A friend emailed this: "Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself; the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of wisdom of a mustache." -G.K. Chesterton.
Not sure if this is a thumbs-up for the blog or a suggestion that I'm over-sharing...but oddly comforting nonetheless.
[Read Part 1 here] A caveat: I think it's probably impossible to say anything accurate about God. The word is too small to evoke anything but the flimsiest similes. So we must always interpret what any of us says about God with eyes that know that the most we can see are only shadows dancing on a wall. They may be good shadows, and the wall may come close to reflecting reality; but they are still only shadows of the truth.
A second caveat: Even though the preceding caveat indicates the impossibility of talking about God, we're caught in a paradox. Because even though we can't do it, we must. Life requires interpretation. And the earth is too big for us not to ask questions about it. For me, those questions depend on enlarging my vision. I grew up religious, and I still want to be. So talking about God is utterly necessary, no matter what the word itself may come to mean.
And so, to Judgement Day, Part 2
Many people raised in Christian circles grew up with an image of God that owes more to the Golem myth or the monsters in Grimm Fairy Tales. (For a postmodern twist, see the last sequence of ‘Inglourious Basterds’ for a vision of God-as-terror that leaves the audience in no doubt who’s in control. It’s horrifying.) The God who-is-love, who is supposed to bathe us in light, who is supposed to be a tender parent, who in the gorgeous phrase ‘knit us together’ seemed to have an evil twin, which, on the one hand, creates a certain confusion among his followers (this God is always male) and is reduced to being nothing more than an antecedent of Austin Powers, with a nice hairy side, and a horrifying nasty genius shadow.
For me, growing up, I knew two kinds of Christians – the first were the kindly ones who baked and prayed a lot, like my grandmother, who exuded grace, tolerance, generosity and welcome. She didn’t seem to think of herself as a bolted-down individual in the same way contemporary culture would have it, in the sense of being an island with a castle whose ramparts would be built higher at the drop of any economic excuse; she had responsibilities to her community, she’d been through a world war, married to a man who fought in it, and lived to serve and give to others. The other kind of Christian, who did their fair share of giving and serving, but they were also the serious kind, the self-consciously “committed” kind, who read their bibles and tried to convince others that they were going to hell if they didn’t accept Jesus. The way to accept Jesus was through a formulaic prayer, preferably said out loud in the presence of another. The way to live for Jesus was to read your bible and pray, and go to worship services, and not swear or smoke, and pretend to yourself that you didn’t have sexual fantasies, and try to convince others to do the same (and that’s before we talk about the cultural and socio-political dimensions of what it means to be a religious person in a society where religion and ethnicity are closely tied. That’s for another day.)
We were told that God loved us; that the arms of Jesus were always open to embracing us, that nothing happened in our lives regarding which God wasn’t already ahead of the game. So, whether we needed to find a parking space or to be healed from cancer, God knew about it, and might even do something, if we pleaded enough. A lifetime of such pleading would produce what they call ‘character’. ‘Healings’ would be rejoiced in; non-healings led to confusion and disappointment. Every few years, stirrings of a revival would occur; and we’d get excited by the hope that the task of saving Ireland would be taken out of our hands as tens of thousands of people spontaneously turned up at the door wanting to be Christians. Of course, it never happened; and we rarely admitted it. At the end of this character-building, miraculous life of denial, you would die, of course. And then the fun really starts. Depending on your understanding of quantum metaphysics, you’d either immediately transfigure upwards, or wait a few aeons until the end of time, at which point Judgement Day would take place. Billions of human beings would stand naked before the throne of God, as images from each of their lives flashed by on a giant video screen, a meta-level tut-tut-tut and wagging finger of admonition waved in your face before you were begrudgingly let into heaven, assuming you had paid mental assent to the right theological formula in that prayer so long ago, or thrown into an ever-burning molten lake, where you would be tortured without end.
Thoughts?
Well, let’s try this: it should be self-evident that the two images of God – devoted and tender parent, and pyromaniac monster are incompatible with each other. Unless God is insane.
People will, I am sure, want to argue about the theological content of that statement; and I’m very happy to have a conversation on this blog about that. But it’s not my priority – I want to say something, not about God (which, as I've noted, is a concept I find it very difficult to talk about), but about the images of God that constitute so much of our subjective experience of the divine, or of what we call the divine.
It's well known that Carl Jung once had a dream in which he saw God taking a massive cosmic dump on a village church, which only moments before had been basking in dappled sunlight on an orchard of a day. The church exploded; and Jung was able to find a way to see and express spirituality as an inextricable part of what makes a whole human life. It changed our understanding of psychology. It changed our understanding of theology. But, at least where I was being formed, Carl’s boat didn’t seem to make its way across the Irish Sea. And, for much of my life, I lived in fear of a God who would one day humiliate me in front of the whole human race. A God who would treat me in ways that I would never treat a friend, or my own children; in ways that no sane person would treat anyone they loved.
