And the Floodwaters Rose...

After deciding to cancel the 10:00 service...where would you have parked, anyway?

Our foyer, which is about FOUR FEET above the ground!

So then, after the waters receded, and the dove did not return to the ark, the National Catastrophe Team showed up.  No, they're not a government agency.

Everything below four feet from the floor had to go...literally, everything.

Groundwater contaminated stuff needs to be thrown away...and there was a LOT of groundwater contaminated stuff!

The rebuilding process is underway...thanks for all the prayers and support!

Eternal Sunshine and God's Okay

I just watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind again last night. As always, wow. If you haven't seen this amazing Michel Gondry film of 2004, written by the one-of-a-kind Charlie Kaufman (Adaptation, Being John Malkovich, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind) and starring Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet (nominated for an Oscar), you must rent it TONIGHT! Call me and I'll loan it to you!

In broad strokes, (mild spoiler alert!) the film is about Joel and Clementine (Carrey and Winslet), a normal couple who fall in and eventually out of love with one another. Clementine, the impulsive one, has Joel erased from her memory. When Joel finds out, he is crushed, and in turn, agrees to have Clementine erased from his memory. The film follows Joel's memories of his relationship with Celementine (as they are erased!), and his gradual realization that he wants to keep the memories rather than lose them.

Unfortunately for Joel, the procedure gets completed, and he wakes up with no memory of the woman he once loved. Somehow, though, he and Clementine (neither remembering the other) go to Montauk the next day, meet up, and begin what they think is a new relationship. Confusing? Yes, you'll have to see the movie twice, but it's well worth it.

Meanwhile, a disenfranchised employee down at the memory-erasing office decides to mail former patients' files back to them, having decided that the whole memory erasing thing is immoral. The upshot is that Clementine and Joel, thinking they've just met for the first time, find themselves listening to tapes of each other telling the doctor why they'd like to erase their former lover. They hear all their complaints about each other before they get into the relationship! And then we get the following exchange:

Joel: I don't see anything I don't like about you.
Clementine: But you will! But you will, and I'll get bored with you and feel trapped, because that's what happens with me.
Joel: Okay.

Joel's "Okay" is a profound statement of love. Provided with empirical proof that this nascent relationship will not be idyllic, he decides that he loves Clementine enough to get into it anyway. I've thought since I first saw this film that this idea must have been Charlie Kaufman's inspiration: If two people knew a relationship wasn't going to work out, would they get into it anyway? How powerful is love?"

His conclusion is that love is very powerful...perhaps the ultimate power. Love causes us to do irrational things; behave in irresponsible ways. As Christians, we believe that love is the foundation of everything. "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son" (John 3:16). And this love, true to form, is irrational and irresponsible. It is love that is one-way, love that is unreturned. We are incapable of loving back in the same way that we are loved. We might say, with Clementine, "I'll get bored with you and feel trapped, because that's what happens with me." And Jesus, knowing us, and loving us, says, "Okay."

Little Miss Sunshine and Losing

With one of the indie hits of 2006, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (directors) and Michael Arndt (writer), introduced us to the quirkily disfunctional Hoover family. In Little Miss Sunshine, it is little Olive (Abigail Breslin) who drives the plot. She is seven years old, and is invited to participate in the Little Miss Sunshine Pageant in Redondo Beach, CA. The trick is, the family lives in Albuquerque, is poor, and nobody trusts anybody enough to leave anybody behind. So they all pile into the family's VW bus and hit the road. The driver is patriarch Richard (Greg Kinnear), purveyor of a self-help Nine Steps to something book. His wife, Sheryl (Toni Collette), doesn't have a trait to pigeon-hole her, but she's the manic glue that holds the family together. Sheryl's brother, Frank (Steve Carrell), is fresh off a suicide attempt and may or may not be the world's preeminent Proust scholar, depending on who you ask. Richard's father (Alan Arkin, who won an Oscar for the performance) is along for the ride, too, having been kicked out of his retirement home for lewd behavior and rampant cocaine use. Completing the family constellation are Olive, the would-be pageant queen, and Dwayne (Paul Dano), a Nietzsche-reading sulker who, in his own words, "hates everyone." Quite the rogue's gallery.

A family such as this is certainly ripe for conflict, and much conflict arises on their two day trip across the Southwest. The particular conflict that I want to focus on today is Richard's conflict with his family over his Nine Steps. Fundamentally, the Nine Steps are like any self-help program: They posit a capability inherent in everyone and then attempt to teach you to access it, and then to use it, to achieve your life goals. Richard has drunk his own Kool-Aid to the point that when Frank comes to their house from the hospital, he explains to Olive that Frank "gave up on himself, which is something winners never do." As you might imagine, all the winners vs. losers talk around the home has alienated his son, pushed away his father, and brought his marriage to the brink of divorce. And then, in the ultimate indignity, Richard himself is shown to be a loser, when the book deal he's been counting on falls through.

The losing ways of the Hoovers are brought into sharp relief by the filmmakers upon their eventual arrival at the Little Miss Sunshine Pageant. It is immediately obvious that Olive, sweet, precocious and talented as she is, is no beauty queen. There is a quiet push from the family, now closely bonded together due to the harrowing experiences they've shared on the road, to pull Olive out of the pageant.

