by height. Matthew’s Gospel suggests God is impressed by mercy. By bread broken and shared. By enemies loved. By lilies that do not hustle.

So on this New Year’s Day, skip the resolutions. They will forgive you; they always do. Instead, stand still long enough to hear the quieter word: “Follow me.” Not after you improve. Not once you’ve figured it out. Follow—into uncertainty, into protest and prayer, into a world still aching under bad rulers and worse idols.

The year will unfold whether we resolve or not. Empires will strut. Crowds will gather. Signs will be lifted. And somewhere in the middle of it all, Christ will be where Matthew always finds him: not crowning our plans, but interrupting them. Not endorsing our willpower, but undoing it with grace.

That, inconveniently and perversely enough, is good news.

What I think: 

It doesn't sound like me or my writing at The Perverse Lutheran. It lacks the wandering, wondering quality of me starting out and not knowing where I'm going to end up. It's a little too tight. 

Certainly pulls in biblical imagery and mixes it up with anti-Trump political images. Maybe too glibly. I do like the idea of New Year's resolutions being "a small, private Tower of Babel." I wonder if ChatGPT stole that from another blog or sermon published online. Actually I think a lot of what I thought at first was pretty good is a regurgitated mix from human writers. Might even be traceable through search engines. 

But -- I've heard many less coherent sermons. 

Celebrating

Last night while carrying out the garbage, I thought about celebrating a pagan Christmas. The walk from the backdoor to the garbage carts in the alley took me past the blue lights woven through the grapevine on my fence. Like most Christmas lights these days, they're LEDs and quite bright, a fiery gas-burner blue. 

And quite tasteful, if I do say so myself. 

Over on the next block, there's a celebration of electric Christmas lighting going on, spreading from house to house with trees wrapped in red and white and arches of light over the sidewalk. "Too much," some would say, shaking their heads, because what do we live for (to paraphrase Mr. Bennet), but to judge our neighbors? 

So go ahead and judge me: I did some serious binging of Hallmark-style Christmas movies earlier this month. Enough to get knit one complicated cabled and three colorwork hats knitted, Christmas gifts all. You need a movie you can watch with only half your mind so that you can keep one eye on the pattern chart. These generic Christmas romances (and there are dozens of them on Netflix) feature very circumscribed Christmas celebrations. "What's your favorite family tradition?" one lead actor will ask the other as they discover one another's better self. The answer invariably involves snow or hot cocoa, family, and a special Christmas tree ornament. But sadly, these things have been inexplicably lost although there's a hint that they might -- just might! -- return at the movie's end. 

I learned while growing up that this sort of sentimental Christmas was, if not hollow, less important than the "real meaning of Christmas" which happened at church with Baby Jesus and traditional religious carols (definitely no chestnuts roasting on open fires). This was a lesson reinforced by participation in traditional Christmas Eve services with my Lutheran elementary school classmate. It continues, since in adult life, including this year, I've ended up as one of the teachers guiding students through this ritual. At some point this evening, during such a service, I'll stop and pray that the ritual -- the music and poetry, scripture and songs -- stays with these kids and somehow shines on into their adult lives. 

But gosh, I could go for a bonfire this Christmas. Or some dancing around the Christmas tree, fueled by spiced grog and good whiskey. Less metaphor, more serious yelling against the darkness. Fire up the Christmas lights, all the colors you've got. Turn on the blowers that populate front lawns with Santas riding on elephants and snowmen ten feet high bobbing in the winter wind. Feast on honey-sweetened Lebkuchen and cinnamon-roasted pecans. Revel in the now, enjoy the secular.

Poets and others fond of paradox make much of God becoming human, of Jesus being born to die and embracing human suffering. A lot of me is wrapped up in that truth -- just read my November post. But there's a lot to be said for letting in the primitive celebration of Christmas -- stuff Christianity borrowed and good taste struggles to tame. Not just a single star, but vast starry heavens. Not just a flickering light in the manger but electrical energy powering lights all around the neighborhood. The seasonal return of longer days and shorter nights. Dinners and desserts and Santa suits and cornball music. 

