Rhythm of Life

I've been fairly busy these past five or six weeks and therefore haven't been regaling the world with updates on my day to day, nor with my occasional theological reflections. I did, of course, take time out yesterday to write that Wild Things review, mostly because I enjoy reviewing movies so much. I guess I am going to start integrating movies into this blog; I still want to see The Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Lovely Bones, Avatar and maaaybe The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus. Maybe. It might be worth it just to see a Gilliam film in the theater.

Where to start? Obviously this has been the thick of the semester, though things promise to get thicker, like an old-fashioned milkshake. I'm mostly keeping up with schoolwork, and I'm figuring out more and more what my rhythm of life will be for the next several years. I had the strange experience on Wednesday of walking into a professor's office, reading the Greek words "eipev autoi de Iesous eimi ho anastasis kai he zoe"* on a wall poster and saying, "Oh, 'I am the resurrection and the life,' I can read that."

Last week I made the big decision to cut back on the amount of classes I am taking because I want to take the extra time to be spiritually formed and discern where I fit into the Anglican church professionally and also because a I was called to interview for a good job opportunity. The credit union barely three blocks from my house unexpectedly called me back about the resume I submitted in August about a part time position. The interview was short but positive, although she told me I might not hear back for several weeks because the individual who plans to leave has not yet given her two weeks notice. Ideally, I would be able to start right around the same time as the beginning of the spring semester so that I can both go home for Christmas for a few weeks as well as take a January intensive class. A job that I can walk to and work around my school schedule will do wonders both for my bank account and my manly sense of financial responsibility (it just feels better to work, however little...). That's not to say women aren't financially responsible! But I'll move on before I dig that ditch any further...

Understanding this new rhythm of life has helped me to accept the day to day, enjoy it, embrace it, and let go of any striving towards making a future happen for myself. I was praying before the monthly Trinity healing service last night and felt directed to consider and pray Psalm 23:1, "YHWH is my shepherd, I shall not want." It helps to remember that every good and perfect gift comes from above, and he will deliver my future and my calling--and one day a marriage? Hint, hint, God--on his calendar and according to his purposes.

I won't be going home for Thanksgiving, but I will be dog-sitting for the Thompson's this next week. At least I will have someone to keep me company. Just kidding. There are enough people sticking around that I won't have to spend the whole holiday alone.

*I have no idea whether this was the actual word order or whether I got the gender of resurrection right. The full text I quoted reads, And Jesus said to him, 'I am the resurrection and the life.

Where The Wild Things Are, reviewed.

Like Fantasia set to an indie-rock soundtrack, Where the Wild Things Are strings along a series of dazzling and incoherent images complemented by musical compositions which reinforce and/or augment meaning and mood. Spike Jonze—director of music videos, the one-two meta punch of Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, and actor who played Three Kings’s hilarious hick—serves up Maurice Sendak’s children’s book as a music video where the best scenes are extended sequences of motion, color, sound and mood. And so moody! Jonze and hipster novelist Dave Eggers have plumbed the book’s inherent darkness and come up with a world of lonely people (I suppose a denouement-set montage scored with Eleanor Rigby would have been too on-the-nose) whose only consolation is acting out like—wait for it—a wild thing.

Young Max, like so many child protagonists, is fatherless and lacking in friends. His ripe imagination, showcased in the “real world” scenes where he composes freudian-slip stories for his mom and barks orders at a fence, provides the excuse for the film’s extended digression on loneliness, fantasy and escape. After biting his mom and shouting Sendak’s brilliant child-angst exclamation “I’LL EAT YOU UP!” at her, he runs out of the house into dark suburbia and ends up in a fantasy-wilderness of heaving, anthropomorphized beasts who share Max’s confusion, loneliness and anger. Like the fatherless Max, they are kingless and pine for someone to bring authoritative order to their lives. One of the film’s central tensions is the problem of authority; not that these beings despise it, but rather they long for it and find it elusive. Glum concessions like “There’s no such thing as a king” suggest the intractable chaos left in the wake of absent fathers and, ultimately, an absent god.

Jonze shot the film in Australia, its images painted like some beautiful desolation, wide open spaces that are all rustic earth tones and blue skies. Those music video sequences show Max and the wild things at play, running, having a dirt fight and—most spectacularly—building the greatest child’s fort ever conceived. Max orders the wild things to construct it, and they rip trees straight out of the ground in order to thatch a hulking home for themselves. The film’s other great tension is that between self and other, individual and community; if Max learns any lesson, it is that he must consider the needs and feelings of others in his words and actions. This comes to a head when the others realize that Max had only himself and his imagination in mind when he designed the fort. The wild things’ friendship provides him with support, but also exposes his selfishness.

