Captive Art

Summer is here! And along with it, the season of family vacations to theme parks near and far. For those of you planning a trip to one of the SeaWorld parks, I hope you will take the time to watch, or re-watch, "Blackfish" before your departure.

The documentary challenges the propriety of keeping killer whales (orcas) in captivity by examining the life of one particular orca, Tilikum, and the multiple human fatalities associated with him. It was made without the cooperation of SeaWorld, so in fairness you should also read their response. However, please do not get bogged down in the technicalities of marine science or filmmaking. For there are larger questions at stake here, as theologian Beth Haile has written about:

The film encourages us to reexamine our commitment to non-human animals and ask whether what we are committed to is the well-being of the animal itself, or the human that loves the animal … We need to stretch ourselves beyond a narrow anthropocentrism that sees all of creation existing for the purpose of humans … Orcas do not need humans to glorify God and live out the purpose of their existence. In fact, human concerns may be precisely what is standing in the way of true flourishing for orcas.

"The greatest lie, the greatest scam of our lives is that this world was created for us, for our pleasure and enjoyment, for our dominance. What stupid, arrogant animals we are. We were created for it. We are simply the audience. What would true art be without an audience? Only in this work, the artist painted us inside the canvas. We are art and audience all at the same time. We are part of the grandest work ever created, ever dreamed."

Am I trying to guilt you into boycotting SeaWorld? No. I have been there in the past, and may well go back in the future. But if we do visit, let us do so with open eyes and humble hearts. Yes, we are here to admire the artwork, but none of it belongs to us. And if things had gone slightly different over the millennia, perhaps Tilikum and his kin would be the audience and we would be the pieces on display. Just how entertaining or informative would life in a cage, or a bathtub, be then?

The High We Seek

Prompted by actor Philip Seymour Hoffman's death, the Los Angeles Times published an article earlier this week about the "surge in heroin use" throughout the country. One particular quote, from a recovering addict, stood out to me immediately.

Bottom line, it presents your consciousness with another reality that at times is so amazing that if you have the power to visit it every day without destroying your life, you would.

I have heard such descriptions before. I know that many of our brothers and sisters rationalize drug use because the high seems so "spiritual" to them. But this is a false spirituality; one that always leads to destruction and chaos of some sort, and one that is wholly unnecessary. For the "high" we seek is ours for the taking at any moment, no intoxicants required. And it never destroys a thing, quite the opposite.

"You know it is true. You've felt it in your heart, in your soul. It's that little piece of you that gets caught up in the drama of life, the drama of nature, the drama of history. That feeling in the back of your throat that you are part of something that you can't quite grasp and yet you know is there. That just makes you want to cry because it's so big and bold and beautiful. That makes you want to scream out in joy and ecstasy, thanksgiving and praise for being a part of it."

"It feels like you're standing still and the whole world is rushing by at mach one. Your adrenaline is pumping so hard you have to scream out for joy and laugh hysterically like an insane person. It's a feeling of such intensity, that it seems like you have an orchestra in your head, building up to a grand crescendo, then crashing down like a tsunami, washing away every impurity in your soul and leaving you awestruck as if seeing for the first time."

"In that moment, in that very moment, whether it lasts a second or a lifetime, you know that you have touched the face of the divine."

"One gaze into the face of god changes your whole outlook on life; opens doors to places in this universe unimaginable before."

"A word like love can never fully contain your essence, but it will have to do, for you are warm and sublimely wonderful love. You radiate in birth and death, in moans of pleasure and cries of agony, in our happiness and our pain, in the hidden moments of beings we are too proud and stubborn to truly see. You radiate from every particle of creation; for every one of them is an act of love. I feel this every moment and it overwhelms me. It pushes me to the brink of sanity and I am not sure I want to step back. I cannot escape you, and I do not want to."

Is there anything more amazing than coming face to face with your Parent? Could any reality be more true or more wonderful than the view through their eyes? May you too be so blessed as to find yourself trapped in their embrace.

The Gift of Ordinary Time

At the high school where I used to teach, we held a brief prayer service for the seniors just before the graduation ceremony. As the senior-year religion teacher, I was always given the opportunity to speak. And each year, I began my remarks by sharing a few excerpts from one of the first articles they had been assigned to read:

The ancient Christian church described days of the liturgical year that were not feast days – the Mondays and Wednesdays of our lives … as belonging to "Ordinary Time." The liturgy of Ordinary Time is unchanging; prayers are always the same.