Pagan is a stretch for this perverse Lutheran. But less theologizing, more staying in the moment -- I'm going to try that on this year and join in as heaven and nature sing all kinds of songs.

Merry Christmas

Candlelit vigil

Last week I attended a vigil at my church. It was a time to sit quietly in a darkened, mostly empty sanctuary, to pray, to contemplate, to sit with a recent and very sad death. 

I went up to the front to light a candle. I stood it up in the dish of sand, with other candles that had been lit and placed there by people who had come to the vigil earlier in the evening. Then I went and sat next to a friend, in silence.

I thought about lots of things, one of them being candles. As I had walked to the front of church, past the tall Christ candle, lit at baptisms and funerals, words from the Easter Vigil service had suddenly popped into my mind, almost as if they'd been spoken aloud: "The light of Christ rising again." 

Huh. I lit my candle from others in the bowl and carefully placed it in the sand, arching my wrist, careful not to scorch the sleeve of my winter jacket.

These skinny white candles were the same kind we use at Easter Vigil, to pass the light of Christ from person to person through the congregation. And those words? It seemed to me like there should be more, like I'd forgotten the next part. Rising again for what? But apparently that's all there is to it. "The light of Christ rising again."

Practical churchwoman that I am -- or is because I'm impractical, I'm curious -- I thought about when else we use these white tapers. Actually, it was just a few weeks ago. Candles had been lit on All Saints Sunday, commemorating those who had died in the previous year. So here they were again, flickering, shining in memory of another saint, a new addition to the roster. 

My mind moved on to this family's loss, the hugeness of it. The deeply broken hearts, personal faith that I know all too well is upended by grief and loss and disaster. Inevitably, because it's a lifelong habit to ask, I thought about where was God in all this, and how I cannot answer that question.

I came back to the candles and when we use them and remembered suddenly that we would be lighting them on Christmas Eve. Yes, at my Lutheran church, we sing "Silent Night" by candlelight at the end of the late service. It's what we come for. It's sentimental. We even sing the first stanza in German, because ... well, for me, because my grandmother taught it to me. It's quite beautiful, as "the dawn of redeeming grace" breaks upon us in "Jesus, Lord, at your birth."

Christmas is a very different thing, I thought. No ideas about death running through Christmas, not like Easter or All Saints. Except, like all of us, Jesus was born to die. Mary brought forth her firstborn son safely, something that could not be assumed would happen (can't be assumed even now). She held him in her arms, watched him grow, and thirty years later, buried him. Yes, Jesus had a remarkable career of teaching, working miracles,  making disciples and upsetting authority. But I thought to myself in that darkened church, surely he had times when stuff happened, friends died, injustice was done and he, disturbed, angry, confused, asked where was God in all this? He was fully human. What do we think he thought about as he gazed into campfires late at night by the Sea of Galilee? Maybe the same kind of stuff that we toss and turn with late at night, staring at the heavens through the bedroom ceiling. 

Candles are for keeping vigil. The electric ones on my windowsills during Advent and Christmas say -- I don't know exactly. Keep hope alive? Watch for the morning? Or just, people live here, and through the darkness, the light of Christ keeps vigil with them. 

Wedding day

 

And finally, it's October 11, wedding day for Kurt and Claire, Claire and Kurt, or, if you will, Clurt, who will be married this afternoon in the midst of family and friends, here in Maine.

Wrote that sentence, more or less, in my journal this morning and noticed the alliteration. Family and friends go together conventionally, paired up with that initial shared letter. "Married in the midst" was more interesting this morning, a reminder that marriages, while they are a private, shared space between two people, exist within communities--communities that may have introduced these two people to each other, provided space and occasions for developing a relationship, and that now come together to celebrate today and promise to support these two people in the days to come. 

My own 24-year marriage ended with my husband's death 19 years ago. If you solve the addition problem built into that last sentence, you'll see that as I remember my own wedding day today, I'm looking at 43-year-old memories. Are they memories of the actual way things happened? Or memories of the photos? It's been a long, long time. 

