Monthly Archives: September 2008

September 28, 2008 · 7:51 am

Pre-Preacher Thinking

I’m not preaching this morning, so I’ve been up thinking, as in the old days.  Not to say I don’t think anymore, but the kind of thinking I did pre-preaching and now are somehow different.  This morning seemed like the pre-days, and my journaling was a bit more like spelunking, discovery…not so much trying to prove a thing.

I kept cycling back around to the big things, things that transcend.  Life itself, the meaning of being human, the perceived, yet false, split of mind-body, as if human being is an awkward splicing of different elements that are in their essence completely foreign to each other.   As I think about God making, and something interfering so that now death enters the picture, so that we all die, are dying, doomed to head back to dust, and as I consider what the work of God is today, what the work of divinity is, I keep wanting to climb out of the religious box into the open landscape of the real.   To be clear, it is no rejection of religion, but a rejection of religion as a separate category, walled off from life as it must actually be lived.

Life given, death on the march, a rescue mission underway, always underway.  Death is the big one, but every loss is a little death, from the inner battles lost, moments of sheer selfishness claimed in jaw-clenched rebellion to the slipping away of a half-century of dreams.  “Who will save me from the body of death?” the apostle cries.   We echo his answer so swiftly, but in our day, we often don’t want to say we need to be saved.  As Thomas Merton said, the meaning of rescue is so much more than just getting back in the boat after having nearly drowned.   When we’re drowning, and the moment is life and death, salvation means all the moments to come in the years gotten back when you climb out of the death lapping at your heels.

It’s so profound to say that life is the point.  We’ve declared at the Northwest Church that one of our five core values is life, that life is the point of all it.   However you perceive Him to be, God makes life to be lived.  I sometimes want to push back and say no, the point is love.  But then, love is life, life is love, back and forth, interdependent, one leads to the other and back again, a mobius strip of divine intention.

I also thought about those words of Paul.  “Everything that does not proceed from faith is sin.”   When we launch in fear and doubt, we miss the mark, which is the classical meaning of the Greek word in the NT translated “sin.”  Faith matters in the world, in art-making, in sport, in relationship…everywhere the evidence points to the truth of Paul.

Holiness, love, power, faith, death, eternity, mind/body, the Christ…beauty, making…

Just thinking, praying, as in the old days…

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September 27, 2008 · 7:26 am

“Tell It To Him”

I watched about 40 minutes of the presidential debate last night and walked away shaking my head over the state of discourse and the odd role of media. Seems to me the differences in the candidates are pretty large and become pretty clear the more you hear them talk about what’s important to them and the way they would go about going after their particular agendas.

In my view it was Jim Lehrer who lost ground. He is the well-respected news anchor from PBS, but on this night it seemed his chief job was to goad the candidates into face-to-face confrontation, hoping for sparks that make for good TV. He kept asking the candidates to say something directly to the other, hoping mostly for those sparkling exchanges we love so much on ESPN and Crossfire-type shows, where combatants get snippy and stop the dialogue and begin engaging in belittling each other with smirks and “can you believe this idiot” facial grimaces. And this morning in the Washington Post, Dana Milbank paints the picture of what she calls “tepid” responses that frustrated Lehrer, as if Lehrer was forced to badger the candidates in order to get some substance from these guys. And I understand that politicians avoid specifics and questions so reporters pursue and push. But it’s one thing to push for deeper and better answers, and another to push for the emotional confrontation that makes for good TV.

Maybe that’s who we are anymore, unsatisfied as we gather at the national arena of political gladiators, the TV. Ideas, those things that have consequences and rewrite history, aren’t nearly enough. Let’s have our visceral confrontations, and pick the fighter we like best. And I’m not naive enough to think personality and emotional patterns are irrelevant, and many a smart man or woman has been destroyed by personality quirks and emotional outbursts, but still, what these men think and what action they will take is what is at stake. Must they badger and squabble at each other, TV hosts goading them as if that’s the point, in order for us to grasp what we need to grasp?

