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.

*SPOILER WARNING FOR THE RIDER

An unconventional film that uses the raw performances of its non-actors to underscore a potent spiritual core. The Rider is not afraid to dig into the human experience without the glamour and the polish. And what surfaces from this rawness are some deeply rooted questions about what makes life worth living.

The Universal Power of Relationships
There are a few ways in which The Rider could compare to another recently released and well received indie film with untested performances and an unconventional narrative style- Eighth Grade. I bring up that film because in the places where I felt that film fell ever so slightly short, The Rider soars, and perhaps the most important aspect is the way it welcomes the audience in on the cowboys experience. If I am not a middle grade, female adolescent, I might be even less of a cowboy. And so the films setting couldn’t be further away from my own experience as a born and raised city dweller. And yet the film is consistent in narrowing in on what lies behind the cowboy and Western motif, the stuff that narrates on a universal level.

Which is really all about the power of relationships, be it with a horse, an estranged father, or a disabled/intellectually disabled sister/brother.

And this is where the film reveals a strong spiritual core, perhaps standing as one of the most Pastoral films I have seen in a long while, certainly in 2018.

Stuck in the Cycles of our Life
While coping with his own disability through the use of different vices, isolation and emotional outbursts, a disability that was the result of an accident in riding that sidelines him for the foreseeable future, the film juxtaposes Brady’s personal struggle against the different relationships that exist in his life- horse, sister, brother, father.  It then uses these relationships to explore that line between giving up and finding the strength to get up and live another day, understanding that he must do this knowing that he has lost the very thing that once defined him and gave him an identity. And as the film moves forward in this struggle it begins to formulate into a question of purpose, a question that reaches into the very nature of our relationship with God in subtle but powerful ways.

There is a captivating scene early on where, caught in a moment of numbing the pain, Brady and a group of friends pray for God’s protection. And as they pray you can see in Brady’s eyes a growing conflict between the certainty of this moment, sitting under the stars with the grand landscape surrounding them, and the uncertainty of what might come when the sun rises again.

And the sunrise becomes indicative of a process or a cycle that finds both joy and despair in constant battle with one another. And it is the same cycle that Brady sees echoed in his father’s own trajectory towards being lost in the grip of the vices that hold him prisoner. And, as he exclaims at one point in the story, he just doesn’t want that to happen for him.

The Prayers of our Brokenness and our Healing
This reality, this constant battle between joy and despair, reaches into the very nature of our relationship with God in subtle but powerful ways. For Brady it becomes a question of purpose, of one day riding again, but with each new day that question becomes increasingly exposed as a call to see the joy in the midst of the despair, in the idea that he might never ride again. The prayer then begins to turn from an expectation that he will find a way back on that horse to beginning to embrace what God has placed right in front of him in a time of brokenness- relationships.

If you have seen the film you will know that one of the most powerful scenes arrives in a moment where he must choose to put his horse down because of a torn leg. With Brady unable to ride him, the horse becomes so desperate to run he breaks through a barbed wire fence and ends up with a deep, irreparable cut that means he will never run again. Brady can’t bring himself to do this alone though and has to bring his father over to help. And yet even as this is happening you can see the same conflict present in his eyes between the certainty of this moment (that he is doing the right thing for his horse) and the uncertainty of what might come when the sun rises again. And in one of the most gut wrenching scenes of 2018 we see him attempting to explain what has happened to his intellectually disabled sister. He tells her he had to put his horse down today. Her response is a simple and definite “no”. No, that is not how this works, thus in her eyes it is not true. And what her response pulls to the surface is the culmination of this conflict between certainty and uncertainty, the imposing question that continues to haunt Brady of what it means to live when your ability to run, or in his case to ride, or in the case of his sister to be able to function normally in society, is taken away. In the case of the animal they are put down. In the case of their own weakness they are expected to go on living. But why does it work this way? Why should it work this way?

A Necessary Grace
The only real certainty that we find here is that it is in relationship we are reminded of our brokenness, and it is in relationship we are reminded that all of us are broken in some way. And it is this understanding that offers us grace. The grace we need to move forward towards a purpose that stands taller than our ability and circumstance. The grace we need to extend to others, which Brady is eventually able to offer to his father as well.

