Wendell Berry wrote this poem for The Progressive Magazine. Food for thought:
1. How much poison are you willing
to eat for the success of the free
market and global trade? Please
name your preferred poisons.
2. For the sake of goodness, how much
evil are you willing to do?
Fill in the following blanks
with the names of your favorite
evils and acts of hatred.
3. What sacrifices are you prepared
to make for culture and civilization?
Please list the monuments, shrines,
and works of art you would
most willingly destroy.
4. In the name of patriotism and
the flag, how much of our beloved
land are you willing to desecrate?
List in the following spaces
the mountains, rivers, towns, farms
you could most readily do without.
5. State briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes,
the energy sources, the kinds of security,
for which you would kill a child.
Name, please, the children whom
you would be willing to kill.
Breaking the high art cinema wake of his films Revolutionary Road and American Beauty, Sam Mendes (better known in some gossip circles as Kate Winslet’s husband), gracefully plods his way through the sacred beauty and tragedy of real life in Away We Go.
Burt and Verona are joyous and honest people. They revel in each other, in the hurts and frustrations of a surprise preganancy that happens at the same time as a sudden loss of home. Burt’s parents live nearby but decide to move to Belgium a month before their grandchild is due. Verona’s parents have passed. Without parents to center their own home around, the young couple, fearful of what their arrested development may mean for the child they welcome into the world, go on cross country trip to figure out what kind of parents they want to be and where they want to live.
To not reveal anything more about the movie let me just say this: Verona refuses to marry Burt, though she is deeply in love with Burt and having his child. This is reminiscent of the character Neil (played by Ben Affleck) in He’s Just Not That Into You. Increasingly in our postmodern culture marriage is seen as unnecessary to truly love someone, as Neil and Verona argue. This stance is usually met with conservative scorn, yet I think that such derision of the crumbling of our culture by cohabitation is misguided. Surely there are many instances of bad cohabitation scenarios just as there are bad marriages. The point is, movies resonate with our culture, and I think the increasing tie of togetherness to love (and not to material things) is a big turn in how my generation, and other postmoderns tend to view things: when everything else around us has collapsed, we can only rely on each other as our centers (and hopefully not ourselves).
We first must be attentive to the fact that these movies offer a lens to a thoughtfully engaged postmodern culture that is not Christian. It would be ridiculous to see their characters vouching for Christian marriage. The writers behind Away We Go and He’s Just Not That Into You are writing from within a postmodern culture, one that for some has seen a revision of stories that has become a new conservative approach to family, one not rooted in the Church or Tradition but in the moral center of the couple. This is evident in the Apatow comedies 40 Year Old Virgin (virginity is okay if it’s okay for the couple) and Knocked Up (you can do the right thing and have a child out of wedlock even if everyone else, including your family, thinks you’re insane) or Juno (you can do the right thing and give a child up for adoption…). These culturally relevant yet thoughtful movies have a very conservative stance on social or family issues without taking a Christian approach, and I think this is because at the center of this postmodern "conservative" turn is the postmodern value of the promise.
The Friday afternoon breakout session featured Fort Lewis College philosophy professor Justin McBrayer and artist Graeme Lowry discussing Romans 13 and the church’s and churchpersons obligation to government or authorities.
Justin discussed three ways to reconcile our obligation to government:
Fudge on what submission means: "there is a difference between submission and obedience."
Differentiate obligations: a legal obligation to do something and a moral obligation not to do something.
First Glance: all things equal, you have an obligation to the government; but, when there is disequilibrium, our most important obligation trumps the lesser obligation.
Which lead to the question: Is it true that everyone has an obligation to submit to church leaders?
How do we approach life? This is the fundamental question behind Donald Miller’s new book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life. In this thoughtful and humble work, Miller goes back to his Blue Like Jazz roots and unfleshes the wonder and beauty of real life, not fanciful, fictional lives. This is what true memoir should be: the literary quality of a novel grounded in the harsh and earthy realities of living.
Miller comes to a point in his life where he is going through the motions as a writer, pushing off a deadline, when he is suddenly contacted to collaborate on making Blue Like Jazz into a film. As Miller goes through the whole process of creating a second Donald Miller for the big screen, one that has a plot and direction behind him, Miller realizes that his real life has no plot and no direction. He’s kind of going through the motions, living without anything guiding his life. He’s a person who gets paid to write stories but doesn’t have one of his own.
So, with that crucial realization, Miller chronicles the various events in his life from a kayaking trip, a run in with Bob the man who memorizes everything, riding a bike across America, attending a seminar on Story by an infamous teacher, and working on a movie about himself to show how he has gone on a journey to create a story out of his own life.
The purpose behind Blue Like Jazz was to get us to think. The purpose behind A Million Miles in a Thousand Years is inspirational, but not in that corny "I climbed a mountain so can you!" sort of way. Instead, this book is a spiritual formation of sorts. Miller conveys parts of his life and his inadequacies in unflinching and sometimes embarassing honesty (to him? to us?). Miller is transparent enough to call the reader to gaze upon their own life: will they find a story? Are they living without a meaning?