All the poetry of themes and images granted, I still found the film contrived. Maybe were I a couple of years younger, or perhaps less in touch with the roots of my own loneliness and angst (and what I take, as a Christian, to be some plausible solutions), then I might have emotionally resonated with its thematic structure. Jonze and Eggers succeed at describing and illustrating the isolation and loneliness of growing up fatherless and friendless with a moody, great-looking and mildly frightening film. This is no small accomplishment. Yet that darkness remains a little too intractable, too unresolved. Not that the conclusion needed to wrap up all of Max’s issues, but making the changes he went through more explicit would have helped.

Where the Wild Things Are evokes another Disney classic, Alice in Wonderland. Any narrative framework that moves from the real to the fantastic/absurdist and back to the real involving wide-eyed children does. I like the film better than Disney’s Alice, but not better than another recent film which evoked it, Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. I think the difference might be that while Max seemed coddled when he returned home, Chihiro was so transformed by her wild ride that she didn’t need to be coddled. I like my coming of age movies to convey the dynamics of the central character, however subtle and token. If Wild Things wasn’t intended as a coming of age movie, but perhaps rather a child’s rebellious night out of the house, then I find its one hundred angsty and childish minutes as self-indulgent as the chocalate cake Max enjoys at its end.

Cranmer & Hope

"Cranmer's sainthood cannot be established on the grounds of sinlessness or denial of weakness, which is an adolescent expectation. He loved life and retained a real measure of the fear of death. The Church, quite early, learned a danger of martyrdom as escape, when some were tempted to give their lives, not so much as witness, but as release from the ambiguities of life and to gain the joys of heaven prematurely.

The Christian paradox, that God uses the weak to confound the strong, can be seen in the life of Cranmer, where strength is above weakness. However, the paradox can be read the other way. There is strength beneath weakness which is obscure to a secular age (cf. II Corinthians 11:30ff.)

There is something everlastingly encouraging about Cranmer's faithful death. All who suffer injustice, betrayal, and defeat of what seems fair and good and according to the purpose of God himself can consider the mind of Cranmer as he died. The burning, dying Cranmer saw nothing with his natural eyes but a bleak Friday with the complete and utter failure and destruction of all he believed in. The unseen Easter reality was Queen Elizabeth's restoration of all his accomplishments and their abiding nurture over subsequent centuries. They were things hoped for but unseen by Cranmer, perceived only by the eye of faith and a heart of hope, faith and trust in the providence of God that gave Cranmer his courage in those last hours."

~C. FitzSimmons Allison in C. Frederick Barbee and Paul F. M. Zahl, The Collects of Thomas Cranmer (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1999), xvii.

This Week in Encouragement

On Wednesday morning I felt inexplicably funky. One of those days you're thankful for the liturgy because you don't have any more to offer than your physical presence and willingness to assent to the truth. Apropos that Martha G used the living dead as part of her sermon illustration. Eucharist, prayerfully received, always gives me a brief jolt of God's kindness. This week I also received prayer, which was from someone either insightful, listening to the Holy Spirit, or both. I mostly remember now that she prayed that God would remove doubt and fear from me. This helped me identify those thoughts as not from God and as barriers to his work, doubly so since he was pointing them out to me through her.

Friends of mind in Tallahassee sent the Trautmans and I a care package with encouraging letters, junk food and pictures of the Bodoh girls. Thanks friends! I remember my spiritual family in Tallahassee with deep fondness and appreciation. How many people get spiritual community like you during the quagmires of twenty-something pre-adulthood? I so covet all your prayers; I love it here at Trinity but it has still been a huge transition and this context is really helping me focus my spiritual growth. So I am not only coming into a new community, going back to school, learning Greek, becoming a member in a new church and trying to discern God's next step (with dramatic implications for the rest of my life)--I am also, with God's help, dredging the subterranean junk of my heart and dealing with it by his kindness and severity, providing a thick layer of spiritual warfare over it all.

Also, my sister blessed me with some prophetic encouragement the other day by sending me a list of attributes and promises the Lord spoke to her about me. It is good to be reminded of the good that God and other people can see in us; I am often my own worst critic. Especially meaningful was her connection of the Psalm 37:4 command/promise to delight yourself in the Lord and receive the desires of your heart with a specific desire of mine--more especially so since I haven often regarded that desire and that verse together! I love you Katie! :D

Last Saturday, before I left Jacksonville for Pittsburgh, some people close to me were sharply questioning my decision to move here. It was painful and frustrating. So I was in a weird mood as I went to board the plane and saw a mid-50s man with bushy eyebrows and carry-on luggage bearing the Anglican seal. I said to him, "Are you Bob Duncan?" He turned, smiled and said he was. I told him I was from Trinity and then we realized we shared both flights that evening.

