Trial-and-Error Symphony         by Mark Nielsen, Oct. 28, 2009

Composing. Caring. Not caring.

Never minding the bad notes.

Changing them later.

Embracing the eraser.

A potter and a pot.

Creating an earthen vessel.

Made of magic mud.

A cracked pitcher, poured out.

A cup who runneth over.

Sweet spirit. Potent.

Refilled daily. Leaking love.

Sparkling. Rippling. Reflecting my source.

Making a decision to not be perfect.

Flying. Falling. Feeling.

Forgiving. Everyone.

Being stuck. Being lost. Being okay.

Trying again anyway. Anything. Anywhere. 

Here, now, before it’s too late.

Believing it’s never too late.

Remembering. Smiling.

Finger-painting. Messing around. Making noise.

Using dirt to get clean.

Mud and memory.

Blood and ashes.

Slow. Learning. Asking forgiveness.

Surviving death by drowning.

Boundless untapped potential.

Broken.

Always new.

In between.

Crossing bridges, rivers, fingers.

In repair.

Behind the scenes.

My original face, an unspoiled place.

Beautiful.

Planting. Planted. Planned.

A seed.

Seeking harmony.

Waiting. Hoping. A certain kind of knowing.

Seeing,

I  AM.

I am.

I am

Doing some homework this week as part of  a sort of inner inventory. Specifically I’m looking at some of the classic myths, stories and symbols that I have taken up or been given as my own personal “sacred stories” (to use Soulcraft author Bill Plotkin’s term).

The main type of myth I realize I’ve been engaged with is the “wilderness journey” tale, with a strong dose of  rejection or “exile” thrown in as well. As opposed to a battle, a love affair, or some other self-defining archetypal model/structure, the metaphor of a journey has always had the most resonance for me. Furthermore, the isolation or estrangement (i.e. “exile”) that often accompanies such a journey has been the primary metaphor that I have defined myself against, or worked to avoid. In other words, my journey and focus is not away from “home” as a selfish explorer or conqueror, but towards it — as a friend, a family member, and a fulfiller of promises.

It is also an essential journey toward integration, since like many people I am estranged even from certain parts of myself (usually the best and worst). So I’ve spent a lifetime digging deeper, processing my experiences, trying to understand myself and my role in creation. Maybe then I’d better understood others as well, and be understood by them… or so the plan is supposed to go. Thus, this repeated “journeying” pattern has impacted my choices and relationships, my career and home life, my joys and struggles, year after year. It’s the reason to blog, and on many days, for me, the journey is the reason to live. Simply stated, I don’t easily “stay put” from a social, intellectual or spiritual perspective, even though physically I’ve always lived within a thirty mile radius of Chicago.

Below are some mythical or historical examples of  personally influential journeys and exiles (pulled off the top of my head today, …tomorrow I may cite others): 

• the original expulsion of Adam and Eve from The Garden;
• traveling and exile (in wilderness, or in another culture) in the tales of  Abraham, Jacob and his son Joseph, the y0ung King David, and Moses;
• the 40-day desert journey of Jesus and his encounter with Satan (or darkness, sin, shadow, pick your own variation…);
• my favored gospel writer St. John’s imprisonment, his travels in Asia Minor, and his purported  island exile on Patmos at the end of his life;
• St. Francis’ many wanderings through the wilds of Italy, and his concurrent journey from wealth and war to poverty and peace;
• political exile/public rejection/imprisonment of many of my modern heroes of faith and social justice, plus similar revolutionary writers, musicians, or visual artists –people like Thoreau, Van Gogh, Magritte (and fellow Surrealist Salvador Dali, who painted the above image), James Joyce, Paul Robeson, Gandhi, Bonhoeffer, Van Morrison, Bob Dylan, Mandela, etc… though some of their rejection was temporary, I will admit ;

• MOST ESPECIALLY the fictional journey of Odysseus/Ulysses, and various later work that mirrors his complex inner/outer journey of transformation and struggle, especially to overcome basic fear, in characters like Hamlet (plus King Lear and The Tempest’s Prospero), Huck Finn, the Apocalypse Now gang, Frodo,  …heck, even little Harold with his Purple Crayon and Max from Where the Wild Things Are (BTW, the current film version is excellent, but dark). 

