"Life's A Happy Song"

Rather than review the new Muppet movie, I'm just going to share this video of Kermit singing with Bret McKenzie of Flight of the Conchords [which I can't embed! :( ].

The movie not only seems poised to revitalize the Muppet franchise, but it is bringing back an old stand-by: the Muppet characters casually riffing with popular comedians. The mischievous interplay of the crew with Jason Segel during his SNL monologue earlier this week is another sterling example, as well as Kermit's back-and-forth with Seth Myers on Weekend Update.

I don't know whether the Muppets have ever been clinically prescribed for depression (unless you count A Muppet Christmas Carol) but certainly these bits, the movie itself and (newly-discovered for me) "The Rainbow Connection", have gone a long way to warm this cynic's heart.

I recently confirmed to a friend that yes, if she bought into a movie's bullshit then it meant the film's producer had done their job well. I don't know all that went in to making this movie, but if I could talk to Jason Segel, I'd have to thank him profusely. Because the movie doesn't peddle bullshit (my emotionally-charged epithet for false or cheap hope, at least when I'm talking about movies or story-telling in general), but the observation that people can build family through love. It's something I suck at, frankly--my immediately family is a mess and I've always struggled with feeling alienated from whatever social group I happen to be a part of.

I'm probably going to number into a large crowd of late-twenty-somethings and early-thirty-somethings who didn't exactly grow up with the Muppets but will have a fervent response to the movie anyway. So what if I wasn't weaned on "The Rainbow Connection"? It still has the power to speak.

Forgive & Forget It Jesus, It's Chinatown: Christian Reflections on a Few Good Crime Movies

“There is no one who is righteous, not even one.”
~ Romans 3:10

“And again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to the skillful; but time and chance happen to them all.”
~ Ecclesiastes 9:11

Movies about crime allow us an opportunity to become temporary voyeurs of a world we know or assume exists somewhere on the wrong side of the tracks. Most of us would never venture there willingly, but this illicit subculture is ripe with human drama and can offer insights about ourselves and our society.

Crime films are legion and often recognized as the best the medium has to offer--The Godfather, and so on. The subject material autmatically supplies two essential elements of an entertaining movie: conflict and spectacle. Many movies about crime of both high and low caliber coast by on this fact alone. But as I was thinking about how I love a lot of movies about crime, I decided the most interesting ones were not simply about crime fighting (police procedurals, most comic book movies) but also about the criminals themselves. Because taking the criminal perspective offers an opportunity to understand the criminal in all of us, one restrained by social conditioning, fear of the law and hopefully transformed or being transformed by the grace of God.

I scribbled down some crime movies I know and love that fit this description. I didn’t want to have to watch anything new in order to make some good recommendations and offer some thoughts, so there may be omissions that reflect this (like The French Connection, Scarface or A Clockwork Orange). I’ve also omitted some that are over-exposed, so I won’t be writing about The Godfather or Pulp Fiction--God knows there’s enough people on the internet already doing that.

I don’t know whether I need this caveat or not, but if you don’t like blood and profanity in your movie selections—well, stick to the ones that were filmed before Woodstock. This blog entry includes some YouTube clips--I've indicated where I think someone might be offended.

9) The Departed

“When I was your age they would say we could become cops or criminals. Today, what I'm saying to you is this--when you're facing a loaded gun, what's the difference?"

Martin Scorsese is one of several directors on this list who made a career of filming the minds and lives of on-screen reprobates. The Departed came in 2006 as a late career return to form for the director, painting the town (and the walls) red with a cracker-jack screenplay about opposite undercovers in the Boston mob and state police. I think what you can get a sense from in this film is both the capacity for those seeking good to resort to the wrong means and the ability of those seeking bad to masquerade as good guys. It paints the pursuit of justice into a morally murky, testosterone-charged corner. Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon both do fantastic jobs depicting men who have lost or are losing their moral center, and all of these boiling identity conflicts seem to literally explode out of their heads by the film's end.

The following video contains brief strong language, a racial epithet and a glimpse of strong violence. The boy Jack Nicholson's character takes under his wing grows up to be Matt Damon--the scene sets up his induction into the criminal underworld. Notice that his gateway to crime is groceries, comic books and a father figure.

