Monday, February 25, 2013

SHAZAM!

You know, I wasn't going to keep on with Silver Lake and The Written Word—at least not yet—but the hubbub regarding The Onion following this year’s Academy Awards forced me to reconsider.   You see, The Written Word was on a three year theological cycle.  The first year was about the idea that we were created in God’s image, that one of the ways we were created in God’s image is that we are ourselves creative, and that we can find echoes of God’s image in our creations.  The second year was about how words have power.   There are lots, and lots (and lots) of examples of words having power in the realm of geek.  From Ali Baba eagerly uttering the phrase “Open Sesame,” to little Billy Batson crying out “SHAZAM!” to turn into the superhero Captain Marvel, to Harry Potter raising his wand to Dolores Umbridge and pronouncing “Stupefy!” to stun the villainess, the theme of powerful words is very common indeed.

The idea that words have power is a very Biblical one, as well.  In Genesis, God speaks the world into being, “Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light.” (Gen 1:3)  Jesus resurrects a young girl with the words, "Talitha cum," which means, "Little girl, get up!" (Mark 5:41)  The beginning of the Gospel of John describes Jesus the Christ as the Word, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was in the beginning with God.  All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.” (John 1:1-3)  Talk about power!

 I believe that we need to remind ourselves that words have power every once in a while.  Because when we forget that words have power, bad things happen.  And unfortunately, we’re living in a society where it is all too easy to forget the power of our words.  Which brings me back to The Onion and the tweet that shocked the nation.
   photo ef17d0d6-39bb-4063-91e3-f975428bd927.jpg
That’s right, The Onion called the first 9-year-old nominee for Best Actress in the history of the academy awards a c**t.  How does something like that happen?  Well, first of all, you have to understand that The Onion is a satirical comedic news site.  As film critic and commentator, Bob Chipman, put it in a recent article,
“They are a news parody outfit, but not of The Daily Show variety where the humor is mainly based on holding up actual examples of idiocy in the media for public mockery by Jon Stewart and his audience.   Instead, The Onion takes the form of a ‘real’ news site and runs fake headlines (and entire fake news stories) that mock the worst excesses of the ‘real’ media by exaggeration.”  
Basically the intent was to point out how badly the Academy Awards treats women by saying the most misogynistic thing they could think of.

 Side note: I suspect this may have been a response to Seth MacFarlane’s opening to the show, which included a song entitled, “We Saw Your Boobs.”  MacFarlane’s humor throughout (ok, at least until I fell asleep on the couch—somewhere around the in memoriam segment) was confrontational at best.  On the other hand, the aforementioned song taken in context seemed to be satirizing himself.  All in all it wasn't his best stuff and I’d love to hear his reaction to the world’s reaction…

 Ok, so, back to The Onion tweet.  Being a satirical site, The Onion’s material gets mistaken for being serious all the time—but not by everybody.  Even people who know that The Onion is satire and really gets how satire works cried foul.  The truth of the matter is that when satire fails it becomes what it is trying to chastise.  The truth is that what you communicated is what was received, not what you intended.  So instead of calling attention to the harsh treatment of women in Hollywood in general—or by Seth MacFarlane specifically—The Onion really did simply call a 9-year-old girl a c**t.

So why did it fail?  Chipman basically argues that the fact that the joke was a tweet probably led to it failing.  He describes the frenetic pace of Twitter humor this way,
“Quick, go turn on the news, watch whatever is happening, immediately discern something insightfully funny about it, phrase it in a short, amusing way and disperse it to the web - you have 15 seconds.  It's hard to do this well.  
And so people cheat.   
The ‘cheat’ in question is generally called ‘live-snarking’ in the parlance of the web.  In lieu of joke construction or punchlines, one simply watches what's happening and says the meanest thing they can think of alongside some funny words and passes it off as a joke.”  
Twitter, in other words, moves so fast that there isn't enough time to think about what you’re saying, let alone construct something as difficult to get right as a good joke.

It is all too easy to forget the power of our words when we’re wildly shooting them out into the world through the internet.  And once they’re out there, we can’t get them back.  The Onion deleted the tweet in question within an hour, and I was still able to post an image of it gleaned from the Wired article that brought the whole brouhaha to my attention to begin with.