Where does this lead me? A few hypotheses.
Any father who would wish to expose his children’s mistakes in public, without a willingness to acknowledge his own errors or the times he did not prevent harm coming to those children is, at best, in need of psychological intervention.
The God who appears in our fantasies of Judgement(alism) Day is not worthy of the name. The God who appears in these fantasies is a projection of our own shadow; when we imagine God telling us what we did wrong, and that we can get into heaven anyway, we are ceding responsibility for our lives, and betting on a finger-crossing theological formula to get us through our fear of death.
There is no such thing as Judgement(alism) Day. The concept is a psychological projection rooted in childhood trauma, fear of authority figures, and the struggle to take responsibility for our own lives. We need to get over it. I think that’s what God would want.
You know Henry Gibson. He's one of those character actors who beefed up everything he was in, and indelibly so. Fully worthy of Jett's appellation 'an OTG actor' (no matter how bad the movie, when he's on screen, your reflex is to say 'Oh Thank God'). You can't imagine 'Magnolia' without his Luciferian bar-loiterer Thurston Howell, stirring William H Macy to humiliate himself with his unrequited love Brad (evoking the sinister sliminess of Richard Burton in 'The Medusa Touch', Gibson here seemed to invest his voice with supernatural powers); 'The Blues Brothers' would be poorer (and the climactic, ridiculous chase sequence much less funny) without his absurd white supremacist; and, despite 'Nashville's status as a fully ensembled ensemble, it is his character, Haven Hamilton, who sings the overture and facilitates the coda.
He helped anchor work as various and memorable as 'The Long Goodbye' (which Elliott Gould told us recently may have a sequel on the way), and Joe Dante's wonderful homage to 50s kitsch sci-fi 'Innerspace'. And who else played two different guest roles on both 'The Fall Guy' and 'MacGuyver' (with character names like Meriwell Cooper, Milton Bach, and my personal favourite, Pinky Burnette; not to mention Reilly O'Reilly (you heard that right) in something called 'The Luck of the Irish. To be sure.) He also made it into 'The Littlest Hobo', which happens to have been my favourite show when I was eight years old. In one of those eyebrow raising coincidences that actors of his generation seem to carry in their pockets, he got his stage name from Jon Voigt, an old roommate, who, along with others who have spoken to the press since his death on Monday, seems to have shared the view that he was one of the kindest men they knew; and, yes, it was a deliberate attempt to evoke the name of the author of 'A Doll's House'.
But I'll remember him most for 'Magnolia', in the dark velvet smoking jacket, sneering at all-comers, laying down the gauntlet to the universe, saying No to grace. He clearly hasn't seen the weather forecast. 'Magnolia', of course, is soaked with references to the numbers '2' and '8', indicating the 8th chapter, 2nd verse of the book of Exodus (in case you haven't been doing scripture memorisation lately, that's a sentence about the potential for certain amphibious creatures to interrupt your day, make you look, and maybe even wise, up). If memory serves, the introduction to the published shooting script for 'Magnolia' has Paul Thomas Anderson saying that he got the biblical reference from Henry Gibson, meaning that he had much more of a hand in that movie than simply sitting devilish and asking for another drink.
'It is a dangerous thing to confuse children with angels', says Thurston Howell, egging Macy's Quiz Kid Donnie Smith to shred a little bit more of his ego; 'It's not', says Donnie later, throwing up his embarrassment, not knowing that tonight will be a turning point toward his own redemption, and perhaps the end of his loneliness. It is, however, a dangerous thing to confuse Henry Gibson with nothing more than a thesp-for-hire. You can't imagine anyone else playing his roles. Rest in Peace.
