Sehnsucht or The Night I Shattered

Just a heads up: In this post I am going to be talking about queerness, about God, and about my own emotional/mental health experience in relation to those subjects. There will also be some C.S. Lewis.

I want to get back to blogging regularly. I am not going to promise that that will happen but it might. One thing that has been in the way of frequent posting over the last few years was the fact that I was not out about my identity. I have known I was trans since mid 2017 or so but for three and a half years I had this idea that I could just know that I am a woman but continue to live a life pretending to be a man. There  were reasons I tried to do that, but it didn't work. During that time though, I did not think of trans-ness as a bad thing, and certainly not as something sinful or evil, mostly I think I just thought of it as excessively inconvenient to the life I wanted to have. The result was that I had a lot of thoughts about how transness and queerness interacted with or shone light on the rest of my life and the ideas I was playing around with. I tried to write some of those thoughts into blog posts but I just couldn't bring myself to write as though I were removed or detached from them. So mostly I didn't write them at all.

And now I am out and there is nothing really stopping me from getting to work on this backlog of ideas and thoughts I have been kicking around for four years. So here we go:

In his sermon The Weight of Glory Lewis (without using the term) describes the experience of sehnsucht: 

In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both.

Now in The Weight of Glory, as well as in the many other parts of his writing where Lewis explores this experience, Lewis identifies it with the desire for God and usually ties it to an apologetic argument. In fact I find the use of sehnsucht as a  broader theological fact far more interesting than as a bit of apologetics. Still, sehnsucht does an admirable job of describing a certain invaluable facet of my experience of God. 

But theology, much less Christian apologetics, is not really what I want to write about today. I promised queer content and I intend to deliver.

Ashley and I watched a movie a few weeks ago. It was Tick Tick Boom and for the purposes of this story I only need to say that it is a musical about Jonathan Larson, the man who wrote Rent, and that the AIDS epidemic features heavily as the context for the musical. After the movie we started getting ready for bed. I wandered into the bathroom and, still discussing the movie but intertwined with other parts of our lives in that way that we do after a compelling film, Ashley commented to me "...that's the thing, you actually really want to be queer". It staggered me—literally. To my recollection I have never physically staggered just from hearing something before, I had always though it was more of a metaphor. That night those words made my knees go loose for a second and I had to catch the towel bar to keep from falling. 

It actually took a few minutes for my mind to catch up with my body (my subconscious). My immediate response was something along the lines of "wow that is definitely true...wow" but as we kept talking I realized I was grinning like a fool. Then I was feeling overwhelmed. I started to brush my teeth but just as I was putting toothpaste on my brush a great, indistinct something came rushing towards a barrier in my mind that I hadn't known existed. For a second I saw it looming and gasped "Oh..it's going to happen" then it hit and I shattered.

I have mentioned this before but I grew up Evangelical. That means a lot of things for who I am and how I experience the world, and one of those things is that I grew up believing that queerness is sinful. It was a nebulous belief at first. I didn't know what "gay" meant until I was accused of being it at a summer camp once—I had been sitting with my legs crossed in a way that I only later found is associated with femininity in US culture—but somewhere around middle school my Christian education ensured that I found out about homosexuality and that it was sinful.

At the same time I was starting to notice a particular note that would appear in certain stories, or around some people. In Surprised by Joy Lewis, again discussing sehsucht, says that one of his early experiences of it was the longing for something he called "northernness": 

Pure “Northernness” engulfed me: a vision of huge, clear spaces hanging above the Atlantic in the endless twilight of Northern summer, remoteness, severity… and almost at the same moment I knew that I had met this before, long, long ago. …And with that plunge back into my own past, there arose at once, almost like heartbreak, the memory of Joy itself, the knowledge that I had once had what I had now lacked for years, that I was returning at last from exile and desert lands to my own country, and the distance of the Twilight of the Gods and the distance of my own past Joy, both unattainable, flowed together in a single, unendurable sense of desire and loss 

That thrill was something I started to treasure and to look for and for a while it existed in me together with the evangelical belief about the sinfulness of queerness without the two meeting... for a while. It couldn't last though; the draw I felt towards queerness—the fascination or longing—eventually showed itself to be too often present in the company of the homosexuality I had learned to call sin. Now this was confusing at first; Evangelical children are not, as a rule, taught about umbrella concepts or the nuanced and complicated ways in which trans identities overlap and differ from sexual orientation. I knew I wanted to be a girl and I knew I wasn't into guys, and I knew homosexuality was sinful and I knew I was drawn to this thing and knew that the thing often showed up around homosexuality and it was all just very confusing. The result though was that I distanced myself from that longing. I told myself it was sinful, or at least that it would lead to sin, and I worked hard to mimic the reactions to of those around me. "This—This thing," I told myself "is not for me, it is not about me, it is bad for me".