8) In Bruges

In Bruges is a witty and elegiac comedy about hit-men sightseeing in “the most well-preserved” town of medieval Europe (Bruges, Belgium). Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson achieve an odd couple rapport in a screenplay that tries to find what dignity a couple of murderers might have. If that dignity remains disconnected from an authentic sense of socio-moral location for these two men, the actors work hard to sell the vulnerability. Farrell’s neophyte gunman is seeking a kind of absolution or reprieve from a tragic hit-gone-wrong, Gleeson comes alongside him with something resembling fatherly compassion and ultimately selflessness. Ralph Fiennes figures in as their livewire boss and wrench in the gears. The resulting and banter and gunfire plays out in stark relief to the somber historical setting and is rendered melancholic by a spare and haunting melodies of the score.

7) Jackie Brown

Adapted from a book by crime-wit writer extraordinaire Elmore Leonard, this hip caper centers on So-Cal flight attendant Jackie Brown as she becomes caught between cops, criminals and a bail bondsman over a bag full of money. Quentin Tarantino cast 70’s icon Pam Grier in the title role and gives her a mo-town soundtrack to underline themes of economic desperation and feminine empowerment. She plays both sides off each other in a series of crosses and double-crosses in order to do something for herself in a world that’s given her nothing. The budding /potential romance between her and the bondsman (the charmingly weathered Robert Forster) adds an element of wistful sweetness amid all the thuggish posturing. Strong supporting performances from Robert DeNiro, Samuel L. Jackson and Michael Keaton round out the cast.

6) Fargo

Sarcastically “based on a true story,” Fargo takes a simple tale of blackmail and sublimely twists it into a violent absurdity. A scheming weasel of a Minnesota car salesman attempts to squeeze money out of his cantankerous but wealthy father-in-law by having his wife kidnapped. The aftermath takes one turn down Murphy’s Law lane after the next, until most of the principal characters are dead or in handcuffs. Said salesman (William H. Macy) squirms his way through the film in a staggering display of wimpy depravity. The silent hulking introvert who acts as one of the two kidnappers unravels all the carefully laid plans via violent outbursts which erupt unexplained from his ineffable depths. And the highly-praised Frances McDormand stars as a sweet and pregnant cop who seems smarter than everyone else in the movie, and providing the film’s bleak universe with both a brain and a heart.

In the following clip, you can see the seeds of discontent take root as the car salesman's foolish first scheme unravels right in his face.

5) No Country for Old Men

The film's opening narration:

Also from Fargo’s directing duo of brothers Joel and Ethan Coen, No Country is a kind of successor to that film—without the brain and heart. To paraphrase Luke Skywalker, “If there’s a bright center to the universe, this is the film that’s farthest from.” It’s bleakness is accentuated by the casualness with which it transpires couple with the characters’ weary resignation to it. The plot is almost inconsequential—bag of money, wanted by more than one person. However the filmmaker’s find in Cormac McCarthy’s source material another ineffable killer in the creature of Anton Chigurh, a relentless hitman in a bowl cut and armed with a cattle-dispatching tool powered by compressed air. It resonates thematically as crime film especially in its depiction of law enforcement’s confusion and impotence in the face of indifferent and careless evil.

The film's utter hopelessness for mankind to solve its darkest problems forces the question of Christian hope. Where do we place our hope? Who do we trust for our security? The resurrection of Christ calls us to look at a world as bleak as the one of this film and still live and act as beacons of love and selflessness within it.

4) Chinatown

“Forget it Jake—it’s Chinatown.”

The above quote has become a shorthand for the cruel and indifferent mess of the world. It also serves as a shorthand for the movie itself, a meandering noir whose gumshoe protagonist (Jack Nicholson) is lost in a web of murder, a women, powerful men and something to do with water rights in 1930’s Los Angeles. Filmmaker Roman Polanski is a Holocaust survivor and a probably disturbed man with a notorious and high-profile criminal history. In Chinatown he uses noir tropes of elusive truth and capricious conspiracies to flesh out a dark world that exists right on the sunny L.A. streets. The infamous revelation at the center of the film seems arbitrary, and exists almost solely to push home the perverse cruelty of the universe. But as someone with a deeply personal connection to one of the greatest criminal acts of the modern world, the wounded cynicism of this film may have something to say about the toxic circumstances which engender misanthropy and criminal rebellion against society’s norms.

