Elijah Davidson Nov 23, 2009
One might argue that conflict and suffering is the thing that most binds us all together. Heartache is our great shared experience. Tragedy is our common tale. We all sing, “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen,” and the irony is, we all sing it. In distress, we cry out in anguish, and we hear the cries of everyone else and indeed all of creation crying in mournful harmony with us.
Turmoil draws us out of our own selfish worlds and awakens us to what is beyond us. We cry out to God. We beg aid, because faced with worlds outside our own, we need someone outside our world to order things. We need someone bigger than and beyond the brokenness to set things right. Affronted with a bent world, we appeal to one unbent outside the broken to enter in and straighten all things.
Why is it then in those moments of deep desperation that God so often appears absent? Why, when we most want answers, is God silent?
Faced with God’s apparent absence, our other problems dissipate. The question, “Why is this happening to me?” pales before, “Where are you, God?” If God is absent or ambivalent or non-existent, what hope do we have? If all that exists is this mess, that fact is much more troubling than the mess.
Faced with the absence of God, how is one to react?
The psalmists wait. “Wait for YHWH,” Psalm 27:14 reads. “Be still before YHWH, and wait patiently for him; do not fret over those who prosper in their way, over those who carry out evil devices,” writes the psalmist in 37:7. Psalm 131 reads, “O YHWH, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me. But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; my soul is like the weaned child that is with me. Oh, Israel, hope in YHWH from this time forth and forevermore.”
But there is another option for how to respond to evil besides waiting on God. One can fight back.
If God will not act and wipe away the injustice in the world, perhaps we should. If God will not raise a hand against evil, we can. In the absence of God’s justice, we can enact our own, or at least this is one possible answer, and it’s an answer contemplated by our world and arguably by the book of Esther.
In Esther, God is silent. The Jewish people have been displaced. Their homeland has been overrun. They are aliens and outcasts in a hostile land. Hadassah is forced to hide her identity to survive. She calls herself Esther, gains the grace of the most powerful man in the land, and is made a queen. Soon however, her secret people are in grave danger, but using her wiles, she saves them. Faced with genocide, Hadassah turns the tables on her people’s enemies, and the Jews slaughter seventy-five thousand people in a single day, a day that was supposed to be a day of triumph for their enemies, and bring an end to their oppression. Through all of this, God is silent. YHWH’s name is never even mentioned.
Similarly, with his characteristic cinematic flourish, Quentin Tarantino gave audiences a modern version of the same tale in his 2009 film Inglourious Basterds. The film is a reimagining of the end of World War II. It is two and half hours of Jews brutally killing Nazis. Even Hitler himself isn’t immune to Tarantino’s fictitious circumcised vengeance. In the film’s main plotline, a young Jewish woman hides her identity, ingratiates herself with the Nazi glitterati, and uses her power to annihilate her people’s enemies during what is supposed to be a celebration of Nazi prominence, bringing an end to World War II. Inglourious Basterds is more than WWII remixed; it is Esther retold as only Tarantino can tell it.
Inglourious Basterds isn’t about World War II. It’s about the problem of evil in a world seemingly devoid of God. (This next bit is speculation, but from what other context can I write?) The Holocaust was an atrocity unlike any other, and God let it happen. Where was YHWH in the midst of that? Was God absent? For many Jews, I would imagine the answer is yes, God was absent. And if God was absent, if God refused to save them, perhaps they should save themselves. Perhaps they should enact their own justice and destroy their enemies. They weren’t able to do that then during the Holocaust, but Quentin Tarantino has given them their justice now much like the book of Esther gives narrative victory to the displaced and trod upon Jewish people in a land and time when God seems silent.
However, Quentin Tarantino isn’t as brave as the writer of Esther. Inglourious Basterds does indeed revel in the violence of killing Nazis, but the film is ultimately ambiguous as to the worth of that violence. Yes, the great Nazi evil is eradicated, but justice comes through strange channels and means. The film does not celebrate the eradication of evil via violence. It simply presents it to the audience to judge for themselves whether good was done.
Esther makes a claim. Esther calls the violence and victory “good.” The book closes with a celebration of the Jewish victory over their oppressors and commends the greatness of the Jews. Inglourious Basterds does not provide that release. The film refuses to make that claim. The book of Esther hates evil enough to call its eradication “good” even when it comes by shockingly violent means. The book of Esther hates evil more.
Because God hates evil. God hates injustice. And God loves people. Unflinchingly. Unfailingly. Even when God seems absent, God’s love never fails.
Here is where Inglourious Basterds falls short of Esther. Tarantino’s film cannot rejoice in the demise of evil, because it cannot call the evil wholly bad, because it will not call God good.
