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xgenesisrei · 3 years

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Understanding Worldviews

Why do you see what you see?

Two persons looking at the same thing may see things differently. In situations like this, an old mentor has advised me that what we see actually reveals more about us than what we are looking at.

What we see reveals what we are made of.

Now, think of a picture frame. Notice how the ‘frames’ help your eyes to see. By guiding what you should be looking at, it allows you to focus on something instead of looking at everything and actually see nothing in particular. In a way, to be without a sense of focus is very much the same as being blind. Frames allow you to see.

The media scholar Marshall McLuhan says that “every person wears his own goggles.” What he meant by this is that there are certain frameworks of the mind which serve as the set of the lens people use to look at the world.[1] Depending on the kind and color of the lens you choose, the world you will see around you shall be as well. Today, a more familiar term shall be ‘filters’ as popularly used in apps such as Instagram. Filters give the moments you capture, whether photos or videos, with a particular texture and ‘feels.’

The ‘visual filters’ that allow you to see the world around you actually gives you more than just a sense of focus, it also help ‘make sense’ of what you have seen or how you would like others to see it.

This ‘filtered’ way of looking at life and the world brings us to what people call as ‘world and life view’ or simply ‘worldview.’ The important keyword would be the term ‘view’ which has something to do with optics. It refers to how you see the world around you. It is, as the cultural anthropologist Paul Hiebert puts it, “what we think with, not what we think about.” But he reminds us, it is “like a pair of glasses through which we look, they are largely unnoticed.”[2]

What exactly is a worldview? The term worldview itself originated from the German word ‘weltanschauung’ as coined by the philosopher Immanuel Kant in his book ‘Critique of Judgment (1790). He refer to is as the way by which human beings use ‘reason’ alone to gain an understanding of “the meaning of the world and their place within it.” It gathered attention over the years and the term evolved within the field of German philosophy in the 19th century. It came to popularly mean as a person’s global outlook in life and the world. A more popular definition of worldview, especially among evangelicals, would be what Norman Geisler and William Watkins have offered: “A worldview is an interpretive framework through which or by which one makes sense out of the data of life and the world.”[3]

While it is easy to confuse worldview from philosophy, the two are quite different in orientation. Worldview’s German lexical root provides worldviews with a distinctive attention to being situated in a particular context and historical location. This is akin to what journalists refer to as ‘point of view’ -that is, every story has several sides and an onlooker captures a particular perspective depending on which angle s/he is looking from. The theologian Al Wolters notes that worldviews, unlike philosophy (and in contrast to Kant), do not necessarily have a universal nature and need not necessarily have a rational character. This is because the emphasis of a worldview is on the looking subject and not the essence of the object being looked at (which is the usual preoccupation of Greek philosophy). In other words, it has to do more with the person seeing red balloons than the redness of the balloon itself.

Worldviews are to personal values as philosophy is to essential virtues of human society. This is why religion is often relegated more as a worldview rather than a philosophy. Wolters identified five different ways of thinking about the relationship between worldview and philosophy:

The New Testament scholar NT Wright would add the term ‘mindset’ to further distinguish a person’s particular grasp of any given worldview. Below are possible features of the worldview you might be carrying in your mind:

Cluster of beliefs -it is “a set of presuppositions about the world in which we live.” (James Sire)

Context-specific -it is a type of shared commitment by a group of people sharing in a common culture (Paul Hiebert) [4]

Covert -it is the underlying assumptions of people about the nature of reality (Paul Hiebert)

Cohesive -it is a system of meanings that organizes or provides coherence to the structures of one’s consciousness

Comprehensive -it is the all-encompassing framework of one’s basic belief about things

In his book ‘Worldviews in Conflict,’ Ronald Nash would provide a good summary of the above-mentioned features. He says a worldview is “the conceptual scheme by which we consciously or unconsciously place or fit everything we believe and by which we interpret and judge reality.”

Why worldviews matter? The importance of being aware of one’s worldview lies in the fact that it serves not only a descriptive function in our lives but also a formative influence. That is, as Michael Goheen and Craig Bartholomew wrote, ‘worldviews not only describes the world to us but also directs our life in the world, how it ought to be and how we ought to live in it.”[5] Furthermore, it shapes “our understanding of truth, our sense of right and wrong, what we think it means to be a man or woman, how we worship God, or whether we have a god to worship.”[6] Brian Walsh and Richard Middleton would add that “our worldviews determine our values. It sorts out what is important from what is not, what is of highest value from what is least.”[7]

Worldviews shape the answers to the big questions of life...

Navigating a world of worldviews? Certainly, such questions are curiosities of enigmatic proportions. It easily brings to mind what the sage who wrote the book of Ecclesiastes has said about human beings: “God has placed eternity in man’s heart” (3:1). But humanity is no stranger to these mysteries. As a meaning-making creature, human beings have sought to provide, from time immemorial, that which shall satisfy the curiosity of one’s imagination, reason, and perception. Below is a sampling of the many competing worldviews in the world today. Take note of the helpful illustrations right beside each description.

In the context of the Philippines, the palate of choices presented becomes even more complex. Throughout its history, the country has played host to several colonial civilisations each bringing with it a particular way of looking at life and order of the world. But like the Pinoy’s favorite merienda, the ‘halo-halo,’ these different ‘worldviews’ came to dwell together in a complex but creative mix. Unlike in the case of a mango shake where one can no longer distinguish the elements, halo-halo’s ingredients mix with each other and yet each ingredient retains its character.

Consider for example how we still have a major religion whose hierarchical model of leadership still echoes the Medieval age, public institutions of governance that strive to bring the ideals of Modernity to our society, a globalized digital media that showcase the values of post-Modern world, and alongside all these, a resilient indigenous outlook ingrained deeply in the collective psyche of the people. Today, all of these era came touching upon the others in a Filipino’s sense of time and space.

A narrative approach to engaging people’s worldview: From culture to culture, answers to the big questions of human existence would often come by way of stories. Myths. Epics. Legends. Sagas. And perhaps, in the Modern world, philosophical systems.[8] Bryant Myers have observed how our own local communities tend to have “a story that frames our lives and our understanding of the world.” [9] We are born in these stories and these stories are the ones that we will keep telling ourselves. As we do so, in time, we will find ourselves enacting these stories in our life and playing the role that is called of us.

James Sire, in his more recent works, has broadened his definition of the nature of worldviews from merely being a mental construct into being form of a commitment that is “a fundamental orientation of the heart.” Sire says that our view of life and the world is “expressed as a story that we hold about reality and provides the foundation on which we live and move and have our being.”[10] Such story/ies is so foundational to being human that Paul Hiebert is convinced that to “to question a worldview is to challenge the very foundation of life, and we resist such challenges with strong emotional reactions. There are few human fears greater than a loss of sense of order and meaning. We are even willing to die for these beliefs because they make death itself meaningful.”

Os Guiness issued a strong reminder on how to engage people’s worldviews,

“A common mistake of some apologists is to reduce people to their worldviews or philosophies...but it’s a mistake to see people as perfect examples of card-carrying humanism, Hinduism, or whatever. Someone’s worldview is rooted in their life story. And there are things that matter to them supremely. Our Lord immediately knows that for the rich young ruler, the treasure of his heart was his love of money. To really speak to someone we’ve got to love them, listen to them, pray for them, and ask the Lord to show us what is the treasure of their heart, the thing that makes all the difference in the world.”

For Christians seeking to engage people’s worldviews, the key would be to note how in every story that people tell themselves, something seems to assume the proportion and function of a ‘god.’ It is this ultimate sacred that appears to wield the qualities of being ‘absolute, immutable, and all-encompassing.’ It is this something (or someone) that plays ‘lord’ in people’s lives, in their history, and in their community.

Engaging the ‘god’ of these stories that people tell themselves with the story of the Gospel is what Christian witness is all about.