I’m gonna have to follow up this “journey” idea, mine it for the gold I know is still there. But that’s enough to chew on for today.

However, I’ve also discovered a secondary myth/archetype which I have also been defined by, though unfortunately I only discovered this connection quite recently. That would be the myth of Narcissus, of course. And –trust me on this one– it takes a true narcissist to go forty three years before realizing what a narcissist he is, as I did during my initiation experiences last year (ripples of which continue to this day). The Narcissus myth captures the essence of what I’ve come to call my deepest “sacred wound” (to use Richard Rohr’s term), and it probably dates all the way back to my toddler years.

Again, I won’t get too in-depth about my own personal growth and challeges. Enough for now to recommend the book Deliver Us from Me-Ville by David Zimmerman, which put me back onto the basic Narcissus principle and its connection to my own psychic journey, to U.S. culture overall, and to issues of faith. I read the book along with most of our church last year, and its wise but simple ideas about human nature and God continue to shed much light upon my own personal tendencies.

And speaking of personal tendencies… I’ve been at this particular post far too long. Time to go brave the wilds of suburban Chicago on a few errands.

As in, I’m in the richest 1% of the worldwide population!

Are you a #1 too?

My family is actually at .78%. However, this is more impressive-sounding than a corresponding number, our actual numerical ranking on a “world’s richest” list. On THAT list, we’re #47,380,745. Aw shucks. I thought I was #1?

Still, being in the top 1% is reason to be grateful, not to mention a strong encouragement to be realistic anytime I’m feeling sorry for myself – like when I can’t buy something, or can’t get the job or the raise that I really want. I’m trying to be a “glass half full” sort of guy, and not sweat the small stuff, so info like my statistically-confirmed #1 status helps with that.

BTW, all this was calculated using a nice round number within about $5K of last-year’s annual net salaries — thus not including our assets, our non-wage earnings, etc. Full disclosure: we have better than average assets, if one were to add up “what we’re worth”. For instance, there’s that little vacation home up in Wisconsin…

To see how your income stacks up against the world’s standard of living, hop over to the Global Rich List. Thanks go out to Christian activist, spiritual practice teacher and Renaissance Woman Christine Sine at her Godspace blog, who posted the Rich List link first. I’ll have to hop over to Godspace again a few times a week myself, as a regular “spiritual practice”, now that I’ve found her great site.

A related item: Back in April 2009– a.k.a. tax-time for those of you here in the U.S.– I posted a short blognote and some links detailing the median (most common) income in the U.S., and how my family stacks up. The above link gives a few choice income details from 1916 through 2008, but for sake of time, the basic 2007 number was $61,500. I noted with neither pride nor shame that our family income was above that (no other personal info will be given here… my wife would kill me… in fact, she still may…)

So you may not be number one in your own community, but if you expand your thinking out to everyone in the world, you’re probably one of the number ones, too. Maybe everyone who owns a computer in order to read this is a #1. And all this, of course, is meant to say just one thing, as any good progressive would:

Share The Wealth!

Technological, financial, food, natural resources… whatever you have access to. Find a way to give that other 99% a better chance at dignity and a decent life.

Took my weekly walk in Harms woods this morning, along the north branch of the Desplaines River. I usually walk on the muddy, sometimes rocky horse trail instead of the paved bike trail, both to save my knees as I walk extra fast for cardio work, and because it feels so much more natural and less road-like.

Early on I came around one bend and –instead of a billboard or some litter, thank God– I spotted a great blue heron perched on a log laying across the river. I almost missed it, but then realized what that grayish flash in my peripheral vision had been. So I walked back, hardly breaking stride, and tried to walk in place as I watched it perched there. 

It only stayed a few moments, though, perhaps spooked by my heavy breathing. Or perhaps it had fulfilled its purpose, attended its 9am meeting with mankind, delivered its package of beauty and reminder of grace by just being noticed, and now was simply moving on to its new assignment. (On the other hand, I’m probably over-romanticizing, since I did see it again briefly on another river log a half mile further up the trail, but this time decided to leave it be.)

When I reached the trail bridge over the river, I crossed it, then ducked into the woods to sit for awhile in a sort of clearing I’ve spent some meditation and reading time in several times this summer. I found a spot on the opposite side of the river from where I had just been, near the bank, and opened my book (Soulcraft, by Bill Plotkin, which is very much about experiencing God and one’s deepest spiritual purpose through encounters with nature). But I spent as much of the next half hour reading the terrain around me as I did reading the book.

