Pulpitations: The Universal Translator

My sermon from today's Pentecost service, a day before the provincial election is held. The verse is below, but the short version is that after Jesus' death and resurrection, his disciples gathered for the Jewish festival of Pentecost. While together indoors, the holy spirit came upon them as a gust of wind, rested "tongues of fire" upon their heads, and they all felt themselves able to converse in a multitude of languages. 

Obviously, my thoughts turned, as they often do, to Star Trek...

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THE UNIVERSAL TRANSLATOR

Language is the ultimate irony - it is the key to understanding and clarity, but also a cause for misunderstanding and confusion. Without a common language, It is nearly impossible to relate to other people.

Even within a single language, like English, one word can provoke multiple responses. Here’s an example: woke.

In today’s reading from Acts, Luke describes the coming of the Holy Spirit, a miracle that allows the followers of Jesus to speak in languages not previously known to them. Even more amazingly, they are heard in the native tongue of each listener who hears them.

Biblically, I find it intriguing that the same God who, in Genesis, toppled the Tower of Babel and confused the builders so they could no longer understand each other, is now helping to gift Jesus’ followers with innate multilingualism. The scriptures abound with these idiosyncrasies and contradictions though. If God has mellowed out considerably since the first book of the Bible, maybe it is due to becoming a parent? Who can say?

Back in Acts though, there is no real explanation as to how it is possible for all these languages to be heard and understood. Those of you who share my affection for science fiction and pop culture will no doubt immediately note the similarities between the effect of these “tongues of fire” and the well-established trope of the universal translator.

Dating back to 1945, the universal translator is largely a contrivance used to expedite storytelling. In the classic Star Trek episode “Metamorphosis,” Captain Kirk uses one to facilitate communication between people stranded on a planetoid and the glowing, mist-like creature preventing them from leaving. Kirk explains that there are certainly universal ideas and concepts common to all intelligent life. The device compares the frequencies of brainwave patterns, looking for recognizable ideas, then provides the necessary grammar.

I mean, this idea is problematic right off the hop, right? The creature in this episode doesn’t even have a brain so Spock has to mod up the translator a bit, but just the idea of remote, inter-species brainwave recognition and interpretation - essentially mechanised telepathy - is pretty far-fetched, even for the 24th century.

Douglas Adams’ book, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, takes an entirely different approach by introducing the Babel fish - a small creature that is placed in the auditory canal, It feeds on the brainwaves of sentient creatures speaking to its host, and, uh, excretes a translation into their brain. In the recent Ant-Man movie Quantumania, the main character drinks a mysterious ooze that lets him understand everyone around him, after which an alien blob casually says, “hi, I’m Veb - you just drank me?”

In science-fiction, there are very practical reasons for having a universal translator. If you had to waste time in every episode where the Enterprise encounters a new species, that would get pretty boring pretty quickly, even as a montage. Establishing a universal translator is a quick and dirty answer to the question, “hey, how come they understand each other?” It establishes that the fact they can understand each other is not the most important part of the narrative, and urges you to maintain attention.

God’s gift of universal translation to the followers of Jesus is way less mysterious than what happened back in Genesis with that tower. The message here seems pretty clear: if God’s love is for everyone, then God’s Word must be for everyone. Baptism, not just with water, but with the “living water” of the Holy Spirit John talks about, must become universal.

But whether we are talking about a universal translator, or a lingua franca, like the Greek that the New Testament is written in, or even a single dynamic language filled with context, nuance, classist associations and slang, challenges remain.

Could a universal translator reach across, say, a political divide?

I used the word “woke” earlier, as an example of a single word fraught with multiple meanings and impacts. In a social context, woke is an expression from black culture, dating back to the 1930s, meaning “alert to racial prejudice and discrimination.” It was used extensively by Black Lives Matter activists after the Ferguson riots in 2014. When white people, particularly young white people, used woke to signal their support for BLM, opinions varied as to whether this was allyship or appropriation.

The Oxford English Dictionary added “woke” in 2017, but by 2020, it was more common to see it used ironically or disparagingly by those on the political right. Equated with “virtue signaling” or acts more performative than sincere, woke has become a catchword for political correctness run amuck (in their eyes, at least). “Go woke, go broke,” is the rallying cry for racist trolls and homophobes who hate the idea of diversity and inclusion upsetting the homogeneity of a culture that is not as familiar to them as it once was, and who review bomb films or games with a feminist protagonist or sympathetic depiction of queer culture.

