Thursday, December 19, 2013

Christmas Trees (and the beauty of God)

We shall behold him....
"Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness." Ps. 29:2b

A standard Hebrew word for "beauty" is "noam," which means "pleasing or delightful to the senses." It is the word David uses in Psalm 27:4 when he said that part of his great desire was to "behold the beauty of the Lord." It is a bold statement, not just in what it's asking but also in what it's implying, i.e., God's beauty is a sensory experience (and not just a mental abstraction). However, David did not use "noam" here in Psalm 29:2. He uses "hadarah" instead, which includes the idea of "noam" but carries it further. "Hadarah" means "ornamentation" or "decoration," and could be associated with one's apparel ("adornment"). It is similar to the Greek word "κοσμος" in that they both mean "order," a specific kind of order: an arranging or arrangement of beauties ("noam") that accentuates and maximizes their overall beauty.

The beauty of holiness.
Think of it like a Christmas tree, which we decorate ("hadarah") with beautiful things ("noam") in order to make an even more beautiful thing, a summation of beautiful parts. I can think of other examples, like jewelry, which is the taking of separate, individual jewels ("noam") and arranging them in a particular sequence ("hadarah") to create an even greater beauty. Another good example, as I mentioned earlier, would be clothing. The "beauty of holiness" is sometimes translated the "attire of holiness," a less poetic but not unfair reading. Individual pieces of clothing may be beautiful ("noam") with their own colors and patterns, but style (and occasionally fashion) comes from arranging ("hadarah") these pieces together into a single, stylish ensemble.

There are more examples I could give: a stained-glass window, the human body, and even the Bible itself are all examples of separate, individual beauties ("noam") brought together to make a beautiful arrangement ("hadarah"). The overall point, however, can be summarized in three startling thoughts: (1) God's beauty is for the senses; (2) beauty belongs to order, and the greater the order the greater the beauty; and (3) holiness is a kind of beauty, a "hadarah" beauty, an arranging of single beauties into a magnificent whole. Perhaps it is the greatest beauty of all, since it is the beauty that belongs to God, a beauty that our sense are capable of beholding and desire to behold.

World War Z, Museums, Evolution: Some Barely Contiguous Thoughts

As the zombie plague worsened at a frightening rate in World War Z, one brief scene takes place on board a U.S. war ship: huge paintings obviously rescued from some museums were being stowed below, along with limited amounts of precious food, fuel, and human beings. The point of the scene is the fast paced movie is obvious: society was collapsing, so humans had to get busy saving the remnants of “civilization.” Other end of world movies provide similar scenes, but rarely with a bit of reflection on why we should save things while we desperately fight off extinction at a basic animal level.

For instance, in the spectacular Deep Impact, not only is a pitifully tiny remnant of humanity chosen to survive a comet strike by hiding deep in some caves in Missouri,  carefully selected items of art from museums and private collections are also carted deep into the artificial cave systems where presumably they too will eventually be rescued to form a rebirth of humanity (though I would hope that American art like like Frederic Remington’s would make it and the Warhols and Koons would be tossed for lack of space).
Save the children! And the Rembrandts!
A variation of this theme: in The Day After Tomorrow, after North America freezes up into a new ice age over night, a group of survivors huddle in the New York Public Library, burning books in an old fireplace to stay alive. In one scene, there is a debate about which books absolutely should not be burned due to their historical or cultural importance. Even as people perish, they recognize that some things are worth saving for the survivors who will eventually crawl out of the frozen buildings.

This theme pops up in many disaster movies; in 2012 and Contagion we humans are once again busy packing away artworks while the world seems to disintegrate into pre-civilizational chaos due either to floods or to a viral outbreak that moves too fast to contain. And this is not an entirely new theme. In the older (circa 1970’s) film The Omega Man, the apparently last human being is holed up in a fortified apartment building with a collection of music, books, paintings, sculptures, ruffled shirts, and so on, while the mutants outside in the dark want to put out the light of culture as well as put out the lights of the last normal human being.

Renaissance man decked out for post-human life

What is art for? What are museums for? Why do we have concerts? Concert halls? Why do we make poems? Poetry readings? Shouldn’t we choose a Keats poem to save and not a Lady Gaga song if we had limited space and the walls were collapsing all around us? Why do we have libraries? Why build databases that preserve Shakespeare’s plays and Eliot’s poems? Would we save a Johnny Cash LP or a Bob Dylan if we had to choose?

This is not what Christianity and the arts looks like.
Scenes in movies like this signal an interesting confusion about art. Here is a delicious irony--a blockbuster movie, loaded with special effects, entertaining us with cataclysmic scenes of human destruction, the ultimate summer entertainment, also promotes the idea of high art as an aspect of humans that must be salvaged. But it doesn’t promote it too seriously. There is no real reflection on the meaning or value of art or larger issues of civilization in these movies. It is just assumed somehow that “art” must be saved along with a human remnant.

Or even if humans will apparently disappear, then the mute witness of our best efforts at being civilized will remain as a kind of consolation (the novel Children of Men shows this beautifully and it is completely lost in the film version). These scenes say that “art is important” in some way, even central to human identity and flourishing, but they don’t seem to mean it. These scenes invoke a kind of standardized view that humans produce something important called art that should be preserved in the case that humanity closes shop, but they give no sustained attention to why art is important and worth cramming into the caves along with the women and children and scientists. And yet these scenes keep showing up as if we all somehow know that art matters and that blockbuster movies don’t matter as much.