On a secular American calendar, Sept. 10 [2001] belongs irretrievably to ordinary time … It was a day for errands and sluggish freeway traffic and paying bills and running late …

I think of late summer evening descending across America on Sept. 10, I imagine televisions lighting windows and telephone conversations filling the night …

I summon Thornton Wilder, the playwright who was one of the greatest inventors of America because he portrayed ordinary time for the stage. His play "Our Town" is about what happens in an American town on an ordinary day, very much like Sept. 10 …

Emily, a young woman, recently deceased, yearns to revisit the living. She is cautioned by Mrs. Gibbs, a neighbor, long dead, to "… choose an unimportant day. Choose the least important day of your life. It will be important enough." …

There is much to learn about America from the boredom, the freedoms, the mundane achievements and routine pleasures of … Sept. 10 …

This is what Emily learned in the end of "Our Town." …

"I didn't realize. So, all that was going on and we never noticed. Take me back – up the hill – to my grave. But first: Wait! One more look. Good-bye; Good-bye, world. Good-bye, Grover's Corners … Mama and Papa. Goodbye to clocks ticking … and Mama's sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new ironed dresses and hot baths … and sleeping and waking up …"

Richard Rodriguez, "The Day Before", Los Angeles Times

My final, and perhaps most important, lesson to my students, on their final and most exciting day of high school, was to encourage them to recognize and celebrate the grace they received from the most boring and routine moments of the last four years of their lives. I offer this same lesson today, with Thanksgiving on the horizon and the start of another Advent close behind. It is so easy to ignore the gift of Ordinary Time, especially when we find ourselves face to face with the grand and the glorious, but to surrender to that temptation is to miss the point entirely.

"Look out your window … What do you see? Trees, hills, grass, concrete, metal bars, trash, crap, and all the other debris of modern life? No, you see something wonderful, something magical and wondrous … You see our reason for existence, our life's work and mission: to be a song of praise about life itself. Our grand and glorious purpose on earth: simply to be here, right here, right now."

We were created to be living witnesses to the truth that nothing is mundane. So let us proclaim that each and every day is the most wonderful time of the year.

A Delicious Madness

One of the joys of experiencing a good TV show or book for the second or third time is that familiar lines arrive with new depth and meaning. Such has been the case for me recently as my wife and I have watched "Battlestar Galactica" and my thoughts have dwelt on a particular quote whose truth has become strikingly apparent:

To know the face of God is to know madness.

"I open my eyes and I see you … I close my eyes and I hear you … I cannot escape you; but why would I want to? You are beauty, glory, joy, ecstasy, and the shiver up my spine when I feel your touch upon my soul … You radiate in birth and death, in moans of pleasure and cries of agony, in our happiness and our pain … I feel this every moment and it overwhelms me. It pushes me to the brink of sanity and I am not sure I want to step back. I cannot escape you, and I do not want to."

This is not the faith of corporate religion or conventional wisdom. They prattle on about it being sensible and normal. They associate it with tradition, conservatism, and order. What fools we all are! The Church tells us that God became human, so that we could become God. Is that sensible or normal? What sort of order could possibly come from encouraging humans to take in the view from our Parent's eyes?

"From your perspective, you see love and hate, good and evil, right and wrong. I see what is and what will be, and what I see is love and good, always."

Ever since I embarked on this journey, I feel like I have been falling deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole. I lived with this revelation for so many years, but only started to live it after freeing it from its cage in my head. Each day, my vision becomes more and more wonderfully disoriented. And each day, the human perspective seems sillier and more superficial. Perhaps that is why I have such a difficult time finding the right words for this blog; for I am tasked with translating sacred murmurings into a language from which I find myself increasingly disconnected. But how could it be any other way?

"In that moment, in that very moment, whether it lasts a second or a lifetime, you know that you have touched the face of the divine. Whatever name you want to call him or her or it, you have touched that face and you will never be the same. Nothing will ever be the same again. You may try to bury the image, pretend it doesn't exist, but there it will be, forever and ever. Always lingering, always waiting, always hoping."

"I cannot escape you, and I never will. Thank you my friend."

