Monthly Archive for January, 2006

How to Dismantle an International Incident (a.k.a. Turning the Other Cheese)

Published
by
Chad
on 31 January 2006
in current events, faith and theology and politics
. 7 Comments

Nigel Powers: [to Goldmember] There are only two things I can’t stand in this world. People who are intolerant of other people’s cultures… and the Dutch.

A short while ago, a Danish Newspaper published a cartoon depiction of the Prophet Mohammed with a turban shaped like a bomb on his head, fuse lit. Protests erupted in every corner of the Muslim world, and boycotts against Scandinavian goods went into full swing. I heard a story on NPR this morning about a Danish Cheese company, who had spent 20+ years developing a $430,000,000.00 a year business dealing Danish products to the middle east has seen their entire operation grind to a halt in about five days.

A few minutes spent scanning the internet will find you many stories journaling the protests rising from the streets of Muslim nations, and echoing in the halls of international power. This is kind of a big story.

The Muslim world is reacting with great passion because it’s considered blasphemy to even depict the Prophet visually, much less with an explosive on his head. They’re passionate about protecting the image of their leader from sarcastic pagans who most likely have little actual perspective about their beliefs, and they’re willing to put 11,000 Danes out of work to do it. Of course, I’d wager that somewhere between 10,997 and 11,000 of those about to be unemployed don’t have side careers in political cartoon satire, but sometimes you gotta crack some eggs to make an omelet… or something like that.

I started thinking about how, while growing up, I fiercely resented it when people would mock Jesus. When I would see the Darwin Fish, or a flippant cartoon, or a bizarre or mischaracterized portrayal, it would get me all hot and bothered.

Christianity is on the business end of a lot of mockery in this world, and you know what? I don’t really care anymore. I don’t care because I have decided that the only real way to impact the way the world feels about Jesus is to simply love more and be pissed less. I don’t care becuase all my justified anger and well argued statements over the years haven’t done a thing for the Kingdom. My guess is that the only meaningful conversation I could have would be, of course, in the context of a friendship, expressing the emotional pain that I physically feel when someone who doesn’t really understand Christ mocks Him, whether it be a comedian going for a cheap laugh, or an Evangelical Church leader who’s apparently forgetten their first love.

Don’t get me wrong… I still struggle when images are presented, or words are spoken, or stories are told that are told that get it wrong, but I just don’t think that Christ needs me to go out and kick ass in His name. I think I wanted to kick ass in my name, ’cause kickin’ ass feels good!

I cannot help but wonder if the Muslim world needs to adjust to the idea that their faith is going to be mocked. It’s going to be mocked by the informed and uninformed, the infidel and the faithful. All religious faith will, from time to time, be mocked in many media and method until the day (I believe) Jesus will return to set any and all records straight.

I cannot help but wonder if the best thing we could do, as people of faith, would be to chill the hell out with our rhetoric and protests, and be examples of restraint, intelligence, and grace as we defend our Leaders.

I feel strange making a plea of this nature to people with whom I don’t share core beliefs, but here it is anyways: let God decide who’s right. Let God decide who’s walking in the council of the wicked, or standing with sinners, or sitting with mockers. You honor Mohammed by shaming the pagans with your restraint and righteousness, and I’ll honor Jesus with grace and kindness, and we’ll both better off.

God will judge, for God sees.

P.S. I realize that there is a difference between the Dutch and the Danes, but the quote was just too good to overlook, and far be it from me to edit or change brilliant comedy.












Headlines with Chad

Published
by
Chad
on 31 January 2006
in current events, laugh! and life
. 4 Comments

Authors Note: This was originally the opening of the little piece on the Mohammed Cartoon / Cheese boycott, but it made it way too long and off topic. However, I thought this was funny and worth publishing on it’s own. You may disagree.

Well, today has been quite a news day.

First, there’s the death of Coretta Scott King. I found myself wondering why I didn’t know more about her, wishing I did. I marveled that, had he not faced the assassin’s bullet, Dr. King might have still been alive today, and wishing that he was.

