Category Archives: Film/TV

What if I don’t feel God anymore?: Ewan McGregor on spiritual development

A life in the Spirit, Film/TV, , , ,

The film, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, is parable about gaining faith. It helps us answer a question people sometimes surreptitiously ask: “What if I don’t feel God anymore?” What if I feel like a mundane Christian destined for mediocrity? What if what excited me doesn’t anymore? What if I am trying to feel God and it is not working?

Ewan McGregor’s development parable

In the film, Ewan McGregor plays a surly bureaucrat from the fish and game department who is unsatisfied with his life and his wife, and emotionally cut off from relationships with his colleagues. When his life is invaded by a charismatic, visionary sheik and the sheik’s wealth-managing, sexy assistant, things begin to transform. For one thing, Ewan’s love of salmon fishing ends up being a metaphor for his own change.

The movie is a somewhat odd story about getting salmon to thrive and reproduce in the Yemeni desert. At one crucial point, they have created a lake and a fish ladder and they have stocked the lake with farm-bred salmon (because the wild fish were too precious for enthusiasts to part with). The farm-bred fish are like Ewan McGregor: staid and stuck in a holding tank. Ewan has sat in his cubicle for a long time not really doing anything; he has sat in his depressing marriage not having children and not really making love. The question about these farm-bred salmon is: will they swim upstream, as salmon instinctively must do to reproduce?

As with all good parables, you are already asking the question: “Will I?” What about my development?

will they develop?They tensely watch from the dam and are sure their whole, huge experiment is a bust. But right when they are ready to give up, one salmon leaps out of the water and soon all of them are turning around and getting up the ladder and up the stream. Excitement ensues.

But then something horrible happens. Just like Ewan experienced in the middle of his new project when his wife decided to leave him, some person who thinks the sheik is a liberal threat to Yemeni culture blows up the dam and most of the fish are left high and dry. Just a little creek is left of the water project. They are sure all is lost. Ewan does not know what to do. But as he despondently looks over the project, one lone, surviving fish leaps in the air. They were not all killed! A lot died, but something new hung on. Their previous idea for the water project was still in pieces, but a new and better result sprang up from ruins of their work.

Ewan felt like a dried up scientist destined for the mundane. He tried something new and it didn’t work just right and he did not know what to do. Something unexpected took place as a result of him taking some initiative. He endured the loss of what was and entered into what is next.

If you don’t feel God, that is probably what is happening to you.

First of all, no one can really answer the questions, “What if I don’t feel God anymore?” because you are precious you. One size does not fit all when it comes to faith.

Second of all, I have some ideas about what might be going on. Don’t give up!

1)  Your childhood faith might be wearing out. It usually needs to move from head to heart.

I use the running the bases chart to talk about how we know God. It implies that we are always developing. That is a good thing, even though it includes feeling the uncertainty of moving further and the loss of standing safely on a base. The “game” is ongoing.

A lot of Christians only get to first base when it comes to understanding God. They have kind of a teenager faith. Many people come to faith when they are teenagers and they never get much farther than their original understanding. If you don’t experience the presence of God, maybe God moved on and you stopped following!

Old feelings pass away, but deeper feelings are in store. Spiritual “feelings” that are deeper than the reactions we learned in childhood are being developed in our much larger and deeper new eternal family.

2) You are going through a change of season and you need some new disciplines.

Just think about what is the center of having a “first base” faith in Jesus: knowing the Bible. It is quite a feat to achieve a basic understanding of what Jesus is talking about, much more to feel secure about the way you are going to do the word.  It takes a lot of concentration to just get started. It might be tempting to stay on the first base of faith, or second, or wherever you are, even though that season of development is over.

In the case of reading the Bible, spiritual development can’t stay at the level of merely understanding concepts. For instance, the Bible leads us to the basic disciplines of meditation and prayer. From reading the Bible we gain a collection of basic approaches to laying a personal, spiritual foundation that must accompany our reading. Meditating on the Bible saturates us with the truth and love that is revealed. We’re not just reading the words, we are responding to God and forming our relationship.

If that relationship does not keep changing and growing, something is stuck. In a new season we are called to run the bases at a deeper level. Our original idea of what they meant, as good as it might have been, turns out to have something deeper behind it.

3) You are experiencing psychological development

In our relationships with God we are always working on basic trust. We develop in the Spirit a lot like children develop in their families. Rather than milk we need solid food. Eventually, we need to develop agency. We have to endure losses and become adult. What doesn’t kill us helps us grow, it is said, and that is mostly true.

If you are wondering why you don’t feel God, it could be depression or anxiety talking. These symptoms are “friends” that alert us to deeper things happening in our souls. They may not feel like friends, but they are signposts of change. The uncomfortable feelings we often prefer to avoid are actually important to our spiritual development. The destruction of dams we thought should never be blown up often results in something better we never could have predicted.

Close relationships and young marriages often go through a lot of anger and hurt as the partners push one another to develop. When children are added to a family they push people farther. Losing one’s job or losing a loved one calls us to become deeper, to trust God. We need to listen to our anger, listen to the sadness and other feelings behind it and find out what it developing. Let’s not merely fight, flee or freeze in a self-defeating way, our typical way, the old way. Jesus is a new way.