And so many other things happened in the years since, one of which is, of course, Kurt. 

Kurt, my youngest. Kurt the basketball player. Kurt who while trying to keep up with the big boys fell out of a tree, picked himself up off the ground, and announced "Walker, Texas Ranger, will return" before running, crying, into the house. The story comes from his older girl cousins. He probably doesn't remember, but we all had a good long laugh when Lauren told it last summer. Undaunted would be a good word for Kurt, one that holds for all the many things he's gone after in his 33 years, the way he's kept going, kept wanting and working and becoming himself.

Undaunted would be a good word for Claire as well, along with creative and kind and curious, and more words that I'll discover in the years ahead. I am so very grateful for her care of Kurt. That undaunted-ness in the both of them keeps them looking forward, facing into the wind and working at doing hard stuff.

And now, creating a wedding out of nothing, at least not the conventional stuff. No wedding planner, no banquet-hall venue, no color-coordinated linens. But they have a vision: friends and family frolicking on a farm on a beautiful fall afternoon, with a Wes Anderson vibe. Plus dancing under the stars, followed by overnight camping for the hardy ones. And they've gathered friends and family around them to make it all happen. To arrange the flowers and set the tables, build a photo background, set up conversation areas in the barn, move chairs, serve drinks, and be eco-warriors at the wedding so that all the compostable paper products end up in the right bins. 

This is no passive "married in the midst." It's an invitation to create the day together. To create the future together. 

Today's weather forecast says sunny, with highs in the 60s. The ground is dry, the woods here in Kennebunk are gold and yellow and green. The day smiles. The wedding website requested prayers for good weather, and people came through. So God came through. 

That's not good theology, but it's the kind of overly simple connection we poor humans like to make while God smiles benevolently. We're small but somehow we're connected to that wide and merciful Unity, that is the source of all love. God's presence is felt in the love Kurt and Claire discovered together. In their adventures, in their work, in their lives amid family and friends. 

And for me today, in the connections between past and future. Utter the word vision and my husband Lon, movie lover, would inevitably add, "Hell of a vision." He was quoting Captain Woodrow Call at the end of "Lonesome Dove," "Hell of a ..." encompasses a lot in that story: hard work, love, pain, maturity and loss. Can't see them at the start, but inevitable. 

If Kris, Kurt's older brother were here to give marital advice, he'd be quoting what his father-in-law told him: "Happy wife, happy life," the reality of dedicating your life to someone else's welfare. Kris, of course, would be bouncing around the wedding venue, working the crowd, and beaming, so crazy-proud of his little brother for winning the love of a woman as awesome as Claire. 

Lost

"One way to look at it," he told me one day as I sawed through scales to make muscle for flying, "is that we are all lost, we were already lost the day we were born. In music, we can become tragically and beautifully lost ... and found again."

Joy Harjo
Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings

Joy Harjo is an internationally renowned performer and writer of the Muscogee Nation. She served three terms as the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2019-2022 and has a host of other honors. I recently read her book of poems titled An American Sunrise, which was listed in a recommended reading article at The Atlantic. I frequently go from lists like that to the local library's online search page. A couple of clicks and the book's on hold. And, unless it's a recent book that many people want to read, it takes only a couple of days for the book to make its way from another suburban library 10 or 15 miles away to the pick-up shelf at the branch library just blocks from my home. This library service goes a long way to explaining the pile of books on the table next to my chair in the living room.

I searched and placed a hold on Harjo's Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings last week and opened it up yesterday and again this morning. Harjo's musical world is a long way from mine. Her poems use images of the all-night circle dance with its singing. Others call on the saxophone and recreate the whirl and tension of jazz improvisation. 

This prose story quoted above brought me up short yesterday morning. What does that phrase mean exactly?  I stopped and noticed and thought about it. Could I find myself in "tragically and beautifully"?  