-believe, behave, belong needs to change to belong, behave, believe
-the Christian response to suffering is to say, "We can talk about God later—let me provide an end to your suffering first."
-what people need is someone who is listening and sharing in their suffering.
-only Christians have God-shaped holes.
-you only start seeking God after you have found God, and when you stop seeking God you no longer know God.
-forgiveness does not come after you repent with Christ; instead, Christ forgives before people repent.
-God is used to explain what we cannot explain—the problem with that is that as science progresses God’s realm decreases and God is pushed either to the margins of the unknown or becomes obsessed with your personal life.
-we want to enjoy life with other people’s gaze on us.
-our enjoyment is learned through other’s enjoyment (we enjoy what our parents enjoyed).
-our beliefs about God must be tied to our actions.
-Christianity needs to be fundamentally transformative.
-Church attendance can impede Christian transformation.
-Religion can allow us to vent our frustrations and then never do anything to fix them.
-God is not an object that we can use to answer our fears.
-God is the subject before whom we are the object: he knows us but we do not know him.
Last night I went into the city with Sarah to see abstract artist Makoto Fujimura and percussionist Susie Ibarra collaborate in a give and take of avante-garde percussion and abstract painting at International Arts Movement’s Space 38|39.
The night was rewarding on so many levels. It was an opportunity to be present in one of the most transcendent artistic experiences I have ever witnessed. The inexpressible burden of artistic creation that unfolded as a catalyst of mutual creation generated a feeling of collective beauty and amazement as a live collaboration blurred the line between artist and audience and became a overwhelming sense of mutual wonder and awe.
I know that sounds complicated, but it was a deeply simple and meditative time. It was immensely serious and formative yet I was still sitting in a chair and drinking a beer. Avante-garde percussion and amazing abstract art make Brooklyn Lager taste magnificent.
The space created with a live collaboration was one of a sacred space: a space that allows the artist to take God given talent and then control improvisation in real time. In a sense, the mutual collaboration is liturgy: this was a public work, both for us within the space and the audience watching via the Internet in cyber-space. This was not a product given to be consumed. This was a public work given to all, as Makoto took a painting and broke it as the Eucharist. Art is meant to be broken forth, so that all can enjoy the hospitality of the sacred space that this collaborative art creates.
Dan Porter needs your support in raising money for African refugees!
Dan is a graduate student at Regent College and a dear friend of Everyday Liturgy. He is taking part in Ride for Refugees Canada, a cyclling event that is raing money for refugees in Africa.
A message from Dan:
The numbers are staggering – 67 million refugees and internally
displaced peoples according to a United Nations 2007 report. Over half
are women and children, vulnerable and voiceless while they flee war,
persecution and tribal violence. The RIDE is a way that I can
personally connect to this crisis, and it’s a way for me to make a real
difference in a refugee’s life. Thank you for your help and generous
support.
Brian Godawa, the screenwriter for the excellent movie To End All Wars, has written a crash course in the art of watching a movie for something more than sheer entertainment called Hollywood Worldviews: Watching Films with Wisdom and Discernment. Written for the general audience, the book takes a look at many of the popular films in our culture and dissects the worldview that lies beneath them. A structuralist critic, Godawa sees films as being bound to specific rules and structures which govern how they should be interpreted and how their worldview should be dissected. Godawa takes all of his worldview critique from James Sire, and unfortunately he uses Veith’s definition of postmodernism which really distorts the approach to postmodernism within this book.
I am certainly not a structuralist when I approach film or literature, vehmently disagree with Godawa’s worldview criticisms in general, and do not like how Godawa seems to desire that all films bend toward a Christian worldview, such as when he critiques the movie Gladiator for having a pagan worldview (what kind of worldview do you really want a movie about pagans to have, seriously?) Godawa desires what I call the Beowulf approach to literature and film that so many Christians take as their form of criticism and creativity: they do not want original stories as much as to make sure that any story is Christianized, like the ancient English poet did by taking the pagan myth of Beowulf and adding Christianity into it. Beowulf was written during a Christian awakening within England, and its cultural value is certainly paramount, as are many Christianized works, but making this the go to way of criticism by judging movies solely on worldview does not give credit to the artist merit and other valuable cultural questions that non-Christian worldviews bring into question for Christians and non-Christians alike.
Breaking the high art cinema wake of his films Revolutionary Road and American Beauty, Sam Mendes (better known in some gossip circles as Kate Winslet’s husband), gracefully plods his way through the sacred beauty and tragedy of real life in Away We Go.
Brian Godawa, the screenwriter for the excellent movie To End All Wars, has written a crash course in the art of watching a movie for something more than sheer entertainment called Hollywood Worldviews: Watching Films with Wisdom and Discernment. Written for the general audience, the book takes a look at many of the popular films in our culture and dissects the worldview that lies beneath them. A 