Will you join me in this most delicious madness?

Give Mother Nature Her Due, Or Else

And so another Earth Day has come to pass. But it's not like we need a special date on the calendar to be reminded of our impact on the environment:

• "Beyond 7 billion"
• "Will humans lose the battle with microbes?"
• "Who suffers most from climate change?"
• "Sandy and the winds of change"
• "Working Against the Grammar of Creation"
• "Ocean acidification is killing sea life …"
• "Phoenix's too hot future"

Perhaps my favorite quote on this subject came from Al Gore earlier this year: "It's like a nature hike through the Book of Revelation on the news every day now." Unintended though it may have been, there is an important lesson to be had from such apocalyptic imagery. We need to stop pretending that environmentalism is us doing Mother Nature a favor, when it is really all about our own self-preservation.

"The greatest lie, the greatest scam of our lives is that this world was created for us, for our pleasure and enjoyment, for our dominance. What stupid, arrogant animals we are. We were created for it. We are simply the audience."

What makes us truly arrogant little monkeys is the notion that we are an irreplaceable audience. How many messages to the contrary must the Landlord deliver before they finally penetrate our obliviousness? Yes, we are beloved children of our Creator; that guarantees us eternal life, not a permanent spot on this particular rock. This planet will do just fine without us, once we have all bitten the dust like the dinosaurs. But will that day come about through our own hands? That is the question.

Peace Be With You

There is a certain kind of irony to life in that just as the Church is celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the papal encyclical "Pacem in Terris", the world should be subjected to the saber-rattling of North Korea. Pope John XXIII shared a vision that "projected a world where peace would be achieved by governments dedicated to the fulfillment of human rights." Kim Jong Un is teaching lessons "about the value of having a nuclear weapon or two." So which of these two men is the crazy one?

I say we are the crazy ones. We chase a peace that will never come, while dismissing one easily within our grasp. Peace is not some utopian way of life that we can talk or kill our way into. It is a state of being that comes from placing absolute trust in Love, and that manifests itself most purely in the love of our enemies.

"Our brother calls us to love, love God, love your neighbor, love. How hard is that? What are you afraid of? If he was willing to die to love you, what’s your excuse for not loving those you fail to understand, those you despise, those you hate?"

Yes, we must fight injustice. Yes, we must reject violence. But simply because that is what love demands, not because doing so will bring about some magic land of peace and justice. Love calls us to tilt at windmills, and to do so joyfully.

"It is time for us to embrace our family, even though we will fail, and probably fail miserably. This is another paradox of our Creator. We can never truly be one family in this life and yet they compel us to try, they demand that we make the attempt."

And therein lies the key to peace: we are family. It is a truth more profound than any encyclical and more powerful than any atomic bomb. A truth we proclaim with a Kiss, and not a kiss that says, "I will tolerate you," but a kiss that says, "You are my brother, my sister, and I love you." A truth that reveals that the Kingdom we crave has been right in front of us all along, if only we would trust in it.

"So much of life is a paradox, but it is there that we find God the most. It is there, in the confusion and that mess that we must dwell. It is there that we experience true beauty, true joy. It is there that we can see something wonderful, something that sends a chill down our spine, and puts a smile on our face and a laugh in our heart, where we know with certainty who and what we are and why we are here in this time and place. It is in that moment that we are at peace."

Peace is not a grand dream, but a simple love. Peace be with you.

Silent Awe

Several days ago, I went for a walk around sunset. It was one of those rainy days in Southern California where the sky is full of dark clouds, but then these patches of bright blue break through. Misty clouds hung low upon the foothills. The air was cold and crisp. Everything had this golden tinge from the sunset. And it was all I could do to not drop to my knees in the street and weep in praise and thanksgiving.

"Look out your window. It doesn’t matter which one. They all will do. What do you see? Trees, hills, grass, concrete, metal bars, trash, crap, and all the other debris of modern life? No, you see something wonderful, something magical and wondrous.

... What you see is a gift. A gift more precious than anything, ANYTHING that has or ever will be imagined by human intelligence. You see our reason for existence, our life’s work and mission: to be a song of praise about life itself.