A friend of mine posted recently that post-Evangelicals have a complicated relationship with our own desires because we are taught that we need to reject our desires and replace them with God's desires. It takes a long time to figure out—and longer to integrate—that what that has often meant is that we need to replace the desires God has actually given us with the desires that straight white male Church leaders have for us. I think about that a lot.

Eventually I stopped believing that queerness is sinful. 

For a while I thought that it might be a sort of tragedy that befell some people, but that didn't last long. I came to think, then accept, then believe, and now I know, that queerness is beautiful and holy. 

But the thing about growing up, the thing about our lives being a story in time, is that I could stop believing that queerness is sinful without remembering why I had decided that it is not for me, not about me. Queerness was beautiful but I was not queer. And of course that is the other thing: I could decide as a 12 year old that queerness was not about me but I was never able to stop the longing for queerness. The soul broken off from itself cannot stop wanting to be made whole no matter how well we bandage it. 

I was magnetically drawn to queerness but I was a cis-het dude; there was no way for me to connect. Not that I didn't try; I read books about queer people and queer theory, I studied LGBTQ+ history, I sponsored my high school's GSA, I made friends with LGBTQ+ people, I advocated, I watched movies, I went to pride parades, I volunteered, I debated with people online, I wrote blog posts, I got kicked out of my church. And it was all satisfying—sort of; it all scratched at an itch—but though a heavy coat. Anyway though, it didn't matter; here was a community that was on my heart—a community whose holiness I could see even if so many Christians around me couldn't seem to—and I was going to atone for my past and, far more importantly, I was going to be towards them the way we all should. I wanted to badly to be a good ally. I think about that a lot.

Eventually I stopped believing that I was cis or het.

For three and a half years I lived in this in-between space: publicly a cis-het guy and knowing myself to be a trans lesbian. But see the thing about how we develop as people, about our lives being a story in time, is that I could stop thinking I was a straight man without remembering, or at least without knowing what that meant for who I am. I wanted to be part of the trans community; "You are valid" is a phrase I saw applied to me and to people like me all the time. And it was true, and it is true, and every trans person is who they are and I could still struggle to ever really feel like that was true. 

That was the stage in my life where I stopped crying. I have never been a really big crier, but I haven't worked to avoid it either. There is this thing that happens when people think you are a boy. From the time you are little you get told in a million loud and quiet ways that growing up means getting control of your emotions; you need to master them. Then if you are the sort of person that most people tend to assume is a boy, in you teens you get these floods of testosterone. My experience on testosterone (and I have heard similar things from other people who have been on the hormone, both voluntarily and involuntarily) is that it makes your anger super accessible. I have seen this overstated as though T turns people into hulk-esque rage-beasts but it is really more like anger is one book on your shelf of emotions and T just pushes it out a little so that it's easier to grab. But, you see, this becomes kind of a whole thing for people who believe we have to master our emotions because now the consequences of not mastering them is that people get hurt, maybe people we like or even love. There is a reason that self-control is a virtue and it isn't a bad reason. And I did have a temper and I did have to learn to control it. 

Anyway I got good at controlling my anger. Then I learned a neat trick. It turns out that if you try, you can turn nearly any negative emotion into anger. Sadness, depression, shame, and embarrassment can all be turned into anger. I developed a go-to method for handling negative emotions: turn them into anger and then control the anger. During those three years I would sing the virtue of my method. "Anger," I would say " is the only negative emotion that moves you forward. I turn my sadness into anger because it drives me to change the circumstances that made me sad." 

I am now convinced that this is a perspective which is really only available to the sort of white men who can comfortably assume that their own channeled anger will result in positive change in their circumstances; it often doesn't work like that for the rest of us. I mean let's be real, it didn't work that way for me. I had plenty to be angry about and I channeled it into doing all sorts of good things but nothing I was willing to do was going to change the pain of not being myself.

The thing nobody warned me about (I mean culture sort of warned me about it but not in that "this applies to you" sort of way that might have worked) is that turning your negative emotions into something else is called numbing; really that's any form of trying to not experience your negative emotions. And you can't selectively numb. 

So I stopped crying. Then I stopped really laughing. I really missed it too. I would think about it a lot.

Eventually I stopped believing I could save the life I had built by pretending to be something I wasn't. Eventually I realized that the attempt to be him was going to destroy everything I wanted for him. 

And I told my wife that I am trans—I am a woman; and I told my family that I am trans—I am a woman; and I told the world that I am trans—I am a woman. I started laughing again about three months after I told Ashley. But I still didn't cry; I still couldn't cry. 

