Like a Child

It seems I am commonly discovering brilliant maxims only to find they have all been discovered before. But I am slow to learn in this way: I do not understand a proverb, be it the most painfully obvious one in the world, until I have lived it.

One of my all-time favorite episodes of television is a particular Community episode entitled “Messianic Myths and Ancient Peoples.” It is hilarious and actually quite beautiful. I could rave about it for pages, but I won’t, I’ll just set the scene for you:

Shirley—baker, mother, Christian—decides she wants help making a YouTube video with a Christian message because “there’s no light there for the kids.” So she asks Abed—an aspiring film-maker who is implied to have Asperger’s—to help her make one. At first he declines: “As a Muslim, I’d be happy to. As a filmmaker? No way. I’m a storyteller, not a preacher.”

But later he comes back, looking very excited, and says he’ll do it. Why? He just read the whole New Testament in one night. I should remind you that this is a completely, 100% secular show, so it would be understandable to expect a swift lampooning of Christianity via cheap parody, and nothing more. But this is also a clever show, so it does better than that. Abed states that “Being raised on TV and movies I always thought that Jesus just walked on water and told people not to have abortions, but it’s so much cooler than that. He was like ET, Edward Scissorhands and Marty McFly combined!”

This episode is SO GOOD.

He could just as easily have said Neo or Batman in the Dark Knight or a hundred other characters, but that’s beside the point. What’s fascinating here is that Abed is seeing the story of Jesus for the first time. All he knows is a cultural caricature, but when he reads the original, it is fresh, new, bizarre, and enticing to him. Like when the book is better than the badly interpreted movie, or when you have heard about someone, but you finally meet them face-to-face and you are far more impressed with the truth than the rumor.

Abed, as a storyteller, decides that the story of Jesus is worth his artistic eye. He decides this as someone outside of and indifferent to the Christian faith.

I confess to feeling a faint, weird jealousy at this perspective. Abed, in this context, sees the gospel with the wide, hungry eyes of someone reading a thrilling novel. Never mind chapter and verse references, concordance checks, etc…Abed sees a story about an unlikely hero who speaks in riddles and whom everyone is trying to kill all the time because he threatens to upset the status quo. Meanwhile, he’s secretly a king who dies for his cause.

See, I always thought “become like little children” meant having childlike faith—believing easily and wholeheartedly—which I suppose it does. But now I am thinking there is a whole other facet to that. ‘Like a child’ means “encountering something for the very first time.” Fresh eyes. Curiosity. A willingness to be awed. A quieting of the mind and a heightening of enjoyment.

I experience this in small ways when reading a book of the Bible that I haven’t gotten to in a very long time. I’m surprised by something I didn’t remember or simply wasn’t paying attention to last go ‘round. But imagine not ever having heard the gospel, not ever having read the Bible, or—taking it a step further from Abed—not even having gleaned atmospheric or memetic ‘Christianity’ from the culture. What would that be like?

Also kids don’t just see things with fresh eyes. When they find something they love, they cannot get enough of it. My nieces and nephews would watch the same new movie a dozen times in two days (the rental period, obviously) if their parents let them. When I was a kid I could read the same beloved book over and over and over. Now my mind is jumpity, distractible, and a little skeptical. To my great shame, I find that I would often rather read a clever, critical, or sarcastic debunking of a book than give the book a chance to speak for itself, with fresh eyes and no preconceived notions. I’m especially prone to do this if I already suspect the book is full of things I don’t like/disagree with.

And this is what our society has done towards Christianity and the Bible. Delicious mockery and deft debunking, without really sitting down and viewing the source material with a clear and neutral eye. In Western society in particular, there are no neutral eyes towards the Bible. Everyone is approaching the faith neither as a child, with new wonder, nor as an adult, with mature and distant insight, but (forgive me, O youth) as teenagers, with bucking and rebellion against that which is familiar but not well understood.