At a certain point, I noticed a gray squirrel on the small island in the river, almost directly across from me. It seemed like it wanted to cross the water on the fallen tree off to my right, but I was seated too close to the tree, and in my big bright red fleece jacket, I did not look the least bit trustworthy. So it backed up off the fallen tree and went up a smaller living one on the island, to check me out.

Its tail was twitching like mad, and I wondered for a moment what the biological purpose of all that seemingly wasted energy is, for this and almost all squirrels. But clearly it was still watching me very intently– maybe trying to figure me out, since it was not a backyard squirrel and did not encounter humans very often (and certainly not humans sitting still, doing nothing). That made me think that the raised, twitching tail might be a nervous habit (like its warm-up for the fast retreat it would make if I moved toward it, like a baserunner leading off first, rocking back and forth on his legs). Either that, or else the twitching was its attempt to look fierce and ready to fight.

Nevertheless, I did not move, and soon the tail-twitching slowed up some. Then we just sat there goofily staring at each other for another two minutes or more, till finally it broke the reverie and decided to move on. Since it still had to get off the island, it proceeded off to my left about seventy feet, where there was another downed tree, and took that alternate route to get to wherever its other morning meeting was.

On my walk back out of the woods a few minutes later, I encountered an old Asian man walking his dog. Funny thing, though: he was barefoot, even though it was about fifty five degrees and drizzly. He held his boots in his right hand, and he was walking on the crushed limestone path, …gingerly of course, probably in a bit of pain. Still, I was amused, and said “I like your idea” as I walked swiftly past him.

“You should try it,” he replied in a friendly way. And I decided on the spur of the moment that he was right, that I really should put my money where my mouth is and actually make physical skin-to-skin contact with the earth, not just read it like a book or use it up like a commodity, like my own private Bally’s Total Fitness walking track. So I stopped about a hundred feet further on, and took off my own shoes. He was closer to me by now, and said it was not easy to walk on the crushed limestone, but most of the horse trail was just mud and easier, smaller-cut stones and pea gravel.

“Walking barefoot like this,” I said, pointing to my own feet as we ambled on at a leisurely pace, “can be sort of another way of praying, for me.” He smiled and nodded slightly, but said nothing more about my idea. By now though, we were almost at the trail head, near where I would have to turn off the path and walk along Lake Avenue to where my car was parked a couple blocks away.

So I started off to the east through the tall grass, still barefoot, and we said our goodbyes. I could tell he was disappointed that we wouldn’t have more time to talk. After all, he had made a “barefoot convert” out of me, so I suppose we had sort of a relationship now. But I was resolved to get back home, to keep my schedule. Maybe I’ll see him again soon, though.

So I went out into the woods by myself today, but made three new friends while I was there. It was a much needed reminder that none of us is alone in this world. We just have to know where our friends are most likely to be found, and be ready to give and receive what little we have to offer.

I read  today that radio personality Rush Limbaugh is putting in a bid to buy the St. Louis Rams football team. I’m trying real hard not to care about that, but I just can’t manage it. And I’m not even from St. Louis.

But former Rams owner Georgia Frontiere was from there, as is Limbaugh (more or less). Not that I’ll hold that against St. Louis. It’s a nice city, and Missouri is a nice state, mostly full of kind, complicated people. 

Complicated like Mark Twain was. Or Beat writer William S. Burroughs, or Chuck Berry, or former Cards and Cub baseball broadcaster Harry Carey, plus various iconoclastic politicians over the years who lean right on some issues and left on others. I think this happens partly because St. Louis was the classic “frontier gateway” town for over a century: where toughness, originality and risk-taking were always encouraged. Risks like Frontiere’s decision to take over the team she inherited from her late husband, instead of letting his son run the team. Or the risk of a move from flashy Los Angeles to flyover St. Louis, or the risk of turning over the quarterback reins to Kurt Warner — a recent grocery clerk–  from 2000 to 2002, when he won one Superbowl for them and took them to a second.