But what can be a challenge for Christians is to enter a space of listening to the possibility of local rumors of the Good News. The missionary Don Richardson experienced this when he worked with the Sawi tribe of Indonesia. He discovered that the local story of a “peace child’ was at the core of the tribe’s understanding of trust, relationship, and community. It is by touching on this key story that the villagers came to understand what the Gospel is all about -Jesus is THE ‘peace child’ they have all been waiting for.

In a similar way, CS Lewis (celebrated author of ‘The Chronicles of Narnia’) came to faith in Christ upon being engaged with his own ‘ultimate sacred’ -the great stories of the world’s greatest literature. With the help of his good friend JRR Tolkien (cf., author of the trilogy ‘Lord of the Rings’), he came to a realisation that the great stories of the world he has read and cherished as professor of literature ultimately find their shadows in the story of “the Word made flesh.” (To return to the initial optic metaphor of this post, Lewis found fresh ‘filters’ that made his beloved stories of old even more beautiful.) What follows, below, is the retelling of Bret and Kate McKay on how Tolkien helped Lewis gain a fresh ‘worldview’ and new story by which he could re-orient his life: [10]

Lewis has often shared with Tolkien his affinity for Baldr — the Norse god of love and peace, forgiveness and justice — who is wrongly killed but comes back to life after Ragnarok (a kind of Viking apocalypse). He has told his friend that he feels “mysteriously moved” by such stories of sacrifice, death, and resurrection.

A love of mythology may have brought the friends together, but it has also served as one of Lewis’ major stumbling blocks to embracing Christianity. As a young man he had decided that the faith was simply “one mythology among many,” and was just as fabricated as all the rest: “All religions, that is, all mythologies to give them their proper name, are merely man’s own invention — Christ as much as Loki.” Lewis lays out his remaining obstacle to embracing his friends’ faith. He can conceive of Christ as an ultimate exemplar in how to live a virtuous life, but that he struggles with the whole idea of his enacting an atonement that saves mankind. He couldn’t see “how the life and death of Someone Else (whoever he was) 2,000 years ago could help us here and now.” Phrases like “sacrifice” and “the Blood of the Lamb,” seem to Lewis to be “either silly or shocking.”

[Tolkien] unfolds to Lewis a different way of looking at the centerpiece of the Christian gospels — one that ironically embraces, rather than flees from, the idea of it being a myth. Myths, Tolkien explains, are not fairy tales, intentional lies, or mere fabrications, but are instead powerful vehicles for revealing the world’s deepest truths. All myths, he argues, illuminate layers and dimensions of existence that are often missed by our narrow human vision. In this way, they can actually be more “real” than what we normally call reality. Tolkien posits that mythmakers exercise a God-given power, and act as “sub-creators” who share pieces of the ultimate Truth that is hidden from plain sight. All the world’s myths then serve as prisms through which we can see fragments of divine light. Stories, Tolkien argues, are sacramental.

Yet, Tolkien challenges his friend, the Christian story of atonement and resurrection should still be approached just as Lewis had the Norse tales of gods like Baldr — allowing the story to deeply and mysteriously move him. Like all myths, the true myth of Christ was not to be grasped mechanistically, as a literal description of things that had happened, but imaginatively, for its meaning. The Christian myth was true not in the sense of revealing the actual nature of God, and how exactly mankind had been redeemed, which finite minds could not possibly comprehend; it was true in the sense that the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection composed the best vehicle — the best narrative — by which the human mind could be illuminated and catch a glimpse of the deeper structure underlying the eternities.

Later on the 19th of October 1931, Lewis would write to Arthur Greeves,

“Now what Tolkien showed me was this: that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn’t mind it at all: again, that if I met the idea of a god sacrificing himself to himself . . . I liked it very much and was mysteriously moved by it: again, that the idea of the dying and reviving god (Balder, Adonis, Bacchus) similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels. The reason was that in Pagan stories I was prepared to feel the myth as profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp even tho’ I could not say in cold prose ‘what it meant’. Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.”

In the end, a biblically-shaped worldview will have to include an epic plot with at least four (4) distinctive elements in its story:

There is one God.

There are two realities: Creator and the created order.

There are three divine persons in a loving community: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit

They are for us, forever, in Christ.

*This article was originally delivered by Rei Lemuel Crizaldo for the ‘Worldviews’ session of the ALT Camp organized by IVCF Philippines on July 2017.

Notes:

[1] This is metaphorically speaking, of course. One can also ‘see’ by one’s heart, or even perhaps by the human faculty that Filipinos call as ‘loob’.

[2] Paul Hiebert, 'The Gospel in Human Contexts'. I guess, there is a way that a person is both born into a worldview and also a time for 'reconstructing' one for him or herself.

[3] See their book “Worlds Apart: A Handbook on Worldviews”

[4] Douglas Huffman remarked, “Where we live matters. The society in which people grow-up significantly affects their worldview.” (See his book entitled ‘Christian Contours: How A Biblical Worldview Shapes the Heart and Mind’)

[5] See their book entitled, ‘Living at the Crossroads: An Introduction to Christian Worldview’

[6] Huston Smith

[7] See their book entitled, ‘Transforming Vision: Shaping A Christian Worldview’

[8] As to how specific periods of time and space shapes worldviews, see https://web.facebook.com/notes/every-square-inch/right-after-modernity/1371750719611408/

[9] See his book ‘Walking with the Poor’

[10] See, for example, his book entitled, ‘Naming the Elephant’

[11] “The Power of Conversation: A Lesson from CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien” (available online at http://www.artofmanliness.com/2015/11/02/the-power-of-conversation-a-lesson-from-cs-lewis-and-jrr-tolkien/)

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dweemeister · 3 years

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Elmer Gantry (1960)

Upon the publication Sinclair Lewis’ novel Elmer Gantry in 1927, an eruption of outrage ensued. The novel, a Juvenalian satire of evangelical Christianity in the United States, drew invectives from evangelical groups and high praise from literary circles. Despite its popularity among American readers, Elmer Gantry’s content long prevented American studio executives from even considering the film adaptation rights. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), from 1934 until 1968, enforced the Hays Code, a guideline for censorship, on all films made by the major American studios for theatrical release. Here is what the Hays Code says on religion – this section was never amended for the entirety of the Code’s existence:

No film or episode may throw ridicule on any religious faith.

Ministers of religion in their character as ministers of religion should not be used as comic characters or as villains.

Ceremonies of any definite religion should be carefully and respectfully handled.

The 1960 film adaptation of Elmer Gantry, released by United Artists (UA), directed and written by Richard Brooks, and featuring one of Burt Lancaster’s most electric performances of his career, violates the second and third part of this section and, arguably, the first as well. By the late 1950s and early ‘60s, enforcement of the Code was beginning to wither – boundary-pushing non-American films (which were exempt from the Code), television, and evolving behavioral and cultural norms in the United States contributed to its eventual demise. One of the beneficiaries was undoubtedly Brooks, whose output around this time – including Blackboard Jungle (1955), The Professionals (1966), and In Cold Blood (1967) – reflects the relaxing standards of Hollywood’s self-imposed censorship. Of the films Brooks made in this period, Elmer Gantry might be the most complete, excoriating, and cinematic.

Elmer Gantry (Lancaster) is a garrulous, ruthless, and ambitious con man who invokes Scripture to hock whatever he is selling. His shtick is effective, as his energetic sermonizing tends to break down the resistance of most. One day, curious about a traveling evangelist tent show passing through town, he encounters Sister Sharon Falconer (Jean Simmons). Gantry, taken by Sister Sharon’s virginal piousness and her fairness, convinces Sister Sharon’s assistant, Sister Rachel (Patti Page), to join their traveling group. Sister Sharon is impressed by Gantry’s – or “Brother Gantry” – orations, and she adjusts her own sermons to complement his. Where Gantry decries the congregants as sinners, Sister Sharon promises salvation through repentance. As time passes, Gantry’s presence in this itinerant ministry becomes the talk of the Midwest and Great Plains. Sister Sharon and Gantry begin to attract new congregants and onlookers’ horror, alike. The sermons become increasingly theatrical, writes the cynical big-city newspaper reporter Jim Lefferts (Arthur Kennedy), who is torn by his admiration of Gantry’s façade and his revulsion for hucksterism. Meanwhile, sex worker Lulu Bains (Shirley Jones) – who once knew Gantry when he was aiming to become a minister – is about to make an unexpected reentry into his life.

