Category Archives: Mostly the arts

Stories ten-year-olds tell, and political conventions

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

We spent last week with three ten-year-olds and a younger sister. A few people have checked in tosee if I made it through in one piece! No problem at all. I was sad to come home. It was glorious.

Alongside the laughs, the grandchildren taught me a lot. Even though I remember being an elementary-age person, I can no longer feel what it was like very well. Nothing happened to arrest my development, so I seem to have cruised through fourth and fifth grade.

As a result of my benignly neglected memory, I almost forgot about the storytelling. As I saw the kids in action all week, I remembered I was also a typical, 10-year-old — full of stories I would like to tell, if anyone would listen.

Story in the making

Around my family table, a good story was prized when I was growing up. My mother was an especially avid and witty teller-of-tales, most of which were true. She was good at exaggeration, which is one of the ways we spice up our relationships, amuse our friends and make new ones [or so it is researched].

As a result, my siblings and I could reenact scenes from the DMV because our mother amusingly or angrily recast her day for us over dinner. We took her exaggerations even further and expanded them into imaginative fiction. For instance, “Mrs. Caputo,” one of her quirky co-workers, had an SNL-worthy storyline of her own, even though we never met her. My dad was quieter, but I still feel like his co-workers at the supply house were family-adjacent, even though I rarely saw them.

Stories make meaning

Ten-year-olds are in the psycho/spiritual development stage when people learn to make meaning. So elementary school children usually like stories and tend to be preoccupied with rules (especially those they violate — or when others violate the one they just made!). For instance, on the van ride home, there was an argument whether the oceans cover 75% of the Earth’s surface or two-thirds — and about “Why did you say 75% instead of ¾?” (BTW, Google says it is 71%, so they were both equally wrong, which would have been rather discouraging to know). They were aggressively using new skills to evaluate their previous, childish ways and compete, often loudly, for some respect at the adult table.

At this stage of development, we learn ways to make sense of the world and deal with it. We can now evaluate and criticize our previous stage of imagination and fantasy. The youngest of the four grandchildren we had last week was holding on to her past. So she demanded a stuffed unicorn as a souvenir. Alternatively, her older sister spent a good deal of time in withering criticism of unprovable facts — if you did not want to watch a movie, you’d better have a good reason! She also gave me a few disparaging looks once the thin plausibility wore off one of the unbelievable tall tales I find amusing to tell.

The gift of this stage is narrative. It feels powerful to form our own stories and re-tell old myths. Grasping our own meaning and influencing the meaning of a group experience can be intoxicating.  During one lunch, two of them were telling stories about previous vacations. Each had an example to give. The conversation was beginning to shift when an unheard member stood up from his peanut butter and loudly said, “Stop! I am trying to tell you my story!” They politely turned and gave him his due. I was glad he had a place where he could expect someone would listen!

In the elementary years, there remains a quality of literalness to our stories. We are  not fully ready to step outside the stories and reflect upon their meanings. Children take symbols and myths pretty much at face value, though they may be touched or moved by them at a deeper level.  The faith of many people remains at this level all their lives. If you were watching the political conventions, I think your vestigial ten-year-old self was often touched as symbols evoked truths and plausible-sounding stories were told to fill the experience with meaning. Plus, the “fact-checkers” activated your own primitive fact-checker to ponder whether “Coach” Walz was lying or not [NPR expert].

The joy of storytelling

My glorious vacation happened right in the middle of this development stage. So a lot of LOUD narration of everything was going on, including most TV shows (only their tablets could stifle them, really). Early in the week, my grandchildren invented a game which  reflected the new Time Bandits series for kids we found on Apple TV. (Caution: My wife found it almost intolerably boring).

The kids loved it. In the stories about the bandits, they bumped up against something magical and something factual at the same time – the same thing they were doing every day! In their derivative game, they let one of their squad be the director of an improv story. The director assigned each one a part, then he/she set the scene, and told them to act it out with further coaching. They did this at least once a day accompanied by gales of laughter.

What my wife and I did for four days was see what was happening at the DNC after the kids went to bed. Like it happened all day in our beach rental, there was a lot of storytelling going on every night at the convention. I realized at what level most of the DNC sessions were aimed: the ten-year-old level. Most speakers had a script about “Coach” Walz and “Comma-La” for the audience. They kept re-telling a story until we could all tell it. The candidates needed to be established at the level most of us are living. We make meaning with stories.

Unfortunately, adults can get stuck in such an elementary-school understanding of the world. No matter how many times Kamala says, “We need an adult in the room,” it is hard to be one if everything is aimed at our ten-year-old selves. Trump is called “weird” and so he refuses to say Vice President Harris’ name correctly. The whole convention chants it properly, so he literally says, “I’m not weird, they’re weird” [CNN]. That’s very elementary school stuff, and it appeals to vast swaths of the country.

A lot of the so-called “evangelicals” with the RNC seem to be Christians stuck in their ten-year-old stage of faith development. As a result, they are usually stubbornly self-centered — as in, “You ate the last donut!” (prepare to die) or “An embryo has human rights!” (prepare for prison). They often find themselves in trouble because they have not yet mastered living according to principles, even though they love them — as in, Papa has to tell them, “You never leave the door open, especially if the air conditioner is running” or “Israelis and Gazans both have terrible stories to tell and terrible leaders to endure.” As undeveloped adults, they are the “You’ll go to hell Christians” — very committed to the rules being followed (especially by someone else). The “We won’t go back” people holding USA signs at the DNC might not be much different.

If adults stuck at ten years old end up maturing into the next stage of development, their transition often occurs in a very dramatic way. The childish faith most of us experienced might suffice until our psychological patterns are disturbed or we experience an epiphany and meet Jesus in our twenties or have a spiritually-productive mid-life crisis. All our stages of development begin with baby steps, whether we are still babies or not. Some of us take first steps of adult faith when we are older. It can feel weird.

I wonder if we can effectively run a country, a church, or anything at a ten-year-old level.  After all, those people can’t remember to pull the shower curtain shut before the bathroom floor is flooded! Is there an escape from immaturity prison? Is any transformation possible? Maybe, since the Time Bandits keep finding a portal episode after episode. And maybe, since both conventions kept promising an escape from the present, as well.

