Probably not all of you grew up listening to, "Bubba shot the jukebox last night," which is the obvious (only to me) reference of my title. To understand the full depth of the song, you need only also see the second song of the chorus. "Said is played a sad song, made him cry." Should you choose to listen to it, you will know one of the sounds of my childhood.
I would shoot the television, however, for a very different reason. God knows TV shows that provided acting, much less writing, moving enough to induce tears would be phenomenal. And that does happen from time to time, which is well worth celebrating. It does seem to be a new kind of golden age for television. No, I would shoot the television for this reason: the way clergy appear.
Probably this doesn't bother most of you. Likely you barely notice when yet another 'pastor' or 'father' or 'reverend' wanders across the screen--the controlling Roman Catholic, or ineffectual Anglican, or the woman liberal pastor. But for me, every word that comes from their lips makes me die a little inside.
Clergy on television are one of the following: insipid; emotional wrecks; pedophiles; secretly disbelieving; blinded fundamentalist jerks; extremists; or pontificating at an irrelevant worship service. Some shows manage to cram more than one of these categories into a single episode, or more unfortunately, into a single character.
I have known very few clergy who fell into these categories. Sure, some of them are jerks. There are clergy I don't like. Hell, I may fall into some of those traps. But really, the clergy I know are by and large reasonable, faithful, practical, and interesting people. They are, in fact, many of the deepest people I've ever met, some of the most introspective, and certainly the most socially aware. The greatest advocates for societal change that I have ever met are clergy or, what is for television an even rarer bird, faithful lay people. Strange that shows occasionally delve into religious themes in deep ways--but their ability to show faith in the life of a person is almost always abysmal.
I could speculate about why clergy have such a shallow reputation on television. Would people who watch television put up with clergy, from any religion, who weren't one dimensional? Is it writing or producing that's the problem?
But maybe more to the point for me: I'm sad to live in a culture so out of touch with religion that its standard currency reflects very few religious people worth pondering.
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Who do we become? A word or two on video games
"When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted."
Matthew 28:17
I often think we undervalue the depth of this verse, and the others like it in the other gospels (I often argue this point, so I won't belabor it here). Jesus appears in resurrected splendor--eating fish, walking through walls, touching people, breathing on people, letting people touch his innards--funny that splendor sounds more like a circus performance than a kingly procession. I wonder if Jesus also juggled, swallowed a sword, and sawed Mary Magdalene in half.
But really, the verse is about how despite all those tricks, despite meeting God face to face in a special way, people doubted. I think that should be comforting for us who worry about what we believe in, much less what we trust in, thousands of years later. It wasn't much different for the first folks. And, the verse also teaches: we make decisions about how we interpret things.
We interpret. What a boring sentence! That's like saying, "we chew." No one is surprised.
Except that we behave so often like there is no interpretation, like things simply change us. Seeing is not, in fact, believing--it's just one prerequisite. But because we confuse seeing with believing, we have trouble with many things--liturgy, news, and art.
Video games are art, or at least the primitive forms of a developing art form. Playing video games at the moment is like watching the first cave paintings happen and thinking: there's something cool happening here! without even really being able to imagine the concrete examples of the future, things like cubism or the Sistine Chapel or Rembrandt. The National Endowment of the Arts thinks so, opening their grants up to digital games. The Supreme Court of the US recently ruled that video games are free speech and thus not subject to censorship.
While there are many dimensions to a debate around video games, not least among them the wide diversity of games on the subject--as different as my stick drawings and Picasso's--, I think what we forget first is that we interpret what happens to us. Seeing violence in a movie does not necessarily make me violent. Often, quite the contrary--Dead Man Walking, or The Hurt Locker, offer graphic violence. Both screech through my humanity and challenge me--they make me want to wear only hemp, hug everyone I see, and play more guitar. Also, work for the healing of the world.
The same for video games--if anything, their participatory nature invites a more complex interpretative experience. Some of them reduce violence to cartoon ridiculousness--jumping on a goomba in one of the Mario games, for example. Some, like Call of Duty, turn killing into a game. The effect, though, is something a little odd--it raises the question less if killing people could become a game for a player (it doesn't for the millions who play it weekly--the feeling of killing and a control pad are quite different), and rather whether we already think too much of politics and warfare like a game. There are outlier games, so horrible that's hard to see much good from them. But then there's Grim Fandango. And the strange culture of Eve: Online, which led to riots over unfair business practices. And the strangely beautiful and horrifying tale of Planescape: Torment, whose bizarre name masks a story on which I still find myself wondering.
