A Clod, and Unknowing

By Sean McDonough, PhD
Associate Professor of New Testament

I went into the Montreal Museum of Modern Art (more properly le Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal) in a positive frame of mind. Sure, some of the pieces might be perplexing, and at times I might wonder whether the proverbial roomful of monkeys (armed with brushes rather than typewriters) might produce a more interesting product, but there could be some very interesting stuff in there as well. Entry that evening was free, so I figured I did not have much to lose.

The results were mixed. At the risk of revealing myself as a bourgeois clod, I found much of the material rather pointless. A hanging video monitor shows a woman’s face; the colors change every so often. That was pretty much it, but from the description on the wall (I will spare you the tortured postmodern prose) you would think she had precipitated a quantum leap in human consciousness. It is bad enough to look at a piece and think, “I could have done this.” It’s worse when your next thought is, “But why would I want to?” Tedium and self-indulgence hung over most of the exhibits.

But not all. The highlight was an extended look at the works of the Québécois artist Paul-Émile Borduas. It was encouraging to see from his early works that Borduas was fully capable of doing what many of us would consider art: representation of natural scenes, still-lifes, and so on. I suppose most of the artists on display in the museum have similar talents. But without the evidence on display in front of you, there is always the lingering suspicion that some of them really might be talentless hacks bluffing their way to fame. There was no such concern with Borduas.

This naturally gave me a more sympathetic approach to his later, more abstract works. He had clearly done these pieces for a reason. The most striking of his later works was Translucidité. You can view the picture here (http://amica.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/AMICO~1~1~96423~220818:Translucidit%C3%A9?qvq=w4s:/what/Paintings/Huile+sur+toile/;lc:AMICO~1~1&mi=30&trs=229), though the image does not capture the intense textures of the work, the violent ridges of white paint that cut into the colored portions. I loved looking at it.

As for what it means, that of course is almost entirely subjective. But I saw it as a painting trying to struggle out from behind a white cloud of unknowing – a cloud that not only obscured whatever was back there, but twisted it as well, so that only the slightest hint of the “original” painting could be glimpsed.

As such, it struck me as a moving metaphor for what life is often like: for the ideas we can’t quite express, the relationships we don’t quite understand, the ambitions we can’t quite realize. As Christians, we may believe in Absolute Truth. But that hardly means we know that Truth absolutely, nor that we can adequately express what we do know. Is this postmodernism? I don’t think so, since it was the apostle Paul himself who said that in this present age we see through a glass dimly. Borduas helps us to at least see that truth clearly, and beautifully.

The Whole World Is(n’t?) Watching

By Sean McDonough, PhD
Associate Professor of New Testament

It looks as though we may need to update the old Zen koan: “If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, does it make a sound?” The new version might go, “If I eat a sandwich but don’t write about it on Twitter, will I still be hungry?”

Now at this point I feel compelled to insert the customary, “Technology has lots of wonderful uses…” and the contractually obligatory, “like allowing people to read Every Thought Captive!” And technology does in fact have lots of wonderful uses. Encryption programs can allow dissidents to report on the atrocities committed by repressive governments with minimized fear of reprisal. On a less dramatic level, you can paste photos of your recent trip to Ethiopia on Facebook without having to email a bunch of people directly (let alone make actual prints and mail them, as we used to do in the late Bronze age).

But the Twitter-ization of communication in the last few years clearly represents the other side of technology’s two-edged sword. Life, I suppose, is always some mix of grandeur and triviality, but the difference now is that your trivia can reach a world-wide audience within seconds. Whether everyone is out there is anxiously awaiting your news (“im typing a thing for evry thot cptiv right now, how cool is that, then im snacking, prb a sweet ‘n’ salty nut bar, ill keep you posted!”) is of course another question altogether. Maybe the whole world isn’t watching.

But there is always the chance that it might be, and that is the problem I want to focus on. One of the most powerful forces that shapes our behavior is simply who we think is watching us. We try to get good grades to please our parents, we tailor our jokes to please our peers, we cut our lawns to please our neighbors. This is all natural enough, but the world-wideness of the Web adds a new dimension to the problem. I can begin to derive significance for my humdrum little life from the assumption that the Global Community is clicking like crazy to read about my latest thoughts about politics, religion, and what color shoes I’m thinking of wearing tomorrow. We speak of “death by a thousand cuts”; we might tweak that to, “life by a thousand tweets”. I came, I blogged, I conquered. I am read, therefore I am.

