Torn Sky

Fearless Identity, "Bill Cunningham New York," and What I'm Wearing for the Rapture

Finally, a Christian blogger who's not going to write some thoughtful / progressive / snarky / whatever response to the Judgment Day hullaballoo. I don't really think it's going to happen, but I'm already bored with everyone making fun of it, and hey... if tomorrow really is Judgment Day, I'm hoping to weasel my way into getting raptured, so it would probably be best not to have a blog entry on the record making fun of everyone who told us it was going to happen. Amirite? 

I saw Bill Cunningham New York today, and it was so inspiring. Full of beautiful, exciting people doing beautiful, exciting things with clothes; both the rich-and-fabulous types we usually think of when we think of capital-F Fashion, and regular-and-fabulous types who just know how to rock clothes.

So many movies and magazines about fashion treat it as an inaccessible or aspirational thing. It's all designer stuff you will never be able to afford worn by people who are thinner than you will ever be to places you will never be cool or rich enough to go.

But Bill Cunningham New York tells the truth about fashion instead - that almost anyone in almost anything can be amazing if it's done right, that it's more about the look than the label, and that it's not about being rich or thin or cool but about being yourself, unapologetically and fearlessly.

My own attitude toward fashion has done almost a complete 180 since I started losing weight about a year and half ago. When I was at my heaviest, shopping for clothes was such a pain... I hated going to what I called the "Fat Girl" section of the store (or shopping at "Lame Giant, " even though they actually have great clothes and I sometimes miss shopping there). I mostly wore black metal-band t-shirts with jeans and tennis shoes, I had maybe one or two dress shirts to wear with my one or two pairs of dress pants... and no dress shoes. I have a picture of me meeting the ELCA Bishop when I went to Mexico for the International AIDS Conference, and I'm wearing a black band t-shirt and baggyish denim capris... and you can't see it, but I'm pretty sure I was wearing white New Balance tennis shoes with that. Eek.

Part of why I put almost no thought into a "look" or whatever for so long was that I wasn't happy with my body, and it's hard to get excited about wrapping the package when you don't like anything about the package you're wrapping.

It started changing when I did CPE, and I started doing some internal work around issues of embracing the power / authority that comes with being a public leader. I'm using those words in the most positive sense - I hate the idea of "authority" as ruling over someone or being the arbiter of others' behavior/beliefs, and for me it's more about recognizing that if people have given you the privilege of being in charge of something or care enough to listen when you say something, you should make damn sure to use that power wisely and for good, not evil. Anyway.

It changed even more once I started reading Beauty Tips for Ministers, where I found writings that made me think about the connections between leadership and presence and appearance.

It changed the most once I started losing weight and was finally happier with myself and my body. I think I've written before about how I cried the day that I tried on clothes from the "normal" section for the first time in four years. It was overwhelming for a few months - I was used to having so few options, and even fewer exciting or attractive options. I would walk into the regular womens' clothing section and feel like there was just too much to choose from. 

It's changing more now... now that I'm no longer overwhelmed by the selection, now that the prospect of presenting myself as a public person/leader is imminent, now that I've started to get really encouraging feedback about the metal/theology stuff I'm into and wondering how that gets interpreted in my appearance (e.g., how to present myself in a way that is congruent with the things I'm thinking and writing about, if that makes sense...), and most importantly, now that I'm realizing more and more the need to claim my own God-given identity and be unapologetic and fearless about it in a world where so many ideas and so many people and so many corporations do everything they can to stake their claim on the minds and bodies of others and colonize them.

Bill Cunningham New York is more than a movie about a guy who takes great pictures of great clothes. It's a portrait into one man's quest to make the radical claim that what is beautiful matters, and matters especially in a world where there is so much that's ugly and horrifying. It's about lifting others up instead of tearing them down, and about celebrating both your own unique and awesome God-given identity as well as the spectacular diversity of people all around you.

It's about the impact that one person can have on millions of other people by simply getting up every morning and deciding to get out in the world and celebrate what it means to be alive in some small way.

If the Rapture really does come tomorrow and I get raptured, I'll be sad. There's so much more that I want to do, and so many people and places I want to experience again or experience for the first time. If the Rapture comes and I don't get raptured, well, I'll be available to hang out with the rest of you heathens tomorrow night, I suppose. 

Either way, it's probably out of my hands now.

But either way, I'll be wearing my knee-high black leather Doc Marten 3-strap boots with something glam-meets-industrial/rock n' roll and sparkle eyeshadow and shiny lips. And I'll go out knowing I was trying to live as fully as possible into the fabulousness for which we were all created. 

And if the Rapture doesn't come... well, those boots are seriously really awesome. It'd be a shame to save them for the end of the world.

 

Ash Wednesday, Red State and Good Friday

I got to see Kevin Smith’s Red State last night.

It’s brilliant.