 Speaking of the Wired article, entertainment editor Laura Hudson makes an excellent point,
“if this unfortunate incident offers us anything, it’s a teachable moment about the best way to respond when we screw up and say things that are sexist/racist/homophobic/insensitive without understanding their impact.  
 One common – and immensely dickish – response is that it’s ‘not a big deal,’ and that it’s the responsibility of person who has been mistreated or marginalized to remove themselves and stop complaining about it. Which is an attempt not only to silence them and sanction spaces as overtly hostile to them, but also essentially a reenactment of that scene from The Simpsons where Bart and Lisa start walking toward each other while punching and kicking the air wildly, saying ‘if you get hit, it’s your own fault!’  
 The Onion, wisely, decided to take another tack, by acknowledging, owning and apologizing for the tweet on their Facebook page and site… No one ever said that being a good person — or trying to understand the struggles and perspectives of people whose experiences are alien to us – would be easy. It’s a life-long process, and one where all of us are going to have moments where we accidentally step in it, either through ignorance or bad judgment. But when the inevitable happens and someone tells us that we've screwed up, we’d all do well to take a page from The Onion and respond not with self-righteous anger, or eye-rolling irritation that we have to deal with the inconvenience of other people’s experiences, but rather a willingness to learn…”
 So, if nothing else, take this home with you. Your words do have power. Try to use that power for good. And when you screw up, and you will, remember that the effect of your words has more meaning than your intentions—so apologize and learn from the experience.

Be good to each other,
Rev. Josh
022513

Monday, February 18, 2013

There is a fifth dimension...

In the post “1407 Graymalkin Lane,” I wrote extensively about one of the reasons I love Silver Lake—namely that it was one of my primary sanctuaries growing up and continues to be a sanctuary for me even today.  And because it is and was a safe place for me, Silver Lake is one of the places I have had the best opportunities to dig into my own theology.  Besides which, it’s where I met my wife and where I was married, so naturally it’s just going to come up every once in a while!

My wife and I have spent several years leading a creative writing conference for high school age youth entitled “The Written Word.”  Unfortunately, The Written Word has run its course—at least as a summer conference—and to be honest I’m kind of mourning its passing.  Like all good Christians, though, I live in the hope of the Resurrection, so who knows?  Maybe The Written Word will ride again someday.  For now, though, I’d like to share at least one of the theological underpinnings of the conference, because I find it especially useful to my geek theology.

The idea, basically, is that we were all made in God’s image.  And one of the ways we were all made in God’s image is that we are ourselves creative.  And so if we pay attention to our creations, we can find echoes of God’s image in them—even if we didn't intend for them to be there!  I used to say “we can find God’s image in them,” but theology is a living, breathing, growing thing and now I think that it’s important to note that our creations, while important and good, are signs—symbols of a truth, not the truth itself.

So why is the idea that echoes of God’s image can be found in our creations important to my understanding of geek theology?  Well, it’s the interpretive lens that causes me to think of Mark 13:1-2 when I watch the trailer for Fallout 3.  It’s why I can immediately think of baptism when I hear Metallica’s “Until It Sleeps.”  Or the plight of post-modern mainline Christianity in an episode of Kitchen Nightmares!  One of the many things that defines us as geeks is our unabashed love of certain forms and genres of storytelling.  I’m a video game geek (or gamer), a sci-fi geek, a fantasy geek, an rpg geek (confusingly, also “gamer”), and so on.  You can see why it feels foundational to identify echoes of the divine in our stories, then, right?

By the way, sometimes I know exactly where I first came into contact with a concept that had a profound impact on my own theology, and this is one of them.  It all goes back to Little Peggy March.  I know, I know, she’s before my time but she fits pretty squarely into the kind of music my father listens to—
What’s that?  You don’t know Little Peggy March?  I think maybe you do.  She recorded a song entitled “I Will Follow Him.”  I’m pretty sure it’s meant to be a romantic peace, but it was most famously covered in the film Sister Act.  There was something about that moment where I realized that the “him” in a love song could refer to God that was a major epiphany for me.  How about you?



