Monthly Archives: June 2009

June 26, 2009 · 5:44 am

Mortality

Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson

I was probably 10, or somewhere close, when I first became aware of the Jackson 5. The Osmonds were in there, too. (He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother) The boy singing the lead in the stratosphere was cute as a bug, and had talent forever. I was never a big fan of the moonwalk, maybe because I just couldn’t do it. But as the years rolled on, the cute-as-a-bug kid became an icon, a master of music and show, and it was truly thrilling to watch his work. Thriller was just that, the announcement of a new age in both video and music, and all should have been right with the world with Michael Jackson, King of Pop.

Obviously, it wasn’t.

Farrah Fawcett

Farrah Fawcett

Farrah was another story. The women of Charlie’s Angels were beautiful, sexy, fantasies for young adolescent boys, of which I was one. If I’m not mistaken, I still have the iconic poster of Farrah stuck in some box in the garage, pack rat that I am. She was never a real person in my mind, at least not until later years, when her life went south, too, and I became aware of various disturbances in her world. Her beauty wasn’t enough to save her, and to watch it fade in both fact and memory panged me.

I also remember distinctly thinking, way back in the 70′s, that it would be weird when the popular people who were our stars and contemporaries began to die. And it is strange. Michael Jackson was 50. I am 50. 60 is a blink away. We live and breathe by the grace of God. As I deal with people facing life’s various seriousnesses each day, I see so clearly that we are not in control of our lives. We choose, we live, we react, we take action, we love. Leaning against so much that seems to push at us, yet eventually, on the physical side, we just wear out. Maybe its cancer, maybe it’s a heart attack, maybe it’s just living way too long to keep going, but one day, it’s done.

A wonderful woman in our congregation has been waiting to die for almost a year, seems like, a victim of a brain tumor. Just this past week, she was finally released, and we all prayed our thanks to God for his mercy. Yet the whole enterprise begs so many questions. Especially in light of the books I’m reading. One is Thomas R. Kelly’s A Testament of Devotion, and the other is The Evidential Power of Beauty, by Thomas Dubay. Both books testify to Glory, to Beauty that is divine, unfathomable, unending, and beyond comprehension, and that those who are truly alive walk in it’s wake, seeking it always. In the face of mortality and loss, truth, beauty, and goodness keep speaking, keep calling out, keep spreading over the world. Tired hands offering the cup of cold water, weary feet walking alongside the lonely, aching backs picking up yet one more burden on behalf of the other, all of us moving along a path the end of which holds great promise.

Don’t really know how to say what I’m thinking, or trying to think, but after my sermon prep from yesterday, in which I encountered once again the giant questions surrounding the holiness of God, I am in a sort of tired awe. Tonight I lead worship at Celebrate Recovery, then again Sunday morning (alongside a good brother), and then again in a special Sunday night time. And I preach the final sermon is a series about what it might mean to live out the verbs of the Christ. Given mortality, seems fit to keep trying.  To live the verbs, I mean.

To feed, to heal, to seek out, to embrace, to call, to train, to discipline, to challenge, to listen, to pause….to love…

After Sunday, Shakespeare…

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June 23, 2009 · 5:29 am

Up

Pixar's Up

Pixar's Up

We get excited about Pixar movies at my house. And we often talk about going to see the latest Pixar movie together, but it rarely works out. The release of Up was no exception. We talked about it, suggested times, but in the end, Anjie and Daniel saw it first while I was in Chicago for the Arts Conference, and I don’t think Amy got to see it before she took off for New York last week. Yesterday, I was wandering around on a desperately needed Sabbath, and decided to drive by the new Thornton Creek Regal Cinema complex up the street from me, and I pulled in and saw that Up was scheduled to start in 10 minutes. I thought, why not.

Carl and Ellie. The Spirit of Adventure. A bird of bright plumage, a pack of dogs speaking in odd patterns a la electronic collars, and balloons–enough balloons to lift a house off it’s foundation and sail it around the world to an exact spot that is the locus of dreams. A small adventurer stowaway rendered in pudgy roundness. A poignant death, a book of “Stuff I’m going to do” with so many empty pages, and a decision to chase adventure after all.

I wept a little–want to again as I write this–over the beautiful simplicity of the relationship between Carl and Ellie. So recognizable, these adventures you swear you’re going to have and life happens and things don’t go just that way, and yet, the life that happens is just so gorgeous if you open your eyes. There are always adventures that go untaken because of the adventure you choose. There is no adventure like relationship, none nearly so satisfying, so demanding, so dangerous, and so freeing. And of course, it is the relationship that provides the fuel for the journey Carl takes on behalf of Ellie, the adventure that had the elements we come to expect from adventure–travel, exotic locale, heroes and villains. But in the end, it’s back to relationship, and new friends rescue each other in different ways, the ways in which we all need to be rescued.

As the credits rolled, I thought, how beautiful. Not necessarily my favorite Pixar effort, but a work of art, a work of beauty. Such resonance and poignancy. A simple and quirky road to truth. As all the reviewers are saying, it soars.

Beautiful making, lifted me…

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June 20, 2009 · 6:47 am

Making, and Making Music

Why is it that when people read my scripts, I am not terribly threatened by their response? I write as much lousy dialogue and description as anybody, and the fact that people point it out to me in the process is fine with me. It’s the nature of the work. It wasn’t really true in the beginning, but I got used to it. Obviously, you have to live it with it if your work is ever going to grow.

