I haven’t been wearing my boot because it is clunky and annoying. I don’t have the numbness anymore (maybe just a little in the mornings) and I rarely think of the pain (except when I pivot quickly). The hospital bill was only $375 dollars. I was expecting much more.
The name of the Film I’m working on is Not Dead Yet. It is a low-budget indy but has some notable cameos, one by David Ogden Stiers (M*A*S*H) and another by Seymour Cassel. Seymour’s scenes are later this week. Stiers already did his (he was genuinely funny and a nice guy).
On Powell’s best sellers shelf sat a book I hitherto hadn’t heard called Deep Economy by Bill McKibben. I sat with it for a few minutes in their coffee shop and realized I needed to take it home with me. The book is one long argument for living locally, and it has challenged me on a lot of levels. The two biggest points are unsustainable economic growth and happiness.
Economic Growth:
Common wisdom is that our economy should be based on unlimited growth. McKibben argues that the way we have gone about his is too dependent on the abundance of cheap oil, which powers our equipment and factories that pump out our food and goods. Everything is about efficiency so large agribusiness and corporations have mounted up. His argument is that this is not sustainable or good for the planet. “For example, if the Chinese owned cars in the same numbers as Americans, there would be 1.1 billion more vehicles on the road—untenable in a world that is rapidly running out of oil and clean air.”1
Happiness:
Imagine you are a peasant farmer in China, you lack essential things, you diet is wanting and in the winter you are always cold. For you, more money will bring more happiness. In general, research has shown that the money-buys-happiness correlation goes upwards together right until $10,000 per capita income, and then the correlation disappears. At which point money does not buy more happiness and sometimes is begins to causes the opposite effect. It is no secret that most of Americans are not happy. And yet we are still convinced that spending more money and more stuff will solve that.
So here is the argument: if working more and more hours to make more money doesn’t make us happy, and if supporting large corporations whose main goal is efficiency and production which creates the cheap stuff we like to buy when we want to feel happy isn’t sustainable… then maybe we should just stop.
One example: food. We only spend 10% of our income on food. It is that cheap because it is grown at mass by people in horrible conditions by people making a lousy living at the cost of not stewarding the environment and being cruel to animals. Then it is shipped on average 1500 miles to us. The whole process depends on a lot of cheap oil (for shipping and for producing) and sends most of the money spent on it out of our communities when we purchase it. AND this food isn’t making us happy. It is fast, convenient, microwavable, and cheap, but in the end it isn’t giving us joy.
He then paints a picture of eating local food in season grown and bought from local farmers. It takes more time and often more money. But the money stays in the community and the time you spend buying food at farmer’s markets and preparing fresh, local products is rewarding. It anchors us back in our community and let’s us enjoy the simple pleasures of life. It makes us happy. Food is just one thing to do locally.
There’s entertainment, politics, and all sorts of other products that can be focused on locally. It slows you down. It roots you in. It fights against our hyper-individualism. What about media and film? He talks a little bit about broadcasting locally but focuses on radio because it is too expensive to broadcast video on a local level well. Re-inventing local news to value community and neighborliness is something I’ve been dreaming about. This book has encouraged me to keep dreaming.
I have been editing an entry for the Portland Film Festival. The film is a karaoke video to Michael Jackson singing “You’ve got a Friend.” I wasn’t much a part of the crew on the day of shooting except to download the P2 cards and pop on set and suggest shots I felt were missing (no one listened. no one cared). Check out the all but final cut of the video here and sing along if you feel so led.
I thought I just badly twisted it, but since it didn’t hurt too bad, and being that I could walk on it fine, I didn’t give it a second thought…until yesterday when my big toe went numb. I did some reading on foot care sites about why one’s toe toe would go numb after a bad twist. Everything I read was just one big warning: SEE A DOCTOR IMMEDIATELY.
Talk about scare tactics. I thought I was moments away from loosing my toe.
I just spent nearly four hours in urgent care, got four or five x-rays and the doctor came in and shrugged, “Well, I’ve never seen this before.” I apparently have a pretty uncommon fracture. The numbness is due to the blood clotting (hopefully) and I just have to wear a space boot for the next month to let it heal properly. He wants me to see a specialist, but unlike the internet he didn’t scare me enough to spend another $500 to make sure my toe doesn’t unattach.
Anyone want to wager on what the bill is going to be? I guess my tax rebate is going towards a long and non-reasurring hospital visit instead of that TV I’ve been conspiring towards.
I live in two worlds: the world I see and the world I believe is possible. I don’t do this only with idealistic dreams like ending poverty. I mainly do this in my everyday life thousands of times over about much less important things like:
I look at room and imagine how much more work I could get done if I spent two hours organizing.
I look at my friendships and imagine what it would be like to live more vulnerably.
I look at my basketball shot and imagine what it would take to start making my three-point a threat.