In this way, those who approach Christianity and the Bible as wholly foreign objects are far likelier to see them for what they really are than disaffected evangelicals, shrugging agnostics, or those who really like the idea of having a faith, but keep walking a little further and further away from it for the sake of their comfort and preference, too afraid to let it go, too afraid to embrace the faith in all its holy fire. Lukewarm. They want to keep it in the corner of their eye while they inch away from it, because it makes them feel better. They daren’t walk far enough to see it from—shall we say—a non-reactionary distance. Indeed, steeped in Western culture, I don't think you can get that distance. Wherever we run, it will always be reactionary.

G.K. Chesterton puts it best in this (slightly condensed) quote from the intro to The Everlasting Man:

“There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there. The other is to walk round the whole world till we come back to the same place…the next best thing to being really inside Christendom is to be really outside it. And a particular point of it is that the popular critics of Christianity are not really outside it. They are on a debatable ground, in every sense of the term. They are doubtful in their very doubts.”

“It is well with the boy when he lives on his father's land; and well with him again when he is far enough from it to look back on it and see it as a whole. But these people have got into an intermediate state, have fallen into an intervening valley from which they can see neither the heights beyond them nor the heights behind. They cannot get out of the penumbra of Christian controversy. They cannot be Christians and they can not leave off being Anti-Christians. Their whole atmosphere is the atmosphere of a reaction: sulks, perversity, petty criticism. They still live in the shadow of the faith and have lost the light of the faith.”

“Now the best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to love it. But the next best is to be far enough away not to hate it. It is the contention of these pages that while the best judge of Christianity is a Christian, the next best judge would be something more like a Confucian.”

Chesterton

This is what troubles me with the current cultural milieu. So many of us are neither close enough to love, nor far away enough not to hate. So we end up with many people attempting to remodel Christianity, gutting it like a house not built quite to their taste, because they are under both the shadow of the faith (losing the light) and the shadow of secular disdain for the faith. This naturally comes with the territory of a piecemeal, yo-yo-ing journey away from faith. Those who depart try to make the faith into something that looks right in their own eyes from that doubtful middle distance, distorting it in many ways.

Then there are those who completely abandon the faith but are still like teenagers reacting against their parents in the way that they talk about God, the Bible, and Faith. Anger, frustration, and contempt.

And we have a culture that thinks that it knows what Christianity is, but doesn’t. They think they know who Jesus is, but most really don’t. That is something that takes daily effort, and all you have, and a willingness to give up anything that stands in the way of you going home again.

I do not think Chesterton was advising anyone to give up the faith and walk as far away as you can, just to come back around…but it may be better than sidestepping to that intervening valley he spoke of and losing the truth by inches—death by a thousand cuts—so that you don’t even notice it has happened, and you don’t even know where you are anymore, and you don’t even know how to get back because you have distorted the very meaning of home in your own mind.

Best that we stay home in Christ, but that we pray for the eyes of a child. To see him afresh as savior and King, story-teller and revolutionary, hero and martyr, truth and way, bread and wine, flesh and blood, light and fire, resurrection and life. A blazing, thrilling story, and an unconquerable fact.

I want to become like a little child, for my heart to be circumcised, and to be made new, so that I can rest in Christ, but still have the of giddy wonder of seeing every fiery truth for the very first time.

Firefly and the Human Condition

When I fall for a TV show, movie, artist or novelist…I fall hard. I become a loud, pushy advocate. Ask any of my loved ones upon whom I have foisted all my favorites (Community! Gregory Alan Isakov! Brick!)…forced all but at gun-point. Minimal complaints so far, if I do say so myself.

Well once upon a time someone did this for me. They told me to watch some random movie called “Serenity” with them at the theater (Sci-fi? I was skeptical. Aliens aren’t my thing). This excellent movie was born of a short-lived TV show called Firefly, which concerns us here today. The show and the film both have a lot to say about the human condition, and so do I, so it naturally follows that we took to one another.