The writings of the Old Testament are built on the foundation of YHWH’s unfailing love. The psalmists wait on the Lord because they know the Lord will come. The Jews in Esther can institute a festival commemorating their victory because they know God also rejoices to see justice done.
And they are all proved true. Time and time again, God answers the psalmists’ cries and delivers them. The transplanted Jews thrive under the auspices of Queen Esther and her benevolent cousin Mordecai, God’s proxies in a foreign land.
Yes, sometimes God is silent. Sometimes, God seems absent. Everything we know can be falling apart, and we can look to the One who is supposed to be holding it all together, but our Help is nowhere to be seen, and I don’t know why that is.
But I know that God is good, and God’s love never fails. So while it may be true that tragedy is the tale common to all humankind, that is only a temporary truth. One day a greater truth will take its place: God is making everything new. And the absence of God will become the ever shrinking space between us.
And the silence will become peace.
One might argue that conflict and suffering is the thing that most binds us all together. Heartache is our great shared experience. Tragedy is our common tale. We all sing, “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen,” and the irony is, we all sing it. In distress, we cry out in anguish, and we hear the cries of everyone else and indeed all of creation crying in mournful harmony with us.
Turmoil draws us out of our own selfish worlds and awakens us to what is beyond us. We cry out to God. We beg aid, because faced with worlds outside our own, we need someone outside our world to order things. We need someone bigger than and beyond the brokenness to set things right. Affronted with a bent world, we appeal to one unbent outside the broken to enter in and straighten all things.
Why is it then in those moments of deep desperation that God so often appears absent? Why, when we most want answers, is God silent?
Faced with God’s apparent absence, our other problems dissipate. The question, “Why is this happening to me?” pales before, “Where are you, God?” If God is absent or ambivalent or non-existent, what hope do we have? If all that exists is this mess, that fact is much more troubling than the mess.
Faced with the absence of God, how is one to react?
The psalmists wait. “Wait for YHWH,” Psalm 27:14 reads. “Be still before YHWH, and wait patiently for him; do not fret over those who prosper in their way, over those who carry out evil devices,” writes the psalmist in 37:7. Psalm 131 reads, “O YHWH, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me. But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; my soul is like the weaned child that is with me. Oh, Israel, hope in YHWH from this time forth and forevermore.”
But there is another option for how to respond to evil besides waiting on God. One can fight back.
If God will not act and wipe away the injustice in the world, perhaps we should. If God will not raise a hand against evil, we can. In the absence of God’s justice, we can enact our own, or at least this is one possible answer, and it’s an answer contemplated by our world and arguably by the book of Esther.
In Esther, God is silent. The Jewish people have been displaced. Their homeland has been overrun. They are aliens and outcasts in a hostile land. Hadassah is forced to hide her identity to survive. She calls herself Esther, gains the grace of the most powerful man in the land, and is made a queen. Soon however, her secret people are in grave danger, but using her wiles, she saves them. Faced with genocide, Hadassah turns the tables on her people’s enemies, and the Jews slaughter seventy-five thousand people in a single day, a day that was supposed to be a day of triumph for their enemies, and bring an end to their oppression. Through all of this, God is silent. YHWH’s name is never even mentioned.
Similarly, with his characteristic cinematic flourish, Quentin Tarantino gave audiences a modern version of the same tale in his 2009 film Inglourious Basterds. The film is a reimagining of the end of World War II. It is two and half hours of Jews brutally killing Nazis. Even Hitler himself isn’t immune to Tarantino’s fictitious circumcised vengeance. In the film’s main plotline, a young Jewish woman hides her identity, ingratiates herself with the Nazi glitterati, and uses her power to annihilate her people’s enemies during what is supposed to be a celebration of Nazi prominence, bringing an end to World War II. Inglourious Basterds is more than WWII remixed; it is Esther retold as only Tarantino can tell it.
Inglourious Basterds isn’t about World War II. It’s about the problem of evil in a world seemingly devoid of God. (This next bit is speculation, but from what other context can I write?) The Holocaust was an atrocity unlike any other, and God let it happen. Where was YHWH in the midst of that? Was God absent? For many Jews, I would imagine the answer is yes, God was absent. And if God was absent, if God refused to save them, perhaps they should save themselves. Perhaps they should enact their own justice and destroy their enemies. They weren’t able to do that then during the Holocaust, but Quentin Tarantino has given them their justice now much like the book of Esther gives narrative victory to the displaced and trod upon Jewish people in a land and time when God seems silent.
