I want to express my gratitude to the officers of Alpha Chi for the invitation to speak this evening. I’m very honored to have the opportunity, even though on further inquiry I discovered that what they generously called a keynote address was a euphemism for filler noise while the judges are busy judging the presentations. So I am, for lack of a better term, your stand-up entertainment for the next few moments. With that understanding, I will be brief, not brief in the grand sense that many speakers promise and fail to deliver, but really, truly brief.

In the spirit of the moment, and wanting to match proper rhetorical style with the occasion, I want to make it clear from the outset that it’s my intention in the next few minutes to say nothing of any moment, of any great importance or of any particular use. I think we need to know where we stand on this issue so that you don’t begin to listen with any real expectations of anything terrific going on up here. In fact, just to be clear, let’s just say that for the next few moments I solemnly swear that I am up to no good.

Desiderius Erasmus

I would like, on the other hand, to match the tone of Desiderius Erasmus, that 16^th Century humanist scholar who penned the wonderful book, In Praise of Folly. Allow me to quote a couple of illustrative passages:

Sample 1: “The type of person who is devoted to the study of wisdom is always most unlucky in everything, and particularly when it comes to procreating children; I imagine this is because Nature wants to ensure that the evils of wisdom shall not spread further throughout humankind.”

Sample 2: “I doubt if a single individual could be found from the whole of humanity who is free from some form of insanity. The only difference is one of degree. A man who sees a gourd and takes it for his wife is called insane only because this happens to very few people.”

[Note: No one laughed at this latter quote. I thought it was hilarious. Either my delivery didn’t match the content or it made people ponder too hard about the difference between a wife and a gourd.]

In that same spirit, you could call this little talk, “The Qualm Before the Storm.”

Qualm is a lovely word. No, it’s not the Princess Bride version of Calm, as in, “Mawwiage is what bwings us togethah on this Cwalm Day.”

Today, qualm means a feeling of discomfort regarding the rightness of a thing. This feeling is most aptly illustrated in the story that’s all the rage right now, the Hunger Games. Some of the characters in this story have qualms. Some do not. When confronted with the hypothetical possibility that in order to survive I, a mere teenager, must perforce kill 23 other mere teenagers, a perfectly legitimate question to ask myself is, “Self—do you have any qualms about killing 23 other teenagers in order to save your own skin?” If I answer in the affirmative, then I have the groundwork for a moral-ethical struggle on a mammoth scale—if I am actually faced with such a dilemma. If, however, it remains a hypothetical issue, I could parlay those qualms into an enormously successful young adult page-turner that then becomes an obscenely successful film in which my qualms can be downplayed for the sake of a couple hundred million dollars at the box office. After all, no one has any qualms about a cool couple hundred million.

What’s interesting about the word qualm is that, regardless of is definition today, during Erasmus’ time it meant a feeling of faintness, perhaps from a fever or sickness. As in, “Are you okay? You don’t look so good.” Answer, “No, I believe I have a qualm. I need to sit down and have a glass of ….” Well, it had better not be water in the 16^th century as you were likely to get cholera or something, and then where would you be? Well, you’d be back a few centuries further when qualm in Old English meant Death, Disaster, Plague, even Utter Destruction, as in, “Dude, I totally pwned on that Call of Duty match. I mean, like, Total Qualmage!!!”

Now, we’re not here to go into how we get from Total Qualmage in Old English to the contemporary caffeine-free, ‘I have qualms about speeding in a school zone.” I am only here to suggest a very simple idea: Qualms, even the weak sister, milk toast, Disney-rated variety that we have today, are in fact very good for us.

Qualms are good for us in the simple matters of practical life. It’s only natural to have qualms before making any kind of big decision—such as choosing a major, buying a house or a car, contemplating a life partner for marriage, selecting the proper shoes to properly accessorize one’s outfit. These are big decisions and it’s only natural that something inside us sort of gasp and say, “Hold on here just one minute! Am I doing the right thing? What if someone else has the same pair of shoes? That would be a complete disaster! ”

The Qualm Before the Storm.

Qualms are good for other things not quite so dramatic. For instance, diet. If I have eaten Mexican three times this week, pizza twice and chili dogs at least once for breakfast, I may register a qualm or two before visiting the ice cream dispenser in the Deacon Jones Dining Hall. A properly placed qualm in that case might just save my roommate’s life.

Qualms can be useful in matters of faith as well. For instance, a qualm or two might be helpful before we misappropriate whatever we hear in the marketplace of belief. I vividly recall a particularly powerful message in Vacation Bible School about faith the size of a mustard seed that gives one the power to move mountains. Afterwards, we went to McDonalds for lunch and in the restroom there I devoted myself diligently to trying to move the garbage can with faith alone…. They had showed us just how big a mustard seed was and I was certain I had that much faith or more. Only it didn’t seem to work on the garbage can. Maybe it only worked on mountains. Anyway, I left the restroom crushed and convinced that I lacked any faith worth mentioning. Major Qualmage.

When you Google "Simony" you will find this lovely picture of Simonists in Hell.

In the culture today, and just as much or more in our Christian subculture, we are asked to believe a great many things. And many wonderful and good folks take those things as they are, dished up with brightly colored sprinkles and slick presentation, and they go back again and again to the ice cream dispenser of commercial Christendom … without a qualm, without a thought, without a moment to pause or reflect on either the quality or the truth of what is being peddled. In Acts Chapter 8, Apostles Peter and John had qualms about a man who offered them money for the power to give spiritual gifts to the masses. Peter’s response to that man was both gentle and understanding. He said, “May your money perish with you!”

For more on this topic, Google, “Simony.”

In conclusion, I could tie a nice little positive bow on this, quote something about clinging to “that which is good,” “if there’s any virtue” and all that … but that would ruin the tone of my talk. You’ve heard those things many times before and can quote them by heart, and if you would like me to pause for a moment of silence so you can do that right now I will.

Instead, I will conclude by saying this: Respect the Qualm. Love the Qualm. Embrace the Qualm. Accept the Qualm. Praise the Qualm.

Because you never know when you will be called upon … to select the right pair of shoes.

Thank you.

The Temptation of Christ

I remember the first time I read the story about Jesus’ 40-days in the wilderness. There’s something about the temptation by the devil that tends to get our attention more than the fasting. And that’s only natural. The temptation has all the earmarks of the classical agon—the duel between heaven and hell, the showdown between Christ and the Devil. It’s got tension and conflict and even a little suspense. And, as we learn if we’ve read our John Milton, the devil can be an awfully interesting character.

But today’s reading in the Gospel of Mark just talks about the 40 days in the wilderness without a lot of detail. And it parallels the reading in Genesis that deals with the end of the Flood and the first grand display in the sky of the rainbow, the sign of God’s promise–all after a period of 40 days of rain. It’s one of those all-too-tempting pairings from the Old and New Testaments—40 days of rain and storm and destruction on the one hand, 40 days of desert and heat and wasteland on the other. Don’t worry; I’m not going into the whole numerology bit to illuminate the mystical meaning of the number 40. Saint Augustine has a great explanation for it and if you’re really, truly interested, there’s even a Wikipedia article on it that makes for pretty riveting reading.

No, what I want to address in this small moment of reflection is the Why of Self-denial. Self-denial is something with which we are pretty unfamiliar in the United States. To us, self-denial is NOT eating the Big Mac today. It’s skipping our favorite TV show or fasting from sweets or walking up the stairs rather than taking the elevator. Sadly, the cultural priorities that surround us pretty much zero out any kind of real self-denial. In fact, we’re pretty safe at any given moment from having any serious thoughts about it. Some product somewhere is going to come to our rescue and make our cross oh-so-much easier to bear. And if that’s not enough, we have plenty of research that will tell us in big bold letters that, after all, self-denial can be bad for your health.

So if we’re not talking about putting away soft drinks or social media for Lent, what are we talking about? Well, first of all we are also not talking about denial for its own sake, to prove a point, to give ourselves some sort of spiritual P90X rush, to deliver high fives to our neighbors or to be able to post the ultimate status update: “Day 40 without food and I’m still alive!”

Flagellants

Nor is it about self-flagellation, the practice that emerged in the time of the Black Death where the people who weren’t dying of the plague lashed their backs to a bloody pulp and then went around killing their neighbors who were full of sin. That’s what we tend to do when we’re feeling especially pious—we take our new-found holiness out on our neighbors who don’t quite measure up.

