Dave | unobtrusive lucidity

Oops, I Did It Again…

As much as I’m opposed to sensationalist media, I’ve found myself scanning the stories of Britney Spears’ apparently horrendous performance at the VMA’s a few days ago. Typically, I don’t even pause when I see this particular individual’s name in the headlines. But, she has grabbed my attention in the recent past, so…blame it on that, or on well-written headlines by CNN, but I can’t help but shake my head today.

Not, however, for the same reason that you might immediately think.

Yesterday’s somewhat more merciful attack to the criticism about Britney’s body was the one that really drew me into reading. Apparently, the entertainment industry seems to think she was too fat to wear the little black…thing…that she performed in at the VMA’s. Their comments about her physical condition strike me, as they struck this commentator, as unmerited. Honestly, I’ve never heard quality music associated with Spears, so the allegations that her performance sucked didn’t surprise me. But slamming someone’s weight?

I guess what struck me when I read this this morning was a feeling of pity. I already feel pity for Spears, because I can see past the goddess-of-entertainment status that she holds and see that she is a human being underneath all of that. If one of my friends had been through a divorce, was having a crisis with children that she suddenly realized she wasn’t ready to raise, and had to enter substance abuse treatment, I would be doing anything I could to help her. Instead of having pity on Spears, however, we enjoy watching her twitch under the microscope of popular entertainment culture, assuming that we, as spectators to her life, have the right to critique her as though she were a character from a novel.

When I looked at the photos from the VMA performance, I wasn’t drawn by the paunch that she was accused of displaying. Instead, I felt as though I was privy to her broken-ness. My heart breaks at the fact that she feels as though she must place her body, once promised to her husband, on display in order to gain affirmation and applause from those who worship her.

Artists were never meant to be placed on pedestals as though they are deities. Our entertainment culture is one of idolization that doesn’t reward the artistry: it rapes the life of the artist. Every singer, writer, or painter dreams of success in the sense that they want their work to be seen, read, or heard. Instead, we’ve turned it into something corporate. Instead, gifted artists must also place their bodies on display in racy photo shoots or risque performances in order to achieve blockbuster success.

Spears has made her choices, many of which were negative choices, and she must live with those. However, she is, in some sense, a victim as well, because she has been taken advantage of by the machine we put in place to idolize artists and athletes, all because we want to fill our need to have something to worship.

So, we worshipped Spears, and then cast her aside into entertainment hell, because that is the way “the industry” works. Then, her once loyal “fans” sit back in judgment because they feel justified, as though they are given that right by this despicable little culture that we’ve created.

I didn’t laugh at Britney Spears.

In fact, I almost cried, instead.

Words In A Void

Douglas has linked to and began interesting discussion into what modern Believers read. While I almost always disagree with what my friend says, or at least with the spirit in which he says it, this is something that bothers me a great deal, as well.

I can’t stand to walk into a Christian bookstore. In fact, I despise them like a plague, and wish they didn’t exist. Part of my allergic spiritual reaction is in the fact that I don’t believe in a distinction between sacred and secular (there shouldn’t be bookstores and Christian bookstores, there should just be bookstores…this concept of creating our own Believer’s pop culture is a Falwellian nightmare). Mostly, however, the only thing sold at these “Christian bookstores” that is worth reading are the Scriptures. 98% of everything else on their shelves is crap.

That’s the nicest word I can find for it, actually. Many Evangelicals don’t seem to want to think, so they find themselves content with Lucado-like fluff that is composed of a lot of terrifically constructed church-speak and absolutely no substance. Other Evangelicals find that they love to gain more knowledge (what does Scripture say about it “puffing up?”), and so they gorge intellectually on theology and apologetics and philosophy, begin believing that they are the focus of what our faith is about, and then let it divide and form a cancerous hatred and denominational divisions.

Somewhere in between are the rest of modern Believers, who are content to read “devotionals” instead of Scripture. Hmmm…that seems inverted, don’t you think?

I believe that there are writers who are Christians who generate beautiful (typically the beauty is in the subtlety, but most modern Believers can’t think deeply enough to find it) explorations of our faith in both nonfiction and fiction. I post links to worthwhile reads in my sidebar…please, if you find others, leave comments. I also find beautiful truth is (gasp) writers who don’t profess our faith, or openly deny it. After all, all truth is God’s truth.

Unfortunately, however, most of it is by people who want to earn a living writing garbage that they know they can sell by focusing on a Christian market.

When did Christ become a market, exactly?

And when did our intellectual and artistic diet become one of junk food?