See the thing about healing, the thing about growing, the thing about sewing back on the chunk of your soul that got torn away the day you realized that you couldn't be—weren't—the girl you knew you were* is that it takes time. Imagine sewing a hand back on after it has been severed for 39 years. You can connect things back together—the skin, the bones, the muscles, the blood vessels—but until the nerves connect, you aren't going to be feeling much from that hand. But what if those nerves heal too? What if they grown back together. What if your wife says from the other room "...that's the thing, you actually really want to be queer"? 

And then your body knows that you are queer and that you are healing a step before you conscious mind does. And then you are about to integrate with your own experience—the experiences you were always having and never letting yourself have because you couldn't only now you could and now you did and here it comes, here it comes, here it comes. And then the toothbrush clatters into the sink and then you are crumpled up on the bathroom floor sobbing and you don't know why yet but you are starting to know why and you already always have known but you are also about to find out. And then there is snot and there are tears and your wife is holding you while you shake and you weep because life cannot be this good, and your own self cannot contain this much beauty. But it does and it already always has and now you know that—only it isn't that you know that, it is that you are knowing it right now. 

And then I was breathing and laughing and crying a little less and I wanted to tell Ashley how good this was and how grateful I am and we moved from the bathroom floor to the couch and she grabbed some tissues on the way and I opened my mouth and then the next wave hit and I was always already queer and I was always already everything that I had only known from behind glass and under the gauze that I had wrapped around my mind and then there was no them in queerness there was us. And every emotion I had had about them were altogether in one moment emotions I had already had/was having/will have about us. And of course I am sobbing again, I am shattered but I am born and breathing and held and whole.

So anyway yes. Sehnsucht. That is a little bit what I think it means to yearn for being united with God.

I am me now.

*Ok it is a lot more complicated then "I knew". I have written a lot about that Here and Here

Delight as a Spiritual Discipline

Everyone raised his hand to pick the fruit he best liked the look of, and then everyone paused for a second. This fruit was so beautiful that each felt "It can't be meant for me . . . surely we're not allowed to pluck it."

It's all right," said Peter. "I know what we're all thinking. But I'm sure, quite sure, we needn't. I've a feeling we've got to the country where everything is allowed."

"Here goes, then!" said Eustace. And they all began to eat.

What was the fruit like? Unfortunately no one can describe a taste. All I can say is that, compared with those fruits, the freshest grapefruit you've ever eaten was dull, and the juiciest orange was dry, and the most melting pear was hard and woody, and the sweetest wild strawberry was sour. And there were no seeds or stones, and no wasps." 

-C.S. Lewis The Last Battle

I turned thirty five the other day and my family bought me a pair of Enchroma glasses for my birthday. In case you haven't watched one of their videos online yet, Enchroma glasses correct a degree of red-green colorblindness for those who have the condition. I had watched the videos and was really excited when I opened the box. The idea that I would be suddenly gaining access to a world that everyone else experiences all the time was somewhere between exhilarating and terrifying. Now my color blindness is pretty mild. I don't have any trouble with stoplights and I am rarely wrong about any given color (purple is my undoing—I just can't see the red in it so I almost always think it is dark blue). But for my entire life, people have been going on about sunsets and autumn leaves in a way that has convinced me that there really must be something to them even though they generally leave me flat (I experience most sunsets as a fairly drab wash of bleached pastels). Now it was suddenly possible that I would be swept into new beauty—beauty which I could literally not imagine. At the same time, I was aware of the fact that the classes don't work for everyone ("individual results will vary") and the fear of disappointment was almost as keen as the hope for I-knew-not-what-exactly.

Without leaving you in suspense: they worked. At least they make a significant difference in the way I see the world around me. I can't say that with them I see the world as though I weren't colorblind since I don't know what the world looks like through your eyes. But when I wear these glasses purple becomes a whole thing. Also nobody ever told me that green has this much variety to it. I spent the first hours after I got the glasses just wandering around with a stupid grin on my face being distracted by the grass, the spring leaves, and the sky. There is one particular tree just across the street, which I am now particularly taken by. I think the underside of each leaf is a different shade of green from the topside (I hadn't realized it before) so when I look at that tree from all the way across the street, I can still make out each individual leaf, even thought they are all just green. My distance vision is perfectly fine, but I had never seen more than an indistinct blob-with-lines above the trunk before.

I think it must be like hearing harmony for the first time after a life of knowing only the melody. The world is simply more vibrant, more deep, more subtle, more complex, more real than I ever imagined it was.

