The Complex Christ

The Falling Man | 'It is finished'

Last night Channel 4 showed a documentary (based on the Esquire article by Tom Junod) about Richard Drew's horrific photograph from 9/11, which became known as 'the falling man.' Released and used by some in the press in the immediate reports, it then 'sank without trace' soon after in an act of seeming self-censorship.

The documentary was a moving and challenging exploration of the history and impact of the photograph. While coroners and others appeared to be trying to revise history and deny that anyone had jumped from the towers, the programme proposed that the image ought to stand as a defining image of the absolute horror of the attacks.

Among the interviews of relatives of those who had died was one with a man who knew his wife had jumped. "After the suffocating smoke, the intense heat and lack of air, to jump must have felt like blessed relief. She would have felt like she was flying." Others didn't agree. The jumpers had 'committed suicide', and thus condemned themselves to hell. They had somehow been cowardly, not thinking of their loved ones.

Personally, I was deeply moved by the horror of the decision these people were forced to take. In one sense, this became for me a meditation on violence and technology (which I have posted on before here). In the face of an act of horrific violence, with a huge jumbo-jet slamming into a structure that had lifted people 107 stories into the air, with the smoke and heat of aviation fuel, pinned in place by broken lift-shafts and burning stairwells, these people had to chose to whether to stay and face certain death after some unknowable wait among hot steel and choking flames, or let go and chose their own exit.

Perhaps they jumped out of sheer terror. We cannot know. But the 'falling man' image, with its almost serene and calm descent, offers us the possibility that it was as a brave act of self-determination that these people stepped out into the peace of clear air, away from the terror and technology that had rounded on them. That rather than be killed by those who brought suggest terrible weapons against them, they denied the terrorists' desire to kill, and chose to take their own lives.

And thus we are turned to reflect on the other falling man, pinned in place by a terrible and crude technology, who chose to let go, defied our violence against him, opened his hands and exerted this great act of sacrificial self-determination. "It is finished," he announced, choosing his own moment to descend into hell, "And breathed his last."

Technorati Tags: 9/11, Art, Grace, Photography, Technology, Terrorism

A Dirty, Robust Messiah

An excellent thought for the day from the always-interesting Giles Fraser on the BBC this morning, discussing the essential dirty nature of the incarnation, rendering the sacred/profane divide fuzzy in the extreme.

His Greenbelt talk on Why Rothko Is Bad For Your Health is also superb. Buy it on CD, or hassle them to fast-track it to MP3.

Steve Martin's Remake of The Sellers Classic The Pink Panther Is Everything That is Wrong About The World

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Technorati Tags: Film

Emerging Church and The Hunch Engine

Article in Wired on an emerging software that combines hunches with mutations to take anything, from photo manipulation to postman route planning in new directions that have a individual touch.

"Our hunches tend to be repetitive and predictable, while mutation can take us in novel directions"

The parallels with new EC programmes are obvious. Keep the human involvement, but bring in other forces to encourage new mutations and prevent stagnation.
Keep it local, emergent, intelligent.

Technorati Tags: Technology

The Last Post...

...is due. According to the Financial Times.

"...which brings us to the spectre haunting the blogosphere - tedium. If the pornography of opinion doesn't leave you longing for an eroticism of fact, the vast wasteland of verbiage produced by the relentless nature of blogging is the single greatest impediment to its seriousness as a medium"

"For Marx and Engels, journalism was trivial - an impediment to serious, memorable and above all influential work. “Mere potboiling,” wrote Engels of the more than 500 articles he and Marx wrote for The New York Daily Tribune, “It doesn’t matter if they are never read again.”

And that, in the end, is the dismal fate of blogging: it renders the word even more evanescent than journalism; yoked, as bloggers are, to the unending cycle of news and the need to post four or five times a day, five days a week, 50 weeks of the year, blogging is the closest literary culture has come to instant obsolescence. No Modern Library edition of the great polemicists of the blogosphere to yellow on the shelf; nothing but a virtual tomb for a billion posts - a choric song of the word-weary bloggers, forlorn mariners forever posting on the slumberless seas of news."

[Thanks to JR for the link. He so needs a blog it hurts.]

Clearly the writer hasn't read (sic) ;-) or my post on the subject [here] where I paraphrase Ed Murrow in Goodnight and Goodluck:

"Given that blogs are so popular a medium (ok, this one excepted ;-) we need to make sure that they are more than 'merely wires and lights in a box.' 'If they are right, and this instrument is good for nothing but to entertain, amuse and insulate, then the tube is flickering now and we will soon see that the whole struggle is lost.' 'Just once in a while let us exalt the importance of ideas and information.'"

Technorati Tags: Blogging

In Defence of Alt.Worship | We Haven't Even Begun to 'Emerge' Yet

I was disappointed to read on Jonny's blog that Graham Cray wanted to down-play the significance of alt.worship and emerging churches in the future of the church. And I'm glad Jonny attempted to correct him.

Just a couple of observations.