But Frontiere passed away in 2008, leaving her 60% share of the team to her two children. That’s the 60% that Limbaugh and St. Louis Blues owner Dave Checketts are now bidding on. The NFL franchise is now reportedly worth $929 million, despite the fact that the team has fallen into the lower third of the league in terms of talent and performance lately. So you might say that uber-capitalist Limbaugh is taking a risk of his own.

Never a shy one, I’m sure Rush sees it that way and will paint it that way in the press. I can almost predict what he’ll say on his show, or in a press conference:

“I’m just the head of a media empire trying to rescuscitate my hometown team and return it to its former glory, just like I’m trying to return the entire country to its former glory with my radio show. We’re all on the brink of disaster, but I believe I can help. I’m the original ‘voice in the wilderness’, and I’d like to be the one to lead the Rams back to the Promised Land.”

Limbaugh hasn’t said it yet. But he will. Can you hear the avalanche of chatter, the media frenzy, that this is going to kick off? Then Rush will stand on his “rights” to buy whatever he wants, while he basks in the glory of all the critical bluster from pundits, sports talking heads and entertainment figures. Just like he did last week on Jay Leno (of all places!… what’s NBC doing giving the guy a primetime pulpit to preach from?). Just like he’s done through the recent spate of town hall shoutfests and underhanded propaganda, taking shots at healthcare reform efforts. This from a man who…

“withheld information from a medical practitioner. That charge is known as doctor shopping and is a third-degree felony.” (Law.com, 2006)

In other words, Rush cut a plea deal on a drug fraud case in 2006, thus avoiding jail time for doing an insurance system end-around (see!? He knows about football…), by receiving thousands of extra oxycontin painkillers from multiple doctors and private sources. On the other hand, a drug-induced haze would explain his insane rants over the years. The man can afford to buy drugs illegally, but when it comes to giving more working Americans a chance to get them legally, he’s against it. Go figure.

Remember the last time Limbaugh got directly involved with the NFL? He was contracted as a weekly guest commentator on ESPN’s pregame show, only to be forced out after he made a racist remark about Philadelphia quarterback Donovan McNabb. That was 2003. How short is our memory?

If the Rams deal goes through, Limbaugh won’t be the first “media mogul” to own a major sports team. For example Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, another “maverick” and lightning rod for controversy, is among that crowd as well. But Cuban is also complicated: he’s on record as a libertarian of sorts, and so has supported both Right-leaning and Right-critical candidates and projects over the years, through direct donations, movies and other efforts. For example: one of Cuban’s companies financed and distributed a project by left-wing wunderkind filmmaker Steven Soderbergh (Erin Brockovich, Traffic, K Street and Syriana being among his most political projects).

Meanwhile, Rush Limbaugh isn’t complicated at all. He’s a one-trick pony and always has been.  He wouldn’t touch the likes of Soderbergh– or any other proponent of an honest conversation about corporate accountability, sound foreign policy, or market reform–  with a ten-foot pole. If Rush had made Erin Brockovich, the cancer those families got would somehow have been their own fault for drinking the water. What Rush calls being honest is to cite and interpret imaginary “facts”, and then ignore other real ones, all to prop up the crazy system that made him a millionaire in the first place.

In other words, I wouldn’t want to be a majority owner of one of the weaker NFL franchises — to have to deal with Limbaugh bullying me to get what he wants a few days a week during his wildly popular radio show, or Limbaugh ”wagging the dog” in the boardroom and in colorful press conferences. Because if nothing else, Limbaugh is certainly a fine salesman, the way he’s gotten middle-America to stand behind the same people and policies that consistently sell them down the river.

So having Rush in on the party will be bad for the NFL not because he’ll be a bad Rams owner (who knows? He certainly shows signs of being a smart businessman…), but because the league will be hurt by all his trademark personal and political distractions in its rise toward becoming the new Great American Pastime. Why? Because Limbaugh is the ultimate media whore. He can’t help himself. He’ll choose his personal agenda over what’s best for the public every time. The Al Davis and Jerry Jones types at the top of some teams are bad enough, with their rampant egotism, illogical football choices and occasional (but veiled) bigotry. But Limbaugh will likely set a new standard for ethically compromised and politically biased team management, whether or not he knows anything useful about football.