But as I watched Apple+ monetizing historical stereotypes and feeding them to us from their endless archive, and the DNC doing much the same, I had to wonder. It might be harder to get past our ten-year-old stage than I would like to think.

Clare Day Psalm

A life in the Spirit, Poetry,

On Clare Day last week many aspects of my meditation combined into a psalm of wonder, which she helped me write.

Clare, you were so young
when you ran down the hill to Portiuncula
and begged Francis to cut your hair!
I suppose I love you because I was eighteen once
and I ran through fields
and I asked God to circumcise my heart,
to cut me free from the domination system,
from my own fears of never being myself.
I suppose I love you because you are an anima,
like a figure in a waking dream
looking for a key to open new doors in my soul,
a mysterious other side to me,
to the Francis I cannot seem to shake.

You, Lord, the Eve, the Eros, the Mary, Sophia
appear in the dreamy places just beyond my grasp
and yet deep in the recesses of my mind and memory.
On Clare Day I turn to you.
And though you flee and I am left in awe,
lost in another shifting, inner building,
left wondering what integration is yet to be,
yet I wait for you, and you will come.

I will look you in the face,
into your blurry familiarity:
so near and so elusive,
so known and so mysterious,
so welcome and yet so wild.
On Clare Day, as I follow you,
an old man limping through the poppies,
I am found and still finding.
I am sure and still surprised.
I am filled. And still you come,
as if we were eighteen together
and opening doors for the first time.

My brief tour of American excess

A life in the Spirit, Music, , , , , , , , , , ,

I always wanted to go to Michigan. Now I have. And now I only have North Dakota left  before I can brag about visiting all 50 states!

When I travel outside the U.S., I am often delighted to wander into a place I did not know existed. Once there, I am often even more delighted to experience something that gives me deeper insight into the culture I’m visiting and the character of its people.  I travelled like that in the U.S. this time and it was revealing.

As we compared our trip to Michigan to trips in other countries, we kept saying, “The U.S. is rich!” We’re so rich we can afford to be excessive, and we are.

So beyond the charming people we met along the way, the helpful guides, the winsome (really!) fast-food servers, and our good friends, I want to highlight the fascinating excesses we discovered along the way.

Cleveland —  The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

I rolled into Cleveland and managed to find our hotel and find parking. I got to the desk and dug out my confirmation when they had trouble finding my booking. I was at the wrong hotel! “You’d be surprised how often people do that!” the nice clerk said.

Just down the street on the waterfront (a short walk from our actual hotel) was the beautiful Rock and Roll Hall of Fame building, an excessive tribute to Boomer music right on the spot where “rock and roll” was invented to name the new art form. I loved it, since I am smack dab in the middle of the Boomer demographic and I was right down to the real nitty gritty in Cleveland.

This museum is almost as overwhelming as the Smithsonian. I particularly enjoyed seeing the tribute to one of my favorite bands, Nirvana, and seeing one of the many guitars Curt Cobain broke on stage (another one sold for $596K at auction in 2023, speaking of excess).

Dearborn — Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation and Greenfield Village

Outside of Detroit (in Michigan!) is a museum complex we went to because someone heard we were going to Detroit and said we should go. We’d never heard of it. It is a huge tribute to Henry Ford that Henry Ford started himself.

Webster House in New Haven, 1927

To make his new faux settlement, Greenfield Village, Ford moved the schoolhouse of his youth to the site and replicated his childhood home meticulously. The village is a giant dollhouse for an exceedingly rich guy to play with. He preserved artifacts or replicated those of his heroes too. He has Noah Webster’s actual house, moved from Connecticut — he’s the entrepreneur who created American English with his dictionary (1828) and then sold books to teach it.  There are a lot of Thomas Edison’s original workshops, too, since he was a real-life hero of Ford’s.

The Museum of American Innovation is enormous, big enough to house 260 vehicles from the earliest to the latest models, not to mention Teddy Roosevelt’s buggy and the car in which JFK was riding through Dallas. I thought the Louvre  was a bit much, but the sheer excess of this exhausted me even more.

Indian River — Cross in the Woods Catholic Shrine

I did not realize that the Michigan Shore of Lake Michigan is essentially a Cote d’Azur where I least expected it. Anywhere there is a coast, it seems, Americans turn it into a cute replica of a scene from Carousel. We bought designer chocolates.

Our friends invited us to pilgrimage to the nearby site of the largest crucifix in the world, since they got the idea we do such things. (We’ve been to Chartres Cathedral twice, after all!). When I saw this cross, I was speechless. I asked how this got built and was told a priest thought Northern Michigan needed a place for Catholics to visit. Sounds like how most of the cathedrals in Europe were built.

Just as excessive, was the newly refurbished doll museum at the shrine, which the cashier said we should not miss. She was right. It might be in the top ten of the weirdest museums I’ve ever visited. Dolls and mannequins of all sizes were dressed in the habits of traditional monks and nuns, mainly pre-1970, the Boomer childhood. I doubt any order was missed. I marveled at the absurd, excessive dedication to minutia and irrelevance in documenting this recently-bygone era. It was a bit like Henry Ford immortalizing his childhood.

Frankenmuth — Bronner’s CHRISTmas Wonderland

I wanted to stop in Frankenmuth on the way up because it was advertised on billboards as the location of Bronner’s, the largest Christmas store in the world. I stopped at Bronner’s for the same reason I go to South of the Border when driving to Florida and Wall Drug in South Dakota (and now Buc-ees whenever I see one). I made sure I got there on the way back — just as Michigan experienced the heat dome.

They were not kidding. It is large. This might be the Protestant answer to the largest crucifix. (CHRIST is intentionally advertised in their name and there is a church in the store). Christmas music my mother would recognize was playing. We wandered. The store is 2.2 acres, almost two football fields. We queasily passed through all of it. I usually like little ornament stores, but the sheer excess and kitsch of this one was overwhelming.