Thinking over a parable, reading this blog post, relating to what is said, trying to stay open to God (even if you think your relationship is in a holding tank that feels less than fresh), are all ways to start moving in a new direction. You have spiritual instincts that are always ready to kick in. Let them leap.

Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta

Do we need simplicity skills?

A life in the Spirit, Film/TV, , , , , , ,

Jonny Rashid often calls me a monk, which is more than a little bit true. It is very true that I admire the Christian radicals who created intentional communities in reaction to fellow-believers getting swallowed by the empire, and I admire how they multiplied monasteries when the Roman Empire fell apart. Believers gathered around Jesus and formed an amazingly creative response to the utter chaos and violence around them. They responded to their challenges with radical simplicity. As a result, their network of intentional communities preserved the truth about Jesus, provided a social safety net, and formed centers of creativity and charity that were rare points of light in Europe for hundreds of years. I think they flowered with Francis of Assisi. All the values that held the communities together: poverty, chastity, and obedience are extremely unpopular today. So people often ask the question, “Do we need to think about simplicity?”

Yes.

bucket_2017_04.jpg

You might like to start with my favorite movie: Brother Sun, Sister Moon. In this clip [link], Francis and his newly-minted band of monks are working in the fields outside Assisi and dealing with the new poverty they have chosen. I like the heart of what they are doing, especially the way Francis receives the bread he’s begged with radical gratitude. His single-minded focus turns the hot, impoverished day into worship.

I don’t know what you think of these monk people: scary maybe, from another planet, embarrassing, quaint. Regardless of how you feel about them, they are successfully working on being simple. God did not give it to me to be a monk, but it was given to me to be simple, same as the rest of us.

The heart of simplicity

To get started on disciplining ourselves for simplicity, we will one main thing. That is, we focus on Jesus and let everything else follow who we follow. Jesus said,

“The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are healthy (or single), your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!” (see Matthew 6:19-24).

That is probably the key teaching on simplicity. Simplicity is about being basic, unclouded, whole. Simplicity is about being radically centered, not just frugal or generous. Simplicity is not mainly an economic matter. The pure in heart, the simple, the single-minded, will what they do from one reality: faithfulness to Jesus, no matter what their circumstance. That willingness is the character trait upon which simplicity skills are founded. Eternity is centered in our hearts so that reality gives our hands their focus.

We usually think of simplicity in terms of money. We are living in the United States, after all — and those people care about money! Not that everyone in the world isn’t pretty much obsessed with it, too, but Americans are schooled to see themselves as part of an “economy” and to see their consumer choice as an expression of their “freedom.” No matter how many times we are instructed that the president can’t really do all that much about the economy, the presidential election is going to be about jobs, when it should probably be about drones.

We need simplicity skills because our relationship with money (and with most everything else about us) is not so simple. We are at the center of a schedule that cannot be juggled properly; we are at the center of a communication system that overwhelms us — we can’t even figure out how to use the machines we have to use to run it; we are expected to be the center of an enterprise that sells our time, our communications, and our future — in terms of debt. The decisions we have to make are weighty.

Here are two ideas that I find important as part of my own simplicity skills for dealing with money. I wouldn’t say they are easy, but they are basic skills for using the tool of money in a radical way.

Be frugal. Budget with a vision. James 4:13-17

We should not construct our budgets as if our lives came from ourselves and as if the future were in our hands. This is basic Christianity. We say things like: “If I live, I live to the Lord. Whatever is at the heart of God, that is what I want in my heart.” I don’t think anyone writing the New Testament is sitting around waiting to find the perfect choice to make so they don’t mess up eternity. God can be trusted for the future. They are moving with the Spirit and focused on that one thing.

I have had the distinct pleasure of walking with people who are getting married this year. Some of them have already talked a lot about their finances and others almost not at all. Some are easy-going about how to organize their budget and assets and naturally want to share. Others are quite nervous about how sharing is going to work out and are naturally protective. Maybe that reflects how they first attached to mom and felt she was generous or withholding. Who knows? But how we handle our money as partners and as a community is important.

A basic simplicity skill is budgeting our money. We should know what we have, what we usually spend, what our goals are. We should not have to go to the ATM to find out what we have before we buy a snorkel for our vacation. We should not put it on the credit card and fix things up later. We should have a radical strategy for how we spend so our money is used for eternal purposes.

Be focused. Know when to kill the fatted calf. Luke 15:29-30

Throwing a lot of cash at an over-generous party might seem like the opposite of having a disciplined budget and being aware of how one is spending down one’s assets. If we did not live in eternity, scarcity would, indeed, be a huge  problem. If you kill the fatted calf too often, there isn’t another calf to eat! You know about the calf, right? If you are a subsistence farmer/cow raiser, the succulent meat of the cow you fed a special diet to plump it into shape is a very rare treat. You don’t eat it until you are celebrating the Eagles winning the Super Bowl, or your sister finally gets her BA.