Samuel Alito was sworn in as a Justice of the United States Supreme Court today, and will attend the State of the Union address, which happens tonight in Washington D.C. We can only hope for jaw dropping excitement.

The Academy Award Nominations were announced this morning. Terrance Howard rules in Hustle and Flow, William Hurt is the deserving suprise for his brief and utterly hynotic turn in A History of Violence, and Narnia over Star Wars for visual effects!? Are you guys freakin NEW!? The Academy has issues.

A Postal Service Worker killed five people in a mail processing facility in Goleta, California last night, about eighty miles from my home. This is in no way funny. It’s tragic. It’s horrifying. Why did it have to be a postal worker? Talk about reinforcing a stereotype… sheesh.

Alan Greenspan retired. I have no idea if this is a good or a bad thing.

A Scientific Study conducted by the minds of www.askmen.com revealed today that Jessica Alba is this year’s lucky winner of the “Most Desirable as a Girlfriend” list for 2006. Alba was quoted as saying, “Well… I guess that’s better then ‘Top Middle Aged Men’s Fantasy Sexual Object,’” a prize which Alba has claimed three years running by the readers at www.oldpervs.com.

Home Improvement

Published
by
aly hawkins
on 29 January 2006
in life
. 39 Comments

Ash & I are installing new laminate flooring in our condo. Let me emphasize: not hiring someone to install it…installing it. For those of you who have been to our place, you know we’ve had truly hideous carpet for almost two years, and I can’t express how excited we are to trade it in for a cleaner, brighter living space. (It’s crazy how much more light is in here! Stupid light-absorbing carpet.)

When we bought this place (probably prematurely) two years ago, we viewed it as a “starter home,” a shady, money-making idea somebody thought up when real estate investment became the fashion. Yeah, we kinda liked it (1/2 a block from the beach), but it was 30 minutes from work and the complex was a lot like one of those ’70s era hotels where all the rooms open out to the pool: starter home. Not where we want to end up, but a way to “get in the market.”

Real estate hooie.

‘Cause the reality is that every other place we might actually want to live has increased its value at exactly the same rate as our “starter home” and we have a snowman’s chance in hell of affording the mythical “trade up.”

Since climbing on the middle class treadmill is not an option we want or can afford, over the last few months we’ve considered some other options: Move out of state? Sell and go back to renting with a tidy nest egg in the bank? Keep spinning the wheels, hating our home and waiting for the lottery win?

In the end, we chose to make our home a home. We’re not ready to move away from Cali, it would be silly to go back to renting, and we have no one to blame but ourselves if we just stay miserable. Ergo, laminate flooring and other [cheap] projects we’re pursuing with HGtv enthusiasm.

I have to say, we’re having fun. Being blessed with two people in the family with rather strong opinions about aesthetics is not a picnic every single minute, but letting our imaginations run wild is just what the doctor ordered for our drab little existence. And it’s truly amazing to be planting our feet in now…not wishing for something different or better, not waiting for our ship to come in. This is our life. There isn’t something grander around the corner…there is only what we make of it today.

And it’s pretty damn wonderful.

Songs That Annoy Christians But Shouldn’t #2 - I Will Follow You Into the Dark

Published
by
Chad
on 29 January 2006
in art and culture, faith and theology and writing workshop
. 13 Comments

Our second song comes from the oh-so-sensitive Seattle band Death Cab for Cutie. Aaah Death Cab, how I love thine EMOtive ways. For those of you not baptized into the cult, DCFC got started several years ago in Bellingham Washington, releasing a series of increasingly successful albums on the independent Barsuk label.

Then DCFC released their most accomplished album to date, Transatlanticism, in late 2003, just as a little show called The OC was raising up getting it’s tan on. I have never watched the show, but apparantly The OC features a character who is obsessed with the band and talks about them relentlessly.