The wedding of Christ and capitalism at Christmas has always been a thing with me. My mother aspired to a Bronner’s-like house that I helped her concoct for the holiday, even though she was not a Christian in any noticeable way. When I became one, I disappointed her by insisting the day belonged to Jesus and I would not do it anymore. I think Bronner’s gave me flashbacks in troubling and good ways. I didn’t buy anything.

This brief sojourn in the Midwest mostly had to take place on Interstates. Interstate 75, for instance, is a top-notch road through the middle of nowhere in northern Michigan. My Itchy Boots motorcycle YouTube fav was recently in Bissau-Guinea which provides a sharp contrast. My main lesson remains, “Americans are a rich people and our excesses show it.” And often their Christianity reflects it.

It is amazing that so many beautiful people sprout from under that excess, like when all those ferns appear from under the leaves in the Poconos each spring. I know I don’t sound appreciative of all the art and ingenuity represented in my stops. I am not sure it was all well-used. But you’ve got to love it. I suspect Jesus does — he loves every drop of creativity in creation, doesn’t he? Even that colossal angel trumpeting over my head in the picture above took some God-given imagination.

AI resurrection: Questions for a “neutral” technology

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

My son had questions about the vagaries of his student loan. I suggested, “You could just type your question into Google and the new AI pop-up will probably give you a good answer. I’m amazed at what it comes up with.”

“I hate A.I.,” he said.

Meanwhile a colleague just a bit younger than me, I think, is in an AI class. She comes up with the most remarkable things. I asked her to feed documents I want to reconfigure into AI and good things came back. She’s a bit frustrated that our other co-workers are not nearly as interested in the time-saving and money saving possibilities. “Why hire a consultant?” she says. “We have AI! Half those people will be obsolete in 5 years.”

Is AI inevitably evil?

As with every emergent technology, evil people will use AI for evil purposes. Some past innovations, like the atomic bomb, are self-evidently an evil use of a new technology. But most new things are relatively neutral, like your smartphone.

When we were at the theater on Saturday afternoon (Yes. I did get Funny Girl for my birthday.), we were in an upper tier. It was interesting to note that at least a third of the orchestra seats had phones lit up as we waited. When the lady voice from off stage said to turn them off, it took a while for people to comply. I suppose they had to tear themselves away from the phone to see real people who need people (Fanny great, Nicky not so much). I admit, I forgot to take my phone when I went out by myself. I felt a bit anxious, since I couldn’t imagine what I would do if there were a misconnection. Should the phone have us hogtied like that?

NY Times, July 9, 2024

The problem I see with the direction AI is headed is that it may become more personal.  There are a LOT of new TV shows exploring this subject! We started watching one called “Sunny” on Apple. They call a “dramedy,” although I did not find it funny at all, just creepy.  But it is stylish. Rashida Jones has a robot delivered, purportedly made by her husband; it knows everything about her, and she can’t keep it turned off.  Here we go.

Maybe, if it can “resurrect” someone

The main reason I am thinking about AI is not “Sunny.” It is the several articles I saw about a Chinese company called Super Brain who “resurrects” dead loved ones from the massive load of pictures and data we have about them, so you can converse with their replication – so far, just on screen. It did not take AI long to monetize our deepest fear and deepest longing: death and resurrection. AI vs. Jesus right off the bat.

by Hector RETAMAL / AFP

News outlets around the world ran with this new resurrection gospel story during the past month. France 24 found Seakoo Wu who visits the graveside of his son and puts his phone on the headstone and listens to his son speak from beyond the grave. The article said:

They are words that the late student never spoke, but brought into being with artificial intelligence. “I know you’re in great pain every day because of me, and feel guilty and helpless,” intones Xuanmo [his son] in a slightly robotic voice. “Even though I can’t be by your side ever again, my soul is still in this world, accompanying you through life.”

Stricken by grief, Wu and his wife have joined a growing number of Chinese people turning to AI technology to create lifelike avatars of their departed. Ultimately Wu wants to build a fully realistic replica that behaves just like his dead son but dwells in virtual reality. “Once we synchronise reality and the metaverse, I’ll have my son with me again,” Wu said. “I can train him… so that when he sees me, he knows I’m his father.”

Super Brain charges $1400-$2800 to create a basic avatar of a deceased loved one in about twenty days. Some Chinese firms claim to have created thousands of “digital people” from as little as 30 seconds of audiovisual material of the deceased.

For Super Brain’s leader, all new technology is “a double-edged sword.” He says, “As long as we’re helping those who need it, I see no problem.” Bereaved father Wu said Xuanmo, “probably would have been willing” to be digitally revived. He told Xuanmo, as France 24 looked on, “One day, son, we will all reunite in the metaverse.” His wife dissolved into tears. “The technology is getting better every day… it’s just a matter of time.”

Assurances of neutrality

NPR had a small story about tech executive Sun Kai who works for Silicon Intelligence. He said (through an interpreter), “I thought, if I’m modeling voices, why not model my mom’s likeness as well? I raised this question with the company chairman.”

After weeks of fine-tuning, they managed to create an AI rendering of his mother, which Sun says he now talks to every day. “I don’t see her as a digital avatar but as my real mother. When work pressure ramps up, I just want to talk to her. There are some things you can only tell your mother.”

NPR also quoted Michel Puech, a philosophy professor at the Sorbonne University in Paris, like CNN bringing on an expert to interpret what we’ve just witnessed. Puech cautions against over-hyping the ability of current AI technology to go beyond what existing technology already does. For example, looking at a photograph or hearing a recording of a dead loved one’s voice evokes memories, just as AI clones aim to do. “So it’s just a better technology to deal with something we already do.”

I’m not so sure it is that neutral. It could also be another technological “apple” we eat to  delude ourselves into feeling the power of knowing and conquering everything, even life and death. I doubt my mother would approve of that, and I am pretty sure she would not consent to being resurrected by AI.

I hope I get a chance to ask her if I was right about that last thought. If I want to take the risk that she might be just fine with being an avatar, all my pictures and old home movies of her are already digitized. I could resurrect her, if I feel like it. Who wouldn’t like that? Super Brain has already bet we will buy it — it is only a matter of time.