Simplicity is also about knowing when it is time to kill the calf and celebrate. Simplicity is not all sweating in the field being poor. It is sharing our bread and praising God. Of course, some of us kill calves we don’t even own yet, hoping we will get some joy out of it — that is a little backward. The skill is to have the joy of eternity in our hearts and to celebrate it, not to celebrate in order to get some joy. We might see some joy looking backwards, but we get it by living forwards.

fatted calf | the classical beaver

Maybe we should all have a “fatted calf fund” as part of our budgets.  Some of us may be living under our means already, so we always have money with which to bless others. But some of us have not mastered money-making and spending yet, so we might need to deliberately put some money away for the time when we need to buy the piece of jewelry, or send someone on a trip, or take a friend to dinner, or buy a forty dollar piece of meat or  a wonderful carrot at Vedge. That’s radical budgeting, too.

I hope my two suggestions spur your imagination for how you can be simple in practical ways, in that you discipline your money, and other things, to move with Jesus in this wild world. One person told me, “Wow! Being simple is complex!” Well, I guess so. But the heart of all that disciplined living is simple. The main thing is being faithful to the Lord who is so single-mindedly devoted to us.

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen Saves the Weekend

Film/TV, Mostly the arts, , , , ,

Sometimes, being squished on a United Airlines plane — heading for a conference that promises to be discouraging, in a land broiling under a smoggy sun — can be inspirational! Take heart!

Suddenly, the screens tilted down and Ewan McGregor appeared. I quickly rummaged around and found the headphones because it was Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. I did not go to the Ritz to see this movie because I thought it had to be silly, even if Ewan was in it. Now I will need to buy a disc to add to my collection, right alongside Brother Sun,  Sister Moon.

Faith for the over-bureaucratized

I did not realize it was all about faith sneaking up on the over-bureaucratized. I did not know it was full of little epiphanies converting fear-ridden people. I did not know it was about a couple coming together over mutual faith in something that is a miracle rather than just a sensation. What a pleasure!

Even though I could barely see the piddly screen and could not see any subtitles. I got the picture. And I got the inspiration. A rich Arab tries to do something wonderful with his money. European bean-counters and petty office workers are lifted to something organic and eternal. Cultures learn about each other in a real-world scenario; bad things happen and they decide that faith is more important than  giving in to fear and hatred

I paid to see Seeking a Friend for the End of the World. (Well I guess I paid an airline ticket for Salmon Fishing….too). But I was not as well served. That one just retreaded the idea that love saves you, which looked even more unsatisfying when everyone blew up. Salmon Fishing had the same vile people doing the same vile things and the same lovers trying to make sense of it all, but they find something beyond their embrace to embrace and it makes all the difference. They did not exactly find Jesus, but Ewan starts praying — and that gives me hope.

I know I did not give you enough plot to convince you that this is not a silly movie. But take my word for it. Put it in the queue.  It actually unleashed a couple of hours of inspiration in me on an airplane serenaded by a grumpy baby! That’s something. It keeps coming to mind while I am in the Yemen of my conference wondering if salmon will ever run again. That’s really something!

Pentecost and the Deepest Magic

Doing Theology, Film/TV, , , ,

Pentecost is one of the main inspirations for my faith. I wish it were more “popular” as a holiday. At Pentecost, the truth, the law, the principles of faith are not just “out there,” in a building or in a book; they are all in me. The faith is not settled and static, it is living and everything is on the road, moving, changing and us with it. On Pentecost faith is real, risen and participative.  I see it as the first day of the new creation, the big bang in the little universe of Earth.

Pentecost is still a harvest festival

For the Jews of Jesus’ time Pentecost was more than just the first fruits of summer harvest festival because it was connected to the Exodus. Fifty days after the Passover and the deliverance from Egypt the people were offered to God as “first fruits;” at Sinai their consecration to the Lord as a nation was completed. So the celebration was also tied to the Ten Commandments and the “giving of the Law.” Jews believe that the law was given after exactly fifty days in the wilderness.

Paul says in Colossians 2:16-17 that the Jewish feasts and celebrations (like Shavuot) were a shadow of the things to come through Jesus Christ. A Christian’s celebration of Pentecost is about the reality that followed the promise of Jesus to his disciples that they would be filled with new life and new purpose.

My celebration is about how the prophecy of Jeremiah was fulfilled. I suppose it is no surprise that the new covenant gets activated with fire on the mountain of Jerusalem like it is a new Sinai. Jeremiah prophesied that a new covenant (or “testament”) was coming. The old covenant was broken. God was planning a new one. See Jeremiah 31.

Pentecost celebrates a great new harvest. The holiday is still a harvest feast. But it is a harvest of people. It celebrates how the law is written on our hearts. It is still a festival about receiving the law. But the laws aren’t written in stone or in a book, they are written on hearts. The stone and book still count, but they are shadows of what the Spirit is making real.

Pentecost is a hard holiday to sell

These days Pentecost is a hard holiday to sell. Especially when it falls on Memorial Day weekend! It is a holy day with no special candy or music associated. There are no notable costumes to wear and people rarely put on plays about it. There is no way to make it cute or sentimental. It is very personal and very practical and spiritual.

The basic material is: the disciples have this great experience, and immediately are sent on mission, and almost as immediately are in trouble with the authorities after 3000 people are received into the church. And we are to follow in their way. That’s so Christian, Christians can hardly stand it!

