(who stars in his own music video here) showed us this "really real...really" video of Michael Jackson's facial morph over the years, as a call to really pray for the man:
The I haven't had any tuckings or liftings.
But I
am tempted to dab some permanent marker over the (four) grey hairs on my goatee.
If the Bible has wonderful and commendable things to say about them,
why can't I just let them be?
I want to paint them black.
Because I fear death;
or better yet, being old.
Because I like you to think I am younger than I am;
not older than I like to think I look.
I want you to (virtually) like me.
I forget to remember that you'll like me better if I'm real.
That I might even look younger if I quit putting on the simulacrap.
In college, I wrote a satirical essay on machismo, which got picked up by an independent newspaper; I'll see if I can find it..
It featured a guy who taped on fake chest hair.
I don't do that.
But I virtually do.
Besides, if I cut the goatee altogether, I won't look like other hip emerging church types
(assuming they don't glue theirs on).
Like Doug Paggitt.
I need to hang with him, like Matt Cleaver did:
I have read plenty of blogs and magazine articles about Solomon’s Porch and their lead pastor (not sure what his real title is) Doug Pagitt. I thought this would be a cool opportunity to see in real life all that I had been reading and hearing about, and it was honestly pretty much what I expected: quite anticlimactic and ordinary. And I mean that truly in the best way possible.
Obviously when I say ordinary I don’t mean mainstream. When you walk into the Great Room (think sanctuary) and see it filled with tons of couches all arranged pointing towards a couple of stools sitting in the middle of the room you realize that the environment is anything but typical church fare.
When I say that the Sunday Gathering is ordinary and anticlimactic I mean that the community and leadership embrace a super-flat ecclesiology. Lines between staff and laity seem blurred, and there is no such thing as a celebrity...
.. You’ll see what I mean in a second.
So, here’s the play-by-play. There are about 12 or so of us from the seminary who decide to go to Solomon’s Porch, and of course we don’t want to be late, so we arrive obscenely early. We walk into the Great Room and walk right past Doug Pagitt, who is sitting on a couch chatting with someone. We all sit down together in a little corner, and are pretty much the only ones in the room besides those who are preparing for some part in the gathering. Yeah, we don’t stand out at all.
Doug finishes his conversation and comes over to us and introduces himself, “Hi, I’m Doug.” I think to myself, Wow, he is really big. He acts like your typical guy and does the whole small talk thing, asking us what brings us there, where we’re from, yada yada yada...
If you ever get a chance to go to Solomon’s Porch, it’s obviously worth your time if you are familiar with the emerging church, if for no other reason that to realize that the heavens do not open when Doug sits on his stool. It’s amazing how anticlimactic innovation appears. Maybe the everyday and the extraordinary are anything but.
Maybe there’s hope for your church after all.
link
Actually, the heavens DO open
precisely when the heavens DON'T open
when the preacher does his or her thing.
That is precisely the point and paradox.
The Lord Be With You...Even When He’s Not"
Kerry Soper, in his chapter (p. 59) in "U2 and Philosophy," notes of "Even Better Than the Real Thing" that "the song concludes that the lover, rather than fleeting, hyper-real images, is the real thing--or even better than the real thing."
Being the real thing is even better than the real thing.
If there is such a thing.
That's not just blowing smoke;
it's taking Baudrilllard, Bono and the Bible at their (supra-)logical extreme.
I had intuitively felt there was a connection between simulacra and wanderlust.
(painted brilliantly in Johnny Cash/U2's "The Wanderer," and the entire "Zooropa" CD)
Mark Sayers helped me catch the connection . It's easy to see how the simulacra of our culture causes us to desire to be something we're not; but there is also the inevitable extension:
wanting to be somewhere we're not.
This is a cousin of the elusive idolatry of place,
and what Howard Snyder calls the church's edifice complex.
We are more concerned with real estate than our real estate.
Sayer's book about hyperreality is called "The Trouble with Paris."
I am sure he enjoys the fact that most assume the title refers (just) to Paris Hilton.
But she is not mentioned in the book.
The title refers to a nameless young lady the author met, who seemed was consumed (due to simulacra of media) with moving to Paris, France:
"All she had to do was travel and find new friends and a new job to experience life as it was meant to be--exciting, stimulating and meaningful.
Six months later I received an email from this girl. She was now in Ireland. Paris was not all she had expected.".
(22)
No place ever can be.
Television, film, movies, church..they all lie; they cannot not.
Especially if church services are televised.
"It's very nearly impossible to tell the truth in television..If I write a novel, signed by my name, I am saying these are my thoughts...and the response of the reader is according. If you set up a camera and take a film, that is not considered anyone's views, that is reality"
-Muggeridge, "Christ in the Media, p. 60
In addressing antitodes to simulacra, Sayers suggests
" we are estranged from the concept of wisdom"(174).
He goes on (175) to offer that
"The medieval spiritual writer Theresa of Avila had a powerful metaphor to describe the effects of choosing sin over wisdom" :
her famous journey through the interior castle.
