Share it around.

This is just brilliant.

Escape Velocity

"Eager for self-justification, we throw ourselves in the direction of a propaganda that justifies us and this eliminates one of the sources of our anxiety. Propaganda dissolves contradictions and restores to man a unitary world in which the demands are in accord with the facts . . . For all these reasons contemporary man needs propaganda; he asks for it; in fact, he almost instigates it".

Jacques Ellul - Propaganda.

"In fact, Disney's robots are masterpieces of electronics; each devised by observing the expressions of a real actor, then producing models, then fabricating skeletons of absolute precision... authentic  computers in human form, dressed in 'skin' made by craftsmen, whose command of realism is incredible".

Umberto Eco - Journeys into hyperreality.

"I wish I was a Wild West Hero".

Electric Light Orchestra - Wild West Hero.


Saudi Arabia allowed the opening of the first cinema in the country for some 35 years this past week, inviting guests to enjoy the latest Hollywood action superhero blockbuster in plush and elegant surroundings as the first step to seeing the re-introduction of such entertainment to the country.

Although cinema has officially been banned by law there for decades, it has done nothing to quell people's well-nigh insatiable appetite for the pull of the fantasy market - shows available on mainstream entertainment platforms proving to be just as popular under the strict regime as they have been anywhere else in the world, so the ban itself proved as impotent as prohibition in America in the 1920's.

The hunger for such escapism says a great deal, not only about the Saudi's, but about all of us.

Jeff Dillenbeck wrote a wonderful little piece recently on the Mockingbird site, which explored his (and ours) delight and fascination with the silver screen. Cinema appears to be able to present us with all of life - its trials and passions, its glories and its angst, but he asks us a telling question... where is God in such adventures?
He alludes to a fascinating work by Josh Larsen, which seeks to show a relationship between movie-watching and prayer - how both are seeking to express something rough and often imperfect yet, at their best, something more honest about us and our needs and desires - no doubt part of the reason why fantasy is so enjoyed in countries where authority is rigid regarding what and how people must be.

In truth, we want to be enveloped into a drama that is far richer and rewarding than the often cold, harsh, detached brutality that the selfishness and spoiling harshness of our 'real' world permits (the key premise of Speilberg's new film, Ready Player One, highlights this), so escaping into places where all our dreams - from the most forbidden to the most genteel - can be expressed, safely and meaningfully, is something key to our nature.
People are longing for what is truly good to clothe their time here, but often the only place this can even be entertained is through entertainment - a few hours of escape from the arid, scorched thing that is just beyond the doorway.

It's no mistake that the Bible seeks to principally present truth as an epic story.
The true story of history is exactly the kind of drama we need. It is filled with the most satisfying events of love, life, death, played out on the largest canvas we can envisage - life itself - with a cast of hundreds of millions and a director who is concerned about the place of every single one of them, evidenced in the way He comes into the centre of the production as, genuinely, one of us.

I've often thrilled at moments in some of my favorite films where the story has truly echoed one of more of the key themes (fall and redemption) discovered in the Biblical story. In those moments, deep indeed calls to deep, and we find ourselves saying "yes!" from our innermost being, often perhaps accompanied with smiles and tears as we enjoy the 'rightness' of what has been said and done.

The pain of today often claws us, and we feel severed and crippled by our failings or the betrayal of the present, but escaping to somewhere else 'whispers' that we're meant for something more than just pain and suffering. Truth can make today bearable, for the greatest truth, in the greatest drama, is an empty tomb after the most violent death... Of angels saying "Why do seek the living among the dead?"

Freedom has come, and our dreams can be beautifully shaped by that liberty, leading us home.

Give and Take - giving something fresh

Christianity can sometimes appear, perhaps, to be detached or lacking, but there's a spot I've recently discovered that can counter that...

Here's a podcast that will get you thinking, and maybe laughing and crying at times.

Here we are...

"The fight for beauty is a true battleground of the soul and intimately linked to the crisis of faith. Dostoevsky himself indicates this in his masterpiece, The Brothers Karamazov: “The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.” What appears as beautiful may not be, and what appears terrible, such as the corpse of Christ, may indicate true beauty. Dostoevsky manifests this tension by placing his prophet of beauty in the midst of suffering and even insanity."For good or ill, beauty has power. This power can be used to illumine the path toward the truth and goodness, or to pull one down in the vain pursuit of self. If beauty does not point toward the true and the good, it becomes a darkness, a turning inward. Another line from The Idiot reveals this ambiguous power of beauty: “Such beauty is real power…. With such beauty as that one might overthrow the world.” This beauty is the beauty of a woman, which may have such power (think of Troy), but when beauty sheds its light in the right direction, it should save the world, not overthrow it!" Jared Staudt. 