This experience has left me thinking more and more about the overlapping concepts of delight, longing, and joy. Historically, Christianity has tended to be associated with the idea of asceticism and discipline. The ten commandments are generally thought of as negatives sorts of commands (don't do this, that, and the other), the whole concept of holiness in Christian teaching is popularly understood to be a list of things people are supposed to not do in order to avoid contaminating their moral purity, as well as a few things we are to do (but which are generally viewed as onerous). We are told that we should be able to find delight in this (the psalms seem to get really excited about obeying "the law") but that doesn't actually tend to jibe with our experience of life all that often. Christian-ing just doesn't come across as that much fun.

And while I know that I have just constructed a straw man, that the "fruit of the Spirit" are all actually beautiful and exciting ways of being, there is a genuine sense that "serious" Christians are those who really embrace a dour sense of suffering and sacrifice.

But. But. But.

That actually doesn't describe the people we read about in the bible. It actually doesn't describe the great saints, it actually doesn't describe the very life of Jesus. Those lives are rich and messy. Those lives are balls-to-the-wall vibrant. We find Jesus laughing and yelling and weeping and partying. In order to be considered for canonization, a saint's life has to show evidence of all of the fruits of the Spirit—joy no less than patience; after all Jesus' great prayer for us was that we would have lives lived to the full—abundant lives.

I think Charles Williams, the Anglican mystic poet-scholar can be of great help here. He (following an older tradition) describes two "ways" of Christianity: the way of negation, and the way of affirmation of images (I have written a bit more about them HERE). The first is the way of the ascetic. In the way of negation, the whole deal is to stop being distracted by all the things which are not God and which cause us to think of God in terms of what we see rather than as the transcendent unknowable. The way of negation tends to focus on knowing God directly; the mystical experience, meditation, and spiritual disciplines like fasting and accountability are hallmarks of the way of negation. The latter, the way of the affirmation of images, attempts to see God "though" the images of god's self in the good world that God has made, and it is worth nothing that the mystics have as much of a propensity to wind up here as as they do in the way of negation; think of St. Francis preaching to the animals, or St. Thomas Aquinas' appreciation for the table and attendant unwillingness to impose his weight on a donkey, these are marks of the way of affirmation. Williams is at pains to remind us that each can become disastrous without the other, that people following the one way need to be reminded not to judge those who follow the other—that, in fact, we need the wisdom and input of those following the other—and that each offers insights the other is likely blind to.

That is all well and good, and I am very much persuaded by Williams' account. But I think it can, and should, be taken a bit farther. I want to suggest that the temperament which is drawn to the way of negation also tends towards a dismissal of the physical as such. In the desire to be united to the Spirit of God there seems to be a strong temptation to deny the goodness of the body, a desire to become mere spirit. This is a dangerous thing. We are spirits but we are not mere spirits, we are body-spirits. We are (to borrow once more from C.S. Lewis) amphibious beings of both body and spirit. The impetus to deny the body can easily become a state of discontent, a state of explaining to God that we were not made as the right sort of being.

For all my love of C.S. Lewis, I believe that one critical mistake he made throughout his eschatology is an over acceptance of neo-Platonism. In neo-Platonic thinking, the only utterly "real" absolute is God (or "The Good") and everything else is an "emanation" from God, with all things becoming less real the further they have "emanated" from the center. This view has a lot to recommend it (you will see echoes of it in the writings of Augustine as well). It has given rise to the whole understanding of heaven as another land, better (more real) than the state of being we currently inhabit and to which we will one day go. The problem is that, at the end of the day, it is not a fundamentally Christian view. The promise Jesus made to us is not that there is a Kingdom of God which we will one day get to go to, it is that there is a Kingdom of God which is, even now, breaking into our own existence. As such, following the way of Jesus does not mean distancing oneself from the world, but growing into people who can first imagine, then partner with God in bringing a greater real-ness, a fuller goodness, to this world. That the old world is passing away and that a new world is being formed, does not mean that we will be transplanted. That new kingdom is being formed under our feet. It is breaking through now. It has been breaking through for two thousand years and will continue to break through until it is fully here and nothing of the old, drab, evil, sinful, broken world is left (I am going to refrain from commenting on the the question of whether there will be one final great push before the Kingdom of God fully comes or whether the entire process will sneak in gradually).

And this is why I believe that delight is a spiritual discipline, one which is far too much ignored and even despised by the western church. The innocent enjoyment of the good world God has made—we cannot forget that even the drab "old world" is shot through with resonant images of the vibrant Kingdom—is a training course in seeing the Kingdom God has made us partners in effecting. To feast, to love, to celebrate, to gaze at the sky in wonder, are all acts of spiritual insight. They are all disciplines. Good sex is as holy—and for many as necessary—as a rigorous fast and laughter is no less godly than lament. In the latter we are reminded that we live in a broken world; in the former, that the broken world is being healed.