Be good to each other,
Rev. Josh
021113


Monday, February 11, 2013

Sue Richards Meets Jane Goodall

When I first started tossing around the idea of this blog, I ran it by a couple of internet communities—my own personal Facebook friends (a bunch of whom self-identify as geeks—go figure) and an online support group for UCC clergy in the 20's and 30's.  One of the most frequent responses I got to the idea was, "What kind of geek?"  People wanted to know if I meant gamers, or computer hackers, or just people who think science is awfully cool.  (One fine wit pointed out that anyone excited about theology might be considered a geek.  Touché.)  And my answer was "yes."  By which I mean to say that I think there are probably enough things common to all of those kinds of experiences of geekdom that a geek theology ought to be able to draw from all of them.  So stand back, I'm going to try... SCIENCE!  Which of course means an experiment.  Please watch the video below and follow the instructions:



How did you do?  I knew what was going to happen the first time I watched the video, and I still almost missed it.  But don't worry about it too much if you found yourself blinded.  According to the research Daniel Simons and Christoper Chabris, fully half of us would not see what was right in front of our faces.  That's right, half.  And what's more, we all believe that we're perceptive enough to catch something that... blatant.  Only half of us would be right.

According to a recent NPR story, researcher Trafton Drew did a similar study with a group of people who are rigorously trained to see stuff—radiologists.  According to NPR:

He took a picture of a man in a gorilla suit shaking his fist, and he superimposed that image on a series of slides that radiologists typically look at when they're searching for cancer. He then asked a bunch of radiologists to review the slides of lungs for cancerous nodules. He wanted to see if they would notice a gorilla the size of a matchbook glaring angrily at them from inside the slide. 
But they didn't: 83 percent of the radiologists missed it, Drew says.
So what does any of this have to do with theology?  Well, I'd say to be wary of anyone that claims to know with absolute certainty the "right" interpretation of the Bible or, worse yet, the will of God for your life.  After all, invisible gorillas exist.  Which leads me into another theological point—Jesus said to not judge each other.  If we really take to heart the fact that we have invisible gorillas, maybe we can be a little more forgiving when other people reveal their own blindness.  And finally, there's the conclusion that Trafton Drew came to in his research, "...what we're thinking about — what we're focused on — filters the world around us so aggressively that it literally shapes what we see."  If we're looking for sinners and degenerates, that's what we'll find.  If we're looking for overbearing Christian hypocrites, that's what we'll see.  If we're looking for the image of God in each other, well...  you get the picture.

Maybe you aren't convinced.  Maybe you want another chance at it, just to prove to yourself (or your neighbor) that you aren't that oblivious.  Well okie dokie.  Here's your second chance:



See what I mean?  I knew something was up and I was completely taken by this one.

Beware of invisible gorillas,
Rev. Josh
021213

PS  If you're feeling kind of down about that last one, don't worry about it, we're in good company.  People who study how our minds work get caught by this, too...


Monday, February 4, 2013

1407 Graymalkin Lane


So, I’ve been thinking about what makes my perspective as a geek different enough from other people’s that it would affect my theology.  And there are a bunch of examples (and I’m sure that other geeks have others, that’s why I hope to have guest bloggers every once in a while) but the first one is probably my experience of sanctuary.  In fact, sanctuary has been such a foundational piece of my theology for such a long time that I maybe should have started my blog with this entry.  Oh well, as one of my favorite quotes from Jim Henson’s Labyrinth goes, “Can’t be right all the time.”  (Extra xp if you know what scene I'm talking about...)

So, maybe this is changing—actually, I pray to God and carefully watch The Big Bang Theory for signs that this is changing—but when I was growing up it was very difficult to be a geek and be popular.  For some inexplicable reason,  you could be a fanatic about the Patriots or the Red Sox, but if you showed the same kind of enthusiasm for science fiction, fantasy, or even—for the love of all that is good—reading…  well, the word “pariah” comes to mind.  I know that I’m oversimplifying a bit—there were those charismatic scholar-athlete types who could move seamlessly between cultures—but my experience was that those folk only made it more difficult for those of us who couldn't   It was kind of like having an overachieving sibling—why can’t you be more like them?  Your classmate gets good grades, and they aren't a complete dork, what’s your problem?

