Film Review: The Great Gatsby

Tags

baz luhrmann, carey mulligan, f. scott fitzgerald, gatsby, joel edgerton, leonardo dicaprio, luhrmann, the great gatsby, tobey maguire

The Great Gatsby, dir. Baz Luhrman. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire, Joel Edgerton, Carey Mulligan.

This film is, first of all, a spectacle of light. Luhrman understands that thousands of lumens of colored light make a picture jump out at the audience. From the fantastic pastels of Gatsby’s shirts to the fireworks over Long Island Sound, each shot of Luhrman’s Gatsby is suffused with otherwordly quantities of light. It brightens everything, but it makes Carey Mulligan entirely luminous. The other characters are brightly-lit, but every old-money inch of her is on fire. And that suits Daisy Buchanan, the hothouse starlet, just fine.

Light is a blessing and a curse. In some of the panning shots of Gatsby’s fantastic castle and the Buchanans’ neo-classical manse, the windows are so blazing bright, like Thomas Kinkade’s improbable cottages, that they must be on fire from the inside.

There’s nothing subtle about this adaptation of Fitzgerald’s novel. The booze, the girls, the parties–it leaves the old Robert Redford Gatsby standing still in the dust for pure spectacle. Many shots are stylish and truly breathtaking, more Jay-Z (who produced the film) than Fitzgerald (who wrote the book). But we, the audience, are fine with that.

The scenes in this movie that stumble come mostly near the beginning. The orgy at Tom’s place in the city is totally overdone. The colors, the drugs, the booze, the costumes–it’s just too much. Luhrman is clumsily emphasizing that Myrtle and her sort are a lower order than the perfectly-attired Buchanans and Gatsbys of the world, but good grief–Myrtle’s whore-scarlet dress is the most over-the-top garment in history, closely followed by that worn by her cousin, whose makeup doesn’t smear as she locks lips with Tobey Maguire’s Nick Carraway. Stylistically and thematically, some things fall flat: the crump-dancing girls at Wolfsheim’s speakeasy and the random Duesenburg full of dancing Nigerian oil barons and their molls (c. 1999) that Gatsby and Carraway pass on the Queensboro bridge. But these are distractions. The real show, when it comes, is something else.

After a certain point, we settle in to watch Gatsby’s story come together for its great unraveling. Gatsby walks, his perfect white suit drenched, into the flower-crowded room in Nick Carraway’s cottage, and sees Daisy there, and the movie becomes nobler. Nick Carraway reads more of the seminal text itself, and the illusion that you have stepped into a dreamlike, Technicolor version of Fitzgerald’s novel is nearly complete. Every scene, from the nightmarish City of Ashes to Gatsby’s last swim, is near-perfect.

DiCaprio, Mulligan, and Edgerton perform well as Jay Gatsby, and Daisy and Tom Buchanan respectively. Perennial schoolboy Tobey Maguire falters in a few scenes, but by the time he confronts Gatsby about running over Myrtle, he, like Nick Carraway himself, summons the wherewithal to be Gatsby’s friend and Daisy’s erstwhile protector, and not just another callow hanger-on.

As the film nears its climax, in the sweltering room at The Plaza where Gatsby and Tom clash, the tension and the heat and the sweat and Gatsby’s growing mania are perfectly measured. As the film nears its end, Nick Carraway’s typed words appear on the screen over the green light, “And so we beat back, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” 

Luhrman is not a subtle director. But in adapting this film, he chained himself to the book, and for the most part the eye candy and hip-hop he offers underline and strengthen the time-tested story of the novel, not weaken it. This is the sort of adaptation any novelist would dream of: faithful to the source material but modern, stylish, expensive–hugely scaled without feeling like a mountain adaptation of a molehill.

Luhrman’s The Great Gatsby somersaults across the style/substance tightrope with grace and panache. It’s loud and brass-gilt and smoky, like the age it hearkens. And it’s not just a 3D FX spectacle; like the book, it’s a careful, dark, and beautiful dismemberment of hope.

(8/10)

"Ecclesiastes" and "John"

Reblogged from Fog On Pleasant Hill:

This past weekend I participated in an awesome talent show featuring an all-star cast of students from New Saint Andrews. Flight of the Conchords met Nun Fight and Les Miserables played by kazzoo-ists. There were also original piano compositions and some crazy dancing. It was fantastic.

My entry was a pair of poems. Since a few folks have requested written versions, I am putting them up here, together with the introduction I gave that night.

Read more… 958 more words

The best slam poetry.

Have We Lost?

Tags

christianity, Church, gay christian, gay marriage, homosexuality, marriage

Right now, Christians are fighting a battle we can’t win. Gay marriage is already a reality in our society. Barring a miracle, gay marriage will be legal in every American state within twenty years.