And in showing us this truth, the film is brave enough to suggest that our true identity, the purpose that God has given each of us in the midst of our own struggle between joy and despair, does not come from our accomplishments or our abilities, but rather from our willingness to receive and extend grace in relationship to those God has placed in our midst. This is why we live. And it is when we do this that we are able to begin to see ourselves the way God sees us as well, both in our brokenness and in our ability to love beyond it.

In The Rider it is this simple embrace of both the joy and the despair that governs the cycles of our lives, the cycles that we find in the sunsets and the sunrises, and it is grace that breaks through these cycles and that makes itself aware in the moments which gives us a reason and the strength we need to face another day.

The sun was getting ready to set, and as we approach the base of the John Seigenthaler Pedestrian Bridge we notice an individual, a woman likely in her mid twenties/early thirties, who is visibly agitated and yelling something seemingly towards someone on the top of the bridge. As we got closer we were able to make out that the string of profanity accompanying this woman’s agitation had something to do with the “black nigger bitches” walking the pedestrian bridge above her.

We don’t know what led to this war of words. What we did know was that this woman, clearly agitated and obviously a little drunk, was now occupying the space by the elevator doors we needed to take to get to the top of the bridge.

Lingering in the shadows for a bit while hoping this lady would eventually give up and go away, we eventually were able to follow behind another middle aged couple for whom this seemed to be “just another day in Nashville”. They saw us following up behind them and quickly ushered us into the elevator doors where we were able to make our way to the top.

Both of us were sweating a little. Of course that might have had something to do with the 30 degree weather in Tennessee. Or the 40 degree weather inside that elevator.

Exiting the elevator we emerged onto the pedestrian bridge to see the group of 5 young, African American adults who had been the source of the ladies ire. And suddenly all 5 of them were turned staring straight at the two of us.

No, wait. They were staring straight past us. At the elevator doors.

Turning around we saw the lady from the ground level had boarded the elevator and was now making her way up.

“Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit” one of the younger ones exclaims.

We share the sentiment.

Caught in the middle, we quickly retreated to the side of the bridge where, at the very least, we would no longer be stuck in the middle. The group of 5 retreated downwards towards the base of the bridge and the agitated woman followed after them. We took the opportunity and quickly started heading for the top of the bridge…

Putting ourselves definitely in the middle of someone shooting a music video.

Or a music something.

There was a conductor, who also happened to be the one working the camera. And in front of him is a man and a woman, one with a keyboard and the other with a guitar, both who look like the came straight out of 1980’s Maranatha Church music video.

The conductor, giving everything he as to breathe life into this music video is getting more and more animated while the musicians keep keep more and more straight faced. Aware that we were most definitely not in Kansas anymore, we nudged our way as best we could past the camera. As I did this I looked for some sort of open box that might indicate these guys are playing up a routine to gain tourist dollars, but there seemed to be nothing of the sort. Just this strange scene playing out in front of us as though we had entered an episode of the twilight zone.

Finally getting past this rather odd state of affairs, I turn my head and suddenly there it is. Music City unfolding right before us bringing a little bit of sanity back into the picture.

Welcome to Nashville!

Nashville in July is hot. I know it’s obvious, but I felt it needed to be said.

A peculiarity about Nashville is that to see this city on a budget, which is a necessity if only because this city of music and museums can easily get expensive and out of control if you let it- nearly everything you will end up doing on a budget puts you outside in the heat.

Which is only to say I’m not sure we would visit again in July. Give me the fall or the winter and a good show though and the stuff that clearly makes this city tick would turn into a great experience. As any good tourist usually does, our exploration of this city started with a jaunt down Broadway where the endless Honky Tonk bars are all vying for the attention of the packed streets. And as the sun sets and the lights come up it only gets livelier.

After a drive through South-Eastern Tennessee, which took us through the historic Chattanooga (a fun stop) and Lynchburg (the home of Jack Daniel), we spent the next three days in the Nashville area. Rather than simply reflect on some of what stood out for me in this area, I thought I would do something different for this one and focus more on the vacation than the introspective journey.