No, self denial is about shutting up, about ceasing the self-centered inner monologue that accompanies our daily routine. It’s about closing out the endless noise of the world and the relentless insistent demands of our bodies. It’s about turning down both the volume of life and the static of our psyches. Why? Because it’s only when we turn off our self-created whirlwinds that we are able to hear Truth.

In the end, self-denial is about freedom.

Pepin the Corgi

We have a beautiful Welsh Corgi. That’s a dog that has all the regal attributes of a German Shepherd, only without the legs (they’re very short). Our Corgi, Pepin, loves to eat. In fact, he has no off switch when it comes to food. If we let him, he would eat all day and still crave more. If he suspects you have a tiny morsel of something edible, he’ll start jumping up and down in front of you with his tongue hanging out. I’ve often thought that we could channel this mighty gift of his. What could we not train him to do by using his appetite as a motivation? I believe we might even be able to teach him to fly. Yes, it’s funny, but the sad thing is that our lovely little dog has a serious problem. He is captive to his appetites. You see, Pepin can’t decide that today he’s not going to crave food. He has no will of his own. He is driven by his genetic code. He is a prisoner to his propensities.

You see where I’m going, don’t you? James talks about being driven by our own lusts. Isaiah talks about everyone of us having gone astray. The fact is, self-denial is not merely a thing we should be doing at Lent.  When Paul says we can do all things through Christ, he’s not just talking about making every day like Friday. No, he’s referring to gaining freedom from the things that drive us day in and day out, that skew our thinking and our values and even our relationships, that make us mean and petty, uncaring and insensitive, overreaching and ungrateful. Self-denial is about closing the door on our appetites just long enough to realize that we don’t have to live as prisoners to them. We can quiet the animal roar long enough to hear that still small voice of the Holy Spirit, always there and ready to teach us and to empower us to take the steps that will lead us into real freedom.

I truly don’t mean to belittle anything anyone has done during this season to put a check on themselves. I hope no one will take anything I’ve said that way. There are many practical benefits to be gained from simple disciplines. But I do hope to invite us, regardless of what we do, to make sure we are not merely trading one bondage for another, but that we are turning the key in the lock that will let go our chains and allow us to make a true beginning of loving God with all our hearts and our neighbors as ourselves.

A pity the real world isn’t always friendly.

To my best recollection as a child I didn’t find the world terribly friendly. When I was four, the world often took the form of a shattering thunderstorm. You never knew when soul-ripping sound would explode around you or when a sight-stealing blue bolt would blast a nearby treetop. One had to tread carefully. One could not be too careful. But one was too young to forecast the weather. So when the sheet of punishing rain marched down the street in your direction, it was time to run as fast as your stumpy legs could carry you. I speak in metaphor, but for the very young there is little difference between the metaphor and the real thing. The tender psyche reads them the same.

For me the best shelter from the metaphorical tempest was deep, deep, deep within my mind, where I drifted like a feather downwards into oblivion, at first for peace and then because I came to like it better than “real” life. In my safe, submerged world, grownups were two dimensional, dimwitted figures, as in the stories by Roald Dahl–James with his Giant Peach, Charley with his Factory. My third grade teacher, Miss Ott, fed my ant-lion brain by reading Dahl to the class. I was an eager and willing acolyte of those caustic black ink characters. My voracious imagination began to construct its own adventures, full of living toy soldiers and unlikely heroes (like a young, dark-haired boy), and, naturally, maidens who needed rescuing.

Many of my earliest conjured adventures were in black and white. That was Shirley Temple’s fault.

Shirley Temple and The Trimmed Mustache

I was reminded of this the other day when I saw a collection of Shirley Temple movies in a bargain bin at the bookstore. Shirley Temple was my first ever celebrity fixation (I must have been a sucker for soft focus). In my monochromatic dreams, I vastly improved the plots of Shirley’s films by being in them myself. I was careful, mind you, not to replace the handsome leading man who played the heroine’s father. That would have been stupid, because He With The Nicely Trimmed Mustache had to smile down beneficently upon the boy hero and praise him for his selfless bravery. This was required to round out the plot.

Errol Flynn

In my dreams, the Trimmed Mustache belonged to Errol Flynn. No matter that Flynn never played opposite Shirley Temple. I never knew that he hadn’t. It was common knowledge that all the guys in the old black and white movies really wished they were Errol Flynn. They certainly tried their best to be like him. But naturally no one could do black and white action quite like Flynn. Even Ronald Reagan wanted to be Errol Flynn. So, for me, Errol Flynn was in every Shirley Temple movie, too. The logic was nearly overpowering.

Even in my fantasy-reinforced mental storm cellar the battering thunder and lightning had a way of blowing in from time to time, messing up the carefully regulated symmetry of my inner life. The onslaught could be relentless at times, and cruel. I’ll never forget the day I was watching television, all innocent and unsuspecting, when a middle-aged woman with a black bun for savage emphasis was introduced by the show host as Shirley Temple Black. Milk and corn flakes spewed from my nose as my world came crashing down around me in my Apollo 11 pajamas. It was without a doubt one of the worst days of my life.

That’s how I first learned what it was like to be unlucky in love. How I managed to move on, I couldn’t tell you, but manage I did. I moved on to Lena Zavaroni.

In fact, Lena Zavaroni prompted this little daisy chain of awkward reminiscence. Her name popped into my head randomly after more than thirty-five years of slumber in my subconscious. I have no idea how this sort of thing happens. But I guess I should be glad it was her and not the girl who challenged me to a wrestling match when I was seven and almost beat me. Her name I don’t recall. (Okay. It was Jodie.)

At first I couldn’t actually place the name that had popped into my brain, so I did what anyone else would do in that situation. I Googled it, unsure of any result and not really expecting anything to come of it. But then I saw a picture and … with a funny (as in “curious, beyond or deviating from the usual or expected”) rush, it all came back to me.

Long ago, my father, out of concern for the educational well-being of the domus, had been good enough to supply our working-class, middle-income household with the emphatically unclassy New Book of Knowledge Encyclopedia from whose coarse, cheaply printed pages I wrote my first ever research paper–on Adolf Hitler, of all people. Five whole, scarcely legible pages emerged from the sweat-slippery pencil one night and I thought I had delivered my own Kampf. Miss Salvin, my fifth grade teacher, thought so, too, because she gave me an A and wrote, in declarative red-ink, “Great job, Matt. I can tell you worked very hard on this.” It was the only thing I ever got an A for in my entire elementary school career.

So the Book of Knowledge was kind to me and I ended up spending a great deal of time with it. For a while, we got additional annuals like clockwork once a year with the latest scientific discoveries, technological advances, geo-political news and top entertainment stories. And in 1974 I was flipping through the newest annual with its new glue smell when I came across the photo of an eleven-year old Scottish singer, an actual star close to my age, (I was 12). Her name was Lena Zavaroni. I remember pausing for quite a while over that photo and then finding it again several times after that and re-reading the extended caption beneath it, something about the astonishing talent of this child sensation.

Lena Zavaroni

Truth be told, I never heard Miss Zavaroni sing, never saw her on television, never listened to an album of hers, never read a single other news item about her, never even heard the slightest mention of her name again from any other source until just before writing this.

But those minor obstacles were unimportant at the time. Shortly before I first saw Miss Zavaroni’s photo, my family had joined a tiny religious sect that thought the Second Coming was due any second. To prepare for the momentous event, we got rid of our TVs, foreswore movies and wanton music, fled to the mosquito-infested swamplands of southeast Virginia and planted ridiculously abundant vegetable gardens. We canned the fat of the land and tarried in virtuous misery for the happy return of the Lord of hosts. Like the survivors of “The Thing” in the original Cold War era science fiction movie, we kept watching the skies. For ten years we watched the skies, until I grew old enough to head out to college and rediscover the planet beneath my feet.

For a brief time in 1974, Lena Zavaroni’s photo filled in for the tragically fallen Shirley Temple as I began a serious withdrawal into my mental bunker. I believe it may have been the timing that has made the photo stick in my mind. The thunder storms of life associated with the isolationist sect would make a wasteland of the real world for a time. I can’t recall any adventures I concocted, nor from exactly what perils I saved the little singer, but the fascination evaporated as soon as I found C.S. Lewis, Dickens, Verne and Tolkien, who broadened my little horizons considerably and took my daydreams into far more epic proportions. Lena was forgotten.

