08.13.08
Summer’s gone
We’re in town for a week before heading out for a final vacation (next week) with my parents and one of my brothers and his family. This had been a strange summer, filled with work requirements (Vicki’s 3-weeks at Drew for her doctoral studies, my week of CE and our sermon retreat).
Of course, the week before a trip is always packed with preps not only for the trip, but make-up work for the work you’re going to miss while you’re away (presumably resting and having fun).
America is the place where having fun is down to a science.
Truth is, I’ll be glad for the structure and predictability that comes with fall. All of our kids are making big school moves, which will be exciting to watch. Skyline is an exciting church community to be a part of. So many things start back up on the fall, it always feels to me like a renewal, in spite of the growing decay that marks the season.
At least it’s pretty.
So I’m ready for fall, and the passing of another summer. I’m ready to see old friends again after a vacation-saturated hiatus. And I’m ready for a little less freedom.
Yeah, you heard that right. A great deal of freedom begins to oppress me in a way that responsibility and expectations of others ever could. Enough with the holding pattern (the patternless holding) and the tyranny of anything goes. Let’s get with it.
08.02.08
What kind of hero?
We watched “The Dark Night” last week (at the Weirs Beach Drive-in on Lake Winnipesaukee, NH). The last drive-in experiece I had was when I was Eli’s age (11), and we watched “Son of Flubber” with Ed McMurray.
This was somewhat different.
There was the typical (for postmodern movie-goers) blurring of the lines between good and evil. The Joker was a likeable character (especially when blowing up Gotham General Hospital). And the Batman was scary. Sure, he always managed to throttle back his anger. But barely.
The Joker wasn’t after money. His character is akin to the Satan (Zatan) in the book of Job. He has a jaundiced view of humanity and he detests hypocrisy. Or it might be better to say he delights in exposing it (it’s his ace in the hole, because he always figures on the failure of humanity to live for something other than our own skin).
Meanwhile, the Batman struggles with the overwhelming burden of cleaning up the streets alone. Not that folk don’t want to help him (in the DA’s office or in homemade Batman suits); he simply prefers working alone.
So his failure is inevitable.
He fights on two fronts. The first is the exhausting task of taking on the world’s evil and his need to give that work to others (not share it, but pass it on). But the second presents him with a Gordoan knot: to fight evil, he believes that he must become evil. So he faces the final adversaries of irrelevance or annihilation (isn’t that what becoming that which he fights boils down to?).
Either way, evil triumphs.
The Joker is both right and wrong about humanity. We are driven by selfishness in even our goodness (he delights in presenting people with “the lesser of two evils” dilemmas, like demanding one person be sacrificed so that many others may live). Yet some human choices (self-sacrifice and the refusal to kill enemies) stymie him.
He repeatedly tells the Batman that the two of them need each other. You wonder if the Joker’s need of the Batman involves his enjoyment of a good challenge. While he never believes the Batman will prevail, he’s in no particular hurry to be done with the fight. Like Batman, the Joker would lose his identity without a worthy adversary.
In the end, Hollywood pays clumsy homage to the “common man” in the style of Spiderman. The Batman cannot enjoy his victory over the Joker, because the fight was someone else’s to lose.
So the Batman chooses the only available option: sacrifice for the good of all. And the role the people will play?Crucify him.
Bo
08.01.08
Hello world!
This is my inaugural post. I’m leaving on a trip to Pittsburgh, PA this weekend a few days after returning from a 10-day combined work retreat and vacation. We’re preaching about Sabbath and I’ll miss the first Sunday because I’m travelling to a CE event.
Funny.
I’ve been thinking some more about how no one can ever communicate our experience to another person. I wrote some about this dilemma in my journal earlier this week. All we can ever hope for, I believe, is to empathize with one another and to demonstrate that we care about the other person’s experience even though we can never fully understand it.
And I believe that sharing a “similar” experience in an attempt to show that we do understand another person’s experience defeats the purpose immidiately because the shared experience will itself demonstrate to the other person your inability to listen, either belittling their story or bulldozing it.
Much better to admit together that words will not deliver the goods and to strive for something that both takes the story and the teller seriously and that lies within reach: care enough to listen. It’s such a wonderful gift, especially in light of the fact that nothing more than the act of listening in the context of being present to each other will be accomplished.
More to follow concerning why any of this should matter.
Some topics for exploration:
1. Choosing what we experience and how we remember it (the story we tell ourselves and the one we tell others). A good topic to explore after watching “Memento”.
2. How two people sharing an experience are not experiencing the same thing, but are, for all practical purposes, in parallel universes (and how this can be okay; i.e., how we can relate to each other nonetheless).
3. How our anxiety about being so utterly alone and unable to relate (from one perspective) forces us to paste over the enormous gaps by pretending we relate, or worse, by forcing each other to lie about relating. A related topic might be how this grand lie (or bullying) is the real cause of our anxiety, and how telling the truth (about our isolation) might be the single greatest freedom we have ever experienced.
boGo
