Monthly Archives: May 2007

Disbelief in Disbelief

Okay, so being the super-hero nerd that I am, I couldn’t get to the theater fast enough last weekend to see Spider-Man 3. I wasn’t disappointed. The movie was full of great web-slinging action. It was also full of forgiving thoughts and redemptive images. Very much so, actually…I walked extremely impacted with the essence of forgiveness, redemption, and second chances. I’m grateful that I’ve received more than my share, and I find myself with a renewed determination to give this forgiveness as well. My personal studies have been about grace for the last two weeks, and this is sort of a culmination of those readings. It happened by divine appointment, I’m sure.

As I sat in the theater this weekend, the lights went down, the preview loop finished and the feature started began, I was caught up in that excitement you experience as you realize you are about to experience a story. There’s a knowledge that you’re about to permit yourself to be drawn into that story, apprehended by what it has to say. In theatre, we call this the willing suspension of disbelief. It is when you stop realizing that the story isn’t part of the real world, and start believing that what’s on the screen or the stage is real. It is then that the story has you.

If you’ve been here before, it comes as no surprise to you that I have difficulty accepting the validity of hyper-conservative Christians. It boggles my mind that we can turn our beautiful faith into such a strict set of rules, regulations, and fear that we can’t breathe. For several years of my childhood, I was engulfed in just such an environment, however, so I can at least empathize if not understand it. Along these lines, there are people (who call themselves Believers…I’m not always so convinced) that reject this concept fearing that somehow their souls will be drawn into the fiery abyss if the permit themselves to be taken in by the story. They freeze like deer in headlights because they fear the possibility that they may see/hear/read something that (gasp!) offends them. And certainly, God never wanted us to be offended, right?

(If you need to pause to roll your eyes or experience some other violent and involuntary physical response to this nonsense, go ahead…I completely understand)

In fact, our churches have largely rejected story altogether. The attitude seems to be the Falwellian principle that, if didn’t really happen, then we shouldn’t be interested in it. Fiction is for children. Real Believers focus on good, solid devotional and theological non-fiction, right?

Well, ignore with me for a moment the fact that 98% of the devotionals lining our bookstore shelves are crap and that theology will always end in heresy if followed to its logical conclusion. Instead, just think about Scripture for a second (you know, Scripture…it’s what people used to read before there were devotional writers). Jesus told these wild things called parables. Parables, while occurring within the realm of what is possible, are, by definition, fictional stories. Jesus used fiction to illustrate spiritual reality. Jesus was a story-teller. His apostles were writers. Yet, the modern church seems to shy away from this as a viable medium of communication.

Fortunately, as the emergent church movement begins to take a stronger hold in both mine and the next (occasionally even the previous) generations, there seems to be a return to story. The emphasis has rightly returned to reading Scripture as narrative literature instead of the analytical picking apart of each individual word that many seminaries tend to favor.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not condemning nonfiction. In fact, it’s probably my strongest genre as a writer. However, when we look at Scripture, we see that God uses all types of genres in His writing: the straight-forward non-fiction of Paul and James, the poetry of David, the historical records of Chronicles and Samuel, the vision-casting apocalyptic writing of Revelation, the fictional parables of Jesus. Some have even posited theories that the Song of Songs was originally penned as drama. So many different styles to God’s literature. So many lives changed by all of the above. So many people offended by much of its content.

So, apparently, God wasn’t too concerned about offending people with His writing.

There is an important component to all good art: if you haven’t offended someone, then you really haven’t done it right. People think when they are offended. They engage in self-examination. They see themselves and their environment differently. All of these are things that art is supposed to bring about.

We’ve become so interested in enclosing ourselves in a bubble as Believers that we immediately disregard anything that may offend us. We’re afraid of seeing a play because a character may swear. We’re afraid of going to a movie because it may be too violent, or contain magic. We’re afraid to read a novel because it may contain a point of view with which we don’t agree.

And, in doing so, we’ve stagnated our own growth. We’ve become still, we’ve become irrelevant, we’ve become paralyzed.

We’ve become, in a word, pathetic.

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Overcompensating for Safety

We knew it would happen.

When it comes to security (or, rather, what we perceive as security), America has this nasty way of overcompensating and (dare I use the word in the blogosphere??) shooting itself in the proverbial foot.

A high school student in Chicago was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct when his creative writing teacher became concerned about an essay he had written. The Chicago Tribune described the essay as “violently disturbing but not directed toward any specific person or location.” Originally, the student was not suspended, but later was arrested.

So, after disturbing screenplays were discovered to have preceded the recent Virginia Tech bloodbath, now we’re going to sweep up anyone who writes something even remotely violent, arrest them, force them into counseling, lock them away from the rest of society in fear? That, after all, is what this comes down to: fear. Fear that creates witch-hunts. Fear that creates the book burning ceremonies of the Qin Dynasty and Nazi regimes. Fear that causes us to throw our liberties to the wind in the name of safety and security.

Look at the story carefully. Notice that the assignment, according to the Tribune, was for the “students to express their emotions through writing.” Any poet that has done the same will tell you that sometimes the result is ugly, because sometimes our emotions are ugly. Granted, these are usually venting exercises for the writer and not published works. But this was a free-writing exercise. The students were told, in essence, to vent their feelings, to write whatever was on their mind. And so, after completing the work as assigned, this poor kid gets arrested for it.

Ever have a thought go through your head that is out of character for you? One that you have absolutely no intention whatsoever of acting on? A passing thought that doesn’t stay? If you haven’t, be careful not to write it down when you do. There’s the moral to this mess.

Here’s an interesting twist on the story, as well. A blogger for Wired notes that the school system in question offers an anonymous online tip form for students to use to report safety concerns to the administration. The source code for the link includes a tracker for the initiator’s IP address. So much for anonymity.

We get angry when the Bush Administration taps phones and monitors email communications without legal authorization, yet we forget that we can only blame ourselves for throwing our privacy and free speech rights out the window the first time we get spooked. Hmmm…

Permit me to point out that the writing of “disturbing” material can be a sign of depression, or bipolar disorder, or any other of a host of psychiatric concerns. As a counselor, I have felt in the past that this has merited my attention in certain cases. However, there is a difference between a threat and a story with disturbing or violent content. Scripture tells stories with graphically violent content. There is also a difference between violent and disturbing content or language that is necessary for the story or artwork, and content that is gratuitous (the screenplays penned by the Tech killer were gratuitous). Permit me to also point out that all of us will suffer from diagnosable depression at some point in our lives. Artists experience this more because we are far more in touch with those emotions. It is our blessing as well as our curse. What we feel, we express in our work. Soon, we will not be permitted to do so, because everything we write or paint or compose or sculpt will require approval to make certain that it is “safe” enough. Soon, the books will be burned. Soon, the hunts will begin.

Because after all, we have to be “safe.”

Is it ironic that we have more to fear than ever from those we expect to keep us that way?

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