... You know it is true. You’ve felt it in your heart, in your soul. It’s that little piece of you that gets caught up in the drama of life, the drama of nature, the drama of history. That feeling in the back of your throat that you are part of something that you can’t quite grasp and yet you know is there. That just makes you want to cry because it’s so big and bold and beautiful. That makes you want to scream out in joy and ecstasy, thanksgiving and praise for being a part of it.

In that moment, in that very moment, whether it lasts a second or a lifetime, you know that you have touched the face of the divine. Whatever name you want to call him or her or it, you have touched that face and you will never be the same. Nothing will ever be the same again."

"But we talk too much. It makes it all seem so trivial. Just let us be who we are. Just let yourself be. It will be enough."

Sometimes, silent awe is enough.

Abortion, Fear, & Love

Yesterday was the fortieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade. It was a day full of editorials and essays, voices on all sides of the abortion debate shouting to be heard. If there's one thing we should be sure of after forty years, it's that none of them have found the solution. Legal or not, abortions will happen, women will suffer, and babies will die, all because of fear. Fear of judgment; fear of abandonment; fear of failure; fear of all the unknowns. A fear that cannot be cured by lawyers, or doctors, or politicians, or even well-meaninged activists. A fear only dissolved by an embrace. An embrace that says I will help you, I respect you, I forgive you, I love you. So maybe it's time for us to shut up, just shut up for a while, and embrace all those who fear, and simply love them.

"There is more love in every atom, every molecule than in all the romances ever conceived. We are the song of life, of love, of a mother and father who made us by sheer force of will. So much of life is a paradox, but it is there that we find God the most. It is there, in the confusion and that mess that we must dwell. It is there that we experience true beauty, true joy."

"From your perspective, you see love and hate, good and evil, right and wrong. I see what is and what will be, and what I see is love and good, always."

Welcoming the Incarnation

Last Saturday, I stumbled upon a new documentary, "Wish Me Away", about country singer Chely Wright, and her process of accepting her sexuality and publicly coming out as a lesbian. What I watched, however, was the story of a woman denying grace for so many years, until she finally recognized that the Incarnation dwelt within her all along. Is that not the task set before each of us in this season of Advent?

"You are my child. More than that, you are myself. We are one, linked forever. What you feel, I feel. What I know, you know. We are love incarnate. We are life."

The Church has long taught that God became human, so that we could become God. But I say that Jesus came to open our eyes to a divinity that already coursed through our very souls. That awakening is what we should be preparing for this Advent, for it is the gift our family needs most this Christmas. The many ways we abuse our siblings, as I have written about the last few weeks, certainly testify to that.

Perhaps the depth of this need is why I was so powerfully moved by Wright's film. Her story begins with a childhood prayer that becomes a daily mantra asking God to take away her gayness. Such pleading led her where it leads too many of our brothers and sisters, to put a gun in her mouth. But then she makes one last prayer, for peace, and finally hears what God has been whispering to her all along: that she's already exactly who they created her to be. And she knows she has an obligation to speak this truth, to share it with all her siblings who still have their fingers on a trigger.

Wright's truth is this: homosexuality is not a "deep wound" needing to be cured; it is a beautiful part of God's design that demands to be embraced. Her witness is evidence of what I tried to convey last June in "The Gift of Homosexuality" post, that our LGBT siblings have much to teach us about love. The most important lesson of which flows from the Incarnation: love trumps biology and everything else.

There is also in Wright's story a general reminder for all. Her childhood prayer did not spring up out of nowhere; it had a source. Corporate religion loves wounds; they keep its version of a hospital in business. Unfortunately, that means it often inflicts the very damage it claims to heal. Is there one among us who hasn't suffered from friendly fire? But that is why God became one of us, so that we might be able to see the difference between our rules and their truth, and to know what really harms our family. That is the grace, the peace, that we wait for so longingly during this time of Advent.

"We are the song of life, of love, of a mother and father who made us by sheer force of will. So much of life is a paradox, but it is there that we find God the most. It is there, in the confusion and that mess that we must dwell. It is there that we experience true beauty, true joy. It is there that we can see something wonderful, something that sends a chill down our spine, and puts a smile on our face and a laugh in our heart, where we know with certainty who and what we are and why we are here in this time and place. It is in that moment that we are at peace."