Truthfully I could use an awful lot of space detailing all the things I love about Firefly but I will try to be very conservative in both my summary and advocacy, because the themes are the thing here (Nevertheless you should watch firefly):

Notice the clothing implies psuedo-Western, but there transportation is space-ship, not stage-coach.

Firefly is a great genre masala—western, sci-fi (but no aliens!), action, drama, comedy, caper—and its basic premise is as follows: humanity spread out onto other planets which are made to be like Earth-that-was (as Earth is then called). A war arose between the Independent planets and “The Alliance” the former of which, as the name suggests, wanted to remain independent settlements, and the latter of which wished to unite all the planets in a progressive and regulated society. The Alliance won, and has become the central government of all inhabited planets—both their high-tech cities:

And their countrified back-waters:

Two of the protagonists of the story fought for the Independents during the war and have moved on from their loss to do smuggling and thieving work on the fringes of ‘the system’.

Zoe and Mal

The difference and tension between the outer planets (quite analogous to rural populations)—with the distant control/neglect they experience from the government—and the inner planets (rather like urbanites) and their appreciation for the government’s facilities and efficiency is pervasive throughout the show.

The excellence of the premise is that, although it shows “The Alliance” through the eyes of those that do not love it, it never claims that The Alliance is evil. It is real modern society in fiction: it provides roads, oversight, security (in the central areas at least), education and medicine. It is not precisely dystopian in nature in that it does not oppress groups, it does not ban art or literature. It has a high degree of physical authority, but it is not a police state. In fact, it is made rather clear that the Alliance truly does do many good things for the people. It is as though the UN were actually effective—moreover helpful—and set in space! It is based upon the most idealistic and humanitarian notions that mankind could bring to bear. The Alliance is, in most of the ways we tend to gauge political purpose and efficacy, a good government with good intentions.

But one of the themes of the show is that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and that human nature is not easy to keep in check; indeed our attempts to constrain or modify the worst elements of human nature may backfire. This is because the constraints are external, and the modifications superficial. And perhaps the most dangerous dystopia is one that believes utopia can be finagled…one that either refuses to acknowledge mankind’s fallen nature, or genuinely believes that by his own hands man can fix himself.

(I don’t want to spoil the story for anyone, so I will be as vague as I can…but be warned, details of show and movie are to be found here):

The Alliance does what many peoples and cultures have tried to do throughout the ages: to “weed out aggression in the population.” They want to make human nature better. They do it very benignly…as best they can, with no intent whatsoever to cause harm. If the image that pops into your head is that of a cop restraining an assailant and carting him off to jail, that is one legitimate way of weeding out aggression. So are anger management classes. Prisons, court systems, reform…these are all in that category.

So, too, is chemical behavioral modification. Likewise eugenics. Also, abortion. And massacre…and genocide.

If it seems like I’ve made a leap too far, I’m sad to say that I haven’t. We—society—like to believe that we can make ourselves better through sheer force of will: adopting this practice, excising that one. One would not say “survival of the fittest” any more, for social Darwinism has become scandalous for good reason…but this nevertheless remains the underlying principle in how societies, governments, laws, medical care and schools are built up. Or cultivated, rather. It seems like such an innocent aim until you realize that the holocaust in WWII—cold, systematized genocide of European Jewry—was derived in large part by a belief that Germany was eliminating that which was dangerous or unhealthy to it. In the minds that conjured the “final solution”, the Germans were “weeding” and “cultivating”, full stop.

Scholar Zygmut Bauman wrote chillingly and convincingly on the subject, showing good evidence that the distance between our desire to reform (which can, remember, be done benignly OR oppressively) and our willingness to do harm is not as far as we like to think. (I reference him here, because it is his eerie garden metaphor that I have just used.)