I had an interesting on-line conversation this week.
A friend of a friend was having a discussion on the nature of beauty in regards to and in relationship with various philosophical views (Realism, Idealism, and Surrealism).
After playfully replying a few times from an artistic perspective, I posted the above quotation from a piece on the nature of beauty.

My correspondent was impressed how I'd met his challenge to define what was/is beautiful, but Staudt's quote married easily with other things I've been seeking to consider of late, especially when it spoke of the corpse of Christ as something truly beautiful.

Another friend bought me a book for Christmas which was all about finding truth through art in places where it often appears hidden to begin with, and one of the sections in the work was about two paintings by the artist Vittore Carpaccio, which focus on Christ's entombment and passion. Whilst most of the other characters in these depictions are readily identifiable, one of the central figures - an old man, seated in both works close to Christ - has only recently been recognized as the Patriarch and Prophet, Job. His inclusion so centrally in these works speaks of how profoundly the artist and those of his time saw Christ's death as the true means to the fulfillment of Job's prophecy - that though worms destroyed his body, yet in his flesh, He would see God (Job 19:26).

What true art points us to is the true significance found in the finite - God coming to us in very tangible ways, so we have something to hold to which affirms Gods work and promises.
Here's how Luther put it: 
“A person does not deserve to be called a theologian who looks upon the invisible things of God as though they were clearly predictable in those things that have actually occurred. Someone deserves to be called a theologian who comprehends that the truly visible and genuine things of God are revealed through suffering and the cross” (Luther – Theses 19 and 20. The Heidelberg Disputation – 1518).
Life is to be centered in a theology of the cross, not a theology about it.

True beauty is done - it's just a case of us seeing it, and that means really comprehending what it is and what that means, even though we currently only understand much of this only partially. The beauty of the Cross is Christ becoming Sin, tasting death, that we are made free from these murderous things. The art of our world is God seeking us in astonishing grace and mercy, and that liberty genuinely allows us to enjoy life in the surety of His profound love, seen at the cross.

Such beauty shows us that God is never absent from the world. In providence and sustenance in life, in staggering revelation through creation, and most strikingly, in the flesh of Jesus Christ. All of this is meant to move us from our poverty.

Beauty, when it removes us from the pertinent truths of life, is dangerous. It can empty us of the need we share for mercy by distracting us to turn inward and believe we can become whole by our own resources. What we truly need to engage with the beautiful, to know what counts, is an intimacy with the one who has come to us, crucified and raised, to make us whole. This is the truth, the focal point, that can lead us into the true, the good and the beautiful in the entire spectrum of what we live.

The Hunger... Deal with it!

"It was the last supper... the snake crawled around the plate".
Larry Norman

"I am the bread of Life".
Jesus

There's nothing worse than missing out on something really good.

Many years ago, when working in my first job, I recall how one Christmas the company had paid for us to dine at one of London's top eateries from a self service luncheon. The food looked absolutely delicious, but, alas, I was unwell, and shortly after arriving, I had to head home without touching a thing.

Imagine being invited to such a sumptuous dinner, where the most delicious tasting items, the most refreshing drinks you can imagine, were being promised, but when you arrive, everything you were expecting is off the menu, and instead you're presented with something you hate.

I expect you wouldn't contain your disappointment.

China, this week, announced it is forbidding all sales of the Bible, and the state is planning to seek to create its own 'revised' edition of the good book. It's pretty obvious why. The Communist party are only too aware that Christianity is bringing a very different, and hugely popular, message to the population to the authorized "religion" of the country's ruling class, and given the continuing growth of the faith, could well pose a national threat to socialism in the next 10-20 years.

It's no doubt hard for many of us in the West to take that kind of growth of spirituality on board amidst our woefully impoverished secular culture, but what we need to at least recognize is that the backbone behind several of our constitutionally - derived societies was, at least at one time, that very same vibrant truth of Christianity.

There's a great deal of "the trouble with" types of analysis going on right now, and one thing that keeps arising in this is the vital importance regarding where Christian truth places us. Well, that's water under the bridge, some say, but it really isn't, because as I've sought to show on my entries here numerous times, there's been plenty going on of late that points to the fact that a Christian world-view is just as important now as it's always been. China shows us that when the Biblical message is taken seriously, on its own terms, there's nothing that can really stand in its way.