3) Psycho

Hitchcock believed in playing the audience like a musical instrument, keeping a tight rein on their suspense and investment with the events on-screen. If not quite his masterpiece, the stabby thriller Psycho is a virtual study in the manipulation of audience expectation when it radically shifts gears after the “shower scene” it made famous. The film begins with a crime—again a missing bundle of money—which brings an otherwise innocuous woman ought into the countryside where the ominous Bates Hotel and its caretaker(s) wait to receiver her. Rather than play out as a sin-and-consequences morality play, Psycho works mostly as a mystery about evil lurking in unexpected places. Whether a chummy hotel clerk or pretty office receptionist, the criminal mind and behavior is right beneath the surface. One of the many ways Psycho was timely was its release in a year (1960) pitched right as America’s postwar conformity was ready to explode and unravel as the country’s crimes (like racism) began to pierce the repressive Eisenhower-era façade.

Creepy.

2) Heat

What Heat asks of its leading male characters is whether they can live the lives their compelled to have and still function as human beings. Both Al Pacino’s manic cop and De Niro’s laconic bank thief are loners, incapable of maintaining extracurricular relationships due to their work commitments. Pacino holds onto the angst engendered by dead hookers, child-abusing junkies and other tragedies entailed by his job because it “keeps him sharp; on the edge; where [he’s] gotta be.” De Niro’s commitment is to have nothing in his life he can’t walk out on in thirty seconds—otherwise he’s dead. The crime and pursuit essence of the film is slick, smart and excellently choreographed. It takes on an epic scope by the sheer number of sharply-drawn characters caught in a web which boils down to one man’s pursuit of the heist and another’s pursuit of the law.

1) Goodfellas

“Ever since I could remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.”

This actually based-on-a-true-story movie is great for so many reasons. Through and through, director Martin Scorsese infuses the whole film with the texture and verve of a raucous Italian family at mealtime. The speech patterns, the cars, the machismo, all the little ethnic idiosyncracies—the film gets them all so right. Moreover, in Henry Hill we’re given an entry into the mafia world we can identify with—and a lifestyle aspiration. Because Goodfellas illustrates the seduction and pull of a lifestyle that offers everything, anything you can think of; it’s the American Dream in a heartbeat. Nowhere is this more lucidly and vividly displayed than the famous Copcabana tracking shot (I can't find a good embeddable version.  Follow this link if you're curious).

It’s at once a technically marvelous, unbroken camera pan through an elegantly choreographed scene and a window into how life in the mob made the world Henry’s oyster. His smitten date can only wonder, “Where do you work?”—it’s uttered with the kind of rapt disbelief usually reserved for high-powered men quick to rattle of their achievements, accolade and prestige. The allure makes the criminal life relatable, demonstrates to us how our often hidden and internal desires for such things could pull us down the same path.

"Everything was for the taking... And now it's all over."

This past year the majority of the ministry work I did was in the local jail. I learned there that I couldn’t afford the pretense that I was a better human being than the men I worked with. I think another reason crime movies are appealing is that they can show what it’s like to act out in seductive, self-serving and ultimately destructive ways. It’s fun to see people run off with the cash, the car, the women, the respect, and so on, but it’s telling that so few crime movies allow their characters redemption without some kind of cost.

Ex-mafioso Hill ended up straight-jacketed by the Witness Protection Program to save his own skin. But he also eventually lost his marriage and his government cooperation by getting slapped with drug charges not too many years later. I find crime movies fascinating because they allow a window into either a take-everything-you-want life I’ll never have or the dark mess of the criminal life or both—because they show human beings letting go of the repressed release valve that keeps so many of our self-destructive tendencies. Sometimes a criminal with nothing left to lose seems more honest, more real about who they really are. He or she can offer us not a window but a mirror, making us ask our usually self-righteous selves—what’s the difference? Acknowledging our own utter helplessness in the morality department empowers us not only to seek the saving power of Christ all the more intensely, but also to see the helpless, broken and cruel in the world around us as desired by God to be recipients of his grace.