Yes, sports, big business and politics have been strange bedfellows for years– from the public and private money involved in NCAA football activities, to the strikebreaking and monopolies encouraged in major league baseball ever since its early days. But the difference here is that I don’t trust Rush to even try to keep his politics and business practices separate from his football-related decisions. So to have one guy, especially THIS guy, creating a whirlwind centered on himself instead of doing what’s best for his players and the NFL – it’s just a real bad idea.

The Cleveland Dawg Pound and Raider Nation notwithstanding, I predict that Rush’s Dittoheads will easily be the NFL’s newest rabidly moronic fans of a very bad team by this time next year. As if the pro sports millionaires’ club wasn’t hard enough to stomach already, now we’ll have to endure Republican “tea parties” disguised as Rams tailgate parties, or ads for Halliburton alongside the Budweiser and Levitra signs on stadium scoreboards.

Over on facebook I responded to a challenge by The Nervous Breakdown the other day. TNB is a fun little collective for folks who express themselves well, often hilariously, but have not been published much …yet. The challenge (or was it a poll?) was to describe your life in exactly three words.

Here was mine: “never grew tame”.

Maybe I said it because I’ve been spending a lot of time in the forest preserves lately. Maybe I was just being cute. Maybe I just never grew up, period… but needed to find a way to justify my fringe-y status in the American middle class. Maybe I’m just so pysched about Dave Eggers’ Where the Wild Things Are movie and novel that my heart hurts.

I dunno why I said it, actually. But I’ve always been just a touch wild. Not completely out of control or dangerous. Just one furniture-climbing incident or inappropriate comment away from getting a time-out —  from Mom, my wife, my friends, God. (Going out in a pristine prairie to walk or howl or read is liking jumping on God’s bed.)

Anyway, I’m off in a few minutes to perform with a ragtag group of men today, in a sort of performance art thing we wrote about St. Francis, the male psyche, and nature. It’s part of a conference Richard Rohr is doing in Chicago this weekend as part of his Men As Learners and Elders spiritual growth organization. I’m in the Illinois/Upper Midwest chapter.

The performance piece is a little rough around the edges, as art goes, especially given that we’ll be in front of 200+ guys, and none of us professional actors, and we’ve yet to actually rehearse the thing in a decent way!  We’ll just have to trust God to let it be what it needs to be, for us and the gathered men.

We’ll be in a big tent, though, with prairie and forest just outside on our doorstep –the real deal for later in the day, instead of our cheap imitation. So it doesn’t need to be perfect. As some wise friends have told me recently:

“Better is the enemy of good…”

Hit me back here in the coming week and I’ll likely have some notes and thoughts on the conference, and the outcome of the performance, and whether the other wild men threw fruits and vegetables at us when we acted like Fools For Christ (in other words, like Francis).

 Did the Schwarzenator have a soul? Does the current movie business have one?

 Robots gone wrong. Clones without a soul. Removable and sale-able souls. Avatars and virtual stand-ins. Replicants. Real Life and other Massive Multiplayer Role Playing Games.

All these removable or duplicate minds and souls, at the movies and in modern culture. Will we ever tire of separating our “selves” from ourselves, maybe to re-create a better self, so we can sit in a movie theater and cathartically watch our artificial selves make a mess of our “real” selves’ lives (theoretically causing us to value those real lives and authentic experiences, when we walk out of the theater and into real life)? Will we ever be just happy with who we are?

Reading bad reviews of Paul Giamatti’s new artsy Cold Souls film & the big-budget (but sinking box-office) Bruce Willis vehicle Surrogates  got me thinking last week.

What I was thinking was this: haven’t I seen this before? Oh yeah, it was called The Matrix Trilogy! And before that, Being John Malkovich (soul intrusion… where the puppetry theme also made me think of Carlo Collodi’s 1883 Pinnochio… the original robot gone bad). 

Of course, before all of the above movies we had Bladerunner . With its bio-mechanical “replicants” who were really trying to acquire a soul and to feel, this film was probably the best of the bunch. And that was in 1982, so maybe the peak for this subgenre of sci-fi happened long ago. Plus, perhaps the source of all of these stories is in some ways Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and her doc-playing-God’s inability to put a soul back into a re-animated body. But now I’m probably at risk of boring you like an English teacher, so let’s get back to the movies…

For instance, since the numerous Surrogates billboard ads seemed mostly to be selling sex, we gotta reach back even before 1982 to the “make your own perfect woman” model, as seen in such non-classics as The Stepford Wives (both old and new), and John Hughes’ silly 1985 teen version, Weird Science. So now we need to talk about Ovid’s ancient Greek/Cypriot mythic figure Pygmalion (man loves a female statue he’s made), and G.B. Shaw’s 1912 play Pygmalion. These were just a few of the original “build a better mate” stories — which also led to some cool movie versions like My Fair Lady, and in a very different way, Bride of Frankenstein.