CS Lewis had a realistic view of the difficulty of getting people to understand the new covenant. He started by acknowledging a body of law that all humankind shares: everyone seems to agree that fair play, unselfishness, courage, good faith, honesty and truthfulness are good. All the religions have some kind of version of this law. This law obliges us to do the right thing regardless of the pain, danger or difficulty involved. It is a hard law — “as hard as nails” But it is a shadow of the love Jesus is revealing. And the “law” of Jesus is even harder. In a poem Lewis wrote:

Love’s as hard as nails,
Love is nails:
Blunt, thick, hammered through
The medial nerves of One
Who, having made us, knew
The thing He had done,
Seeing (what all that is)
Our cross, and His.

In Lewis’s first Chronicle of Narnia, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), the lion Aslan predicts this hardness of God’s love by promising to save Edmund from the results of treachery. He says: “All shall be done. But it may be harder than you think.” When Aslan and the wicked White Witch discuss her claim on Edmund’s life, she refers to the law of that world as the Deep Magic. Aslan would never consider going against the Deep Magic; instead, he gives himself to die in Edmund’s place, and the next morning comes back to life. Aslan explains to Susan that though the Witch knows the Deep Magic, there is a far deeper magic that she does not know. This deeper magic says that when a willing victim is killed in place of a traitor, death itself begins working backwards. The deepest magic works toward life and goodness.

Stone Table by Henrik Tamm

Pentecost is about the deepest magic working toward life and goodness. We dare not get stuck practicing the “deep magic” that any person can know. As we see, Jesus says, “All shall be done. But it may be harder than you think.” As we immediately see from the history in Acts, it is harder than one might think to be alive with the Spirit in a dying world:

  • to be the presence of the future,
  • to have one’s own love that is hard as nails,
  • to be personally responsible for carrying life and not just let the priest or church take care of it,
  • to have a living faith and not just live a legacy of being a Christian as part of your culture or family.

Pentecost is more than the deep  magic

Most religion is just natural law — love the baby in the manger, justify yourself as not guilty by doing what others think is right. I think the world can sell all sorts of religion based on the “deep magic” that everyone already has an inkling of and that cultures preserve in their laws. But that law is not being the baby, or receiving forgiveness, or speaking out love and forgiveness. It is not receiving the power to work the deepest magic like Jesus.

I like Pentecost because I want to follow Jesus. I don’t want to profess to follow Jesus unless I am working with more than the “deep magic.”

I need the law written on my heart. Being a good person is not enough. I need to be forgiven, to be written on. I need God to write my itinerary and determine my value.

I need to harvest. Attending holy day meetings is not enough. I need to praise God in public like those enthused disciples. I need to form community and include people in it like the first church. I need to come up against the “powers that be” equipped with the truth about Jesus and little more. That’s what happened at Pentecost and what happens still.

Wanderlust, Eckhart Tolle and Autonomy

Doing Theology, Film/TV, Psychological growth, , , , , , , ,

OK. So I am one of the forty-five people who watched Paul Rudd and Jennifer Anniston in Wanderlust, last weekend, before the bomb blissfully sank into the red ink, unexploded. US Magazine will no doubt try to keep it alive for the sake of Jennifer falling for her co-star Justin Theroux. I thought the movie was amusing, even though one character ran around in a prosthetic penis the whole time making normal penises seem abnormal, even though the beloved Alan Alda was inexplicably present, and even though the state of Georgia was accurately portrayed, which isn’t usually a nice thing to do.

Jesus followers should be students of pop culture

That being said, there isn’t much a Christian can receive from the pop culture that isn’t very instructive. There is more philosophy in the typical rom-com than in The Tree of Life. Just looking through the Jennifer Aniston window, herself, is usually a great look at what is infecting and motivating normal people. For instance, I opened up my Facebook page on the same weekend I watched Wanderlust and there was a quote from Oprah’s buddy Eckhart Tolle infecting one of my “friends”:

Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at the moment.

Essentially that quote could have been the guiding philosophy being taught by Wanderlust, and is more likely the guiding principle for some people in my church than anything Jesus is talking about or demonstrating. Such postChristian ideas are so common they are the center of little fables on the big screen (or almost immediately DVD in this case).

Wanderlust is teaching the meaning of life

If you know me, you know I think meeting God in the present moment is a crucial skill for having a true self in Jesus. So there is some “truth” in what Tolle says. The people in Wanderlust are having the Eckhart Tolle mystical experience with “Life,” not Jesus, and they get “conscious” and “evolve” before our eyes in ninety-eight minutes. It is a comedy, but you can’t write a script without a philosophy someplace. It has one.

Paul and Jennifer play characters who are sick of being abused by New York (also accurately depicted, which is also not nice). Paul’s high-flying finance company goes bust in a scandal; Jen’s documentary on penguins is rejected by HBO. They evacuate the Manhattan microloft they just got suckered into buying and move in to his brother’s McMansion outside Atlanta – the brother who made his fortune renting porta-potties, of course.

I can feel this. What we learn about them is: they hate corporate America and they hate entrepreneur America; they hate being enslaved and they want to be themselves; everyone is a jerk.

“Life” gave Eckhart Tolle a similar experience. He said in an interview: “I couldn’t live with myself any longer. And in this a question arose without an answer: who is the ‘I’ that cannot live with the self? What is the self? I felt drawn into a void! I didn’t know at the time that what really happened was the mind-made self, with its heaviness, its problems, that lives between the unsatisfying past and the fearful future, collapsed. It dissolved. The next morning I woke up and everything was so peaceful. The peace was there because there was no self. Just a sense of presence or ‘beingness,’ just observing and watching.”

