I confess that life has turned me into something of a cynic.

I haven’t always been this cynical. In fact, it is only recently that I even came to recognize myself as a cynic. Truth be told it is an odd label for me to accept because it is not at all what people used to see me as. Especially when it comes to the Christmas season. But I’ve come to realize I’ve learned how to hide it well. Or at the very least was once more adept at knowing how to battle back against it. Looking back at my younger years, i funneled my struggles with crippling fear and anxiety and depression into a love of story. An embrace of story. Telling stories, reading stories and watching stories. Imagination helped to remind me that there was more to this life than what I was experiencing in the here and now, and fostered a sense of hope that could see beyond my struggles.

But life has a way of unsettling all of that stuff that is lying underneath the surface. The stuff we don’t always acknowledge. The stuff we aren’t always aware of- my questions, my fears, my hurts, my struggles, my inability to change or break certain cycles. All of this has creeped to the surface in recent years, beginning with a personal crisis of faith. And the more unsettled it all becomes the more power it seems to have to turn me into a perpetual cynic of all things big and small.

The Cynical Cycle
And when it comes to that struggle, I have found that the more cynical I become the more I tend to replace imagination with what I perceive as realism. The truth, the facts of the matter, the answers, become the most important thing when it comes to navigating this life. The problem is, as a few significant players in my life once said when they walked away from their once imagined faith, knowing what I know now it is impossible to go back, and the more I feel I know the more disillusioned I seem to become.

And then I wondered, what happens when this starts to move from my perception of what’s right in front of me to the way I view the whole of life? I become cynical. And then more cynical. And the cycle repeats itself. And grows. And grows. And the life I once knew, that life of child like wonder that I used to hold so near and dear. That life where imagination was a possible and cherished part of my reality. Where story could remind me that life is not simply what my grown up mind believes it to be. It gets more and more distant, reminding me that this is a time long gone, a time I cannot to back to knowing what I know now.

But go back to what? That childlike wonder? That pure sense of abandonment I once felt at marveling in the mystery of the small things? Of my ability to imagine God and the unknown and the unseen? None of this fits in a cynical worldview where it is built on a think first and feel second outlook. But I am learning something important about myself as I think through this stuff in 2018. Looking back over some of my previous Christmas traditions and experiences, I am realizing that this is precisely why Christmas has been so important for me over the years. I have always been prone to cynicism. I faced darkness at a young age and that darkness became familiar to me. Christmas was always the one time of year that I seemed to be able to let some of that stuff go and embrace the idea that life was more than I could see on the surface. And the older I got the more important it became to enter into this in an almost liturgical fashion. It reminded me that maybe it wasnt all gone. That some of that imaginative and hopeful process still remained.

Unfortunately the older I got the more life also seemed to steal from Christmas at the same time. So rediscovering this year after year became harder and harder to do.

The Green Book Controversy
I have said in many circles that the new film Green Book has quickly become one of my new favorite holiday films. I had been thinking about writing a piece on it for a while as it was one of those films this past year that helped me to return to that childlike joy I once cherished and that seemed so significantly lost to me.

But as time went on the more life started to push back on my experience of this film, as it does with so many things. Controversy emerged. Writers and think pieces began to question the films “truthfulness” and wonder whether its message of hope was disguising the fact that we still have a very real problem with racism. One writer went so far as to label it a “magic act”. A good one, but nevertheless a feel good delusion that becomes less meaningful once you recognize how the trick is done, let alone dangerous for the degree of manipulation it fosters.

You can see the core of the controversy with a simple google search online. But to summarize the main points of the controversy here:

1. Some have deemed it a picture of a “white savior”, depicting Dr. Shirley as estranged from his family (a fallacy his family says is absolutely not true) and Tony (the white man) as the one who gives him a place to belong and to rediscover who he is as a black man.

2. The story is being told by Tony Vallelonga’s son (Nick) and thus largely from the white man’s perspective. The family has since spoken out calling it a “symphony of lies” that gets very little about Dr. Shirley right.

3. The film tells the story of two sides coming together in hopeful reconciliation, seeing the solution in relationship with one another while, according to some, largely ignoring the fact that racism is a problem that still exists.

4. In making the movie the filmmakers failed to track down and speak to members of Dr. Shirley’s family (Mahershala has since apologized for his failure to do so, which was largely because he was unaware they existed or were free to approach).

For what its worth, this is a good article on Dr. Shirley that highlights an upcoming documentary that will share his story in a more faithful light:
https://shadowandact.com/the-real-donald-shirley-green-book-hollywood-swallowed-whole
And on the side of Tony Lip, here are some of the letters on which the movie was based:
https://www.thewrap.com/green-book-special-read-tony-lips-real-letters-to-his-wife-from-the-road/

Navigating The Complicated Landscape
The big question here for me is, what does one do with a film like this when it is mired in such a complicated landscape? How do I reconcile my experience of the film with knowing what I know about the film today?

This is largely the same question that fuels my cynicism in life. Knowing what I know now, how do I reconcile this complicated landscape with my ability to hold a childlike wonder. And can I even trust life enough to allow myself the freedom to enter into the experience of it?

Spoiler alert: I haven’t figured this out yet.

The Problem of Perspective
If Green Book taught me anything it is that so much of life comes down to a problem of perspective. And while gaining perspective is the thing that stole my ability to experience this film as I initially did, perspective is also the thing that can allow me to reengage it.

This is especially true as I do my best to willingly bring my own perspective to the table.

Perspective. It’s a dangerous idea.

Told from the perspective of Tony Lip, Green Book largely tells the story of his experience of their time together. For as much as many think-pieces and critics desired to display a measured response, more often than not I found them making definitive statements that were not open to challenge on why Green Book was a dangerous and flawed film in a world where racism definitely still exists, and how this film is saying something false about that reality. What they tend to gloss over though is that the reality of reading through much of the controversy actually shows that there is a good deal of uncertainty and confusion that still remains when it comes to this film. There are compelling gaps in the story on both sides, both in the story that was told and the story Dr. Shirley’s family believes they failed to tell.

And as a matter of perspective, as all film is, what Green Book set out to do was fill in those from one particular perspective- Tony Lips. But here is what is important. Just because it is telling his side of the story shouldn’t relegate this to black or white terms. What matters most is what this perspective was trying to do- which is to say something about their relationship.

The problem as I understand it is that far too often perspective tends to get equated with knowledge and absolutes, or even worse “truth”. If they failed to tell the perspective of Dr. Shirley, many critics and think pieces would have you think that the perspective they did share was then unequivocally false. Which is not truth. What gives this film value and what was clearly valuable to those who participated in telling it (from Tony’s letters and his witness) was the relationship that changed their singular perspective. This is what drives the film. This is what lies at the heart of the story the film is looking to tell. Not a white perspective or a black perspective, but a human one.

Here’s what really matters in Green Book. From his perspective Tony was racist, and this relationship with Dr. Shirley challenged his racist thoughts. It broadened his perspective. It opened his eyes to how big and broad and diverse our Country really is. And it helped him rediscover love above all. This is what Tony’s family observed. That is what this film depicts. Nothing more. Nothing less.

And this is a line that you can draw through may of the particular depictions in this film, even if the film (as every film does) takes a bit of narrative freedom in building the stories structure (the timeline is different for example). Take Tony’s perspective on Dr. Shirley’s estrangement from his family for example. It is not that this was necessarily true, and it is important to gain perspective on this from Dr. Shirley’s family. But what is clear is that this was the perspective Tony had from his relationship with Dr. Shirley. This is also something we have evidence of, and this is also important.

And this is always important when it comes to a matter of perspective.

Further Thoughts From My Perspective
The way this film lifted me up, gave me hope and caused me to cheer is important. The way it imagined a world in which the problem of racism could be approached in relationship with one another is important. The way it challenged me to reach inside and examine my own racial tendencies, whatever those may be, is important. But it is important as a matter of perspective, and if anything can break the cycle of cynicism that exists within me it is the idea of gaining perspective.

Christmas as a Matter of Perspective 
This raises an interesting question in terms of my love for the season of Christmas. If Christmas is a season that lifts me up, gives me hope, causes me to cheer. If Christmas imagines a world in which the problem of poverty and struggle and distance and apathy and depression can be approached and dealt with in the context of relationship, what does this do with those of us who’s experience is largely not this? Those who live in poverty, who continue to struggle, who remain distant and apathetic and continue to wrestle with depression… those who are stuck in cycles of perpetuated cynicism.

And from a specifically religious perspective, what does it mean to imagine a world in which the great community of the children of God is being called to live in a hopeful expectation that there is freedom from these things. Do we approach this like Green Book and simply shut the book altogether when it our knowledge and our experience don’t match up? Do we remain skeptical about the experiences that Christmas can bring as a season of hope and reimagining because it does not measure up with the truth of our reality? Of our world?

This is what has fed my cynicism for many years. Again, that old adage that says knowing what I know now I can’t go back. It’s one I have heard too many times over. And it is one that consistently challenges my ability to embrace the Christmas season as I once did. In fact, this is true about my ability to embrace life as a whole.

Full confession here. I have written about my struggle with suicide elsewhere in this space. Far more than that struggle (I have come to discover on my own journey that for many of us who have struggled with suicidal thoughts, the real issue is not finding a reason to live… we know there are reasons, but it is fighting against that feeling that we don’t have the courage to die and the guilt we feel for feeling that. That’s what makes many of us feel most stuck) is the ongoing struggle with apathy. This is what life breeds when we have no idea what to do with life itself.

The Model of Apathy and Life’s Deconstruction
I would say that one of my biggest challenges is that this world models this apathy for me on a daily basis. It is insistent on telling me every day that the most important thing is to know that there is a problem, and that any experiences that speak into this problem must be primarily questioned and scrutinized and broken apart before we do anything with it. In my own narrow perspective of this world’s model, it has consistently deconstructed nearly every corner of my life, including religiously, politically, socially, experientially. In a world that appears at once addicted to truth and rational thought and the need for answers, there is very little that the darker corners of our reality does not touch and does not counter.

The problem is that the world, generally speaking, is not very good when it comes to giving us something in its place, in the absence of this childlike wonder. It is not very good at dealing with the idea of hope, of knowing how to live with different perspectives that don’t always reflect our own. It is not very good at being willing to shelf one notion of truth for the idea of actually living “in” relationship where perspective has a chance to grow and challenge our understanding. If I take Christmas as an example, there exists this perpetual rift between those who hate it and those who love it, and what often doesn’t get addressed is the gap inbetween. The places where those perspectives live and breathe and develop. And when that gap dosen’t get addressed it tends to get demonized and/or written off and ignored.

But what about those of us who live in that gap? What does that do with us?

Minding The Gap
What is my gap? My gap is that who I used to be doesn’t seem to belong anymore with who I am today. My childlike wonder is often a fleeting memory, something I have to wrestle to hold onto. My cynicism is often all I can see in the here and now. And yet, again from the confines of my narrow perspective, what I know is that cynicism never brings with it the answers it promised me when I allowed it to deconstruct my world. It didn’t free me. In fact it has slowly revealed itself as a sickness, a fight against my ability to actually embrace other perspectives and see this world more clearly.

The truth is, if I may use that word, is that I need hope. The same hope that Green Book dares to imagine. And Christmas is a place and time where I always used to find it. Hope that wonder still exists in the struggle. Hope that those gaps don’t need to simply represent a life of loneliness and struggle and apathy and depression. Hope that I can still experience something good in the midst of the messiness of life, and that these good experiences can grow my perspective and raise my sights to the promise that all of this is being reconstructed into something new and reborn. If Christmas is ultimately about opening my eyes to the concept of waiting and anticipating this growth, this revelatory break in my singular reality and struggle, these moments where it does break through to me are the miracles worth waiting for. This is what hopefulness looks like, the freedom to experience life and moments and perspectives for what they are- stories worth sharing and stories worth telling and stories worth hearing.

And so this Christmas season I carry my experience of Green Book forward as I look forward to Dr. Shirley’s upcoming documentary. A chance to see one perspective and gain another. My prayer is for a Christmas miracle. Not simply for myself, but for anyone who feels stuck in that gap. And as I do, my eyes remain open to the idea that miracles still happen. That God is somehow in someway still with us. Still with me. That a light is shining in the midst of these growing perspectives.