God-Loved Ghosts in Broken Machines

This is the homily I gave last Tuesday morning during morning prayer at Trinity. It's based on the psalm for that day, Psalm 78.

Memory. We take it for granted, but all of our perceptions and judgments are shaped by it. It’s where, in one sense, our view of the world comes from. Our minds are host to so many memories we can’t count—weddings and funerals, friendships gained and lost, sought goals that did or didn’t pan out. Probably most of these memories revolve around our connections to other people—the things we did with them, or to them, or vice versa. For better or for worse. But as Christians, we have another category of memory—that of our testimony, our past experiences of being tangibly connected to God. Our psalm for today shows how testimony can overcome living from the cumulative memories of a broken world.

Some ancient songwriter composed Psalm 78 long ago in order to remind Israel of her testimony. “Give ear,” he says, “incline your ear,” pay attention to the things “that our ancestors have told us.” What did the ancestors tell? First and foremost, that Yahweh set it up that Israel would be the people to put their hope in him and keep his commandments. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob—these ancestors had a testimony from God setting them apart from their own ancestors, “a stubborn and rebellious generation.” Secondly, they told us through their actions that being the people of God is often, to quote Leonard Cohen, “a cold and broken ‘Hallelujah’.” Because the psalm goes on to recount the people of God’s history of vacillation between faithfulness and rebellion, between “Israel” and “Jacob”. The Psalmist is reminding the worshiper that to be Israel means to bend God’s way and not another, to be, in fact “Israel”—and to leave the wilfullness of “Jacob” behind.

The worshiper is reminded that Israel “forgot what [God] had done, and the miracles that he had shown them.” We’re also reminded of the God whom they encountered—not the bitter, fickle and angry God of some imaginations, nor the stoic dispenser of justice common to others. This God comes across as passionate, involved with and invested in the people he has marked for himself. His anger flares up at their disobedience, but steadfast love comes quickly on its heels, providing water and food. He’s a triune omnipotent groud-of-all-being person on a mission for the redemption of humanity, and in his millenia-long to and fro with Israel he demonstrates both his worthiness of character and humanity’s absolute need to be redeemed from above.

Psalm 78 bracingly reminds us of our shortcomings—Israel demonstrated the human capacity for open rebellion in the face of God’s kindness. The poet protests, “How often they rebelled against him in the wilderness and grieved him in the desert!” We’re a fickle species, human beings. Being human can sometimes be like being a machine where some of the most important parts are missing, or a cake missing its best ingredients like sugar or chocolate. God knows that about us—he knew it about Israel, no doubt. To the point of killing some. But despite that, he remains invested in us. Our sinful actions anger him, but he has compassion because he knows our frailty, he knows how we have been compromised by the stain of sin and the poisonous memories bequeathed to us by our lives. It is knowing and trusting in this God which empowers us to transcend the bondage of common fare human living.

That we can see all these things in this Psalm belies the songwriter’s own frustration and love for the sometimes faithful of Israel. He’s rubbing our noses in the past, begging the worshiper to remember the God who saves and act accordingly. And, ultimately, his hope is for a God-sent king to shepherd us in this charge. David serves as the template, the preliminary sketch of the solution this messy situation demands—an unruly people brought under a righteous but deeply invested God demands God’s direct leadership. We are like Isaiah’s sheep, each turning to our own way, but God has instituted Jesus, son of David, to sort us out.

This all suggests that what we’re in desperate need of is an active remembering of God and his works coupled with the example and leadership of Christ. This is not in any way to lean towards a so-called “works righteousness,” but rather to wrestle with the real and dirty problem of being a human being and also a possession and follower of Jesus Christ. Because we all have our demons, so to speak, whether anger, pride, lust, gluttony or fill in the blank. I don’t have to name your sin, or mine, to be confident that it exists and that on some days it exists boldly. It’s why the confession is part of daily worship.

Let us be reminded, then. We must face the fact that our sin angers God, but we can be comforted to know he has compassion nonetheless. Whether this means prayer, or repentance, or bible reading, or journaling, or all of the above and more, we always need to be reminded of the powerful God who doesn’t always seem close and essential to our day to day lives.