Back to the movie – Paul and Jen return to the commune they stayed at overnight on the car ride down to Atlanta. They remembered their night there as so peaceful they thought they could make that moment last forever. Drugs, sex, nakedness, and sharing toilet-time follow. On top of that, add Justin Theroux as a yoga-esque guru. They have a commune experience.

I can really feel that. I’ve been there, in my own way. They want to feel something. They want to be honest. They want to experience relationships. Everyone should be friends.

Tolle is there too. According to his official website, “At the core of Tolle’s teachings lies the transformation of consciousness, a spiritual awakening that he sees as the next step in human evolution. An essential aspect of this awakening consists in transcending our ego-based state of consciousness. This is a prerequisite not only for personal happiness but also for the ending of violent conflict endemic on our planet.”

As it turns out in the movie, Paul and Jen don’t get to transcendence; The commune doesn’t work any better than the McMansion.

The autonomy industry is powerful

The movie ends up with a much more conventional happy ending than the “next step in human evolution.” Paul and Jen wander, like Tolle, through a narcissistic breakdown and emerge with a new image better suited to their passions. They start a small publishing firm back in New York that exploits all the people they have met on their journey up and down the East Coast for mutual profit.

Their solution to their unhappiness is better autonomy. At the end, they are not beholden to a big financial product company or to HBO; they make their own way, selling media products in a much more hippy-like atmosphere. They couldn’t live with themselves; they had a collapse and epiphany and, like Tolle, created a media company to teach what they learned. John Stackhouse says Tolle “gives a certain segment of the population exactly what they want: a sort of supreme religion that purports to draw from all sorts of lesser, that is, established, religions.” It is a religion of self, and a self that is defined by one’s own interpretation of experience.

So it was not a good movie. But it was an instructive movie. At the end of it I had to say, “That’s it?” What you learned from your breakdown is that everyone is bad in their own way and the only solution is to be autonomous, create a little pod with your mate (assuming you can find this marvel who will stick with you through infidelity and financial ruin) and create a small niche where you can do what you want by selling deconstructive thoughts about the monster you hate?

For a lot of people I know, that is, indeed, their dream. The movies taught it to them, with a lot of help from Oprah.

Us Cowboys and Alien Technology

Doing Theology, Film/TV, , , , , , ,

To begin with, smart people expressing the zeitgeist:

“You’re playing God.”
“Somebody has to!”
Steve Martin, The Man with Two Brains.

And life itself confided this secret to me: “Behold,” it said, “I am that which must always overcome itself. Indeed, you call it a will to procreate or a drive to an end, to something higher, farther, more manifold” Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra II 12

I watched the best movie I never heard of in 2011 on pay-per-view in the Poconos Saturday. Did you know that Cowboys and Aliens cost $163 million dollars to make? As we watched it, the women in the room laughed out loud when one came to the realization that, “This movie is an extended study of Daniel Craig’s behind!” I had missed that feature, but they were essentially right.

What I was not missing was the thinking behind the comic book. We have an ongoing ambivalence about technology and an ongoing hope that “us cowboys” can save humanity from being taken over by it. In case you haven’t seen the movie, Daniel Craig is a cowboy. (He plays the part straight, but Harrison Ford is winking conspiratorially at us through most of the picture). Craig is abducted by aliens but escapes with one of their powerful devices on his left arm. He is a cowboy who learns quickly how to fight like an alien. I’d say it was a hoot to watch this, but that would not be enough. It elicited many hoots on many levels. Netflix it for sure — watch the cowboys save humanity.

Thank God some Jesus-followers are also considering what becoming posthuman might mean (not just Steven Spielberg and Steve Martin)! Circle of Hope leaders have been trying to come up with our own “theology of technology” for the past couple of years and we can’t do it. Nevertheless, we sort of have alien devices attached to us. We need to answer the ultimate questions attached to the attachments, “Why not renounce our human limits and accept transcendence? Why talk about God when we are as good as gods?”

The questionable activities that demand answers are proliferating. The Enlightenment and the humanist perspective convinced everyone that progress was inevitable, that life is a grand adventure, and that reason, science, and good will would free us from the confines of the past. People are taking that logic to its predictable extreme and saying that we can attain higher peaks by applying our intelligence, determination, and optimism to break out of the human chrysalis. They argue that evolution, despite our efforts, has channeled our behavior in particular directions built into our neurology. Our bodies and brains restrain our capacities. Supposedly, our creativity is struggling within the boundaries of human intelligence, imagination, and concentration. People think we can beat that.

It is easy to see that brilliant people are certainly trying hard to break out of the chrysalis. The technology they are creating is the dominant force shaping the emerging postmodern world. I know I am dependent on various information, communication, and transportation technologies. With advances in biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and robotics, that dependence will increase. But my dependence (and the movie-maker’s dependence) is accompanied by a deep ambivalence. For many, technology symbolizes the faith of the postmodern world, but it is an ambivalent faith encapsulating both hopes for and fears of the future.

I don’t underestimate people who call themselves extropist or transhumanist. I appreciate that they are being philosophical rather than advancing the cause of chrysalis-breaking under the banner of improving technology. I had an argument last week about whether our church should adopt a technology merely because it was faster, when I thought the adoption had a lot of other ramifications that were unexplored. I met with a few blank stares. At least the philosophers are having an argument rather than just buying an ap.