Now, despite the fact that its harshest critics are unable to even define “woke,” or what it is about racial justice or the acknowledgment of systemic racism that is so terrifying, the word is a battleground.

So let me tell you, being given this scripture to discuss, the day before an incredibly important and probably divisive provincial election has really made me wonder if there is another layer of meaning to be found in the story of the coming of the Holy Spirit.

In two days’ time, we should have the election results. As of right now, it feels too close to call, so that means that no matter what the result ends up being, half the population of the province are going to be upset. Some are going to be sad. Some are going to be angry. And a very small group of that last set is going to act inappropriately.

Some of these emotions are going to carry over into the legislature, but I hope and I pray, I mean literally pray, that the next assortment of MLAs, no matter who the premier is, governs for all Albertans, and recognizes the need to heal the rift between left and right.

And outside the government buildings and riding associations, in the living rooms, and front steps and coffee shops and street corners and bus stops, we all need to talk - not in another language, but in whatever common tongues we have at our disposal. And we have to reach across that divide I mentioned.

And it won’t be easy, because there is going to be suspicion on both sides of this divide, and we will occasionally get our hands slapped as we stretch them across the chasm. But if we do it enough times, persistently, consistently, maybe we can get someone thinking hey, maybe drag storytime at the library isn’t an existential threat to civilization. Or wondering if perhaps capitalism isn’t irretrievably broken and just needs some rethinking, whatever.

But more than talking, we have to make sure our internal transceivers are set to receive and we have to listen. I mean really listen. The light of God is in that obstinate individual, the same way it exists in our stubborn selves! We have more in common with the folks on that other side than we have differences, no matter what side that happens to be. And yes, some of those differences are fundamental, but they always have been, and when we stop thinking in absolutes and start looking for areas of understanding and compromise, that is when Albertans, and humanity in general, have made their greatest progress.

Maintain your principles, but stay flexible, be fluid. Remember that anger often begins out of fear, and fear out of misunderstanding. Be patient. Don’t fight, flow! Bruce Lee, the famous martial artist and film star, spoke at length about this power:

“Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.

Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.”

In John’s Gospel, we hear Jesus say, ““Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, ‘Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.’” When we reach out, out of our individual communities, out of our respective bubbles, we become a channel for that water.

We use things like language and culture to define ourselves, but in doing so we often alienate the “other” - and spoiler alert, there is no “other.” By removing the language barrier at Pentecost, God illustrates that language is irrelevant in the big picture and not the important part of the story (just like Star Trek). And just like all the fictional universal translators, it is a storytelling contrivance - for a very important story.

God’s love is for everyone. The message of Jesus is for everyone. We can have that tongue of flame on our heads if we want it, and bring that message and that love to everyone, with our actions as much as our words.

Don’t stop reaching out! It is what God wants and what Jesus has taught us.

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Acts 2:1-21

The Coming of the Holy Spirit

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.

Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia,  Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.” All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?” But others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.”

Peter Addresses the Crowd

But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them, “Men of Judea and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say. Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning. No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel:

‘In the last days it will be, God declares,
that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh,
and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
and your young men shall see visions,
and your old men shall dream dreams.
Even upon my slaves, both men and women,
in those days I will pour out my Spirit;
and they shall prophesy.

And I will show portents in the heaven above
and signs on the earth below,
blood, and fire, and smoky mist.
The sun shall be turned to darkness
and the moon to blood,
before the coming of the Lord’s great and glorious day.
Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.’




John 7:37-39

Rivers of Living Water

On the last day of the festival, the great day, while Jesus was standing there, he cried out, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, ‘Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.’” Now he said this about the Spirit, which believers in him were to receive; for as yet there was no Spirit, because Jesus was not yet glorified.

A Deck Game, Except Indoors

One of the more puzzling gifts I received last Christmas was a black nylon bag about 6 inches in diameter and nearly five feet long. Audrey explained that it was some sort of game not being bid upon at a silent auction she had attended, and which she procured for a very minimal bid but never actually examined. 