We wrote another annual adoption update. Late in coming but you can use this link to find it on our official adoption blog.

https://adoptingukraine.blogspot.com/2018/12/another-yearly-adoption-update-looking.html

INTRODUCTION
Back in July, Jen and I had been given the opportunity to drive a group of students down to Knoxville for the Covenant denomination wide (North America) youth conference. Thousands of students from across North America all coming together for a single purpose.

And when you ask me to drive a group of students down to Knoxville you will end up stopping at every possible cheesy road side attraction I can find.

I have a picture of this with me and the students. You can note me looking like I am in Heaven (come on, it’s a real life Willy Wonka inside), while the kids have a look that says, why did I get in the car with this guy? By the time we made it to Col. Sanders birthplace and the original KFC restaurant, the students were, how can you say… miserable.

On the flip side, this is what happens when Jen is asked to drive a group of students down to Knoxville.

Actually, this is what happens after we drop the students off and we made a detour to the Smokey Mountains and Nashville while we waited to pick them up.

• The Jack Daniels Process
  This was actually a really interesting tour. In fact, when we walked out of the tour the first thing Jen said to me was, that would make a great sermon illustration. And so here we are.By far the most interesting thing about the tour was seeing the process of how they make Jack Daniel. To make Jack Daniel (Jack Daniels is the Distillery, Jack “Daniel” is the drink… they were very clear about this distinction) they drip the Bourbon through, very slowly, ten feet of packed, sugar maple charcoal (this is called the mellowing process) and then put it into charred oak barrels for what they describe as the maturing process. This maturing process is defined by elevation. Barrels on the lower level get a certain label for a certain taste. Barrels on the higher level get another label for another particular taste.But what is most important to note, and what they emphasize on this tour is, what makes it Jack Daniel is this slow drip process. This is what sets it apart from the Kentucky Bourbon on one side and the Mountain Moonshine on the other.
• The Definition of Transformation and the Slow Drip Process of the Spirit’s work
  Earlier on in this series I decided to look up the definition to transformation just to help me make sense of some of these stories of transformation we have been working through at our Church, namely how to make sense of those stories when my own life couldn’t appear to be further from that truth. Looking up the definition I found that it can be an instantaneous act or a process, a subtle or dramatic change, present or past tense. If it was a choose your own adventure, I would choose the instantaneous, the dramatic, the past tense. Or at least want to peek a few pages ahead to see if the decision and choice I am making now is leading to a dead end or my impending death.Far more often though transformation appears as the slow drip process of the spirits work in our everyday life. A process that is bringing us to maturity, but one that takes a life time, and if I am fully honest, that can be frustrating even on my best days. Because I want to see the difference in the here and now.
• The Apostle Paul and the Slow Drip Process
  And then we come to the story of the Apostle Paul’s transformation, which is the story I will be looking at here. Perhaps the most recognizable, most dramatic, most instantaneous example of transformation that we find in scripture. Or at least that’s what I carried into his story. Rather, what I found as I dug into his story is that he was a man who shared a little bit more of my struggle than I realized. He wrestled with the idea of this slow drip process over the course of his life. He questioned what God was doing in his story and in the story of his people. He refers to an ambiguous thorn in his side, which however you choose to interpret it is something that he carried with him everywhere he went. He found himself wondering whether everything he was doing was worth the effort. Most significantly he wondered whether God could overlook his past and actually make something of his weakness, weaknesses that haunted him with the confessional question “why do I do the things I do not want to do.” And yet, this idea of being transformed as a “slow drip process” became the centerpiece of his ministry, a full expression of his reigning hope as we witness him struggling to work through all of this tension in his writings.

  And it really is a privilege and a wonder that we can watch Paul being transformed and changed and matured through his writings over time. On this note, reengaging Paul’s story was timely for me. When I was asked to preach on Paul I had actually just started N.T. Wright’s (a spiritual hero of mine) new book, Paul: A Biography. So this welcome intersection seemed like a real opportunity to remain intentionally aware of what God needed to teach me or show me through Paul’s story. And my hope and prayer is that these learnings, as best as I can speak to them, will resonate with you as well.

• Paul’s Story as Context- 3 Things He Taught Me About Transformation
  Wright suggests that to understand Paul we must take him in context: what we know of him before and after the event in question in order to see what transformation is doing in his present. And just as a disclosure, there is much scholarly debate to be had on which writings are actually Paul’s and which are not, and which can shed light on his personal story. I hold to the idea that some scholars do that Paul wrote all of his letters and wrote none of them at the same time. That is, regardless of how close or distant Paul is to the actual penning of these letters, behind all of it is the voice and influence and distinct ministry of Paul’s message, journey and story. So it is no more problematic to me to see his story in something as uncontested as Romans than it is to see him in something a bit more contested as Ephesians.

  SOME REFERENCES:
  And before I get to that, a brief mention of some books I found helpful for exploring his context over the course of my journey, both in previous study and in my reengagement:The Apostle, A Life of Paul by John PollockBackgrounds of Early Christianity by Everett FergusonPaul and Palestinian Judaism by E.P SandersPaul in Fresh Perspective by N.T. WrightClimax of the Covenant by N.T. WrightPaul: A Biography by N.T. WrightPaul the Convert: The Apostolate and Apostasy of Saul the Pharisee by Alan F. Segal

  Ephesians: An Exegetical Commentary by Harold W. Hochner
  The Writings of the New Testament by Luke Timothy Johnson
  Paul Through Mediterranean Eyes by Kenneth E. Bailey
  Cross Cultural Paul: Journeys to Others, Journeys to Ourselves by Charle H Cosgrove
  Romans by Thomas Schreiner

  Our Mother Saint Paul by Beverly Roberts Gaventa
  When in Romans by Beverly Roberts Gaventa

  Road from Damascus: The Impact of Paul’s Conversion on His Life, Thought, and Ministry by Richard Longenecker

• 3 things that this context taught me about what transformation is and how it works in our lives that I want to look at this morning:
  1. It begins with grace. It is grace that meets us where we are in that slow drip process. Galatians 1:15 But when he who had set me apart before I was born, and who called m by his grace…”And grace can come in any number of ways. Grace in the way of healing. Grace in the way of something in our lives that needs to change. Grace that we need to extend to others. Grace we need to extend to ourselves.

  2. Grace helps us to see things differently- in the context of God’s story Gal 1:15-16 … was pleased to reveal his Son to me…

  3. And in seeing things differently, in context, it then gives us the courage and strength we need to step out (or back out) into the world as transformed people, trusting that God is using our circumstance for something good. Gal 1:24… in order that I might preach him among the gentiles.

1. GRACE MEETS US WHERE WE ARE
Back to that trip to Knoxville/Nashville. The closer we got to the trip the more I began to recognize that something was going on in me. Perhaps an indication that the spirit was trying to do its transforming work. And I knew that I needed to engage it, figure it out.
So I prayed, I reflected, and I journaled before, during… there’s a lot of road between here and Knoxville/Nashville… and after. You can see those reflections in this blog space under my from Winnipeg to Nashville entries.

And what kept coming to mind was a conversation from my past. It was a conversation that defined my transition out of music, once my life long dream, and into youth ministry. At the time of this conversation I was right on the precipice of seeing my dream to play music full time become a reality, and right before the band I had sunk all my time and investment in ended up moving to Nashville and becoming a success I started to reevaluate why I was doing what I was doing. And what the spirit revealed to me at that time was the life of 5 youth whom I had the privilege of sharing life with as a stand in youth leader at our newly planted Church from 12 years old to now nearing graduation. And music was taking me away from some important milestones in their life. So I used this conversation as a way of expressing and enacting this transition towards stepping out of the band, I stayed behind while they made it to the city of my dreams, eventually went to school to get my Youth Leadership Degree and did Youth Pastoring for a number of years.

Until the last position I held went very wrong and very badly, leaving us (Jen and I) feeling stranded and defeated and destroyed.

What I had felt had been an obedience to living into the promise of God and his call on my life ended up feeling like complete abandonment with my confidence in that promise and call seriously shaken. I was in need of a dramatic, instantaneous transformation encounter.

At that time we entered Faith Covenant, which has been an important part our healing journey over the last five years. But what this trip was bringing out in me was two things: Rather than something dramatic or instantaneous, God had been at work in a slow drip process way as I began to look back on where I had come from and where I am now. And secondly, in the spirit of that process it seemed there was still more healing that needed to happen. Here I was driving a group of students (yes, I know I was just a chaperone) to the place and symbol of my once lifelong and now failed dream (Nashville). This was telling me there were more steps I needed to take towards being freed from that destruction and despair and, as I came to realize, heavy cynicism. And as I like to believe as I was working through the story of Paul, this is where grace found me. On the road to Nashville. The same grace that found Paul on the road to Damascus “still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord”. A grace that seemed to be calling me to reengage that slow drip process for what it needed to do in my life, my context, here today. And it is Paul’s story, Paul’s context that has been helping me make some sense of what that grace might look like for the next step in my healing process.

The Conversion of Saul (Acts 9:1-19)

9 Meanwhile Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest ² and asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any who belonged to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem. ³ Now as he was going along and approaching Damascus, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. ⁴ He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” ⁵ He asked, “Who are you, Lord?” The reply came, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. ⁶ But get up and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do.” ⁷ The men who were traveling with him stood speechless because they heard the voice but saw no one. ⁸ Saul got up from the ground, and though his eyes were open, he could see nothing; so they led him by the hand and brought him into Damascus. ⁹ For three days he was without sight, and neither ate nor drank.

¹⁰ Now there was a disciple in Damascus named Ananias. The Lord said to him in a vision, “Ananias.” He answered, “Here I am, Lord.” ¹¹ The Lord said to him, “Get up and go to the street called Straight, and at the house of Judas look for a man of Tarsus named Saul. At this moment he is praying, ¹² and he has seen in a vision^[a] a man named Ananias come in and lay his hands on him so that he might regain his sight.” ¹³ But Ananias answered, “Lord, I have heard from many about this man, how much evil he has done to your saints in Jerusalem; ¹⁴ and here he has authority from the chief priests to bind all who invoke your name.” ¹⁵ But the Lord said to him, “Go, for he is an instrument whom I have chosen to bring my name before Gentiles and kings and before the people of Israel; ¹⁶ I myself will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name.” ¹⁷ So Ananias went and entered the house. He laid his hands on Saul^[b] and said, “Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus, who appeared to you on your way here, has sent me so that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.” ¹⁸ And immediately something like scales fell from his eyes, and his sight was restored. Then he got up and was baptized, ¹⁹ and after taking some food, he regained his strength.

This is what Grace does in Paul’s context- It reminds him (and us) that even when we can’t see where God is in our story (Lord, who are you?), He knows our story (Saul, Saul.. he calls him by name). It tells him that grace, and the transformed life that grace pushes us towards, is a gift. In Gal 1:11-16, Paul says, “For I would have you know that the Gospel that was preached by me is not man’s gospel, for I did not receive it from any man nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.”

• Sharing from Paul on Remembrance Day
  This is the written form of a sermon I gave this past Remembrance day. Knowing that I was preaching on this day of remembering the stories and persons who gave their lives for our own freedom story here in Canada, I found myself thinking back to an old neighbor of ours. We often called him our very own Wilson from Home Improvement, as we would often find ourselves in our backyard gaining from his wisdom as we chatted through our chain link fence. As a retired war veteran (from injury), I remember him often reveling in the opportunity to share his stories from being overseas, not because he needed to be remembered as a hero, but because he cherished (and perhaps grieved) the opportunity to impart one of his most important learnings from his participation in that freedom story, which is that there are no winners in war. There is simply an awareness that things are not as they should be and a hope that some day things will be made whole again.This is what grace imparts to us. The present is messy. Frustrating. Incomplete. Rife with our (and the world’s) failures and fears and brokenness and struggle. And yet in grace we are offered hope that there is more to this present picture. That despite all our incomplete efforts to battle back or respond to the mess, in war and out of war, to find peace in the conflict, healing in the sickness, growth in the setbacks, a way out of the cycles that continue to bind us as a now modern society that looks much the same as it did in Paul’s day (issues of slavery, race, sex discrimination, fear of the other, hatefulness and violence), grace arrives as a gift, something that we can submit all of those things towards in our feelings of desperation.  As theologian Johann Peter Lange puts it, there is “no fall so deep that grace cannot descend to it and no height so lofty that grace cannot life the sinner to it.”

