On Sharing The Things I Love

by Ben Howard

Last night I got to do one of those things that everyone loves to do. I introduced my friends to something I like.

Every Wednesday, like many others, I meet with a group of friends from the church I attend to have a bible study or a small group or whatever in-vogue church-y phrase you use to describe people getting together to talk about stuff.

Last night, our discussion centered around The West Wing episode "Two Cathedrals." If you're unfamiliar with the show, this episode centers around two elements: the funeral of President Bartlet's longtime friend and secretary Mrs. Landingham and President Bartlet's announcement that he has multiple sclerosis and his subsequent decision to run for re-election. It's a beautifully shot, beautifully written story and it regularly comes up in discussions about the best TV episodes ever.

Now, while I would love to keep waxing rhapsodic about The West Wing, that's not where I want to focus my attention today.

You see, I realized on my drive home that this was one of the first times I had shared an episode of The West Wing, a show I adore, with friends of mine who had never experienced it. And what do you do when you're sharing something you love with friends who haven't seen it? You spend most of your time looking around making sure they enjoy it; making sure they laugh at the jokes, feel the weight of the serious scenes, checking to see if it connects to them the same way it connects to you.

And there are a few reasons for this little mid-viewing check-up. First, I just want to make sure they don't hate it. Somehow, I feel like my reputation, my taste, is on the line when I share something with my friends. I feel somehow responsible for their enjoyment. And that leads to the second reason: I want to make sure that not only do they not hate what I'm sharing, I hope they just straight-up like it.

I'm sure all of this sounds obvious, but here's the kicker. I feel like this is all so important because of what their enjoyment does for me. 

When I share something, whether it's a TV show, or a song, or even just a quote from a book I'm reading, what I'm really doing is trying to reveal a piece of myself. And somehow, through the transitive property of things that touch the soul, their mutual engagement with that same show or song or line makes me feel more connected to them.

I've noticed within myself a certain creativity when it comes to snark and criticism. I can joke and deconstruct with wit and style, but I can't do the same with beauty. When I try and say good things, hopeful things, beautiful things they come out trite and cliched and hackneyed. Somehow, my words and my methods of communication fail to elucidate the myriad complexity of a deeper, ineffable good that permeates existence.

And to bridge that gap, I need you to hear this song, I need you to read this phrase, I need you to watch this movie. I need you to feel what I feel so that I can know I'm not alone; so I can know what it feels like to be understood.

This is why I love church. It's especially why I love Advent, and Lent, and Ash Wednesday, and Holy Saturday. It's why I love taking communion with friends and strangers, holding candles, hearing a harp or an organ, and repeating the same words that my people, people I've never met, have said for centuries.

I can't explain God to you, I can't unravel the mysteries of the universe, and my best attempts sound empty. 

But I can share this moment that I love with you and we can watch The West Wing together. Because loving Jed Bartlet says something about me, something I want you to know, but something I can't quite say. It brings us closer, and that is good.

Ben Howard is an accidental iconoclast and generally curious individual living in Nashville, Tennessee. He is also the editor-in-chief of On Pop Theology and an avid fan of waving at strangers for no reason. You can follow him on Twitter @BenHoward87.  

You can follow On Pop Theology on Twitter @OnPopTheology or like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/OnPopTheology.
  
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Tell Me a Love Story: Learning About Relationships From Strangers on the Internet

by Ben Howard

It's no secret to readers of this blog that I'm a bit of a hopeless romantic. I'm a sucker for romantic comedies and I even caught the Bachelorette bug for the last half of one season (Let's all have a moment of silence for Jef with One F). So when my friend Joanna sent me a link to the blog/experiment 40 Days of Dating it took me about five minutes to become completely addicted.

The concept behind the experiment is relatively simple. Two friends, New York-based graphic designers Jessica Walsh and Timothy Goodman, have issues with relationships. In order to sort through these issues they decide to date each other for forty days. They see each other every day, go on three dates a week, and go to see a couples therapist together once a week. At the end of each day they fill out a questionnaire reflecting on what they did that day and what they learned.

So far this probably reads like the pitch for a revamped version of When Harry Met Sally and that's true, sort of. I was initially fascinated by the mere "Will they or won't they" facet of the experiment. I'd read through the questionnaire and try to decide if one of the two was falling for the other, or, hopefully, that they were both falling for each other.

However, as I've continued reading through the days (Day 16 posted today), I've become fixated on a completely different aspect of the experiment. I'm continually fascinated by 40 Days of Dating because it highlights, perhaps inadvertently, how two people can have wildly different responses and interpretations to the same event. When you read the questionnaires, it puts in stark relief how deeply these dueling interpretations of events are shaped by perspective and context.

It's not that Jessica and Timothy have wildly diverging interpretations of events, but they do focus on different aspects and see differing significance in the same tiny situations. For instance, there is the Bread Pudding Incident on Day Ten. Jessica and Timothy attend a Knicks game together and during the evening they buy bread pudding which Tim eats by himself.