The Basis of Everything That is Important To Me

The following is a selection is from a brief essay by my systematics professor on the influence that the medieval theologian Anselm of Canterbury had on the twentieth-century German theologian Karl Barth.  It essentially outlines exactly what reading the Bible means to me and is like for me, and by extension describes the process by which I have any knowledge of God at all.  I am learning that theology can be deeply edifying.

"Although Anselm begins with God's remoteness... he does not stop there.  The theologian pores over Scripture in the hope that God will reveal his very Self through the Scriptural medium.  That this may occur is not, in the first instance, due to any inherent power of the biblical words.  The Scriptures, like any other created reality, cannot reveal god.  If God does reveal his very Self it will be an act of grace.  Therefore Anselm begins with prayer.  Anselm prays because he knows that he cannot know God unless God takes form within the written word.  'What is at stake here is not just the right way to seek God, but in addition God's presence, on which the whole grace of Christian knowledge primarily depends, the encounter with him which can never be brought about by all our searching for God however thorough it may be, although it is only to the man who seeks God with a pure heart that this encounter comes.'*  When God reveals himself he does so by taking form within the written Word.  This is an event; it happens from time to time.  In the moment of speaking, God reveals the Word as Scripture.  As the theologian hears this Word, he grasps the underlying intelligibility of Scripture and formulates it in theological statements.  The statements themselves are comprehensible only when they are also illumined by God as revelatory words.  This happens as God the Word binds himself to the biblical work, similar to God the Word having bound himself to the human nature of Christ.  By the communicatio idiomatum, the divine Word was comprehensible as human words.  Similarly, the divine nature, God the Word, becomes comprehensible as the words of Scripture.  In this way real knowledge of God occurs, a knowledge which is known by the categories of the understanding grasping the intelligibility of the biblical words.  This knowledge depends, in the final analysis, on God's grace.  Without grace, Scripture is silent.  The knowledge of God and the faith to believe it 'does not come about without something new encountering us and happening to us from the outside... The seed to be received is the 'Word of God' that is preached and heard; and that it comes to us and that we have the rectitudo volendi to receive it, is grace.'**  In short, Anselm proposed a doctrine of revelation which depended upon God's act, an event in which God took form within the spatial and temporal existence of the believer to reveal his very Self speaking as the biblical words."

~Robert Sanders, "Barth's Encounter with Kant:  Liberalism, Its Rejection, and Anselm"

I wonder if it's really true, as Barth says, that God only reveals himself to those with a pure heart.  It seems to me that God is in the redemptive business of revealing himself to those with wicked hearts and thereby purifying them.  I know that he reached out to me when I was thinking and acting any other way but pure--and that he continues to reach out to me even as I continue to need purifying.

*Karl Barth, Anselm: Fides quarens intellectum, trans. Louise Smith (New York:  Harper and Row, 1962), 38.
**Ibid., 171.

Theology as Therapy

I'm kind of a neurotic person. I try not to let it show; I probably fail. When I'm at my most neurotic I isolate myself because I don't want people to see me that way--twitchy, clammy, socially mal-adapted. I guess that most people who know me know me as a person of faith, but I'm a skeptic first. I am a person of my mind and sometimes its prisoner.

Maybe I can't avoid sounding obnoxious if I describe myself as intelligent, but it's a designation and reality that has been normal for me since I can remember. It's one I think that most of my close friends would agree upon. My mind works fast and intuitively; I enjoy making connections and interpretations, and I'm constantly stitching together the big picture from all the disparate parts. I'm quick to resist other people's interpretations and explanations--unless they jive with my pre-existing framework--a tendency that does not play well with a good many ways of thinking religiously.

I am in some ways a reluctant Christian, faith thrust upon me by Christ-centered spiritual experiences which I can give no account for other than by responding obediently. And though my mind and body kick and scream as my spirit points them heavenward, I routinely return to Peter's exclamation, "Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life" (John 6:68).

In college, I lived in two worlds which tended to remain unhelpfully separate: secular history and religion classrooms on one hand; biblicist worship meetings and small groups on the other. I'm grateful for both, but over most of the past decade those two strands of thought have met in a chaotic mess on the battlefield of my mind. In the classroom I imbibed more and more the dismal story that is human history (a long tale of Darwinian cruelty, imo) and tortured myself with questions about the socially constructed nature of thought and reality. In Christian community, worship and bible study I could take refuge from these mental torments, but I could not possess intellectually satisfying resolutions--only escape through faithful affirmation that Jesus stands above and will one day save me from the mess.