A few weeks ago, I saw a debate between a conservative American pastor and a liberal Catholic blogger (a British expatriate) about the subject of gay marriage, moderated by a British journalist. I paid very close attention, even though I was tired and sitting toward the back.

Andrew Sullivan, who defended gay marriage, did so graciously. He did not, like many of his allies, attack Christian opponents to gay marriage as homophobic and bigoted. He had strong words for them, but he won points with those of us in the audience who disagreed with him for making an effort to understand the conservative position.

Pastor Doug Wilson, who defended traditional marriage, did so ably and made some crucial points. He asked Sullivan, who believes in monogamy, why polygamists could not use the same arguments that Sullivan had used, when they organized themselves the way the “LGBT community” had done. Sullivan literally spluttered at this charge, and spent more time grandstanding about AIDS victims and gay soldiers in Afghanistan than responding substantively. He himself made many good points, but neither he nor the noisy college students in the audience could see any merit in this one. Overall, if I had been undecided at the debate (trust me, no one was), then I think Wilson’s points about the mess heterosexuals have made of marriage, the heartbreak of divorce, and the ultimate imperative upon Christians to love sinners and yet hate sin would have convinced me that, at least, his position is morally praiseworthy and logically tenable.

But in that ballroom, things looked different. My friends and I, who support traditional marriage, made of a majority of the audience, but at the end when moderator rather mean-spiritedly asked for a show of hands and declared Wilson the winner, I didn’t feel like he had won anything–and neither had Sullivan. In that debate hall, Wilson and Sullivan had argued well. But in the real world, the necessary gay character on every TV show is convincing thousands of people every week that gay marriage is normal and, after all, they’re in love. These arguments are all well and good, but they’re not changing hearts and minds.

Of all the things that happened in February 2013, that debate was not perhaps one of the more significant. It excited some comment on blogs, but already most people who did not attend have forgotten it. But I will never forget the ecstatic hooting of the pro-gay-marriage minority as they pumped their fists in the air at the debate-ending vote, or the silent, self-conscious assent of the cowed, Christian majority.

Christians have lost. It’s unpleasant for us to realize it, but we must do so. The gay debate is one of many debates that we’ve lost in the post-war period. One example: even thirty years ago, the normal American family went to church. That’s not true anymore. There are millions and millions of faithful Christians in America, but there are also millions of nominal Christians, who for years have been convincing themselves and everyone else that they are living for Jesus, but they are not. It’s sad, but it’s also true. These people are inoculated against the Gospel because they’ve been exposed to it (or a close facsimile) all their lives.

So for the reactionist commentators who wonder why and how gay marriage became so popular, so fast, stop looking at church attendance stats. Faithful Christians are a minority, even and especially in the United States, so it is infeasible to make jingoistic cultural war presuming on the ranks and ranks of “Christians” who really just go to church for fun, who care more about low taxes than the sacrifice of Christ, and who will accept gay marriage as soon as the cultural momentum turns in that direction (that was around 2005, if you’re wondering).

We’ve lost the debate, and that really is a bad thing. Gay marriage will not be good for the institution of civil marriage. I don’t care if a man wants to leave his estate to his male lover with a lower tax rate, or get spousal access to his deathbed, but the idea that children will be raised to think that having two mothers or two fathers is normal repels me. Our culture lost the ability to raise children in two-parent homes, and now we’ve lost the restriction on which sex those parents should be. Despite what I’m about to say, the gay marriage debate really does matter. Or, it did.

Gay marriage is a distraction. The real attack on Christian marriage comes from our toxic hearts. 

Here’s the rub: the state will do what it wants, and it wants to allow gay marriage. But we are Christians before we are Americans. We should care deeply about politics and how to make our nation a righteous one, but we should accept that we have lost this civil battle and draw up battle lines for redeeming marriage within the church. Bible-believing Christians would have a time of it trying to defend gay marriage, and it’s hard to imagine anyone seriously sanctioning it Biblically. But that little objection hasn’t lowered the divorce rate.

If we care seriously about God, about the Church, and about marriage, then we will fight a new battle, for Christian marriage rather than against the private sex lives of unbelievers. We need to win hearts and minds before we can preach sexual ethics to them.

Christian marriage, not civil marriage, is the battle that matters.

Mass-Murder in the City of God: A Middle Way for Gun Control

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adam lanza, christianity, gun control, gun rights, newtown, nra, sandy hook, wayne lapierre

The AR-15 is the bestselling rifle in America, and it is selling even faster after its use

A firearm, not sin or salvation

in the Newtown massacre. Thousands of people are buying Lanza’s weapon of choice, but they are not emulating him. In fact, most will only ever use their rifles for target shooting and home protection. Sometimes after a disaster, an object, not a person, can become a scapegoat. For example, Roosevelt refused to sell Helium to Hitler’s Germany, and so when the Hindenburg was struck by lightning as it loomed over New Jersey, it became a hydrogen-fueled ball of fire. Passenger airship travel was dead. And this has happened in some ways after Newtown: the media and a tenuous majority of the populace want to see stricter gun control laws. But other people, with perhaps a deeper understanding of human nature, have dissociated the weapon of massacre from the thought and act of massacre. One man may buy an assault rifle and murder with it. Another, perhaps a serviceman, may buy an assault rifle and prevent murder. The assault rifle is the common denominator, but not the cause, of both actions.