In Tim's point of view this is all that occurs. He wanted the pudding and he ate it. However, Jessica sees this incident as something slightly more. She says that "Tim is not very good at sharing." This small event, which Tim views as meaningless, has meaning to Jessica. There are other similarly small incidents like this, as well as larger fights and disagreements which really underline this divide in the way that people view the same reality.

I find this all so interesting because I think it magnifies the importance of communication, and on a grander scale, community in general. Communication is essential to understanding the experience of the other even if we're experiencing the same events. The concept that one view of reality is the objective view, or the true view, is deeply narcissistic and problematic. We need to listen to ourselves and learn from experiences, but we also need to listen closely to those closest to us to learn from theirs.

This is obvious in romantic relationships, but it's also true in wider communal interactions. For instance, there has been so much conversation is recent weeks about issues of race and justice. The easiest way to undermine these conversations, to shut down dialogue, is to assume that the experience of white middle to upper class Americans is the experience of all. It is impossible for us to inhabit the context of another person and experience the world as they do. What we can do, what we must do, is communicate openly and honestly. This means we must listen, but it also means we must share.

It may sound strange to extrapolate from a rom-com style blog experiment to deeper, far more entrenched problems like race relations, but I don't think it's that far of a step. Relationships are the bedrock of our society, whether they be romantic, personal, or civic. Open lines of communication are essential whether you're trying to heal the worlds problems or just date for forty days without killing each other.

Peace,
Ben

*All images are from the website 40 Days of Dating.*

Ben Howard is an accidental iconoclast and generally curious individual living in Nashville, Tennessee. He is also the editor-in-chief of On Pop Theology and an avid fan of waving at strangers for no reason. You can follow him on Twitter @BenHoward87. 

 

You can follow On Pop Theology on Twitter @OnPopTheology or like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/OnPopTheology.

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Babel, or God Is a Saboteur

by Amanda Taylor

A few weeks ago in Brussels I watched a man get bludgeoned nearly to death in the middle of a busy market street. He came bursting out of a side alley just ahead of me, and barreling after him came four or five large guys who, once they caught him, just started hammering him into the ground. He tried to break free, but blows came to the knees, on the back, in the head. It took all of them to wrestle him to the ground, his face flattened into the cold, hard concrete. He screamed at the top of his lungs the entire time he was being beaten, a time that felt like hours, until the police sirens could be heard in the distance and the crowds were told to clear.

Based on the few indications available, this man was a criminal and the men who captured him were undercover policemen, though they only displayed armbands suggesting as much toward the end of this excruciating display in the open street. 

I watched the whole thing. First in surprise, then horror, then sick fascination. I took a picture on my phone of the man lying in the street.

I took a picture. Looking back I hate myself for it, though I knew I would when I pulled out my phone. I just needed to verify that something so horrific had actually occurred right in front of me; that I had turned the corner at the exact moment he came barreling out, and that he was there in broad daylight, bleeding from the head. 

The worst part was that I couldn’t talk to anyone about it. No one on the street seemed to know English and I couldn’t identify the languages passing in hushed whispers. I wanted to do something, to say something, to scream: “Do you see this?  Are you seeing what I’m seeing? What do we do?!” 

But we didn’t do anything. We just stood there and watched, like idiots. One girl even took a picture.

There was a disconnect between what happened on the street and the crowd who witnessed it, a disunion between that reality and ours. It felt so odd, but when the two realms don’t have any reason to depend on one another, to overlap further, they simply part ways. I’ve been thinking less of the violence and the crime than this idea of intersection, of community and communication among disparate parties.
How is it that we can be standing right next to someone, yet worlds apart? Communication is supposed to bring us back to one another, but what about the times when it doesn’t? Or can’t? Or perhaps when it shouldn’t?

Of course there are more ways to communicate than the combination of words and the use of syntax; language is only one of the infinite mechanisms we use to interact. Nothing makes this clearer than visiting another country or culture where you are an alien, a foreigner, without the ability to navigate direction, time, work, or people, and your only resources are your hands and eyes and intuition.

But why are things complicated in this way, why are we disconnected? In Genesis 11 we’re

told that things are this way because God was displeased with what we chose to do together as humans when we could communicate as a single unit. We didn’t appear to handle such capacity well, and God “confounded the language of all the earth.” He isolated us into pockets of humanity, confined by limited comprehension. He is and was a saboteur. 

Genesis 11 has bothered me for months now. Who is this God that “came down” and shattered the culture into irrelevant, splintered pieces? Who is the God that makes it virtually impossible to communicate with you, to know you, to empathize with you, to hear your words and know your children? Who is this God that made us strangers on the street?

N.T. Wright writes that, “The story of the Tower of Babel is an account of a world given to injustice, spurious types of spirituality (trying to stretch up to heaven by our own efforts), failed relationships, and the creation of buildings whose urban ugliness speaks of human pride rather than the nurturing of beauty.” That is a useful and concise description, yet I can’t help but think it sucks the life out of how complex and complicated the turn of events really was. We became foreign to one another, creating new realms and new communities that didn’t interlock. We lost something, and the story is a turning point in our participation in the development and construction of the future of this earth.