I look at my alarm clock as it barks at me at 7:00AM and imagine my morning routine if I pushed snooze one more time.
The world I inhabit and the world of my imagination collide constantly. It is almost as if every moment of my life is pregnant with the world of my imagination.
This isn’t threatening when the world of my imagination is not that different then the world I currently know. Like when the world of my imagination has me raising my school grades or making a new friend.
But how dreadful is it when the world of my imagination looks so entirely different then the world I know that it would take some sort of apocalyptic event to make it a reality. Like, when I try to imagine myself loving people perfectly, or I try to imagine this entire world being made whole.
This is what the Gospel does. The Gospel pits two conflicting worlds set side-by-side. The first world is the world that was handed down from Adam, a world of dreadfully messed up people trying to subdue the earth and inhabit it. This is the world where children are sold as sex slaves, where people live in their own filth and die from not having clean water, and where neighbors kill each other out of anger and greed. This is our world.
The second world is seen in visions from the prophets where there is no more wars, where there is an abundance of food, where there is no injustice, where the poor rejoice, the persecuted are blessed, and the meek inherit the earth. This is the world scripture calls the Kingdom of God.
Jesus takes these two worlds, and he sets them side-by-side and then pushes them together. He pushes and pushes until the beauty of the one rubs up against and becomes the pain of the other. He pushes more until the life of the one is swallowed up by the death of the other. And even in death he pushes more until life resurrects and pits death of its power.
The good news of the Gospel is that Jesus has done this and is doing this.
Jesus used a metaphor to explain this. He said the Kingdom of Heaven is like yeast being worked into a batch of dough. The baker kneads the dough, turns it over, and forcefully pushes it back into itself. If you lived in that dough, your world would be violent and confusing. But if given the right glimpse, after the baker’s hands fold a piece of your reality back into you and pushed down hard, you may see that there is yeast spreading all around you like a backwards infection. Life is overcoming.
You see, God has an imagination, and the Gospel is the world of his imagination at work in our world. And so when scripture calls us to believe the Gospel it is really calling us to attune our imaginations to God’s.
Scripture is one long story calling us to imagine. And scripture itself gives us the tools to imagine much like a painter needs certain tools to paint. It gives us stories, metaphors, images, parables, and mysteries that open our eyes to what God is doing right in front of us and inside of us.
N.T. Wright insightfully says about the Gospel and imagination:
“God has come to that place where the world is in pain, and he wants us to go to the place where the world is in pain, and to imagine the love of God at that place, and to express that imagination in our art, our music, our silence, our poetry, our architecture.” And then, to earn the right to speak resurrection into that culture in ways that will stretch and blow the mind and the imagination…”
Be careful what you are attuning your imaginations too.
“Imagine yourself with unlimited recourses,” the T.V. preacher tells us.
“Imagine yourself with ageless beauty,” the billboard tells us.
“Imagine yourself with attractive, witty friends,” the sitcom tells us.
“Imagine yourself with a better economy,” the politician tells us.
And the scriptures, sometimes quietly, sometimes with great force, tells us, “Imagine a world in which I have conquered death. Imagine that I am making all things new. Imagine a day when swords will be shoved into plows and a wolf and a lamb will take a nap side-by-side. Imagine a world where I can forgive you of your own offenses. Imagine a world where peacemakers, people who stand up for righteousness, the persecuted, and the poor are blessed. Live in that world.
Tomorrow I’m helping Melanie with a shoot for a short she is directing, which will show at the PDX film festival. I was originally just going to be on set to download the scenes and helping with grip, but now I will also play a pizza boy. IMDB get ready for me.
UPDATE: I’m not longer the pizza boy. She found an actual actor. I will be editing the project though and I’ll let you know how it goes.
Shane Hipps, a former advertiser for Porsche and now a Mennonite Pastor, spoke last Sunday at Mars Hill Bible church about spirituality and technology.
He started with this sledge hammer of a statement that shattered any question I had of whether or not this was an appropriate topic for a church service, “Christianity is fundamentally about God communicating himself to us. So any study of communication is in some way a study in theology.” He had me.
Hipps introduced the thinker Marshal McLuhan and focused on one of his insight’s, which I’ve heard before but never spent time chewing on: the medium is the message. This is an upside-down concept. It forced me to think about how the act of reading, or writing, or blogging, or watching television, or sitting around a fire…whatever the medium is… that is more important then content of what is shared in those mediums in shaping who you are and communicating to you what is true, real, and valuable. So before you think about, “what is my message,” you should already be thinking about, “what is my medium,” because the two cannot be disconnected. In fact, McLuhan argues that the message just distracts us from realizing what the medium is doing to us.
So, the mere fact that I listened to a podcast on my iphone laying in my backyard with my eyes closed should communicate something more significant to me than the content of Hipps sermon itself.