The majority of gun-owners are probably a little eccentric in their belief that formidable weaponry is necessary to maintain the freedoms they enjoy. Some of them are irrationally fearful of government search and seizure, or of a foreign invasion as laughably implausible as Red Dawn. But even Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, who now wants to renew the Clinton-era ban on high-capacity magazines and assault rifles, if she is thinking rationally, cannot associate the millions of gun-owners, even assault-rifle owners, with the violence of Adam Lanza and Jared Loughner and James Holmes and Anders Behring Breivik, and the other mass killers, lionized by the media, who have terrorized innocents in the past few years. Lanzas and Loughners are not the 1%, they are the .1% or less of gun owners. Any regulation of weapons must weigh in the balance that it will not prevent crime, because it will not prevent criminals.

This is not to repeat the tired mantra Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. The uncomfortable truth is that guns are the most effective method of killing people that people have access to. In countries where guns are rarer, the murder rate is lower (often, however, the incidence of violent crime is much higher). However, massacres like Newtown are the exception that proves the rule: for every cold and calculating Newtown, there are murders (like the 500 homicides in Chicago in 2012) motivated by drugs, money, lust, or hatred. American ‘gun culture’, I submit, is not necessarily good or evil. It causes murder, it prevents murder. In a far-off country with an unarmed populace, most criminals are unarmed–and their criminal life goes on. It is the same, in America, with armed citizens and armed criminals.

There are two ultimate solutions to the problem that people use guns to kill people. We could ban civilian gun ownership completely and confiscate all of them. The murder rate would fall into the basement for a while, but human nature would not be changed. Violent crimes would still be committed, and some criminals, namely the more dangerous ones, would somehow sneak their guns under the government safety net. Such a blanket ban would violate the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution, and change society in unmeasurable ways. It would not mean the end of freedom, at least not immediately, but it would make American citizens impotent in the face of terror. It is not a farsighted solution.

The other solution, advocated by a slightly crazed Wayne LaPierre in a recent NRA press conference, is to arm almost everyone. The basic fact that armed guards in schools would prevent crime is true, but it would not fix the problem. There was an armed guard at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999. He was one of the first to die. Training the American populace, all of us, to use guns to defend ourselves, our families, our pupils, our friends, seems to make a lot of sense. However, advocating a heavily armed populace means despairing of any less drastic remedy. When the “West was won” and dusty little towns on the railway line were pacified, it was a relief for federal marshals and right-thinking cowboys to hang their rifles over the mantle, to sequester their gun belts to museums. It was progress for civilization, that we had all agreed to live together and not shoot each other. The NRA is advocating a step backward: they have already, because they love guns, dismissed the possibility that we can prevent crime without turning every citizen into an arsenal. For me, I would prefer a future where there are as few guns in schools as possible. Guns and children do not mix. The NRA seems to think there would be no victims if everyone had a gun and could use it. But there would still be predators and prey, rapists and cons who can talk their way past a .38 Special. You can die just as easily from gunfire whether you are armed or not. Maybe we should give everyone a gun and body armor. No! Where would it end?

The NRA has lost touch with reality almost as much as their opponents. One side has forgotten the depth of human evil, so deep that all of us are Adams and Eves and Adam Lanzas, murderers in our hearts. The other side has forgotten that humans, because of grace, can get up in the morning with beating hearts and open eyes and a very limited amount of hatred for our fellow-men. I do not want to have to strap a gun belt on my waist every day, even though I have used firearms and enjoyed them for as long as I can remember. I want human civilization to have moved forward, if that is even possible, so that I don’t have to be constantly armed, constantly vigilant. It is true, and I think many gun enthusiasts know it in their hearts, that any John Doe with anger problems (and that’s most of us) might be more dangerous with a gun on his belt than without. He might prevent a crime, prevent Newtown even, and then be caught up in the anger and darkness of his heart and commit crime himself. There is no one righteous, no, not one. There is no one who seeks God.

I am trying, always, to resist the urge to put any measure of faith in human civilization. I seem to have more of it than my friends: most of them would agree, reservedly, with the NRA’s position that maximum-gun America is the safest America. All of my faith should be placed in God–but civilization is His gift. He has given us this framework for dealing with each other so that we have redress for grievances beyond the gun, and a police and a military to protect us, sometimes even effectively, from the chaos of the evil of men.