Around the same time, lead singer Ben Gibbard did this little side gig with a programmer buddy in L.A., and they named themselves The Postal Service, since they never actually collaborated in the same room together, but emailed (or snailmailed) tracks back and forth in various phases of completion. Their album, Give Up, was a suprise hit, and you hear it everywhere, even if you don’t realize it. The song Such Great Heights, has become so ubiquitous in commercials and TV promotion that my bank account gets weepy just thinking about it.

Anyways… Death Cab is now a big band, and their latest album, Plans, was co-released by Atlantic Records, giving them worldwide distribution and promotion. The song in question comes from this latest album, and it really caught my ear. It’s not a single, and it’s not that popular of a song, but I will bet you dollars to pesos that it has annoyed some Christian, somewhere. So, I write this little essay for them.

We begin with a simple guitar pattern and Gibbard’s gentle tenor singing:

Love of mine some day you will die
But I’ll be close behind
I’ll follow you into the dark
No blinding light or tunnels to gates of white
Just our hands clasped so tight
Waiting for the hint of a spark

Nice happy little ditty here, Ben. Way to go. I think I’ll go eat some razors to cheer up. Where are we going with this?

If heaven and hell decide
That they both are satisfied
Illuminate the no’s on their vacancy signs
If there’s no one beside you
When your soul embarks
Then I’ll follow you into the dark

Wow. This guy believes there’s no heaven or hell, or if there were, that they might be disqualified for both for one reason or another. He doesn’t know where they’re going, but only that he’s committed to go there with her. I find a beauty in this sentiment, even though I do believe in an afterlife that will be impacted by how I spend my time here. So often we as believers are quick to point out the flaws in secular humanism, but we’ve missed one critical strength of their worldview: they hold on tight to one another, because that’s all we have if there’s no God. How wonderful might it be were we to cling to one another so fiercly in God’s name?

In Catholic school as vicious as Roman rule
I got my knuckles brusied by a lady in black
And I held my tongue as she told me
“Son fear is the heart of love”
So I never went back

And it all comes clear.

I believe that perhaps the most destructive force in Christianity is our predestination doctrine. I firmly believe that, while God calls us to Himself, we are actively engaged in this great experiment called free will. We so often (either when explaining someone else’s inexplicable bad behavior or our complacency) just expect God to work some things out that, frankly, He wants us to deal with! I fear that there were souls throughout history who might have chosen Him had they actually experienced Jesus. Ben Gibbard did not experience Jesus, so he claims not The Name. I think that sucks.

If heaven and hell decide
That they both are satisfied
Illuminate the no’s on their vacancy signs
If there’s no one beside you
When your soul embarks
Then I’ll follow you into the dark

Here’s our chorus again, and in the light of verse 2, it’s worth reprinting. He’d rather follow his love into blackness then go back to that place of judgement and violence. I would too, most likely.

You and me have seen everything to see
From Bangkok to Calgary
And the soles of your shoes are all worn down
The time for sleep is now
It’s nothing to cry about
Cause we’ll hold each other soon
In the blackest of rooms

I don’t know whether to think this is lovely or hopelessly tragic. One side of me deeply resonates with the profoundly counter-cultural sentiment expressed here. Don’t try and hold on to things too tightly. Don’t worry so much. It will be ok, because we’re together… and if we’re asleep, we won’t know we’re together.

Another side of me thinks that the fatal flaw and ultimate downfall of secular humanism is that this kind of whatever-will-be-will-be attitude (however poetically rendered) will not enough to keep us all moving the right direction, towards peace instead of war, towards justice instead of exploitation, towards hope instead of despair. There must be something more… something towards which we must reach.

If heaven and hell decide
That they both are satisfied
Illuminate the no’s on their vacancy signs
If there’s no one beside you
When your soul embarks
Then I’ll follow you into the dark
Then I’ll follow you into the dark

Ben Gibbard’s perspective is so beautifully skewed that it made me want to curb my natural tendency to correct his doctrine, at least in my mind. His perspective is born out of experience, and his experiences are true to him. This is where we get into trouble as believers with our insistance on absolute truth, because this is Ben’s absolute truth.

