Month: April 2011

So this is Easter…

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I’m one of those lazy people who doesn’t bother to do things like change the playlists on my iPod very often. So therefore as I was jogging the other night, John Lennon’s “So This is Christmas” started playing with the opening lines “so this is Christmas and what have you done? Another year over and another just begun.” The question stopped me up short as here we are in Holy Week at the end of Lent. It forced me to reflect on my experience of Lent this year.

And in all truth, it’s been a strange season for me. Holy Week as well. I am immersed in the Christian world and yet I think Lady Gaga’s new controversial single “Judas” has prompted more spiritual reflection in me than anything else this week. It’s been amusing to follow the controversy and to read the outrage of those who are incensed that anyone would dare admit to being tempted to love Judas over Jesus. Because, of course, none of the rest of us ever betray Jesus in any way. None of the rest of us lives in the real world full of its tensions and murky conflicts. We all must preserve the façade of who we declare Jesus to be without admitting to the reality of the world we inhabit. Or something like that.

So while Lady Gaga’s song was a well-timed publicity stunt, it is brilliantly proving its own social commentary in how it is being received. A world that hypocritically denies its own hypocrisy is throwing a fit at having that hypocrisy pointed out in such an outrageous manner. The Jesus they claim to follow doesn’t match the lives they live and it is a divided life that they are fine with until someone like Lady Gaga forcefully pulls down the dividing curtain. But as I thought about it, I realized that it is that crazy divided life and disconnect from reality in the church that has defined my experience this Lent.

During this season of spiritual reflection and sacrifice as Christians theoretically prepare ourselves to respond to the sacrifice of Christ by becoming living sacrifices ourselves, the church as I’ve experienced it this year has been hell-bent on defending tooth and claw its own personal construction of Jesus apart from the reality of the world. On one hand there have been the vicious attacks on any who would dare suggest that maybe, just maybe, God’s love is stronger than death and will win in the end. For some, their conception of a limited God must be defended above relationships or the even the communion of saints. Then on the other hand this season has been defined by large sections of the church campaigning to ensure that our government doesn’t waste our hard-earned tax dollars on programs for the poor and disadvantaged in our nation. ‘Jesus’ must be defended at all costs, but never to the point that he actually crosses that dividing line into our real lives (and budgets). This is how we have been preparing to celebrate the Resurrection this year.

Instead of letting the sacrifice of Christ prompt us to live eucharistically as the body of Christ that shares the abundant blessing and gifts of God with each other, this Lent has been defined by selfish hoardings of God’s love. We limit God’s love to only those who intellectually assent to the same cognitive propositions as we do, and we then hoard God’s freely given blessings as if we’ve done something to deserve them or something. We love Judas and the pieces of silver too much to actually follow the Christ we proclaim – but unlike Lady Gaga, we refuse to admit it.

So this is Easter and what have we done? It hurts my soul to see how the church has spent Lent this year. We are the Body of Christ, why can’t we live like it?

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Feminism in Hollywood

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Hollywood is generally fairly reluctant to produce films with strong feminist messages. It is far easier to sell women cast as the sexy sidekick or vapid damsel in distress. Older women generally get portrayed as the perfect or controlling mother, wise or bitter hag, or as the uptight nag. (check out this brilliant flow chart for an exploration of why strong female characters in film are so hard to come by). But in the past few weeks I’ve seen two films that surprisingly subvert this dominant paradigm as they explore the stories of women trying to escape from the expectations of patriarchy. Unfortunately, they aren’t being received as such.

The latest version of Jane Eyre was spectacular. Those of us who love the novel have been waiting for Hollywood to finally get this one right. Charlotte Bronte wrote into the character of Jane that longing she as an intelligent woman in her age had for independence. Jane is a person who isn’t afraid to tell the truth even if convention discourages such from a woman. But she also is constrained because she is unable to express outwardly all that she holds in her head. While that is explicitly expressed in terms of her artwork, it serves as a metaphor for women in that era. The best she could hope for was to be a governess and to teach others what she passionately cares about. Charlotte Bronte too felt that gender constraint in her time. Even this tale of a woman struggling to be independent had to be published under a male pseudonym because society would never accept such writing from the pen of a woman. All her gifts were constrained by what the world allowed her to offer.

Into this world of constraint Jane asserts, “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will.” In willing it so, Jane finds a way to be herself despite the constraints of culture. Yet interestingly it is cultural constraints that are ensnaring that very message with this film version. The film is being received as a beautifully portrayed period piece love story and the audiences in the theaters are mostly women. While the film might be those things, it tells a story that is far deeper than those stereotypical gender-based constraints. That message of women breaking free and being accepted in the world as creative intelligent people is lost amidst the background romantic tale.

The other feminist film of the moment, Sucker Punch, suffers from a similar response. The film itself is a brilliant exploration of the history of the struggle against patriarchy. It portrays young girls who have been betrayed by imposed fathers (step-fathers and priests) being shut away and taken advantage of because they are women. Their attempt to escape this imprisonment is depicted through dream sequences that use Jungian symbolism to show them entering worlds typically controlled by men (church, battlefields, fortresses, technology) and conquering them in order to escape them. They had to play by the rules of those worlds and demonstrate that they could dominate in those realms in order to move past them. It is a deconstruction of those realms that leads to a better world for the girls.