The philosophers are justifying how we have already taken our first steps along the road to posthumanity. We have begun to directly alter our genetic structure to remedy “nature’s failures.” We use drugs to modify our psychology, enhance our concentration, and slow brain aging. Research into more specific and powerful neurochemical modifiers is going to speed up  how we apply new tools from molecular biology, computer-assisted molecular design, and brain imaging.

The merging of human and machine is advancing. Machines are becoming more organic, self-modifying, and intelligent. At the same time, we are beginning to incorporate our technology into our selves. We began with pacemakers, artificial joints, and contact lenses. We’re far beyond that, now. The government is developing artificial retinas. Microelectrodes can be electrochemically coupled to our brains. Computers and their interfaces rapidly evolve to fit us: from mainframes and text-based interfaces to PCs, hand-held devices and voice-recognition. Even I played Fruit Ninja on voice-recognition Kinect last Friday! (Big weekend, people!) Surely we’ll be called to implant a computer in the name of buying a new product, soon.

Things are advancing rapidly. People hold off on medical treatment because a new technology will save them better, next month. We will use engineered viruses to alter the genetic structure of any cell, even adult, differentiated cells. Molecular nanotechnology may give us control over the structure of matter, allowing us to build things atom-by-atom — we might be able to program the construction of physical objects (including our bodies) just as we now do with software. This has already played out in other movies, but people are honestly working on the ability to “upload” ourselves (our psychology, memories, emotional responses, values, feelings) from our biological brains into synthetic brains that run a million times faster and allow more extensive modification than allowed by our natural brains.

There are certainly no simple answers in response to all the questions that are being raised. I am excited when technology does such good things for my friends (like the robot that managed Dave’s surgery!).

But I can’t help thinking that wanting to break out of the chrysalis of humanity is a human-hating aspiration. I am working out what it all means. Today’s bullet points:

  • Transcendence is not a new desire, even if it has new technology to back it up. Revisit the apple again.
  • The desire to break out of humanity it surely fundamental to the reason God broke into humanity in Jesus. How we save ourselves never works right, Spielberg notwithstanding.
  • Being human is good. Being connected to God forever as our true selves in our own bodies is a gift that is even better. Thank you, Jesus.

The Tantric Propaganda in Green Lantern and Elsewhere

Doing Theology, Film/TV, , , , , ,

Lately, I have had a belated crash-course in the Tantric foundations of the myth-making of our media-driven culture. Today, I am especially interested in the redundant retelling of the myth of the “hero” with which I am surrounded.

All one has to do to find this hero myth is look at the IMDb synopsis of Green Lantern and there is it again:

In a universe as vast as it is mysterious, a small but powerful force has existed for millenniums. Protectors of peace and justice, they are called the Green Lantern Corps. A brotherhood of warriors formed by the different races from entire universe sworn to keep intergalactic order, each Green Lantern wears a ring that grants him superpowers. But when a new enemy called Parallax threatens to destroy the balance of power in the Universe, their fate and the fate of Earth lie in the hands of their newest recruit, the first human ever selected for the Corps: Hal Jordan.

Hal is a gifted and cocky test pilot, but the Green Lanterns have little respect for  humans, who have never harnessed the infinite powers of the ring before. But Hal is clearly the missing piece to the puzzle, and along with his determination and willpower, he has one thing no member of the Corps has ever had: humanity. With the encouragement of fellow pilot and childhood sweetheart Carol Ferris (Blake Lively), if Hal can quickly master his new powers and find the courage to overcome his fears, he may prove to be not only the key to defeating Parallax he will become the greatest Green Lantern of all. 

Christians generally think this story-telling is just innocent fun. But it is also philosophy. It is propaganda. It is worldview shaping. And if one would like to have a robust Christianity that is not consumed by the power of ascendant myths, then it should be seen as an alternative religion. The hero myth calls for faith. It is mainly faith in determination and willpower, in finding the courage to overcome one’s fears and master newly-discovered inner powers (with the help of your soul mate) – and to be the savior.

Esalen and the conquest of Christianity

Jeffrey Kripal, in his book: Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion, talks about the man who popularized the invasion of this hero myth, Joseph Campbell.  Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey begins “with a Tantric parable from The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. Campbell tells the story of a vegetarian tiger cub raised in a flock of  goats who has to be shocked into his own tiger-identity by another tiger, who forces him to transgress his own conditioned feelings of disgust and social propriety in order to eat meat. Campbell summarizes the moral of the parable as the secret of his entire lifework. The moral of the story is, ‘that we’re all really tigers living here as goats. The function of sociology and most of our religious education is to teach us to be goats. But the function of the proper interpretation of mythological symbols and meditation discipline is to introduce you to your tiger face.’”

Kripal summarizes Campbell’s criticism of all religions that claim absolute, exclusive or literal truth. “A conservative Hindu’s belief in the actual existence of Krishna or an orthodox Christian’s belief in a literal resurrection are just as misplaced and mistaken as an orthodox Jew’s or Muslim’s claim to an exclusive monotheism (or the land of Israel). They are all goats fooled by their social systems, not tigers awakened into their deeper human-driven natures through transgressive acts.” The original trailer for Green Lantern shows how the writers were faithful to this idea and the foundational hero myth more clearly than what the movie ended up being.