For myself, I think guns should be registered like cars, and rigidly protected from government seizure. If some way could be found to profile likely psych cases like Adam Lanza or James Holmes, then I would support preventing those people from having guns. Adam Lanza stole his mother’s guns. If she had locked them up, she would probably be alive today. We can’t use technology to save humanity, because only Christ can do that (and He has), but a gun with thumbprint activation, only to be fired by its owner, is safer than one without. Let those who wish to be armed be armed. Let the government safeguard their right to be so. Let those who do not wish to be armed feel safe, because the government and the armed populace work together to protect them, and perhaps, by the grace of God, to prevent the next Newtown.

Worship in the Wilds

Tags

god in nature, Man Against World, nature, worship in the wilds

This is a paper I wrote for Persuasive Writing class in Westminster Term of my sophomore year. It’s about the false dichotomy between the Book of Nature and the Book of Scripture.

WORSHIP IN THE WILDS

I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

-Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Windhover—To Christ our Lord

Have you heard, child? The snow melts and the rocks are naked and the earth begins to smell again. The trees flower, and the conductor of the birds takes up his baton again. A cockamamie color stains the hills. The moss is back from wherever it disappeared to, and the ferns are shooting up.

We have heard the rumors, and we are sick of books. We try to work, but we can’t ignore the whispering for long. She’s whispering to us with the rain. I’m reading next to the window and she reaches a thin arm and turns my chin away from my book and toward the world beyond. Now she is a solemn girl in a gray frock, but her teeth are pointed when she smiles. She patters on the windows and tells us that carnivál is coming. She will paint herself green and gold, with a ring of crocus around her neck and hyacinths in her hair.

We can’t escape spring, she coaxes too sweetly. She lures us out into the wild, because she is a handmaiden and a serving girl to the Ruler of that place. Wilson has been out here longer than any of us. He is the leader when we hear a bear, startle a rattlesnake, or lose our way. Zach goes off on his own when we are in the woods. His thoughts resonate best when he lets the trees frame the questions. Tali tries to bring the wilds back with her. One hand, one level of her thought, is always fidgeting for them. She pulls us back to them whenever she can, because they’ve captured her soul. She’s a handmaiden, too, and now the spring rains tempt us all together. I remember, a year ago, when we first succumbed.

The Mountain — Spring in the wilds is fresh, piney venom. When I first smelled it in the air, the mountain captained my thoughts. The gradual slope to the mountain’s rounded cap was white even in mid-May. The girl in the gray frock was a lavish pusher, and the rain was her fix. She had hooked me by then. She was raining wisdom on me all that spring.

Finals were done, and we escaped. We took the Jeep out of town, down gravel ribbons into the woods and then out and above them. The pastures on the foothills were flying spring’s brilliant ensign. We stopped to make friends with a few horses on our way up. They were content, despite the rain and puddles, because their grass was young and inexhaustible. On the mountain, there was gasping snow. It was wet, heavy, tired, and dirty, waiting exhaustedly for the sun to rapture it up and fling it on some foreign land in transfigured form.

The snow kept us from continuing up. The mountain was still fermenting fresh liqueur in its snowy casket, and we would have to return when it was brewed. Besides, our lady was calling to us from somewhere else, behind drizzled veils, and we were faithful knights errant. So we quested farther afield, exploring spring’s new kingdom in fields and forests.

Kamiak Butte –A massive tree had fallen, and we climbed it sideways, pretending that we were daredevils. We watched the sun and the clouds dance as we ascended the trail. It was steep and slippery. Below us after each turn lay the Palouse, God’s bumpy golf course. At the top, where the rocks had broken through the mountain-skin, we sat and talked about the changedness of things.

At Kamiak, I realized that I did not have to choose between learning from books and learning from the wilds. Nothing I learned was true unless I found it both in books and in the forest. The mountain and the butte helped me to take the words in my mind, in long strings from when I had read them, and draw them out and lay them down in the earth. The things I learned worked in the wilds. I could worship there. The trees and the river were a church just like mine, and the bark was a new braille full of wisdom. The girl in the gray dress stood behind a tree and smiled as I thought these things through.

It has been a year since I learned. I learned to heed the rain’s whispers and walk out among them and worship in the wilds. But I don’t understand the God of the wilderness like I thought. The more I grasp at His meaning, the more it slips away. Why? I can only go out again into the pines and try to find an answer. I am learning to be an old soul. Only a forest will show me how. Only an old forest.

Idler’s Rest — The pines here are virgin. They reach up and curve over and touch, and a creek bed runs through it. The trees are old now, and falling. The park men piece them out and move them off the paths. They are pews and a chickadee song is the prelude. This forest is a temple to its creator, and we are here to learn and worship.