Disentangling from perfectionism — 2013

A life in the Spirit, Doing Theology, Film/TV, Spiritual direction, , , ,

Our teaching for Lent in 2013 had to do with “getting disentangled from the world.” Here is one of the first speeches I offered on that theme.

The movie Enchanted (from 2007) had Dr. McDreamy from Grey’s Anatomy as an unlikely prince charming from New York to Amy Adams playing a princess from fairy tale land. (This is the same Ms. Adams who was nominated this year for an Oscar for the wretched film The Master. “Wretched” is not peer-reviewed.). In France they named the movie “Once Upon a Time” and made the better-looking Adams the main face.

The movie Enchanted, (or Il Etait Une Fois) is a sweet-ish fable that deconstructs the old sweetness of being a princess in your imagination and gets you to face the new overwhelming reality of postmodern, urban life and messy, noncommittal relationships. It asks the question, “Can I get some enchantment into the megalopolis?” And, as in many Disney movies, the answer is “Yes, there is a Prince Charming or Princess Giselle for you — probably not the one you are looking for, but you will miraculously find them and everything will be perfect, just as it should be in your own private fairy tale.”

This piece of fluff  is a surprisingly philosophical movi for being a little fairy tale. I think you will see that fact as you watch one of my favorite scenes from it. Amy Adams, Princess Giselle, has just arrived in gritty New York from happily-ever-after land. She wants to make her environment tidy, like at home, where everything is as it should be, so she calls on animal friends to help her like she used to do back in her native land. You’ll see the homage to Snow White. It’s a fun way to get started on our subject.

The song is being ironic instead of seriously asking the question, which is how we keep from addressing the real questions that bother us. But it presents the dilemma we feel about our very messy environments and our need for special powers to make it all perfect. Amy teaches us that:

You could do a lot when you’ve got such a happy working tune to hum
While you’re sponging up the soapy scum.
We adore each filthy chore that we determine.
So friends, even though you’re vermin, we’re a happy working throng.

Our dilemma: we are supposed to make things neat, tidy, working things out together, ultimately loving and never getting your white gown dirty, happy and talented, filmable, effortless, quick, efficient and you win best song for your ditty.

But, it is a big mess, and often feels like it is getting bigger, the only friends we have to help us are pigeons and rats, we have a lot of filthy chores and we are in charge of them, and we don’t get paid enough to do them, and the big one: we are vermin — not happy and can’t sing.

The world’s answer to our dilemma

I think the world’s answer, including Disney’s most of the time, which is the #14 corporation on Forbes 500, is to “make it work” as they say on Project Runway. You can do it; it’s up to you, it’s a DIY world and you have the tools. Dream like an American, just get educated, assert your rights, make all the right choices — consumer choices and otherwise, especially in a mate, and it can all be made well.

The moral to Enchanted, if I recall, is that if you just stick with it, you can make it all work in reality and not just in the movies. If you just believe in the real you instead of the make-believe you, love will find a way and it will be beautiful.

I suppose there are worse things that could be said, but I think the whole premise ends up making us very tangled up, not only tangled up in our responsibility to make everything tidied up, but tangled up in the need to do it with the right attitude, and right psychology, not tripped up with any of the mess from the past, and being pretty much prescient about how we might be messing up the future, AND with the just right person, or church, for that matter.

The alternative way of Jesus

Jesus has a better way. In a huge contrast, in the face of his impending disaster, not just a dirty apartment, when Jesus knows the true frailty of his disciples is going to be fully revealed and evil is going show itself without disguise, when all the facades of the self-sufficient world are going to be shown up for their true self-destructive purpose, he says:

“I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” — John 16:33

In Disney’s hands, the way is: “Let’s be honest, you are vermin, but you’ve got to make this work or there is no hope.”

In Jesus’ hands, the way is: “There is hope because I have overcome the world. Take heart, because it is not all up to you. Perfection is not the goal, anyway. The goal is a heart at peace in the kingdom of God.”

This might seem like it is an obvious thing a Christian might say. But I am not sure we even hear Jesus talking to us in the middle of our normal pursuits. We even get hung up on whether we are performing Christianity perfectly enough! Christians argue all the time about how badly the other Christians are doing. We do that, even though Paul clearly wants us to imitate him when he says,

“Who makes you different from anyone else? What do you have that you did not receive? And if you did receive it, why do you boast as though you did not? — 1 Corinthians 4:7-8

There were some overachievers in the Corinthian church who not only thought they could make it work, they thought they were making it work — and better than Paul! Paul says, “Who in the world do you think you are, all puffed up and competing for the highest rank, thinking you need to be number one and, in fact, are number one? You think you are kings in the kingdom of God, while we apostles are still having trouble in the world and rely on Jesus every minute to give us joy in our very difficult circumstances. I’m talking about Jesus who gives us whatever life we have.”

Why don’t you talk back to the Disney faction in Corinth with Paul by reading the rest of this scripture as if you were saying it to someone yourself:

Already you have all you want! Already you have become rich! You have begun to reign—and that without us! How I wish that you really had begun to reign so that we also might reign with you!  For it seems to me that God has put us apostles on display at the end of the procession, like those condemned to die in the arena. We have been made a spectacle to the whole universe, to angels as well as to human beings. We are fools for Christ, but you are so wise in Christ! We are weak, but you are strong! You are honored, we are dishonored! — 1 Corinthians 4:8-10

You would think we would all be on Paul’s side, but even the first believers were already taking things into their own hands and doing Paul better than Paul and telling him so! — becoming perfect, thinking that was what Jesus had in mind all along, and getting there without Jesus!

Perfectionism has always been tempting

This perfectionism is very tempting for us, which is why we are bringing it up during Lent.

Last week I experienced us in the middle of the dilemma in two ways. And I’ll close by talking about them. I feel bad, if all I am getting you to do so far is wondering if you understand what Paul is talking about well enough, or whether you trust Jesus well enough, or whether you are good enough to be in the church, or whether you can take on one more big idea because you already have so much on your plate to handle, or whether you can be responsible for following Jesus and get spread so thin, you are already so responsible. But if I am getting you to wonder these things, you are not alone. In the world we have trouble. But Jesus has overcome it and brings us peace. I’m shooting for helping you receive that.