It has been observed recently that we need a theology of lament, of loss, that too often our theology is entirely about propositions or about ethical duties—a theology for computers and enlightenment philosophes—too rarely is it about being. I agree with this critique, we do need a theology of lament and loss. We need a theology rooted in Ecclesiastes, Job and the Good Friday. That would give us one critical part of a theology of they way of affirmation. A theology of lament is critical to our capacity to honestly, richly, greet the very real world of which we are a part. But we also need a theology of delight. We need a theology of dancing till we collapse on a hot summer night; a theology of the third beer; of laughing under a string of lights because tomorrow has no hold on us tonight. We need a theology of thick time in thin spaces, a theology of the presence of divine joy in every street lamp and blade of grass. We need a theology of the tinny speaker and the spontaneous sing-along to an 80's anthem, a theology of bluegrass and crickets, a theology of lighting bugs. As much as we need a theology of lament, we need a theology of the eternal moment and the laughing earth, for human flourishing is thing of both laughter and tears.

And I Really Do Mean That

  I divide the causes of human laughter into Joy, Fun, the Joke Proper, and Flippancy. You will see the first among friends and lovers reunited on the eve of a holiday. Among adults some pretext in the way of Jokes is usually provided, but the facility with which the smallest witticisms produce laughter at such a time shows that they are not the real cause. What that real cause is we do not know. Something like it is expressed in much of that detestable art which the humans call Music, and something like it occurs in Heaven—a meaningless acceleration in the rhythm of celestial experience, quite opaque to us. Laughter of this kind does us no good and should always be discouraged. Besides, the phenomenon is of itself disgusting and a direct insult to the realism, dignity, and austerity of Hell.

....
  But flippancy is the best of all. In the first place it is very economical. Only a clever human can make a real Joke about virtue, or indeed about anything else; any of them can be trained to talk as if virtue were funny. Among flippant people the Joke is always assumed to have been made. No one actually makes it; but every serious subject is discussed in a manner which implies that they have already found a ridiculous side to it. If prolonged, the habit of Flippancy builds up around a man the finest armor plating against the Enemy that I know, and it is quite free from the dangers inherent in the other sources of laughter. It is a thousand miles away from joy it deadens, instead of sharpening, the intellect; and it excites no affection between those who practice it.

 The  Senior Demon Screwtape, to his Nephew Wormwood

Transcribed by C.S. Lewis -  The Screwtape Letters

I was thinking about hipsters recently (I promise, I am going somewhere with this) thanks to an article my friend Steven Leyva posted. Specifically, I was been thinking about their use of "irony". The article (by Christy Wampole) deals with the idea terrifically and I do not propose to pirate and reword her observations. What did strike me though, is the similarity between "irony" as a hipster byword (which at the end of the day seems a little more sarcastic than ironic) and Lewis's treatment of flippancy in The Screwtape Letters. Both are ways of hiding and, probably more importantly, both criticism without substance. If Ms. Wampole is correct, the Ironic Hipster is mocking sincerity and the past in precisely the same way that the flippant man is mocking virtue. The Hipster does not tell us what it is that makes mainstream music, media, fashion and culture ridiculous; he simply treats them as though they are.

 Not that there isn't plenty to criticize in practically any culture- there certainly is. But criticism needs to be grounded, I am free to dislike the music and media image of Madonna only as long as I can say why I dislike them. To treat them as "obviously ridiculous" and mock them by becoming ridiculous myself while facetiously wearing or playing them is simple meanness. It is the difference between discernment and bullying. 

 
More serious though, is the relationship that the Ironic Hipster and the Flippant Man have to Joy. One aspect of Joy is that it is profoundly serious. A clever man may be able to make a Joke about virtue in general, it would be very hard indeed to make a good Joke about Joy (possibly something rooted in its use as a name but I'm not sure that even that would work out). But this difficulty does not arise from any intrinsic link between somberness or melancholy and Joy; indeed, Joy is often great fun, rather I am using "serious" to mean something closer to "weighty" or "significant". Joy really matters, and because it matters, it is out of reach for the flippant, insincere or ironic person. For the Flippant Man, sincerity is anathema - it explodes his facade of cleverness, an illusion built on the circular idea that the object of ridicule must be ridiculous because  it is being ridiculed and attended by the impression that the ridiculer is somehow above or better than that which he ridiculed. (If you don't think this is true, have you ever been ashamed of a song, book or movie only because someone else used it as a comparison to something they didn't like "whoa, that was worse than the country muisc"). I think it would be fun to go up to the next hipster I see wearing an Alf t-shirt and exclaim "You like Alf too? Awesome, so few people get how truly great that show was" I think they might be a little ashamed. 