2. HELPS US TO SEE THINGS DIFFERENTLY
And if transformation is a gift, it is primarily a gift of sight. For Paul, seeing begins with the mind, or this marriage of the mind and the heart that forms the Biblical (very Jewish) notion of belief. Not an intellectual exercise, but an exercise of spiritual knowing, the increased and imparted knowledge of who God is and who we are and the world. As Paul writes, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds…”

And if it begins with the mind it ends in this passage with discernment, seeing things differently, rightly- “… so that you may discern what is the will of God- what is good and acceptable and perfect.” Coming to see our story, our context, in fuller picture and clarity as a part of Gods story, of a part of what God is doing in our world still today.

• Blindness and Sight
  The blindness that we read of in Paul’s story forms the emphasis of the three accounts of Paul’s Damascus Road experience in Acts. This blindness highlights the idea that the others with Paul “did not see” what Paul could not see himself. Eventually we get this dramatic instance of the scales falling off of his eyes and Paul’s sight returning, a powerful symbol of that slow drip process of the spirit’s work in transforming our lives. And here’s the truth that Paul came to embrace- the scales fall off in order for Paul to see Jesus, and the Way of Jesus, not as a conversion from his Jewishness to Christianity (an important distinction to note here), but as a way of seeing how God’s story intersects with his own context. An expression of the sacred Temple-Torah story that has shaped Paul’s covenant promise and Resurrection hope of God with us. A reminder that Paul is a child of God loved and marked by God’s grace in a messy, difficult world.

  And here is what I think Paul can teach us about the process of allowing those scales to be peeled off of our own eyes. The blindness leading to sight. Our desperation, the inward struggle that our outward actions are often a symptom of, can either push us towards Jesus or away from Jesus as occupying that place in the center of the tension we have been talking about. The job of transformation is to reorient us back in His direction, to learn and relearn to embrace that existing tension and to allow Jesus to carry that tension for us in order to help us see the Way He desires us to move us in its midst towards the particular grace that we need. And in the context of the traditions of the fathers and the prophets that came before Paul, that anchor his tradition, to allow Paul (and us) to see what God is doing through Jesus in order to speak that sacred story that binds his zeal into a broken world. To breathe hope into the hopelessness.

  So here is a question for us. Where can grace offer us a change in perspective? Where do we need a reorientation in our lives?

Jesus allows Paul to see that transformation is not about everything suddenly going right or becoming perfect. It is about submitting our context- the messiness, the tension, the not rightness about it all- to Him and allowing Him to do something with it. To carry it for us. To this end, Wright offers an interesting note that the one thing Annanias does not give Paul when he is imparting God’s prophecy for Paul’s life, is the prophecy that he “must suffer for my sake”. That was something Paul needed to figure out on his own in the way only the slow drip process could teach him. It is something we are asked to learn in our lives as well as we embrace the slow drip process of the spirit’s work in the light of the Cross, the full expression of that slow drip process way of life.

• Seeing Differently
  And here is the great truth about seeing differently. We not only come to see differently (this is a mark of transformation), but Jesus frees us to participate in the process. No matter our baggage. No matter our past. No matter our frustrations and failures and weaknesses. And what is this process? Pastor and Theologian Greg Boyd puts it this way. Transformation is a process of “becoming who you already are.” And “the process of becoming who you already are in Christ is identical to the process of being healed from who you were.”

  This is the true freedom story. We are becoming who God already sees us to be. Forgiven, loved, sons and daughters of God. Which then frees us from having to fight and claw our way to become something other in order for God to see or respond to our story differently than we perceive it to be. This is the true beauty of the grace that meets us where we are. In our imperfect ways of seeing we are called to take one step forward into a fuller truth of who we are in Christ, and we do this while forever allowing the transformation process to push us towards trusting God with the rest. One step into grace, and one small step back into the world. And this is what met Paul exactly where he was on the road to Damascus in order to help him see and participate in this fuller truth by calling him to take one small step back out into the world as a transformed person. The sad truth is Paul never got to see what his ministry would become, the vast influence of his life on the wider story of God’s grace and story being made known to the world at large. But what he did come to see in his lifetime was Jesus and the difference Jesus made on how he learned to trust and live into God’s story. And that alone became enough to carry him through all of the tension.So here is another question for us this morning? What small steps can we take? Either towards grace or in response to that grace by stepping back into the world as grace filled people? And what is the rest that we need to learn to trust God with as we take that step? If Paul taught me anything, meditating on that is a way to stripping off the weight of those extremes and actually living towards freedom in a meaningful way.

3. The Courage and the Strength To Step Back Out Into the World

So if it begins with grace, and grace helps us to see things differently, more fully, the final truth of transformation that I found in Paul’s story is this. The movement of Paul’s transformation account is undeniably one that takes him back out into the world as a transformed person.
– The first is a 3rd person narrative that speaks to Paul’s circumstance. (Acts 9)
– The second is one that emphasize the Jewish foundation. (Acts 22)
– The third, ultimately shapes where Paul is headed as a transformed person- out to a world that needs God’s grace (Acts 26)

The placement of this transformation narrative also marks in Acts this natural movement from Athens to Rome and out to the world. And as this movement progressed, the multi-ethnic, globalized, diversified characteristic of Paul’s world became the context for his ongoing embrace of the process of transformation, both as a Jewish man (Saul) and a Roman citizen (Paul). And what shapes the movement of Paul’s ministry is a single truth to which all of Paul’s ministry efforts point to- love of God and love of others. This grace that meets Paul ultimately becomes an extension of God’s love for all, a promise of a creation restored.

And here’s the thing about this movement out into the world. The more steps we take out into the world as grace filled people learning to embrace the stuff that transformation desires to make more clear to us, the stronger our hope can become. Because this small step is what offers us that glimpse of forgiveness and love and healing that we need, not only in our lives but in the lives of others. And the wonderful truth of the Way of Jesus is that we get to participate not only in our own transformation, but in the transformation of others. And this participation builds a foundation. It plants markers for our journey. A place to start and restart from. A means of moving forward when the tension appears to be too much, spinning out of control. It is the promise that we are being transformed into the same image from “one degree of glory to another (2 Corinthians 3:15-18).”

CONCLUSION

• Coming Back to My Story
  In that place of desperation, of feeling stranded and defeated and destroyed, over the years God did give me glimpses of where God was using that story to show me His. This came in the form of letters from youth letting me the difference I had made simply by being where I was. In a big way it was this experience that paved the way for us to finally as a couple take that step towards adopting our now son of 17 years old.But one of the most distinct memories of that time was the glimpse God gave me of his grace after being asked to preach one last time in the final moments of everything falling apart. I don’t know why they asked me to preach when there was so much hurt and brokenness, but they did. And not knowing what to preach on I felt called to preach on Acts 4. In particular I focused on the prayer by Peter for confidence and boldness in the process of growing into transformed people of God living in the “tension” of that hurt and brokenness. The same prayer that paves the way for Gamaliel’s story and Annanias’ story and Paul’s story to start to emerge in chapters 5 and following. And at the end of that sermon I asked the Church to stand with me and for all of us to pray that together, in the hope that it would center us on the one who can heal that tension and protect us from falling into those extremes of despair or misplaced zeal. It was after I had preached that a member of the prayer team, whom had been on that team long before I arrived, shared with me that when she came on that team she had a vision of someone someday leading the Church in that specific prayer out of Acts 4, and that she had been praying for years towards that end. Apparently that was to be me.And that’s the thing about the foundation these small steps create. That example, and all of those examples above, are now meaningful places to restart from in seeing where the healing needs to come from. They are reminders that somehow and in someway God is still here, doing something with my life because He was doing something with my past. And that a small step, whatever that might be for me, can actually do far more than my expectations of this present reality. That is what the freedom story is. It is a hope that is not my own. A hope that stands much taller than just my own story, my own limited perspective.And if hope is a virtue, something that has to be practiced, if I may add this. We are entering into a season (Advent) that is the perfect illustration of this slow drip process. Advent is literally and spiritually and theologically about the function of waiting and anticipation. Of living with the tension and allowing Jesus to occupy the center. So as this season begins, this is a perfect opportunity to engage in the sort of discipline that Paul modeled himself, that I believe kept him open to seeing and hearing the grace of the spirit breathing into his own story.

Back to Acts 4 one final time. Here’s the thing about Peter’s prayer. At that time I considered it a prayer we needed to pray together as a community. Because transformation doesn’t happen in isolation. It happens together. That’s why it calls us to move out into the world. So in that spirit I would like to use this prayer now as a means of encouragement to embrace that slow drip process of transformation together, wherever grace finds you, and in whatever it is revealing to you. And to see it as a prayer of encouragement and courage and strength and confidence to take that small step back out into the world.

“And now Lord, look upon their threats and grant to your servants to continue to speak your word with all boldness, while you stretch out your hand to heal, and signs and wonders are performed through the name of your holy servant Jesus.”

And when they prayed it says they were transformed.

Far more than monsters and ghosts or the joy of a well told horror story (which I admit, I am quite fond of), it is the “why” questions that seem far more threatening and scary to me. There is something about the uncertainty and fear of the unknown that tends to show itself in places I least expect and linger long after the lights have gone out.

Giving Thanks For Virtuous Idealism
Thanksgiving is an opportunity for our extended family to come together over food and conversation. Although we do live relatively close together, it is typically the nieces and nephews who are the most visible measure of another year gone by, arriving a little bit taller, a little more socially mature… a little more graduated than the year before.

And with graduation comes an increased awareness of those why questions. Like where should they go to school and what should they be taking in school and why (and how) will these decisions matter for their future. Our own son is merely a year and a half away from facing these same questions, something that is, if I am being honest, both exciting and extremely frightening for me as a parent.

For one particular family member this year, these why questions had led them to consider, given the irreversible impact they perceived human activity to be having on our environment, that the single most important human endeavor needs to be a renewed commitment to space exploration. Space is the only way future generations will have a chance to survive, and this was leading them to work through a decision to head into engineering in an effort to help towards this goal. A valiant and ambitious goal to be sure.

Damien Chazelle’s First Man
In a similar way, considering the importance of space in shaping the future of humanity, the much anticipated new film by Damien Chazelle (the director of Whiplash and La La Land) tells the story of Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, and, in the larger context, the story of NASA and the complicated political nature of the space race.

The way Chazelle frames these two aspects of the film shapes the most interesting dynamic of what I think is an exceptional cinematic accomplishment. It is for movies like this that we go to the theaters. He takes the larger context and sees it through the lens of Armstrong’s personal story (it is based on his biography). And in doing so he affords an expansive, culturally aware, larger than life event a sense of intimacy and urgency by putting us in the chair with Armstrong, played to wonderfully restrained, cold, static affect by Gosling.

In effect, Chazelle is asking us in this film to consider, from this perspective, the question of whether the risk of this mission was truly worth the reward. It is a harrowing question given the vulnerability and sacrifice required to accomplish this mission.

A Spiritual Experience
It would be an understatement to suggest that something happened in my spirit as I was watching this film. To see a monumental moment of human achievement in the light of a tragic human story allowed me to see both the event and the person in a way I had never considered before. And the more I began to see of this story, the larger the why questions began to loom in my mind. Over the course of the film we watch as Armstrong deals with loss and grief by sinking himself into the mission and distancing himself from the pain, causing growing dissension in the family unit which Chazelle sets directly against the demands of the mission. The more Armstrong and others sacrifice for the sake of the mission, the further detached he becomes from the things that seem like they should be the greater priority.

The question that ultimately lingers in the shadows of this monumental accomplishment (and yes, we all know he ultimately makes those first steps onto the moon) is not whether America won the race, or even whether Armstrong accomplished his goal. This is demonstrated as a matter of fact in a film that is brave enough to shift the flag planting to the background and move the relationships to the forefront. Rather, Chazelle chooses to explore the greater why questions using this shifting perspective to consider why this mission mattered and why this momentary step taken by a single man became such an important part of our cultural and human story? What it is that makes this giant leap forward a necessary human accomplishment? What made the race for space worth the cost, sacrifices that become increasingly evident as the film moves forward. And why do we (or should we) value space exploration to begin with?