Then there are the “robot with a heart of gold” movies, from Robocop to Bicentenial Man (not as bad as critics said… but schmaltzy) to A.I. (note Spielberg and Kubrick’s involvement here), and then some, including several really bad comedies. These movies explore the positive or perhaps teachable and programmable aspects of human emotion and consciousness — unlike Kubrick and Clarke’s HAL computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, who was both a killjoy and a literal killer.

Oh, and did I mention practically every existing action-packed Schwarzenfillum?!  Starting with Terminator (robots) and also including  The 6th Day (clones), and Total Recall (virtuals). Arnold was a specialist in the “Who is the real me?” action movie.  One might even say that his religio-apocalyptic hack-job in End of Days subsitutes demonic possession for a more technical form of soul removal and transferrance. (Not a good flick, but I like Gabriel Byrne as Lucifer, as I like almost anything Byrne’s ever done.) Those Arnold films have their place, but I would only call the first two Terminator movies great, the second better than the first, which almost never happens in Hollywood. However, Total Recall  also lets us talk about this virtual cops and/or robot robbers thing, as done in such films as Denzel Washington’s somewhat underrated Virtuosity, plus a few others.

Then there’s the rest of the Philip K. Dick film-adapted oevre  (Bladerunner and Total Recall were both based on this pioneering sci-fi writer’s stories). Most of  Dick’s novels and short stories explore what happens when we depend too much on our digital, cloned or mechanical stand-ins, when we try to re-create what is “real” and thus de-authenticate it. A semi-famous quote from Dick puts it this way: “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” 

Notably, Dick was not all about science gone haywire either, but also about soul and the nature of consciousness. Maybe this was because he was a twin, whose sister died a few weeks after they were born. Also notable: Dick had a so-called visitation from God in 1974 which he was never certain was real, or a schizophrenic episode.  And he had a drug problem. And was married five times. And, and, and… in other words, this guy literally lived out there on the edges, with one foot in the tragically real world and the other who knows where.

So Mr. Dick , all by himself, causes us to consider such surrogate or fraudulent-copy movies as  Minority Report (Spielberg again), and Gary Sinise’s Impostor, plus a number of other movie adaptations (most recently Nic Cage’s Next). And there are no less than FOUR Dick-adaptation movies currently in production. Too bad this guy died before he was “discovered”. Tragically, he died at age 53, just a few weeks before Bladerunner, the first movie adaptation, premiered. Not funny, God.

Meanwhile, dark comedy is more the angle Cold Souls is trying to take, though with an existential streak that is more gimmicky promise than satirical reality, if I’m to believe the reviews. As for philosophical, art-house comedy, this stuff has been tackled better before as well. Start with the above-mentioned Malkovich , and then move on to almost all of Oscar-winner Charlie Kaufman’s  other top-flight scripts afterward (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Adaptation, etc.) . Charlie often explores surreal or absurdist ideas about loss of reality, duplicate or false selves, misuse of tech and creativity, and/or the selling of our souls.

Hey wait, lookit this! Mr. Dick’s novel A Scanner Darkly was made into a movie by another of my favorites: director Richard Linklater (Slacker, Before Sunrise, School of Rock) . Gotta go pick that one up immediately, as I have not seen it yet. Furthermore, Charlie Kaufman says he is very influenced by Philip K. Dick, and Kaufman even did his own adaptation of Scanner  (which went unproduced, but can be read by going to that link there). Who knew?

Meanwhile, for sheer light comedy, Multiplicity, with Michael Keaton (times five), was up-and-down in its writing and acting quality, but had some very funny moments. And I suspect there are plenty of good clone/twin/avatar comedy projects from tv floating around all over the place… I know X-Files worked well with this concept several times, and a recent South Park featuring World of Warcraft was hilarious. 