Given our approach to the city, I figured I would go through our time in Nashville from the angle of doing Nashville on a budget. It is an expensive city, but it doesn’t have to be. And although ours is just a singular experience, here is at least one perspective on how to see Nashville and maybe save a bit of money while you are doing it:

Tip #1: Take advantage of the free parking
When I was researching Nashville one of the things that kept coming up was that it was hard to find parking and the parking that you can find is either expensive or not available during the day.

One of the most popular pieces of advice I found was to look into parking in one of the lots at the Tennessee Titans Stadium and using the Pedestrian Bridge that sits right beside the stadium to take you right into the heart of downtown (a block away from Broadway). There are (I believe) 2 lots that are free to park in on days where there are no games or other major Stadium events happening. The problem with this, and what this advice did not clearly divulge, is that these spots can be reserved ahead of time. And so unless you are booking way ahead it is tough to actually find an available spot there.

On a fluke though I came across a secondary piece of advice that instructed me not to go into the lots but to instead to enter the Stadium grounds, drive through the lots and turn towards Titans Way, Victory Avenue, or First Street South. All of these streets are either entirely unreserved or have portions that are unreserved and free, unlimited parking on days (both during the days and in the evenings) that are not Stadium event days. And if you don’t find anything on Titans Way (your closest proximity to gain access to the Pedestrian Bridge elevator), just drive up 1st Street and you will find a spot closer to the actual foot of the bridge where you can simply walk up and over to the downtown attractions.

It is also worth noting that parking is free in downtown Nashville after six, but you might have a hard time finding a spot that is closer to the attractions than the stadium lot.

Tip #2: Take the free bus
If you are parking by the Stadium lot (or in the lot) and using the bridge as your entry point into downtown, directly the bridge you will see a bus stop called Music City Star Riverfront Station. There are two buses (the Green and the Blue Line) that you can catch from this station that are free and that make several different stops along the major sights and attractions. The routes overlap at a few points, but there is a map at this station letting you know which one you might want to take.

The only place in the downtown district these buses don’t go is to Music Row. It does however take you within reasonable walking distance.

Tip #3: Plan a morning at the free museum and Bicentennial Park
This might not be the greatest idea when it is 35 degrees in the middle of the day, but if you do get out early before the midday sun this is a decent option for getting familiar with the history of Tennessee and taking in some of downtown Nashville’s public spaces. The free bus takes you straight to Bicentennial Mall and there is a lot to see in that area, including the downtown farmers market, the free Tennessee History Museum, and the more affordable (and I heard many argue more interesting) Musicians Hall of Fame and Museum located between fourth and fifth avenues right beside the Tennessee State Capital (also something to see).

Tip #3 Plan a sunset Walk in Centennial Park
If you are content with simply seeing Music Row and not doing the Studio B tour (which is really the tip of what becomes a long line of really expensive museum exhibits), take some pictures, grab a treat from the famous Goo Goo Candy store downtown,some of the famous Hattie B’s “hot Nashville Chicken” (two locations, one that has parking a little further from downtown, and one that is hard to find parking closer to downtown) if you are so inclined, and head up to Centennial Park for a picnic and a viewing of the rather breathtaking, made to scale recreation of the Parthenon. If you never make it to Greece this might be the next best thing. And it gets more glorious in the sunset after the lights come on.

The park is free and you can walk all around it for free. But one bonus during the day is that for a small fee you can actually go inside and visit the gallery that is houses, which includes the largest statue ever made. 

Tip #4: The Museums are expensive but the music itself is affordable
Take a walk down Broadway and you will realize you can take in show after show for free. And this is because most of the places where bands are playing are opened up to the street. You can waste an entire evening lingering here and enjoying the venues and not spend a dime. 

Should you want to actually go in and find a seat in one of these places though, most of them do not have a cover charge, which means you only need to buy food.

Also of note is the famous Bluebird Cafe. Really hard to get in, but if you want to spend a portion of your day waiting in line (being there around 2 or 3 hours early would give you a good chance of snagging one of the unreserved spots which are first come, first serve. We were there just over 2 hours early and no one was in line yet), this is a mostly free venue where you can catch great music (with a minimum $10 per person drinks/meal along with the odd fundraiser that sometimes costs $10 or $15 per person).