Fall 2012
  • Internal perfection police

We were at the prospective cell leader training last Monday and great people were learning all about the ambitious mission we have been given as part of God’s redemption project. At the end of the evening people were invited to express some of the fears they had as they imagined themselves eventually being cell leaders. I think some of their answers reflected the perfectionism we are all saddled with: the need to do it right, to be unjudgable, to not mess up.  I don’t think anyone was unaware that this wasn’t where they wanted to be, they were just being honest.

Someone said, “If I become a cell leader, I want to do it 100%.”
Whatever that means. I think it usually means “the extra effort I am not able to give.” It does not always mean, “Doing the best I can” or “Acting with passion and abandon.” It often means matching up to the best effort I can imagine myself doing with the best outcome.

I am afraid I will alienate someone if I say “Christian.”
And you will. We started out our day at Childs Elementary yesterday with worship and two ladies from the neighborhood walked out and waited until we were done. I felt like I had offended them. As it turns out, I hadn’t, they were just kind of dismissive and sort of rude and self-consumed. But I felt I was supposed to be better than that, better than Jesus, and not be alienating. That perfectionism might lead us to only mention being a Christian in the most controlled of circumstances, when I could be sure I was doing the right thing. Whenever that is.

I am afraid I won’t have the right words.
Cell leaders are know-it-alls, after all.

I am afraid of looking flaky or uncommitted.
I am anxious about making it happen, because I have to make things happen right.

I am afraid to represent Jesus or the church.
I am not wise enough. I don’t match up to what’s in the book. I am not good enough. So I have to wait until I am perfect before I put myself out there and am judged by the perfection police.

And just who are these perfection police? Paul doesn’t even judge himself. And Jesus who will judge the living and dead at the end of time, says  “I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”

  • Perfectionism is beaming at us

I just talked about an internal process that keeps us tangled up in trying to be perfect, but there are a huge external forces, too! One of our pastors sent out a very interesting article that adds sociological reasoning for why we are so perfectionistic. The powers-that-be totally convince us to disbelieve the trouble we are in for their vision of a perfectible future.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin shows off Google Glass

As far as the Forbes 500 know, everything is getting better. The iPhone 6 will dispense with the annoying home button and feature a 4.8-inch screen and quad-core processor. Google is developing Google Glass, which will allow users to text, take pictures and videos, perform Google searches, by talking in a normal voice to a smart lens. The Dow Jones average just reached an all-time high last week, corporate profits are enjoying “a golden age.” Day by day, problem by problem, American life is being fine-tuned to the point where experts now confidently predict a state of near-complete perfection. We are a happy working throng.

But in other news, America’s economic and social decline continues. The percentage of corporate profits going to employees is at its lowest level since 1966. Unemployment remains stuck around eight per cent, and the long-term jobless make up almost forty per cent of the total.  The concentration of wealth at the top grows ever more pronounced all over the world. From 2009 to 2011—the years of the financial crisis and the recovery—the income of the top one per cent rose 11.2 per cent. The income of the bottom ninety-nine per cent actually shrank 0.4 per cent. Eighty per cent of Americans believe their children will be worse off than they are. We are vermin.

The author of the article said this: When things don’t work in the realm of stuff, people turn to the realm of bits. If the physical world becomes presents a dilemma, we can take refuge in the virtual world, where we can solve problems like – how do I make a video of my skydiving adventure while keeping my hands free? Problems most people in the world don’t even know exist! Futurist Ayesha Khanna, from her think tank in London, which funds research into human-technology co-evolution and its implications, described smart contact lenses that could make homeless people disappear from view, “enhancing our basic sense” and, undoubtedly, making our lives so much more enjoyable. In a way, this does solve the problem of homelessness—unless, of course, you happen to be a homeless person.

We need to stay disentangled from all the forces that would lead us to believe human ingenuity will lead to perfection and evolution is inevitably making progress. Human ingenuity — great. Evolution — whatever. The reality of what is going on in our troubling world was striking us in the face at Childs Elementary yesterday. We made ourselves look again at how the powers keep asking people (like teachers) to make bricks without straw. We can’t make things work well enough. Even though we are smart and caring, we are not changing things fast enough to get where we think we ought to go and it makes us angry, depressed, frustrated and self-hating. Part of our anguish is caused by what is bearing down on us from the weird world that technology is creating. But most of our guilt is just that same old sin that leads us to believe that all we have us what we are and we are who we are without God giving us life.

“Take heart,” Jesus says “I have overcome the world.” When you become silent or you move into your worship connection in a few minutes, when you pray as you pray next week, take heart. Let’s receive the gift that Jesus is giving by overcoming the world and reopening the door to true, everlasting life.

God loves the world and we love it with him. But we can’t receive peace from the dying world or our false selves. We take heart, Jesus has overcome and we will too.

When we feel like we have to get it all right, we let that perfectionism lie pass right by and receive our goodness and strength from the Giver of Life.

When we think we have to do it by ourselves in the face of all the huge forces or even judge our community by how good we are, we need to recognize the seeds of a graceless future and let that impulse, that temptation, pass by and be restored and be restoring in relationship to the Lord of all. Jesus is disentangling us from the temptation to be perfect. He’s good right now, right where you’re at.

Music matters: A message to Boomer prison guards

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

Is it just me, or do you sometimes feel like you will never be released from your Boomer music prison? I was in the dim sum restaurant celebrating 8th-grade graduates and one of them stopped eating dan dan noodles as soon as “Build Me Up, Buttercup” came on the background music. We belted out, “I need you (I need you) more than anyone darling,” which was sweet. But I also thought, “Will we never be free of this song?”

Graduation Day

I went to two commencement ceremonies (loved them!) and heard 8th graders singing Boomer anthems to Boomers. But most of their parents were born in the 70’s and 80’s, weren’t they? In the first ceremony  the kids actually sang “Graduation Day” which was a hit for the Four Freshmen in 1956! I went down to gym floor as the director was cleaning up the band music to congratulate her, “Extra points for ‘Graduation Day.’ Where did you discover that?” She said, “Oh, we always sing it. It’s a tradition.”