Character actors round out the cast of this motion picture, including Dean Jagger as Sister Sharon’s manager, Bill Morgan; Edward Andrews as businessman George F. Babbitt; and John McIntire and Hugh Marlowe as two reverends. Rex Ingram (1936’s The Green Pastures, 1940’s The Thief of Bagdad) cameos in an uncredited appearance as the preacher of a black congregation.

Elmer Gantry never feels like a 146-minute movie, as it moves through its scenes with fervorous pace thanks to some excellent performances and crisp filmmaking (more on both later). Brooks’ adaptation covers less than a quarter of Sinclair Lewis’ novel – Lewis allows its plot to unfold over the course of several years – and takes liberties in deleting or rearranging characters and plot points to fit neatly in a movie adaptation. Like the novel itself, Brooks’ adaptation ends without clear moral or narrative resolution – albeit at an earlier point in the novel. The character of Lulu Bains does not reappear in Lewis’ novel until after the events depicted in the film. To provide Elmer Gantry, the character, with the immoral backstory lost on a moviegoer unfamiliar with the novel, Brooks integrates Lulu into this film adaptation. On a surface level, that appears to deprive Lulu of her own characterization, agency, and backstory, but Brooks allows the character (and Shirley Jones) the space to portray and develop her complicated feelings – a stew of trauma, bitterness, and love – for her current life station and towards Elmer Gantry.

Reverential low-angled shots from cinematographer John Alton (1951’s An American in Paris, 1958’s The Brothers Karamazov) during the revivals make Sister Sharon’s tent seem cavernous, a fabric cathedral without need of stained glass, marble statues, flying buttresses. Looking slightly upwards at Sister Sharon’s of Elmer’s faces (at times with a Dutch angle), the film elevates the two above the masses listening intently on what they have to say, imbuing their scenes with striking imagery that draws the viewer’s attention. The decision to shoot the film in the 1.66:1 screen aspect ratio – wider than the Academy standard, but not as much as the widescreen standard sweeping through American filmmaking at the time – constricts the audience’s peripheral vision, forcing one’s focus on the speaker’s body language, rather than any miscellaneous activity occurring behind or to the side of the speaker.

As for the speakers or, should we say, actors, there are stupendous performances across the ensemble. For his turn as the eponymous lead, Burt Lancaster, known for his vigorous performances, provides Elmer Gantry with vigor aplenty. Modeling his performance off of the behavior of baseball outfielder-turned-evangelist Billy Sunday, Lancaster struts around the tent during revival meetings, his upper body animated in conversation and salesmanship outside those meetings. Even in stillness, Lancaster’s physicality swaggers, brimming with euphoria – his most private moments abound in sexuality molded by what his character might call the love of God. Even Lancaster’s haircut appears to be defying gravity more than usual in Elmer Gantry. The sweat on his brow, within the 1:66:1 frame, feels as if it is about to seep through the camera. As he delivers his lines, Lancaster masters the complicated beat – accelerating with certain turns of phrases and strategic pauses for emphasis – and wildly varying volume of Elmer’s sermons. “Love is like the morning and the evening stars,” he intones as Gantry (that is his signature quote), somehow making us believe in such bromides and other simplifications he sells to the revival’s attendees.

Jean Simmons, as Sister Sharon Falconer, is a clear-eyed minister who nevertheless falls – or, perhaps, “seduced” – for Brother Elmer’s pontifications. In her own way, Sister Sharon Falconer is as ruthless as the man who wheedles his way into her company. Simmons, retaining her British accent, speaks like a patrician but, as Sister Sharon, reminds all that even the poor, the downtrodden, the sightless, the hard-of-hearing can know the munificence of Christ. So different is she from Gantry that when the latter begins to aggressively court her, the scene elicits squirms. Not because the scene is poorly acted, but that Simmons and Lancaster (with assistance from Brooks’ screenplay) have developed their characters so masterfully that Elmer’s pretense-free seduction feels straight from an Old Testament story that invariably incurs God’s wrath. Their characters convince themselves of their mutual love, even though Gantry is probably incapable of loving and Sister Sharon cannot view love outside how she might interpret it through the Bible.

In the aisles or the congregation’s peanut gallery are Arthur Kennedy and Shirley Jones. For Kennedy, as the reporter Jim Lefferts, this is a dress rehearsal for the similar but more biting role of Jackson Bentley in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962). Like Bentley was to T.E. Lawrence, Lefferts views the work of Elmer Gantry and Sister Sharon with a cynical lens but, to some degree, each finds a professional need for the other. As Lulu, Shirley Jones crackles with a sexuality essentially nonexistent in American movies at this time. Upon Lulu’s introduction, she tells her fellow sex workers her past experiences with the minister now stealing newspaper headlines:

LULU BAINES: He got to howlin’ “Repent! Repent!” and I got to moanin’ “Save me! Save me!” and the first thing I know he rammed the fear of God into me so fast I never heard my old man’s footsteps!

With this suggestive language that would never have been tolerated by the MPAA a few years earlier, Jones delivers her lines with shamelessness, slightly colored by a modicum of romantic trauma that reveals itself later. Jones is not in Elmer Gantry long, but her presence, her character’s raw contradictions deepen the tragedies that seem to follow those entranced by a former seminary student now returning to preaching his idea of gospel.

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André Previn’s unsettled score to Elmer Gantry leans heavily on brass dissonance and rhythmically complex string runs in the few instances where there is no dialogue or diegetic music. Though not used often, Previn’s music lays bare Gantry’s motivations of lust and profit, a man devoid of internal meaning and one who craves sensation. There are moments throughout the score where it seems like a Coplandesque Americana sound is begging to burst free. But Previn, more than capable of composing such music and considering the narrative to this adaptation, knows better than to let those tendencies escape. The raving strings and blaring brass bury melodicism, which is left for the jazzy interludes that accompany Lulu’s scenes (jazz at this time was considered scandalous by many Americans). Previn’s score might not suit those longing for free-flowing motifs, but the technical skill required to play, let alone accomplish the musical phrasing he intends, some of the passages he writes for Elmer Gantry are stunning.

Earlier in this write-up in reference to the Hays Code, I mentioned that Elmer Gantry villainizes and makes comic characters out of religious figures, in addition to portraying the events at Sister Sharon’s revivals as debauched, deceitful. But does Elmer Gantry “throw ridicule on… religious faith”? Probably not, although those who despise religious belief in and of itself might disagree. Given Sister Sharon’s modesty and her less-fiery diction early in the film, probably not. Brooks does not expand upon what Sister Sharon’s congregation looked or sounded like in the months of years before Elmer Gantry’s arrival. Instead, Brooks’ movie targets individuals seeking to make economic and personal empires of organized religion – and Elmer Gantry, whose ravenous pursuit for money and women, is the man to defile Sister Sharon’s ministry. Only once he ingratiates himself to Sister Sharon, Gantry begins to emphasize what sounds suspiciously close to the “prosperity gospel”, which broadly states that faith in God and religious donations will lead to material wealth and physical wellbeing. The prosperity gospel is not scriptural. But it is a central tenant of numerous evangelical traditions.

Like Oral Roberts, Billy Graham, and the Falwell family, Elmer Gantry is the byproduct of the United States’ Third Great Awakening, which also resulted in Prohibition and the State of Tennessee’s decision to prosecute John Thomas Scopes for teaching human evolution in a public school. Sinclair Lewis, like Richard Brooks and his cast for Elmer Gantry, warn of profiteering “prophets” that remain a fixture of American life. From the mid-1950s to the mid-‘60s, the major Hollywood studios were prioritizing epic movies such as Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956), William Wyler’s Ben-Hur (1959), and George Stevens’ The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) – spectaculars intended to check the perceived threat of television to moviegoing. A film like Elmer Gantry that disparages religious ministers – even unethical, villainous ones – released during this time was nothing less than a landmark. Adapting a work by one of the great American writers of the twentieth century, Richard Brooks, with no small assistance from a cast topped by Burt Lancaster, results in a venomous film including one of the great characters of American film history. The book is almost a century old and the film is just past its sixtieth anniversary, but Elmer Gantry’s power endures. Elmer Gantry’s dialectic continues, even with evangelical Christianity akin to the homilies of Elmer Gantry supposedly on the wane.

