The Shadow-gloom and Weight of the Sacred

We lived in Europe just under three years and that doesn't seem like a lot of time; I didn't think there would be so many changes to Oklahoma City during that time. But, there have been a lot of changes. I haven't been up in the Edmond area much, but I'm still not used to the new interchange at Broadway and Kelly/Memorial. That's really a major change and it's confusing for someone who wasn't present to watch the changes develop. Every time I try to get on Broadway southbound, I need up in a BancFirst parking lot!

I know once upon a time there was a minor league basketball team in OKC, but I think they left well over a decade ago. I can't remember their name, but it seems like they left OKC for Enid where they were coached by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (I always thought "Lew" Alcindor was a much cooler name). As a kid, I always thought there was something lacking about Oklahoma City because it didn't have a pro sports team. It seemed like less of a city in a way. But, now we have our very own NBA team. I'm not really much of a basketball fan, but it has been really exciting to watch the Thunder and the Lakers play in the first round of the playoffs. It's been really exciting to cheer for a team located in my own city, but even with the excitement of the NBA playoffs, I still find myself getting lost in the fact that we have an NBA team at all. It just doesn't seem right because I wasn't around for everything that brought the team to OKC.

Stephen Jay Gould was famous for his idea (I don't think it was solely his idea, but I'm not sure who else worked on it) of punctuated equilibrium, which basically states that, if I understand it correctly, there are periods of slow change and periods of rapid change. Or, stated another way, continuous change occurs slowly over long periods of time, but discontinuous change occurs rapidly and within a relatively short window of time. For Gould, this is why there are breaks in the fossil record: because there were periods of time in which change occurred rapidly so that the "steps" between one evolutionary stage and the next are not represented in natural history.

I recently listened to a lecture on podcast in which the theologian Mark Love (his blog is one of my favorite blogs to read) described discontinuous change in our culture--we're living in a time of discontinuous change because there are things emerging that have no antecedant, at least for most of us. As an example of continuous change, Mark gives the shift from phones with rotary dials to phones with touchtone dials. The phones were still wired to the wall of your home; it was a subtle, simple change and it made sense. Facebook moved very quickly from an existence as a site for university students localized to a single school but became a worldwide networking phenomenon. It happened very quickly and there was nothing really like it beforehand.

To someone who has lived in Oklahoma City/Edmond for the last three years, the development of the Broadway and Kelly/Memorial intersection probably seems like continuous change. They observed as the old intersection was slowly removed and as its replacement was meticulously laid down. For me, though, it's a jump, a rapid change. The fossil record is missing.

I just don't feel like I was gone long enough for all of this to have happened. I don't feel like I was gone long enough that Oklahoma City would be so strange to me. It's just a weird time, I guess. Probably this time next year it will all seem normal and I'll wonder exactly what it was that I found so fascinating.