Maybe I am particularly worried because I am generally a rather sincere and occasionally insecure person. I was taken aback a few weeks ago to discover that my high school students think of me as a hipster. On investigation it turned out to have a lot to do with the way I look. I have shoulder length brown hair which I generally keep tied back, I wear large sideburns and a goatee and my usual work attire involves a corduroy cabby hat, a selection of cartoon and comic-book ties, a tweed vest and a pocket watch. I do not really blend in. That said, while I am aware that hipsters often accoutre themselves similarly, we do it for entirely different reasons. I genuinely like Captain America, Bugs Bunny and Dr. Suess (got a 1-fish, 2-fish, red fish, blue fish tie for Christmas), I am a hopeless anglophile and bibliophile and happen to think that people in the 1920's looked really cool. It turns out the hipsters are mocking my style, or at least, the styles I have adopted!

I like sincerity as well. I write because I want to express something profound, I delight in books, music and movies which inspire me to sing, weep and cheer. I want to live an abundant risk-filled life, to drink deep and drain life to the dregs; I want to experience the laughter and sorrow the pain and the mind-shattering Joy. I want to see God and be undone.

Les Miserables is No Lord of the Rings, I Can Tell You That Right Now

   Alright, I just got back from finally seeing Les Miserables and I am happy to say that I was not disappointed. For those of you who don't know, I absolutely love both the musical (Ash and I have seen the stage version 4 times so far) and the book. In fact, for quite a while now, the stage production has been my go to example of how it actually is possible for a book to successfully cross media formats without being diminished.
  Cameron Macintosh and crew managed the same feat in the transition from stage to screen and that is no mean feat. The movie manages to be a bonified movie musical where the temptation for die-hard stage enthusiasts may have been looking for a filmed stage production and the full bore movie people will probably be upset that it is a musical at all (look for words like "melodramatic" as an indication that the review just doesn't actually like musicals).
  What I am generally looking for when a story crosses media formats is the preservation of the stories essential themes and characters. While I love what Peter Jackson did with the visual aspect of Middle Earth, I have to fail him on these points for what he did to Faramir, Treebeard, Saruman, Merry and Pippin and for his utter rejection of Tolkien's understanding of the relative power of good and evil, of the importance of age and wisdom and of the potential beauty of hierarchy. Wether Jackson approved of those things or not, he had no business changing Tolkien's story, his proper business would have been to tell his own story or that of someone else with whom his agreed.
  Les Miserables certainly does make some edits and changes so if you are hoping to see everything you love from the stage production you will be a disappointed there, the Thenardiers get more airtime but less song time (beggar at the feast is dramatically reduced and somewhat reinterpreted while dogs eat the dogs is cut down to a single line),  and while most of the numbers get an appearance, most of them are also shy a verse or so.

  What the movie does is capitalize on its own form. A movie allows for a far lazier imagination than does a stage production (which in turn allows for a lazier imagination than a book) by putting the story in its full setting.  On the stage we get a few props and some great costumes and the rest is up to us when it comes to setting. On stage there are no close ups and we can't really see things like tears so the crew has to find other ways of conveying personality and emotion. In a movie all of these are possible and Les Miserables uses them to the fullest extent. I have read some complaints about extended close-ups on characters as they sing, but I thought these were all incredibly moving (Fantine, ValJean, Javert and Marius all get them). I am not an expert in either stage or film so I will stop there but I was certainly pleased with the use of the new medium.
  The great thing though, is the preservation of Victor Hugo's essential themes and I am reasonably sure that not all of them are popular today. I have always loved the novel's ability to insist that life really is both horrendously tragic and wretched and also painfully beautiful and noble. Where so many stories and philosophies fail by trying to balance the good and evil in life or to choose one over the other and being dominant in our existence, Les Miserables refuses to admit to a watered down compromise and instead sets all the horrors of early 19th century Europe against true sacrifice, repentance, loyalty and nobility (there's a virtue we don't run into much anymore). I wept for both pity and joy while reading it and each of the times I have watched it.
  The victory of mercy over Justice without condemnation is also still present in the movie and comes across quite powerfully. Russel Crowe's Javert, while not a great a singer (I miss the baritone) was certainly well acted. As by brother put it, "this Javert is a lot more sympathetic but no less the villain". Redemption, Grace and the hope of Joy were all present as well.

  I certainly recommend it and hope you all go see it. Then leave me a comment and let me know how you liked it and what I forgot to mention.