My rating: 10/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. Elmer Gantry is the one hundred and sixty-fourth feature-length or short film I have rated a ten on imdb. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found in the “Ratings system” page on my blog (as of July 1, 2020, tumblr is not permitting certain posts with links to appear on tag pages, so I cannot provide the URL).

For more of my reviews tagged “My Movie Odyssey”, check out the tag of the same name on my blog.

#Elmer Gantry #Richard Brooks #Burt Lancaster #Jean Simmons #Arthur Kennedy #Shirley Jones #Dean Jagger #Patti Page #Edward Andrews #Sinclair Lewis #John Alton #Andre Previn #TCM #31 Days of Oscar #My Movie Odyssey

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peaceofthespirit · 4 years

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8, 10, 11 for the religious asks

Sorry that I took so long to answer! I've been having a rough couple of days....

8) What is your favourite passage from your sacred text, if you have one?

So back when I was a kid one of my favorites was: Romans 12:21 "Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good."

This is probably because it is very participatory, reminded me of Return of the Jedi, and the verse number is a palindrome.

Nowadays, one of may favorites is John 1:1-5 - "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it."

For a while I avoided this verse because I'm not always convinced that Jesus was uncreated, as I was always taught that the "word" was Jesus. But now I have read other interpretations that mean it to be the wisdom of God, God's plan for relationship with us through Jesus or just like - in general. To me, this is comforting as I feel like the idea of wisdom existing from the beginning challenges the idea of "original sin." God is not a dummy and doesn't hate us just because of the way they literally created us (with limited knowledge and the option to sin).

10) Do you have a favourite prayer/ritual?

I grew up in a very basic Evangelical church where our only ritual was singing contemporary christian music. Now I enjoy meditation, contemplation, and praying to Mary and Jesus in addition to prayers to God. I am interested in learning more about various communal rituals and liturgies though. I think worship in a lot of modern churches is kinda superficial and I want to learn how to make it more meaningful.

11) Have you ever considered converting to another faith?

A few years ago I thought I might be an atheist because I thought that Christianity or Faith in general = Evangelical Christianity, but I quickly got over that. Lately I have been interested in Jewish Mysticism, Hinduism, Sufism, and Zoroastrianism. However, Jesus is very important to me and I believe that he is the personified word or wisdom of God (whether that means he is literally God, I don't know) but I find it personally fulfilling to root my spirituality through a "Christian" lens. In terms of Christianity I am very interested in Process Theologology and Mysticism, which is very different from how I was raised.

#ask #liberal christian #liberal christianity #progressive christianity #progressive christian #mysticism #queer christian

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cumbersomelift · 4 years

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Fire and Brimstone

A few years ago, a close friend of mine came out to their parents as a non-Christian. Distressed by their child's infidelity, they said that if they had known this would happen then they would have never had kids in the first place. In effect, things would have been better if they were never born.

That’s a cruel thing to say to a child, but it’s also refreshingly honest. I think if more of us took the fundamentalist doctrine of hell seriously, then conversations like this would be more common. These feelings might surface for others. Fundamentalism of any kind can create the circumstances that lead kind and gentle people say remarkably harsh things.

Damnation complicates interfaith relationships because it raises the stakes in a way that's rarely acknowledged. For me, it also dredges up a series of experiences I had as a child preoccupied with the fear of hell. I've since discovered that this is not uncommon. So before I talk about the doctrine as a barrier to relationships, I wanted to share a few experiences of why I see efforts to internalize the doctrine of hell in children as emotionally manipulative at best and abusive at worst.

Growing Up Damned

Growing up in a fundamentalist tradition, I thought about hell a lot. Of course, I was taught about hell a lot. I imagined it as an active, eternal torment and in long family car rides I wondered what it would even look like to inflict that kind of pain. I pictured immersion in lava pools, splinters under fingernails, hooks in one's skin, and being eaten alive by rats. I shuddered at these ideas. I also cried a lot. For a significant portion of my childhood, I believed I was nearly or definitely damned. Based on my 4th grader's interpretation of Hebrews 6:6 and an offhand comment by the Bible school teacher, I thought my joke delivered in a sugar rush at bible class was "mocking the holy spirit" - which I interpreted to be the unforgivable sin. I remember sobbing into my pillow and quietly weeping hymns that night just in case God was still listening.

Now that I'm older - and out of the church - some friends have shared similar experiences. Their damnation came from things like muttering "godammit" or was evidenced by their failure to speak in tongues. Some described recurring nightmares and even panic attacks that were triggered by fire and brimstone sermons. Many of the object lessons I received on hell are still burned in my memory.

A high school friend from a sister church recounted one object lesson about hell that she found especially devastating. One time at Bible camp, about half of the campers hiked to a hilltop for the nightly sermon only to find that many of their friends were missing. She took a seat among the empty chairs as the preacher welcomed them to heaven, and began preaching from Matthew 7 & 25. He read, "small is the gate and narrow is the way that leads to life and only few will find it" and "[the unsaved] will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life." At that moment, she began to hear her friends calling her name through the trees from the bottom of the hill. They, the unsaved, were begging her to come back. To save them.

I remember listening to a leader in my old church as he explained how the gospel is like a cure for cancer. "Imagine that everyone in your school is dying of cancer, and you have the cure in your backpack. Are you going to share it with them, or keep it to yourself? How selfish must a person be to withhold that from those that need it most?" I agreed and felt a fresh burden of guilt - how many people haven't I told? How many are unsaved from my cowardice and apathy?

Parents sometimes complained about these lessons and as a teenager I didn’t understand that. If we really believed these are the terms of existence shouldn’t be we made fully aware of their gravity?

I've often wondered if, as kids, we took the idea of damnation more seriously than our parents did. In an episode of The Life After, a therapist joins the hosts to talk about internalized fundamentalism and undoing what some call religious trauma syndrome. One host offers an explanation for why children (now millennials in their 20s-30s) experienced this growing up:

“This is something very interesting that I have not heard a lot of commentary on, but I’m really interested in exploring: A big part of the reason that our generation experienced so much religious trauma is that our parents' generation more or less chose Christianity, and our generation was born into it. So for us, growing up, it was our entire reality. Whereas for our parents, it was an augmentation to the reality they already knew. They were able to pick and choose what they let in, whereas we didn’t have a choice. That’s part of the gap. That’s why we can’t communicate [about the impact of our religious upbringing].”

The doctrine of hell was a defining aspect of my faith by design. While I personally think it's a stretch to call these experiences religious trauma or spiritual abuse, I'm troubled that emotionally manipulating teenagers this way is normalized -- even systematized -- in so many traditions.

Why Hell Matters for a Nonbeliever

I became a Christian universalist at 17 - even as a Christian, I thought to torture nonbelievers for their nonbelief was morally indefensible. But even after leaving the faith entirely, that fundamentalist doctrine has caused me more pain than any other. It also makes interfaith relationships much trickier to navigate.

One reason for this is that I find myself preoccupied by its normalcy. In fact, I'm comfortable saying that my damnation is the primary lens through which I view the church. Every steeple, every cross on the highway, and every bible verse on Facebook is a reminder that a considerable portion people in this country would not object to my eternal suffering as long as it's at the hands of the right deity. That number includes many family members and people I grew up with. Maybe you can see why that’s a little preoccupying.

This means that my damnation often becomes the unshakeable backdrop to any relationship that I have with a Christian person. Even when they’re not thinking about it, I almost certainly am - and I want to know what they're thinking about it. There's not a clear way to introduce that into a conversation, but I'm always curious. I mean, maybe I want to be friends, but it's awkward if you think your God will call for my torture in fifty years. In many cases, there’s no aspect of faith that I want to engage believers on more than this point exactly. I rarely do, because it's impolite to ask that kind of question, and when the conversation arrives I often find myself ill-prepared to engage.