Everything is hushed. My doubts about the wilderness God are silenced too, as if I were thinking too loudly and the girl whispered in my ear, shhhhh, listen. There are threads here that wind back to the Giver who wove this wood. Idler’s Rest is a few threads in a tapestry, which if we could hold it in our minds would roll out and reveal to us secret things of God. But our minds would break, like a house would if the floors pushed out in all directions at once.

We can only worm our fingers into the weave and clutch at a few threads. That is what we do here. We tramp through the forest thinking that over the next hill will be the wise hart (the hart Solomon yearned for and was given).

Once at the edge of the Rest, past the verge of the trees, I saw a great light, and I thought the Lord had come down. I ran towards it, and into a snowy field, so brilliant in the sun that it stung my eyes to tears. I did not see the Lord. I should have known. The mountains and the hills, though they yearned for it, had not yet broken out in song, and the trees, though they tried with every breeze, could not clap their hands.

I was ready to go, then. I was ready for the world to be rolled up and shaken out. I realized that though the clouds have not yet been drawn back for the Lord’s entrance, the moment I stepped into the field was closer to the Resurrection than the last. This spring is closer to Him than the last. The girl who tempts people into the wilds is growing in the nurture and admonition of a wild and loving God. He is so magnificent and vital that even as the stone was rolling into place, grass blades from a new world grew up between His tortured fingers. And we are hurtling, we are galloping, we are rushing through the forests toward His arms.

Idler’s Rest whispered these things to me. I was there and I touched the trees and the dirt and I heard those words, or I heard the things that hide behind those words. The wilds are an oaken cask that the gray-clad girl guards, full of mysteries that will be broached at the beginning of the next age of the Earth.

One mystery I know already: the Wilderness God is working with His trowel to make a garden; He is green-thumbed. Rivers are the veins in His hand, and a lake is a piece of his robe. He does not reveal Himself yet because He is working hard, and we are working hard, bringing the city and the garden and the wilds together, and making them bow their knees. The girl in gray has bowed already. Now she is painted bright and sings sun and water, earth and sky.

One day, we will be exploring, and we will run into a field and the sun will be brilliant and the Lord will be there. Tali will pick up a flower and Wilson will climb a tree. Zach will take a walk and I will lie in the grass. Until that day, we must find meadows in which to turn and turn until we fall down and laugh and cannot stand.

The Gullwing

Tags

automobiles, gullwing mercedes, mercedes

This is a shocking, beautiful car. The Gullwing Mercedes was one of the most successful race cars of all time. Picasso had one, even though he didn’t have a license, because it was so beautiful. Sir Stirling Moss made one of the greatest drives in history at the 1955 Mille Miglia in an open-topped version of this car. The man in this video cherishes his Mercedes, and I can see why. I loved these as a child just like he did. Maybe he’ll pass his along to me.

God in heaven, listen to that engine.

Neither Left nor Right

Tags

charity, christian politics, christian thought, left and right, ministries of mercy, timothy keller

Tim Keller’s thoughts on Christians and the parties.

The ideology of the Left believes big government and social reform will solve social ills, while the Right believes big business and economic growth will do it. The Left expects a citizen to be held legally accountable for the use of his wealth, but totally autonomous in other areas, such as sexual morality. The Right expects a citizen to be held legally accountable in areas of personal morality, but totally autonomous in the use of wealth. The North American “idol” – radical individualism – lies beneath both ideologies. A Christian sees either “solution” as fundamentally humanistic and simplistic.

The causes of our worsening social problems are far more complex than either the secularists of the Right or Left understand. We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but with powers and principalities! We have seen there is great social injustice – racial prejudice, greed, avarice – by those with the greatest wealth in the country (and sadly, within the evangelical church itself.) At the same time, there is a general breakdown of order – of the family and the morals of the nation. There is more premarital sex (and thus, there are more unwed mothers), more divorce, child neglect and abuse, and crime. Neither a simple redistribution of wealth nor simple economic growth and prosperity can mend broken families; nor can they turn low-skilled mothers into engineers and technicians.

Only the church can minister to the whole person. Only the gospel understands that sin has ruined us both individually and socially. We cannot be viewed individualistically (as the capitalists do) or collectivistically (as the Communists do) but related to God. Only Christians, armed with the Word and Spirit, planning and working to spread the kingdom and righteousness of Christ, can transform a nation as well as a neighborhood as well as a broken heart.

Ministries of Mercy, Timothy J. Keller, P&R Publishing, 1997, pg. 26. (via Tried with Fire)

The Church is Feminine, not Effeminate

Tags

christianity, Church, complementarian, Doug Wilson, effeminacy, femininity, masculinity

Pastor Doug Wilson is a great and good man, and that doesn’t prevent him from hitting the wrong tone on important issues. In this post, he properly diagnoses a problem in the church: effeminate services with weak men, wretched music, led behind the scenes by women who are strong in the wrong way. He’s getting this from a book that I’ve looked into and found to be quite solid, Leon Podles’ The Church Impotent. Thank you, Pastor, and amen.