According to Jonny's notes, Graham Cray said:

"Mission vision not church angst. Emerging churches good but only part of picture. Alt worship etc part of picture but not future... Postmodern is passe - paradigm shift has taken place"

I agree with some of this. Alt.worship is not the future. But it has been a very vital catalyst. And catalysts rarely get the credit they are due when the history is told. They are the invisible spaces that allow reactants time to create newness. Without them the process of change would take much much longer. However, this energy they bring to speed up the process should not be interpreted as 'angst'. It is disingenuous to suggest it.

I would also want to take Graham to task on his view that 'Emerging Churches are good but only part of the picture.' If he is right that the postmodern is passé and a paradigm shift has already taken place, then the church that emerges from this shift is, by definition, all there is going to be. The big problem is that people are, I think, far too easy with the definition they are using.

The chapter I wrote on Advent in the book - about waiting for the old to pass and the new to come - is pertinent I think. And I don't think people in the institutions have shown enough patience to wait yet. They think the transition has already happened. That we are already 'emerging.' I don't think we are even close. Unless there is a proper 'wait' then what emerges will still be too much infected with the old forms. And I think this is happening now. People are tacking together programmes of café-style stuff and a few nightlights and thinking they are 'emerging.'

I'm afraid I'm sceptical. I just don't think that's going to work. We need a far deeper change to occur. One that reaches wide and deep. And given that this was led by the same old white men, I'm afraid I don't think that can possibly have happened yet.

Technorati Tags: Rebirth

On Beauty and Justice

One of the tensions we often faced within Vaux was whether the pursuit of the beautiful was inappropriate when injustice was still present. I've been thinking more about this following the Soliton meeting in Northern Ireland last weekend.

This article in The Believer, the interviewer asks the utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer "Given that a wealthy couple spends more money going to the theatre than many families make in a year, should we cut out activities like this entirely?" He replies that:

"Support for the arts must come second."

His reasoning?

"If everyone in the developed world gave just 1% of their incomes to organisations fighting global poverty, we could eliminate poverty and still have enough to support the arts."

I think this focuses the debate too heavily on money and gets away from the key truth that we all ought to try to grasp: justice is, in itself, beautiful. To consider this another way, art and justice ought both to be corrective.

Good art subverts our comfortable view and alters our perception of the world. It gives us a new way of seeing, or helps us to see beauty in the everyday. It orders what is disordered, or at least gives us a lens through which to perceive disorder, and thus retunes our senses. Art is also a gift. It can never be truly bought or sold.

Justice is also corrective. It brings order to disorder, and sense to dissonance. It is about perceiving the world in a fresh way, with fresh eyes. It is a gift, beyond money, and into the realm of relational potential. We don't pay for the homeless to be housed so the dirt is cleaned up. We want them to be helped into a place where they can become whole, part of a caring community.

We shouldn't close the galleries until the soup kitchens have no queues. But artists must try harder to create what is just. Whiteread's white boxes at the Tate are a gargantuan waste of plastic, an oil-based resource that is a chemical disaster zone. She should have done better.

Technorati Tags: Art, Beauty, Emerging Church, Justice, Poverty, Tate

Forget Flushing - Use Less

I recently posted a piece taking up Mayor of London Ken Livingstone's advice to only flush when really necessary.

Thanks to Jon who's just mail me this piece from The Guardian. It's pretty shocking. All that lovely coffee you drink? The rice we eat? The water required to produce these goods is astronomical. As a typical meat-eating, milk-guzzling westerner, I consume as much as a hundred times my own weight in water every day.

Technorati Tags: London, Environment, Sustainable Growth

Solition | Endings | Merton

Just spent the weekend with Si and Gareth over in Northern Ireland. Good to see Pete Rollins too (his book is going to go ballistic). They also had the guys over from The Bridge in Ventura for a few days, and it was excellent to spend time hanging out, doing some Guinness, and doing the Celtic Solition day on the Saturday. It was a great time, but hung with sadness as we heard of the death of someone from The Bridge. It's been a painful year for them.

Some of the conversations turned to why we had stopped Vaux, and it's still something I/we think about a lot. I might do some posts of reflections about this over the next few weeks, but talking got me thinking, and my thoughts turned to this passage from Merton's New Seeds of Contemplation.

"All sin starts from the assumption that my false self, the self that exists only in my egocentric desires, is the fundamental reality of life to which everything else in the universe is ordered.... I wind experiences around myself and cover myself with pleasures and glory like bandages in order to make myself perceptible to myself and to the world, as if I were an invisible body that could become visible when something visible covered its surface. But there is no substance under the things with which I am clothed. I am objectified in them. When they are gone there will be nothing left of me but my own nakedness and emptiness and hollowness, to tell me that I am my own mistake."

I think in a funny way we at Vaux had grown worried about the false self that we were projecting. We'd wound a lot of bandages, and it was time for a bit of naked truth. This is, for Merton, the essence of contemplation. To put down the fantasy self and "pass through the centre of our own nothingness [...] and awake as our true selves." "We become contemplatives when God discovers Godself in us."

I'm glad we left the building. The stones were heavy. Perhaps you'll find us in a tent somewhere, someday.

Technorati Tags: Fantasy, Merton, Religion, Spirituality

Release Your Inner Mr Man/Little Miss

Make your own Mr Man or Little Miss here. Resistance is futile. You know you're going to have to. The Mr Emergent™ competition starts here.

Technorati Tags: Cartoons