Part of what continues to bother me is that while we were decimated and scattered at that time we’ve entered a new era in the human history in which we’re slowly clawing our way back to one another. The world is “flattening” and shrinking and becoming ever more interdependent, and language barriers are diminishing. Google glasses, which can translate anything in the world into any language instantaneously, are about to hit the market, launching an onslaught of technological advancement that will very likely turn this world of nearly 7,000 languages into a world of one.

I think often about the implications of unconfounding the confounded, and what we think we’re building by uniting the world through communication. We were one, we were then made many, and here we find ourselves ever so close to one again. Is that what’s right?

The European Union is currently an amalgamation of 27 countries that speak 23 different languages, having been created for Europe to dispel any environmental forces that would allow for another Adolf Hitler and World War II. These nations have come together to avoid reckless, horrible violence and promote stability and longevity in their continent and the world. When EU Parliament meets, all 23 languages are translated instantly so that all countries will know one another and each distinctive culture can work in unison with its partners to build a brighter future for all. They are unconfounding the confounded, but it is with the best of intentions that they do so.

It sounds to me as though we are slowly building a larger world community that somehow looks alarmingly like a tower. Are we? To be clear, I have a healthy fear of technology, a healthy fear of unconfounding, and a general apprehension of believing too heavily in the capacities of man’s constructions independent from God’s hand in the work. 

Yet I want to know the stranger on the street, to be able to ask more than directions, to exchange culture and lives, to understand more of the infinite manifestations of this human experience. I want to build that knowledge together. 

Is it the right thing to do to bring together disparate worlds? To allow ourselves the privilege of exploring the extent of our capacities to do so? That, I have no current answer for, but I do know that in watching a man be brought to his knees in cold, brutal force, the geography of the incident had no overriding authority. Nothing about that experience was more or less human because I couldn’t have asked the man next to me what time it was. It was humanity at work and we all played a particular role in its warped expression, and my response to it has set about a curious reflection.

This conversation about the fallout of different worlds colliding and communication as a mechanism help us make sense of that and act together. Is it really about language or is it about something else entirely? 

1 And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. 2 And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.  3 And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them throughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for morter. 4 And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. 5 And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. 6 And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. 7 Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. 8 So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. 9 Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

Amanda works in “community development” and no, she doesn’t know what that means either. Forever the critic. And enthusiast. Never one for dichotomies. Follow her on Twitter @tayloram03 if you’re not into receiving tweets.

You can also follow On Pop Theology on Twitter @OnPopTheology or like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/OnPopTheology.

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Why Twitter Marks the End of Church Pews

Today I'm putting up a guest post from Dixon Kinser.  Actually, it's a post taken from the archives of his blog So Indie It's Embarassing (http://dixonkinser.blogspot.com/).  Sadly, he doesn't post much anymore, but there's some fantastic things there.  Enjoy!

Peace,
Ben
------------
by Dixon Kinser

It is my opinion that when Christian’s gather for worship the rituals they undertake function as a kind of training. What they do together gives shape, form and imagination to the kind of people they are trying to become. This is as true for the obvious elements of Christian worship (preaching content, song selection, giving, confession, prayer for the church and the world etc.) as it is for the more oblique ones (room orientation, seating configurations, vestments etc.). It is these oblique ones that I think will be most affected by a technology like Twitter.

Twitter is, of course, a relatively new technology that allows the user to update a personal web feed with what they are doing at any given moment. It provides a new and interesting way to communicate to be sure, but it is also indicative of the larger culture trends toward virtual relationships. These are the kind of relationships that are facilitated in spaces like MySpace and facebook and use email and twitter their means communication.

These media make it is possible to converse with many people, all over the globe on any given day but never look at another human being in the face. Even worse, these technologically based relationships can actually supersede the real thing (ever had somebody ignore you while you were talking to them to respond to a text?)

All this brings me to my point.

As our culture moves into more and more virtual forms of communication (for a scathing critique of this reality see the film Wall-E) will the church’s practice of meeting together become increasingly both counter cultural and crucial.

Christianity is a living way of life that requires relationship with other human beings. The kind of formation we seek (I am a Christian so I put myself in this camp) happens most authentically in community when face to face with other human beings. As more and more technologies crop up that draw us away from looking at other people in the face the more important the churches practice of relating to other people “in person” will become.

And this is why Twitter could very well be the death knell of the church pew. We all know that worshipping in pews requires very little face-to-face interaction. Yes we subvert this with some of our practices (passing the peace etc.), but for the majority of our community training we only see the back of our neighbor’s head. Will the increased need for face-to-face time in worship in response to our cultures increasingly virtual relationships finally call for the end of pews?

We need to look at one another and one of the technologies working against us is the church pew. Architecture is one of the intangibles of our Christian formation and its augmentation can really make a difference. Could this be the time?

It’s not like the pew has been around since the time of Jesus or anything. It’s usage came into vogue as another communication technology rose to prominence – the printing press (ever notice how a Basilica’s pews are shaped like the layout of a book?) Perhaps its demise at the hand of another communication technology is just the right kind of poetic beauty.

Or is it irony.

Peace,

D