Back to the future, or “Meanwhile,” as the Internet meme goes, I stumbled again on the existence of Lena Zavaroni after three and a half decades … and no sooner did I find that she had grown and enjoyed a celebrated career than I also found that she was dead. It was as if Google had resurrected someone from my distant past, flashed an entire life in front of me, and then closed the book on it, all in a few minutes of surfing. There was something decidedly cruel and harshly real about it at the same time.

Lena Zavaroni fell victim, as have many others, to the perils of child stardom. She suffered cruelly from anorexia, led a desperately sad, psychologically impaired adulthood and died in 1999 at the age of 35, too fragile to recover from pneumonia in the wake of surgery. She spent every penny she had earned as a singer on treatments for her depression and disorders, but they all failed. In the end, she was eking out a meager existence on welfare. She is remembered now as a British Judy Garland or Karen Carpenter and still has a loyal fan following who strive to keep her memory alive with photos and video clips from her many performances. A film based on her life was in the works at one time, but seems to have gone by the wayside.

Obviously this isn’t going to be one of those happy parables with a tight little compositional bow tied on. The real world wasn’t friendly to Lena. Her life and career mirrored the Shakespeare lines I quoted at the beginning, “So quick bright things come to confusion.” No Errol Flynn, or other heroic stand-in, was there to save her. Those who tried to help her labored in vain.

It was, and is, hard for me not to take the whole thing just a little personally, along the lines by which all of us to a certain degree bend the whole universe around our own little lives. While Zavaroni’s life and death–in reality–have nothing remotely to do with me, a mostly forgotten fictional version of her had lived in my mind all this time and seemed taken by surprise by the turn of events in real life that spelled an untimely end to the fiction as well. There’s probably a quirky one-act play in there somewhere.

And of course, this got me wondering how many self-manufactured oddities rattle around inside us, like space junk flying around Earth even now, mostly forgotten but ready to become suddenly very noticeable in bus-sized pieces without much warning.

Maybe I’m conflating the issue. Maybe most people don’t have a lot of mental space debris orbiting their micro-cosmic psyches. That would be a good thing. But Lena’s story suggests that our private carefully crafted versions of reality may have flaws.

For we do craft our internal realities and project them onto the world. Everyone does.

Dorothy locked out of her storm cellar

It’s how we make sense of things, how we order our waking lives. And when we sleep, the windmills of life and the knights of imagination mingle in riotous dance. I’m old enough..and wise enough, I hope…to know that Dorothy’s storm cellar is a hiding place for children. As such it isn’t a bad place. It was actually a very good place for me to be sometimes. But as an adult, one must learn when to take shelter and when to stand atop the mountain and hurl lightning back at the storm. As a child, you have to run.

Lena’s memory took me back for a little rummage into a cobweb festooned corner of my existence. At the same time it forced me to reflect on the intersection of people’s stories, these apparently random connections that are as visible as dust motes but as substantial as monuments. This brief reflection is but one offshoot of a connection so ephemeral as to have no measurable being. And yet … now that I have released it into the world, who knows where it will go from here?

As uncomfortable as it might be for us to admit, the world in which we live today is completely different from the one we lived in only a week ago.

True, most of us can go back to work. We have hung our flags. We have prayed our prayers. We have held our moments of silence. We have given our blood and our money. But we were all witnesses to the most horrific disaster ever to befall a group of American civilians on their own soil–far worse than Pearl Harbor, worse even in some ways than the carnage of Antietam in the 1860s. For in those other situations, the people who died did so with their guns trained on a visible enemy.

In this instance, civilians from 40 different countries were busy checking their e-mail, sipping coffee, chatting with friends and family on the phone, making plans, engaged in the same little rituals as the rest of us in the Eastern United States. In an instant, that all came to an end.

I was grading papers in my office when someone called to announce the collision at Trade One. Funny thing–in my isolated, comfortable little world, I shrugged it off, thinking it was only a private plane and that the “disaster” would be on the order of a “regular” plane crash–a few dozen killed maybe. It’s horrible to say, but the way these stories are normally sandwiched between the latest scandal and the home-run race, we’ve learned not to think much of them.

Minutes later, I found a television and watched as the top of Trade Two came down, in slow motion like something out of a movie, and my stomach lurched. A half-dozen or so other people were watching with me, and I couldn’t even tell you who they were. What I was seeing hit some kind of barrier in my mind and refused to register. Numbly, I turned away.

As the week trudged on and the endless coverage continued, a lot of things went through my mind. The first was, it’s amazing what loses importance in the face of mortality. We wonder how the world can get on with its petty scurrying hither and thither, with the mechanical grind that seems ultimately self-serving and essentially useless. We take a serious hit in the viscera of our values and wonder what we’ve been thinking about all this time, and why didn’t we see all this before?

But we should remember something very important. The shift in our vision is instructive, but it is exaggerated. To a large extent, life is really about being faithful with what is in front of us, regardless of where we are, and no matter when. That’s precisely what most of the folks who were lost to us last week were doing–being faithful with the paper clips on their desks. They had no idea they were going to be called away just then–and neither do we at any time. But I have to believe that their deaths were as noble in their way as the soldier’s on the front line.

While the president and generals get justice in gear, we can do something vital. We can remain faithful where we are and we can pray. For while God is not more in one place than He is in another, we can believe, I think, that our prayers can send angels to those who need them most.

The 83rd Annual Academy Awards are set to come off in style this weekend. I’m not inclined to advertise the show, as I typically find it agonizingly dull. I understand that there’s an I-Pad and I-Phone app you can download to follow every second of the event even through commercials, so if you’re a fan, go ahead and knock yourself out. I used to be really interested in who was going to win what, but after years of disappointment in both the ceremony and the results of the ceremony, I’m sorry to say my interest has begun to flag. It’s hard, though, not to feel a little curiosity about whether The King’s Speech or The Social Network or Inception will get Best Picture, so I might suffer through it anyway.

Of equal interest are the Golden Raspberry Awards, also this weekend, where the worst in the year’s films also receive the recognition they richly deserve. I hear the latest Twilight film is one of the nominees, though it’s hard for me to be objective as I suffered a kidney stone about halfway through it. I’m not at all sure the movie didn’t cause the kidney stone. I’m actually afraid to try to finish it.

So, as you now know, today’s topic is movies. I’d like to address a question that tends to make people uncomfortable—What role to do the movies play in the life of a Christian? And, perhaps more importantly, is there a RIGHT way to think about movies?

I should provide a disclaimer at this point. By talking about movies at all I am guaranteed to disappoint, anger, offend or otherwise provoke just about every person in the audience today. If I fail to do that, then it’s highly likely I will have been of no use whatsoever.

First for some background: In 1973, when I was eleven years old, my family did two things that would change the course of my life. We sold our television and we stopped watching theatrical films. The last TV show I remember watching in those days was the pilot for “Little House on the Prairie.” The last film I can recall was a terrible Disney thing called, The World’s Greatest Athlete. It was really horrible. Considering the fact that I wouldn’t watch another theatrical release for twelve years, it was a decidedly bad way to end. I didn’t own a TV set for the next 15 years.

Some people would applaud such a drastic move away from the eye candy of the world, the flesh and the devil. And I have to admit that from one standpoint, it was the best thing that ever happened to me. Freedom from mainstream visual media allowed me to focus on books, newspapers and radio for a decade and a half. I should mention that newspapers and radio were contraband. The strict religious community to which my family belonged at the time forbade both, but my father ignored the newspaper ban (thanks, Dad!) and I ignored the radio ban, listening to National Public Radio every chance I got, along with weekend sports. I never saw the Super Bowl all those years, but I could have recited you a mean play-by-play.

When it came to books, I read several each week. I generally didn’t tell people what I was reading because if you did that in our particular religious community, you fell under dark suspicion of heretical and unholy leanings that you caught, like a disease, from the paper on the pages. The book might be yanked and you might be placed “on restriction,” which meant an indefinite period of penance marked by silence, fasting, heavy Bible reading and lengthy essays confessing the error of your ways.

But in spite of all the good things that came from my decade and a half hiatus from visual mass media, I was pretty unhappy about it at the time. I would have preferred to be John J.B. Wilson, founder of the Raspberry Awards who also wrote a funny book called Everything I Know I Learned From the Movies: A Compilation of Clichés and Un-Truisms Gleaned from a Lifetime Spent Entirely Too Much in the Dark. (As a side note here, last year, Sandra Bullock was the first person to win a Razzie and an Oscar in the same year. She also showed up for both ceremonies.)