However, Quentin Tarantino isn’t as brave as the writer of Esther. Inglourious Basterds does indeed revel in the violence of killing Nazis, but the film is ultimately ambiguous as to the worth of that violence. Yes, the great Nazi evil is eradicated, but justice comes through strange channels and means. The film does not celebrate the eradication of evil via violence. It simply presents it to the audience to judge for themselves whether good was done.
Esther makes a claim. Esther calls the violence and victory “good.” The book closes with a celebration of the Jewish victory over their oppressors and commends the greatness of the Jews. Inglourious Basterds does not provide that release. The film refuses to make that claim. The book of Esther hates evil enough to call its eradication “good” even when it comes by shockingly violent means. The book of Esther hates evil more.
Because God hates evil. God hates injustice. And God loves people. Unflinchingly. Unfailingly. Even when God seems absent, God’s love never fails.
Here is where Inglourious Basterds falls short of Esther. Tarantino’s film cannot rejoice in the demise of evil, because it cannot call the evil wholly bad, because it will not call God good.
The writings of the Old Testament are built on the foundation of YHWH’s unfailing love. The psalmists wait on the Lord because they know the Lord will come. The Jews in Esther can institute a festival commemorating their victory because they know God also rejoices to see justice done.
And they are all proved true. Time and time again, God answers the psalmists’ cries and delivers them. The transplanted Jews thrive under the auspices of Queen Esther and her benevolent cousin Mordecai, God’s proxies in a foreign land.
Yes, sometimes God is silent. Sometimes, God seems absent. Everything we know can be falling apart, and we can look to the One who is supposed to be holding it all together, but our Help is nowhere to be seen, and I don’t know why that is.
But I know that God is good, and God’s love never fails. So while it may be true that tragedy is the tale common to all humankind, that is only a temporary truth. One day a greater truth will take its place: God is making everything new. And the absence of God will become the ever shrinking space between us.
And the silence will become peace.
Aaron Raymond Nov 19, 2009
Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul - by Stuart Brown, MD
Early last month marked the bicentennial anniversary of the birth of one of our most post-mortemly celebrated authors in American literature. Any guesses? I’ll give you a hint: “Nevermore!” I am of course referencing the poem The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe. What correlates Edgar Allan Poe with Virginia Woolf, Vincent van Gogh, Jackson Pollack, and several other popular artists down through the centuries is that none of them would have received a mental bill of health. The old stereotypes of the Modern genius, tortured in her soul by an enslaving talent fit well with our assumptions towards the artist. We expect them to act irrationally and erratically because such extreme behavior is the result of living on the existential extremities of life where the divine is experienced, on the borderlands of the mind and in the thin-places of the soul. Forgive me for a moment if I steal the reader from out of the clouds to seek a more incarnational approach, more down to earth.
Over the years Stuart Brown has been making a name for himself and for his foundation, The National Institute of Play. He’s directed and produced a PBS series on the topic of play, counseled Fortune 500 companies how to harness the benefits of play in the work place, and now has co-authored a book that came out earlier this year as a follow up to his widely acclaimed lecture at the 2008 Art Center Design Conference here in Pasadena, California. You may have seen the lecture on TED Talks, in which case his book follows the same basic outline but is obviously longer than the twenty-six minutes it take to watch this lecture. To meet the minimum word requirement Brown fills the pages with anecdotal stuffing, along with trimmings of easy-to-read tables and b&w photographs of children and animals naturally having fun. In short, the book is an easy read with a light peppering of that confusing hard science, which the publishers must have assumed the average consumer has a hard time chewing.*
All this aside, the book, like the lecture, did provide many valuable insights, too many to fill this short blog post, which would likely raise issues of copyright infringement. ©,®,℗,℠,™ - take your pick. Brown highlights creativity as one of the many hallmarks of the phenomenon of play. For what little science Brown does discuss, he describes the psychological event as both an altered and elevated state of consciousness. Altered being that we tend to accept as the norm the brain state that our societies deem to be normal. And elevated because senses are heightened, as we tend to allocate more of our body’s resources towards a task that involves “play.” It’s no wonder then that Fortune 500 companies want to harness this type of productivity.
Another issue Brown discusses, which struck a dissonant note in my philosophy of aesthetics, was the antithesis of Play. He states, “The opposite of Play is NOT Work. The opposite of Play is Depression.” How can this be if all of the greatest artists that we’ve come to idolize for their misery could have qualified for a lifetime prescription to Prozac? This is understandable on the biological level since an PET scan of a patient diagnosed with clinical depression can literally show signs of depressed brain activity. It is as if the mind is shutting in on itself, a chronic low-grade malaise prematurely simulating a lethargic death. However, a growing amount of research is showing remarkably just how close the body-mind connection actually is and how we can best harness this to our fullest potential.