How does this relate to Firefly/Serenity? In the end of the tale about the Alliance’s attempts to improve human nature, the Alliance—via its great scientists, and its bright young social engineers—ended up causing a certain large percentage of the population to become overly complacent, and another small percent to become overly aggressive, exposing extreme reactions in human nature to these human attempts to modify it.

I must be clear. The complacency was such that, in the end, all those who reacted in that manner died of it. The aggression was such that it became violent madness. Blind suicidal pacifism on one hand and blind homicidal rage on the other. The pendulum swings. In this case a catalyst made it happen, but society does it all the time. We are pendulum swingers. Extremists. Reactionaries. Of our own devices, our reforms are normally just returns from whence we came and back again.

In Pilgrim’s Regress, as C.S. Lewis explores the spiritual and intellectual experiences that either waylaid or led to his conversion to Christianity, he discusses “Northern” and “Southern” ways of behaving—equal and opposite evils. He means by these directional terms metaphors for opposing tendencies of human nature…a thing which will automatically go awry to one of them unless anchored in God.

“Nature, outraged by one extreme, avenges herself by flying to the other”

-C.S. Lewis

We—people, art, literature, pop culture—are always trying to say “something” about the human condition. But in the majority of films and books, even the most poignant illustrations of life and death are merely a sober recitation of either that snide phrase; “life sucks and then you die” or that indulgent one “do what you feel while you can.” The former of these would be Lewis’ “Northern” fall from Grace, and the latter would be dubbed the “Southern” one.

Clearly neither of these are sufficient, but if there were no God, I think there would be no other conclusions to reach. I have several parts the cold-blooded rationalist in me and God is the only thing that renews me and keeps me from turning into what—in any story worth its salt—would be an outright antagonist. My very own nature gives me myriad reasons to be skeptical about human nature broadly speaking, and plenty of the things I’ve seen could make me one of those “life sucks and then you die” types.

This is part of why I like it best when the arts portray human nature as it is: broken and in need of repair; awry and in need of calibration; fallen and in need of salvation. The latter description may seem explicitly religious, but one can portray fallenness without asserting salvation (as is done all the time in popular culture), but at least this—in my opinion—is half the battle and far better than the other alternatives of either white-washing our nature or yielding to its worst vagaries.

That is why the story told in Firefly and Serenity strikes me so. It readily acknowledges that human nature is pretty well awry, but that us trying to doctor ourselves without the real surgeon present, presiding, and acting, is going to get us killed or worse. And human nature tends to toss back and forth, not quite understanding where on earth the solution is.

(Above) Captain Malcom Reynolds: “They’ll swing back to the belief that they can make…people…better, but I don’t hold to that.”

These wounds are much too deep to staunch through our own means. We often end up doing ourselves damage because our efforts are entirely unanchored. But we don’t give up and stop helping, caring, working, fighting, protecting, building…because when anchored in the Lord, it’s a whole different story. That’s the center passage, the plumb-line and it’s anything but some mere compromise or happy medium. It’s the Way, the Truth and the Life. In Lewis’ allegorical metaphor, everything “North” of it is frigid, barren rock, and everything “South” of it is fetid, seething swamp.

Thus it’s the only real, solid ground at all.

Patterns of Portrayal

The people of ancient Judea struggled with legalism in Jesus’ time, just as we struggle with it now...in our own, newer, flashier ways. They knew, and we know, that God’s laws are good, growing firmly out of his will and wisdom. But they lose their potency when we cut them off, take them into our own hands and make them into what is easiest for us. Sometimes we twist his words so badly to make them do as we wish, that we end up abandoning the mess we’ve made of them, tossing this and that word entirely out of our vernacular. We bounce back between legalism and relativism and never seem to hit the center-mark.

When Jesus admonished the Pharisees for giving a tenth of their mint and cumin, while neglecting their elders, he chastised them, not for obeying the law down to their very kitchen spices, but for doing so having cut the heart of God out of the law. They made the law their very own, and in so doing, ruined its purpose...like a child plucking out a flower who then wonders why it starts to wither from that moment on.

