Rent, relevance and the life of a bohemian

So I went to go see the movie Rent last night with some of my friends from High School. I would highly recommend anybody (especially Christians, for reasons I am about to go into in a minute) to go see it. I would go see it again, if anybody is interested. Drop me a line through this thing or email (allegrid@msu.edu) and let me know.

Anyway, I loved this movie. The music was amazing. Not only that, but it was perfectly cast with people who could act as well as sing. All the music seamlessly integrated in the greater thread of the movie, so you never felt like asking, "why are these people breaking into song in the first place?" The way these people acted the music, you really felt like the only way they could really express what it was they were trying to get across was song, ie this was no musical for the sake of being a musical; like all good art, it had a message.

And a powerful message it was at that. The whole movie followed this group of broken people in their respective quests to find some sort of life in the world in which they found themselves. Four of the characters had AIDS, another four were homosexuals, one was a stripper, another a transvestite, two were out-of-work artists, another an expelled college professor. There were lawyers and yuppies, performance artists and bohemians, lesbians and live-in-lovers. The whole thing smacked of a reality where not everyone lived in the cookie-cutter lifestyle of the Beev's suburbia. AND I LOVED IT!

Because these characters transcended their identities as strippers or drag-queens and lesbians, they gave that sector of society a name and a face and personalities. These are people. More often than not the church of Jesus forgets that. People have lives beyond their classifications or boundaries. Personhood extends far beyond labels like the 'homosexual agenda' or the 'enemies of family values'. Despite the fact that he was a transvestite, I didn't want Angel to die because he was a person.

I would dare say that the church needs to stop ministering to sins and start ministering to people. We objectify and we classify and we put people into these little boxes so that they either conform or react (often virulently) to our systems of labels and hierarchy. Christ would have none of that because he knew that sin was not the last word in anybodies life. Love was.

Does this mean I agree with homosexuality? No, it doesn't. But since when did disagreement translate to a flat-out rejection of personhood? It's possible to respectfully disagree on an issue and still love with the passion of Christ. So why don't we? Are Christians afraid they might actually enjoy a homosexual's company? People need God and instead of ramming our convictions down one another's throats, why can't we say "This is what I believe, here is why, now why don't we talk about it?"

Ultimately, the church has to be relevant to people like lesbians and AIDS patients and strippers. It has to be relevant to those who need God, because ultimately all those people seen in Rent, the artists and the poor and the hurting, they are all us. And we all need God.

Viva la vie Boheme!

Daniel

Aslan is on the move....

The Lord God, known to some as Aslan (though they do not know it), is on the move. We need to follow Him, because this pursuit is singularly important. Follow the moving God. He is not still.

I love hanging out with a certain friend of mine (let's see if she can tell if this is her or not) because she just slaps people. Not in a spirit of condemnation or bitterness, but not in spirit of fear either. I admire that in her. The world needs more truth tellers. Sure, I mean, we all sin. But if we, sort of like Prometheus, see each others' sin and not our own, then maybe in a community of Christ-Followers we can cover each other's back. The trick is listening when your brother says, "Stop sinning", because turn-about is fair play, and you might have to tell him someday.

The Truth must be told, Aslan must be followed, life must be pursued and sought after.

Follow the Lion,

Daniel

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!!!!

I'm sitting here at my grandma's house, rendered imoblie by the profundity of food I have just consumed. I enjoy holiday's about eating and more than that, I enjoy the people around them. It seems like feasts like this are all about connecting and bonding and- for lack of a word less churchy- fellowship. Maybe that's why Jesus ate with people, because-- rich or poor, pagan or pious-- we all need to eat. A deep type of sharing emerges from the holidays. We learn that we are all essentially the same--- some of us know God, others don't and we all need Him more. We pray for each other, sure, but we learn that we shouldn't begrudge each other's spiritual progress at meals, after all, we got food to eat, right? I guess I'm all about a God who commands us to rest and enjoy time with Him and our families, at penalty of death, for most of our year (Read the Old Testament and the laws of the Sabbath and the Holidays--- while not applicable to Christians, they certainly show us where God's priorities are at!).

The point is, I am all about rest. As Christians in modern, post-modern, whatever-you-want-to-call-it, era, we must make every effort to free ourselves from the mindset that our worth lies in what we produce. Don't mistake me, God wants us to do well and to live vibrantly, to "be fruitful and mulitply" in the world in which we live. But if we don't or we can't, if we refuse to live in that suburb-slave mindset that demands that we are not really living well if we aren't at peak efficiency, pushed to the limits of production till we begin to die, God still loves us anyway. He still cares for us, and He still made us Who we are, regardless of if we conform to the doctor/lawyer/dentist mindset the world tell us we can't live with out.

I guess what I'm saying is I am all about the Bohemians and the wanderers and the street-corner, coffee shop intellectuals. Maybe it's cause I'm a college student or a malcontent (some would say they are synomonous!) that I'm probably too hard on the suburban crowd. After all the smartest people I know (my parents!!!!) are die-hard denizens of the suburbs. I grew up there, for pete's sake! It's just not for me.

Regardless of where you live, we do need to rest in God and each other. The Bible makes that startilingly clear. I guess the question I have to leave you all with, is, if you are doing what you love for a living, how do you rest from that, still enjoy your passions, without falling into the trap of endless production, without really living. How do I still study my beloved languages without thinking I need to study in order to validate or prove myself worthy?

Josh is buggin me to leave, so this is over. leave comments!!!!!!!!