A Reminder From Mother Nature

"The greatest lie, the greatest scam of our lives is that this world was created for us, for our pleasure and enjoyment, for our dominance. What stupid, arrogant animals we are. We were created for it. We are simply the audience. What would true art be without an audience? Only in this work, the artist painted us inside the canvas. We are art and audience all at the same time. We are part of the grandest work ever created, ever dreamed."

There is a certain irony to Hurricane Sandy's arrival a week before election day. We oftentimes act as if our political choices will decide the fate of the world. The Landlord just reminded us how very delusional we are.

Minutes and hours. That's all it took for air and water to decimate the work of human hands. Yes, we will repair and rebuild, and pat ourselves on the back for our ingenuity and perseverance. And one day, Mother Nature will snap her fingers again, and it will all come tumbling down, again. We pour endless amounts of time, treasure, and talent into our creations. But air, water, fire, and earth will always get the best of them.

We humans are a small and impotent part of the cosmos. It is not the reality we want, but it is the truth we need to accept. And let us do so joyfully, not grudgingly; for we are not diminishing ourselves. Rather, we are embracing our rightful place in a much grander family than we could ever dream of, if we can be humble enough to listen to Sister Hurricane, and all that she has to teach us.

"So much of life is a paradox, but it is there that we find God the most. It is there, in the confusion and that mess that we must dwell. It is there that we experience true beauty, true joy. It is there that we can see something wonderful, something that sends a chill down our spine, and puts a smile on our face and a laugh in our heart, where we know with certainty who and what we are and why we are here in this time and place."

"Finding Neverland" (2004)

After writing about violence the last few posts, something a bit more cheery seems to be in order for today. "Finding Neverland" is a dramatization of the friendship between playwright J.M. Barrie and the Llewelyn Davies family, who provided the inspiration for "Peter Pan". It is a real life story of the power of the human mind.

My favorite part of the movie takes place on opening night. Barrie has had twenty-five seats, scattered throughout the theater, held aside for a group of special guests, who turn out to be children from a local orphanage. He knows that "Peter Pan" depends on the kind of imagination that adults are conditioned to see as silliness, but that children find magical. As the children watch the play with eyes full of wonder and delight, the adults are happily swept along to Neverland with them.

This is what Jesus had in mind when he urged us to "accept the kingdom of God like a child." He was not telling us to embrace a childish, immature faith, but a childlike one full of wonder and delight at the beauty and adventure of life.

"Look out your window. It doesn’t matter which one. They all will do. What do you see? Trees, hills, grass, concrete, metal bars, trash, crap, and all the other debris of modern life? No, you see something wonderful, something magical and wondrous ... What you see is a gift. A gift more precious than anything, ANYTHING that has or ever will be imagined by human intelligence."

Check out this movie on IMDb, Wikipedia, or YouTube.

"Fearless" (1993)

Most people think of mystical experiences as the province of monks or gurus, people who spend countless hours in prayer and meditation. They are wrong. Each of us is meant to experience God, in the minutiae of life, as well as its grandest events. And contrary to popular opinion, God is not a carnival barker. The truly mystical are not freak supernatural occurrences like burning bushes, angels, or booming voices from the clouds, but rather the most sublimely ordinary of things.

"It’s that little piece of you that gets caught up in the drama of life, the drama of nature, the drama of history. That feeling in the back of your throat that you are part of something that you can’t quite grasp and yet you know is there. That just makes you want to cry because it’s so big and bold and beautiful. That makes you want to scream out in joy and ecstasy, thanksgiving and praise for being a part of it. In that moment, in that very moment, whether it lasts a second or a lifetime, you know that you have touched the face of the divine."

"It feels like you’re standing still and the whole world is rushing by at mach one. Your adrenaline is pumping so hard you have to scream out for joy and laugh hysterically like an insane person. It’s a feeling of such intensity, that it seems like you have an orchestra in your head, building up to a grand crescendo, then crashing down like a tsunami, washing away every impurity in your soul and leaving you awestruck as if seeing for the first time."

The movie "Fearless" is the best representation of a mystical experience that I know of. Jeff Bridges plays Max, an airplane crash survivor who has discovered "the taste and touch and beauty of life," but struggles to make sense of that vision in the context of everyday living. He seems crazy to those around him, but how do you incorporate an experience of the divine into life in the "real" world? Once you see the face of God, the superficiality of modern society becomes unbearable, and the beauty of what lies beneath is overwhelming. How exactly do you deal with that?