I emptied out some of the contents of the bag at that time, decanting two bags of plastic pucks with three metal ball bearings in the base, as well as some pusher sticks. The scale of these helped us to divine that this was not, in fact, a tabletop game as my wife had suspected, but an indoor version of the cruise ship standard of shuffleboard. We elected not to unroll the playing surface due to its enormity, but finally got the opportunity to do so this weekend at our church's annual long weekend at Rundle's Mission at Pigeon Lake.

The upstairs of the lodge has an enormous common room with an obligingly smooth that is...well, let's call it mostly flat. We rolled out the vinyl court to its full length (about 12' perhaps?), assembled the pushers (more formally called cues or tangs), looked up the rules on the interwebs and set about playing.

Unlike tabletop shuffleboard which uses a curling-style bullseye and similar rules to play, regular shuffleboard has players aiming at a triangle, with the smallest scoring area at the tip gaining skillful shooters ten points. This is followed by an 8-point and 7-point band, bisected by a line into two areas.

At the end of the court is a wide band labeled "10 OFF" which, as you probably suspect, subtracts ten points from one's total. This is bracketed by two much narrower 3-point areas, which seem unique to this indoor iteration.

Initial scoring was decidedly difficult as not only did we need to dial in the precise amount of force to avoid stranding our discs (or "biscuits") in the middle or landing them into the dreaded "10 OFF" area at the end, but scoring any points at all requires the disc to be completely within the numbered area and not touching any lines whatsoever! Yes, the only point to bisecting the base of that triangle is to make scoring even more difficult. 

Games are typically played to 75 points, and after a few games, we found this normally attainable in 6-8 rounds. 

The accessibility of the mechanics and the compelling footprint of the set meant it drew quite a bit of attention from the younger visitors to Rundle's who maintained very accurate scoring each round but could not be bothered to maintain them from one round to the next. 

And when our dear friends Shari and Dave motorcycled up to Pigeon Lake from Red Der, we were delighted to get a couple of games in with them before they headed back through the smoky haze. 

All in all, indoor shuffleboard was a major success - it is just unfortunate that at this point, we only know of one venue we can actually play it in!

Ruthless Decisions and Daring Escapes at the Ju-Ju House

One of the things I appreciate most about tabletop roleplaying games (or TTRPGs) is that they are primarily cooperative ventures. Even when the sly rogue sends a note to the dungeon master about pocketing an extra gem from the treasure for himself (or even picking the pocket of a fellow player's character), these antics are more along the lines of a rivalry than flat-out adversarial.

There are campaigns where it happens though, where one character reveals they are a shapechanger who killed off the original a few sessions back, or that they have been co-opted somehow, or are actually a member of the secret police, but I've never been a part of one personally. So I was very surprised when last week's Call of Cthulhu session very nearly included the first time in my life where one character caused the death of another.

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SPOILER WARNING: If you ever intend to play the legendary 

Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign, read no further, lest you be spoiled!

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New York City, 1925. Our group of five investigators, having come together on a previous adventure in Peru five years prior, are summoned to the Big Apple by another companion, the globetrotting author and death cult investigator Jackson Elias. They arrive too late, however, and see him murdered by a rag-tag group of cultists tied to an African sect called The Bloody Tongue.

Over the past few weeks, their investigations have led them to the cult's headquarters in the basement of an innocuous shop in Harlem called The Ju-Ju House. They have forced the shop's owner, Silas N'Kwane, into the basement at gunpoint, and discovered a pit covered by an immense stone lid. It takes three of them to winch up the enormous stone covering, after which one of them leaves to investigate shots fired upstairs by the comrade they left to cover the rear.

Randall Emerson Winchester II, formerly His Royal Majesty's diplomatic envoy to Hong Kong, keeps a bead on N'Kwane with his treasured trap-shooting piece. Delbert Greenwald, an academic from Miskatonic University left unsettled by the impossible things he witnessed in Peru, is drawn closer to the edge of the pit despite the strange wailing coming from within, his .45 automatic grasped tightly in his sweaty fist. Meanwhile, reformed burglar Jack Cole looks for any other egress from the room. 

Greenwald peers over the edge of the pit and behold something even more unimaginable than what he saw in Peru; a twisting mass of writhing purple tentacles, each about as big around as a man's leg, and each capped with a horrific human visage. 

There are perhaps two dozen such faces, perhaps more, each wailing, moaning, screaming, whispering, laughing in a maddening cacophony. [Game Note: This causes a Sanity test, where each player must test the will and mettle of their character by rolling under their SAN score.] 