Ultimately, Olive herself is asked what she'd like to do. She's clearly intimidated by the other girls, and has never been more sure that she's fat, but she decides to go on anyway. As the family expected, she is woefully out of place, and that's never more apparent than in the talent portion of the competition. But, amazingly, when Olive fails spectacularly in her dance routine, the family runs up on-stage and joins her in the dance, embracing their collective loser-hood.

And really, that's what Little Miss Sunshine is all about. It's about a man, but really a family, who is so afraid of being a loser that he creates a system that "guarantees" winning. But the winning (a happy family) only gets created when the losing is acknowledged and embraced. We might draw the parallel to the Church's "law." The church attempts to create a "Nine Steps" to a good life, to happiness, by giving us all kinds of things to do. But the law can't make us good. In other words, its requirements don't give us the power to keep them. It's only in realizing that we're losers that true winning is possible.

Duplicity and Real Love

I've often said, as I ply my trade, using examples from movies to illustrate the themes of law and gospel, that it's a lot easier to find examples of law in movies than it is to find examples of the gospel. The reason is simple: humans just don't love one another the way God loves us. That kind of the love (the unconditional kind) is simply beyond us, and wouldn't ring true if two characters in a movie behaved toward each other in that way.

But I may have found an example. The below clip, from the Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton) -scripted and -directed Duplicity, has two characters speaking to each other in the language of love. The REAL language of love. Watch:

Now, don't worry about all that junk about the formula, that's just this particular film's macguffin. (For the wannabe cinephiles out there, "macguffin" is a term coined by Alfred Hitchcock to describe the object that everyone's after, the thing that sets the story in motion, but the nature of which ultimately doesn't really matter at all. Think the Maltese Falcon in The Maltese Falcon. Does the fact that it's (69-year-old SPOILER ALERT) made of tar make the movie any less exciting?) Do you feel the power of the scene?

These are two people, in a relationship, who haven't been able to trust each other since the day they met. They've just stolen a formula, worth billions, and are both pretty sure that the other is going to try to get all the money for themselves. In a situation like this, love cannot exist. But then, Julia Roberts begins to play the God role. "I know who you are. And I love you anyway." What a statement! These two sentences, when placed one after the other, have insurmountable power. Clive Owen is powerless before them. But more importantly, he is transformed by them. His distrust becomes trust. Not knowing what Roberts has, he offers the formula. And, in this wonderful scene, he tells us his reasoning. "I look at you...I can't stop looking at you...and I think, 'That woman. She knows me. And she loves me anyway.'"

This is the best non-cheesy illustration of the kind of love God has for us and its effect on us that I've ever seen. And believe me, I know that "loves me anyway" needs a serious theological fleshing-out, but the power of the statement cannot be ignored. God knows us, in all our conniving, self-centered, and jealousy-laden splendor, and loves us anyway. And this love is a creative love, creating trust where there was distrust, care for others where there was self-centeredness, and love where there was jealousy.

Who Are You Praying To?

Recently, the below prayer was said as an invocation at a NASCAR race:

Hearing this prayer, and seeing some of the reaction to it, got me thinking about prayer in general.  Here's my thought:  for whose benefit do you think that Pastor Joe Nelms is praying?  Or let's ask the question this way: is this how he would pray in a room by himself?

I have always been a little bit uncomfortable with public prayer.  You might think this is strange, me being a priest and all.  Before I was a "professional" Christian, I never wanted to pray out loud; I never thought my prayers would be good enough to be out there, side by side with the prayers of the truly (poetically) spiritual.  You know the people I mean.  After I became a pastor and become more comfortable speaking in front of people and more confident in my ability to think on my feet, I became less worried about the ability to pray in public and more worried about the theory behind it.

I mean, aren't we supposed to be praying to God?  Certainly Pastor Nelms has gotten some notoriety for his church, and probably boosted attendance a little bit, but could anyone argue that his prayer was truly intended primarily for God's ears?  Or is it more likely that he wanted the gathered assembly to know that his wife is "smokin' hot?"  Perhaps he'd just seen Talladega Nights the evening before?

In a worship service in seminary, during a public prayer time, someone prayed a thanksgiving for the beauty of  God's creation.  It was autumn, and prayer thanked God for the beauty of the changing leaves, for the reds, yellows, and browns of the season.  When that prayer ended, someone in a different part of the church piped up and said, "And the oranges."  Now, I don't want to disparage either of those people (I don't remember who they were), but that occurrence made me wonder exactly who we are praying to.  Are we praying for the benefit of those around us, or are we praying to God?  What are we to do with Matthew 6:6, wherein Jesus tells his followers that when they pray, they should go into a room and close the door.  Jesus seems to be regularly at odds with public displays of religiousness.

Certainly, we pray communal prayers...as an Anglican, I believe that a general confession (said together) takes the place of individual confession (to a priest).  But confession is a kind of prayer that almost cannot help being personal:  surely we have our own sins in our minds as we confess, and aren't really even aware of the content of the prayers of those around us.

So what do you think?  When we pray in public, are we beholden to the pressures of "quality?"  Is there a component to communal (yet individual) prayer that is missing from prayers said to God, alone?  Who are you praying to and for when you pray out loud in a group.  Or do such concerns prevent you from praying out loud in groups at all?