However, the original post made me a little queasy. Reading it again, I see it’s meant to me humorous, but people didn’t take it that way. Frankly, that’s because it wasn’t particularly funny. It was pretty dark satire. Here’s an excerpt:

Your worship service and church community might be effeminate if . . .

….

2. Your music minister is more concerned that the choir trills their r’s correctly than that they fill the sanctuary with loud sounds of battle;

3. One of the ministerial staff has taken to wearing a clerical collar and a powder pink shirt, and no one on the session has the courage to tell him that he looks like a thirteen-year-old boy with rosy cheeks, as painted by Norman Rockwell;

4. The worship team gravitates toward “Jesus is my girlfriend” songs, and their facial expressions while up front are those of guys in the backseats of their cars, having just gotten to second base with their actual girlfriends[.]

Pastor Wilson is talking about a real problem, to an audience that includes people who are propagating the problem in a tone that seems calculated merely to raise their ire, not bring them to repentance. I think satire was the wrong approach. These are lazy generalizations about the Church at large, not actual practices, such as female elders, etc.

There were some concerned and angry responses from respectable men in the Christian community, and now Pastor Wilson has come up with this post, which is better in every way and sheds light on the parts masculinity and femininity play in the Church.

First, effeminacy and femininity are not synonyms. When I say that worship services have become effeminate, I am not saying that that they have become feminine. They have actually ceased being feminine (but more on this later). Feminine characteristics are God-given, and in their assigned place, they are a great glory, as terrible as an army with banners. But when feminine characteristics are falsely adopted by someone who has no claim or title to them, then that is effeminate.

The same principle runs the other way. When a woman adopts certain masculine prerogatives, putting on the gear of a warrior, let us say (Dt. 22:5), then this is grotesque. But to say it is grotesque is not to say that the same thing applies when a man who puts on the gear of a warrior. It would be grotesque for him not to.

Second, there is a difference between corporate piety and individual piety. In the first paragraph of my original post, I recommended the book The Church Impotent by Leon Podles. This particular point is a central theme of his book. The Church is the bride of Christ (Eph. 5:23), and is in the process of adorning herself, as a bride does for her husband (Rev. 21:2). Podles points out that a fatal step was taken (by Bernard of Clairvaux) when expressions of corporate piety became normative for expressions of individual piety. The Church can and must adorn herself as a bride. Our corporate identity is feminine. But if an individual man attempts to replicate that identity in his personal devotions, two bad things can happen. The first is that he finds he can step right into such role, no prob, and presto, we have ourselves a new worship leader. The second problem is that the cultivation of this demeanor is so alien to how God made him that he concludes that the Christian faith must not be for him. This is all the result of a fundamental confusion about the relationship of corporate identity to individual identity.

I had never really considered this before. Together, we are the bride. We are feminine, and we submit to our husband the Lifegiver. But individually, we are men, and we approach God as…sons? I’m assuming so, since that is our relationship to God the Father. So, Wilson’s beef with high-voiced worship leaders is one part ad hominem and two parts substantive criticism: they think effeminacy, not femininity, is called for in worship, and in private life, instead of masculinity.

I come from a church that is wildly different from the make-believe effeminate congregation Wilson satirizes, but it still falls into the ditch he describes. I think that’s why his post rubbed me the wrong way: yes, this problem exists, and heck no, that is NOT how it manifests itself in the real world. What use is it to diagnose a cancer if you think it takes the form of purple spots on the elbow?

Ultimately, Wilson’s second post filleth up and runneth over with wisdom, which balances the rather arid nature of his previous screed. Doesn’t that tell us something about Christian give-and-take, about the Blogosphere? It’s so easy to write quickly and hit ‘Publish’ before we ought, and to attract a swarm of infuriated bloggers with the same problem. It’s not easy to make peace with the hornets after taking a swing at their nest (and calling them bees, to boot), but that’s what Wilson does. Christians should learn from him.

We should also learn from him that we are feminine together, because we serve the ultimate masculine God, and that we as men are masculine, and our sisters are feminine individually because we are sons and daughters of the High King, the Holy One of Israel. He has given us sex and sexual identity to image His eternal, ever-forgiving marriage to us, and His everlasting adoption covenant with us. Praise be to the Lord, the God of Israel!

A Paean to the Automobile

Beautiful cars, soundtrack by Radiohead. Amen.