Some time ago, I inadvertently come across three television shows, each which had an overtly “Christian” character wherein celibacy is the primary indicator that they are Christian. Oh that and, of course, a small cross on thier neck. At first blush, I was foolish enough to think that this was a positive trend. I’m afraid I was mistaken.

The trouble with this TV “Christian” is that it is simply a caricature that settles amongst the classic list of high-school style stereotypes: the jock, the rebel, the punk, the slut, the goth, the geek, etcetera. As with most caricatures, the depiction is exaggerated, lacks nuance…and by and large, it’s grotesque.

The first example I encountered was on the posthumously popular “Arrested Development”. It is a clever off-center comedy about a severely dysfunctional family which I can recommend for wit, but not for content. The Christian featured in this story is the young girlfriend of a teenage character. She is presented as a drab girl who goes about protesting morally questionable people and events, and is generally disliked (no, despised) by other characters on the show. How much they all hate her is, in fact, a running gag.

At some point during the series, she claims (at age fifteen) that she wants to get married so that she can have sex. She asks her boyfriend to whisk her away to the secular world. Her Christian mother makes a very similar statement of wanting to learn ‘secular ways’, as though she has been living in a nunnery.

The theory seems to be that these poor indoctrinated girls are sexually repressed and secretly wish to escape thier cloistered Christian world. The girl’s “protests on behalf of morality” are also depicted as a hobby, or an opportunity to exercise intense emotions otherwise forbidden to her, rather than as derived of any sort of conviction. She is not a main character...she's mostly there for laughs in this ensemble show:

The second example seems more moderate at first glance but, ultimately, is just as damaging. Strangely, this example does not seem as though it is intended to be negative. Yet it still manages to leave a bad taste in the mouth about what the world believes Christians to be and represent. It comes from the show “The Secret Life of the American Teenager,” about a pregnant teen in high school. (I could not stomach more than a couple episodes of the show, but I looked up the events. Not my kinda show).

Theoretically the show’s objective is a good one; to teach teens the truths and consequences of sex. At least I’m guessing that’s what it is. It even seems to offer not having sex as a viable option. One character and her boyfriend are painted as strong Christians who speak loudly about abstinence. Yet the girl’s boyfriend grows increasingly desirous of sex and ultimately accepts a solicitation for oral sex from a girl he barely knows. He apologizes to his girlfriend for seeing someone else, but lies about the sexual nature of his behavior.

This does not scratch the surface of the unchecked hypocrisy enacted by the supposedly Christian characters in this show. The boyfriend pays someone to do his schoolwork for him. He lies and cheats and is a generally unsavory sort of boy. But of course he is a square-jawed, popular jock.

The girlfriend—initially quite genuine—is a blonde, peppy cheerleader who is very vocal about her Christianity. Later in the series, however, she gives in and has sex with her boyfriend, afterwards feeling shamed and recommitting herself to abstinence. This is a severely mixed message.

On the one hand, we all fall and we can all be redeemed. If that were the crux of the message, not only could I stomach it, but I could support it. But so far, the all-consuming factor for these Christians is sex: i.e. whether or not they’re having it. Purity is important, but what about all the other interacting facets of a God-centered life? Kindness? Justice? Honesty? What about the basic tenants of the faith? What about our Author and Creator? What about any other factors of what it means to be a person of faith?

I should point out that this show in particular was well-versed in ‘Christianese.’ The girl wore a purity ring, invited friends to church functions and her prayers made her sound like someone who had been to a youth-group meeting or two.

The third example is the most troubling by far. It comes in the form of the show “Glee,” about classic misfits finding a place and some joy in show choir. Interestingly enough, it’s about defying stereotypes, as it goes on supporting them every which way. It’s fun, musical and peppered with enjoyable quirks.