How did that piece of fluff become a tradition? You could say, “The same reason your son  makes the Jello dessert for Thanksgiving your mother’s family still calls a salad.” Touche. But still, any use of that song does not make perfect sense to me.

I was out in the Redwoods with ten-year-olds where we discovered our cool farmhouse VRBO had a TV in their room with the Disney channel. We turned it on and there was the new Beach Boys documentary being headlined. I was interested in the Beach Boys, so we watched a bit. But I thought, “The Beach Boys hold some interest for the Disney Plus watchers?”

The Boys also came to mind during the first commencement, since Brian Wilson was obsessed with the Four Freshman and much of the brilliant harmonies he built into surf music were directly from them. The Beach Boys also recorded “Graduation Day.”

The first record Brian Wilson bought when he was a teenager in Hawthorne, CA (about an hour from where I lived), was the Four Freshmen’s 1955 album Four Freshmen And 5 Trombones. The story goes that 30 years later he still loved the album. He told an interviewer, “They had a demonstration booth where you could listen in the store and I found the Freshmen album. My mother said, ‘Do you really want to hear this?’ and I said, ‘Sure.’ So I went into the little booth and played it and fell in love with it.”

I aspired to BE one of the Beach Boys when I was young. So I find them very appealing and have almost all the songs from Pet Sounds on my playlist. But “Graduation Day” was a bit of nostalgia when the Beach Boys were young! What was it doing in an amazingly diverse class of 8th graders in Philly in 2024? Has it become “America the Beautiful?”

I turned to the grad’s older brother and said, “Couldn’t they find a more representative song than that?  Do they think people have stopped writing music?” He wasn’t really listening to me complain but he was polite. I went on to suggest, “How about ‘What Was I Made For?’” (which I recently Smuled for my sister). That would be a great commencement song for the present generation, some of whom were dressed like Barbie before our very eyes.

Forever Young

The next day we celebrated with an even more diverse class of 8th graders and they were also programmed to sing for us, which they did very nicely. But what song did their Boomer teachers (or were they GenX?) pull out for them to learn? — the classic “Forever Young” by Bob Dylan, written for his son in 1974. He recorded a couple of versions but, honestly, I have never been able to listen to him sing. Here’s my favorite of his interpreters:

Last year there was a Joan Baez documentary, too: I am A Noise. I watched part of it because I have always admired her voice and activism. She’s inspiring. It ends with her dancing in a field as an old woman, but much like any hippy would imagine Joan Baez dancing.

But what was Dylan’s song doing in a commencement ceremony 50 years after it was written? Has it become classic, like the “Hallelujah” chorus? I looked at my wife when the kids first sang, “Forever young,” and said, “No thank you.” Who in the world would want to stay young, especially always in 8th grade? I want them to be full of the brightness and hope of that moment, but I am not sure they’ll make it if they are stuck in Dylan prison.

My mind turned to all the other, more recent, sentimental music they could have used. I think Dear Evan Hansen’s  “You Will Be Found” from 2016 would have been much better. It is just like Disney but always makes me cry. This year’s grads endured the pandemic, after all.

Music matters

We live in an environment in which every sound wave is monetized. Molecules will probably soon come with pop-up adds. There is a lot of competition for our attention, which means were are mostly not attending at all. But we need to listen to the music. Music matters. The Boomer/GenX teachers keep sampling the past for feel-good nostalgia, for the muffled sounds they heard in the womb, I suspect. That’s OK. But that’s not real enough.

Music is such a wonderfully integrative art, especially singing, if we let our whole bodies get into it. That’s why churches are holding out as a place where singing in public still happens (well, there is the Phillies games and Luke Combs concerts, too). Singing is a spiritual discipline. But even if you aren’t disciplined, or aren’t really listening, it is still a spiritual experience.

The teachers, it seems to me, chose to keep their kids enclosed in a small space — the kind of space stores offer when they dish up more “Build Me Up Buttercup” while you’re looking for polenta (which they keep moving around!). The kids of the future will need a lot more than sedation or amorphous feelings of well-being. They will need a lot of spiritual imagination to get out of the mess they are in. As the atmosphere gets warmer and the warzones get wider, they will need real music to live on, not just leftovers. I hope they learn to remember way beyond 1956 and dare to write the soundtracks of healing and building way into the future.

Pentecost season

A life in the Spirit, Poetry

You are so kind Lord!
When I wondered who I am,
You said, “Call me Abba”
and the calling made me. Makes me!
I call your name and you call mine.
I name you mine and you name me back.
You are so kind, Lord!

In a day of meaningless words,
who will you send into the streets? Who?
In a day of CGI-fantasy fire,
who will marvel at the tongues? Who?
In an ocean of one-bedroom apartments,
who will join your fire-born community? Who?
In your broken-down church,
wearing its terrible reputation,
where will you show your face to the world? You!

You are so kind Lord!
I shied away from saying, “Let it be me!”
and you still said, “I’ll let it be you.
It has always been you and me.
Always. Before you were born, I knew you.
I loved you and waited for you to grow.
Waited. When you first saw me, I was looking at you.
When you were a twentysomething,
I knew what could happen and laughed.
I laughed at you thinking you were too old
to burn with fire and energize grace.
Old! If you are too old, what am I?”
You are so kind Lord!

In this season of celebration —
wearing red, singing confident songs —
this season of unimagined beginnings,
help me. Help me to be looking for you
as you seek me out again and name me.
Seek me! Lick me with the presence of the future.

Wrangling about law when “nothing is written”

A life in the Spirit, Doing Theology, Film/TV, Psychological growth, , , , , ,

One of my favorite scenes in the masterpiece, Lawrence of Arabia, shows what happens after Lawrence returns from his journey across the Nefud desert. He has just accomplished the impossible by taking the Ottoman port of Aqaba from the desert side.  Having returned across the deadly, scorching expanse, he is told one of his companions, Gasim, fell off his camel and was left behind. He is advised any attempt to save him is futile — Gasim’s death is “written.”