The catch is this was not a mere metaphor in Teresa's part,
it was a vision, an experience, encounter..
a real reality.
Like visions are.
Like vision is.
"I have a dream; I have a vision..television!!,"
Mac Phisto once preached.
No, not that vision.
The real vision.
Teresa was not just a "medieval spiritual writer,"
she was a mystic visionary who was after something/Someone better than the real.
Sayers also almost suggests that an ancient Christian doctrine, rightly envisioned,
is key to subverting simulacra:
Trinity.
In a a helpful section,
"The Hyperreal Christian Trinity,"
he offers this chart of our counterfeit trinity:
He doesn't explicitly address how a theology of the trinity should and could inform and form almost everything
we do, say and pray as church.So get next to some pioneers who do:
Len,
Moltmann,
Frank Viola,
The Shack,
and inevitably,
Bono.
Here's Len:
"is it possible to articulate an enduring missional theology apart from the Trinity?
And the answer to that I believe is"no."
-comments on Tony Jones post, Is the Trinity optional?
Call it/them what you will,
but can we dare to believe there is something so inherently relational
that all of life is really relational and intrinsically
trinitarian?
Three-Personed?
Trinity might even be our only model for church..
.(and computers, by the way).
If...if....
we finally embrace our full humanity.
Like the Second Member of the Trinity did.
Like I do, when I don't black out my gray goatee hairs.
We do indeed bear the image of the Trinity in and through the assumption of our humanity in Christ. The imago trinitatis is always and only the imago Christi.
-link, Inhabitatio Dei
Via our humanity.
Our real rugged, authentic and actual, bathroom-going and glorious human-ness.
Do we have any role models on this quest to just be human?
Many of those mentioned (Doug Paggitt, Bono)
and many not mentioned above(Bruce Cockburn, Mike Yaconelli)
are consistently themselves,
insistently human.
But one final helper.
One who died not long ago,
but bridged Hollywood simulacra and real humanity..
No, I don't mean the equally deserving Johnny Cash,who, like U2 in Zoo TV, brilliantly subverted simulacra on a medium prone to simulacra:
I'm talking someone of whom it was said:
"closest thing we've had in a movie star to a saint—and probably he'd say that was the dumbest thing he'd ever heard, which as far as I'm concerned is more proof."
Paul Newman.
?
I once went shopping with Paul Newman.
!!
Actually, we were both shopping at a rural outdoor fruit stand/shopping plaza in Connecticut.
There was not a bodyguard in sight.
Just Paul Newman, a real live human being,
about to cross my path
No one else around.
I said hi.
He smiled graciously and said, 'hi."
We walked our separate ways.
His famous blue eyes were haunting.
Of course, they may not have been real; he certainly had enough money to simulacra them up.
But he was, on that road, the real thing.
A delightful memoir from "CBS This Morning":
Paul Newman has died, damn it. He was the closest thing we've had in a movie star to a saint—and probably he'd say that was the dumbest thing he'd ever heard, which as far as I'm concerned is more proof. I'm not just talking about the hundreds of millions he earned for charity with his Newman's Own products, or his persistent but judicious political activism. As an artist, he was self-deprecating, often deeply self-critical; he never assumed we'd love him because he was, you know, Paul Newman. When directors built him pedestals, he worked to earn his place on them. Early in his career, he studied the Method, but he never went in for the fumbly-mumbly self-plumbing that became its hallmark. He always threw his attention onto the other actors—which might be why, opposite him, so many became stars and won awards. Everyone looked brighter in his light.
The light came from those blue eyes, of course—but it wasn't just their color that was hypnotizing. Two of his most vivid performances were in black and white: the self-loathing pool-hall drifter in The Hustler, and the mean-drunk, oversexed sleazeball rancher in Hud (probably his sexiest, most magnetic turn—but who can choose?). Newman didn't use those eyes promiscuously, as jeepers-creepers peepers. He hooded them, slit them, closed them tightly in pain. When open, they were sky blue with a milky haze. You could get lost in them; you could also see that he was sometimes lost behind them. Trim, smooth, chiseled, pretty, Newman was physically our most wide-open movie star, yet on one level he was also our most unfathomable...
...Newman was ambivalent about his prettiness, but he didn't make a show of fighting it: He never slapped on a fake nose or did a Quasimodo turn. (His voice—gruff and increasingly gravelly—balanced out his looks somewhat.) He was good in wounded Adonis parts (as in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof), but he was better with a shot of self-satire.
...Great actors and great artists don't have to be role models in life to inspire you with their work. But when they are, they give a special kind of joy. The character of his life is everywhere in his work, in its lack of self-centeredness, in the way it radiated out. In sad days and sunny ones, Paul Newman bathed the world in blue.
Paul Newman's Light
Joan Collins:
I remember once at a party, we played a rather morbid game where we all suggested our own epitaphs.
Beer in hand as always, Paul quipped: 'Here lies Paul Newman, who died a failure because his eyes turned brown.'
link
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