I've been slowly captivated over the years by the films of Andrei Tarkovsky - the last scene of his 'Solaris' may be the closest the cinema has come to re-producing a mystical experience on screen. His films pose questions that each of us is asking, all the time; they take some work and patience, but are ultimately deeply rewarding experiences. I'm excited to be seeing his 'Andrei Rublev' in a cinema for the first time this Sunday at the Belcourt in Nashville. My co-host on The Film Talk considers this the best film ever made; and asserts that it 'feels as if it were made in the Middle Ages'. It's about the greatest painter of religious icons of the period; which either attracts you or makes you want to run a mile away from this film - but, trust me, watch this opening sequence and maybe I'll see you Sunday. The opening minutes of 'Andrei Rublev' declare its intent: this is a film, like all of Tarkovsky's films, about the search for God, the desire to be met, and sometimes the confusion between the desire to meet God and the desire to be God. In other words, it's about fear of flying. Check out the clip below and you'll see what I mean. I'd be glad to have a conversation on the blog about the film with people who've seen it. (The whole thing's available online in pretty decent quality.)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-R_P8qEwwQ]
The first dream I remember had something to do with the Disney dark sci-fi epic 'The Black Hole' and the seven dwarves from their earlier fantasy arriving in my bedroom to amuse a lonely four year old; five years after that, I watched an episode of 'TJ Hooker' in which a serial killer claimed his victims with a hammer - that night granted me a terrifying nightmare involving Leonard Nimoy, my beloved grandmother's house, and a set of kitchen knives. (Yes, I know Leonard Nimoy wasn't in 'TJ Hooker', the show that William Shatner presumably hoped would put some distance between him and Captain Kirk, but I suppose the fact that my subconscious was able to link Nimoy and Shatner even at the age of nine telegraphs the reasons why the cinematic image means so much to me even now.) After the Leonard Nimoy-tries-to-kill-me-at-my-grandmother's-house-and-shes-worried-that-I'll-get-blood-on-the-carpet nightmare, my dreams went quiet for a few years. Now I know they (and when I say 'they', I guess I mean Freud and friends) say you dream every night; and this may well be the case. But for the longest time, I couldn't remember my dreams; so I don't know if they were happening or not. I do recall that, at eighteen and twenty, on the deaths of a friend and my grandmother respectively, I had dreams in which they appeared and said goodbye to me, and I was comforted. Plenty of people have told me of similar experiences when loved ones cross the threshold; I'm guessing that there's some kind of integration that occurs in the deep levels of the psyche, enfolding the shock of death into something more manageable.
I've had more vivid dreams lately; two in particular have been about my own death. One of these is still too complex and strange for me to share just yet; but the other seems necessary. I'll write it down here, without comment for now; maybe someone reading can tell me if it provokes any thoughts; and I'll try to write something more interpretive about it later in the week. Please note that this does not come naturally to me; this really is a kind of transcript of something that happened to me when I was asleep, so it may be entirely indulgent and a waste of time; but I'm risking sharing it because I think it might mean something to some of you reading. I make no comment about the content of the dream. Not yet. But your comments are welcome today.
The setting was the typical Judgement Day scenario, beloved of conservative evangelical and Catholic Christians alike (there may be a similar notion in other faiths too, I'm not sure). The entire human race was lined up, Nuremberg rally-style, and naked, awaiting their fifteen minutes of shame. God was on his throne, white-bearded and cliched, but visible to all, and not as frightening as he had appeared in the fears of my younger days (in this dream, God was definitely male). The person at the head of the line would gingerly step forward, and stand gently shaking before a small TV dinner table on which sat an old top-loading VCR - of the kind that you probably watched 'BMX Bandits' on in 1983. One of God's assistants would bring a cassette with the name of the person at the front of the line on it, hand it to God, and God would put it in the top-loading VCR. He'd press play, and then, on a white screen to the left of the throne, the details of your life would be played back for the rest of us to see. Only the bad stuff. When, as a kid, you stole from a corner shop; when you mistreated a girlfriend; when you lied to your parents; when you lived in apathy, giving your devotion to consumerism and stress. It wasn't clear in the dream what happened after the film of your mistakes was shown, but soon enough, I found myself at the top of the line.
God looked at me, but I wasn't sure what the look meant, and some events from my life flashed through my mind. When God didn't intervene to save the life of someone very close to me, who had a good ten years of life left, and deserved it after five decades of serving her husband; when God didn't stop people who were threatening me, and causing untold psychological impact; when God couldn't figure out a way to allow me to have a sense of innocence in childhood without interference from guilt and persistent fear; when God didn't save me from the trauma that all of us who grew up in the same place were touched by at some point. And then, images not from my life per se, but those horrifying events that I observed through the TV twenty years ago and more; the obvious ones, like the Ethiopian famine of 1984, the Armenian earthquake, the wars in Afghanistan and the Balkans and everywhere, a slide show of horrors I remembered seeing at an age when brain plasticity was pliable enough for the Nine O'Clock news to embed itself.
God had put the cassette in the top-loader. He was about to push down the flap, and show my mistakes to the world. But then, with the definitive power of a reflex, my right hand found its way to his, pushing it away from the machine. God looked at me, smaller now than he had been just a few seconds before, his eyes conveying what I can only call perturbation - confusion mingled with disappointment, as if he was a child who had just had her ice cream taken away. Then I spoke. The words that came were simple:
'I tell you what, God. I won't judge you if you don't judge me.'