Why Real Men Bed the Same Woman Every Night

Tags

christian man, christian marriage, joffre the giant, real men, remy wilkins

My theology teacher once told us that sex is more amazing for Christians than for anyone else. The reason is that Christians sacrifice themselves for each other. We put ourselves last. In love, we should seek our spouses’ happiness. In sex, we should seek our spouse’s pleasure above our own. Two people who are giving of themselves and devoting themselves wholeheartedly to each other will have more, fuller, truer intimacy than a man and a woman who seek brute physical gratification as quickly as possible. These words from Remy Wilkins on this awesome blog should encourage those of us who are still single and painfully abstinent to press on: the final goal could not be more worthwhile. Marriage is the best picture we have of the relationship that defines the world, that of Christ and His church. (Post title via Toby Sumpter).

We have bought into certain lies that are flimsy as our pick-up lines. One of the most absurd is thinking that the more women you sleep with means more sexual skills, that more women equals more experience. Nothing could be further from the truth. Consider the  man who declares his love of cities, all cities and talks about his vast knowledge of cities. He spends the night in a different city one day after the next. He gets off the bus, buys a t-shirt, notches his belt and hops back on the bus. He is suppose to be a grand lover of cities? Rather his is the most worthless of tourists, he’s the doofus in the fannypack mugging in front of every giftshop across the nation. He knows nothing of the city, does not love any city at all, but rather he loves to see his greasy unshaven mug in different settings each  night. The man that says he knows New York City because he was once laid-over there one rainy insignificant night is a great fool.

So too the lothario, who beds women with tricks and well worn moves. He’s never had to please a woman night after night. He can only pick up women at the watering hole looking to be watered, the lowhanging fruit. A real man knows how to please the woman who’s dealt with screaming kids all day, who went through the day with peanutbutter in her hair, wearing sweatpants and grannypanties because the laundry is stacked to highheaven. A real man can’t rely on a couple of cheap sex tricks to please a woman, running the same two plays on an unsuspecting defense, a real man has to play the same team night after night and the things that worked last night aren’t good enough for today. Real men bed the same woman every night keeping it new and fresh and exciting. Lotharios, in the extremity of their lameness, have so little game they have to move from woman to woman with their smoke, mirrors and hand dancing.

Chapel at Rio Roca Ranch

Tags

chapel, rio roca ranch

Chapel at Rio Roca Ranch // Maurice Jennings + Walter Jennings Architects // Texas

Easter is Kingdomtide

Tags

christianity, easter, Kingdomtide, postmillenialism, resurrection

You know, if Christ really rose, and if He really made the world better, then this Easter is the best day anyone has yet seen. And tomorrow will be better, and the next day, and so on until the end of time. –Z.A.W.

Easter is the greatest day of the year, because it is a swell in the kingdomtide.

We use a long word for this ultimate optimism: postmillennialism. We believe that Christ came, that He died, that He rose again—so do all Christians. But what did the Rising mean? We think He began something in Bethlehem, completed it at Pentecost, and two thousand years later we live in a better world–in the best world that has yet been.

But, you say, we sinned. The world is full of the weeping of the broken—I weep, I am broken. But the Father, the Son, and the Spirit have encompassed our suffering. The suffering of Jesus on the cross is big and broad enough to take all ours away. It is great enough to draw all who are willing to the unfathomed love and unutterable mercy of our God.

Dostoevsky:

I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, for all the blood that they’ve shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened.

Jesus shouted to the world: IF ANYONE IS THIRSTY, LET HIM COME TO ME AND DRINK. And they will come, and they will drink, and they have been for a thousand generations, and they will until the Son comes and balms all wounds and wipes all tears away. The sower in the field will be overtaken by the reaper, so quick and fertile will be the soil. And because this is happening every day, in every moment, whether we see it or not, the world is being annexed by the King more every day.

It is Eastertide. We have filled our bellies and our hearts brim full with the Gospel light on this Day of Days. Now we must go out and make the world shake with the name of its ruler. We must preach Christ, crucified and risen, to the nations. We must be washed clean to do this. We must drink the water, the blood, and eat the bread of the Lamb.

We had brunch amid the tombs today, and talked about the Coming. We joked how the prideful in their mausoleums would rattle the chains until an angel led them sheepishly out, and how the humble beneath simple stones will rise, freed from dust, into glory. Once, I thought graveyards were landfills. Now I know they are gardens.

Garden-Gospel    – m. m. b.

This is the Garden-Gospel

And we serve a Green-Thumbed God.

We have been planted like lilies,

And we will wear white vestments

as they.

We will reach with stamen and steeple

Unto Him, Unto the Lifegiver.

He is water and bread for our roots

Wine for our fruits

And sun and shade for seasons.

We are His, we blooms.

We will dry.

Germination is a long time coming.

We will shoot up once again.

Green tendrils, bleary heads

ensorcelled, once again

by light. Entrapped,

Once more, by sunsoilearthwind Holy God Holy Son Holy Ghost -

amen.