In other words, life is not as simple as banning the influences we don't like, despite the great temptation this presents in the modern world. We don't need to burn books--we could simply choose not to read them. We have to learn to interpret those influences, reflect on them, challenging them, revisit them. Our faith, in fact, requires it.
Matthew 28:17
I often think we undervalue the depth of this verse, and the others like it in the other gospels (I often argue this point, so I won't belabor it here). Jesus appears in resurrected splendor--eating fish, walking through walls, touching people, breathing on people, letting people touch his innards--funny that splendor sounds more like a circus performance than a kingly procession. I wonder if Jesus also juggled, swallowed a sword, and sawed Mary Magdalene in half.
But really, the verse is about how despite all those tricks, despite meeting God face to face in a special way, people doubted. I think that should be comforting for us who worry about what we believe in, much less what we trust in, thousands of years later. It wasn't much different for the first folks. And, the verse also teaches: we make decisions about how we interpret things.
We interpret. What a boring sentence! That's like saying, "we chew." No one is surprised.
Except that we behave so often like there is no interpretation, like things simply change us. Seeing is not, in fact, believing--it's just one prerequisite. But because we confuse seeing with believing, we have trouble with many things--liturgy, news, and art.
Video games are art, or at least the primitive forms of a developing art form. Playing video games at the moment is like watching the first cave paintings happen and thinking: there's something cool happening here! without even really being able to imagine the concrete examples of the future, things like cubism or the Sistine Chapel or Rembrandt. The National Endowment of the Arts thinks so, opening their grants up to digital games. The Supreme Court of the US recently ruled that video games are free speech and thus not subject to censorship.
While there are many dimensions to a debate around video games, not least among them the wide diversity of games on the subject--as different as my stick drawings and Picasso's--, I think what we forget first is that we interpret what happens to us. Seeing violence in a movie does not necessarily make me violent. Often, quite the contrary--Dead Man Walking, or The Hurt Locker, offer graphic violence. Both screech through my humanity and challenge me--they make me want to wear only hemp, hug everyone I see, and play more guitar. Also, work for the healing of the world.
The same for video games--if anything, their participatory nature invites a more complex interpretative experience. Some of them reduce violence to cartoon ridiculousness--jumping on a goomba in one of the Mario games, for example. Some, like Call of Duty, turn killing into a game. The effect, though, is something a little odd--it raises the question less if killing people could become a game for a player (it doesn't for the millions who play it weekly--the feeling of killing and a control pad are quite different), and rather whether we already think too much of politics and warfare like a game. There are outlier games, so horrible that's hard to see much good from them. But then there's Grim Fandango. And the strange culture of Eve: Online, which led to riots over unfair business practices. And the strangely beautiful and horrifying tale of Planescape: Torment, whose bizarre name masks a story on which I still find myself wondering.
In other words, life is not as simple as banning the influences we don't like, despite the great temptation this presents in the modern world. We don't need to burn books--we could simply choose not to read them. We have to learn to interpret those influences, reflect on them, challenging them, revisit them. Our faith, in fact, requires it.
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
The Real Housewives of the Episcopal Church!
Someone--I will not cast aspersions on them by saying who--was recently watching The Real Housewives of some Affluent-Place-or-Other on a television near me. The accents of the women on those shows seem to vary, but thick makeup appears the universal unity at a certain socio-economic class. One of the women was trying to make a theological point, something about loving a person in her same-sex relationship and yet also broadly condemning all such relationships. That's a conversation I have witnessed a million times, although the tawdriness of the show gave a certain flat tabloid-ness to the exchange. If this series of trash-TV is anything, it is most certainly not "real," which makes it a rather poor place for a discussion of theology.
As I watched, I wondered: what would it be like to have a Real Housewives of the Episcopal Church? (with an emphasis on the 'real'). Husbands who stayed home with the children; same sex couples who were so healthy and happy as to be utterly dull; families who struggled to make sense of their faith; communities dedicated to social justice; people young and old who spend time in meditation and prayer. Perhaps the show editors could arrange scenes in such a way as to belittle any reality, smash it to an easily digested pulp of animal conflict and herd instincts.
Strange that our fictions show the highest truths, and our realities are pale imitations.
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