Before we go any further, allow me to set your mind at ease. I love movies. Growing up in the strictest of religious sects produced in me a spirit of such towering rebellion that I went forth and became a media specialist and I have immersed myself for the past thirty years in virtually every form of mass media imaginable, from pamphlets to smart phones. I spend more hours on Netflix every week than I care to confess to this group. Most of you aren’t even my Facebook friends, so how can I trust you with such private information?

Let’s begin the discussion with one of my favorite false analogies. Maybe you’ve heard the inspirational parable about the wise father and the brownies. It can be found here, but I’ll read it to you:

“A father of some teenage children had the family rule that they could not attend PG-13 or R rated movies. His three teens wanted to see a particular popular movie that was playing at local theaters. It was rated PG-13. The teens interviewed friends and even some members of their family’s church to find out what was offensive in the movie. The teens made a list of pros and cons about the movie to use to convince their dad that they should be allowed to see it. The con’s were that it contained ONLY 3 swear words, the ONLY violence was a building exploding (and you see that on TV all the time they said), and you actually did not “see” the couple in the movie having sex – it was just implied sex, off camera. The pros were that it was a popular movie – a blockbuster. Everyone was seeing it. If the teens saw the movie then they would not feel left out when their friends discussed it. The movie contained a good story and plot. It had some great adventure and suspense in it. There were some fantastic special effects in this movie. The movie’s stars were some of the most talented actors in Hollywood. It probably would be nominated for several awards. Many of the members of their Christian church had even seen the movie and said it wasn’t “very bad”. Therefore, since there were more pros than cons the teens said they were asking their father to reconsider his position on just this ONE movie and let them have permission to go see it. The father looked at the list and thought for a few minutes. He said he could tell his children had spent some time and thought on this request. He asked if he could have a day to think about it before making his decision. The teens were thrilled thinking; “Now we’ve got him! Our argument is too good! Dad can’t turn us down!” So, they happily agreed to let him have a day to think about their request. The next evening the father called in his three teenagers, who were smiling smugly, into the living room. There on the coffee table he had a plate of brownies. The teens were puzzled. The father told his children he had thought about their request and had decided that if they would eat a brownie then he would let them go to the movie. But just like the movie, the brownies had pros and cons. The pros were that they were made with the finest chocolate and other good ingredients. They had the added special effect of yummy walnuts in them. The brownies were moist and fresh with wonderful chocolate frosting on top. He had made these fantastic brownies using an award-winning recipe. And best of all, the brownies had been made lovingly by the hand of their own father. The brownies only had one con. The father had included a little bit of a special ingredient. The brownies also contained just a little bit of dog poop. But he had mixed the dough well – they probably would not even be able to taste the dog poop and he had baked it at 350 degrees so any bacteria or germs from the dog poop had probably been destroyed. Therefore, if any of his children could stand to eat the brownies which included just a “little bit of crap” and not be effected by it, then he knew they would also be able to see the movie with “just a little bit of smut” and not be effected. Of course, none of the teens would eat the brownies and the smug smiles had left their faces. Only Dad was smiling smugly as they left the room. Now when his teenagers ask permission to do something he is opposed to the father just asks, “Would you like me to whip up a batch of my special brownies?”

I thought you would like that story. The problem with a false analogy is that it forces your perspective to the range of choices before you. It does not ask first just how alike or unlike the two things are that are being paired. For example, here’s a great false analogy: “Employees are like nails. Just as nails must be hit on the head, so must employees be hit on the head.” In the brownie analogy, we find ourselves wondering whether or not consuming brownies and watching movies are sufficiently alike to draw the likeness between them. Then we have to ask whether the presence of fecal matter and the incidence of vulgarities are also enough alike to make the analogy hold up. If you think eating a nutty, chocolaty brownie and sitting down to a romantic comedy fall into the same general category of pleasure inducing excitement, then for you this analogy is pretty tight and you should therefore avoid any filmic work that has anything in it that might represent dog poop in your fragile consciousness.

We all know that when you start talking about Christians and movies, you cannot be too careful. The opinions on what is wise and what is permissible are as varied as they are vehement. On one side you have this father with his brownies who believes that the 13 in PG 13 movies is a pinch of arsenic in the mocha latte of life. “Touch not the unclean thing!” But clear on the other side you have people, like some Christian pop culture experts I could name, who say that those who are offended when they watch explicit material are weaker brethren. Since all good things come from God, we should strive to see the good in filmic art and celebrate it. We should be willing, like Jesus, to sit down and eat with the publicans and sinners. How else can we be salt and light in a fallen world, how else can we be faithful witnesses shining a light in the darkness?

Guess what? I’m not going to presume to dictate to anyone today just who is right or wrong in this wide ranging debate about Christians and film. What I can tell you, from having good friends on opposite ends of the spectrum, is that the trench lines in this debate are deeply dug and firmly fixed and the culture warriors manning those trenches are more than eager to lob holy hand grenades at each other across the no man’s land of Hollywood. And while I’m certainly one of those warriors, I have no doubt at all that if I were to attempt to impose my personal standards on anyone here today, I might as well have showed up in a Darth Vader costume (a small one).

So what do I have to offer today that might be of any use in this discussion? What can I toss out there that might provide some sort of plumb line for the faithful?

I’d like to offer today not so much a definitive standard for judging films as a framework for helping people make good decisions about them. People who know of my interest in film are quick to ask me what I think about certain movies. Usually the conversation goes something like this: “Dr. Melton, have you seen Death to Smoochy?” “No, I can’t say that I have.” “Dude! You haven’t seen it? You really need to see it.” “Really?” “Yeah—you gotta watch it and then tell me what you think of it” “Is it any good?” “Yeah! It’s the best movie I’ve ever seen.” “Wow! Okay then, I’ll check it out.” I then go and find Death to Smoochy and watch it. I’m horrified. It’s like scraping my eyeballs with razorblades or squeezing my brains out through my ears like Play Doh. Later, “Did you watch it yet?” “Yes, I did.” “What did you think?” “It … wasn’t … really my thing.” “You mean you didn’t like it? How is that possible? How could you not love this movie?” “Well, to be honest, I hated it.” And they go their way sorrowing.

I’ve had this conversation any number of times and if nothing else, these encounters about film point out just how subjective appreciation of the film art can be. But is that the end of it? Do we settle for endless subjectivity? Is that the answer when it comes to the Christian and film? Or is there a better way?

I think there is. I want to give you something today that I hope will change the way you look at the movies. I hope you take what I offer in the spirit of good faith and apply it to the movies you watch. I’m not naïve enough to think that these ideas are going to bring a sudden unity of feeling with regard to movie appreciation—but I hope it will get us talking on more meaningful terms.

When we watch a movie, we generally get a sense of whether we like it or not. Sometimes the impression is so favorable we’re ready to hang out a banner and declare to all the world, no matter what anyone else feels, that this film is awesome and worthy of worship. We might face ridicule, verbal abuse and mockery, but we sometimes consider it a badge of honor to like movies no one else seems to like.

Here’s the question I’d like for you to ask of your favorite film—what if the universe of that movie were the real universe? No, I’m not getting all mystical and fantastical. I’m just trying to provide a way to read some of the virtues of the piece of art. What if the universe of the film were the real universe? What kind of world would we be living in? Most importantly, what is sacred in this alternative world, not just in plot and dialog, but also in the way the film unfolds, in the camera work, in compositional hierarchies, in all the various ways that a film presents the imagery, the colors, the sound, the music, the action, the characters? All these things are part of the universe of the film and they can speak quite loudly when you stop long enough to listen. It’s not just about the story and it’s not just about the so-called message.

Let’s take an example. In last year’s mega blockbuster Avatar by the same James Cameron who brought us Titanic in 1997 (“I’m king of the world!”), we are transported to an alien landscape and treated, via the miracle of computer animation, to exotic life forms of breathtaking scope and beauty. Somewhere in there we are treated to a plot that pits a destructively evil mining corporation against native plants and innocent life forms.

It doesn’t take a 3D viewing of this movie to recognize that the most important element, the most sacred part of the text, is not the plot or the message or any particular character—it’s the lovingly created world of Pandora. At every turn, the camera leads us to the astonishing color, beauty and even danger of this exotic place. It’s almost an imaginary National Geographic documentary that just happens to have an adventure story clinging to it.

As such, while some Christians dismissed the film as mystical mumbo jumbo, I think some missed a terrific opportunity to allow this movie to inspire love and appreciation of our own world, of the breathtaking beauty and attention to detail provided by our own Creator, of the endless variety of earth-bound blessings we enjoy every day in our sunrises and sunsets, and ultimately of the sacredness of life.

Am I saying everything about this movie is wonderful? Of course not. I am, after all, a critic, and I wrote a review of this film shortly after its release in which I shared a fuller slate of issues, but I only wanted to use it to make a point.

Let’s look at another “artistic” film of recent memory. Take 300, the movie based on Frank Miller’s graphic novel. Like Avatar, 300 is heavy on the graphics side, filmed almost entirely indoors in front of green screens, much like “Blues Clues.” But what is elevated by the art in this film? Besides digitally enhanced six-pack abs, red capes and speedos, the art of this film is devoted to making mayhem visually appealing to the tune of driving rock music. A near endless sequence of shots with creative variable speeds are affectionately dedicated to the dismembering, decapitating and otherwise dispatching of staggering numbers of people in various states of costumed splendor. Yes, there is an underlying message about courage and sacrifice—not to mention beefcake—but in the universe of the movie, the filmmakers telegraph for us the focal point of the energy and passion in their art.

Now here is where I am likely to offend you, if you are not already offended. As Christians and as sub-creators, certainly we can admire slick graphics, superior technique and glittering production values of a film like 300. But how far do we embrace the piety of the art, how much do we allow ourselves to identify with that which a film elevates as sacred? Should a Christian allow himself or herself to be seduced into finding mayhem beautiful? I certainly hope not. And right now I’m being psychically bombarded by a lot of “but, Dr. Melton.” Let me move on.

Let’s talk about message vs means. In some film art you have Good Message delivered with Terrible Means—one thinks of the Left Behind movies here. The underlying theme in such art is that God doesn’t care about production values. Schlock with a good message is still good and should not be spoken evil of. I beg to differ and I think most you would agree. Our Creator has the most awesome production values anyone could ask for. Isn’t shabby work an insult?

But beyond cheesy production values is a spate of films that receive a fair amount of support among Christian viewers because of what is seen as their redeeming message. I’m talking about movies like The Boondock Saints, Pulp Fiction, V for Vendetta, the Saw series. The list goes on. Now we’re getting serous. I see many of these on favorite film lists on Facebook and it always surprises me, but I suppose it shouldn’t.

All I can say is that, as I’ve said before, we need to take the step of considering what the actual working of the film elevates as sacred. In Boondock Saints, for instance, a triune gun-crew of studdly Irish Americans execute bad guys in highly stylized vigilante fashion. The movie fits into a genre of neo-gangland films that combine quirky scripts, unconventional filming and artsy pacing to deliver action-packed, pulse-pounding, hard-driving stories with more violence per second than chocolate chips per bite in something from the Cookie Store. Violence in a film is not bad per se, as in HBO’s recent series The Pacific that tells the unvarnished story of American Marines in World War II. But when the violence is elevated to the sacred, when it appears for its own sake to appeal to baser instincts, which it does in some of the films I’ve mentioned, we have a problem.

In the Saw movies, for instance, the message is certainly that your sins will find you out. But they will also chain you in a little room and dismember you digit by digit. Or drown you in a glass box. Or some other terrible fate. Are you getting the picture here?

What about a film that uses Good Means to convey a Terrible Message—the technique is cool but the film preaches bad values? Certainly some of the movies mentioned above also fit into that category, but we often find ourselves being manipulated into cheering for criminals. The Oceans Eleven movies, for instance, do an exceptional job with this. In the old days, the so-called Code did not allow criminals to get away with their villainy. The original 1960 version of Oceans Eleven, abiding by this code, makes use of a wonderfully creative ending to bring the work of the thieves to naught. We seem to have few such compulsions today.

On occasion you get a Good Message and Good Means together, though the old Hollywood adage is as true now as it ever was—if you want to send a message, use Western Union (though we might say Facebook today). Film art that focuses primarily on message tends to get derailed as art. What you want is a great story with solid entertainment credit that elevates as sacred something of genuine redeeming value. New films that fit the All Good category, in my view, would be The King’s Speech, True Grit and Toy Story 3. I could list more, but I’m running short on time.

Allow me to conclude with this thought. Before you stick a film on your lapel or wear it proudly like an article of clothing, please stop and consider what I’ve said today. I’m not charging us to ask ourselves what movies would Jesus watch. Those who say we should hang out with the publicans and sinners at the movie house actually have a point. In John 17 Jesus prays that we would remain in the world but be not of it—that means, I believe, that we are to fully engage our culture. In another sense, as Tolkien said in his essay “On Faerie Stories,” we are creative beings. We have been given these art forms. We should use them and appreciate their beauty when it’s appropriate to do.

I don’t think for a minute that many people in this room will necessarily agree with my conclusions, but if I have made you just a little uncomfortable, if I have made you think, if I have made you stop and consider the piety of an individual movie, if, in short, I have ruined your film viewing experience and made you attempt to fit the films you enjoy into the larger framework of your life as a Christian, then, to quote a famous Star Wars character, “Everthing is going according to plan. Mwahahahaha!”

If you’d like to listen to the podcast, you can find it here.

Cato urges Dante forward

“What negligence and what delay is this?
Race to the mountain and strip off the slough
Which won’t let God be manifest in you!”

Cato’s message, of course, is that the purging of sin is serious business and one shouldn’t loiter in the past, even the good past.

Perhaps Cato was aware how the Past can be all consuming and the Future so deeply intriguing that the Now shrinks to a pinpoint of significance. And when a distressing Past threatens the imminent Future, the Now can vanish altogether in a welter of worry and panic. Sometimes we find ourselves shuffling along, blind, deaf and dumb to the crucial Now, or riding the Present like a slumbering passenger on a subway, ignoring the crucial intersections clattering by, missing the doors that open and close.

Thomas Merton claimed that past and future “are not ours because they are always out of reach.” Some of us are in dire need of a Cato to remind us of the Time, that it’s Now o’clock, the moment to be doing something about what we’ve been given.

If only it were so easy. Even though the Past is not ours, it does not necessarily proceed peacefully to the corral when we want it to. Sometimes it’s the big suitcase that will not close. Sometimes it’s the glaring nail hole in the wall that the picture frame just fails to cover.

Drinking from Eunoe

I love the symbol of the two rivers at the end of Dante’s Purgatory. Those baptized in the River Lethe forget their sins. Those who drink from the River Eunoe are blessed with the memory of righteousness, a Divine memory we didn’t know we had. Dante borrows the image of Lethe from Greek stories and Greek religious philosophy. Some Stoics believed that in the afterlife, the River Lethe washed the soul of all its memories so it could be recycled into the world. Dante appropriates it to symbolize the New Creature: “All things have passed away…” –not the typical Christian redemption symbol, but something that comes after the hard work of penance.

For Cato’s harsh reminder precedes Lethe’s blessed waters. Penance in the Now plants the Promise of the Future.

Shed, for a moment, the dogma of denomination. Forget prayer beads and bloody knees. For many, taking the Now seriously–truly seriously–is a penance of its own, a turning away from hypnotic Siren songs from before and behind. And staying there, standing fast there, may call for some pretty serious penitential work, the kind of work that overcomes the insistent tug of bitterness, anger or despair. It may require the gritty, unglamorous labor of forgiveness, patience and genuine belief, the sort of belief that walks without theatrical theme music.

We tend to idealize forgiveness because it appears so often in the teachings of Christ. It acquires a kind of halo effect that belies its real mundane and unspectacular dimensions. The divine glow makes us feel that forgiveness is the sort of thing God takes care of while we stay busy making theologically correct propositions, satisfied that our rightness has done the work of righteousness. We are like Andrew Jackson who blasted his foes: “May God forgive them, for I never shall.”

As for patience and belief, few have even a mustard seed of the former and fewer still know what the latter looks like. Our persistent sense of entitlement renders us immune to the sheer force of effort that each requires. G.K. Chesterton would have called us functional atheists–those who profess belief in the Divine but behave consistently as though there’s no such thing.

The Angel of Zeal

As Dante begins to climb Mt. Purgatory, he finds his forehead stamped with symbols of his wrongdoing in life. As he leaves each level behind, an angel comes and wipes a damning mark away. He runs the gamut of the Deadly Sins from Pride to Lust. The final gateway leads through fire–”for he is like a refiner’s fire,” says both the scripture and the celebrated song from Handel’s Messiah, “and who shall stand when He appeareth?”