In this show, there is also a lovely, blonde cheerleader who wears a shiny silver cross. She is aggressively vocal about her virginity and that of others (dare I say “the Lady doth protest too much”...?) She is also rude, malicious and enjoys blatantly drawing her boyfriend to what she then makes clear he cannot have (and I mean very blatantly. The show was at pains to point this out, lest they be accused of 'blaming a girl for the guy's behavior'). The line “we’re about teasing not pleasing” is uttered in the second episode. This character is obsessed with appearances, reputation and is, of course, territorial with ‘her man’. She is meant to be despised and indeed she is despicable.

When this character was leading a school celibacy club (where the girls talk about the wonder of wearing sexy cheerleading skirts with which to tease their male counterparts), I rather sided with the secular teen who, watching the entire absurd display, proceeded to point out how skewed their motives and behaviors were. (Note: the show has veered far from this premise…this was only the launching point to serve the desired aim of pitting the Christian cheerleader character against the main female character)

It seems the secular world has reached the following simple conclusion; these Christian kids are really emphatic about abstinence, but they have no follow-through. Something must exist en force in order to be parodied, and this concept is being parodied left and right. A majority of the creative minds in television seem to have gleaned little more than: Christians are hypocrites and snobs, who either hold thier physical purity out like a vicious lure, or hold it close like a religious security blanket.

I can’t help but wonder if this perspective has its roots in the fact that today’s youth find it easier to claim obedience to a physical command, than submit to a spiritual lifestyle. I hope not, but if so, it is legalism and nothing more and its legs will eventually buckle out from underneath. Abstinence does not a godly person make. It’s supposed to be a strong indicator—an outflow, or by-product—of your life purpose, not the purpose of life itself.

Popular media has been producing its version of Christians for quite some time now, and some of their critiques are unfair. But some are fair. But stereotypes can almost always be distilled down from thier respective hyperbole into some grain of truth--or at the very least a point of origin--which must be examined.

It seems that, with the preponderance of purity conferences and bubble-gum style celebrities with “true love waits” rings, the concept is making its way into the very public sphere as a Christian criterion. The emphasis is perfectly understandable, since abstinence can be a hard ‘sell’ in a culture where the only stipulations for sex are that it be ‘safe and consensual.’ And, y’know, it helps if you kind of like the person too.

But if the virtue of waiting-till-marriage stands on its own to the world, without comprehension of meaning and without roots in a believer’s love for God, then that virtue will fall at earliest convenience. It should be noted that of all three referenced “Christian” characters, two had premarital sex, and one tried her hardest to do so.

The idea of abstinence is definitely on the secular radar screen, but the reason behind it clearly isn’t. Until the deeper motivation becomes clear from the inside out, then the whole thing will continue to be seen as some baseless, archaic idea, when viewed by a world that categorizes abortion under the term “reproductive rights” and says that following the blind-eyed demands of momentary desire is to be known as “sexual freedom.”

However, if our choices flow, not from moral checklists, but from seeking and abiding in the source, our Messiah, then the world will scratch its head in wonder when we refuse to fit into the confines of what we are imagined to be. Then the world will have a reason to search for the answer to such an anomaly, instead of simply labeling it with a cross and slapping on a purity ring…which they, not unreasonably, expect to fall off at any moment.

 POST SCRIPT (because I wrote this article a while ago):

Lo I did find a Christian character on TV that is neither coddled (as on Christian-made TV) nor demonized! Shirley on Community. (Awesome show, by the by). They deal in both stereotypes and complex facts. The show both criticizes her and adores her. She’s not perfect, but she strives to do right. She loves her non-Christian friends, but is often saddened by their choices and behaviors and can sometimes be harsh or judgmental towards them. It’s a rare show where a Christian is treated more as a person than as a concept. There are seventy-five thousand other reasons to like the show—it’s an ensemble cast—but her character is definitely one of them!

A little montage of Shirley clips which may or may not be appreciated if you haven’t seen the show: