Death and Play

I keep thinking about this adorable baby video juxtaposed against an astonishing sermon my spirited friend Ruth Mackenzie delivered a few weeks ago.  The sermon considered the intersection of death and play, two topics that aren’t often comfortable partners.

Ruth set us up by singing in her rich, textured, throaty voice.  The first line she sang went something like this:  Nothing is going to become of anyone…nothing nothing nothing nothing….except death. Later lines:  So pick a perch and play and It’s okay to yearn too high. She talked about the risk associated with play.  She said we are built to dance across this high wire stretched between life and death, while juggling the necessities of risk and pleasure—the two central components of play.

The baby in the clip is perfectly safe, cared for, loved.  Nothing changes on that front.   But one moment it’s all engaged attention and loving connection.  Then, immediately* comes terror, shock, panic…the unknown. That one dangerous moment of unknowing seems like a tiny death, a sliver of disconnection from all that is good and secure.  Then, understanding–something happened but I’m still here and all is well! And immediately, Sheer delight!  Laughter!  Learning!  Joy!  Pleasure! Play!

Who knew death and play were such intimate friends?

*Look up how this word is used in the Gospel of Mark.  It’s fascinating.

The poem in the song is Play by A.R. Ammons; music composed by Elizabeth Alexander.

A.R. Ammons

No Church Left Behind

I have been thinking about the astonishing chasm between mainline churches on Sunday mornings and the characteristics of the newly emerging participatory culture birthed by the internet.  Henry Jenkins describes this new perspective in a provocative paper you can peruse here.

Jenkins leads a team that studies how media technology overlaps learning.   All online activities, he says, are not the same.  When we make broad generalizations about “screen time,” we discount the skills and innovation that inspire an amazing array of media creativity.   It’s not just an outlet for passive entertainment; the web offers the chance to be active producers.  To be sure, there are plenty of mind-numbing websites to suck up time.  But there are other channels and opportunities for life-affirming self-expression and civic engagement.  It matters what tools are available to a culture, but it matters more what that culture chooses to do with those tools, Jenkins writes.

Participatory culture is reworking the rules by which school, cultural expression, civic life, and work operate. Indeed.  This suggests that to simply equip a church with projection equipment and a Facebook page misses the powerful shift in cultural expectation and engagement that is exploding our same-old notions of community seemliness. 

We’re moving away from a world in which some produce and many consume…, toward one in which everyone has a more active stake in the culture that is produced. Now what would that mean for Sunday worship?

Taps

My uncle died about a week ago.  He was a Colorado cowboy.  A silversmith, a stubborn cuss, a 35-year cancer fighter, an entrepreneur, a family man, a son-of-a-gun.

I went to his memorial service in Colorado Springs. I wasn’t alone; there were at least 500 of us there, with more pairs of boots, more spurs, more cowboy hats than I think I’ve ever seen in one place at one time.  I had on the silver earrings he had given my mother.  They dangled and sparkled, with delicate designs etched into quirky comma-shaped slivers of shine.

My uncle was, in many ways, a traditional man.  In other ways, not traditional at all.  So it seemed fitting that the interment was before the church service.  We started from the church parking lot, in dozens of cars streaming down the road to the cemetery.  When we got there, we parked and walked up the hill to the burial site, joined in our procession by about a dozen men on horses.  They were representing the Range Riders, a group of men  my uncle belonged to who make a yearly horseback pilgrimage up to Pike’s Peak. They were all wearing black shirts and black hats, and one led my uncle’s horse all saddled up.  But today, there would be no rider.

We all stood there at the burial site, mourning my uncle’s passing but also gaping at the view:  a snow-sprinkled Pike’s Peak, as sharp and craggy and tough as my uncle.   He  was a veteran of the Korean War, and so the ceremony included a military flag presentation to his widow, my aunt.  As the clear tones of the bugler’s Taps spilled out over the hillside, the horses with their solemn riders processed down the hill;  the first man was holding the reins of my uncle’s riderless horse.   Later, at the memorial service, the Range Riders would sing a beautiful cowboy song, The Place Where I Worship.   They would be singing about us, standing there on that hill.

Phone’s For You.

At 8 o’clock this morning, the phone rang.  I answered.  It was God.

God’s voice was a lot like my friend Erica’s:  same gracious, lyrical African cadence, same sweeping love, same expansive spirit dancing through to my soul.

Erica has been thinking about me almost every day, she said, in the 9 or so months since we last talked.  All kinds of things remind me of you and I know that you are working on big things.  You and Lanny are extraordinary people—you are not ordinary.  I have been praying every day for you.  Prayer is powerful, Zoe, very, very powerful.

When Erica says it, is sounds like this:  prayer is vedy powderful, vedy, vedy powderful. It’s so beautiful and melodic and reassuring.  Like a lovely, bubbling spring.

It is vedy powderful. It’s storywater.

Confronting Confrontation

I’m reading a book that explores how our ideas of God are shaped by the different ways we communicate.  Content vs. form, folks, content vs. form.

I won’t quote directly because the text is a translation from the original German and the language is a bit convoluted.  But here’s a juicy idea from the book:  we should be less concerned with trying to reconcile God’s communication to us with the various modes of communication as it exists in our world.  Instead, we might glean more from hanging out on the border between the two realms, where we’re likely to find all that messy “confrontation and difference.”

Hmmm.  Perhaps we should be less absorbed with getting everything calmed down between us and God and see what we can learn by stirring up the pot.

The book is The Practice of Communicative Theology by Scharer and Hilberath.

Fear Declawed

I have been savoring Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody.  I would be further along in the book–I love ideas like this one:  social tools allow a “loosely affiliated group [to] accomplish something more effectively than the institution can.” Trouble is, I’m absorbed with the astonishing array of loosely affiliated groups accomplishing amazing things in Tunisia and Egypt and Wisconsin and now…Libya.  Libya! 40 years of unconscionable dictatorship imploding in the space of days.  Thank you Twitter. Thank you Facebook.  Thank you cell phones.

Scanning the headlines this morning, this one stunned:  Kadafi’s last refuge, fear, is collapsing. Of course it is—why else would Kadafi be so desperate to cut off all forms of internal communication?  Fear is most powerful when you’re alone with it.

Lines and Lines and Lines

I’m intrigued by a fascinating little video I saw a few days ago.  It documents a simple, follow-the-leader online exercise.  Five hundred people, one after another, were asked to trace the drawing of the person before.  What began as a single vertical line transformed into a complex and intricate design.  Take a look:

In his book Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky riffs on physicist Philip Anderson’s idea that more is different.  The copying exercise is a vivid reminder that  we can’t predict a group’s behavior by just looking at the separate parts.  Each and every tracer contributed a quirky discrepancy, a tiny, imperfect deviation.  Who could have foreseen such a result?