This is because I find communicating the relational toll of this dynamic to be almost impossible. Asking someone to take my perspective is hard because, for one, there is a lack of any secular analogue. In that past, I've asked whether it would change our relationship if I believed that eating animals for food was a sin. (I'm a vegetarian.) Would it change anything if I believed that, if you don't also become a vegetarian, you will be reincarnated as an animal that's needlessly slaughtered forever? That if you stop eating meat now, you can save yourself this fate, but that I'm afraid your late omnivorous relatives are already in anguish for their crimes? Of course I don’t want that for them, and it’s sad but it’s true. That I don't make the rules, but also the rules are fair? Maybe our dinner parties would be a little more awkward. Maybe you wouldn't let me around your kids. Or invite me to dinner at all. You can see that our interactions might be a little strained, and you might have some questions about what this means for our relationship.

Why Hell Matters for Believers

The doctrine of hell also impacts Christians who have relationships with nonbelievers. It raises the stakes for any Christians willing to have interfaith relationships by casting nonbelievers as both a soul that’s in danger and a spiritual threat. This is why I've seen preachers tell new Christians not to befriend nonbelievers, and why I've had parents tell their Christian kids to stop hanging out with me. I think this advice is hateful and misguided, but more than anything it’s self-preserving and intuitively follows from the doctrine of damnation. Moreover, it puts many of the necessary conversations out of reach.

The mathematician Blaise Pascal invented a tactic of evangelism that won souls by threatening them with Hell. (He was also a lot of fun at parties.) It’s called Pascal’s wager, and it goes something like this: “If you’re an atheist then you might as well be a Christian, because if you’re right then you’ll die and be dead, but if you’re wrong then you’ll die and be damned. So, just be a Christian. Why roll the dice?” It's about as effective for evangelism as it is unethical. But it's an excellent retention technique for those already in the pew. If you're a Christian already persuaded of the stakes, it's a paralyzing reminder about the cost of defecting.

When I was a Christian, I found the risk of dissuasion utterly terrifying. I read up on apologetics mostly to reassure myself that I could parry every objection with my faith intact if any atheist came looking for a fight. But when the atheist is a loved one, the stakes get even higher. It’s not enough to defend myself anymore. I have to bring that person back to the fold before they're calling my name from the bottom of the hill. So many believers decide to withdraw altogether. By taking a step back, they can at least say it's in God's hands. But the relationship is too risky to pursue.

My point here is not to say that the doctrine of damnation is incorrect -- though I obviously think that. My point is to say that it’s damaging. A judgment about whether another person’s life stance makes them worthy of suffering will matter for that relationship, and in the end that judgment is what the doctrine is about. It’s especially preoccupying for the deconverted when we assume that Christians take the belief as seriously as we did when we internalized it in childhood.

Addressing that assumption requires a conversation where we may find ourselves at an impasse: the doctrine of damnation is both preoccupying to nonbelievers and immobilizing to believers. I can't say that every nonbeliever wants to have this conversation or that every believer is so reticent. What I can say is that on three different instances, I have been contacted by an old friend who I thought was just catching up, only to discover they were enlisted by a concerned believer to "give me a nudge in the right direction." Presumably feeling ill-equipped to do this themselves, my family recruited someone with ministerial experience. I found myself heartbroken, not only by the pretense of reunion, but because I desperately wanted to have that conversation - not with a minister but with those closest to me. Not to interrogate or dissuade them, but to unpack the challenges that I'm writing about now.

Even as I'm attempting to acknowledge the pain on both sides of this discussion, I'm still blinded by my indignation about it. (I’m shaking as I type this.) Personally, I've found it a relief to openly ask Christians about this in a way that is as nonjudgmental as I can muster. Taking an exploratory posture toward these attitudes has at least put my wandering mind at ease and is a big part of why I feel less preoccupied with all of this than in years past. That's required self-restraint on my part and interpersonal courage on theirs. Relationships have grown as a result, and I consider myself extremely lucky for the opportunity to have them. I don’t know if it’s something talk through and be done with, but even if the questions may never be entirely resolved it’s a conversation worth having.

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torreygazette · 5 years

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Book Review: Breaking the Marriage Idol

I have written at length about what it's like to be an adult single, a long-term single, a single in the church, what it's like to be celibate in a day and age where even Christians fail to recognize that as a biblical principle, what it's like to want biological children and know that the time for that to happen is extremely limited. I said I wouldn't write any more about it, I don't want to have to deal with it any more, I am tired and sad! And yet this is exactly what God is using to break me. This is what God is using to sanctify me and draw me close to himself.

I don't get to say when or how this chapter of my life ends. My singleness is inextricably linked with my identity, but not necessarily in the way you're thinking: I really do view this as my vocation, what God has given me and called me to. That doesn't mean it's easy. Our callings are not any less God-given if we are sad in them or if we are happy in them—ask any parent, any spouse. Our responsibility is to serve God in the state we are in: our feelings about our state are real, and valid, but to be taken with as many grains of salt as is necessary.

So I keep writing. Not in any hopes of discovering a "life-hack," not because I've figured it out, not because I'm looking for pity or a solution or a setup. (Although I'm not above taking all 3 if you have them.)

When I was growing up, a teenager in the height of the purity culture hey-day, I thought if I read all the books, I would be SO PREPARED for marriage. Knowledge is power. (Yes, I am an enneagram 5, why do you ask?)

I would have ALL THE DATA and I would BE THE BEST AT MARRIAGE. My parents discouraged me from reading books about marriage or singleness by single people, because "their own advice didn't work for them"—the author wasn't married. This is one of the problems with marriage as idol: it assumes that singleness is a problem to be fixed. In some ways, I can see how the same issue would arise within marriage in regards to childbearing—childlessness is a problem to be fixed, and the message is that you are not complete until married. Except, surprise, then you're not complete until you have kids. The carrot, the brass ring, is always out of reach. Because once you have kids, they have to be perfect, and your marriage has to thrive, and ... I'm exhausted just typing this.

In light of recent news regarding some of the authors of these books on marriage, courtship, dating, etc., I'd like to point out that marriage is not a box to be checked which then renders you fully sanctified: never again tempted, never again sinful. (This shouldn't have to be said! But that was absolutely the implicit—and in some cases, explicit—message in many of the early purity culture books. There is nothing scriptural about this.) Rather, in his book Breaking the Marriage Idol, Kutter Callaway points out at length that our entire lives as Christians are to be about the right ordering of our desires. Chastity (which obviously looks different for marrieds and singles) is not just about not having sex, it is about the attitudes of the heart, mind, and body.

One of the wonderful things this book does is ask you to step back and reconsider the entire, God-given purpose of both marriage and singleness: self-sacrifice, mutual submission, service rendered towards each other and the church as unto God. A recognition that marriage and singleness are different and possibly temporary stations in our journey towards the resurrection, where, Callaway reminds us, we neither marry nor are given in marriage. I've said it before, and I will keep saying it, no matter how many angry evangelicals yell at me on Twitter: the Bible literally says it is better to be single and celibate than to be married. Marriage is good. Single celibacy is good. God calls us to one or the other, but never alone, never unto ourselves: always oriented towards God, in community. Kyle James Howard had one of the most helpful threads I have ever encountered on this topic: our sanctification doesn't rest in marriage (thank God! This is VERY GOOD NEWS for the never-married single, divorced, widowed, abandoned, or same-sex attracted). Our sanctification continues in whatever station in life we are in, and you can actively resist sanctification in whatever station of life you are in. To say that all single people, or all childless married people, are selfish (another key talking point in many evangelical exhortations towards marriage or child-bearing!) is a gross generalization. If all married people were completely selfless, after all, the divorce statistics wouldn't be what they are.