A True Horror Film
In exploring these questions, in his own way Chazelle has made what might be the most horrifying film of this season. And really, when it comes down to it, framing something as small and intimate as the human experience against something as large and monumental as the space race is scary business. Not simply because of what it celebrates, but for what it reveals- we don’t necessarily have the answers to the questions, and there is no promise that they will come by the time we reach the end of this film.

What the film does capture with certainty though is the complicated process by which we measure the things that are most important, the messiness of our human condition and the reality that we are not as in control of our world as our achievements tend to make us feel. And that leads to a growing sense of fear, both in the characters on screen and for me as a viewer. What Chazelle coaxes to the surface through the performances is a sense that it is actually this fear that fuels much of our need for progress and the pain we feel when we become a causalty of it, whether we recognize it or not. Hiding underneath the surface of accomplishments like the moon landing is the tragedy of our human story, the stuff that we often would rather ignore rather than face head on.
So Why?
When asked why they wanted to go into engineering, this young family member answered by offering a stark commentary on our human condition. Our life here on earth is past the point of no return. We are self destructing. We have messed things up so bad our only means of survival as a species is to get off this earth and start over. And yet I couldn’t help but think as I considered his answer in the moment, why? If humanity is so messed up, why is it so necessary that we find and fight for a way for to survive? What makes this fight for survival a meaningful endeavor, and at what cost will it arrive?

This is the same question asked of Armstrong in the film. Why go to the moon? For him he was given a glimpse of the world from space, and it is this shift in perspective, this new way of seeing the world that makes him the right candidate to fly to the moon. And yet the more he gazes at the moon the more he blinds himself to his earthly struggle and is haunted by his failures and mistakes. He fails to see what is right in front of him- his life, his wife, his son, the memory of his daughter, and he allows his pain to build a wall that begins to separate and guard his mission from his relationships.

And ultimately what Chazelle constructs is a sense of context. For as awe inspiring as that first step is in the film (an incredible moment to experience in Imax format), it is the tragedy of the human story that affords it meaning.

Quest for meaning: values, ethics, and the modern experience by Robert H. Kane
When it comes to the relationship between our why questions and our search for meaning, recognizing the tension is half the battle. And in his book, Kane argues that one of the things we need to recognize is that modernity, in its shift towards relativism, has actually begun to erode our sense of meaning, and, as one critic added in conversation on Goodreads, “stripped value from fact.” There is a sense that one gains from this book that society, or more specifically philosophy, has been attempting to (over) correct this by reinserting meaning back into the current reigning system of thought (using Locke’s blank slate theory as an example) by reestablishing value as creative (or created) fact. Whether it is doing this successfully is a matter of interpretation and perspective, but at the very least one could argue this is a problematic exercise at best.

Married to this notion (again, from Kane’s book) is the idea of progressivism as an idealized process. This is the idea that our social systems, human (technological) invention and our biology is being perfected (progressed or progressive) over time. He takes the time to examine this idea by offering a focused break down of the main schools of philosophical thought: Spinoza’s feeling-emotion tradition, Hume’s appeal to human nature (Sentimentalist approach), Hobbes and Rawls’ social contract theories (Contractarian approach), Bentham and Mill’s utilitarian theory (Utilitarian approach), and Kant’s reasoned ethics (Rationalist approach), understanding that each of these schools of thought plays into how we understand this ideal progression in terms of human reason and rationalism.

And yet, as another commentator put it, the reality is “the game theory of Utilitarians (the aim and expression of this perfection), the veil of ignorance of the Contractarians, the categorical insistence of the Rationalists, even the optimism of the Sentimentalists, all try to reduce humans to stick figures which are interchangeable with any other human.” This is the truth we often choose to ignore in favor of our accomplishments, our visible progress if you will. The bi-product of this is a confusion of the nature of personal responsibility. In other words, we seem to deem it necessary to hold humankind responsible while simultaneously allowing our reason and ration to dismantle the source of our responsibility- free will. And what ultimately gets sacrificed in this wake is meaning, or at the very least an honest expression of it.

Through all of the work of building these philosophical frameworks, we seem to still be sitting in this tension between “modern ethics and the wisdom of the ancients”, an idea I referenced in my previous blog on The Tangled Tree and the problem of Progressive Thought. Which is to say, meaning itself has become something of a problematic and volatile construct that finds itself stuck between the concreteness of rationalist ideals and the allusiveness of relativist meanderings, with the real question being, “is there a universal and absolute good that can actually connect these two worlds of stripped and re-created meaning (the questions of MacIntyre’s “After Virtue” and Plato’s “Good”).

In the book the suggestion is yes, there is a universal, objective truth of meaning. And he finds this by tracing it back across the secular-religious lines (or modern-ancient line), from everything such as the Eastern mystics and the Mosaic commandments to Jefferson’s “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, suggesting that we have always retained a shared sense of who we are and how things should be- which is precisely the foundation we need to recognize a shared value system of virtues or meaning that is not bound by cultural lines but rather shaped by human progress. And what does this come down for Kane? Love. Love is what we share and what gives us meaning.

THE GOOD PLACE AND GOODNESS FOR GOODNESS SAKE
It is interesting to note that a recent episode of The Good Place recently came to precisely this same conclusion. Outlining the same essential philosophical constructs, one of the shows main characters faces an existential crisis when an unexpected realization threatens the ability of his philosophical constructs to define and offer meaning to our everyday actions, primarily by doing away with the question of motivation. No longer able to assume a proper motivation for determining what is good and what is not, what has value and what does not, the only thing he has left is nihilism. Another character eventually helps to remind him that life means something simply because it is meaningful, and therefore we must do good for goodness sake, especially in the context of relationship. And to simply do this should be enough.

As I suggested in my previous blog, there is an obvious (to me anyways) leap of logic (or faith) that is necessary for this episode to arrive at this final conclusion (season 3, episode 5, for those keeping track… And it feels like they will be using this to set the stage for the remainder of the season). There is an existing, and arguably unbridgeable tension that exists between these two conclusions, nihilism and goodness for goodness sake. And while authors like Kane and the writers of The Good Place do deal with this tension in some shape or form, in both cases they eventually choose to ignore the inconsistencies of their reasoning in order to allow themselves to reconcile the fragility of the human experience with the reigning philosophical lines of thought that guide them. The values and virtues and meaning that they desire to find and uphold are, as I argued in my previous blog, antithetical to the facts of nature (survival, reproduction, non-linear adaptation and the selfish gene), and it is only (really) by neglecting the idea of human nature (which Locke does) that we are free to circumvent this fact as a necessary contradiction. As another commentator understands it, “goodness often creates disorder and disunity” precisely because it circumvents the natural order. If, as in the Jefferson mantra and the religious constructs of the ancient world, it is about freedom above all (as the highest expression of love as virtue), we are essentially left with a world that is consistently pushing back against the order that has imposed itself on our will. To be free is not our natural state.

And So We Start Over… and Over Again
The solution of the young idealist in my family (mentioned above) is to leave the mess and start over. To let the world self destruct and try again. Our responsibility today is to give future generations the opportunity to leave behind humanities mess and push forward towards something better. Given this individual has grown up in a relativist philosophical system, it is likely fair to assume this idealized future somehow sits above the accepted natural order that informs it. In this system of thought, humanity is the reason but progress is still the end game. All of which, once again, assumes meaning where meaning is not a given, while at the same time it cannot function unless these pursuits mean something. In this context it assumes the race for space is in-fact the greater good, while forgetting that it is the tragedy of the human story that this goodness is supposed to be for.

In the movie First Man, Chazelle recognizes that assigning meaning to something like the space race as one of the greatest and most important achievements of human kind can only be true if framed against the more intimate, human story that informs it. The painful why questions of Armstrong’s life. In-fact the tension that Chazelle manages to achieve in this film comes from the way he allows these questions to haunt Armstrong rather than satisfy him with the answers he needs. He believes what he is doing means something, and yet the closing scene leaves us with an open ended silence that simaltaneously shakes our confidence in what we just experienced and returns us to the brokenness that brought us to this point. Was it worth it? Here I think is where Chazelle does a rather brilliant job of giving this tension a subtle yet distinct trajectory, both as a larger cultural statement and as an expression of Armstrong’s personal story, giving us glimpses of hope while allowing the uncertainty of the moment to linger. We have landed on the moon, but the truth is the world he left behind is still a divided mess. Armstrong has completed his mission, but the truth his relationship with his family is still broken. The pain still persists. For all that we can control, even now as we try to get to Mars and manipulate genes and create robots, we remain as much out of control, at war and divided as we were back then.

In my previous blog I mentioned that one of the biggest obstacles to our ability to derive meaning from human progress is the latest research (The Tangled Tree, or HGT- Horizontal Gene Transfer) that is pushing back on one of the foundations of rationalist thought- that linear picture of evolution that allows us to posit and locate an original source for our progressive ideological and biological pursuits, a source that is able to draw a clear line in our progression from here to an idealized there. I then wondered if the greatest obstacle to our ability to locate this source is, in-fact, the human experience. After seeing First Man I am left wondering this even more.

As a film, First Man dares to wonder whether the cost was worth the reward, and in doing so considers why the space program is so important. What is it that we are after? Immortality? Survival? Achievement? And what gives these things meaning in the first place? To find the answer it has to dig underneath the surface to see the human story that helped guide this mission, and in doing so considers that it is the stories that we neglect in our need to control the future on our own terms that tend to be the things that leave us most out of control. Armstrong is not established as a pilot with super human abilities or a series of amazing accomplishments. He is simply presented as the last one standing. He must complete the mission because it is something that needs to get done. To what end is not a question he truly considers until it costs him everything. And the truth is, exploring the grief, the loss, the broken relationships, the uncertainty that marks Armstrong’s journey to the moon, this requires us to actually get into the mud with him and wrestle with the why questions on a deeper and more complex level. It requires us to wrestle with what is virtuous and good and right and meaningful in this world. And it requires us to do this even when we don’t have all the answers.

More Than Goodness for Goodness Sake
Truth be told most days (again, if I am honest) living life in the name of survival and progress gives me more reason not to live than to go on living. In truth, it is difficult for me to see the moon when I can barely see myself on the best of days. And so it requires faith for me to believe that who we are and what we are striving for matters. A faith that can transcend the experiences of this world and speak to something universal, something that is given to us rather than created by us. Because the truth is, for as awe inspiring as it was to go to the moon, to see the surface open up before me in all its accomplished glory, it is the broken experience of Armstrong’s story that left me most shaken. And if there is a greater point to Chazelle’s film (subjectively speaking of course), I think it is that, for all that we give to achieving the impossible, it is our willingness to enter into the human story that is the far more worthwhile journey. Because it is when we enter into this story that we can actually attend to the brokenness rather than escaping it. That we can learn to embrace it rather than try to control it. This perspective, the perspective Armstrong finally seems to gain near the end of the film, even if in limited fashion, has the ability to turn our gaze away from the false promises of our ambition and towards something greater, something other. Something we can actually call good not for goodness sake or because it is something we accomplished or achieved by the measure of our ambition, but because it has the power to change us.

A few years back I wrote in this space about a class I took on what it looks like to navigate “the second half of life”. It was a class designed for those over 40, and in part it is what inspired this blog.

One of the big learnings I took away from this class was that loss, a benchmark for defining what it means to grow older, has many faces, some that are more obvious and easily recognizable, many that are not. And learning how to grieve well might be the most important part of the process, certainly when it comes to our ability to recognize and label these losses for what they are.

I also discovered that I am really… REALLY bad at knowing how to grieve. And given the obvious loss that has shaken my, our, lives over these past few months, this is a reality that has hit doubly as hard, a fact that has turned even more necessary to reconcile

Simply put, loss sucks and life is…

A GHOST STORY
One of my favorite films of 2017 also happened to be one of the most striking reflections on the grieving process I have seen on film. Directed by David Lowery and starring Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck, it tells the story of loss, in this case the loss of a spouse, from a particularly unique perspective, that of the Ghost whom we see struggling to make sense of life on the other side of death as he stands helpless against the process of grief.