Also for later nights is a place called Cafe Coco. I bring them up because they are known for good music, open late and they are a cafe, which means you can choose from a more dessert oriented menu.
http://cafecoco.com/

And it’s Nashville. It’s all about the music all the time. Research what’s going on downtown on any given evening/weekend and there is a good chance you will encounter more opportunities for free music. And if you track down where the locals like to peruse, chances are you will find an affordable evening with the best of Nashville’s music along the way as well.

Tip #5: See the Gaylord Opryland Resort for free
If you don’t really care for the high end shopping centre while you are out seeing the legendary Grand Ol’ Opry (extra tip: there is a book for sale in the Opry gift shop for $25 that essentially photo ops the entire backstage tour. If you want to take the tour but you don’t want to pay the price, linger a little bit and page through this book, or purchase it. It will make you feel like you’ve taken the tour and seen the Opry: https://www.opry.com/backstagebook), then wander over to the Gaylord Opryland Resort. Park at the far end of the mall and Opry parking lot and you will see a walkway that takes you through the wall and into the resort grounds. Follow this walkway and you will eventually arrive at the side entrance of what is a very, VERY big resort. Once you are inside, don’t be afraid of feeling like you are inside a hotel where you are not supposed to be. Keep going forward and you will enter the central plaza. This is the area, or multiple areas, that is housed by that glass dome visible from the freeway. There are maps at every entrance into this central plaza area, and you can follow the trail from there through the waterfalls, the garden, the town, etc., and it will even take you to the grand front entrance. 

It might sound odd, but it is definitely something to see. And you can wander, stay, sit, shop, peruse as if you were actually paying the money to stay in the hotel.
https://www.marriott.com/hotels/travel/bnago-gaylord-opryland-resort-and-convention-center/?scid=bb1a189a-fec3-4d19-a255-54ba596febe2

Tip #6: Take in dinner and a movie (and maybe some pretty fantastic ice cream) in the Hillsboro Village District. 
Along with The Gulch downtown (https://explorethegulch.com/) and The Arcade downtown (http://thenashvillearcade.com/) where you should track down the boiled peanuts, a Southern delicacy, Hillsboro Village is another great place beyond the downtown borders to wander and window/culture shop.
http://www.visitmusiccity.com/visitors/neighborhoods/hillsborovillage

If you are from Winnipeg, think Corydon Avenue atmosphere. And there are places to park!

The Belcourt Theatre is a great little indie theatre where you can see more independent movies and hang (and chat if you aren’t too introverted) with some of the locals. A cheap night out in Nashville. And in the area are some popular restaurants, including Fido and the Pancake Pantry (Nashville is known for their pancakes along with their hot chicken).

And highly recommended would be a stop at Jeni’s Splendid Ice-Creams, just down the block from the Belcourt Theatre.

Their cake ice cream is even gluten free, and so, so good.
https://jenis.com/ 

The great thing about heading to this area out of downtown as well is that it gives you an opportunity to drive through the Belmont neighbourhood, which is also where the Belmont Mansion is. Again, if you are already spent on museums and can’t spend any more, driving through the neighbourhood and by the mansion is a great Sunday drive that gives you a sense of its history.

Tip #7: Use the Greenways
If you are mobile enough to make use of the Greenways, look up Nashville’s greenway system, connecting the Opryland to downtown. It’s a cheap and affordable way to get around we well and gives you some great views of the city.
http://bikethegreenway.net/

That’s all I have for our budget trip to Nashville. I’m sure there is plenty else one could add, but for a first time to Nashville and as someone who wanted to see the big sights but not pay the big prices, these tips were a great way to feel like we got up close and personal with this beautiful, quirky, lively and very hot city without breaking the budget.

 

 

There are a lot of museums in Tennessee. And a lot of them are not cheap. In Nashville alone, two persons could easily drop more than a few hundred dollars within a couple block radius on museums.

We had to pick and choose which ones we were going to see and which ones we were going to pass up fairly early on. I tend to ask two questions when deciding which Museums are worth the money and which are not.
1. How much do I already know about a particular person or place of interest
2. Does the museum showcase a particular artifact or object of interest that I feel I need to see in person

From those two questions I am then able to measure that against the dollar value and the travel time/investment.

And of course when there are two of you travelling together it is also helpful to be able to match these questions with a shared interest in a particular place.