Seven Stanzas at Easter by John Updike

Tags

easter, john updike, poetry, resurrection, risen lord

Make no mistake: if he rose at all
It was as His body;
If the cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit,
The amino acids rekindle,
The Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
Each soft spring recurrent;
It was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the
Eleven apostles;
It was as His flesh; ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes
The same valved heart
That-pierced-died, withered, paused, and then regathered
Out of enduring Might
New strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,
Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded
Credulity of earlier ages:
Let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
Not a stone in a story,
But the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of
Time will eclipse for each of us
The wide light of day.

And if we have an angel at the tomb,
Make it a real angel,
Weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in
The dawn light, robed in real linen
Spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
For our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
Lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed
By the miracle,
And crushed by remonstrance.

(via Justin Taylor)

You Are Afraid; You Are Going to Die

Tags

christian men, good friday, repentance, toby sumpter

Pastor Toby Sumpter of Trinity Reformed Church on the reasons for repentance: love and fear. Pastor Sumpter is a great and good man and his sermons have helped me break down the walls of sin in my life and conquer the strongholds of worldliness that keep me from serving God. Only through Christ, only through love can we come to true repentance. The goodness of God brings us to repentance. The goodness of God brings us to the goodness of God. Please, read the whole thing. If you are a true man or woman, put away fear and throw yourself upon the freely offered love. It will be the most painful and the most glorious thing you will ever do. Read the whole thing HERE.

But why do we repent? Why do we ask for forgiveness? Why do we apologize? Why do we want to go make it right?

There are ultimately only two possible answers to that question. In this world, there are really only two motivators, only two engines that drive every human soul. There is the way of fear and the way of love. The engine of fear drives people to try to obey, to try to do what’s right because they are afraid of the consequences, afraid of what people might think, afraid of pain, afraid of shame, afraid of embarrassment, afraid of being rejected, afraid of losing friends or loved ones, afraid of being alone, afraid of sickness, afraid of disease, and ultimately this is because people are afraid of death (Heb. 2:15). But this kind of fear is ultimately selfish and self-serving, and so it must collapse back onto itself. This kind of fear operates in order to protect self, in order to protect yourself from those fears. But selfishness is always self-defeating. Jesus says that those who try to save their lives will lose them. Those who try to protect themselves will be destroyed. This is because selfishness is actually a thick blindness, and this means that for all the thrashing about, you’re still on a hook that’s drawing you to your death. You’re a lousy protector, a lousy god, and you’re still going to die. And thus, fear begets more fear.

……

It’s the goodness of God that drives us to repentance. It’s the goodness of God that drives us back to the Father who awaits us with open arms. It’s the insistent, stubborn, relentless goodness of God that teaches us to defy our fears, to defy our circumstances, to defy the lies and lusts that seduce us and imprison us. It’s the goodness of God that wakes us up with stomach full of the pods fed to pigs; it’s the goodness of God that wakes us up and reminds us of the goodness in our Father’s house.

Taking Part in Europe

Tags

france, rod dreher, truman capote

Rod Dreher, one of my favorite bloggers, is leaving for Paris for a few days. He is going with his niece, the daughter of his late sister Ruth. He is writing a book about her life, and his trip to France with Hannah will become the closing chapter. In preparation for this trip, he shared something by Truman Capote, about whom I knew nothing and now want to know something.

In London a young artist said to me, “How wonderful it must be for an American traveling in Europe the first time; you can never be a part of it, so none of the pain is yours, you will never have to endure it — yes, for you there is only the beauty.”

Not understanding what he meant, I resented this; but later, after some months in France and Italy, I saw that he was right: I was not a part of Europe, I never would be. Safe, I could leave when I wanted to, and for me there was only the honeyed, hallowed air of beauty. But it was not so wonderful as the young man had imagined: it was desperate to feel that one could never be a part of moments so moving, that always one would be isolated from this landscape and these people; and then gradually I realized I did not have to be a part of it: rather, it could be a part of me. The sudden garden, opera night, wild children snatching flowers and running up a darkening street, a wreath for the dead and nuns in noon light, music from the piazza, a Paris pianola and fireworks on La Grande Nuit, the heart-shaking surprise of mountain visions and water views (lakes like green wine in the chalice of volcanoes, the Mediterranean flickering at the bottoms of cliffs), forsaken far-off towers falling in twilight and candles igniting the jeweled corpse of St. Zeno of Verona — all a part of me, elements for the making of my own perspective.

It almost always feels prideful to talk about the blessings of foreign travel. It is something that comparatively few people do in my circles; they think it is a luxury. Perhaps it is, but it taught me many lessons. Travel, Twain said, is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness. I remember being teased about going to France; people said things like, “Are they still surrendering over there?” No one visits France for the politics.

Everyone visits France for its great natural beauty, its exceptional food, and, if they go about it rightly, for the reasons Twain mentioned. What better way is there to understand the world wider than the States than experiencing it? I intend to travel as much as I can, because as Capote relates, the whole place is like a treasure box of lessons about the world.