Lowery breathes into this process a timeless perspective. The haunting of a mere moment by a bed sheet with two holes in it for eyes gives way to a more expansive view of life that sees the cycles of grief playing backwards and forwards through the building and demolishing, the progress and the destruction, the construction and deconstruction of the land on which he stands. What is most striking about this panoramic picture is the way it connects this sense of time and place. For as much as the Ghost’s view of the world gains this brevity, it remains intimately tied to the place which gives it definition, a soul so to speak- the home, the people, the experiences, the memories of this place. There is something unfinished and unresolved that haunts the Ghost who is forced to watch the process of grief unfold, watching Mara’s character slowly coming apart, desperate to hold on and to remember and eventually moving on and letting go. We see the house itself being built, moved into and made into a home, and finally forgotten and demolished. And what centers this whole process is the symbolism of this singular note. A note that Mara’s character writes and sticks in wall, seemingly as a reminder of what we see fading from her own view. A note that captures all at once the complexity of their relationship in the years that they were given together. The regrets and the joys. The hurt and the love. This note comes to symbolize what haunts the Ghost as he is unable to gain access to it. And yet it seems to hold the key to this unfinished business. And what is stunning here is Lowrey’s choice to leave the contents of this note out of view, unresolved for us as viewers, even as the Ghost finally accesses it. We never get to read the words, only surmise about what it said, if anything.

Which for me is sort of like trying to make sense of life itself. Life is allusive. For me it is like trying to make sense of this loss. I feel the pain of regret and second guessing. The hole that now exists that seems like it will never get filled. The questions that will never be answered. And the memories of all the stuff that made that relationship meaningful and joyful and full of love.

Gone, in a moment.

There is very little dialogue in A Ghost Story, but there is one scene in-particular, occuring right in the middle of the film’s narrative, that appears to hold the film together on both sides of the grieving process giving it a degree of narrative force and direction that allow the visuals to become reflective in a more concrete fashion. It is a conversation that happens between a group of people, with a specific individual caught wondering about the nature of life in the face of loss. The big question that the film pulls out this moment is why?

Why does it all matter? What is the point?

As the character suggests, we die, others die, the world and the universe is one day going to die. And the only way to hold it all together for this singular moment, to give it meaning, is to in some sense give in to the lies that we need to tell ourselves in order for that meaning to take shape. The lies that say who we are and what we do matters in the bigger picture of that timeless view of life. This character’s questioning of it all then becomes a way of interpreting the Ghost’s perspective of seeing the grieving process unfold as a panoramic shot, of seeing how quickly things move forward and are forgotten.

This becomes the tension we are forced to carry from gaining such a sweeping view of the world, a tension that struggles to stay centered on that sense of place where meaning and identity and purpose can be realized. These are the places out of which grief flows and pushes back against, allowing the questions of our despair to take hold and challenge that sense of certainty. The only certainty to be found in these moments is that loss sucks, and life is…

FIRST REFORMED
One of my favorite films of 2018 so far also has to do with a similar question of grief, albeit from a slightly different perspective.

It tells the story of a priest whom, after dealing with loss begins to experience his own crisis of faith. Over the course of the film there is a relationship that then begins to develop between a widow named Mary, with these two characters representing the difficult place that lingers in this crisis between hope and despair. What disguises itself as a physical relationship emerges as a stark and surprising symbol of the spirit, with much of the imagery of this relationship imagining the moments of spiritual transcendence (the levitation scene for example) and transformation (being reformed) that is able to break through the despair.

First Reformed is, in many ways, an ode to transcendental filmmaking that flows out of the director’s intent to write a film that can contrast or be set in conversation with the films which inspired it- Ordet, The Diary of a Country Priest and Winter Light. Set against these films we have an idea of redemption, or of life and resurrection, set against the bleak and threatening reality of suicide, world weariness and defeat. The gradual deconstruction of Hawke’s character’s faith over the course of the film is given a rather striking resonance through the subtle polluting of the whiskey glass that mirrors his physical deterioration. The ending then, in the director’s own words, arrives as this sort of intervention of the spirit, a picture of a necessary grace that meets us at the crossroads of this struggle between hope and despair. It doesn’t necessarily answer all of the questions that this crisis of faith brings to the surface, but it is nevertheless transformative as it embraces the shape and form of the crisis itself.

I think it is, like A Ghost Story, this willingness to sit in that space in-between, in the sort of ambiguity out of which our questions and uncertainties seem to persist with the spirits transformative work, that is also able to give voice to the films larger concern- can God ever forgive us? Can God ever forgive me? This is not so much a question of sinfulness in the film as it is a desperate need for grace in what feels like a desperate, persisting and helpless condition. When we look out ourselves and then look out at the world with all the war and sickness and death and struggle, is it fair to suggest we are broken beyond repair, or is there hope and joy to be found in the mess of it all? In the process of grief, through the anger and the questions and the pleading and the doubting, the answer we find in the films final picture of its main characters I think is yes, yes there is hope, but it is a hope we can see only when the spirit invades our space and transcends our brokenness.

In interviews the Director suggested that he toiled over where to take the films ending. A part of him wanted it to end in a picture of ultimate pollution, of that whiskey glass becoming poison and suicide overtaking notions of faith, capturing that sense that even when hope is in our grasp it remains allusive. The truth that often times despair seems like it will and often does have its way with us and our world, sometimes to tragic effect, is a brave picture to confront. This lingering decision to confront this is felt in the film’s narrative force, and it allows the tension to remain real even as the director allows the idea of hope and resurrection to transcend the human experience. This is not an easy conclusion to what is a heavy and difficult film to embrace. Nor is facing and walking through the overwhelming emotions of grief and loss and struggle. Hope is allusive. Life is…

HEARTS BEAT LOUD
Some have considered this to be a movie about finding yourself, a family drama about a child coming of age and a parent needing to learn how to let go.

For me this is a movie primarily about grief and the ways in which loss can isolate us from the places and people that define us rather than pull us together. It is, on the surface, a sweet, affecting family drama that proves music, a universal language, can speak louder than words and be an incredibly effective narrative device through which to tell a story. Underneath it is a drama that proves with the right script, the right direction and the right performances, a movies heart can beat even louder than the music, breathing into this universal language a degree of meaning that actually transcends and transforms the song itself.

And transcends the human experience that defines this movie’s heart and rendering of the grieving process.

At the heart of the film is a father-daughter relationship, both of whom are attempting to navigate life on the other side of the loss of their wife and mother. What holds them together through this loss is a shared love of music, music which acts as the thread weaving into their own process of grief the memories of this loss and the struggle to make sense of this loss in the present. The reality is that life continues to move forward whether they want it to or not, like a song intent on writing itself, and it is the way they are able (or unable) to submit themselves to this process that gently form their journey towards each other in this film.

With its use of music the film shows that there is a certain poetic presence to the way grief works to isolate the different notes of our lives and to bring these notes together in song, and it is this subtle and growing isolation that can sometimes blind us to the fact we do not perform this song alone. Our notes can only become a song when performed in the context of community, and it is here where Hearts Beat Loud emerges as the true family drama that it is.

Through the music it considers the idea that however messy the process of grief can be, it is in the context of family and community that we are given the means to give it words and definition. Grief only means something if it can be expressed against the joy it has stolen, and the best way to find that joy again is to allow it to push us back, and with more intention, into relationship where it can once again emerge. But it takes courage to sing the songs we need to sing and perform in front of others on the best of days. In times when those different faces of loss threaten to steal our voice, it takes more than courage, it takes desperation. And yet at the heart of this film is the idea that desperation can push us forward and allows us to heal even when we think it is pulling us apart. Desperation is what can form in us that lost desire to learn how to perform again when life seems to be forcing us to leave our songs behind. And that power comes from the melody of others. And ultimately for me from the gift of a truly transcendent other.

There is nothing flashy or complicated about the direction of this film. It is the simple nature of its approach, largely stripped down, that allows the performances and songs to do the hard work of bringing us in on the journey. And in this sense Hearts Beat Loud offered me one of the most compelling and meaningful cinematic experiences of this year. In this present moment it offered me something even more powerful-hope. The tension is still there. Just the other day I told someone in my life that I am not sure I am ever going to come out on the other side of the loss we faced in the past few months. But as I considered the perspective of A Ghost Story and the hopeful transcendent spirit of First Reformed, Hearts Beat Loud gave me a picture of what it looks like to actually step into life again, even if in my moment of grief I remain unsure of what that is. I am reminded of the promise that somehow, in someway it is still worth embracing in the midst of the process.

What does it mean to be progressive. To say that we live in a “progressive” society. To champion progressive policy. To share a “progressive” view of this or that issue. To be labelled a progressive in the world of politics, religion, philosophy or social reform.

I started to think about this word “progressive” a number of years ago after finding myself at a point of frustration over the ways we tend to give opposing points of view both a label and a box. I wondered about the wisdom of viewing the world in such overly defined ways that sees one generation as smarter, more advanced and more aware than the last. Or whether there even is such as a thing as a highly defined trajectory towards better, more enlightened ways of thinking and being in this world that can be measured without the muddled presence of human presupposition.

In the midst of all of this wondering and perusing I happened across an article which led to a book which led to more articles on a revolutionary find in the world of scientific theory that appeared to be changing the way we see, or at least my Grade 10 and 11 Biology textbook saw, the evolutionary process. This is a theory I have found myself returning to all these years later after once again feeling frustrated by similar things and picking up a book called The Tangled Tree by David Quammen. And it has found me thinking about these questions all over again

THE WAY OF HORIZONTAL GENE TRANSFER
The revolutionary theory in question is called horizontal gene transfer (HGT). It is an idea that challenges the old paradigm of the Darwinian Tree of Life, in which gene transfer happens inwards and in protective isolation by proving that genes can also transfer sideways and backwards and forwards by permeating DNA from the outside world via outside sources (read: molecular phylogenetics).

In this theory we are far more a product of our environment than we once thought ourselves to be. So what are the implications of this theory?

As said, it changes the old paradigm, which it is worth noting remains the reigning paradigm in my son’s Grade 11 Biology textbook. It takes the Tree of Life, where a single source branches out over time into succinct, measurable and defined evolutionary changes via inherited genes, and rewrites that picture as a web, or in the case of the book a picture of tangled branches where these same evolutionary changes are far from succinct, measurable and defined and rather a testament of an extremely complicated mix of sources and outcomes that defy previous notions of natural progression.

In other words, in purely biological terms life is a bit of a mess. A bit of a sprawling, undefined mess. Far messier than we once thought it to be. And, for what it is worth, far less “naturally” progressive than we once perceived it to be under the old evolutionary paradigm.

Which begs the question in my mind, why is it that we hold so tightly to the idea of “progressive” on purely human terms, a key tenant of the modern age, when there is no true paradigm in nature on which to measure this sort of natural progression, certainly not in the linear fashion that history tends to read back into our human evolution on both a social and biological level. Why have we attempted to deviate from the natural process so succinctly, desperate to pick and peruse elements of nature that match our perception of the “good” human condition while ignoring the others? The root word, progress, after all is burdened by the idea that we are becoming better, more advanced, more informed, more “progressed”  than we were before, and therefore weeding out the less productive, less ideal, less enlightened stuff that used to hold us back. It is a word that owes itself heavily to the old paradigm in which the enlightenment was essentially birthed. And in terms of human advancement in progressive ideology, this tends to be seen as “freedom” and rights of the individual as the highest value.

Yet, science would suggest that this is not a consistent picture of the evolutionary process as a whole. We aren’t evolving to become a more advanced species, nor an advanced version of our species. The idea of a progressive society is in a sense an aberration born out of humanities need (or desire) to circumvent the norms of the process precisely because we looked at the process at one point in time and found it unbecoming and in need of a recognizable moral foundation. And yet this needs a universal morality to work, and the idea that philosophers (for as much as they have tried) can actually pull a universal meaning or value out of the evolutionary construct is questionable on the best of days, precisely because it is something that must work against the natural order.