Acknowledging that single celibacy is good should not be perceived as an attack on the God-given good of marriage, and acknowledging that marriage is good should not be used to tear down those who are already struggling with single celibacy. In the same vein, acknowledging that bearing and raising children is hard should not be used to crush those who yearn for children. But the key to this, beyond grace, understanding, and empathy, is acknowledging that ALL these things are good and God-given. If that isn't your premise, there's no room to even have dialogue. If Callaway is asking for one thing in this book, it is that both married and single people would learn from each other, work with each other for the furthering of the kingdom, and realize that we are all yearning for something no other person can give us: the complete fulfillment of Christ, in the resurrection. We remain co-laborers in the gospel, bearing one another's burdens. I spent my spring reading Charles Williams: once you start looking at the Christian life through a lens of co-inherence, it's hard not to see it everywhere.

Some important take-aways:

Human sexuality has a multitude of ways to express itself within the biblical framework of celibacy and/or chastity. As the author puts it, the "genital expression" of your sexuality is not the only part, but it's more or less the only one commonly talked about. God made us sexual beings, and our definition of what that means and looks like has shrunk to ONLY the genital expression. (This was also a main theme of Ed Shaw's wonderful book Same-Sex Attraction and the Church: The Surprising Plausibility of the Celibate Life.)

The reminder that the over-correction towards "marriage (and/or childbearing/rearing) is the highest and best calling for Christians" (my words, not his, since I have literally been told this multiple times), which he attributes to Martin Luther, stems from a time when singleness was being held up as the highest and best calling for Christians (being a monk or nun). Again: both are good and God-given. Our upbringing, background, or denomination may encourage us to skew towards one extreme or the other: scripture does not.

That the grand point of marriage is not sexual fulfillment (again: a MAJOR selling-point in purity culture, with a focus on getting your needs met. Essentially, works-righteousness, with the reward being a hot spouse and great sex, forever): it is a call to justice, generosity, forgiveness, hospitality, and yes, love. Even the sexual fulfillment rightly found within marriage is to be focused on giving to the other, not taking for yourself.

The idea of some kind of formal ceremony marking an individual's commitment to a celibate lifestyle, which would involve public declaration or rite of passage, accountability, and community support. This would go hand-in-hand with the idea that a family unit, or multiple family units, would commit to the celibate single, to be their family: in short, making friendships more covenantal. I have been told that Wesley Hill's book Spiritual Friendship: Finding Love in the Church as a Celibate Gay Christian has the same idea (I have not yet had a chance to buy this book for myself), and there were echoes of this in Ed Shaw's book. I have no idea how this would look, but I am all for the concept of treating friendships as deeper and less disposable. This is something I consciously work at in my life, and it has been a tremendous blessing to have the same thing extended back by a number of families. If we are in this for the long haul, and we are, the only way to navigate this world is with those kind of familial, covenantal friendships. We are family in Christ, and we can and should act like it. How many people do you have that kind of relationship with? This was a key theme (no pun intended) in Rosaria Butterfield's most recent book on hospitality. Loneliness is rampant, we need each other. I've seen so many married people online just insisting that the solution is to get married. Maybe it is! ... but do you think I haven't been trying? I need the love and support of my fellow believers now, not to have it held at arm's length as a prize once I can join the club. Also, the longing for the eternal is never going to be satisfied by anything we can experience in this lifetime. Think about it: we were made for eternity, and we are placed in a finite timeline. Things are never going to be perfect, and looking for that perfection in any one human is just going to lead to disappointment. That's also a hefty burden to place on someone, and has, I believe, led to a number of divorces and struggling marriages. Again: fall-out from purity culture.

Callaway identifies himself as an egalitarian: before you get up in arms about that, the way he defines that term gives me little to no trouble. Which probably makes me thin comp: I don't really care. Those terms are now so loaded, they are nearly impossible to use.

The book includes a number of vignettes, or short chapters, from people in various stages of life, talking about how marriage as idol has affected them. These are poignant: touching on cultural/social pressures, being held back in ministry, how this has affected the relationships they now find themselves in, etc.

The idea that celibate singleness serves to point to life in the new heavens and the new earth, and marriage serves to point to Christ and the Church.

An over-realized eschatology may be somewhat to blame for the idea that you find your ultimate fulfillment in marriage or children. (I say this all the time on Twitter, but.... sounds FV....) Everything we do, everything we are, should be pointing to the resurrection. You know the famous Augustine quote: to paraphrase, God made us for himself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in him. WE CANNOT FULLY ACHIEVE THAT IN THIS LIFETIME.

The narrow lens through which contemporary evangelical culture is looking at marriage really tends to leave the divorced, widowed, abandoned, or same-sex-attracted out in the cold. Our books, our media, our lecture: almost all of it is geared towards straight never-married individuals, exhorting them to get married. Here's the thing: those of us who want marriage are probably already working at it, and this endless exhortation to do something we have (up until now) found impossible is incredibly discouraging. Some of us genuinely are content not being married, for whatever reason: asexuality being one of them, and this is almost never addressed! But can we not acknowledge that there are honorable reasons why someone would choose to delay marriage? Again: if you are viewing marriage as essential to sanctification, that would explain a number of divorces: it doesn't work like that. And this I would say most fits the "gift of singleness" Paul talks about. The focus, again, needs to be turned off of ourselves, and our needs, and towards the church. How may I best serve where God has placed me? I keep seeing the accusation of selfishness being leveled towards unmarried people, by married people, and I always want to ask: do you have someone particular in mind? What are the single people in your church like? I am choosing to spend as much of my time as I possibly can in service of my church, because I can right now. I won't always be able to. Sometimes we give, sometimes we receive - seasons come and go. Maybe try talking to a long-time single? This would be the same as me leveling judgement at young parents with small children and saying "they don't spend enough time at church serving in XYZ capacity." Not my circus, not my monkeys.

I could keep going: as I read through this book, I found myself wanting to share entire chapters at a time. I am aware there is plenty in here that you may disagree with (there is some I would disagree with too), but I would ask that you read this book with a willingness to understand a little bit better what our life together can look like, and the particular challenges faced by both singles and marrieds when marriage is held as an idol.

Overall, I found Breaking the Marriage Idol deeply encouraging, and I am thankful for the compassion, clarity, and scriptural acumen with which the author writes.

#Breaking the Marriage Idol #Family #Marriage #Singleness

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handsingsweapon · 5 years

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you may blame aphrodite;

the sequel to in a future time; is now underway thanks to a charitable donation made by @sunnydisposish!

After a mythical summer on the coast of Thessaly, Greece, brings Yuuri Katsuki into Victor's life, it's up to Victor to find a way to keep him. The Midas touch which allowed him to so swiftly sail through his research while a student is proving a burden now; even Yuuri sometimes seems to think there's nothing he can't turn into gold. A story about how two people who've put each other on a pedestal become mortal again, and in so doing, find the sort of love that the gods used to inscribe into the stars.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/19390903/chapters/46142590

see below the cut for some thoughts re: a neat quirk of Victor’s resume in this chapter.

So, when I started writing in a future time I knew I was going to make Yuuri a graduate of Oxford and Victor a graduate of Cambridge, with the idea being (at least for Victor) that his research is a bit ahead of the mainstream where lots of people consume narratives about art and history (typically famous national museums like the Louvre or the British Museum, for instance). Because the piece was for Born to Make Art History, I needed Victor to have a bit of an ax to grind about art history in general for all the references to work and as it turns out I got to graft my love/hate relationship with The British Museum and with a lot of the art collections of the Catholic church / Catholic cardinals onto him. Because these are some of my favorite pieces of art and my favorite museums but they’ve also rendered incredible damage onto the public, either by refusing to return artifacts or simply by being the product of either A) stodgy British Victorians being puritanical about sex or B) closeted Catholics being puritanical about sex in the public sphere and gay as fuck in the private sphere.