“Well, He’s wrong, and I’m annoyed.”

Well.. ok. So he’s wrong, and you’re annoyed, deal with it. Now, are you going to shut your trap, (Chad), listen to his sweet song and learn about his perspective, or do you need to make sure he gets corrected before he drives home? Maybe you should try rapping his knuckles.

Perhaps she didn’t hit them hard enough.

The LA Experience

Published
by
michael lee
on 28 January 2006
in art and culture, faith and theology, prayer and writing workshop
. 7 Comments

Subway trip homeGretchen and I spent the day yesterday walking along Grand Avenue in LA. My folks had driven down to watch Sophia, giving us a rare free day, so we decided to ride the subway downtown to the Museum of Contemporary Art. They have an extensive collection of works by Mark Rothko, whom I love. What I didn’t do was call ahead and see if they had actually bothered to take any of the Rothko’s out of storage and hang them on the wall. They hadn’t. So instead, we got to see an exhibition called “After Cézanne”. The exhibit explored how artists’ conception of the human body had evolved in the years since Paul Cézanne’s hugely influential pre-modernist paintings of nude bathers.

It was an exploration of despair, from one end to the other. Which is not to say that it was bad art, but that all of the works seemed to speak with a singular kind of voice, and that voice despaired of any possibility of a transcendent human experience. It explored the human body as a kind of machine for living, a machine that acted in violence, in ignorance, in a brutish kind of sensuality, and in voyeurism. In the same way that modernism in architecture tried to reduce buildings to pure transmutable functionalism, the works of these modern artists tried to reduce our human bodies into a functional kind of meat sack for enacting the animalistic impulses of soulless minds.

facing west

There was no joy. There was no beauty. There was no transcendence. There was little material for reflection, for exploration, that did not immediately devolve into gross violation of the human spirit.We left, and walked north up Grand Avenue, past the new Walt Disney Concert Hall. I started to feel better. I started to remember that we have not lost the ability to create art that sparks creativity, that speaks to the part of us that revels in the act of living. We are not machines, we are not complex levers of muscle and sinew, constructed to enact the impulses of soulless minds. We are human beings, people connected to this earth by sense and experience, but made apart from it by transcendent acts, acts that touch the eternal substance of the created world, not the temporal manifestation of it. We are human beings, and we strive always to live not as dust, not as breath, but as the beautifully intertwined balance of the two that makes us the Children of God.

The LA Phil is playing through all of Beethoven’s symphonies this season. Gretchen and I are going to make the trip back downtown to hear them play the 5th. I can think of no better statement of the transcendent hope of human creativity than that piece, played in this venue, in this city.

We emerged from the tragic humanism of MOCA, and past the soaring hope of Gehry’s Disney Hall, and what better way to complete the transformation than to end up at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels.

forgive us our sinsAt the back of the cathedral, there is a fountain of Holy Water. Rising above it is a mural of Jesus being baptized by John. I stood in the back of the enormous room, listening the the thunderous chords of the organist, the scent of candles lingering in the air, and facing the mural, wept.

We are not machines for living. We are not people of despair. We are not the tragic consequence of fate.

But we are not divine, either. We are not the gods and goddesses of the pantheon, propelled by perfect hubris through the mundane trappings of mortality for a little while.

We are imperfect Eikons. We are the breath of God in broken pieces. We are human beings, and we live suspended between two world. We create because, in that act, we unite dust and breath, and our physical selves commune with our spiritual selves. We are the people of the descending God, who emptied himself to stand on our thresholds, not once, but three times. He descended with breath to give us life. He descended with self to give us new life. He descended with spirit to give us full life. We are the thrice blessed people of the twilight, who echo the songs of heaven with guttural voices.

We are human beings, born of clay, yet touching the sky.