Thus, if one was to spend time with the philosphers who created the framework for progressive ideologies, we would find a philosphy that still sits in tension, needing to work against the natural order while also proporting to work in service of it.

In truth, the only real universal constant over time is change, and in the context of HGT this change happens without regard for the sort of progress we have long been trained to see by modern philosophy, at least in the ways we are taught to see it as measured against idealistic visions of what “civilized” societies must be. What we see as progressive is little more than a facade, a mirage, a value that we have superimposed onto society that nature does not hold to on its own merit outside of change for the sake of survival and reproductive methods, the two central values of that construct. The best philosophers can do is read into this construct some proclaimed higher, superimposed values of human activity that render things like inclusion and social awareness as a representation (or means) of these values of survival and reproduction. For example, freedom for all is a value we have set over and above the natural order, but this is a value because by protecting freedom for all we can protect the survival of the human species.

And the more I consider this tension the more I feel like it is a rather large problem when it comes to how we view the world, especially as we use our need to see civil and social change as a means of filtering out the weak (non progressives) from the strong (progressives).

HUMAN NATURE AND NATURE
One of the other big implications of this revolutionary theory is the way it reintegrates our understanding of human nature back into nature itself. HGT recognizes that we are at our core “mosaic creatures” made up of bits and pieces of the world that surrounds us over time. In this sense the idea of a unique human condition that sets us over and above nature as civil versus wild is little more than a figment of our inherited imaginative process. With the old paradigm of the tree challenged, we are as much a part of this nature as anything else, and a randomized and broken version of it at that. Not as enlightened or in tension with the old construct of nature as we tend to see ourselves to be.

Further, HGT has shown that 8 percent of the human genome originated through virus genomes operating on this horizontal transfer theory. In other words, regardless of how we see the size and/or function of our brains as the thing that sets us apart as “civilized” beings, we are at our core broken, flawed and corrupted representations of the natural order given purely to the construct of change for the purpose of survival. This remains the highest order.

Which had me thinking even further. By its very nature the word progressive divides. In fact, on philosophical terms the entire construct of evolutionary theory divides. Not simply according to ideologies, but it divides us by our nature. Tribalism, seperation of species, nationalism, progressive ideologies. It all flows from the same place. In modern terms it sets humanity directly above the natural order from which it belongs and is in relationship to and divides us from nature. The word progressive also coopts for its own purposes and sets us over and above one another. It supplants nature with superimposed virtues and values that essentially attempt to control the trajectory of the one constant in the process- change, and thus gives it meaning and purpose according to our own culturally embedded values. And lastly, the word progressive sells us on an idea. It sells us on this idea that because nature is heading somewhere particular, so should humanity, and that this progress aims for something better, whatever utopian ideal that might embody, at the expense of what we deem as worse.

Which leaves philosophers trapped by this need to find a universal value that can pull all this division together (because values tend to throw the old natural construct into disarray) or accept the division as a function of natures value (which leads to things like the Holocaust).

So back to my question, why do we hold on so tightly to this idea of “progress”? I think some semblance of an answer could come from contextualizing the word into our modern paradigm of old versus new. We have been taught that nature is heading somewhere particular, towards self correction and the betterment of our world and humanity, and therefore we expect it to be true and make it our task to interpret this. And in many ways we need this as social and socially aware creatures that can actively measure one action against another. This is an affect of becoming increasingly aware of the world around us, the world which we inhabit and must make sense of in order to reconcile how we feel against what we see.

This same contextualization could also apply to the way we understand this old versus new paradigm in the light of history. Historically we can measure human society as being at some sort of intersection of secular and religious ideologies. And as humanity continues to try and control this shift away from the old (religion) and towards the new (secular), with the belief by the stronger that this is progress, we are experiencing a tension between what is essentially still borrowing from the language and assumptions of the old paradigm- religion, and what is also fighting at the same time for freedom from this paradigm. Which means that this idea of heading somewhere particular, of this process having universal meaning and purpose beyond just survival (the assumptions of religion), of this trajectory being one of heading somewhere better (which is built into the language of redemption and restoration of creation in religion) is an inherently religious one that is trying to disassociate itself from religion altogether. Talk about messy.

THE WHY QUESTIONS AND OUR SELFISH SELF

The harder answer of course is to say there are no easy answers. I’ll be honest, the reality of this revolution in scientific theory bogs me down even on my best days. I have no real answers, only struggles and considerations and convictions. There are moments though where contextualizing my struggle into my own relationship to this old-new paradigm shift, which largely includes wrestling with my own faith based perspective and progressive ideologies and value systems and questions of meaning has been helpful.

At the heart of this for me is the question of why. Why should we care about what is good or bad? Why should we spend our time trying to convince others about what is right or wrong, helpful and not helpful when it comes to our ideas of what it means to progress and to get better and advance as a civilization? Why does any of it actually matter when, at best, meaning and purpose on a purely biological basis is something that we must admit we have presupposed and superimposed seemingly to make ourselves feel better about what is at it’s heart an aimless process?

When the author of this book encountered the question, why does nature choose to invest its energy in this HGT when there is no consistent or measurable outcome to be gleaned from it (sometimes it results in good, sometimes bad and at other times it is simply benign), he went on to suggest it comes down to one thing- it does it for purely selfish reasons.

To arrive at his answer it is important to recognize that the author holds to the conviction that what he writes is hugely important to not only our understanding of how things work, but about where we are headed in terms of medicine, exploration and ultimately survival. But if there is a sharp criticism to be made here, it is not so much about his material as it is about his assumptions. He spends so much time challenging the perceptions of the old paradigm where he believes it is necessary to do so that he fails to consider the ways his own assumptions are indebted to the ways of the old paradigm in the first place. He assumes a measure of meaning and worth to human advancement. He assumes a measure of meaning and worth to the idea of progress, which for him is still an important part of human participation in the natural “disorder”. But he cannot disassociate it from selfishness or the disorder of HGT.

The end result of this research is that the only true carry over from the old paradigm that still matters as perceivable and rationalized truth is that of survival. We all, as an interconnected species, share this same need and want and built in natural desire to survive on purely selfish terms. Which is super interesting to me, because if there was one big takeaway from this book for me it is what it exposes about our need to survive, the same answer the author gave when asked the question, which is the idea that in this revolutionary theory it is the selfish gene that still reigns. From the pages of Ayn Rand to the polemics of Dawkins and the modern, neo-darwinist new atheists, to modern expositions of the importance of the selfish way, it is the power of the selfish gene that continues to permeate the messiness of the process. And in HGT we can see that this is still the only real reason nature would have for expending energy on something that has been exposed as far more eraddic than we once thought it to be.

And then I wondered about this notion of selfishness as I pondered some of the markers of progressive thought. What if selfishness really is the great adversary, the great mark of the natural condition. What if even our ideas of progress, when you pull back the curtain of those imposing “why” questions, is indebted to these same selfish aims. It all leads me to wonder about where it is we think we are heading when we speak of investment in space travel, advancement in technology and medicine and genetics, protection of the earth and our children and future generations. For the book this is all a reason to celebrate. The necessary science to better our understanding of the world and give us a better chance at survival. But when I pare it all down, to what aim do we invest in all of  this when progress is little more than a carry over from our old nature? Why survive as  human species? Why live?

SELFISHNESS

Selfishness becomes even more complicated when one tries to make sense of the values of socio-political progress in ideological terms. Values that grow out of and depend on reading a level of distinction into this mosaic. Of finding individual beauty in the mess. Values that assume meaning in the importance of individual rights and expression as the highest order of society, of being able to distinguish why one value matters next to another based on a “given” meaning that says we have value to begin with. And yet the paradox of this is the thing that holds it all together continues to be, and has always been selfishness. Human survival. Species distinction. The betterment of our society and our future generations. All things that fight against the picture of the mosaic creature as a virtuous being in and of itself, valued because of it’s diversity. Ask someone why progressive ideolgies are necessary and important and the answer will be because it means something important to the value we can give to humanity. But where does this greater meaning actually come from?

Which brings me back to the intersection of the old and the new. And this is purely my personal and subjective opinion. In my eyes, the only true paradigm that we have for meaning is religion. It seems to me that for as much as philosophers try, the only true measurement we have of expressing this degree of value and meaning is spirituality. Sure, we might be lying to ourselves in order to believe religion is actually a viable (human?) construct on which to base our progressive ideologies, but we owe much to it in terms of our modern social evolution. But the reality is we are lying to ourselves on the other side of this paradigm as well. Outside of religion nature orients us around species. Nature embellishes who we are by taking broken beings and adapting us to our environment for the sake of ensuring our survival. It’s an instinctual genetic function, not a given value. And to give it value from our “human” perspective is simply to play god with nature. And we all know how that is turning out.

Which, again, all leaves me even more curious about the place of faith in helping us to understand why we continue to see progressive thought as important in light of the evidence to the contrary. Spiritually speaking I can begin to see the idea of the new creation all over this concept of the “mosaic creature”. I can begin to see the promise of redemption against the light of our corrupted and broken genes. I can begin to see notes of grace in the messiness of the process. I can begin to see beauty in the diversity, even if the selfish gene continues to challenge my human condition. And I can begin to grow a love for all of life and the whole of the created order.

In the same light of this spirituality it also then becomes even more compelling to me to consider that what this book calls endobiosis (the event that set up and enabled life to begin to take shape) has only ever happened once. In other words we are indebted still to a single source on either side of the old/new paradigm. This to me is hopeful. This to me makes some sense, because if there is a singular source of life it means it is possible to see a given meaning rather than a created meaning, one that maybe has been hidden but in our awareness is now being revealed. This is different than the progressiveness modern eyes tend to read into the evolutionary process, if because it means we are not growing into more enlightened beings, but rather discovering truths about who we have always been, who God has always been and what this world has always been. We are then coming back to a point of perspective before evolution had its way with this world.

Which means the real question is, can this single, universal source actually shape our values and sense of direction (or lack of it) with purpose? With science alone I feel like my answer to that is no. When I leave space for my faith to inform my wrestling with this science, I can at least begin to see the possibility of a yes forming out of the mud, out of the messy mosaic, and that gives me the strength to at least begin to accept the process of itself. To actually see the mosaic as beautiful, not only in its cohesiveness which pushes back against our divisive ideologies, but in its expression of the spiritual process itself that is in fact heading somewhere, towards being made whole again.

If there was a flaw in the film White Boy Rick, one could argue it is the film’s central, titular character played by Richie Merritt. If you know the story of his casting, he was a troubled youth hand picked straight from the principles office to portray a troubled youth on-screen. On paper the idea sounds inspired. On screen it becomes obvious that Merritt is outmatched by a tremendous supporting cast, most notably the incredibly talented Matthew McConaghey. At its best, the film allows the supporting cast to elevate Merritt’s emotionally static performance. At its worst Merritt keeps the film ever so slightly chained to his level of inexperience.

I can see how this could represent a problem for some viewers. It makes for a slightly uneven viewing experience. But the context in which I saw this film allowed me to play this semblance of imbalance as a sense of of inspiration and an overall strength. I knew nothing about the story of White Boy Rick going in. If anything I had high hopes from the trailer that this was going to be a notable Oscar film. In-fact, the only thing I really knew was the casting story of the young Richie Merritt, and through that small bit of information I was able to read his story into the character he plays in the film. Which of course sounds a bit counter intuitive to what good film making “should” be. Merritt should be bringing us into his story, not expecting us to read into it something that is not earned. But I felt a degree of humility and earnestness behind the inexperience, an earnestness that has followed his public journey as well on his way from the principles office to the big screen. Commenting on the struggle, at one point he declared, “I’d remember what my mother always told me: ‘God wouldn’t put you here to fail,’ ” he says. “I would take a couple of deep breaths when I was anxious. I would always try to be in the moment, have fun and do what God brought me to do.”

This degree of humility suits a character who is uneducated and an equally unlikely candidate. It left room to consider his performance was perhaps more honest than unpolished, a reflection of his own context rather than aspiring or trying to be anything else other than his true self. And the more the film went on, especially in the films final 30 minutes, the more this began to grow on me.