The Golden Mask

So this post is one of those "being vulnerable because I am doing something I don't do well" deals. Having a friend who actually is an excellent poet and a circle of friends who write this stuff on a semi regular basis turns out not to have made my brief attempts in the arena any easier. Ah well, I'd better just take the plunge:

The Golden Mask


I tell a tale to turn from unknown truth; too long known
and seek instead a kindergarten color wheel.
Your palette is too subtle; your pastels strained my eye
I never could connect with grays and browns
and purples faded, washed in detail, tassels, minutia,
death.

Instead I long for fairy queens and war,
for melodies, trombones and marching bands.
The cross, the stone, the bread, the cup, the fish
smother my soul with a nuanced earthquake devoid of Flame.

But quiet winds, drifted from English pipes
to children's minds are lightning from the sun,
and dragons and ships and warriors and crowns.
a whispered wardrobe starts a carousel.

Such simple themes must overwhelm my eyes
with red and blue and brassy green and gold
And that fierce name by which I loved Him first
is Love and Death and Joy without renoun.

"My King is coming, riding on a fawn;
I could not love Thee till I loved Aslan"

By - me

Be gentle.

The Love of God

There's a wideness in God's mercy
I cannot find in my own
And He keeps His fire burning
To melt this heart of stone
Keeps me aching with a yearning
Keeps me glad to have been caught
In the reckless raging fury
That they call the love of God

Now I've seen no band of angels
But I've heard the soldiers' songs
Love hangs over them like a banner
Love within them leads them on
To the battle on the journey
And it's never gonna stop
Ever widening their mercies
And the fury of His love

Oh the love of God
And oh the love of God
The love of God

Joy and sorrow are this ocean
And in their every ebb and flow
Now the Lord a door has opened
That all Hell could never close
Here I'm tested and made worthy
Tossed about but lifted up
In the reckless raging fury
That they call the love of God

- Rich Mullins

I don't have much to add, but this one does a good job of summarizing my experiences over the last two years or so.

Sehnsucht - the hunt for Tao?

I think this post will work best as a follow up to my earlier "Do You Like Green Eggs and Ham?". In that one I talked about the importance of desiring God. While I was responding to one of Steven Hamilton's comments, realized that I have quite a bit more to say on the subject of desire so here is at least a little bit of it.

In case you haven't noticed yet, much of my thinking, both in philosophy and theology, has been shaped by C.S. Lewis. It would be odd, therefore, if I didn't agree with what  Lewis has to say about the subject he is most respected for: sehnsucht. Lewis more often referred to this as "Joy", especially in his autobiography Surprised by Joy.  Under either term (I take sehnsucht to be the more philosophical and joy to be the more theological) Lewis is describing a phenomenon which we don't have a really good concept of in the English speaking world. We try to get at it with words like contentment, fulfilledness, ecstasy and happiness but they all fall short; they don't quite get there. Contentment misses that sense of yearning for our far off country, fulfilledness (which my spell check insists is not even a word) isn't passionate enough, ecstasy doesn't get at the sense of coming home, and happiness just isn't strong enough.  Joy, as Lewis describes it is a state well beyond emotion (although there is often emotion in it). The most effective method I have found to convey the meaning of Joy is to refer to how it is sometimes experienced. That thrill of delight when you are two chapters into a new book and you suddenly realize that it is almost exactly the sort of story you have been wanting to read but unable to find; the self forgetful delight when you are surrounded by your oldest, most comfortable friends and the day is long and you have nothing to do but be yourselves; the Monday morning you wake up and realize, really realize, that summer just started and you won't have to go back to school for three months; the tunnel vision in a groom's eye when the music changes and his bride steps into the sanctuary on her daddy's arm. These experiences often contain glimpses of Joy. 

I believe we are made for that eternally. Lewis suggested that Joy was the state of yearning for what God is; that any time we experience even a glimpse of Joy it is because we have caught a ray of the divine slipping into our existence. All of those experiences above can be times when the divine essence suffuses our lives in a slightly more tangible way. I think that we are made to experience it always. 

This is why I find it somewhat confusing when people talk about living a good life so that they can have happiness later (at retirement, in some eternal future etc...). I won't settle for that, I want joy now. I want joy in my doing; in my leading a good life. In fact I want to lead a good life because I believe that a good life is the most joyful kind of life I can lead. On a certain level I suppose this is very selfish; I want to have my cake and eat it too. I insist on living a life which leads to infinite, eternal ecstasy. But that isn't enough for me. I want that same life to be full of joy now, in fact I insist that it be the best kind of life I can possibly live. And I think that it's possible.