Call me old-fashioned, but in the film The Great Debaters, set in the mid-1930s, a small all-black college from Texas takes on the big Ivy League Champions from Harvard in a debate that was nationally broadcast on radio. The topic was race, so the stakes are not small. As they debated in full hearing of the nation, can you imagine the moderator trying to goad them into arguing face to face? Somehow it appears absurd, because it would drop the entire plane of discussion, robbing it of the dignity demanded by the severity of the issue. If the two teams had stood jaw to jaw interrupting each other, personally belittling the opposing side not with sharp thought, but with visible facial contempt and disdain, etc., would the frank superiority of the winning argument have been nearly as clear?

We talk about the need to end partisan bickering, but on national TV, we goad our candidates toward what Milbank in the Post calls “blood-letting.” And when she mentions we finally got to it, “blood-letting” is without doubt a relief, almost the debate’s reason for being. Again, I’m just out of step with the times, I suppose, but I’ll be glad when the blood-letting is over.

Enough of that…

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September 26, 2008 · 5:44 am

Beauty Arriving

“Thou know’st the mask of night is on my face…”

You never know when a face is going to show….

I have always enjoyed teaching acting. There’s always a small voice in the back of my head wondering about the whole notion of memesis, the old Greek idea of imitation, and the various means by which we approach according to the ideas of the day. How best to mimic the action of the human being, so that it’s presence on a stage becomes a force, a mirror with intention, almost Disney-like, from which we beg wisdom, or at least input. “Who is the fairest? What is the meaning of ‘fairest’? Show us the good and the bad, and who we were, are, and might be.” So men and women, young and old, they climb onto the boards with words heavy in their mouths and hearts and they proclaim the state of the race as best the playwright and director see it.

But behind and before all those $60-$100 moments (Far more if it’s TV and film) there are the days when the actor struggles alone, in a studio, in a class, maybe even in the basement of your acting teacher’s home, because that’s where he sets up shop. And you work with words and articulation and the speed of thought Shakespeare requires, the speed of human being, and it’s hard, and who knows if you’ll ever get it right. The teacher prods and pulls, fusses and frowns, hunting alongside you, looking for keys that will unlock not acting talent, but human contact, that strange connection between a soul and its inner life, that inner life buried by all manner of social expectations, games, sins, and flat fear, all of which rides beneath the surface of things. We don’t even know we have blocks keeping eternity’s light from shining up through us, but oh…when they are suddenly removed through an act that combines grace and sweat and God’s very Spirit, we suddenly, in a moment, realize all we’ve been missing.

When an actor gives you that as audience, you can only weep in gratitude.

I say this because I had such a moment yesterday. Unexpected, a sheer gift the giver doesn’t grasp. An actor simply working, a speech from Romeo and Juliet, and progress is being made, and a thought comes to me, and I ask her to try a thing, as I’ve asked her before, this and that, a step taken, now another back. But this day, this moment, in the mundane of things, something happens, something clicks, and she emerges. Suddenly, the words are not longer words, but shafts of light illuminating a heart that reaches from Shakespeare’s pen across the centuries, and in my little basement, there it is, the old familiarity of the curtain parting that only comes occasionally now. In such moments, time stands still. I don’t know why. It is what it is. How does heart a break, yet thrill at its breaking?

Break me in such ways everyday, O God. Your presence is more than I can stand, and with less, I am never full.

It’s embarrassing of course. The actor doesn’t really realize what she’s done. And her teacher, if he were to let go, would simply weep in joy for a long, long time…sappy, overdramatic, blah, blah, blah. But no, he gathers himself together, and moves on. Let’s try it again, he says, and the actor launches in again. Behind him, Beauty smiles, passing into memory. He glances back, and She waves, a gesture of reminder, and the lesson is over.

Over?

It’s never over, and I wonder…what to learn? Why this gift? Why now?

I’m listening, thankful…

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September 25, 2008 · 6:46 am

Girl with a Pearl Earring

Girl with a Pearl Earring

Girl with a Pearl Earring

After frozen pizza that was better than you’d think, spicy chicken fingers and potatoes, and salad that someone wondered over, asking if anchovy might be in the dressing, we finally wandered downstairs to watch a film only one person besides myself had seen. “This doesn’t have much dialogue, does it?” she said, and she was right. Girl with a Pearl Earring, the film by Peter Webber providing a rich backstory to one of the more famous paintings in the world by the same title, is a quiet movie, which is just fine with me. The lack of auditory input allows the eye to rest more fully on the endless series of gorgeous, painter-like shots. In 17th century Holland, Johannes Vermeer (Colin Firth) finds inspiration and passion in the eyes of a young maid named Greit (Scarlett Johansson) who can see light, composition, and meaning the way he sees them, and recognizing that, the two form an unspoken connection that sizzles, though they never touch.

