"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.