I am trying to find ways to talk about these things with the people I know and meet. Most of them are not dashing out to read the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna any time  soon. But then, they don’t have to, since his teaching is being transmitted through every media outlet. The “transgressive act” that is usually recommended is to slough off the goat-training of Christianity and become one’s Green Lantern-like tiger self. We are taught that the true religious community is not gathered around the Savior, Jesus, it is a gathering of all the heroes from around the cosmos who are protecting the universe from being subsumed under some exclusive power (in Green Lantern, it is  Parallax — highlighting the power of misperception — calling Neo). You can see where this goes; Jesus becomes another Hinduized Green Lantern, if he is anything.

I want to talk about this some more, because I think a lot of my loved ones have a religion that is going Tantric under the influence of this incessant propaganda. Myths with which they are unfamiliar are being presented as “new” or “evolved.” Their faith in Christ is seen as “old” or “undeveloped.” Without some decent awareness and some healthy dialogue with the big voices of the media, it is easy to be swept away into their fantasy land. Test out what I am saying when you are watching whatever you watch on a screen in the next month (especially the cop or hospital shows). See how many times you encounter Joseph Campbell’s “hero.” See how many “goats” become “tigers.” Count how many times the word “hero” is mentioned in relation to the 9/11 celebrations. Ponder the training of those famous Filipino inmates.

The Hurricane, the Nanny State and Katniss Everdeen

Building community, Film/TV, , ,
Irene coming to N.C.

I know I could have turned off the TV, but I was a bit concerned about Hurricane Irene. Mayor Nutter said we might lose power for two weeks! Mayor Bloomberg shut down New York! It certainly sounded serious. And, of course, for some people it was extremely serious. David’s sister’s house in the mountains is by a little stream they never expected to pour through their first floor windows!

But, overall, don’t you think the coverage was a bit much? Aren’t we being overseen and instructed a bit too much? I don’t usually agree with right wingers, but it does seem like we have a lot of regulations just waiting to be applied in Philadelphia. We might actually have a “nanny state” already. A couple of girls were caught on TV walking down Main Street in flooded Manayunk yesterday and were also caught on TV being given a citation for doing it! Whatever you do, don’t overtax the “first responders” by being a fool! They are going to overtax themselves by giving you a ticket for violating some statute you never imagined existed. My rule in Philadelphia is, “Don’t forget. Everything is illegal if they want it to be, especially if you are a homeless or unlicensed human.”

Nanny state

We are definitely going the direction of Suzanne Collins’ picture of a super nanny state based on the ever-broadcasting tube in her very popular books for teenagers: The Hunger Games. The trilogy is a very inventive and subversive look at where we are going. I said on my personal Goodreads site: “[The Hunger Games] is an entertaining primer on how to react to a dystopia dominated by manipulative media and a huge military-industrial complex. To no one’s surprise the lessons are: be a superhuman survivor, be super individualistic, be superviolent but moral and, when you are completely burned, be super in love and start over in Eden/home/the wilderness.” (Here is the Circle of Hope Pastors site).

Katniss really does not like to do what she is told. The big problem for the authorities is, every time they try to kill her, she manages to incite a revolution. Plus, she is very good with a bow and arrow – a Rambo for the 2010s. It is a big problem for her oppressors when Katniss’s resistance is televised by the nanny state or televised by the rebels who take over the airwaves — it disrupts their programming schedule! The other day, I found myself wishing that one of my hacker friends had discovered how to hack an alternative feed into CNN and could broadcast a huge crowd of us shouting, “Will you please shut up, already!” We need the info, but not the constant, irrelevant making-news-out-of-nothing that programs us to buy every battery in Target! (I know. I could have  never turned it on. But I did.)

Live out our alternative

What are Jesus-followers to do? We could just do whatever the nanny tells us. Within that constant blather are seeds of actual information, after all, and we like being supportive and nice-looking. We could do like Katniss and find ways to get over the electric fence around our lives and murder our opponents – we like being judgmental, superior and holy-looking, too. I never think either of those solutions is adequate, no matter how many times the myth is replayed in the media. I still think we need to painstakingly work on living as an incarnation of the kingdom of God in the here and now. I think we need to take ourselves seriously as people entrusted with the Holy Spirit and live out an alternative that not only undermines, but transforms the  self-destructing status quo.

When the BW men met last night, their topic was “What do we do in a disaster?” (Timely, eh?) One of the conclusions voiced was that our connection with one another was possibly too weak to survive a disaster. We were either reliant on the government or reliant on ourselves. We agreed that our meeting was a great way to start something. But it was not enough to build the trust that would make one’s brother or sister reliable in a disaster. We don’t want to rely on the TV for our communication and we don’t want to be left alone on the other side of the fence. We really do need each other. To form an alternative community that allows us to be our full selves in the face of the powers that be we need to remember a basic truth Mike and Mimi scripted into  their wedding on Saturday: “Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil; cling to what is good. Be devoted to one another in love. Honor one another above yourselves.” (Romans 12:9-10)

I may be too optimistic, but I think both the nanny state and Katniss Everdeen are shooting (sometimes literally) for those goals listed in Romans. They just can’t get there without Jesus, and it is hard enough with him.  We need to keep at it with true devotion on behalf of us all.