Jesus claimed to be the way, the truth and the life. If I focus on the way for a second, maybe it will explain what I am thinking. When Jesus said he is the way, I think that He was talking about much more that a path or a method. I think that Jesus was claiming to me something much more like the Tao incarnate. He was claiming to be (and to exemplify) the kind of life which is in ultimate harmony with the cosmos as the cosmos is designed to be. If that claim is true, then living in Him, and by His example would be both the most joy-filled way to live, and would lead to the highest form of ecstasy available to a person. Thus the desire for joy, sehnsucht, is the desire for Jesus; whether or not we recognize him as the end of that desire.

Let me end by saying what I am not saying. I am not saying that there is no pain, suffering or even anguish in joy. Actually I think that there is and I suspect that that has rather a lot to do with living in a warped and twisted world among warped and twisted persons and having a warped and twisted set of desires myself. I do think that if everyone entered into joy all the time, that suffering would be significantly decreased (Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done on earth and it is in heaven). But I think that joy is an experience, deeper than any thought or emotion and is something which can somehow persist even in the worst of circumstances. 

Does Jesus Change the Flavor of Life?

  As a response to a comment in my last post, I was asked :
 "what is the difference between believing in an absolute Christ versus an illusory Christ if the end result as it pertains to your life and behavior towards fellow man is the same?"
 which I think is an important question and will (I hope) help to clarify my thoughts as to why truth is so important to me. In this response, I will be taking a lot from an essay C.S. Lewis wrote (Man or Rabbit) in which he addresses a similar question. As I sat down to answer the question, I kept wanting to focus on different parts of it. In the end my answer became to complicated for a simple reply and so I have decided to turn int into this post.
  I have several answers and I would like to first list them, and then I will comment a bit on each one. My answers are: "All the difference in the world"; "no real difference at all"; and "that question isn't a question." So let me start with "all the difference in the world":
  Now I might do many of great and sacrificing things for other people if I believe in an illusory Christ, but I will only do them up until I run into a good reason not to. If I believe in an illusory Christ, I do not believe in a person with whom I have a real relationship and to whom I am actually responsible. When the ethics become tough, I can always remind myself that Jesus is a "helpful illusion" which means that I can abandon the illusion just as soon as it ceases to be helpful. If, on the other hand, I believe in an absolute Christ, the questions of "helpful" or "beneficial" will not really come up. When it becomes difficult or unhelpful or seems unwise to show agape to my neighbor, the real Jesus does not let me off the hook. The absolute Jesus is a completely demanding ethical taskmaster (in churches we call this holiness) and He doesn't really seem to care that much about how hard, confusing or demanding it is for me to have agape, He insists that I show it anyway. And this makes sense because an absolute Jesus knows more than me, is wiser than me and is better than me; an illusory Jesus cannot, by definition, be any greater than I am. In fact, if Jesus is an absolutely real person, I ought to expect that I will not understand all of the things He asks me to do.
 My second answer, "no difference at all" begins to lead to my third response but is probably worth the stop along the way. It comes from my assumption that it is actually impossible to believe in something we do not think is actually true. In fact I think that this is supported by the fact that we have a word for when someone tries to believe in something they do not think is actually true, it is called "pretending". So on that level I would have to say that someone can only really believe in an illusory Jesus by making pretend. Either they are pretending that He is real, in which case they will ultimately make the same important life decisions as someone who believes that Jesus doesn't exist at all and refuses to pretend He does, or they are pretending that He is an illusion (I sometimes wonder if many of our post-modern brothers and sisters fall into this category) when they actually believe that He is real and then they will ultimately make the same crucial life decisions as someone who openly professes the absolute reality of Jesus. One final option would be that they believe He does exist but are pretending not to so that they don't have to deal with His existence (James points out that even the devil believes in God). In this situation I suppose that the person would make the same crucial life decisions as someone who doesn't believe that Jesus is real although I think that they would not be able to make them honestly.
  Finally I would answer "that question is not a question" because on it's surface it pretends to be neutral as to whether or not Jesus is illusory but on a deeper level it only works as a question if the answer is that Jesus is illusory. Jesus himself claimed that He makes a huge difference in the world (Matt 10:34, John 12:46, John9:39). If the existence of the God-man is an actual fact that has to be taken into account when we make our life choices, then it is impossible that the end result of our life decisions as they "pertain to [our] life and behavior towards our fellow man" would "remain the same". It is a bit like asking whether or not it is important to add real salt to our meal instead of adding illusory salt to our food so long as the end result is the same. We have to answer that real salt makes a difference to taste and that illusory salt doesn't and therefore the end result simply cannot be the same. The only way it could is if there were no such thing as real salt and all salt were actually illusory. In the same way, the only way there could be no difference between an absolute and an illusory Jesus is if there were no real Jesus.
  So my final answer to the question is: "Yes it makes a great deal of difference whether we believe in an absolute Jesus or an illusory Jesus and that difference is manifested (among other places) in my life and my behavior towards other people."