The West has been drenched for all my life in secularism, and whilst most enjoy what would be deemed a 'free' society, people are beginning to wake up to the fact that Secularism alone isn't a particularly good thing. It doesn't ready you for the sharp corners of life (principally because it gets you to aspire for all the wrong things) and it certainly becomes really unpalatable when dealing with those truths, because it's an empty set - it has nothing to say but 'well, that's just the way it is'. Christianity focuses on something more than our facile, predictably selfish, aims. It unambiguously affirms that all of life is to be focused upon the life, death and resurrection of a person who says that the trials and the suffering are meant to drive us beyond ourselves to life within one who has shared all of this, but, by dealing with our fallen, bent, inward,  messed up world, is at work to reconcile the present troubles to a deeper, richer, truer life that resides in God.

The last few decades has seen an exponential growth in the psychological and social maladies our modern world creates, mirrored by a huge dependance upon pharmaceuticals to seek to cope with this.
The irreplaceable meta-narrative that Christianity has supplied our world for centuries - that history is going somewhere - has been removed, but not been replaced by our materialistic times, and this has left nothing but a terrible void that several post-war generations have taken as the only way of seeing the world.

It's cold, it's destructive, and it's totally untrue.

The Atheistic authorities in China are tripping into the same void we occupy, but they need to stop and look at the ancient story of China itself to understand how foolish this direction really is.

God has left His fingerprints across the heavens, the earth, and in our hearts.
It's time we stopped dining on ashes, and came home to the real feast, made ours in the gift of Jesus Christ.

So...

"It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth; this defiles a person.”

Jesus - Matthew 15:11

So, there I was, thinking I'd be having a quiet easter weekend this year, when I discovered that something totally unexpected was in the offing.

I was visited by a friend who is very knowledgeable in the field of nutrition and food (author, podcaster, lecturer, and so on). One of the things that came up in our conversation was how she had recently moved from practicing a Vegan diet to one which included other foods she's previously viewed as off limits. I was fascinated by the process of thinking and research that had lead her to this (we all have moral/ethical/social issues in life that we juggle with), and couldn't help wondering how this was going to work through, particularly in the public sphere of her work in her field.

I didn't have to wait long to find out!
The next day, she posted a podcast on Face book and other places, seeking to clearly present her change on these issues. Within a very short time, feedback began to flow, some supportive and encouraging, but some very harsh and judgmental, with quite a few comments to the effect that this change had happened because of the fact that she had become a Christian in recent times, and this was clearly a bad move.

It was at this point that I decided to enter the fray, not because I have anywhere near the kind of clarity on health and nutrition that my friend and others have, but because it was very clear that Christianity was, once again, being miss-understood.

The last few days have been pretty remarkable, as I've listened to people expressing what they think makes them 'good' -
Their attitude, their character, their diet, their morality. It can all, apparently, equate to something righteous so far as godliness is concerned.

God, of course, must keep silent.
There's no space here for hearing what He has said about us, or to look at what has been done in and through the Life, Death, Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus.

What never ceases to amaze me is how quickly we de-fault to thinking we can do what counts, be good (because of some mantra we declare, or behavior we cherish) and thereby change the world, without truly looking ourselves in the eye and seeing what lies just beneath the surface.

A couple of final threads are still ongoing, but most of the people who eagerly jumped into the conversation at the weekend with their 'I'm fine because' home-spun religions quickly vanished once I started to ask them - what do you really mean by that? or is that really good enough?

In the Gospel, we read of a rich young man who came to Jesus with a list of His 'goodies' - all the ways he was doing what, he deemed, was good and god-pleasing. He eagerly tells Jesus this, and asks, 'so, do I make the grade?' Jesus has to tell him no. The very lifestyle he was investing in was in reality divorcing him from God. If you're serious, said Jesus, sell all of it and follow me. The young man left sad.

No scheme or method we devise is ever going to make the grade because, as the verse above notes, it's what's inside of us that's going to condemn us. We need a far more radical remedy than we can ever devise, and that's why Jesus Himself came to us - to set us free from sin by 'becoming sin' for us - bearing our sins in His death on the cross.

If we're looking for a quick fix to our and the world's problems here and now, we're going to be either sorely disappointed or seriously delusional regarding what we do.

Thankfully, that's not the end of the story.
Like my friend who visited last weekend, we can live in a manner where all of life becomes filtered through God's work of redemption through His Son, and that begins to give us an understanding and a foretaste of the glorious new creation that is to come.

That is certainly worth waiting for.

Living, and Dying, well.

Easter has the biggest impact upon us when its truth becomes personal, but so often, religion can be drab and meaningless.

In this superb sermon, Joe Dent shares some very old wisdom on how life can be rightly shaped by the one thing true for us all... the inevitability of death, and touches on how the death and resurrection of Jesus grants us the right way to unpack what's going on.