Lawrence goes into the desert to find Gasim.  I give you the long version of the scene of his return just to celebrate the cinematography and score. It is worth your four minutes just to watch David Lean humanize the abstraction of sand and sky.

Later on that night, after Lawrence has rehydrated and awakened in time for dinner, Sherrif Ali, in all humility, says, “Truly, for some men nothing is written unless they write it.”

I think it is safe to say Lawrence was teaching Ali to think, “Everyone decides their own fate. No one’s destiny is predetermined.” And “I’ll be damned if I let that man die.” I hesitate to disagree with Hollywood, but Lawrence is wrong even if he is brave. I don’t think it is “me, or us, against the world.” If nothing is “written” it is not because men rule  the world, but because  the world is alive with the Spirit of its Creator and is growing in grace (or in spite of it). We should be beyond arguing about what is merely written by now. But we wrangle.

Daily Mail captures Johnson at the courthouse

The fight for what is written

Last week the spectacle of Trump in court continued, with Mike Johnson, himself, attending in order to subvert the gag order (possibly in the name of Jesus), with Matt Gaetz tweeting in the ex-president’s honor, “Standing back and standing by, Mr. President.” For those guys “nothing is written until they write it,” for sure, as far as I can see.

For the prosecutors who dare to bring Trump to trial, “It is written, in the law. And no one is above it.” The law is god in a pluralisitc democracy and the prosecutors want it known the assaulters are crashing up against the stone of the legal code.

We’re having a national crisis about the law. But all those Christians involved in this battle should remember that law is just a tutor (disciplinarian, guardian, etc.) to teach us how to exercise our freedom to live in grace. Isn’t that the clear New Testament teaching? Subvert the law or apply it, it can’t kill you or save you, at least not forever.

The temptation to fight for or against what is written is everywhere, it seems.

  • Right now, many people are so afraid, they are reverting to certainty and order. Jesus Collective devolved into a teaching platform instead the catalyst for a movement. They may have fallen off their camel in the desert.
  • My former denomination has vainly tried to quash a book people have written about their experiences of being LGBTQ in their branch of the Church, cast out, and abused by what someone said was “written.” This contrary book was written by people who refused to leave someone in the desert, refused to be confined to principles imposed in the 1600’s.
  • My HOA leaders keep trying to shore up what went wrong with the past management of our old building instead of starting here and now and working together for the future. Like I said last time, someone threatened a lawsuit because of some words thrown their way! There are many lawyers scheming away.
  • My church splendidly presents ancient humans with lovely words each week and performs classic chants with great voices and instruments. They are heirs of someone else’s invention instead of inventing like the heirs we are. I think we may love being ruled by the liturgical rules.

You have your own examples, I’m sure. I think I am effectively tired, again, of everyone who teaches, “It is written.” I’m a Jesus follower, so I am mainly talking about church leaders, pulpiteers and dueling factions splitting up the Methodist Church, etc., who are wrangling over words, litigating righteousness constantly, sometimes like Trump, sometimes like the  prosecutors, but rarely in grace.

Don’t we resist bad teachers intuitively?

That is a wishful question, of course, since we follow tracks that are bad for us all the time. We believe the voices in our head defending us against what we thought might kill us as a child! We all have our own laws we follow. But don’t most of us also have an operable b.s. detector?

If we connect with Jesus at all, the Holy Spirit will be helping us detect what might really kill us.  The main way God does that is to bear witness in our own hearts, souls, minds and strengths that we are God’s adopted children in Jesus.

We tend to settle for much less than that wondrous place in the world. Nevertheless, I think we all know about it at some level. I think I felt the following truth before I read it in the Bible when I was seventeen for the first time, as a relatively aware adult:

For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you received a spirit of adoption [into the full legal standing as an heir]. When we cry, “Abba! Father!” it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs: heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, if we in fact suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him. — Romans 8:14-17 (NRSVUE)

I’ABBA, FATHER! – The Place of Praiseve always resisted the heresy of power-hungry men saying they love the Bible and then undermining the fundamental truth Paul taught. Nothing in the New Testament was written about how we should live  which was not first written by the Spirit witnessing to us, just like God taught Paul. Our organic relationship with our loving-parent-of-a-God is the central example Jesus wants to demonstrate. We’re not an application of principle, nothing is merely “written;” the Spirit is writing. We’re not unforgiveable, merely the sum of what we can make of ourselves, we’re all imminent miracles.

I have to admit, I’ve got that power-hunger in me, too. I also often feel I, alone, must solve the problems I face. We were talking in a meeting of psychotherapists not long ago about clients who struggle so hard with their view of themselves, views that have a repeating narrative, something “written,” making ruts in their brains.   They come up against certain situations and a voice comes from nowhere, it seems. It could insist, “We never cause conflict. It is deadly.” Or worse, “You are unlovable. Don’t bother.” You probably have stories that repeat in you, too.

Yet In the surprisingly psychologically-sound Romans 8 (only surprising to people who think humanity has progressed until they and their pleasant splendor is possible), we are reminded, or promised, what every one who shares Christ’s death and resurrection knows. Nothing is “written,” at least not in stone. Everything is a new creation in Jesus. We’re changing and growing in grace. The Spirit of God is creating us right now and we’re creating right alongside.

Guilt: How it starves our true selves

Climate, Music, Psychological growth, , ,

To begin this meditation on guilt, I want to confess one of my guilty pleasures. I was (OK, still am) a John Denver fan. No, I did not think he was cool, and yes, he can still make me cringe at times. But his clear, sharp tenor often often gave melody to the best of the idealistic 1970’s and 80’s. Those were years when I also expessed some of my loftiest ideals (often in song!). Like Denver, I hoped to be accepted but sometimes I was scorned.

A hunger guiltfest

I was looking through old pictures from that era as I prepared them for digitizing and ran across one from an event for the youth group we called “The Planned Famine.” Our intentional community was devoted to living simply and sharing our resources so others could live. Many of us led the youth group so we spread our convictions into the church, as well. For instance, as part of our Famine, we charged the parents and other adults  for a “Third World Dinner,” which did not go over well with some of them who got nothing and “starved.” Even today I would remind them that getting aced out of food isn’t pleasing to the 783 million hungry people in the world right now, either.  (Here are some Mormons doing the same idea we had 25 years later).