Greenwald fails his check and shrieks into the pit, preparing to empty the clip of his pistol into it. Randall flinches almost imperceptibly, but it gives N'Kwane the opening he'd been waiting for - he bats aside the muzzle of Wincheter's 8-gauge shotgun, and charges the twitchy, tweedy professor, shoving him into the pit and to the floor of it 15 feet below. "Now the chakota can feast!" he cackles maniacally.

His triumph is short-lived, however, as the furious Winchester regains his composure and his Greener Far Killer barks deafeningly in the basement. In such close quarters, the blast almost cuts the elderly African in half, and N'Kwane's shattered remains tumble into the pit.

Greenwald blasts away at the horrid creature at point-blank range, but his bullets have no effect and he pitches the useless .45 in frustration. 

Cole scrambles over to the edge of the pit, hoping his climbing skills will help him extract Greenwald, but he too balks at the horrific sight in the pit and crabs away from the lip. At the bottom of the pit, while several of the chakota's heads begin devouring the remains of Silas N'Kwane, a handful turn their mindless attention to Greenwald, but he is able to dodge their slavering bites.

[Meanwhile at the table, I am figuring out who goes next - normally it goes from the highest Dexterity score to the lowest, but holding a firearm adds 50 to this figure, putting Winchester to the top of the betting order.

"What do you want to do?" I ask Jeff, Winchester's player, who has his chin in his hand and is deep in thought. 

There is a pause, and then he says, "I am half-tempted to just drop the lid on that damned pit." 

Silence surrounds the table, as everyone present (even the two players whose characters are fighting for their lives upstairs) knows this will unquestionably end the life of Prof. Greenwald. 

But they all have played these kinds of games long enough to recognize the tactical and strategic validity of Jeff's plan.

Greenwald's player, Scott, is the first to speak. Looking directly at Jeff, he asks earnestly, "What would Randall do? Never mind what Jeff would do or what Scott wants, what would your character do?"

Jeff is clearly pondering this, so I tell him to take his time, and return to the battle upstairs. This doesn't take very long to resolve, so all too soon I turn again to Jeff and say, "so, what does Winchester do?"

Jeff takes a deep breath, mimes holding an invisible shotgun and using its butt to break the catch on the winch holding the stone lid nearly 15 feet in the air. "I do it," he says firmly. There is a sharp intake of air somewhere around the table - maybe it was me though.

"So be it!" I say.] 

With an enormous crash, the stone lid drops from the ceiling, closing the pit in a cloud of dust and bits of broken stone.

[A hush descends upon the table, but as I return to my papers to determine who goes next, I am shocked to discover that Winchester has acted out of order! My fault entirely.

The +50 DEX bonus only applies if you are shooting a firearm, not using it in melee or any other way. I inform the players, undo Winchester's premature action and set the scene:]

Jack, sitting on the floor with his hands behind him propping him up, sees Winchester striding over to the winch holding up the stone lid, clearly intending to seal the pit with Delbert still inside it. The second-story man has a single moment before he does this…

[I turn to Totty, Jack's player, and say, "What do you do?"

He looks briefly at his character sheet and says, "I steel myself for what is in the pit and scramble over to the edge of it. If I make it, I stretch my arm into the pit so I can help Delbert to clamber out."

I check the pit's description and shake my head sadly. "It's 15 feet deep, your arm is maybe three feet long, figure Greenwald's arms over his head give him another two feet for a total of... maybe eight?. That means the professor has to make at least a 36-inch vertical, while fighting a monster, just to have a chance at it..."

"To be fair," Jeff adds, "those conditions are probably the best ones possible for a middle-aged academic to achieve a 36-inch vertical..."

"Be that as it may," I reply, "it won't give much of a bonus to his Climbing skill (which is only 20%)." Someone else cursed in frustration while Totty looked over his sheet again.

"Well, how far can I extend my body into the pit without falling?"

"Roll your climb skill," I tell him. Now, Cole's Climbing skill is 50%, as befits a former burglar, so rolling 50 or lower on percentile dice denotes a success, but rolling below half your score is called a strong success and typically grants a better result. Rolling below one-fifth of your score (10%) is called an extreme success, with an even better outcome.

So what a time for him to roll a 04!

When the table had quieted, I resumed the narrative.]