But music has been a different thing. I don’t know why, which is why I’m taking a minute to reflect on it. I once wrote a Christmas musical for church that a friend told me later he hated. Well, he didn’t say hated. But he did say that there was nothing in it, save one character, that he liked. The music, he said was derivative (terrible thing to tell a writer, as if the vast majority of things weren’t in some measure derivative–can anyone say Shakespeare? But it hurts our pride. Hah…) I didn’t write anything for over six months. Spun into a pretty deep depression, and to this day, I’d kill the desire to write music if I could. And sad to say, I’ve been more successful at killing that impulse than is probably good.

But I always end up rolling back around to it. Since trombone in the sixth grade and singing “500 miles” in the third, I’ve been doing music. Picked up a guitar as a sophomore in high school and have been bumming around with one ever since. But still, when I trot out a song, it’s one of the most terrifying things I do. Not that I think my music is particularly strong or insightful–I’m pretty sure they’re average, run-of-the-mill kinds of songs. But for some reason, when I think that, or worse, when someone tells me that, I default to the notion that I’m average, run-of-the-mill, or probably worse.

Pride. Drives me nuts.

But it makes me sensitive to all the making we do. Again, the creative urge lived out connects something of our hearts to a material something we offer the world. And inevitably, it means we are parading something of our invisible selves for the world to react to, enjoy, or despise. We trade in “goods” that we make and are making, and that commerce is called relationship. It’s easy to see why acceptance means so much.

I’ll keep making songs here and there. Can’t help it, really. Just like you can’t help making whatever you make. Truth is, God’s called us to it, according to the gifts we have.

Takes faith to keep going.

Keep going….

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June 19, 2009 · 8:27 am

Inspiration

Hard to say where it comes from.  The Greeks thought it came from the gods, from the muses.  I suppose I still think it does, from God, from sources of creation and spirit that He oversees and delivers in mystery, in conversation, in idea and image.  My son is no doubt being inspired even as we speak, roaming the streets of Paris.  My daughter sits on a plane headed for New York, where she will work as an intern in a casting agency, no doubt finding inspiration in the Broadway plays she will see over the next six weeks, not to mention the energy of the city itself.  Yesterday, it came for me through a brief conversation with the pastor of a small inner city church in Portland.

I spoke with Ike about A Cappella music.  But what he told me about was the kingdom of God, and worship, and what it means to “bring it all.”  He told me the story of the young people at his church that worship with such impact and energy (makes me think of the word “furiously”) that they couldn’t keep the projector throwing the lyrics on the wall steady.

To inspire.  To breathe into.  To borrow breath from.   For some reason, I took some breath out of that conversation, and almost imperceptibly, began to move with a quicker step, with a lighter heart, with a more purposeful and hopeful energy.  I guess after talking about “taking Kingdom ground” on Sunday, it was great and inspiring to hear from someone so obviously doing just that.

Give breath.  Inspire.  Take ground.   Who knows what life will change…

Read that last sentence however you want…

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June 18, 2009 · 6:56 am

Emotions

Two weeks ago, our film group watched an old film that isn’t on anybody’s great list.  Equilibrium is a Matrix wanne-be starring Christian Bale who plays a bad-guy turned good guy in a world that’s decided the only answer to war is to get rid of all emotion.   Dumb movie, really, but it led us to talking about the role of emotional life in human beings, and what the Bible might have to say about it.  I was in Chicago last week, so last night was our first chance to dig into the Bible about all of it.  And one of the first comments was regarding something that puzzled me for a long time.   The Bible has very little to say about emotional life, at least directly.  Now before you take me to task, I know “Jesus wept” and everybody talks about his full humanity and that he laughed a lot and that he had lots of passion, which is emotion (think he was calm while he was throwing the buyers and sellers out of the temple?), but that’s not really what I mean.

We live in a world of romantic notions about emotion.  What we “feel” is paramount.  And “feeling”…well.  “Feel” covers a whole gamut of things from internal sensations that arise out of who knows where to tactile sensations to emotional reactions instinctual, instantaneous, or those that develop over time.  “Feel” also includes intuition, and even certain kinds of rational moves.  Last night we talked about what Eve felt as she stood pondering the fruit the serpent said wouldn’t kill her after all.  Pleasing to the eye, good for food, it would make her wise…hmmm.   No Greek-like description of passion, but a rather straight-forward list of things we know elevate heart-rate and respiration.  Sounds like she just flat wanted.  James says it’s our desire that entices us, and what desire doesn’t have emotional life wrapped up in it.   Then we talked about David and Bathesheba, and read II Samuel 11.  David’s lust for Bathesheba (and for that matter, her parading in front of the king–albeit from a distance–on a rooftop naked), then his panic over her pregnancy and the resulting madness of his action…lots of emotional life roiling there.

We talked about the centuries old debate about the basic dividedness of human beings.   Rational vs. emotional, right brain-left brain, head vs. heart–all of these trying to describe what we all feel (there’s that word again), the conflictedness when there are two things we want, and we must choose, navigating the treacherous water between thinking and feeling, both of which are glorious functions and experiences God gave us.   But rivers can quench thirsts and they can drown and break us on rocks, and the power of emotion is a bit the same way.

The Bible treats us as full human beings I think, and the stories are rife with the full gamut of human emotion, if you know how to imagine and read between the lines.  And while emotion is not the core of the human, I’m not sure there is a core if emotion is not there.

Just thinking…you’d think that passion would be on the list of the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5), but no…

…but self-control is…

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