Our theme song for the 30-hour, overnite “famine” was John Denver’s “I Want to Live.” He wrote it as a potential theme song for President Carter’s Commission on world Hunger. Here he is singing it.

A lot of the dinner and the overniter was, unfortunately, about our guilt. Not the good guilt of admitting a sin against God and our true selves, but guilt before what we should have been or guilt about what others think and say about us (or might), or guilt  about our lack of laudable courage and deficit of shining character (at least compared to others). When John Denver sang, we felt ashamed of ourselves and the earth for letting people starve. Some of us became hunger warriors. Most of us just became better educated about more things to avoid.

Life under criticism and contempt

There is some room for the shame we felt, but not in the way we often feel it. When  criticism leads to guilt and contempt leads to shame, we often defend against those awful feelings with only the tools psychology offers us. They aren’t bad tools, they just aren’t up to the full task we need to complete.  Paul Tournier says,

Freud reveals to us all that remains infantile and regressive in us, our fear of life and of responsibilities, our longing for a refuge in maternal consolation. We are all children, and we feel guilty at being so lacking in courage, in virility, in adulthood. C.G. Jung widens these notions by talking of integration and by depicting [humanity’s] destiny as the acceptance of all that is within [each of us]. — (Guilt and Grace p. 54)

We cannot blame our lingering unease with ourselves on psychology alone because Christianity has specialized in guilt. It has often been better at crushing people than fulfilling its promise to set them free. Instead of surpassing Freud’s “becoming adult” and Jung’s “integration,” Christians often  criticize one another’s behavior and pour contempt on people who threaten or offend them. Maybe you don’t do that, but the church of the last decade in the U.S. has become even more famous for it.

We pour guilt on ourselves, too, even if other don’t induce it. Instead of glorying in our weakness, as the Apostle Paul insists we should, so God’s power for transformation can break into us and break out, we feel guilty that our weakness makes us powerless. We can’t do what we are meant to do. Our fear of failing at our responsibilities has made us ineffective rulers of ever-diminishing zones of personal control. We have shriveled under the comparison with others, using the whole internet to demonstrate how incapable we are of measuring up. And we may also protect others from having their own struggle with guilt by suggesting they should not be so proud as to think their desires to live are relevant or warranted, just like ours aren’t.

Baby humpback finding her wings off Maui

Leaping from the dark

When we played John Denver’s song during the Planned Famine, we had a slide show to go with it. We needed to turn up the volume of the song enough to overcome the distracting squeal and click of slides moving around their carousel. The faces of child after child came on the screen from around the world, some happy, many starving, some dying. John sang for them,

I want to live I want to grow
I want to see I want to know
I want to share what I can give
I want to be I want to live

And then he changed to the hopeful imagery of animals marine ecologists were just coming to understand.

Have you gazed out on the ocean,
Seen the breaching of a whale?

We put up a beautiful slide of a whale leaping out of the depths. I vividly remember the small, involuntary gasp it aroused in me, “I want to do that.”

I want to do it because Freud is right. We are all children singing, “I want to live.” I want to leap because Jung is right. From the depths of the great ocean of the unconscious self, even the collective unconscious, if you like, our true selves are coming up to the surface for air. If we get out of the way, they might leap into the sky with joy.

It takes some courage to leap, to suck in clear air. It takes some effort to be real, to swim free in the ocean of grace in which we live. If we dive in and leap out, we know our previous methods of self-preservation will need to die. We know we will have to admit we cannot effectively avoid all the things that cause us to condemn ourselves: our lack of genuine relationships with mates and friends, our resistance to admitting our faults, our willingness to avoid responsibility, our lack of forgiveness, lack of solidarity with our struggling acquaintances and loved ones, our unfaithfulness to God and others. We will have to see how we flee, fight, and freeze because fear rules us.

Tournier, again says

To be faithful to oneself would mean to always be like oneself in all circumstances, in the presence of any interlocutor. We remain silent in turn about either our deepest convictions or the doubts which inevitably arise concerning them. We hide our feelings, or else we show them to be more ardent than they really are. To be faithful to oneself would mean to be natural, spontaneous, fearless of the opinions of others. (p. 57)

I think we all feel a calling to be faithful to our truest selves, perhaps from our first cry after leaving the womb. We want to live. I think we can at least imagine how God called us into being and can hear at least a faint voice encouraging us to live, full and free, embodying everything we’ve been given to be and do. I wish for you a moment of joy today when you dare to breach the surface. May your unique, childlike, fully-welcomed desires and fully-honored genius be well-fed and lively.

Thirty-three and thirty-three again

Poetry,

Today, the sun rises again
and the Son again rises with it.
You may want to sleep through it again,
the pillow over your head in dread again.
It may burn your eyelids as it invades your bed,
make you queasy with its sky turning red,
make your dizzy brain reel in the face of new day.
You may resist it all and hit the snooze,
pick up the phone and zero out, or lay
and feel the uneasy knowledge of staying still.

On your road to your Emmaus
you may not spy the bloom among us
right there at the edge of your blinders.
You may not recognize the warming,
the gentle, but binding, binding heat
of burning light in the deep, in the dark,
in the places you are sure no one sees,
in the old pains you feel will never heal,
in the memories you cannot forget,
in the aches you never could forgive.

But there He is again. You
turn your head and catch his eye again.
You take the bread from his hand again
and the moment is an eternity before
he’s gone missing, gone in some fog —
working and loving, God in God,
until he rises from the good earth again,
descends through a thin place again,
connects through a tender touch again,
surprises with that distant voice again.

My new friends call it Eastertide. It
ebbs and flows unstoppable, again and again; its
waves of life, sweet and swelling, wake us up to live again.

Would you like to hear me read it? Here is a link.

Today is John Leonhard Dober Day! He is the first missionary the Moravian Brethren chose to send out from Herrnhut in 1727. He has a remarkable story of faith and courage. Get to know him at The Transhistorical Body.