Enter the sequel. Like in a future time, I want you may blame aphrodite to have artifacts in each chapter. They won’t be poems because Victor isn’t a poet, but in this chapter he’s applying for jobs in the background because he knows he can’t stay with Yakov forever and he’s not getting very far. I decided to include his CV, which meant looking up some of the kinds of things he would’ve been getting up to at Cambridge, which brought me to this page: https://www.classics.cam.ac.uk/museum/things-to-do/things-to-do-1/lgbtq-tours

I quote:

The story of why we do not have a statue of a hermaphrodite in our collection

And as soon as I saw this I blinked because in chapter one of in a future time (Victor’s prologue) he goes on a rant about the exact piece of art this page is referencing -

“.... Maybe you get close with The Sleeping Hermaphroditus, until you realize that the first person to snatch it up after rediscovery was Cardinal Borghese, and if you think too long about that while you walk around the Villa to take in the rest of its collection, you’ll realize many of the highlights are romanticized rapes, and you’ll see no mention of the fact that Scipione was probably gay and that Pignatelli wasn’t his close friend ...”

Now, I haven’t attended Cambridge’s tour, so I have no idea why they have a story about why they don’t have a copy of the Sleeping Hermaphroditus. I've seen this piece, or its copies, everywhere except for the Hermitage, but I was first introduced to it at Villa Borghese, which is another institution I have a love/hate relationship with. I love it because the collection is legitimately gorgeous; you will find two Bernini masterpieces there along with a number of incredible Caravaggios, among other things. It’s a breathtaking place. But Villa Borghese was the first place where I actually began to experience sharp, sharp cognitive dissonance in regards to the art collections of the Catholic church. First and foremost, Cardinal Borghese was almost certainly gay. You may feel about this however you like, but for me, I feel 1) frustrated about the way the Catholic church has, for years, insisted on vows of celibacy from the clergy who have proven at all levels of the church ever since its inception that these vows are unattainable and often unenforced at the highest levels; 2) deeply upset because the Catholic church continues, to do this day, to do incredible harm to LGBTQ+ people and they’ve got a long, long legacy of gay-as-fuck cardinals that somehow gets totally glossed over in the process so the hypocrisy is truly astonishing. ANYWAY. Back to the Galleria Borghese. The two Bernini masterworks are of Daphne & Apollo and The Rape of Prosperine*, both stories of women being pursued by gods unwillingly (*or possibly willingly depending on your view of Persephone mythology which again, has had its variants totally messed with by early historians in a number of cases). And this was the place that two things struck me: 1) wow, this Cardinal sure was into a lot of weird sex stuff* 2) that the two Bernini pieces (some of my favorite works of art) were both about the bad experiences of women, which A) still persists, thousands of years later B) were beautifully and maybe arguably harmfully romanticized by this brilliant male sculptor. Once you see that you can’t unsee it. You’ll find it all over the Vatican Museums, too, even with the artfully-placed leaves placed as the pieces were uncovered, decorating ancient genitalia to protect everyone’s purity (I find this practice a little humorous since Adam & Eve were naked in the garden and therefore one could argue that the leaves are, themselves, markers of sin). I saw it in the houses and castles of nobles all over Europe, where paintings and statues loomed over people’s dining tables. I asterisked 'weird sex stuff’ because, at least in Renaissance art, a lot of the reuse of Greco-Roman mythology was meant to be allegorical, and because when you look on a piece of art today and you think about things like trans rights or these masterpeices that deify the rapes of women, you’re doing so with a modern lens from a modern context, and it’s highly unlikely the original authors or artists experienced anything like the same thoughts. And truth be told you won’t ever really get to know what those people were thinking at that time. But it does remind me of a friend of mine who once asked a group in Beijing what the weirdest food they’ve ever eaten was as an ice breaker while we spent time getting to know each other. They replied “things you think are weird we don’t think are weird” which remains in my mind as the most obvious demonstration of cultural norms that I’ve ever experienced.

Anyway, I grew up in the evangelical church listening to a lot of narratives about how bad sex is for everyone, especially women, but it seems to me that centuries of keeping it in the closet has done us all more harm than good and by reading a bit about how Victor feels about the Sleeping Hermaphroditus and lots of the other things he was writing about hinted at in the excerpts from Beloved you were, in fact, learning a little bit about me.

#in a future time;#you may blame aphrodite;#sim's charity prompt-a-looza #yoi #victuuri #about sim

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stevekarma-blog · 5 years

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John 4:1-26 A Samaritan Woman Meets Her Messiah

You're Not a Good Samritan - Your This One

C - This section is preceded by the conversation with Nicodemus and the Pharisees about baptism and the spirit and is proceeded by the Samaritan revival. Historically the Samaritans and the Jews were religious and ethnic enemies who hated one another and this discussion takes place at the Jacob’s well.

A - Look at the significance of wells and divorce in the first century.

p - Most people see her as the adulterer and not the abused.

T - Chrst gives to us that which sustains us and quenches the thirst from our souls. Main image is water.

O - Come to Christ for the life giving Spirit.

R - FCF Inner thirst an only be satisfied in Christ RHF Brings an end to the endless search for that which will never satisfy. For her it was a relationship and maybe kids.

Therefore, when the Lord knew

that the Pharisees had heard

that Jesus made

and baptized more disciples than John

2 (though Jesus Himself did not baptize,

but His disciples),

3 He left Judea

and departed again to Galilee.

Jesus did not want to give the Pharisees the satisfaction of undermining His or John’s ministry by setting them up as rivals in the same way that two churches in the same city setting up an Alpha course on the same night and the same time may negatively effect both and undermine both in the eyes of others. The fact that Jesus ‘did not baptise,’ Paul will later say that he ‘did not come to baptise,’ was probably so that people would not place too much importance upon it and believe that spiritual rebirth (the biblical term that is often used is ‘regeneration’) came about through baptism. It is an outward sign of public repentance, faith and entrance into the Church.

4 But He needed to go through Samaria.

Practically He did not need to ‘go through Samaria’ in fact, most law-abiding Jews would have noothing to do with the ethnic half-breeds and heretics that were the Samaritans. Nontheless, ‘He needed to go through Samaria’ as this would be the place of His encounter with the women at the well and would be the place of a religious revival.

5 So He came to a city of Samaria

which is called Sychar, near the plot of ground

that Jacob gave to his son Joseph.

6 Now Jacob’s well was there.

The well belongs to Jacob or Israel and was an ancestor that was claimed by both the Jews and the Samaritans the fact that it takes places near a watering hole is not biblical warrant to drop by the bar to pick up girls in the name of evangelism though (and I have heard this text used in this way).

Jesus therefore, being wearied from His journey, sat thus by the well. It was about the sixth hour.

Here we are reminded of Jesus’ full humanity. Jesus did not appear to be human, He did not pretend to be human and He was not half human. He was fully God and fully man in one person, this is like a glass that is full of oil and water. The components are seperate but contained within the one container. In the noon day sun Jesus, who was halfway through a 120 mile journey from the region of Judea in the South and the region of Galilee in the North, was exhausted.

7A woman of Samaria came

to draw water.

The reader is supposed to wonder why this woman was drawing water alone, since the women would draw water together and why this women was drawing water in the noon day sun, the hottest part of the day.

Jesus said to her, “Give Me a drink.”

8 For His disciples had gone away into the city

to buy food.

Jesus not only humbly served others but He humbly allowed Himself to be served by others. In the missionary world this is sometimes called reverse hospitality which is when the missionary is not the one providing all of the food and health care and education but also a recipient. This elevates the person providing hospitality like: Zaacheus, Mary/Marhta/Lazarus, Simon the Leper, Matthew Levi etc in the same way when the believer not only welcomes people to their home but allows them to bring something or help out with the dishes or will come to their home. This can be difficult for proud people, like me, who like to give but do not like to feel indebted to anyone for anything.

9 Then the woman of Samaria said to Him, “How is it that You, being a Jew, ask a drink from me, a Samaritan woman?”

For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.

Relgious Jews had nothing to do with women or Samaritans in fact Jews and Samaritans hated one another in the same way that Sunni and Shia Muslims or Catholics and Protestants in NIRE in the 70s and 80s or Jews and Nazis in the 30s and 40s might.