 

Red State is a horror film about an extreme Christian sect - the Five Points Trinity Church, headed by Abin Cooper (Michael Parks), and made up almost completely of Cooper’s own extended family. They picket funerals and say nasty things and quote a lot of Leviticus. Any resemblance to the Westboro Baptist Church is not a coincidence. Without giving too much away, the Five Points Trinity Church uses fake Internet personals to lure unsuspecting people into their clutches, and that’s when things start to get scary.

It’s a horror film about a group that almost everyone would agree is scary and evil.

But it’s also about so much more than that.

The film is divided into three acts, labeled in the credits (though not during the film itself) as “Sex,” “Religion” and “Politics.” Red State is not a horror film that follows the predictable patterns of contemporary horror – rather, it constantly unsettles, it makes you laugh and cringe in the same breath, and, at least for me, it provokes a response that reveals an ugliness in the audience that is at least as troubling as the ugliness in the characters on the screen.

 I don’t like the Westboro Baptist Church, and I really don’t like sharing the designation “Christian” with them. But I found myself a little repulsed and a lot disappointed when the audience erupted into applause and raucous shouting time after time when a member of the Cooper clan was killed onscreen.

It just felt like such a kind of... I don’t know... pro-wrestling-audience reaction to a film that was genuinely deep and dark and just… a lot smarter than that. I guess I was hoping the audience would be, too.

Red State has a lot to say about sex, religion and politics. I’m reminded of Romans 3:23, “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” It’s always important to remember that Paul goes immediately into redemption in the next verse. While Smith’s other films offer surprising redemption for their sinners (especially Chasing Amy and Clerks II), Red State hints at opening the door for redemption over and over, slams it shut each time, and ends with several haunting scenes that leave those characters who have affected us the most hanging in the gap between damnation and salvation.

Perhaps that’s why it’s one of the best horror films I’ve seen in ages.

In Faith As A Way of Life, Chris Scharen writes about engaging all kinds of art through the lens of faith:

The idea is not that we simply baptize popular culture as filled with God; some of it is truly awful. Rather, we should simply trust that God’s grace is broad enough to be working in the world, in and through arts and culture, and our ability to see the depth present there should allow us to sit and listen fully, deeply, with a generous spirit. C.S. Lewis put it this way: ‘The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. (There is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.)’

I am conscientious of the fact that I saw Red State as a Christian on Ash Wednesday. Earlier that day, ashes were ground into my forehead and I was told that I am dust, and to dust I will return.

Perhaps that was why I was so saddened by the casual and even joyful audience response to death – even the death of the "bad guys."  Walking through Lent means walking to the cross, and we do that most faithfully when we contemplate Jesus’ long walk to the cross in the dark of Good Friday instead of the light of Easter morning.

Red State is very much a Good Friday kind of movie.

It’s a shame that “Christian entertainment” in America is so often equated with “no swearing, no blood, no sex, a happy ending, and Kirk Cameron should probably show up somewhere.” To say that mature Christians ought not engage with messy, bloody forms of media is really also to say that mature Christians need not engage the messy, bloody parts of the Bible, including the parts where Jesus’ followers deny him and Pilate’s question “What is truth?” lumbers around like the uncomfortable elephant in the room and regular folks like you and me yell out “Crucify him!”

We need to look at those parts of the Bible honestly. We need to look at real-world horrors honestly. We need to look at ourselves honestly. We need to be reminded that there is rarely a hard line between the good guys and the bad guys, that final-girl style redemption is a horror movie cliché...

...and that we are groaning with the whole of creation, slouching madly toward Golgotha, in desperate need of an empty tomb.

In The Sanctuary

I like silence in the sanctuary.

The lights are dim as I enter, and you with the cell phone, I’m giving you the hairy eye. Turn your ringer off and put that thing away. And no texting.

I avoid sitting near couples (They talk) and big groups of teenagers (They talk more). Old women, either alone or in groups, are good. And lone men. They know how to act.

There are never very many young women alone. I don’t know why they’re not here. Maybe seeing all the lone men makes them wonder why the men would rather be alone than with them. Maybe I’m just in the wrong room.

I’m talking, of course, about the movie theater.

You thought I meant another kind of sanctuary?

I love going to the movies. Not just watching movies. I actually find it harder and harder to watch movies at home… I’m easily distracted by the lure of the internet or the chirp of the cell phone, and it’s rare that I sit for an uninterrupted 2 hours to get through a whole movie. That bothers me. Going to the movies forces me to step away from all that, and in stepping away from reality, I enter into a space where something magical can happen.

I sit close to the front – usually the third or fourth row. I like the screen to fill my field of vision almost completely. I like to be just a little bit overwhelmed.

I know which theaters have tasty popcorn (good), and which ones have popcorn with real butter (even better, and better still). If the movie theater is my sanctuary, then squeaky-buttery popcorn and an ice-cold soda are some kind of sacrament, and they can make a great film an almost transcendent experience.