Yet the movie itself follows the same format. It accepts the genre of fan-boy action films and subverts it. The girls look like the typical mindless sex toy – with costumes, lollipops, and choreographed moves expected in that genre – but don’t embody those roles but are portrayed that way in order to enter that oppressive realm and expose it for what it is. But of course, the average movie-goer can’t get past the trappings and understand the commentary. They want it to be a straight fan-boy film full of babes with guns that they can ogle at and therefore criticize it for not meeting their expectations. The message is lost on them for they came expecting the very thing the film serves to deconstruct. Who can hear the feminist message when they are upset that they weren’t titillated enough by the eye-candy?

I loved both films. But as I read the responses of others, I have to wonder what place feminism (as in the assumption that women are people and not just objects) has in Hollywood and therefore our culture. It is so rare for strong whole women to be portrayed or for the patriarchy to be questioned, and when it happens it is lost on most audiences, so what hope is there for that message to ever truly take root in our cultural imagination?

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Embracing Creation Theology

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Next week, on April 15, is the annual National Day of Silence, a day where students across America pledge to be silent for a day in order to bring attention to anti-LGBT name-calling, bullying and harassment in their schools. Sadly, but also obviously, it is a day not without controversy. I recall a parent of one of the kids in the youth group we led years ago complaining to me about the day and that her (high school) student had to be exposed to such an agenda. Basically she was offended that her son was forcefully made aware of the harassment of people she didn’t like.

I was reminded of that encounter this week as I was reading Rowan Williams’ essay “On Being Creatures.” The essay argues that only a belief that God created the world ex nihilo allows us to embrace our full dependence on God as the source of our identity and therefore stop competitively asserting ourselves over and against other people and the environment in futile attempts to define and create our own identity. For Williams, it is only in rooting ourselves in God that we can be fully human and live responsibly in the world. What most intrigued me though were his conclusions regarding the practical implications of what it would mean for us to trust so fully in God. He writes –

Both the rhetoric and the practice of our defence policies often seem to offend against the acknowledgment of creatureliness – in two respects, at least. First, there is the offence against any notion of ‘creaturely solidarity’ implied by the threat not only to obliterate large numbers of the human race … but to unleash what is acknowledged to be an uncontrollable and incalculable process of devastation in our material environment, an uncontainable injury to the ecology of the planet. Second, there is the extent to which our deterrent policies have become bound to a particular kind of technological confidence: somewhere in the not-so-distant future, it might be possible to construct a defensive or aggressive military system which will provide a final security against attack, a final defence against the pressure of the ‘other’. If I may repeat some words written in 1987 about the problems posed by the Strategic Defence Initiative, the Christian is bound to ask, ‘How far is the search for impregnability a withdrawal from the risks of conflict and change? A longing to block out the possibility of political repentance, drastic social criticism and reconstruction?’

Not embracing our identity as dependent creations of a loving God puts us at odds with the rest of creation. When we assume that our identity is shaped by something other than God, like our own efforts and resourcefulness, we live in competition and not solidarity with others. Others become not fellow image-bearers similarly in dependent relationships with God, but entities competing with us for power and limited resources. Instead of loving others, we set up defenses (or offenses) against the pressure of the other – even to the point that we arrange our world so that we don’t even have to acknowledge that the other exists.

We don’t want to know about starving children, or trafficked women, or ravaged countries if hearing about such things might upset us and demand something of us. We’d rather pretend that people we dislike don’t exist than have to encounter them and see them as human. So people try to ban days like the National Day of Silence. They pass laws prohibiting the construction of mosques in their community. They, as like with what happened to a pastor friend in Wheaton, spray-paint “Go home N***” on a black family’s garage door when that family moves into a white neighborhood. Instead of trusting in God and embracing a ‘creaturely solidarity’ because of that trust, defenses against having to respond to the other are continually built up. And as Williams so rightly points out, when we refuse to even engage the other by building up ultimate defenses against them, we shut down any possibility of being convicted of our sins. If we don’t have to engage the other, then how our actions affect them are above critique. If we’d rather pretend that LGBT people do not exist then we won’t listen to (or even allow) any dialogue regarding how they are treated. But we can never fight against injustice if we refuse to admit that injustice even exists. Liberation and reconciliation will never happen in this world if we refuse to even acknowledge voices different than our own.

But this isn’t what creation is supposed to be. We do not live ultimately in a competitive world, but we live in a world where everything is a gift from God. It is only when we can acknowledge God as creator and therefore trust in God that we can stop asserting ourselves over others and refusing to responsibly and lovingly see them as part of the community of the imago-dei. I appreciated Williams’ essay for reminding me of this practical importance of our beliefs. Our theology of creation matters. Not for some silly science vs. faith debate, but because it defines our very identity and how we live communally as the body of Christ in this world.

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