Most human enterprises end up slogging towards the swamps of idolatry, and the new communication tools look like taking that same sad path. The internet can serve as a surrogate sheltering sky, aglow with galaxies of fellow bloggers and tweeters; a Zodiac of sympathetic stars happy to guide our ways. But like all makeshift deities, it promises much more than it can deliver.

Because at the end of the day, we all live pretty ordinary lives, and continually blogging about them is not going to change that. What makes the difference is recognizing that your ordinary life is in fact lived out in the presence of a very extraordinary God, who knows every hair on your head and loves you limitless concern. With his eyes on you, you don’t need to worry about who else is watching.

Fun for the Whole Family?

By Sean McDonough, PhD
Associate Professor of New Testament

A large woman, couchbound for years, walks upstairs to the utter amazement of her family. A shy young man begins courting an inflatable doll named Bianca, and is affirmed in his relationship by a small town. A not-traditionally-beautiful little girl goes off to a beauty pageant accompanied by her bickering parents, her silent brother, her gay suicidal uncle, and her drug-abusing, foul-mouthed grandfather.

Film-goers may recognize the above as representative snippets from three films: respectively, Lasse Hallström’s What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? (1993); Craig Gillespie’s Lars and the Real Girl (1997); and Jonathan Dayton’s Little Miss Sunshine (2006). The cynical among us might look at the list (and indeed the films in their entirety) and think, “Fun family entertainment, Hollywood style.”

At one level, the critique would hold. The families in these films (if we can count Lars and Bianca as a ‘family’) put the dys- in dysfunctional, and none of them constitute “family fare” in the traditional sense of the word. A few moments around the dinner table with Alan Arkin’s ‘colorful’ grandpa in Little Miss Sunshine would give the proverbial drunken sailor pause, while even the generally sweet-tempered Lars and the Real Girl centers on a man and, um, an inflatable doll. Anyone thinking to gather the young kids around for Edifying Video Night with one of these films should un-think it pretty quickly.

We could go on and level a salient cultural critique as to why these films roll the way they do. They could be seen as the quintessential products of the postmodern ethos, where traditional values are there only to be shredded, and alternative life-style choices – whether it is affairs with married women (or unmarried dolls); septuagenarian heroin ingestion; or illicit water tower climbing (one of the many memorable scenes with a young Leonardo DiCaprio in Gilbert Grape) -- are there to be tolerated, if not indeed celebrated.

They could also be seen as a perhaps welcome salination of the sickly sweet family films of a bygone era: here comes Lassie to drag Timmy out of the neighbors’ cobra pit. Mom had told him a hundred times not to go in that thing, but we know he’ll learn his lesson and they will all live happily ever after. (“Gee, Mom, you’re swell! And you too, Lassie!” “Ruff!”)

And yet…I found myself moved by all these films, and wondered what it was that touched me. They are all well directed and well acted, but that only provides a lowest common denominator for enjoyment. What distinguishes them is that, for all their visible dysfunction and edgy behavior, they really are sweet at heart. The characters may find themselves lost in a jungle of pathology, but they eventually hack their way through the brush to find one another, and with that to find some kind of peace amidst the chaos of life.

The fact that they find it in the worst possible circumstances of ordinary life makes the grace of re-discovering one’s family all the more profound. In Gilbert Grape, a dropped birthday cake can rip your heart out, but the mother’s trudge to the second floor becomes a kind of ascent of Jacob’s ladder. Try to keep a dry eye as kindly Karin berates Lars for not recognizing what they are doing for him, “Every person in this town bends over backward to make Bianca feel at home. Why do you think she has so many places to go and so much to do? Huh? Huh? Because of you! Because - all these people - love you!” As for Little Miss Sunshine, all I can say is that you may never think about Rick James’ Superfreak the same way again.

I may be wrong about the merits of these films. But it is not because there is something strange about the idea of love appearing in the strangest of places, or of something – or Someone – pulling people together when everything seems to be pulling them apart. Whatever the filmmakers’ motives may have been, the films can function for us as parables of the divine seed of the gospel that flourishes in the most unlikely soil.