I've never been much for writing trails of adverbs and adjectives to describe music. This is because music does things that words can't -- so why use words? The words come out looking weak and insufficient. (Note: words also do things that music can't.) A critic can analyze forms, progressions, describe how a piece of music does what it does. A listener can describe the images a piece of music conjures in the mind — all those angels floating around singing "Holy, holy" in settings of the Sanctus, for example. A publicist will pile up the adjectives to promote a concert or musical event; these might include glorious, transcendent, hopeful — marketing words currently on display in promotional material I'm working on for an upcoming City Voices concert I'm involved in. (It's on October 18 and 19. More info here.) 

But "tragically and beautifully lost" was a new idea for me. I understand being lost in the music, cares and worries abandoned in the discipline of performing or in the immersive experience of listening. I was chatting with a fellow chorister recently during a break in rehearsal; he said that the thing he enjoyed about choral singing was that you could go to rehearsal and not think about anything else for a while. I had to agree. The mental and physical work of reading, counting, and singing well leaves little room in my brain for anything other than did I get that right and what's coming up next. 

That's rehearsal —mental work, uncertainty, vulnerability, eventual success. Getting lost in the bigger picture of the metaphysics of performance, of musicians and live audience traveling through musical time together -- that's something else. My most recent reference point is, as it often is here at the Perverse Lutheran, a Bach Cantata Vespers service. Last Sunday's was the first cantata in the 55th season, the first cantata in my 47th season of singing in the choir. (Yikes, this is a serious rut I'm in.) 

The cantata was based on my favorite hymn to sing as a ten-year-old, "Praise to the Lord the Almighty." Back in the day it was sung in the key of G, and that short "Let the Amen" phrase went up to an E, the top space on the treble staff, the note where a child's vocal apparatus pops into head voice, on the third of a brilliant major subdominant chord. In Bach's setting, in C major, with the tune sung a fourth higher, the melody is altered and the note is the third of a minor chord based on the second degree of the scale; Bach is pushing the phrase forward into the next one and through a more complicated harmonic progression (because he's Bach). (Here's the hymn sung more recently in F major. Cantata chorale here.)

The whole cantata is brilliant, with trumpets and oboes and all the things. And there was a lot of other very big music in the service, with a very big orchestra and a big Samuel Barber concerto for organ as a prelude.

The Epistle lesson that was read in the service (the one appointed for this cantata's day in the church year in Bach's time) was 2 Corinthians 3:4-11, a bit of a puzzle that used the word glory a lot. The final hymn was "When in Our Music God Is Glorified." Glory be, I walked out of the service happy and exalted, the hatred and conflicts of the outside world abandoned for a while. Soli deo gloria amidst all the negativity of these days in history.

And then yesterday, on another beautiful September morning, I found myself nodding along to "tragically and beautifully lost." Not the glorious trumpets, drums and organ of the day before.  Joy Harjo writes about the pain of Indian nations decimated and made homeless by Europeans arriving in America. Jazz is rooted in the Black experience, with its own themes of pain and struggle against injustice. We are all lost, says the speaker, lost from the day we're born. But when we're lost in music that condition is transformed -- not necessarily into happiness, but into tragedy and beauty. We're not just pounding along, practicing our scales because we must. We're something else. The disciplines of music (and art, poetry, drama) help us to see it. 

Soli deo gloria. ;-)

Random on a September Sunday

It's been two months since I posted here at the Perverse Lutheran. One reason for the drought, ironically, is that there are already so very many words out there every single day. I'm so inundated with incoming information, so flooded, that there's no time to let anything soak in, let alone spin it back out into the world with added thoughts or insight. 

But -- giving this a try. Random thoughts today, on a Sunday.

From the lectionary this morning: choose life, choose Jesus. In church we sang "Let Us Ever Walk With Jesus," a German chorale from the 17th century. The second stanza begins "Let us suffer here with Jesus." One has to ask, who would choose Jesus if that means choosing suffering? What's wrong with Christians? I think the Buddha has an explanation for that: life is suffering. What crossed my mind singing the hymn this morning was not so much the "suffer here" part as the "with Jesus" part. The suffering is inevitable, sometimes because that's just how things are, sometimes because we bring it on ourselves even as we struggle against it. (Buddha again.) I think that suffering is a whole lot easier to manage, spiritually anyway, in the context of a God who gave himself up to suffering in life and death as a human person. 