Long before leaving we knew there were two museums that we both really wanted to see during our time in Tennessee- the Titanic Museum in Pigeon Forge and the Jack Daniels Distillery Tour in Lynchburg, and thankfully we got a chance to visit them both.

I figured I was going to enjoy them. What I didn’t expect was to be so captured and moved by their collective stories, both of which brought to light issues of class, slavery and heroism in their own way.

The Titanic Museum
The telling fact about this museum’s attention to detail is the scaled down replica of the Titanic that houses the exhibit itself, including the worlds largest lego Titanic.

And to say it is scaled down is definitely not to say this thing is small. It would be near impossible to miss the massive ship looming over the Pigeon Forge Parkway.

We didn’t realize it at first, but when you enter the museum you are walking into a recreation of the ships grand staircase. You are quickly turned towards the back of the ship, but there will be two more visits to this staircase along the way. And it is a neat experience to walk through, especially after the exhibit has brought the ship to life and given it context.

Along with this grand entrance you are also given a boarding pass for a single individual. This is the character you play along the way, and the museum is set up in such a way as to keep the fate of your given name a mystery until you happen upon its reveal. It plays to neat affect as you are intentionally viewing the exhibit through the lens of that particular story, attentive and aware of how he or she fits into the bigger picture. Were they a part of first class or third class? Were they part of a wealthy family or struggling immigrants. What brought them onto the ship? Where were they coming from? Where were they headed?

All of these questions are opened up before you as you wander the different sections of the ship itself. You learn about how each level housed different classes, and of how many more third class residents there were than first class. I think this is something that really stuck with me, is just what this ship represented to so many struggling individuals anticipating the promise of a new life. It makes the harrowing reality of the sinking ship that much more painful to experience, and a part of what this museum does is allow you to really gain an appreciation for the experience itself, whether it has you standing at the bottom of a stairwell watching the water rushing towards you, walking up that Grand Staircase or attempting to walk and stand on the ships deck at the different points of angle during the ships gradual and inevitable sinking.

And then you come to the bow of the ship where you are able to touch a man-made iceberg and immerse your hands into the water to feel how cold it would have been when the ship sank. Standing under the stars and looking out at the expanse of the ocean ahead of you, the stories of all the individuals on the ship really come into perspective at this point in the exhibit.

And this is really a big part of what made this museum so effective, is the way it tells the story. Using elements of all the senses, it really becomes an emotional experience. The stories of the children on board were probably the toughest to read, but you also get to read and hear about largely untold stories of individuals like whom sacrificed themselves for others, whom were transformed by the experience, whom represent immense loss in terms of spiritual voices, family members, mentors and innovators.

Speaking of the tragedy of the Titanic against the even more immense tragedy that would soon follow, journalist Tony Parson writes,

And yet we remember the victims of Titanic in a unique way. We remember Titanic for more than the senseless loss of life.

Like the casualties of 9/11, their tragedy seems to mark a turning point in our history.

When the icy, black waters closed over the Titanic, and when the last of the screams of the freezing and drowning had finally stopped, the world would look a very different place.

The old world feels like it died with the Titanic – the good and the bad.

The unforgiving class system of Titanic is part of its myth, and gives it immense symbolic power – we may have lost the age of chivalry with Titanic, but we also lost the age of deference, and serfs who were content with their lot, who would cheerfully tug their forelocks while they died and their superiors lived…

Every generation discovers Titanic anew, retells her story, tries to find meaning, and sees some reflection of its own time.

Jack Daniels Distillery 
Perhaps the most offsetting thing you learn about Jack Daniels (Which, as they will point out is the name of the distillery, not the drink. If you want to describe the drink it is “Jack Daniel”) is the fact that Lynchburg, the small town that houses the Distillery, is a dry town.

In fact, Jack Daniels is literally the only place in town you can go to get a drink, either on a tasting tour or from the gift shop. And the only reason that is the case is because of a loophole in the system. Technically, and for legal purposes, they are selling bottles, not alcohol. What’s inside the bottle is beside the point.

Unless you live in Lynchburg and want Jack Daniel. Then what’s inside the bottle is all the point.

That and some mutually beneficial economic legislation.