When we disembarked in Charlotte, he was waiting for me at the gate and offered to buy me dinner during our layover. So for the next hour we chatted and ate Chili's. I really like him. We covered a wide range of subjects and covered a little of his personal history and a lot more of my own. I had the distinct feeling of being gently probed by the man who might ordain me in three or four years. After the discouragement before leaving, it was a blessing to have a "chance" encounter with the archbishop of American Anglicanism. It seems just one more step in the process of belonging to this new family. And speaking of my sister the prophet, she even said she hoped I would sit next to someone interesting after I wearily quipped that "There's never anyone interesting on commuter flights."

Lastly, I would like to point out that, save the archbishop, all this encouragement came by the way of women. Pick up the slack, brothers! Don't be outdone in the imitation of God. :)

The spirits [and minds] of the prophets

Funny the things you remember. ~ Forrest Gump

I remember something Stuart Greaves said during my summer 2003 internship at IHOP.* He exhorted our group of young charismatic zealots not to "manifest" when we felt the Holy Spirit--not to shake and convulse and scream, as much as could be helped--by sharing a story from his youth.

During a certain season, the Spirit began to grip him intermittently and he would groan and shake in God's presence. These experiences interrupted the daily flow of his life, driving, being in church (I hope I'm remembering this correctly). When a leader who was discipling him spoke to him about it, the young Greaves replied, "I'm sorry--I just can't control it. It's God." His leader rebuked him, saying, "No. The spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets" (1 Corinthians 14:32). Greaves went on to instruct us, saying that wild manifestations are alright when you first encounter the spirit, but as you mature they really help no one. He exhorted us to, when we feel the weight or power or fire of God's presence, resist any urge to manifest but rather turn that spiritual energy back towards God by means of contemplation, prayer or some combination thereof.

These words returned to me this weekend at the conference I attended with some seminary friends. It was called "Dreams, Visions and the Mystical Realm" (they should add that subtitle to Urbana and see what happens). I think Greaves's instruction was relevant in two ways. The basic application occurred Saturday night, when I really did begin to feel God's presence in such a way that might have lent itself to convulsions (and it was happening as I was observing other people go through holy shakes, no less). Rather than whoop, shout, or shake (not that there's anything essentially wrong with such expressions), I focused that divine gripping into intercessions in tongues peppered with maranatha pleading ("Come, Lord Jesus!").**

The other application had to do with many times in the conference where my mind flat out rejected what was being said, but through stirring up my spirit through muttered prayers I was able to receive from the Lord and suspend my judgments. This is not to say that I because I was feeling spiritual I just accepted everything I heard uncritically, but I feel like I was able to be encouraged and provoked by God through this man's ministry. Without the extra prayer I just would have gotten a headache. In the first case, I restrained the fire, in the second I fanned the flame.

The truth that our spirits are subject to us speaks to the relationship of spirit and mind. The charismatic tendency (I speak as one reared charismatic) is to welcome the Spirit and shut out the mind, encouraging a kind of divine possessing where we lose control and God takes over. I contend that this has more in common with Eastern mysticism and Gnosticism than the spirituality encouraged by the Christian Scriptures. To have an active mind is not less spiritual, to turn off one's mind is not more spiritual.

I am reminded again of Psalm 27:4 (another mark of IHOP's influence on my life). It's words don't encourage mindlessness, but rather mindfulness. "Ask, seek, behold, inquire" are sensory words about a creator god who can be known, explored and given witness to in concrete ways.

The incarnation testifies that spirit and flesh dwell together, not one over the other. Jesus did not set us an example of self-emptying so that he could be remote controlled by the Holy Spirit, but rather he "became obedient to the point of death--even death on a cross" (Philippians 2:8). The life of worship ought to be characterized by a fiery spirit and an active, disciplined mind that daily yields volition to God's direction--not his usurpation.

"I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God--what is good and acceptable and perfect." ~ Romans 12:1, 2; emphases mine

*International House of Prayer
**I contend that shouting because of a mystical God moment does not "release" something abstract in the Spirit, as is common to say in charismatic parlance. I don't see that in the Bible.