I’ve found that meditating on Scripture or poetry in the morning centers me on God, while reading cheap correlations like Lucado’s or Nehemiah’s or Chamber’s “devotionals” fill me with empty calories, leaving me hungry within the hour. What if our standards for evaluation became higher? What if we raised the bar? What if it became about reading something on Monday that took us until Thursday to unpack and apply to our lives? What if it were quality instead of quantity? What if we read the Scriptures instead of reading about the Scriptures?

That, I suppose, would require publishers to be about the integrity of the work instead of money. And, since that won’t happen, it was a nice thought.

I suppose we’ll just have to keep fighting the machine.

Losing Proposition

America’s work culture is a source of unending amusement to me.

I guess because it is never in the best interest of the person working. Our work weeks are longer than many other countries. Our workers are less healthy than in many other countries. The American thought process is a constant push to identify yourself with what you do, pressuring workers for constantly improved performance and dedication to their career, resulting in less time with family, not to mention less time to contemplate God, existence, purpose…you know, important things like that.

It occurred to me as I discussed with some friends this weekend the origin of Labor Day. It originated as a holiday for the blue collar worker. However, this weekend, I saw all kind of white collar workers taking a long weekend to shop at outlet stores and eat at nice restaurants, all of which were staffed by blue collar workers who had to work on their holiday.

Does that seem backward to anyone else?

I was hesitant to go anywhere to shop or eat today. It seemed profane somehow. All of those workers should have been with family and friends, and being paid for it. Certainly, they get too few holidays as it is.

Of course, the argument would be that this would damage our precious economy, and, since America is driven by the all-powerful dollar, I don’t suppose that justice will ever happen there. We will continue to lose time to ourselves, time with our loved ones, continue to blow through life at a breakneck pace as we forget (or, in many cases, never discover) the emotional and spiritual benefits of a meditation time, or the relational benefits of more time in conversation with your significant other. We’ll just keep losing precious time, in order to keep from losing dollars that are only precious in perception.

Losing. Hmmm…that seems like an adequate word, doesn’t it?

Visions From Across the Room

Have you ever noticed the different connotation that art takes when you perceive it from a distance?

I found myself gazing at a re-print of Monet’s “Banks of the Seine, Vetheuil” this afternoon. It was a small re-print, and I was looking at it from across a room. It didn’t take me where Monet would have had it take me, however. The realism of the scene he painted from the Seine (where I’ve never been, actually) didn’t strike me until later, almost as an after-thought. Instead, it took me to a park.

A park in Philadelphia, to be exact. A place where I stood with a group of others trying to touch God, praying to the sounds of sirens and hip-hop in the distance. The skyline of the city was stunning in the background. Standing amidst that greenery, gazing at the skyline and praying, was one of those moments that stays in your memory for some time to come. The greenery of the foreground of Monet’s work, against the trees in the distance that morphed themselves into the Philadelphia skyline in my mind’s eye, took me there, forced a pause…I can still hear the sirens, still feel the throbbing beat of the music.

Nathaniel Hawthorne said that the highest value of art is its subjectivity, its suggestiveness. He stated that the goal of encountering beauty in any medium is to get more from it than the creator foresaw. The fact that I got Philadelphia from the Seine is, I think, that at work.

I hope Monet would be proud.

Intellectual Chasms

What is it about the Christian faith that wants to discourage critical thinking?

I don’t think it is quite the issue everywhere that it is where I live. As with many intellectual trends, it follows geographic lines. In the south, there is this attitude that everything about our faith lies in tradition. Seminarians and scholars can point to many a historical council and creed to cite the reasons they hold the theological positions they do, or why they believe that the Scriptures hold their current canonical structure, or why you should or shouldn’t say a certain thing, vote a certain way, etc.

Everyone has an opinion, and I love that about our culture. However, when opinion is raised to a level it shouldn’t be and labeled as “doctrine,” we have issues. When another Believer disagrees with you, expresses their opinion, and then labels their opinion as a “conviction,” it is supposed to have some hallowed quality at that point: we wouldn’t dare offend another Believer by questioning his/her “conviction.”

Well, I have this problem: I enjoy offending people. Because I see Jesus offending all sorts of people in the Scriptures. Further, as Karen recently pointed out in a conversation, He wasn’t ever offended that I can think of. Righteously angry once or twice, but not offended. Funny that we are so easily.

The true poison that this has introduced into our faith, however, is that we lose the ability to think critically and analyze something objectively. We mindlessly believe whatever has been taught us, because it is what a given community or a given family has believed for generations. The result: denominations and dogmatic theology and other worthless things that cause division and hatred…you know, all those things Jesus didn’t want.

Must we be products of our education and tradition without examining things with an open mind, accepting the possibility that there may be good and bad in what we hear? Must we approach our faith with stupidity? Somehow, I can’t believe that’s God would have wanted when He created intellect.

Just a thought.

Oops…I guess I’m not allowed to have those as a Believer, am I?