Bottom line: these two themes (What is the essence of human consciousness? and Will tech lead us where we should not go?) have been done much better in print and movies dozens of times before. The themes often go together, too… so we might say they’re twins (ack! bad joke alert…)

So while both the current movies may be okay, nevertheless, save your $12 (or whatever a flick costs these days… I go so seldom anymore). Instead, rent one of the above classics (or classically bad camp-fests) on DVD.

…or read a book, for cryin’ out loud! Maybe start with a Philip K. Dick short story or two, quicker hits with a whole lotta punch.

Who knew? The Methodists, ELCA Lutherans and Roman Catholics agreed on something major and theological ten years ago, and still keep talking about it:

You Are Invited to Attend a Special
Ecumenical Anniversary CelebrationFrancis Cardinal George, O.M.I., Archbishop of Chicago, and The Reverend Mark S. Hanson, Presiding Bishop, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, invite the public to attend the:

10th Anniversary Celebration of the
Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification
Between the Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation
and Affirmed by the World Methodist Council in 2006
Thursday, October 1, 2009
6:30 p.m.
Old St. Patrick’s Church
700 West Adams Street
Chicago, Illinois 60661

Homilist: The Most Reverend Wilton D. Gregory, Archbishop of Atlanta
Special Guest: The Reverend Dr. Ishmael Noko, General Secretary Lutheran World Federation

Please call 312-534-5325 or e-mail eia@archchicago.org for more information and to reserve a place at the service and reception.

Nice. Now if only the megachurches will catch on and stop pretending they’re the only ones who have God’s ear.

For those of you who have not noticed, there’s a mild resurgence in a number of mainline Christian denominations in this decade. Some are participating in the three mentioned above. Others are part of the Emergent Church movement: not a denomination, but a cross-pollination. It’s a discussion about how to do church in a postmodern context, by reaching back –sometimes hundreds of years– for spiritual practices and core beliefs, and then spicing up or re-thinking how to make them relevant for 21st century folks (especially for that holy grail of demographic groups, the 18-35 year olds). For those curious to know more, a website called Emergent Village is one of the larger hubs of activity.

The Anglicans/Episcopalians are re-friending the Catholics, Rick Warren offers prayers at the inauguration, after working with gays on AIDS and the problems of the African poor, and the hits just keep on coming.

I was also privvy to some news about essential national level discussions the Mennonites were having a couple years ago. Those were with Catholics and Pentecostals (specifically Church of Christ, I believe). The peaceable Mennonites have even had several meetings with Iranian religious clergy and Ahmadinejad himself, while still in good conscience calling them on the carpet for their anti-Semitic tendencies. And Hasidic Jew Matisyahu’s cool combination of reggae and ska with Hebrew mysticism is catching on with Jews, Christians, and even those with no formal religious conviction at all. He  just follows his heart, and the kids keep grooving.

So why do the nations rage? There are rumblings among the extreme conservatives that the liberalizing social climate and government are seeking to press everyone toward “one world religion”, but anyone who thinks this is realistic is a moron. (As are those who believe it is what Obama wants.) We can stand upon what we have in common, and still have our own ways of seeing and doing things. We can learn from each other, so we have even MORE in common, without sweeping our distinctives under the rug. 

For instance, I even spotted a goofy news story this week in which Myron Lowery, interim mayor of Memphis, was able to teach the Dalai Lama the African-American “fist bump” greeting. This is the same Lowery who took heat recently for allowing prayer to open city council meetings, offered by visiting and almost exclusively Christian clergy (given the population of Memphis). A separation of church and state group wrote Lowery a stern letter. He politely told them to mind their own business. Soon after, the Tibetan spiritual leader came there to receive a human rights award, as Memphis is home of the national civil rights museum. Memphis is also sort of a cultural mecca for African Americans, so the image of the mayor fist-bumping the Dalai Lama — much to the Lama’s amusement — is further sign of religion’s role as a unifying force.

“Raven came. All the world was in darkness. The sky above was in darkness. The waters below were in darkness. Men and women lived in the dark and cold. Raven was sad for them. He said, ‘I will search for light.’  “

- from Raven: A Trickster Tale From the Pacific Northwest, as told and illustrated by Gerald McDermott (Harcourt Brace & Co.)