Jack scrambles across the floor, and heedless of his own safety, drops into the pit, arresting his fall with an iron grip on its lip. Delbert sees the possibility of escape from a previously hopeless situation, and lunges for the outstretched arm of his comrade...

[Due to the literal helping hand from Jack Cole in play, I give Greenwald a bonus dice, so he gets an extra 'tens' dice for his percentile roll. He rolls a 53 and a 23, so using 3 points of his rapidly diminishing Luck stat actually allows him to succeed.]

With a mighty heave, Jack swings the academic out of the pit and they both clamber to safety, mere seconds before Winchester slams off the catch on the winch handle with the butt of his shotgun, and the lid plummets to the floor with a massive slam. The creature is trapped, its disturbing cries muffled, and all three of the investigators are safe outside the pit. 

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A bit more happened before the adventurers fled the Ju-Ju House (one of them clinging to life from the battle upstairs), but that sequence has definitely been the highlight of the campaign for me, and the closest I have come to seeing one player character killed (or in this case, doomed) by another.

And best of all, this campaign is just getting underway! How many more such opportunities might we encounter?

All the Feels - Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, Reviewed

In terms of release dates, Guardians of the Galaxy is the longest Marvel trilogy, with nearly nine years between the release of the original in 2014 and Vol. 3 this weekend. It's funny to think back about the skepticism around the first movie: "Marvel's lost their minds! Do they expect to make their money back on a sci-fi picture with no superheroes, no stars, and bookended by a walking tree and talking raccoon? Sell your stock!"

Obviously, Marvel's tenth movie went on to do all right, with the characters appearing in two Avengers movies plus their own Holiday Special. Having read and loved the source material I was never worried, but as the MCU gets bigger and almost prohibitively interconnected, there is a worry about diminishing returns.

But let me say this about that: I will need to see it again to be sure, but I think Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is the best entry in the trilogy. It is also unquestionably the most emotionally impactful Marvel movie since Endgame.

I recognize nothing is more subjective than emotions, but the story is so empathetic and the characters are so emotionally grounded that I have a hard time finding another adventure film to really compare it to.

Despite an expansive and expanding cast of characters, everyone is given a chance to shine, even ones like former first mate Kraglin (Sean Gunn), space-dog Cosmo (Maria Bakalova). And all our favourites are given a chance to do something new, from Drax (Dave Bautista) providing legitimate insight to Mantis (Pom Klementieff) asserting herself beyond providing support to her teammates.

Most impressively, James Gunn does a fantastic job of establishing Zoe Saldana's alternate universe Gamora as a new and distinct character from the original she replaced in Endgame, and the relationship between her and Star-Lord (Chris Pratt) is handled deftly.

But the lynchpin of the story is Rocket (Bradley Cooper), whose origin story and links to the High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji) provide not only the plot but emotional hub for the rest of the yarn to revolve around. Cooper peels back the cynicism and displays tremendous vulnerability in Rocket's tragic, younger self.

Looking in the eyes of the animal subjects of the High Evolutionary's experiments reminded me of my own pets, but never felt excessively manipulative. Likewise, Ikuji's performance is less maniacal and more monomaniacal; someone so convinced of the legitimacy of his perspective that he will go to any lengths to pursue it - the fact that lives are lost along the way are not the goal, like Thanos, but an incidental consequence. 

As a comic fan, I appreciated having Adam Warlock (Will Poulter) in the film (as teased by the cocoon in Vol. 2), even if his naive demeanor is very different from the composed and nearly omniscient character from the pen of Jim Starlin.

And James Gunn's dialogue has never been better; funny, poignant, and with only a handful of pop-culture references. Well, outside the soundtrack, which has now progressed to the 90s, courtesy of Star-Lord's Zune from Vol. 2.

But while the laughs are great, the real highlights are the increasingly personal moments of truth shared between characters. Some of these play up relationships established in the Holiday Special, so it helps to have seen that, but there are very few connections to the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe, if that is a concern. In fact, they do a great job distilling the complex time travel shenanigans into just what is needed for new viewers to follow along.

But if you have watched the previous movies and have been looking for something to shake off the dust of the Phase IV films, and familiar characters treated in new ways but with heart and respect and full appreciation of their background, Guardians Vol. 3 is a film that scratches a lot of itches, at least for this nerd.

And is certainly the best MCU film since Endgame.