Regarding the film as a whole, since seeing it for the first time I have read a number of articles and reviews that have found not just Merritt, but the entire film to be slightly underwhelming. I have heard many decry the films lack of a clear trajectory. Even more have complained about the films pacing, some calling it flat out boring and uninspired. In nearly every case (if not all), these two issues seemed to come back around to the idea of the film as “social commentary”, which is to say, some feel like the film needed to comment on “a” or any number of social issues that arise through the context of the film- the plight of Detroit, poverty, gun control, drugs, prison reform; but that it never truly commits to any one of these points, rather feeling scatterbrained in terms of what it wants or desires to say, even to the point of saying nothing at all.

It is fair to say this is where I diverge even more sharply in my own opinion and experience of this film. The first thing that deserves mention is the degree to which this film is not the film we see in the trailer. The trailer advertised a fast paced, taught, entertaining character drama about a particular kids story of living through the epidemic of a post apocalyptic Detroit. The moment I realized most of the trailer occurs in the first half hour of the film was the same moment I knew my expectations were going to be upended, if simply because the story itself had yet to be told. What the film becomes, rather quickly I might add, is a slow burn, immersive experience that sheds light on the everyday moments that form the real life, post-apocalyptic setting. Instead of simply telling the story in a direct and concise way, it is content to meander, at times allowing us to simply sit with the visuals while it takes the necessary time to build a deeply felt sense of atmosphere which flows out of this routine sense of direction and misdirection.

I think peoples criticism of the pacing and lack of clear direction speaks more to people’s expectations than to an actual weakness of the film. It is fair to want a film to represent a more direct social commentary, but I think in doing so it becomes easy to miss what White Boy Rick actually is and desires to be, which is a dysfunctional family drama. This also happens to be the film that landed with me on a personal level, more so than if it had been a more direct social commentary.

I think where the film truly finds its voice is at the halfway point when the narrative takes a sudden twist out of its more dire sensibilities and into a complicated vision of optimistic fervor. We see McConaughey’s character sitting on the porch of their house having a conversation with Ricky about the idea of family. In a life born out of their own given and earned social context, the idea of family seemed to remain just slightly beyond their grasp. In this moment though it is an idea that seems realized, an idea that maybe, just maybe could capture and reinforce a bit of Ricky’s sentimental longing for those forgotten childhood moments where “things were good for while, right?” And yet the sentiment of McConaughey’s character that breaks through this moment of perhaps ill-placed optimism quickly reminds Ricky that “family”, or at least our expectation of family, is an incredibly fragile and volatile thing. It is a stark picture of what it feels like to be stuck in a cycle without hope while doing everything in your power to simply put another foot forward.

It is out of this moment, looking both backwards and forwards as the story moves seemingly from point A to point A (for lack of a better description of the movies trajectory), that we begin to see where this slow burn is heading. The people we meet at the end of the film are not the same ones we meet in the opening moments. There is transformation, even if in some cases it is hard to recognize, and this transformation arrives in the midst of the fragile and misguided world that they embody.

Sometimes when your expectations are upended, a film can go very wrong. And sometimes, as it did for me, it makes the film that much more compelling. I was there for the real life story, and instead I got something that was far more immersive, a film content to sit and marinate in its sense of time and place. The narrative that it does follow becomes important for how we learn to weigh our sympathy for a family of corrupt individuals making corrupt choices that somehow and in someway manages to mirror something of worth and demand our empathy. And it is this process that becomes incredibly important for the ways we are able to engage with larger social issues. If we can’t gain sympathy for the brokenness of others, and if we are unsure how to see the good in something that appears on the outside to be morally corrupt, our engagement with social issues will be limited to the level of responsibility we see people taking for their own problems. And yet these problems are rarely so black and white. Often they are systemic and complex. What White Boy Rick teaches us is that what is most important when it comes to those larger social issues and concerns is taking the time to hear the story that lies behind it.

For Richie Merritt, it was the compassion of others that gave him the chance to better himself and to tell his story. In the context of this film it is the story of a family that ultimately leads towards a compassionate end. In both cases the starting point is the same- a story about corrupt people making corrupt choices struggling to become better people. And that is the issue that compassion should be concerned about first and foremost.

In my own wrestling with the recent documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor, one of the best and most powerful films I have seen in 2018 so far, I’ve been spending a lot of time with the Good Samaritan parable found in Luke 10. A while back I came across a teaching on this passage that really transformed the way I think of faith and God and salvation in general, and much of this came flooding back as I watched Mr. Rogers story unfold on screen.

The Good Samaritan: Discovering the most important question
My tendency (and I don’t think I am alone) was and is to read this passage solely from the perspective of what I thought was the most important question, “what does it mean to be a “good” Samaritan”. With the emphasis on the word good, the parable would then boil down to the following two takeaways- being a good Samaritan means helping others, and so go and be a good neighbor to others.

What I missed in the passage through so many years of reading it from this singular perspective was the motivating question of the passage that the parable is actually responding to, along with the way this motivating question actually directs (and redirects) the trajectory of the narrative in a slightly different way than I had been reading it to that point.

What Must I Do To Be Saved
Consider that the concern of the initial question posed by the central character, in all respects appearing to be a good, God fearing Jewish man is, “what must I do to be saved”. What fuels this parable then from the get-go is a question of salvation. At which point consideration for the ancient Jewish context becomes vitally important here for understanding the nature of this man’s question and for ensuring we don’t simply submit his question to modern day constructs of what salvation is. To start, the question this seemingly devout, Jewish man poses would have been one of participation, not conversion. Participation, that is, in the hopeful “Jewish” expectation of ushering in God’s Kingdom “on earth as it is in Heaven”, an important piece of the ongoing Jewish story of exile and expectation. At this place and time they had indeed returned from a long period of exile only to find things were not not as they were supposed to be, or at least not as they expected things should be. What is important here to note though is that what was most definitely not foremost on their minds when it came to this question of salvation was notions or concerns of going to Heaven or Hell after they die. This was about Kingdom building and Kingdom participation.

It is also easy for our modern day constructs to quickly turn a discussion of salvation into a very Protestant tinged faith-works or law-grace dichotomy or argument. The Jewish man in question certainly would have been thinking along the lines of the law, and his question immediately points us in this direction, but what is central to understanding the nature of Jesus’ parable, or the answer He gives to this man’s question, is not positioning this question of law against notions of a Christian faith or Jesus grace. Christian theology was not a thing at this point in time. Rather it would have been about recognizing how the Gospel, recognized in the person and ministry of Jesus, was breathing life and meaning into this man’s idea of full participation in the Kingdom of God. In other words, Jesus was informing the true nature of the law and the man’s deeply devout Jewish expectation, not upending or demonizing it.

So to return to the question at hand, “what must I do” implies that if I do this I will be saved. A more accurate rendering is more apt to read this as an assertion of community, or Jewish community, what must “we” do in what was (and was becoming) an incredibly fractured and assimilated state at the time.

On the flip side of this same question is the fear that I am, or we are not doing enough to be saved. That the promise of God that formed the Jewish expectation of God’s Kingdom come was not going to arrive as promised. New Testament scholar and theologian N.T. Wright has written extensively about how this plays into the forming of an early and distinct Christian theology, primarily through the apostolic ministry of Paul, and in his latest effort, Paul: A Biography, he talks a lot about how the person and ministry of Jesus, certainly from Paul’s own experience and understanding, really becomes an embodiment of this Jewish exile tension, going so far as to posit Paul’s own ministry in line with the Jewish prophetic tradition and legacy. They have returned from exile as the Prophets promised, but they found themselves still waiting for God’s Kingdom to arrive. For Paul, Jesus minds the material gap of this tension as an already-not yet spiritual and earthly reality where heaven and earth are in the process of coming together. Jesus is the promised fulfillment, but the pattern of exile continues to mark the “Christian” life as we, both Jew and Gentile, patiently wait for the restoration of His Kingdom to be completed.

It is under this backdrop that Jesus’ immediate response to this Jewish man sets his parable directly into this same already-not yet paradigm. What must you do to be saved? Do this- Love God and love your neighbor as yourself and you will live.

In other words, if you want to see God’s Kingdom ushered in in its fullness, here are the practical steps you can take to ensure this happens.

What becomes clear at this point though is that Jesus considers the lawyer’s basic motivating question to be problematic from the get-go. There is no step by step process that can accomplish what this man desires. He is worried about the idea of salvation and is looking to “justify” himself as a God fearing, Jewish man in the eyes of the law, which is the mark of belonging to the Jewish faith and thus as part of God’s Kingdom. In his expectation of what God is doing, or should be doing, the nature of his motivating question requires him to continue down the line of this same problematic reasoning. And so this is precisely what he does. He pushes it further by asking Jesus to tell him, then, exactly what he needs to do in order to be saved, or exactly what is necessary to participate in God’s saving work, the ushering in of the new Kingdom, of the restoration of the Jewish people. So tell me, who, then, is my neighbor. I need to know who exactly “is” my neighbor that the law of God binds me towards so that I can assure I am doing what needs to be done in order to see God’s Kingdom being ushered in and the Jewish promise finally fulfilled. And in case you have forgotten, exile and pagan rule is not a distant reality for this kingdom building reality we are still waiting for.

On this note, there is no reason to think this man was not well meaning, faithful, and honestly looking to the greater good. But specifics and certainty matter much in this line of reasoning, and as the parable unfolds we are going to see that this is a big part of the problem not in the integrity with which he asks the question, but in his ability to ask the right question.

To which Jesus offers him a parable about three individuals passing by a man beaten up on the side of the road. And it is at this point that the passage begins to really turn my old understanding even more completely on its head.

Learning To Ask the Right Question
Jesus takes the initial question, “who is my neighbor” and flips it around to ask the man, “who was the neighbor” in this story?

By doing this Jesus has completely dismantled not simply the lawyer’s motivating question, but his understanding of how salvation, God’s Kingdom being ushered in, must work and indeed has been working. Instead of being a matter of what we must do in order to participate in our salvation, true freedom and expression of this promise of “Kingdom come” flows out of knowing precisely how far reaching this Kingdom is and always has been in its participation. An honest Jewish construct would have understood God to be found in the order of the entire cosmos. From the moment of His first reveal to Abraham and through Moses and Elijah and the prophets, God has revealed Himself not just as the King of a people, but the King of all creation, including all nations, peoples and tongues. The Kingdom come, the expectation of this new rule is not simply a restoration of a people, but of a new “creation”. A cosmic restoration and redemption. This understanding lies at the heart of the Abrahamic promise, and it is a characteristic of God that colors the entire admittedly complicated and messy God-Human relationship that we find playing out in the specific Israelite story.

A chosen people raised up to be a a witness of a God for the world.

And yet as this parable demonstrates, we cannot arrive at the idea of a God “for the world” without beginning with our own story first. For the Jewish man he is likely thinking in a nationalistic sense of “God’s chosen people” first. This is how God has worked in their past. But by flipping the question around on the man, Jesus is forcing him to reconcile the question of what God raised up this people for. It is startling and striking to realize that in this parable the Jewish man is actually the one on the side of the road needing help. And this is not startling because it is a deviation from the Jewish narrative- it is in-fact deeply ingrained in the man’s motivating question. We are on the side of the road. Yes we need saving. This is the work of God we have been waiting for all this time. This is the work I want to take part in helping to usher in. It is striking because of the way it reveals the man’s line of reasoning is what is keeping him from connecting the work of God to God’s work in the world.

And perhaps most startling because of the ways I, and I have to think many of us, seem to miss this in the midst of our own pictures of exile.

What God did for the Israelite people, helping them to see that they are accepted and loved as children of God, He is also doing for the world. This is the Gospel. This is the light that Jesus came to bring into the world. This is what God has been up to all along. And the implication for this God fearing man is this- He is, we are, already accepted and loved as a child of God. There are no distinctions, Jew or Gentile. In the shadow of the temple or in the vast portions of pagan society that surround this temple construct, there are no distinctions. Therefore make no distinction about who your neighbor is in the context of an already-not yet world. The truth of this man’s story, of the tradition and narrative that he would have studied and been informed by and shaped within, is that we cannot see the world the way God sees it unless we first see ourselves the way God sees us in the midst of this narrative. God first found us on the side of the road and declared us to be children of God. And to participate in the ministry of Jesus, God’s breaking into our world, our story in a far reaching sense, is not to limit our view of what God is doing to restore our individual (or nationalist) sense of (Jewish born) exile, but to allow him to use our story of exile and expectation to expand our view of God’s promise being fulfilled in the story of our world.