One need not be Pelagian or Roman Catholic to embrace the need for Penance, the transforming life labor that goes far beyond the sheer repetition normally associated with the term. There is no real penance without empowerment. We have just celebrated what we call the Advent, the inception of the Incarnation of Christ. That Incarnation is the Divine Penance–not that He needed to purge Divine sin, but that we desperately needed the model whereby to purge ourselves. A great mystery rarely addressed is just how Christ handled the relentless barrage of disbelief that came to him every hour. Jesus is often presented as some kind of redemptive superhero. But he walked in dirty streets and dealt with grossly selfish people and got hammered, day in and day out, by ignorance, insult and indifference. The challenge for Christ was to avoid calling down fire from heaven and leaving smoking holes where people stood. If Righteousness was all about Being Right, Jesus could have Shown Them. But he didn’t. He worked. He took all of it and he kept right on working in the Present. And the Present of Christ extends to ours and provides the empowerment for our penance.

I don’t pretend to have reached any apotheosis here. Like Tolstoy’s Konstantin Levin, I’m always on the lookout for one of those. But for the moment, maybe for only a small window of Now, I’ll try to taste truth.

From Simone Weil: An Anthology

“The chief danger does not lie in the Collectivity’s tendency to circumscribe the Person, but in the Person’s tendency to immolate himself in the Collective.”

In this essay, Simone Weil, an early twentieth-century French thinker, deals with the place of the “person” within larger “collectives.” I capitalized both nouns in the quote because the English word “person” is an unattractive cousin to the French personne, which can mean “anyone” as well as “that individual.” It is not as synonymous with “individual” as is the English word. Capitalizing it may not quite do the trick, but maybe we can tweak it thereby into a Bigger Idea.

“Collective” is Weil’s word for the group to which a Person attaches oneself, such as a political entity, corporation, church, union, etc. I capitalized it, too, to give it the same level of emphasis.

To put the quote into slightly more understandable terms, Weil is saying that it is less dangerous for a group (community, church, labor union, political party) to restrict (or ultimately silence) individual expression and freedom than it is for Persons to so completely devote themselves to the will of a group that they surrender their voice–and will–to that of the group. She goes on to say that the two errors are doubtless connected. In other words, the suppression of the Person by the group may be related to some level of voluntary self-supression in the Person. Either way, It is that self-supression that worries Weil so much.

With good reason. The statement of Weil’s caught my eye because of her use of the term “immolation.” The word is old, iderived from a Latin term for sprinkling meal on meat about to be sacrificed. In French, as in Latin, the word became synonymous with sacrifice. But because Weil, who died in 1943, did not live to see the Vietnam War, she would not have been familiar with the English connotation of the term as “self-sacrifice by fire.” One particular Buddhist monk, protesting government policy in the war, poured fuel on himself and lit a match, burning hiimself alive. I remember seeing a photo of this self-immolation as a teenager and being horrified by it. Apparently I wasn’t the only one. Malcolm Browne’s award-winning photo may have single-handedly shifted our understanding of a word.

Malcolm Browne's famous photo

I had this photo in mind when I was writing my dissertation in 1994 and included the term “self-immolation” as a way of describing an extreme level of self-censorship in social and public interaction.

All of us self-censor in social settings. Those who lack the ability of self-censorship in public are either small children (with horrendous questions or commentary in the checkout line) or have Tourette Syndrome, whose afflictees cannot always control what they say. But the rest of us have a lot of things going on internally at any given moment, much of which gets set aside when we engage in conversation or when we find ourselves speaking or performing in a public setting. Sometimes we might be shutting off the never-ending flow of inner psychological drama. And at other times, we may just choose not to say something we’re thinking. The other day during commencement festivities, I was speaking with a person whose nose was flaming red. It was so red it was impossible to ignore. And all the while this person and I were speaking, a little monologue was going on inside my head: “Does he know? How can he not know? Why didn’t he do something about it? Does he care? Good grief, that’s red!”

Often when I am teaching a class or speaking in a larger venue, I see things going on in the audience, many of whom are under the impression that they are invisible, that beggar some sort of comment. But to tell someone to wake up or to put away the cell phone or stop doing homework for another class would have a negative impact entailing ripple effects that, to me, aren’t worth the momentarily satisfying assertion of authority. Therefore, I self-censor.

But there is another level of self-censorhip that has more to do with Weil’s statement than the normal social maintenance I’ve just talked about. We also self-censor in order to show our allegiance to certain ideas, ideals and groups. Whenever we become part of a group, whether it be as an employee, a disciple, an amateur enthusiast, an artist, or even as the natural result of a shift in status (the Country Club as opposed to the YMCA), we naturally learn the Language of the Tribe the better to fit in with that group. In learning the new lingo, two things happen. We acquire new terms, so that we can be perceived as using them smoothly and knowingly “I pwned you, freakin’ newb!” And, conversely, we begin to shed, to prune, to self-censor terms that don’t harmonize with the Tribal Tongue. In church, we sing “Wonderful Words of Life,” not, “Your Body is a Wonderland.”

All of which gives rise to a question: Is it truly a thing to be feared when someone self-censors to such a degree that they have, for all intents and purposes, eliminated themselves? To what extent was/is this happening for those adherents of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in El Dorado, TX (think uni-brow and antebellum peasant fashions)? Or to what extent is this happening with suicide bombers in Baghdad?

FLDS Yearning for Zion–

Certainly ideological self-immolation creates these extreme cases. But Weil’s question, and mine, is concerned more with those who do not perhaps belong to some extremist sect in the middle of nowhere or in some terrorist training camp, but those who live and breathe among us who have allowed some Voice of Authority to silence their thinking, their reason and their ability to see beyond the confines of some mental prison they have created for themselves. Would this describe, for instance, the people who let their 11-yr-old daughter die of treatable diabetes last year because they thought God was going to heal her? Does this describe the senior citizen who sends her life-savings, pension checks and social security to a complete stranger who has persuaded her that this TV ministry is God’s best hope for humanity?

Does it describe people on the political fringe who seem to live on the intellectual equivalent of a liquid diet–consuming only the kind of news, opinion and information that affirms a pre-selected point of view, right or left?

The answer to that last question, though it might surprise some, is no. While subsisting on the impoverished dogmas on the fringe does involve a harmful level of self-negation, it is not as absolute a condition as immolation. There is something inherently destructive and even deadly about immolating oneself for a Collectivity. The consequences are always catastrophic for someone.

But the fringe-dwellers, though heavily “negated,” can and do function quite well in society, though typically flocking in groups around mega-personalities or ego-saturated agenda-setters. Yes, I am speaking of the likes of Rush Limbaugh on one side and Michael Moore on the other, both of whom left their senses years ago but whose ardent fans have failed to see the vacancy signs. The devotees of Limbaugh fail to realize he is neither conservative (nor Christian), and the disciples of Moore fail to see he is neither liberal (nor socialist). They are both super-inflated grand-standers carried along by the inertia of their bloated personalities, with no safe harbor in sight. Their adherents, while deceived, are in no real danger of capsizing their own lives by bombing clinics or getting handcuffed for civil disobedience. Most of their biggest fans are fully functioning members of society whose personal lives represent the best and worst of living in an affluent, unreflective culture. It is only their intellects they have chosen to deprive.

Nevertheless, the specter of intellectual and spiritual self-immolation looms–not that rank and file hard-liners such as those I just mentioned are susceptible. I doubt seriously that they are. Those trapped in an immolators’ fate got there by other means, usually involving either an involuntary or semi-voluntary stripping down of their persons and psyches brought on by want or need. The benefit of affluent middle-class life is that, while it doesn’t guarantee against a near-fictitious understanding of the world, it does tend to insulate against radical extremism. Be that as it may, we find ourselves compelled to deal with the immolators. They have a tendency to crop up from time to time, whether it’s Jim Jones or Branch Davidians or FLDS in our backyard–or people who come over and commandeer or airlines. We cannot afford to ignore them.

From No Man Is an Island Chapter One:

“Love must be based on truth. A love that sees no distinction between good and evil but loves … merely for the sake of loving is hatred rather than love. To love blindly is to love selfishly. It is not interested in the truth but only in itself. f we are going to love others at all we must make up our minds to love them well. The first step to unselfish love is the recognition that our love may be deluded. The truth I love in loving my brother … must be at the same time supernatural and concrete, practical and alive.”