For many years my main exposure to formal theology came through biblicist Calvinists whose aggressive certainty and investment in the particularity of their various doctrines only seemed to confirm my charismatic-fundamentalist suspicions that most of theology was a distraction from "mere Christianity." This dovetailed nicely with the post-modern suspicion of reason I gained through various classes and conversations in college, leading me to a place where my mind and spirit seemed like they were forever doomed to be reluctant companions.

Recently, some assigned readings in theology have seemed breaths of fresh air to this sordid chaos--it only took two full years of seminary for them to come along.* "To pronounce the name of Jesus Christ means to acknowledge that we are cared for," writes Karl Barth in Church Dogmatics in Outline, "that we are not lost... We do not exist in any kind of gloomy uncertainty; we exist through the God who was gracious to us before we existed at all... God has so acted for our good, does and will so act, that there exists salvation for every lost condition." The phrase "gloomy uncertainty" grabbed my attention as it so aptly described the mental and emotional anguish I am sometimes beset by. It shook me out of my complacency with such quagmire: I realized that I accepted as normative a mental state which does not make sense for someone who believes they belong to and have been rescued by the god of Israel. And I have long accepted it without ever thinking it absurd, but rather felt arrested by the frustration it brings.  His insistence on "salvation for every lost condition" reminded me that I needed to look to Jesus and fight against the chaos.

Barth treats Jesus phenomenologically--his reasoning accepts the historical and contemporary reality of Christ a priori, and he refuses to distance his thought from the person of Jesus through abstraction. This way of thinking is especially appropriate for someone whose adult faith began with a spiritual event which they have had to come to terms with rather than conversion through evangelism, community or some other means.

The other theologian whose words have been soothing salve to my chaotic cerebrum is Richard Hooker. I wish I had read Hooker my first year at seminary, as his Thomist view of law, creational order and wisdom may have settled much of the law-grace perplexity I experienced. "The being of God," he writes in The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, "is a kind of law to his working; for that perfection which God is, giveth perfection to that he doth." In other words, God's actions are consistent with his nature--"his most glorious and most abundant virtue." Divine law is not an arbitrary set of commands, nor a merely a redemptive roadblock whereby we are condemned so that we can recognize we need God's mercy. Law has to do with a sacred pattern reflective of God's nature, loving and keeping it the essence of wise human living.

This essentially Thomist perspective establishes a way forward for Christian discipleship and radically undermines common Platonic perversions of Christian thought which see spirit and matter as radically opposed to one another. C.S. Lewis described Hooker's worldview as one "drenched... with deity"--not pantheism, but rather an insistence that ultimately all creation is of and from God, despite the brokenness and sin which come from the fall. A.M. Allchin writes that 

"Above all things [Hooker] is concerned to hold together the glory of God and the true dignity of man. This means that in his controversial writings he finds himself defending the demands of a Calvinism which was already setting the sovereignty of God over against the freedom of man, thinking to exalt God at the expense of his creation. This was never Hooker’s way. He sees God’s wisdom and power shining out in and through all things, in the richness and diversity of the world which God has made, and above all in man whom he has created in his image and likeness."**

I find it to be intellectually healing to read these Christian thinkers talking about God in a way that doesn't require logical and moral gymnastics in order to readily recognize Him as "good," "beautiful," and "merciful."  These are affirmations of a recognizably good person at the center of what can sometimes seem like a veil of nice-sounding God talk that may or may not pan out.  I can be told a hundred times that God is my Father and he loves me and shrug it off.  It's as if by reading these different theological bits I've had someone go beyond telling me I have a loving heavenly Father:  they've actually begun to show me what he looks like.  And God seems less and less like a dream my intense and skeptical mind keeps wanting to wake up from.

*I should note that some readings from Augustine and Aquinas last year on the subject of God and goodness were also helpful, though I think I was too emotionally strained at the time to receive from them all that I could have.

**A.M. Allchin, Participation in God:  A Forgotten Strand in the Anglican Tradition, 7.