10 Jesus answered and said to her,

“If you knew the gift of God,

Jesus was not only God’s gift to the Jews but to the whole world. That is that He was the long awaited Jewish Messiah but He was also the long awaited Samaritan Messiah and is the long awaited Messiah of all peoples. He is the Oliver Cromwell, the William Wallace, the Che Guerra, the Nelson Mandela, the George Washington, the Christian Ronaldo, the Ussain Bolt, the Gandhi that we have all been waiting for. In fact, the reason why their stories fascinate us is because they are mere shadows of something more significant that came through Him.

and who it is who says to you, ‘Give Me a drink,’ you would have asked Him,

and He would have given you living water.”

John does something interesting here he uses the idea of dead water (meaning water from a stagnant source, the spring from this well had probably ceased or this well had always been a well that collected the rain from the rainy season) and living water (which is water from a spring or flowing water from a river). He says that Jesus was comparing the dead water of life with the living water that comes from Him.

11 The woman said to Him, “Sir, You have nothing to draw with,

and the well is deep. Where then do You get that living water? 12 Are You greater than our father Jacob,

who gave us the well,

and drank from it himself, as well as his sons

and his livestock?”

Yet again we see that Jesus is misunderstood by those who are overly literalisitic with His words. What if there were 2 ways to percieve the world, maybe that is too simplisitc too, but what if there was one way which was overly literlaisitic and one that was equally true but was more the langage of the poet or song writer and contained within it metaphor and word picture and symbol? Well in Chrit these two ways or lens need to be alligned so that we might read His word not in a literalisitic sense but in a literal sense recognising shades of meaning and not dismiss it as ‘arty farty.’ Ultimately to understand the things that are revealed, revelation, we need the illuminating light of the Spirit - illumination.

13 Jesus answered and said to her, “Whoever drinks of this water will thirst again,

14 but whoever drinks of the water

that I shall give him will never thirst.

But the water that I shall give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life.”

‘We are all baptised by the one Spirit’ which means that Christ fills us with the same Holy Spirit that filled Him and the apostles which mean that the power that dwells in the youngest and weakest believer is unfathomable. And that power is not just pragmatic, for the healing of the sick or so that one may be able to interpret dreams etc that power bubbles up in someone and becomes the source, or ‘fountain’ that leads to the life that is promised by Christ. Abundant life in the here-and-now and everlasting life in the bye-and-bye.

15 The woman said to Him, “Sir, give me this water,

that I may not thirst, nor come here to draw.”

This woman longs for this water as her shame and her string of failed relationships have never been able to satsify the inner thirst she has had she is like the gambler who thinks that the one big win or the drunk who will just have one more binge before giving up but no matter how much the one wins and loses and wins again and the other drinks and drinks and drinks nothing can satisfy the craving of their innermost being. Intectually, relationally, spiritually the thirst in our souls can only be fulfilled in Christ, when He and He alone is our single delight when if everything if stripped away would be nothing in comparison with His good pleasure.

16 Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband,

and come here.”

17 The woman answered and said, “I have no husband.”

Jesus said to her, “You have well said, ‘I have no husband,’

18 for you have had five husbands,

and the one whom you now have is not your husband; in that you spoke truly.”

Although many preachers and commentaries would see this womn, in the words of Alister Begg as having had ‘5 husbands and a live in lover,’ I don’t think this is the case. I say that because in this day a woman caught in adultery would be stoned to death and it was only men who were able to iniaite divorce I think we have a woman who was always a good looking girl the stunner from Sychar. And not only was she physically attractive but she had a personality that made men like putty in her hands. Maybe she married her childhood sweetheart and then he died, she is till young and still has her looks and her charm and maybe her second husband leaves her for another woman and the fourth because of the hard time his friends and family give him and the fith because she can bare him no children. Until the final guy is happy to sleep with her or live with her but he is not marryng her. This is the young girl who served you at Boots, this is the one in your English lit lecturers, this is your cousin this could be you. Not so much immoral, though that is maybe a art of it and Christ saves the immoral, but the lost and oppressed who have tried to fill the Christless void with actual or imaginary romantic relationships.

If I can only find me a Justin Bieber or Scarlett Johanson.

If only if I had a little girl who I could take to pilates or a little boy who I could take to the football.

If only I had genuine friends and a Church that loves me.

Look! It is not that I grudge you this, I want you to have this but you ask the people who wanted the same things and who got what they wanted and they will tell you honestly that although it was awesome, though for some the dream became a nightmare, it was unable quench the inner thirst within them.

19 The woman said to Him, “Sir, I perceive that You are a prophet. 20 Our fathers worshiped on this mountain,

and you Jews say

that in Jerusalem is the place where one ought to worship.”

This woman does what we often do when the spotlight of conviction comes upon us by the Spirit she makes excuses. What she says here is the context of the conversation is stupid. This is the I would follow Jesus but I need to first figure out if I should be a Pentecostal or a Preysbetarian or if I perfer Gospel choirs or worship bands.

Some of you know enough by now to repent of your sins, place your faith in Christ, be baptised. Some of you know that you should make covenant and serving in leadership. And some of you should be training for the ministry, be setting up a Christian business, adopting or fostering or be on the mission field but you wont because you have excuses.

I heard of the American General Paton who was taking his men across a bridge while they being pursued by the enemy. Something was holding up the men so the general got to the front of the bridge and found out that it was a donkey that was not allowing people to pass. He took out his 9mm and blow the donkey’s brains out. That’s what you do with excuses you destory them before they destroy you or God’s plan for you.

21 Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe Me, the hour is coming when you will neither on this mountain,

nor in Jerusalem, worship the Father. 22 You worship what you do not know; we know what we worship,

for salvation is of the Jews.

23 But the hour is coming,

and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit

and truth;

for the Father is seeking such to worship Him.

God cares nothing about beautiful and ornate and well functioning buildings - these are good things but not when they become more important than people. So in some churches the philsophy is guard the church from young people and the local community or where the asethtics and the architecture becomes more important than the function. This why the Puritans smashed the stained glass windows and tore out the statues because the good things had become god things.

But your car and your desk at work or the weight section of Lancaster House Hotel gym is just as sacred as this building. Worship is nothing to do with the form but the person that you worship (God), the way that you worship (the spirit - one that is set ablaze by the Holy Spirit not bored and indifferent or mechanical) and the way that you worship (its true: it’s biblical, it is as revealed, it is the kind of worship that God delights in).

Not only are there some who do not worship God as the all-powerful all-loving God of the Bible but there are those that do not worship Him with their hearts abalze and their Bibles open.

You might be someone with a limited emotional spectrum. Your steady Eddie, your cool, your controlled or your Spock your analytical and rational. Well do the things that stir your affections. Listen to the preachers, get the CDs of the songs be around the people who strangely warm your heart for the things of God. Sit at the front so you do not have to put off by others, remember God looks on the outward appearance and God judges the heart and that Church is a place for people in all places in their spiritual journey and none. In fact, let me deal with the flag waving issue. Personally it is not my thing. Unless we could make them look like they belong to an underground resistance movement or military unit but can I tell you something it moves the very heart of God so you wave those bad boys.

Or you might be someone who is content to have a shallow and superficial faith. For goodness sake open your bible. Learn, develop, grow, take notes, ask questions, read, watch listen, study. The more you get to know of God the more your heart stretches and burns for Him. Theology is not the enemy of passion but the enemy of ignorance, immaturity and ineffectiveness. The more you love Him the more you will want to know Him.

24 God is Spirit,

and those who worship Him must worship in spirit

and truth.”

25 The woman said to Him, “I know that Messiah is coming” (who is called Christ). “When He comes, He will tell us all things.”

26 Jesus said to her, “I who speak to you am He.”

Not only where the Jews waiting for the Messiah but so where the Samaritans in the same way that Buddhists are searching from freedom from suffering (well Jesus gives life and life in its abundance), in the same way the philosophy student is looking for truth (He is the way, the truth and the life) and in the same way that the work-a-holic financial investor is looking for peace (He is the Prince of Peace) and He comes not only to her but to you but what will you do with His offer. Will you tear it up and throw it in His face or will you sign on the dotted line?

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