From a creativity standpoint, the old body-mind dualism of Western philosophy culminating in the Modernist agenda of the Cartesian theatre is daily finding new challenges that refute such assumptions. If the creative process is indeed a mental process, then a case is made that a healthy brain is more capable of such things. A correlative issue that Brown briefly discusses is from John Ratey’s new book SPARK: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain. In it Ratey shows with substantially adequate science that another one of our stereotypes is completely wrong. In this new understanding the Jock is the Nerd! The Bronze is the Brains, or at least has more potential to be so. Of course proper input of time into any given task is necessary to become adept at it. Anybody up for 10,000+ hours of Sodoku? This being said, waddle on friends, waddle on!
But what do we do with people like Edgar Allan Poe? Or for that matter, what do we do with artwork that by and large seems to be unbearably depressing for most individuals, save our hyper-morose teenagers who love their own melodramatic agony? It may be understood that Edgar Allan Poe, or Virginia Woolf, or Vincent van Gogh (take your pick), didn’t necessarily create their art out of their misery but as a response to it. The artistic process was a means through which they were able to break loose from these cold chains of melancholic conventions of the mind. The difference is one of subtlety where in the former the state of depression is lifted up as an idol of perceived authenticity. In the latter it serves as catharsis and if playfully and properly grappled with, like Jacob wrestling with God, serves as a moment of transcendence.
So what new models are there for us to use if the old paradigms fail to set the standard for creative achievement? Numerous examples abound. But what comes most earnestly to mind is the old photograph of Albert Einstein at a ripe old age riding a bicycle. The argument here is not that depression and concepts of the tortured artist are invalid. Every aspect of human experience is worthy of the palate’s objectification. Instead what is proposed is that the experience of play, most akin to what ‘Jack’ Lewis might have called JOY, is the entry point into the creative process.
*Thanksgiving is only a week away so thanks for putting up with the bad humor.
stuartbrownmd.com
National Institute for Play
TED Talks with Stuart Brown
Elspeth Noble Nov 08, 2009
“Hands up who’s going to “Jubilate!” tomorrow night?”...this was my effort at a punchy facebook status advertisement early last week. Undeterred by the fact that NOBODY replied (shame on you facebook friends) I showed up to both the dress rehearsal and the performance with tingling anticipation. This was to be the inaugural performance of an “ancient-future Mass.” As a choir we had been rehearsing Ed Wilmington’s creative, complex, and challenging offering once a week for five weeks. Yep, five weeks. The tingling anticipation was therefore as much a result of my nervous curiosity concerning how this thing would (could) actually come together, as it was indicative of my inherent trust in the prowess of the piece. I needn’t have worried though. Reports, both from those listening and performing, state that the evening was a delight of musical intensity, spiritual refreshment, and inspiration to those interested in fostering creative community that seeks to bring worship, theology, and the arts into conversation.
A bit of background for those of you who don’t know: The “Jubilate!” Mass was one part of a two day Brehm Centre event entitled “Just Art” (‘just’ as in ‘justice’ not as in ‘barely’...you’re welcome). It was the first of what will be an annual lecture series designed to encourage ideas, conversation, and action in the arena of theology and the arts. World famous philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff, and practicing worship consultant Marcia McFee, came to us to explore and share ideas about art, ethics, theology, worship, and practice. It was inspiring and sobering to listen to their ideas about the relationship between art, beauty, and justice in our diverse, pulsating global Christian community.
The Tuesday evening event which showcased Ed Willmington’s Mass was, therefore, an opportunity to truly experience theory birthing practice, action embodying concepts. It was a privilege to be a part of that evening. Ed had embraced the structure, text, and heart of the age old Catholic Mass, fusing it with both contemporary and ancient musical expressions. The technological track, the live musicians, and the choir were admirably threaded in a mutually beneficial manner which resulted in an eclectic musical tapestry. Alongside the music there were visuals also. The dramatic walls of Pasadena First Congregational Church held projections of key texts and images, whilst Marcia McFee gave physical embodiment to the music by gifting us with deeply insightful dance interpretation.
The full title of the event was “Just Art: The Place of Art in the Ethical formation of Christian disciples.” Especially meaningful to me personally, was the effort that Ed Wilmington took to explicitly link the artistic process and the real life living. Time after time he would tell us as a choir that he hoped the rehearsal and performative process would be deeply enriching to us. He gently exposed us to the formative (and sometimes painful) privilege of living with art during its gestating period. He took time to explain the Latin biblical texts. He took time to pray with us. And he took time to remind us that we were taking our place in a long line of Christians who had sought to glorify God and bless others through those exact words expressed through music. To those listening I truly hope and pray it was a blessing. As one performing, I know that it was.