What I see depends on my mood. I watch a lot of movies with words like “offbeat” or “quirky” in their reviews. I like foreign films, especially Scandinavian and Korean films. I’ll go through horror phases, but a lot of the best horror films never make it to theaters, and the films that pass for horror these days are usually not really scary at all. I’ll go to what I call “big dumb Hollywood” movies. I don’t use “big dumb Hollywood” derisively – I enjoy these films – I just mean that they are full of actors with winning smiles and explosions and car crashes and you know exactly what’s going to happen from the moment you see the preview so you don’t have to pay much attention and you don’t engage in much critical reflection afterwards. One of my favorite movies of all time, The Day After Tomorrow, is one of the biggest and dumbest big dumb Hollywood movies, and I love it.

People point out that it’s less expensive to watch movies at home.

People gripe about the price of concessions. And $10 for less than a dollar’s worth of food is probably too expensive, but that’s only if you think you’re just getting some lousy popped corn and sugar-water.

There was a Wal-Mart electronics commercial where a woman joked about how her family could be as loud as they want watching a movie at home, and I literally yelled at the TV, “Well, I’m glad you’re staying home then!” (Yeah. I’m too legalistic about the silence. But seriously. Be quiet. Yes, you. No, you can’t ask your friend a question about the plot. And stop texting. Seriously, that screen is visible to everyone else in the theater.)

I go to the movies because it’s a chance to get out of my head and immerse myself completely in another world for a few hours, and that’s probably why I sit so close to the screen and why I’m so uptight about things like talking or texting, or even bad acting or distracting scores. The best movies, for me at least, function like the best sermons. They illuminate my own experience, illuminate the relationships I have with other people, and illuminate my understanding of God.

So I’ll see you in the sanctuary. We’ll enter into silence and the images will paint themselves across the screen and the strings will crescendo as good triumphs over evil and we’ll hear something new in the story we’re told, maybe even know something new about ourselves.

Seriously, put your phone away. Something holy might happen.

Lovestoned Jesus

I wrote my final paper for the Gospel of John on the "love-drunk Jesus" encountered in the poetry of Jacopone da Todi. And that's not just my crazy-nontraditional-rebel-Christian interpretation of what he wrote... (although his nickname - which he embraced - was "Crazy Jim"... so yeah) Anyway, here's an excerpt:

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Jacopone da Todi sees in the Word becoming flesh a God so all-consumingly enamored with humanity that God becomes foolish with love. We usually think of God's love as majestic, magnanimous but controlled, drenched in Terence-Malick-gold light and festooned in flowers, but ultimately clean and pure – never messy, never foolish, never scandalous.

In other words, nothing like how we actually experience love.

“Were these the actions of someone drunk, or out of his senses?
How could You abdicate kingdom and riches,
A renunciation that verges on madness?
Did someone promise You other and greater treasure?
O measureless love that would cede
Such glory as Yours for such humble estate!

“High-born Love, who is it You love
So deeply and tenaciously and wildly?
Love holds You bound so tightly
You give all of Yourself – this You can hardly deny.
And this love will lead You to Your death,
For it gives no signs of diminishing or cooling.” (from Second Canticle of the Nativity)

For da Todi, the Divine Word is captive to the Word’s love for humanity to the point that the Word becomes Love. And high-born Love, deliriously in love with humanity, is willing to forsake all to be with the beloved. This basic premise we understand all too well – it is the basis for countless popular songs and works of fiction (Cinderella, Survivor's "Poor Man's Son," and roughly half of John Hughes' films, to name a few).

But Jacopone da Todi’s application of this premise to God seems scandalous and surprising. He writes:

“It was almost as if You did not grasp or sense
The depth of the descent, when You came among us.
It was almost as if Your understanding was darkened,
Your power and insight lost. Wounded by Love,
You did nothing to defend Yourself;
Surrendering to Love, You gave it Your strength.”
(also from Second Canticle of the Nativity)

We can accept the idea of a God-on-high who loves us. We can accept the idea of a faraway God who forgives and forgets our sin. But the reality of a God so overcome with love that “It was almost as if Your understanding was darkened, / Your power and insight lost?” This speaks of something that some might perceive as a weakness in the Word that is all too close to our own weakness.

The Word “wounded by Love” – the Word holed up listening to The Cure’s Disintegration, the Word leaving mumbled messages on our answering machine in the middle of the night, the Word standing outside our bedroom window with a boombox?

How could that be the Word who was in the beginning, the Word who made all things, the Word who was life, and the life was the light of all people?

Boombox Serenade
Say Anything... at MOVIECLIPS.com

 

 

If Jacopone da Todi is on to something, and the Word became flesh because the Word was “lovestoned” with all humanity, then how does that color the way we read the rest of the Gospel of John in particular and the rest of Scripture in general?