Apologies for the dearth of posts this week. God has blessed me with more work — fun, exciting, well-paid, in-the-zone kind of stuff — than I’ve had in quite some time. I’ve been waking at dawn with the birds, leaving the house at 7:30AM, focusing hard, forgetting to eat and returning at 9:00PM virtually all week and it’s felt good.

May is my favorite time of year around here, hands down. The days are pleasantly cool, the nights still have a bit of a bite of chill (good for sleeping) and the sun is consistently bright. It’s easy to feel energized. The serotonin meter is pegged to the bar. But one cannot keep up the pace I’ve been keeping very long, even if the sun is shining. So now it’s time to kick back a bit and re-charge the batteries. And, among other things, that means blogging.

What I do for a living, more or less, involves designing and facilitating management ‘retreats’ — the kinds of high-level confabs that bring a bunch of really smart (or at least presumptively smart) well-paid (and often overpaid) muckety-mucks together in a room for a day or two or three to think big thoughts, fill flip charts, argue with each other and come out with new insights into the future of their industry.

Years ago, I was fortunate to have several professional mentors in this craft, and one of them tipped me off to a term he used (and still uses) to describe what happens when a group zooms much too fast and too blithely through an exercise meant to be provoke much deeper analysis, thought and debate: ‘hydroplaning’.

For example, I might ask a group to wrestle with the intricacies, uncertainties and complex interdependencies of how the banking system in China might evolve over the next five years, or how the iPod and Facebook might change the landscape for manufacturing software. I might give them an hour to ponder these things and five or six questions to answer in doing so.

If a group was ‘hydroplaning’, they might come back in just twenty minutes with an answer that said, in essence: “We think the banking system in China will get bigger and become more like the West. We think this will be good for us if we push hard and don’t give up.” Or in the case of the software example, perhaps: “We think manufacturing software will need to take into account some of the things we’ve learned from the Facebook and iPod interfaces, but not all of them and maybe not as quickly as some think. This will be good for us if we push hard and don’t give up.”

In other words, they would come back with subtly self-serving, meaningless, jargon-filled drivel that completely missed the point, only managing to prove that their brains had been in neutral most of the time — distracted, mesmerized or paralyzed by group-think, allied with the desire to come up with something quick rather than correct. They would never have even approached what constitutes logical multi-layered thinking, insight or truth.

In short, they would have been hydroplaning.

And so it is that I read this morning this post mortem on National Geographic’s subtly self-serving, meaningless, jargon-filled drivel on the ‘Gospel of Judas’ — an effort that completely missed the point and never got close to the truth (because it was driving in the other direction and didn’t bother to even glance in the rear-view mirror). [emphasis added]:

When the Gospel of Judas was unveiled at a news conference in April 2006, it made headlines around the world — with nearly all of those articles touting the new and improved Judas. “In Ancient Document, Judas, Minus the Betrayal,” read the headline in The New York Times. The British paper The Guardian called it “a radical makeover for one of the worst reputations in history.” A documentary that aired a few days later on National Geographic’s cable channel also pushed the Judas-as-hero theme. The premiere attracted four million viewers, making it the second-highest-rated program in the channel’s history, behind only a documentary on September 11.

But almost immediately, other scholars began to take issue with the interpretation of Meyer and the rest of the National Geographic team. They didn’t see a good Judas at all. In fact, this Judas seemed more evil than ever. Those early voices of dissent have since grown into a chorus, some of whom argue that National Geographic’s handling of the project amounts to scholarly malpractice. It’s a perfect example, critics argue, of what can happen when commercial considerations are allowed to ride roughshod over careful research.

One thing that’s perennially fascinating about lies is that there are so many of them. To the intellectually curious (a group to which I like to think I belong — at least on my good days) they can be endlessly fascinating if one is not careful. They present new challenges. They offer myriad ways for individuals to stand out and say (to themselves and to others): I’m special because I ‘think different’ (ly).

Don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing inherently improper about intellectual curiosity. In fact, in its fullness, it’s a good thing. A really good thing. Questions are good. Reason is good. If God had wanted us to be mindless, he would have made us all like my dog: tremendously obedient (most of the time) but not bright enough to screw in, much less invent, a lightbulb. Not even close. No, instead, God made us in his image and that means (among other things) having a mind that’s unique among creatures.

No, what frustrates and annoys me when a group ‘hydroplanes’… what troubles me when a brand like the National Geographic Society — once internationally respected for it’s intellectual honesty and open inquiry — jumps to shallow, premature and patently silly conclusions… is that it gives thoughtfulness a bad name.

Truth, real truth, for the most part, tends to seep out slowly, thoughtfully, prayerfully, openly. Truth accretes over time — the cumulative wisdom of ages and sages.

Truth does not hide behind non-disclosure agreements and then suddenly jump out from behind a bush and yell: “boo!” via a splashy television special. Truth does not, in one week, undermine the root of Western Civilization, revealing it as a farce.

In science, sudden insights do happen. Sometimes. But even there, new insights aren’t announced on TV until long after they occurred in someone’s brain. Relativity, Newtonian physics. Each one of them took decades to put together and get vetted and check out.

So put the Gospel of Judas where it deserves: on the ash heap of lies, along with catastrophic, anthropogenic global warming. Don’t hydroplane. Think. Pray. Love. Come in and dive deep. The water is fine.