Again, I see the world moving in the right direction on this point, but at that time, bullying was a monolithic, intractable thing.  Adults said things like, “boys will be boys,” and “kids will be kids,” and avert their eyes to the systematic physical, mental, and emotional abuse that young people were dealing out to one another.  And if someone was brave enough to broach the subject, the prevailing theory was that if the victim wasn't willing to “stand up for themselves” (One adult even said, “I wanted you to hit him.”) then they deserved what they got.  It’s the victim’s fault for being a victim.  They should fit in better.  They shouldn't read in front of people, or admit that they enjoy fantasy and science fiction, and they especially shouldn't admit that they enjoy it enough to be considered a fan.  They should just know better.

As you can well imagine, I was an awkward and less-than-popular boy.  I cared entirely too much what my peers thought of me, and I only seemed to hear the negative things they thought.  Luckily I had my safe places, my sanctuaries, places where I could relax and be myself without worrying about what people thought of me.  Places I could just be myself, no strings attached.  I was lucky to have these places.  My home.  My church.  And the Connecticut Conference of the United Church of Christ’s location for its outdoor ministries—Silver Lake Conference Center.  Silver Lake is a church camp, a retreat center, and it’s the place I think of when I think about sanctuary.  I’m certainly not the only one to have that experience of Silver Lake—it has been a sanctuary for young and old alike for over fifty years now.

Despite the fact that I had a pretty good home life and that I felt safe at church from the systematic abuse that ran rampant at school, Silver Lake was the first public space where I felt safe being completely myself.  It’s where I learned to say, “I like reading.  I like fantasy and science fiction.”  The first place I ever saw people playing Magic: The Gathering, was on the floor of one of the bunk rooms in the Cedars.  That was during the summer conference (think “camp”) that has come to be known as The God Show—we wrote and produced a musical within the confines of the week.  My very first day with that conference, I was so excited that I busted out my favorite piece of costuming—a hooded cloak that my mom made for me.  My counselor still remembers seeing me running around in the thing and thinking, “I like that kid.”  Can you imagine?  Being safe enough to run around in a cloak—and actually finding someone that liked you for it?  Maybe you can—the world seems to be changing about these things—but at the time it was a Big Deal.  In fact, when I said goodbye to my counselor that week, he said, “May the Force be with you.”

Then he paused, looked me in the eye, and said, “It already is.”

Can you imagine?

I will always remember standing in the common room of The Cedars with several other teenagers and talking about what a special place Silver Lake is.  We all agreed that it was a place where we could just be ourselves, no matter who we were or what we were into—no worries, no strings attached.

That’s when one of our counselors broke into the conversation and asked a question that changed my life.

She asked us how we could take “that Silver Lake feeling out into the real world” with us when we left.  Silver Lake was the mountain top—holy ground—a sanctuary in every sense of the world.  I loved it there and I love it there still.  And here she was, challenging us to bring this sanctuary with us wherever we go…  Well, I took that to heart.  I decided that the best way to carry that sense of sanctuary out into the world was to be the kind of person it was safe to be around.

When I later heard my call to ministry it became more clear to me that one of my primary jobs as a pastor is to not only be a sanctuary myself, but to help others create sanctuaries together—and to challenge them to bring those sanctuaries out into the world with them wherever they go.

So later in life, when my wife and I were Co-Deans for a summer conference centered around creative writing, we were working with high school youth on a behavioral covenant.  It’s an agreement between the youth, counselors and deans—with God as our witness—concerning how we want to behave when we’re with each other for the week.  And one of the youth was describing how he wanted to feel that week.  He said that he wanted to feel safe in every sense of the word—that he wanted to feel physically safe, mentally safe, emotionally safe, spiritually safe…  He was at a loss to sum his thoughts up in a way that fit well in the covenant.  So I told him that there’s actually a word for what he was talking about.

That word is “sanctuary.”

When it comes down to it, I have an easier time understanding why sanctuary is important because I've had the experience of totally, desperately, needing one—and finding it.  And that’s primarily true because I am a geek.

Be good to each other,
Rev. Josh
020413