In my menswork and other church work, I’ve gotten back recently to telling and using the American Indian mythic story Raven Brings the Light. It has many parallels to Christianity, especially the Nativity story about the birth of Jesus. Thus it has special significance at Christmas among Native American Christians in the Athabaskan tradition, from Oregon up into Canada, and on into Alaska ( I think… unless I’ve been misled, which is always possible, as lies and convenient fallacies abound in these mixed-up multicultural times).

I first heard the Raven folktale on tv, in the context of the early 1990s show Northern Exposure. Below is the version they staged on one of their Christmas shows. Thanks, YouTubers!

I didn’t watch Northern Exposure show very much when it was originally being aired, but discovered it soon after, in syndication. It soon became one of my all-time favorites though, one of the early “dramedies” –one hour long, no laugh track, occasionally taking on serious subjects. I liked Northern Exposure for the quality of the writing, for its whimsy with a purpose, and for the accessible way that it portrayed Indians’ role in the American (and Canadian) experience.

As for those of you, Native and European alike, who would get on my case for using the word “indian” above –instead of the more P.C. version “Native American”– well, go soak your head. You’re just naive Americans. Things change. Yeah, I know the difference. I know my history, too. And I do care. But if the highly political Russell Means and the American Indian Movement found the word good enough for them, then it’s good enough for me. For now. More important fights should take priority, and positivity will go a lot further than intellectual gibberish.

Take for example the upcoming 56th Annual Powwow, sponsored by the American Indian Center of Chicago. This is one of the bigger ones, on Nov. 7 and 8 at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Attening this event a few years ago was deeply moving for me, and yet I have not one ounce of Indian blood to brag about. I just want to understand the community. To be taught by them. And the thunderous sound of  those ten-foot drums, played loud and proud by committed members of an authentic community, still rings in my ears. If I let them, those drums (and the important conversations in-between) have the ritual power to change me – as much as any church service can, and probably more than any classroom ever could. They widen and deepen community, and strengthen the love between equally valuable citizens within various communities.

And yet, isn’t UIC a branch of the same state university that many self-serious people have criticized for using Chief Illiniwek as its mascot? So what’s up with that? Why would Chicago’s own Indian population have their event there? I suspect that the only people who argue ad nauseum about silly semantics are those who prefer arguing to actually DOING SOMETHING about the real problems today’s Indian (and other impoverished communities) still face. The local and regional participating organizations and Native Americans don’t seem to mind using the word indian, the so-called racist or inaccurate term. Or at least they don’t take themselves or the word or Chief Illiniwek too seriously. So why should I?

Maybe today’s American Indians are reclaiming and reinventing the word indian. In which case, more power to them. Especially when my cousin Tom’s mid-level engineering job (at Lucent?) was just this month shipped overseas to the REAL India — by a company more concerned with bottom lines than with its own employees and their families. Ah yes. Now I have seen the light. All bets are off in the ridiculous economy of present-day North America.

So steal the light back from the Sky Kings, Raven. We all need your help now. Not “by any means necessary”, as Malcolm X once said, but maybe it IS time to start becoming tricksters, maybe fight a little dirty, like the big boys in power ties have been doing for generations.

In the same way, this Italian American can reclaim and reinvent the words Dago, wop, or greaseball while still claiming my dignity and my rights and accepting my responsibilities. I really don’t mind if you use those so-called slurs. With me, anyway. Sticks and stones, as they say. Besides, I really do have oily skin. That only means I will have fewer wrinkles at age 50 than my counterparts of a more northern ancestry. So who has the last laugh now?

As long as you will eat with me at my table, and as long as you will respect and enlighten me like our beloved Raven and our beloved Jesus, and let me do the same for you, then call me whatever you want. We have more in common than we have differences. And we’re all stuck in the same mess of contradictions. Why claim otherwise?

So maybe I will see you in November at UIC, or at Evanston’s Mitchell Museum of the American Indian, or at some other event coming soon to a drum circle, health clinic or campfire near you. If I do, we’ll share a bit of  Indian frybread, pray together, and then dance dance dance!

Then we’ll get down to the real work, which is the hardest, but the most fun of all.

“Raven threw the sun high in the sky, and it stayed there. This is how Raven stole the sun

and gave it to all the people.”

ALL the people.