In the film version of Remains of the Day, Mr. Stevens the butler, who is the central character played by Anthony Hopkins, shows a frustrating inability to relate to people as people. For him, everyone fits into a prescribed, pre-determined role, and he defines them and his relationship to them by almost mechanistic principles. His rigidness in this regard forces him to distance himself even from his father, who seems to have taught him to see the world in that way. And the possibility of a genuine, human relationship based on love passes him by. Only when the ordered universe upon which he has built an artificial sense of security turns out to have been a deluded farce does Stevens look back and see his personal wasteland of lost opportunities.

Mr. Stevens with his father

Stevens is almost a Jungian archetype. He represents a selfistic principle that governs a large chunk of human thinking–judging by world history, anyway. The saints among us would argue that they try, really try, to be “selfless” about things. A cynic, such as myself, might ask–isn’t it true that the more we enjoy a sense of self-sacrifice in a value-system that makes us feel good about it, the more likely it is that we are trapped in a selfistic mesh even when we are being noble? Perhaps some have sprung the trap. But the quote from Merton suggests that we may stray on two equally deluded fronts–that we may appear to be both partial and impartial yet remain deeply selfish either way.

Try a “for instance.” William lathers compliments like margarine on a muffin, but with a view toward getting something in exchange. Kate, on the other hand, cannot bring herself to praise anyone. She tells herself that she behaves in the interest of “fairness.” In either case, the issue isn’t about the virtue of giving or not giving compliments, is it? The issue is how the Self figures into the equation.

It’s refreshingly easy to condemn Self-ism in all its grossest forms, commonly demonstrated through the Seven Deadly Sins: lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride. These are the Vaudeville stars of Sin that get all the good lines and all the bad press, like Hester Prynne in Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter. These are the inheritors of fire and brimstone from countless pulpits around the world.

But Merton’s quote should give us pause. He suggests that Selfism is more subtle than the Big 7 and that sin bred of Selfism isn’t always of the neon-sign variety. In fact, most selfistic sins may not be visible as sin at all. Most of it, in fact, may be more like cracks in the wall beneath the paint.

What if most of what we really need to worry about regarding selfistic behavior isn’t heinous harlotry at all, but almost-accident? What if it constitutes behavior that somehow “misses the mark,” to use the word in the original Greek sense of hamartia?

Hamartia is the Greek word often used in the New Testament for “sin.” Our English word “sin” comes from a Germanic root that simply meant “guilty”–a “state” rather than an activity. The Hebrew has a lovely array of words for sin, but one closely mirrors the Greek concept of Hamartia. It is the word Chattah (the same word would make its way into the Aramaic spoken by Jesus and Paul). “Chattah” is the word used in the sacrificial language of the Tabernacle and Temple as being what the sacrifices were meant to address. Chattah and Hamartia were both originally used of an archer who missed the mark.

From allposters.com

On the surface, the idea of “missing the mark” suggests an unintended action, and that’s probably a good enough way of looking at a one category of wrongful things we do. It would accurately describe the action of the kid who demonstrates a karate kick on his bedroom door. His intent is to demonstrate his prowess to his rapt audience of friends, not to kick the door off its hinges. But to his parents, who have to pay for the repairs to the door, the hinges and the doorjamb, the unintended consequences are substantial.

I’ve heard sermons that refer to the Biblical concept of Sin with a capital “S” as a Sin Nature, something that clings to us like an alien substance, and the “all things new” of redemption changes us, delivering us from the Sin Nature, ridding us of Original Slime, to paraphrase St. Augustine. After our glorious deliverance, we are still forced to deal with the nagging commission of small-letter sins. These require a steady regimen of repentance and forgiveness, like dealing with the weeds in our flower garden of righteousness.

But I am beginning to wonder whether Hamartia is a more subtle concept altogether, one which the Armor All of standard salvation sermonizing doesn’t actually cover because it doesn’t address the fundamental issue. It’s like giving a starving man a four-course meal, only to discover he is on death row. He will fry, but at least he’ll be full.

Okay. So I pushed the analogy too far. It sounded too cool to pass up.

The more I think about Hamartia, especially as it appeared to the Greeks, the more I begin to wonder whether or not the Apostle Paul and the others who used it intended it as more than mere linguistic spackle.

I don’t know enough Hebrew language and culture to be able to unpack the full meaning of Chattah. But there has been a lot of writing about the Greek concept of Hamartia, and it suggests a substantial alternative to our normal thinking about what it means to “miss the mark.” The archer fully intends to hit the target. But, for whatever reasons–a cramp, a gust of wind, a flash of light, a lapse of skill, Robin Hood misses and does not split his competitor’s arrow down the middle.

What then? To the Greeks, Hamartia was the “flaw” that led to tragedy in human affairs. College students have endless trouble trying to figure out how this comes together in Oedipus. “Okay. Explain one more time just what Oedipus did wrong that made him unwittingly murder his father and sleep with his mother?” The message of Oedipus is neither fate nor guilt. The message of Oedipus is that human frailty mixed with uncontrollable circumstance equals “Bad things, man. Bad things.”

I’m beginning to think that the New Testament writers, following Christ’s lead, had a profound appreciation for this mix of things that resulted in human’s “missing the mark” in general, that this was the starting point of all human discourse and interaction. It did not entail finger pointing and leveraging of shalts and shalt nots, nor did it involve juridical pronouncements designed to find the location of the flaw. Instead, it created a deep-seated recognition of unworthiness and propelled an understanding of sacrifice. It was as if, in sacrifice, the supplicant recognized that no amount of cleansing, washing and sanctification could erase Hamartia. In fact, Hamartia never goes away. It is with us always, even in the lives of the redeemed. It passes from me personally only in death, but its traces linger on after me, in all the mix of the consequences of my actions as they have intersected with the lives of countless other people. In sacrifice, I ask God not to count Hamartia against me, as Christ said in the Lord’s prayer, commonly translated as “lead us not into temptation,” but actually saying, “Put us not to the test.”

Though we intend to hit the mark but miss for any number of reasons, Hamartia is not without a source. The source, ultimately, is the Selfism with which each of us is born. We all strive. We strive to excel, to do better, to be mediocre, or maybe even to be left alone to our own devices. We are all protagonists in our own stories–the root of that word being “agon,” conflict. Our striving is born in the complex breeding ground of motives, and our motives cling to the skin of Self in ways we rarely examine or even see, as we struggle for identity, for purpose, for the consent and approval of others. Our frailty then, our Hamartia, is closely linked to the mere fact that we are Selves, that we exist as separate beings living in the same limited space. And when you take my Hamartia and combine it with yours, it’s a wonder we don’t mess up any more than we do, though the state of the world at any given time may suggest otherwise. That is the ultimate reason for sacrifice. Sacrifice s supposed to represent as much nullification of Selfism as I am able, with God’s help, to manage.

Oedipus, in despair over the consequences of his Hamartia, puts out his eyes so he won’t have to see his tragic reality. His blindness, as Merton says, is useless. His act is utterly Selfistic. Our only hope, according to Merton, according to Christ, is to do what we can, without self-disfigurement, without self-emolation, without a self-destructive distortion of the truth, to love. Christ demonstrated that only love, only an appreciation of Others as Other Selves, manages the consequences of Hamartia. It’s that part in His Prayer that says, “Forgive us as we forgive.”

Note: I realize this is really dense. I’m sorry for that. I just needed to get it down. I’ll build on it from here, unless the overwhelming cries of “heretic!” convince me that I’m full of beans. Thanks, if you made it all the way, for courageously hanging in there with me. It took three months to write.

“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason and intellect has intended us to forego their use.”

That’s from a letter written by Galileo Galilei, the dude from the early 17th century who suffered a lot of persecution because he had the audacity to assert that the earth revolves around the sun rather than the other way around.

I’m grateful for the opportunity to speak today about the question, “How do we worship God with our minds?”

When we talk about worship, we come to the table with a number of preconceived notions, many depending on our own worship traditions. For most of us, the idea of worship is largely confined to the walls of a church building. During the week we live and move and have our busy little beings. On the weekend, we take some time out of our hectic existence to make ourselves somewhat presentable, file quietly and reverentially with a lot of other presentable people into a place set aside for worship, a place that is frequently referred to as “The House of God,” and we alternately sit and stand, sing and listen, clap and/or be quiet in the various rituals and practices that, for most of us, define what it means to worship.