Related articles

Lent, the Teen Whisperer, and Skins

A life in the Spirit, Film/TV, The Mission, ,

Last night the room was dark and smoky. Candace took a journey around the room with a censer and spoke out laments and promises based on the prophet Micah. The wall had grown with another floor-to-ceiling abstract painting. Looking at it all a day later, I have to wonder, “How weird is that?”

It seemed like people were into it. But given the typical attention-span of most of us, it will probably take an uninitiated person about five years to understand what is going on during the season of Lent. I hope they stick around that long. A lot is going on. Right now we are getting to the home stretch, moving toward April 24 and the resurrection.

Lent will not soon be popular

Lent goes against about everything that’s going down these days, which is the main reason I like it. But it is not going to get popular any time soon.

Although — Lent is, apparently, getting more popular with evangelicals. Many of the people of Circle of Hope are from that fold. I never really drank the evangelical kool-aid, so sometimes I don’t understand how big a leap some people are taking to use the discipline of Lent. They suspect anything that is Catholic and feel obligated to argue about orthodoxy. (Someone came through the door last night, smelled smoke, and asked, “Are we having a BBQ? I thought we were Protestants.”)

But uncomfortable Christians from the subculture don’t make me nearly as concerned as teen-agers from the culture at large, when it comes to Lent. Increasingly, Christians are even more uncool than ever, and the notion of discipline, in general, and ancient things, in particular, are not likely to be the next fad. I don’t want Lent to be a fad. But I don’t want people to miss it.

Tina Wells has me thinking about teens and Lent, which is probably why I’m thinking, “How weird is that?” She knows all about what teens think is cool and uncool. So she hates “Gossip Girl” because it is all about the market perpetuating stereotypes without even asking their audience. People call her the “teen whisperer” because she can speak a fifteen-year-old’s language even though she is older now. She’s been a marketing guru since she was a teen herself. Now she’s working on becoming Camden County’s Oprah. She doesn’t really like MTV’s controversial “Skins” (another rip-off from British TV) but she relates to it. On Joy Behar she said, “I was haunted by the decisions they were making, but it’s realistic…I think it’s the reality that’s making people so scared of the show.”

I am not scared of “Skins” (I have about ten episodes on my DVR right now and nothing is malfunctioning!). But I think it might point out how weird Christians are becoming. If a teen’s church is doing Lent, she might be uncomfortable that it is weird Christianity. But her secret discomfort might really be that she is more like “Skins” than Christian. That reality unnerves Tina Wells, and it unnerves me. But I want to be more like Tina and wade in to keep learning the language of the culture emerging around me. If you are speaking it better than I am, I want to get to know you.

One of the reasons I like the spiritual discipline of Lent so much, is because it is so Christian. It is unabashedly speaking the language of reconciliation with God. A person who is a nonbeliever often gets Lent better than the Christians who suspect it is too weird. The unbeliever doesn’t know any “better,” so they can either do it or not. So many believers are modestly doing Lent while pondering whether they want to do “Skins” or not. Either way, Lent gets the subject out of one’s head, however distantly it might be there, and into a smoky, weird room, in which they’ll be invited to share the body and blood, and be invited into the possibilities of knowing God and their true selves.

Go See Of Gods and Men

Film/TV, The Mission,

Dear friends, please go see Of Gods and Men. If you are in Philadelphia, it will be at the Ritz Five for about five more seconds, I imagine. It is the most Christian movie I have ever seen. It is as slow as life in a Cistercian monastery, so don’t go sleepy. It is in French with subtitles, so don’t go irritable. It is about being a real Christian, so go discouraged, or questioning, or ignorant. Go to meditate on what it means to live by faith in a tumultuous, violent world.

Here’s the trailer: A monastery perched in the mountains of North Africa in the 1990s. Eight French Christian monks live in harmony with their Muslim brothers. When a crew of foreign workers is massacred by an Islamic fundamentalist group, fear sweeps though the region. The army offers them protection, but the monks refuse. Should they leave? Despite the growing menace in their midst, they slowly realize that they have no choice but to stay… come what may. This film is loosely based on the life of the Cistercian monks of Tibhirine in Algeria, from 1993 until their kidnapping in 1996.

Gwen and I both felt, after we left the theater, “I have been WAY over-concerned with my problems.” It is easy to forget how wrapped up we get in small things and make them big, because they are the only things we’ve got. The movie was about big things and how to find the faith to face them. Watching it made me understand that I could also be faithful in relation to my small sufferings.

I have been praying ever since, “Thank you, Lord, that there are still people who do something as radical as plant their Cistercian monastery in the Atlas Mountains to pray for Algeria and love its people!” The story of these monks opened my eyes to realize that I am living among such a people, who are inspired enough to be a circle of hope and plant themselves in the middle of the megalopolis with a very similar intention and practice. We aren’t Cistercians, but we are strange enough when we aren’t too afraid to be so. Plus, we have Compassion Teams and intentional households that keep us on the edge. “Thank you, Lord!”

Circle of Hope has a strange connection with the monks, you know. They were kidnapped on the exact weekend we had our first public meeting. It was Palm Sunday. Jesus says, “Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.”