The other most striking thing about this nearly 90 minute long tour of the Distillery in action is the degree with which they have turned Jack into something of a humanitarian. He’s not. In fact he seems like he was quite the troubled individual. A bit of an assuming “ladies man” as they put it subtly and delicately. And yet Jack Daniel has grown into an institution that proudly continues to aspire towards the family name all these years later. As the tour will inform you, most of the workers in the Distillery are connected to the blood line that started the institution. It is in a very big way an undying family business that functions using the same underground spring (that refuses to dry up) an the same recipe that Jack used all those years before.

Now, this might sound weird, but my wife Jen turned me on to the idea of considering a theology of Jack Daniels. She casually noted how the story of Jack Daniels, and really the larger history of Whiskey that permeates the area (and the whole Kentucky Bourbon/Jack debate is a hotly contested issue to be sure), plays into our understanding of faith as Christians. And she was right. The more I thought about it the more this made a lot of sense.

So here are 3 ways in which Jack Daniel is theology:

1. It’s about spiritual formation
A word on how they make Jack Daniel.

They will tell you over and over again on the tour that Jack Daniel is not a bourbon – it’s a Tennessee Whiskey. To makeJack Daniel they drip it through, very slowly, ten feet of packed, sugar maple charcoal (mellowing process) and then put 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.

It is this slow drip process that sets Jack Daniel apart from Bourbon.

Just don’t tell them that this is a technicality under regulations. As far as regulations are concerned, Bourbon is Bourbon no matter how you make it.

There is something to be said for this process though. Kentucky Bourbon, and Moonshine to an even greater degree are much quicker and much easier to make. In reality Bourbon arrives via international travel and trade, but in 1964 the Kentucky Bourbon enthusiasts declared it to be a distinctly American drink. Only, as they say, everyone knows that by American they mean Kentucky.

Jack takes time. It take patience. Just like our spiritual life. To be transformed from Kentucky Bourbon into Jack Daniel we must be formed by the spirit using that slow drip process. Drip, by drip, the spirit shaping us and molding us through our experience of the sacred in the every day process of living.

2. It’s all about grace
A noted thing about the Jack Daniel distilling process is its attention to mastering the craft. And the master craft really comes down to controlling the taste. In the case of Jack Daniel it is about ensuring that no matter which bottle is sold and where we buy it the product tastes the same. So that when we are buying a single barrel or double mellow, we know precisely what to expect.

The analogy is not perfectly applied to our spiritual lives, but I think what is striking is just how much this attention to detail shapes their love of the of the product. If it is not right it goes through the process again. And every part of the process has a role and has a use or is reused. The barrels, the sour mash, the charcoal. There is no wasted part of the process. Apply that to our spiritual lives and I think we are given a picture of how the spirit shapes us. There is no wasted product. You do not discard imperfections. You simply go about the process again. And as we go through this process, the stuff of life, we trust that we are being made and shaped more and more into the sons and daughters of God we are already known to be.

3. Whiskey brings us together

There is a healthy debate that exists across state lines between what is whiskey, what is not, and how that Kentucky and Jack differs. And these debates spill out of what has become a recognizable part of the culture.

Get close to the Mountains and talk about Moonshine, and the conversation pushes even further yet. Moonshine is the stuff of raw experience, unaged and unfiltered. The sort of drink you risked drinking and that shaped the plight of the drinker. And yet it is still Whiskey, even in its rawest form.

And the truth of all Whiskey, whether Bourbon or Jack or Moonshine, it all shares the same source, the same origin. And when it comes to the sour mash, it is akin to sour dough, with a single, seemingly eternal source giving life to endless creations.

And as spiritual beings we all share the source of our strength. We are all equally seen and loved and adored by our Heavenly Father. We are all equally welcome to participate in the sacred.

And this is hugely important to recognize when it came to the Jack Daniels tour. I didn’t realize it at the time, but one of the most compelling notes of the tour is the subtle mention of a slave that accompanied Jack in coming up with his creation. It’s significant because until recently this slave was never mentioned on the tour, that is until a woman stood up and made a difference. You can read her article here. But suffice to say that it is a powerful reminder of how we are being shaped and renewed and transformed over time, whether that be as persons, including the raw, unfiltered life of Jack himself, or as a nation. And in God’s light we are being shaped and transformed according to His spirit, His love and His unifying acceptance.