The truth of this parable is that if we ask the question in any other way but the way Jesus does we leave ourselves open to being trapped by the same line of reasoning that forms the Jewish man’s need to create clear cut boundaries and definitions in order to participate in the work of God.

But the truth of God’s grace in the Jewish and Christian tradition is that it is persistently breaking down these barriers and boundaries. This is what the work of God does. The need to give definition to who our neighbor is is by nature a limiting process. It is an exercise in self control. It sees first and foremost our exile and our restoration, and as such it subtly and slowly exchanges God’s expectation for our own. The nature of the law was always to point us outwards, to teach us how to see the world through God’s eyes. And to truly see through God’s eyes requires us to gain and regain that perspective on the side of the road where our story began. And as the Good Samaritan passage reminds us, it is simply far too easy to bypass that and leave that picture behind in favor of the promised restoration, the saving work, especially when our own exile weighs us down. But when we move too quickly forward, when we need certainty and answers to the problem of our own exile in the here and now, it causes us to see the rest of the world through our own eyes rather than God’s. Call it a result of the human condition, but the problem when we do this is that we end up missing what it is that binds us to a shared and common human experience, which is the very thing that frees us up to participate in the Kingdom work to begin with. Thus our understanding of God’s work narrows rather than expands. We will begin to see God’s Kingdom Come juxtaposed against our own exile rather than allowing God to use our exile as a means of seeing his vision for the world.

And seeing a God for the world.

Who was the neighbor? The neighbor was the one who extended grace to me in my own position of exile regardless of who I am and where I came from. And it is this realization that frees me up to go and do likewise regardless of where I find myself in this world.

The Question of Mr. Rogers: Won’t You Be My Neighbor
What brought me back to this parable as I watched the powerful documentary “Won’t You Be My Neighbor, is hearing the story of a man who wrestled with this same thing as the Jewish in the midst of our own modern context. Looking around at the state of the world he was burdened by a sense of exile and the brokenness that seemed to prevail in the midst of God’s promised restoration. And for Mr. Rogers, facing this reality causes him to ask the same question as the Jewish man over the course of his ministry (which is how he saw it), have I lived the sort of accomplished life I must live in order to see the brokenness of this world healed?

In other words, have I done enough to be saved? Which is profound because what we see over the course of the documentary is the slow process of this question connecting to his own life and struggle, which is have I done enough to be loved and accepted by God myself?

The mind boggling part of hearing him ask this question is that the authenticity and impact of a man who at one point is jokingly referred to as second only to Jesus, was awe inspiring. There is something genuinely dismantling about considering that, for all that he aspired to be and all of the good he did in this world, and all of the ways he continually put others before himself, he still found himself approaching Jesus with that same prevailing question. What must I do?

Later in his life as he faced down the pressing reality of his own mortality, his central struggle and concern with whether he was accepted and loved by God comes to full fruition, a concern that for all of God’s work he participated in he could trust he is counted as a “sheep”. And this is precisely the moment where we see Mr. Rogers differing from the trajectory of the Jewish man’s line of reasoning. They started with the same motivating question, what must “we” do to be saved, to see this world healed of its brokenness, and it uncovers the same struggle and need to know that I have done enough to be a part of God’s restoration work. But for all the ways he struggled to understand the nature of God’s Kingdom building work, the difference for Mr. Rogers is that he never lost sight of where he stood on the side of that road. He kept that front and center. He never jumped to needing to see himself on the road participating in that restoration work, and in-fact never felt comfortable on the road over the course of his ministry work, and it is because of this that he was able to allow his doubts and  struggles with his own faith and salvation to determine and shape and fuel the ways he lived out his relationship with God in service to world, day in and day out.

Who was the neighbor in this story? For Mr. Rogers it was all the people that continually fed into his life. And it is one of the most powerful moments in cinema that I have encountered to reach the end of this documentary and to see the challenge his life gave to those who worked with him to go and do likewise by recognizing and thinking on and celebrating those who have been neighbors to them.

And then, and only then, go and do likewise.

Who is my neighbor was not Mr. Roger’s concern. In-fact, the idea of such a question, full of all the boundary making, exclusivity and nationalistic implications that come with it, repulsed him in ways that became increasingly obvious throughout his public life and career. His question, deliberately and intentionally and honestly,  was always and remained, won’t you be “my” neighbor. If you have seen the documentary or plan to, don’t miss the sheer power of this question as you consider the story of Mr. Rogers and the witness of his own life and work. This approach to the same question the Jewish man asked in Luke 10 diffuses the boundary making exercise of that limiting perspective. Mr. Rogers question defines the “my” part of the phrase by placing himself on the side of the road, a position that shapes not only the way he sees God working in his story, but the way he is able to invite others into full participation of what God is doing through his unconditional acceptance of them as “children of God” as well. And in perhaps the most powerful sense of all, his dedication to seeing things from this perspective is what frees and empowers these same children to then follow his call to participate in the work of God through the Jesus tinged Gospel by living this out in the world through their acceptance and love of others.

This is what it looks like to participate in God’s saving work. This is what it looks like for God’s Kingdom come. In the throes of a not yet world where the weight of the world’s messiness and turmoil feels far from the already of this ancient and eternal Kingdom promise, it is stories like Mr. Rogers that remind me that God is already at work in my life and in the life of the world and that we are free to participate in this work if only we learn to ask the right question.

I’m not sure exactly what sparked the discussions, but there have been a few threads over the last few days that have emerged some of the movie discussion groups I am involved with that have been talking about the merit (or lack there-of) of Director’s cuts.

Of primary concern in these particular discussions has been the question, how should we (or can we) approach a Directors Cut as viewers, especially when it concerns a movie or movie watching experience that is important and meaningful to us on a personal level.

What makes this particular question a complicated one is the relationship that we have as viewers to the Directors vision for a particular project. That there is no clear rule to what a Director’s Cut is intended to be for us as viewers simply adds possible layers to the ways in which we might or might connect to these altered versions of a given film. It “can”, for example, offer us a clearer picture of a Director’s initial vision for a project, but it can also muddy it. It can (subjectively speaking) enhance the theatrical version, or it can make it worse. It can offer us some insight into what and why certain deleted scenes ended up on the cutting room floor, or confound us by these same choices of edit.

And sometimes it can even end up altering a films narrative entirely, as seems to be the case with the upcoming September premiere and release of Malick’s “Director’s Cut” of The Tree of Life, a film that Criterion director Lee Kline suggests seriously blurs the lines between a Director’s Cut and being a completely new film. Criterion, or the Criterion collection, for those who don’t know, is (to borrow from its official online definition): “an American home video distribution company which focuses on licensing “important classic and contemporary films” and selling them to film aficionados.”

You can see the conversation here:

Indiewire: https://www.indiewire.com/2018/08/criterion-tree-of-life-terrence-malick-new-movie-1201999468/

Reflecting on Malick’s own intentions, Lee goes on to say, “What’s interesting talking to Terry about this [new version of ‘Tree of Life’], I think he still doesn’t want people to think this is a better version. This is another version.” a statement which arrives in reference to the notion that the 2011 version was in-fact the “definitive version” Malick wanted to release.

Which raises some more serious and intentional questions for fans of this complicated but challenging film, like how will this new version change the narrative of the film? Will it keep the film’s spiritual core intact? Open up new conversations and insights about the film’s vision of what it means to be both human and spiritual beings? Will it create (or recreate) the film’s central relationships which remain at the core of articulating this vision on-screen?

As we await the release of this film (on Blu ray in the middle of September for those of us who can’t see it at the premier), it has an interesting exercise to mull this over in my own mind. In that process someone was even generous enough to forward me this link to what they suggested was a definitive “in-process” or “working” version of what eventually became the final 2011 film, which for those willing to peruse the many pages of the script could offer some clues as to where the new version might go with the newly imagined story. That definitely ends up somewhere on the geekier side of Malick fandom, but it’s something I personally have been having a bit of fun with as I try to surmise and predict Malick’s alternate or growing vision for The Tree of Life.

You can see the script here if you click on the link and then click on the blue box:

https://scriptslug.com/script/the-tree-of-life-2011

In any case, and in the meantime, I found myself revisiting the original film along with some of my initial thoughts, through which I was reminded of some timely words I penned in a review of that film 7 years ago:

“The film utilizes the art (or gift) of silence, allowing the visuals to speak through the absence of dialogue. The scenes jump quickly, and then slow, only to be given over to the chaos again and again in almost frustrating fashion. The performances submit, seemingly intentionally, to this same movement, their performances a prisoner to this same degree of chaos. If we gain a glimpse of grace, a break in the unending cycle, it is in the nature of the relationship between Jack and his father.

It is this relationship that allows the film to take the unfathomable, the unseen, the uncertainty, the unknown of life’s great mystery, and to allow it to take concrete shape as a deliberate human process, one that happens on the inside even if not always visible on the outside. Through this relationship we are encouraged, in the moments between the silence and the chaos, to find glimpses of our own inner struggle that pulls between our fallen nature and the grace and love that exists in the often unseen parts of our human (and spiritual) formation. It is this grace that gives worth to what can otherwise appear to be a meaningless endeavor of living in the chaos. And ultimately for each of us, this is what life is. Life is an ongoing battle between these two worlds, these two tensions, with the idea of hope being our single anchor. And the more we learn what it means to hope or to have hope, the more we can learn to see in the silence a means to live above (and in the midst of) the chaos, a vision and idea this film helps bring to the forefront of our own imaginations. In other words, the silence can help us see what the chaos is trying to teach us.”

This goes hand in hand with another piece of wisdom I encountered this morning in a YA Historical Fantasy book by James A. Owen called Here There Be Dragons, where one character (Mordred) surmises that “Shadows cannot exist without the light. But without the shadows, the light has no meaning.”

These are timely words as I continue to adjust to what for me has been a bit of an earth shattering loss nearing the end of summer, 2018. A pair of losses actually that has also offered me some perspective. One material, the other irreplaceable. One a loss of stuff, the other a loss of life.

To re-read these words from a film that 7 years ago shook the senses of a personal career transition, is to let it land for me in a completely new and fresh context. Which is fitting when it comes to the idea of encountering a new version of this film. In the cycles of life that sit somewhere between the silence and the chaos, the process of being able to re-contextualize the lessons of a singular experience is not only important, but also necessary. It is a truly rare thing to see how this might unfold through a canonized film, which makes this an exciting process. But as someone else also pointed out to me (or us) in one of the movie discussion groups, the answer to any difficultly with how Malick might change or mess with the original 2011 film is simple- don’t canonize. And I think what is powerful about this realization (or perhaps mandate) is that this applies in so many ways to our lives as well. As the 2011 film taught me, we see very little in the present tense, it is only in process that we can learn to see more fully by holding past, present and future in opened hands.

There is, I would argue, a human tendency to canonize the different moments of our life, and to thus harbor them and hold them tight for better or for worse, to obsess over, scrutinize, analyze and worry about them as time moves forward, often with or without us. But when we do this we risk getting stuck in the cycle of these present thoughts, and bound by the ways in which they hold us captive to a limited way of seeing ourselves and the world around us. Which, after a recent breakfast with a friend reminded me only leads to the sort of growing cynicism, anxiety, depression and regret that comes with the reminder we are never as in control as we feel we are. To use the language of Malick’s film, in the silence the chaos awaits.

Instead, we would all benefit from learning what it means to constantly be thinking and hoping anew, learning to embrace what it means to be molded and reshaped by expecting the experiences of our life to be re-contextualized in a way that can help us learn and grow as persons into new creations. This is in-fact what also must shape our spiritual longing, because, as the tagline for the movie suggests, in process “nothings stands still”. Time moves forward with or without us. But that shouldn’t leave us without hope. The power of this realization comes in the truth that it is in process that we can begin to trust that we are growing into grace, and growing towards a greater understanding of the ways grace and grace alone is getting the final word.