The discussion after was interesting, exploring the moral dilemmas of making art, and wondering whether the appearance of a great work of art justifies the sometimes destructive actions of the artist. In Girl with a Pearl Earring, Vermeer’s wife is not a woman we particularly like. He seems stuck in a world of philistines who have no sensitivity to the beauty of the world (at least not the beauty Vermeer sees) or to him. All around him are schemers and whiners, begging for attention and affection while he stares at the maid in the corner, not so much with lust (although that can be debated) but with a pull toward beauty and connection. Vermeer, obviously lonely, filled with longing, passionately pursuing something he can barely name…such romantic description begs us to create a sort of cushion for him, as if the choices he makes in service to his art, in service of his very self (is being true to your “self” selfish or age old wisdom?) have a certain moral immunity because of his ability to create such powerful work.

The conversation then broadened, and we saw that these dilemmas face everyone, that we all have “great paintings” that we chase, those achievements that we think will finally give us satisfaction and meaning. And the temptation is always there to pursue such things regardless of what one person called the collateral damage. Finally, a newcomer to the group pointed out the world remembers the people who made deep sacrifices in order to single-mindedly pursue their passions. He was a scientist, and his point hit home with some strength. Maybe if a person makes a contribution that changes the world, then perhaps the cost to his family is worth it–at least that was the suggestion.

It brings us back to God’s perspective of time, achievement, the worth of the person, and the long-term (generational and eternal) consequences of the choices we make.

God does not see things as we do…

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September 24, 2008 · 6:53 am

Trusting the Mind

Okay, here’s a heady entry.  Let’s just say it’s needed at this moment.

Personally, the deepest injury postmodernism inflicts on the unsuspecting is the severing of the basic trust between the mind and the self.  What I mean is simple:  if we are locked inside our own perspective, our own  cultural influences, and we can’t shake it off to see the world in any “true” sense, one logical leap to make (it’s not the only one) is that we cannot trust the thoughts we think.  Who is to say that one thought of mine is any better than another?  Perhaps the process of logic itself is flawed, a silly Greek invention to be thrown off if reality is to be apprehended.   The process of thinking itself, bringing images and ideas before the mind for analysis (ahhh!-there it is again, cultural bias! Oh, no!) or experience…maybe the whole thing is bogus, a never-ending circle cycling back on itself until thankfully death releases us from the cruel illusion that humanity has even the slightest shred of dignity.  Perhaps we live in a madhouse, idiots every one, unable to do nothing close to what we have called independent thinking, little more than siphons sucking in whatever anyone says, helpless but to pretend that we are actually choosing, creating, making, inventing, contributing to something as mundane and impossible as the good of humanity, as if there was such a thing among asylum inmates.

Sorry for the rant.

But once you give up the notion that you can trust your thought life to any appreciable degree, you are lost.   Truly.

Some will accuse me of advocating that strange idea that we control things with our thought.  No, no, no.  But in the end, what do we have but the ability and responsibility to interact with experience with the totality of our thought-life, our mind, our felt experience of consciousness.  Every word that comes in, every sound, every nuance of color and light and touch, every image that embeds itself in memory and fantasy, every idea that hangs around in the gray matter looking for an antecedent to give it a place to anchor-this is our mind.  God help us, it’s all we’ve got, and history, scripture, and practical living tell us quite plainly that some ways of utilizing it are far better than others.  And constantly, constantly, streams of ideas, images, and emotions are coming at us, hoping to impact us, influence us, tempt us, encourage us, foisting any number of other energies, working, working to make us into this or that.

As an artist, I think of all the input of life as material.   We must pick and choose, shape and mold, think and rethink, and apply the heart of human energy as the potter applies pressure to the clay.  I know, you Bible folks, that that image belongs to God, and that we are the clay, but the image is no less applicable to the material that is life as we sit at our own mini potter’s wheel.   God throws us, and we throw the world…as least our part of it.

To sit at the wheel in hesitancy is to watch the clay spin in chaos and drop off the wheel in mere splats.  Just think, we could have been making vessels to hold living water.

For what it’s worth…

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