The final sequence, showing the actual crash, is the most beautiful piece of cinema that I have ever watched. Those five minutes seem to encapsulate the taste, touch, and beauty of life, death, family, God, and love. Max walks down the center aisle of the plane to sit with a boy traveling by himself. As they brace for impact, he tells the boy, "close your eyes ... it'll be over soon ... everything's wonderful." His eyes make the meaning of his words clear: whether they live or die, in that moment everything truly is wonderful. That is mysticism in its rawest form.

Check out this movie on IMDb, Wikipedia, or YouTube.

The Purpose of Education

For the past ten years, I have taught a faith development course in a Catholic high school. Due to the implementation of a new standardized religion curriculum mandated by the U.S. bishops, that course comes to an end with my last class this Friday. The looming demise of my course has prompted a good deal of reflection on the purpose of education in our society. What seems evident is that our goal is to create people who will be what our corporate systems want and need them to be, rather than helping them to discover who our Parent created them to be.

What prompted this post was a recent article in Time magazine about partnerships between public schools and corporations to ensure that students receive the skills necessary in today's job market. The author quotes one of the corporate executives, a former school administrator, responsible for this effort. "These kids have already gone past a $15-an-hour lifetime. They are reinventing what high school - and their future - is all about." Once again, it's all about the money.

Why does our future depend on what we can do for the economy? Why do we identify ourselves by our jobs? Why do we surrender our lives to our corporate masters rather than our Creator? Does the economy love us the way they do?

"We were created for so much more. There is more love in every atom, every molecule than in all the romances ever conceived. We are the song of life, of love, of a mother and father who made us by sheer force of will."

In the case I began with, the bishops are not making curriculum changes because the current religion courses fail to teach God's love. Their concern is about the exodus of people from the Church and a decline in orthodoxy among those who remain. Their analysis of this problem is that it stems from a failure to properly convey the corporate message. Hence the curriculum changes as part of the solution. What the bishops fail to consider is that perhaps the people get the message better than they do.

"Do not listen to the preachers and prophets because they tell you that you should ... If you believe the message to be true in your heart, then listen to the messenger. If not, reject him, whomever or whatever he may be. Trust yourself."

Both of these examples are about control. They are variations on the "Tiger Mom" phenomenon: adults attempting to create children in their image. In so doing, we fail to follow the wisdom of the one Parent who actually accomplished this feat, then gave their children the freedom to become whoever they felt called to be.

But not all of us are this way. Another news story that made the rounds recently was of a child who made an entire arcade out of cardboard boxes. Sandy Banks of the Los Angeles Times wrote a column about the boy's father:

"Here's the whole thing about parents," [George Monroy] said. "They want to create their kid into what they want it to do. And they force upon them sports, books… 'This book is good for you, read it. Play T-ball. Play soccer.' But he'll be so miserable on the soccer field if he doesn't want to play, you're wasting his time and your time too. You have to let the kid decide what he wants to do."

If God trusts us to figure it out, why can't we trust our children ... and ourselves.

The Lie of Anthropocentrism

Just about every night last week saw a fresh news report on weird weather happening throughout the nation. Common sense, and the TV meteorologists, tell us that this is a result of climate change. These stories reminded me of an opinion article published by the Los Angeles Times two years ago warning of the dangers of our anthropocentric approach to the environment. Expressed by both the oil company who wants to exploit and the hippie who wants to protect, this worldview places human beings above nature and legitimizes our efforts to control the environment. "Mother Nature" seems to be reminding us that someone else is in charge of things.

"The greatest lie, the greatest scam of our lives is that this world was created for us, for our pleasure and enjoyment, for our dominance. What stupid, arrogant animals we are. We were created for it. We are simply the audience. What would true art be without an audience? Only in this work, the artist painted us inside the canvas. We are art and audience all at the same time. We are part of the grandest work ever created, ever dreamed."

We may be special, but so is all of God's creation. We are not the center of the universe, nor are we its caretakers. Our family is bigger than one species, and it is time for us to adopt an attitude of humility towards nature. We can do this on our own initiative, or nature will do it for us. Such a forceful humbling would not be a punishment from God, but rather the logical consequence of our oversized ego.