The mere fact that I sat down at my computer in my office under the yellow glow of a lightbulb to blog about the sermon should communicate something more significant to you then what is communicated in the content of this blog post.
The medium is the message.
Hipps observes that Jesus had already recognized this: Mark 2:22 - “No one pours new wine into old wineskins. If he does the wine will burst the skins and both the wine and the skins will be ruined. No, he pours new wine into new wineskins.” You can’t change the medium without also changing the message. The container and the content are intimately connected: Burning Bush. Stone Tablets. Bahlem’s Ass. What are these mediums communicating?
As technologies change, so changes the entire DNA of a culture. Oral cultures are about tribal community, which keep their thoughts alive in oral tradition. The culture of the written word becomes an individualistic culture. The digital age is a paradox of the two: tribal individualism. In the digital age we are connected to people everywhere yet we are alone. We are told that location is irrelevant. Yet when you think about it, presence is a piece of what makes us human. The fundamental truth of the gospel is that the Word became flesh. God became present. In Jesus, god’s message took on it’s perfect medium and that was a living, breathing, incarnate being who walked among us, broke bread with us and touched our sick.
Laying in my backyard listening to Hipps… Sitting at my desk blogging into this anonymous borg of information… communicates one thing very loudly I am not connected to the presence of people. What is the message of these mediums? Information equals transformation. My thoughts do not exist until they are read and commented on.
You can’t escape technology like you can’t escape the tide. Hipps explains that to escape technology he would have to be preaching naked, since clothing is technology. You can, however, ask what technology is doing to you, and you can have a healthy diet of it.
Hipps ended his sermon with this beautiful Doxology: “The ultimate expression of God’s love in the world is to be with, to be present, to be carnate. And so, may you go into the world as the physical body of Jesus in a disembodied world. May you incarnate Christ in a discarnate age. You all, right now, whether you know it or even like it, are the message of the gospel. In Jesus Christ, the medium and the message were perfectly united. Of all the media that God chose Jesus Christ was the supreme way of revealing God. And if he is the supreme way of revealing God, and we are to be the body of Christ, what does that mean for us?”
I just watched J.J. Adam’s giving a lecture at TED on his experience directing and producing movies and television. J.J. Abram’s is best known for producing the television show “Lost” and directing “Mission Impossible III”. Lost, in particular, is driven by unending mystery surrounding an island and the intertwining lives of everyone plane-wrecked there.
His entire talk was about mystery.
Mystery, he said, is the catalyst for imagination.
Mystery, sometimes, is more important than knowledge.
I think I agree. Why is it that our imagination - fueled by the mystery we find ourselves in - is reliably more life-giving, coherent, beautiful, and pragmatic then stripped down facts.
One might say that we are attracted to mystery because through the millions of years of evolution, and especially since we evolved any sort of consciousness, we have known only mystery about everything we experience. One could also say that God uses mystery because it is a more authentic way of being human and free than complete knowledge. Either way, the more we dig into the empirical world, and the more knowledge we collect and systemize, the more mystery we are always left with. So until we have the arrogance to assume we can wrap our minds around this beautiful mystery we find ourselves submerged in, we’ll have to recognize it as our primary mode of existence.
Alix Spiegel gives a fascinating report from NPR news on how Old-fashioned Play Builds Serious Skills in children.
Today, children’s play is focused on toys, whereas before it was focused on activity. Kids use to improvise their own play in a highly imaginative way. Now, kids are given scripts for their play with the newest toys and adult moderated activities such as gymnastics and soccer.
A growing amount of psychologists believe that the the lack of imaginative play is having it’s consequences on kids cognitive and emotional development. In 2001, the repeat of a test first done in 1940 that measured self-regulation in children found that today’s five year old children have the self-regulation of a three year old in 1940. Likewise, today’s seven year olds had the self-regulation of five year olds in 1940. According to this study, today’s children have significantly stunted self-regulation capabilities to their 1940 counterparts.
What does this mean? Self-regulation is the ability to control emotions and behavior and it helps us to not be impulsive, have self-control and discipline. Good self-regulation is a better indicator of success in school than IQ.
In the report, Laura Birk of Illinois State University talks about how imagination is an effective tool for developing self-regulation by using what is called “private speech.” In private speech children talk about what they are going to do and how they are going to do it. It is through private speech that children and adults learn to regulate themselves, manage their emotions, and overcome cognitive obstacles. The more structured the children’s play the less private speech that occurs.
It is being suggested, then, that children are less able to self-regulate because we have stripped them of the space for imaginative, free play, and in replace have given them toys and activities with defined scripts that don’t give them the opportunity for private speech.
What intrigues me most is that free wheeling, imaginative play is not a superfluous activity, as it is usually viewed, but rather, it is at the very core of creating the habits and skill we need to be successful in life.
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