While we find that Scripture does in fact support this definition of worship, we also discover that our Sunday behavior is only a small part of what worship is supposed to involve. The Apostle Paul, for instance, says in Romans 12: 1 “Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God–this is your spiritual act of worship.” And in Matthew 22 Christ identifies the two greatest commandments in this way: ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

One of the most pivotal moments of my own life occurred when I was 19 years old. I had just come out of a horribly oppressive and ultra-conservative Christian sect hidden away in a rural part of southeastern Virginia and I was on my way to a small Bible College in the suburbs of Dallas, TX, when I had a remarkable encounter along the road. The Bible has a lot of these roadside marker experiences, which would make a great study subject, I suppose.

On my way to Dallas, I stopped in Fort Worth to visit one of my many uncles and there I had a chance meeting with a man named Manuel, a total stranger whom I met that day and have never seen since. Manuel described himself as an agnostic existentialist. He might as well have swatted me across the face with his gauntlet and challenged me to a duel. I went after him like a fly to a cow pie. My intention was to dismantle his agnosticism then and there and bring him, all trembling and weeping, by force of my all-powerful arguments, to the very throne of grace.

But, oh my! I had no idea what I was in for. In short order, Manuel took me apart, line-by-line, statement-by-statement. He unhinged my confident arguments and overcame my secure defenses in much the same way Hurricane Katrina swept over the levees in New Orleans. I soon found that not only did I not know what I was talking about I really didn’t even know what I believed myself. By the time Manuel left that evening, I was the one left weeping and trembling, wondering how this could have happened to me and even angry at God for leaving me in the lurch.

In retrospect, it was exactly what a mentally driven young person like myself needed, and I’m convinced today that Divine Providence put Manuel in that place on that day to meet me and to blow my false certainties apart.

I have to confess that I didn’t get the message. My initial reaction to this distressing experience was to search for more certainty, to spend hours and hours of Bible reading and study in an attempt to exorcise the constantly questioning demon that tormented my soul. One of my favorite passages of Scripture became Jeremiah 29, where it reads,

11 For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. 12 Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. 13 You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. 14 I will be found by you,” declares the LORD, “and will bring you back from captivity.

And in the true spirit of appropriating scripture to fit my need, I felt that this message to the nation of Israel was God’s secret code, placed there just for me, and I saw my captivity as my ceaseless wrestling with the truth and saw that searching for God with my whole heart meant devoting my time and energy to this pursuit of Certainty, the Holy Grail of my existence. At one point, I was like a Jewish Hasid at the Wailing Wall. I would pray standing up, rocking back and forth, resorting to groanings that cannot be uttered to express the cry of my heart. That was all while I was in college.

Fast-forward a couple of decades. How does this story progress? If this were one of those terrific standard stories such as you find in the works of John Eldredge, I would tie it up in a nice little ribbon, tell you about the time I received the powerful thundering revelation from on high that settled it all for me and answered my riddles, like Robinson Crusoe being rescued at last from the desert island.

The truth may come as an unwelcome shock to a lot of people here today. The truth is that over the intervening years from then to now, nothing has essentially changed. I never succeeded in answering my questions conclusively. I never attained the promised land of absolute certainty. But along the road, I did make a remarkable discovery, and that discovery is the heart of what I want to tell you today, the heart of what I believe it means to worship God with our minds.

What I discovered was Faith and what the medieval Christians called the Mysterium Tremendum, which translates to the “Tremendous Mystery,” but sounds a lot cooler in Latin, so we’ll use that instead. In my discovery of faith, I have come to believe, and I think Scripture supports this very thoroughly, that God is not to be found in the answers. He is to be found in the questions. That God is not in the certainties, but in the ambiguities. That God is not to be found in all the noise and clamor of the clearly identifiable wind, fire and earthquake of our harsh declarations, but in the much less identifiable soft, whispering murmur that we refer to as the still, small voice. He’s in the burning bush. He’s in sound of the cool breeze in Genesis 3.

I’ve always found it curious that devout Jewish believers insist that the true Name of God cannot be said, that to try to pronounce it is an act of deep disrespect and disqualifies you from having any part in him. And I’ve often wondered, as I am sure you have, why Christ seemed to spend more time telling stories with open-ended interpretations than he did declaring certainties.

I believe the reason is that God wants us to use our minds to engage him with questions. Once upon a time I thought this was a marked lack of faith, but now I think the opposite, that God expects us to wrestle with him, like Jacob at Piniel, like Isaiah in chapter 1:18, where God says, “Come let us argue together.” Is God threatened by our questions? No. I think He welcomes them.

I saw a movie recently called Smart People in which a widowed college professor on his first date in years spends the evening lecturing his date about literature. Eventually, she leaves in disgust. He asks her what he did wrong and she calls him a pompous windbag, “You never asked me a single question about my life,” she says as she stomps off.

I wonder how often what we call worship actually does the same thing the professor in the movie did. It seems we spend a lot of time informing God of what’s going on with us, then we tell God who He is, just in case he doesn’t know, then we clue Him in on other things we know about Him, all the while showing proper reverence and gratitude. I doubt there is anything wrong or bad about any of that, really. But do we pause long enough to ask? Do we stop long enough to engage him on that intense, personal level in which we are willing to bring to the fore the questions we have been afraid to ask, but that He is more than willing to hear?

For while I can’t say that I have absolute answers to all my questions, I can say with more certainty than many other things that I have met God, and that while I may know less about Him than I once thought I knew, at least when I have shouted my questions, I have heard that soft whispering murmur that says not only that He is there, but that He smiles when he hears from me.

I’d like to conclude with a quote from Thomas Merton, who writes in his book No Man is an Island: “One of the moral diseases we communicate to one another in society comes from huddling together in the pale light of an insufficient answer to a question we are afraid to ask.” Let’s not be afraid of the questions. Let’s love God, not just with our heart and soul, but also with our mind.

Response to Thomas Merton I

No Man Is An Island

From the Prologue: “…anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity. It is the fruit of unanswered questions. And there is a far worse anxiety, a far worse insecurity, which comes from being afraid to ask the right questions–because they might turn out to have no answer. One of the moral diseases we communicate to one another in society comes from huddling together in the pale light of an insufficient answer to a question we are afraid to ask.”

Those who ask the right questions, especially in communities of faith, tend to be unpopular. The very act of asking questions, the hard questions, the “anxious” questions, tends to elicit offended expressions. I think, though I can’t be sure, that much of the offense comes from the deep-seated anxiety to which Merton alludes. Perhaps the more anxious a person is the more likely he or she is to be offended by questions that heighten anxiety.

But for some the lack of clear answers is a serious cause of perpetual angst. This state is often aggravated by other things: first among them is that the sort of questions that create this internal tension don’t seem to upset many other people. (That in itself creates another layer of nagging questions.) Also, this particular kind of personal anxiety stirs little supportive understanding from the general class of public conversant. Doubt is often viewed as a quirk of personality or is simply emphatically unwelcome. The angst-ridden questioner becomes a leper of sorts and must find ways to adjust to this fate. Trying to explain this painfully interrogative state to someone who just wants to sympathize is like walking underwater–lots of effort to little purpose.

But perhaps it is the precise role of some to be perpetually asking questions and just as perpetually to be angling for answers, like the fisherman on the sports channel who labors so hard for so long to land a beautiful fish, finally snags the coveted prize after a great struggle, admires the catch for all the viewers to see…then lets it slip back into the water, free and clear. Perhaps some are meant to believe and not-believe at the same time, if only to keep the rest of us honest.

The pale light of insufficient answers, as Merton indicates, is the curse, perhaps even the bane, of many whose still-born thinking ends in sweeping judgment and a loss of genuine human compassion. The once deeply spiritual, yearning drive within them shrivels into a need to belong to a group, an exclusive social club complete with support structures, financial incentives, high-grade coffee and child care.

The questioner finds him or herself herded, like so many others, into these huddled masses but never really belongs and may decide to cut and run at the first available opportunity, only to be caught in another herd or, perhaps, to go rogue, feeling like an outcast.

In the end the questioner has to evaluate whether or not the social structures of the huddled group are in themselves worthy not only of preservation but of tolerant, even loving, support for the good they awkwardly and imperfectly manage to spread. Sometimes it’s like watching a monster tractor trundle along with a hand-hoe attached at the back rather than a genuine rig. But perhaps it’s not always as much about the insufficient answers as it is about being with real people in a real world. Sometimes the trade-off creates an almost intolerable strain, but it does not absolutely require the suspension of the one thing that must not be suspended under any circumstances….

Someone still has to ask the unanswerable questions.