Daniel

Dai Aynu

During the festival of Passover, The Jews recite a hymm detailing the works of their God in History, after each sentence of narration everybody at the table sings "Dai Aynu" detailing that if God hadn't done any of these things for the People Israel, if He didn't redeem them, nor heal them, nor save them from the Hand of the Pharoah, if the LORD had done nothing else, but existed,

Dai Aynu! It would have been enough for us!

So often, we think of redemption as personal reconciliation between us and God. We come to God because we are dirty and we need to be cleaned. While this is so true and right and real, we must realize that this redemption is freedom we don't deserve. Dai Aynu! It would have been enough for us!

I try to fight God on this all the time, like I still need to give Him a reason for loving me. As if my worth depends largely on what I put out, or how productive I am, or I how I show myself worthy of the deposit I have been given, and, while we certainly want to be wise with our gifts, they are not the instruments of our being made good--- God is. We think we have to output and output and output as if we have somehting to prove or justify to our God. We don't.

God has saved us, healed us and loved us. He wants to spend time with us, and woo us. He loves us and rescued us from every sort of evil thing and ever sort of horid malady. The LORD is so real and active on our behalf, and He chooses to be so. He's in this because He wants to be. And while, like the People of Israel, we can exclaim that the smallest morself from the hand of God would have been enough, I think God can say the same thing about us. No matter what small gifts we could bring to God, for Him, because it is from us, it would have been enough. DAI AYNU!


Happy Thanksgiving!

Daniel

giving up everything...

What does it mean to give up everything? And when you are ready to do that, is it then that God says come and see what I have for you, because you, like Abraham, "did not withhold your only son"?

Come Lord Jesus

Daniel

some ideas....

"If we ourselves reject, as did Lewis, our own age's "chronological snobbery," we might just find that the way forward is the way back. Lewis's welcome strategy was to be "in, but not of" the period in which he lived, aligning himself with a perspective outside that world--i.e., divine revelation.

This enabled him to discern the rules of the "game" while maintaining an equilibrium amid the endless undulations of time and culture, hence his maxim: "All that is not eternal is eternally out of date."

This is perhaps the best clue to the mystery of Lewis's continuing impact and influence. Owen Barfield, reflecting many years later on Lewis's career, once capsuled well Lewis's secret: "Somehow what Lewis thought about everything was secretly present in what he said about anything."

Since I was a kid, I've always felt like I wanted to follow God into uncomfortable or difficult places. (Not that this shows any piety or heightned religious instinct on my part. Quite frankly, I enjoy getting myself into trouble, as my Italian penchant for drama will no doubt attest.) I write often in my journal that, though the suburbs have a special place in my heart as the 'land of my youth', I was not built for them any more than I was not built for undersea life.

Pretty much, I want to follow God. He's the one I have to impress, not any particular system or person. If he goes somewhere that American culture or Western Culture or (please try to get my point before you seize on this) Western Christianity won't go, I would rather go with God then I would go with these systems. He's and fair bit nicer and I would hope that most see this as obviously a good Idea.

The point is, we are all searching for a God free of the systems around us. I think at it's most resonant level, this is what we mean by the "eternal God". We don't want "Christianity-and X" where X is what ever fad happens to be passing by at the moment, be it postmodernism, modernism or the strictist form of literalism or liberalism you can imagine. We want Mere Christianity (which is a phrase as you can tell, I stole from CSL), no matter how uncomfortable that could be.

How do we disembed ourselves from the systems of this world and engage with something real, profound and eternal? How do we connect with that which is not 'eternally out of date'? How do we get some roots, some profundity, so wherever we are, we are always living out of our center: the risen Christ?

My point is that we need our ideological roots to be in Christ, not in a system. Lewis understood that better than anybody. He was able to understand the chief vice of his age so people wouldn't get caught up in "guarding against chilbains so the devil could give them cancer". We all have values imparted to us by our culture. The trick is, to get so connected with God, that we start to value what he values and to connect with His "culture'. Are we willing to leave our lives to be caught up in something bigger than ourselves? Can we be tethers to the culture of God in a world gone mad?

What we will find out, like Lewis, is that our connection to the culture and values of God rubs off on the cultures of this world that we find ourselves in. When we see ourselves as adventuring ambassabors for the plans and concerns of God, we then realize that we effect our 'host culture' a lot more deeply than we realize. We value what God wants, we have His heart, and people see that and want that passionately. That is the work of Christ in our world today: using His people to download his redeeming heart to the world.

These quotes above were writeen by a Lewis scholar named Dr. Bruce L. Edwards, but and be read at http://personal.bgsu.edu/~edwards/newsarchive10.html. If he should read this, forgive me. I

trying my hand at the polemicist's pen...

Alright, I know I don't post on here nearly as much as I should, but frankly, I have noticed some really disturbing trends that hamper the sublime goodness that is redpoolscuba.blogspot.com. Hopefully, the following will deter certain groups.....

STOP FREAKING SPAMING MY BLOG!!!!!!!!!!!!

Especially 'gypsy spells to return a lover' or whoever in blazes you think you are. You don't know what real magic is, so don't act like you do. Real magic is Aslan's magic from before the begining of time that will forgive a traitor of the blackest heart. Real magic is the Cross of Jesus and Grace and the heart of our lover God who rescued us and swept us up from the depths of the Hades and the Horde. Real magic is NOT what you are selling so please stop immediatly. If you would have actually read my blog, or gasp, the Bible, you would notice that the only ones Jesus truly chews out are those who oppress and exploit those who cannot think or reason for themselves. It doesn't take a Rhodes scholar to figure out that those "feeble-minded" souls are your target demographic. Stop or you are going to find your 'table' overturned in the Temple in which you think you are a distiguished 'businessman'. Stop it, I will pray for you, but please don't ever grace this blog with your presence... EVER AGAIN!

in real magic,

Daniel