"Choose life" comes from Deuteronomy 30:15-20, the Old Testament lesson read this morning. 

Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, loving the LORD your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him.

Choosing life means choosing what God values. Life worth living means choosing God's values and attributes: love, mercy, righteousness. "Choose life" is not just choosing to continue to live and breathe on this earth. It's not judging other people's choices. It's not deciding to live your life to its fullest, or to seize the moment, or to resolve to live in the present every day. It's choosing to love and trust in what and who is God. It's bringing all of that into relationships with others. 

This is all pretty preachy for the perverse Lutheran. The sun is setting on what was a beautiful September day. The sky was so blue, the weather cool, the light at this time of day, golden. How did I end up in a post with all these imperatives? 

I spent some time in the car this afternoon and while driving I listened to Dan Pfeiffer of Pod Save America interview Heather Cox Richardson of Letters From an American. (Listen here.) She introduced herself as a cultural historian and told stories from American history that chronicled two different ideas: the strong individual under no constraints, no government regulation, that gathers resources to himself, versus the collective good, democracy, the people govern, resources are used for the good of all. (Pejoratively this is "socialism"--horrors!) One idea empowers enslavers, Jim Crow, racial dog whistles from Nixon and Reagan, and today's radical right. The other was articulated by Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama and turned into legislation by LBJ. 

Choose life. Choose life in a way that includes all, that suffers with all, that rises again. 

Waiting for the fireworks

It’s the Fourth. I did not brave the rain this morning to watch for my daughter in the local parade. I picked her up when it was over. Her red, white and blue t-shirt was damp, her red shorts, too. 

Damp falls far short of describing my depressed patriotic spirit today. 

But the weather has cleared up, it's evening, and I’m sitting in the park listening to a cover band entertain the crowd until it’s dark enough for the fireworks to begin. 

I don’t think anyone’s here for the music, but live music does seem to say this is the place to be. Celebrate, come on. There are a few women standing and dancing. I’m guessing they’ve had a beverage or two. And we just heard a round of “USA, USA” yelled from the bandstand. The band leader tried but if anyone picked that up, well, I’m too far away to hear it. 

The people-watching is good. Children with parents. Parents and kids on the blanket next to me are playing a card game. Teens are casing the crowd, pairs of girls in shorts and crop tops. Who’s here, who’s new. And plenty of people like me are doing stuff on their phones. Not much conversation. The music is LOUD.

I like fireworks. I’m hoping these will brighten the end of July 4, 2025. I’ve been working on threading my loom today (and yesterday and the day before yesterday), and I’m looking forward to sitting here in the dark, hearing the whoosh after the shell is lit, that second of suspense, and then the pow! and exploding sphere of blue or red or white light. And again the suspense before the sparks fade and fall. 

Lots of kinds of people here. This is the suburb where I grew up, and it’s a more diverse place now than it was then. The kids I grew up with have mostly moved elsewhere, farther away from the city. 

It’s a hard year for celebrating the birth of the American nation, a nation founded on ideas. What can we count on as shared values when fundamental words like liberty and freedom and citizen mean different things to different people and parties? Where are we headed with the country led by a narcissistic, stupid, boastful man with an unfortunate gift for getting attention and no moral compass for how to use power? 

This too shall pass? Or will the things that are breaking stay broken for a long time? Those white men who met in Philadelphia 249 years ago and pledged each other their lives and their sacred honor — the sky just exploded! — started something we keep trying to make better. A more perfect union. A more caring and inclusive society. Lincoln's "last best hope." 

Here in the park, the fireworks kicked off with the "Star Spangled Banner" on the loudspeaker. It was followed by Bruce Springsteen and “Born in the USA.”

A protest song. Damn, it’s a patriotic night.