(Interesting thought--in a self-referential bit of irony, we would see in one of these movies a close-up: if a choice has to be made, a dvd of Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru will be saved and 2012 will be thrown into the ditch.)

Something is going on here probably at unconscious, repressed depths that the filmmaker does not recognize. There is something about human activity that should not die. We are not just meat machines whose directionless evolution is finished because of cosmic chance, as happened to the dinosaurs. They were successful, highly evolved meat machines, right? They were at the top of the evolutionary scheme for their time, right? So when the accident of their extermination happened, we, i.e., the secular materialist mind, has to  chalk that up to the mindlessness of randomicity, right? But when it comes to us, people, human beings who want to be human, we know with inarticulate intuitive urgency  that we are not in fact merely animals whose day in the sun is over. We know that what we do as human beings--like writing plays-- is not just evolutionarily optimized behavior. Our art, which we want to save, witnesses to our more than mortal craving for ultimate being and worth.

Humans make things like poems and films and books because these things are fun. Opera is fun, there is no doubt about it. So is film. But art also signals that we want to insert ourselves into pure nature to show that we are not purely natural. Disaster movies are fun to watch, and some are better than others, but they also unwitting witness to the truth that humans are possessed by a need to transcend time even if most people don’t know why.

Optimized evolution


Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Christmas carols

So why, if we don't really believe in Christ anymore, do we still find our culture looking forward to Christmas?  Everyone likes a holiday, no?  Isn't that enough?  Not if you care about how things happen in a culture.  It seems that enough of us have believed for a long enough time that Jesus' birth really should be celebrated that we have aligned our business year with the church calendar.  We have over time adjusted the meanings of the church celebration to make it more palatable to non-believers.  We changed "holy day" to "holiday," we changed "St. Nicholas" to "Santa Claus" but we still desire to gather our family together, exchange presents, hold feasts, and celebrate, even though we no longer have any real belief in the thing being celebrated.  But we still want to sing Christmas carols...

We should look carefully at the second and third and fourth verses of our familiar carols.

No more let sin and sorrow grow, nor thorns infest the ground.
He comes to make His blessings flow far as the curse is found.

He rules the world with truth and grace, and makes the nations prove
The glories of His righteousness and wonders of His love.

How silently, how silently the wondrous gift is given,
So God imparts to human hearts the blessings of His heaven.
No ear may hear His coming, but in this world of sin,
Where meek souls will receive Him still, the dear Christ enters in.

God of God, Light of Light, lo, He abhors not the virgin's womb,
Word of the Father, now in flesh appearing… O come let us adore Him…

Good Christian men, rejoice, with heart and soul and voice!
Now ye need not fear the grave - Jesus Christ is born to save.
Calls you one, and calls you all to gain His everlasting hall.
Christ was born to save...


Sunday, December 8, 2013


"And you were dead in your trespasses and sins in which you formerly walked according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience."

The mobility and immobility of the human being provides a variety of archetypal images throughout the Bible: Christianity is first called The Way; Psalm 1 uses the movements of sit, walk, and stand to indicate righteous and unrighteous behavior; Moses leads the Chosen People into pilgrimage out of the fleshpots of Egypt and into the Promised Land; Adam and Eve are ejected from Eden to wander until their son Cain, who who is cursed to be a fugitive and a wanderer, builds a city of Nod, which is a fabulous irony--staying put in the land of wandering, yet in that city that doesn't move the human being is still a wanderer from God even in the city--wandering in the soul in the land of wandering, dwelling in a city in pretense of having a place to stay put. Spiritually, we are wanderers even when we dwell, we think, secure in our own technological and cultural barriers against death and separation.

The book of Hebrews develops this theme at length, playing variations of the physical pilgrimage of Israel and the spiritual pilgrimage of the soul back home to the heavenly Jerusalem, the true city of God and rescued humans.

Movement--walking, traveling, being on the road, looking for home, exile and return--this spectrum is captured in Paul's teaching, quoted above, of our true condition, that we are by nature the walking dead. The Walking Dead. Does this felicitous conjunction of scripture and popular T.V. show say something to us? Might it be that zombies today and the current obsession with them indicates something profound that we habitually repress?

We are pilgrims, but outside of God's grace we are lost on the journey, our minds and affections damaged by viral sin passed on from one to another. We live in a miasma of misdirected love, a mental fog of incurving self-regard, a ravenous hunger for expanding our own identities at the cost of diminishing others'. Our original orientation to our beloved Creator has become confused, and now, spiritually speaking, we shuffle around, trapped in a kind of brainlessness when it comes to the knowledge of God and our true home.

In the television series The Walking Dead (and, from what I gather, in the original comics--err, I mean the graphic novels), the cause of the zombiefication of the world is never explained. Virus? Man-made or natural? Earth-born or extraterrestrial? Supernatural curse? Natural evolutionary development to kill off the plague of humans despoiling the planet? It doesn't matter in this case, and the narrative works with this calculated gap in the storyline. But in our own lives, we know what's up: Paul says in Romans 1, "they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened. . . . "  In Ephesians 4 he reiterates: the Gentiles walk "in the futility of their minds, being darkened in their understanding." The walking dead have a "hardness of heart" and have become "callous." And thus we are all zombies, because we are all possessors of this deadly infection. (Paul, to invoke another film, could say, "I see dead people!").

The enlightening irony: we are the walking dead while we are living outside of Grace, but when we begin to be aware of ourselves as dead, we can begin to live by dying with Christ who is our real life.

Irony. Isn't that kind of a literary thing one is supposed to study?