Growing up, every Thanksgiving in memory started with watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade on television. Live television is fine, but I used to wonder what it would be like to experience the whole parade thing in person. So when I was living in Manhattan, one year I decided to do just that.
Most people think the parade is just that: a parade. Floats, bands, drill teams, clowns, and Santa bringing up the rear. And while the Macy's extravaganza usually has all of these components, their flagship store at Herald Square was still the largest department store in the world back when I lived there (South Korea's new Shinsengae Centumcity Department Store, opened in 2009, is now the title holder) so they're compelled to do things over-the-top.
During Thanksgiving week, Macy's bombards the city with reminders of the parade, either to drum up support among the locals so the parade route will be stuffed with cheering throngs, or to warn the locals to git outta Dodge before the West Side and Midtown become gridlocked Thursday morning.
Meanwhile, the media machine in North America's largest metropolitan area publishes routes, recommends viewing areas, gushes about the newest balloons, runs poignant nostalgia stories about the parades of yore, and banters trivia about the Big Apple tradition. If it wasn't for the fact that this was New York City, it would be easy to wonder if the original holiday for being thankful wasn't being co-opted for a dazzling marketing barrage. After all, just how do the Radio City Music Hall Rockettes commemorate the Pilgrims?
They don't, of course. They're just advertising the season's mega-show at the storied Rockefeller Center performance hall, the Christmas Spectacular. Which, all kidding aside, actually is a must-see and so moving, I teared up both times I experienced it. If you travel to New York between Thanksgiving and New Year's Day, the Christmas Spectacular is just that - spectacular. And you know I don't use that term lightly.
Backstage Before the Parade
After the traditional Thanksgiving Eve service at Manhattan's Calvary Baptist Church on West 57th Street, I walked with some friends through Central Park to the American Museum of Natural History at West 77th Street. A heavy, cold mist shrouded the park in a dark suspense, enhancing the glow from the Tavern on the Green's twinkling lights wrapped amongst its garden's trees.
Within earshot of Central Park West and the museum, we could hear the gleeful chatter of children and see the hazy glow of spotlights. Emerging from the park, we were swallowed up in a good-natured crowd of parents with children propped on their shoulders, video recorders drinking in the memories.
Memories of what? Of blowing up the famous balloons, of course! Every year, Macy's spends the entire night before the parade inflating Garfield, Betty Boop, Snoopy, Superman, and other icons of Western society. Beguiled by the scene of so much taking place so effortlessly - humming inflation machines were doing all the work - my friends and I strolled among the sprawling lumps of Mylar that were slowly taking shape, noses lifting off the pavement, fingers getting fatter, wrinkles vanishing from faces. On the balloons, I mean; not us.
For generations, families have made a tradition of watching these creatures take shape on the streets and lawns around the Natural History museum. On Thanksgiving morning, the parade belongs mostly to tourists and the rest of the country via television. But this ritual of the balloons' inflation, however, is New York's own little celebration, and some quirky sentiment inside me appreciated this backstage revelry.
Indeed, none of my friends from church who were admiring these misty, serene transformations with me were planning on attending the parade the next morning. For Gotham denziens starved for intimacy in America's most congested yet isolating city, these up-close-and-personal encounters with creatures which would later float above the crowds had become the part of the parade they most treasured.
Show Time
Thanksgiving morning didn't so much dawn as emerge grimly from the night, still chilly, and now drizzly. Being a vacation day, I slept in and watched the beginning of the parade on TV. As it begins on the Upper West Side, I had time before the real show arrived in Herald Square, a mere 15-minute walk from my apartment, where I planned on taking in the festivities.
Walking westward down a nearly-deserted 34th Street, I could see Pluto bobbing around the corner above Broadway four blocks ahead. If New York didn't already have enough bizarre sights, that would probably have been quite funny. As it was, with the raw breeze and spitting rain, Pluto's handlers probably didn't want him to get as high in the air as would be necessary to look really thrilling. It would have been nicer if we had the cold temperatures counterbalanced with bright sunshine and calm air. Oh well, this was still the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, I told myself.
In Herald Square, grandstands towered over the sidewalks, but television cranes and on-location RVs blocked most of the good views. Hundreds of people were milling about, no one seeing much of anything except probably those at the tops of the grandstands. Plus, since it was raining, we had to dodge umbrellas. So much for not arriving early, I chided myself! I could tell the crowd must have been mostly tourists - despite the weather and poor views, few people were as grumpy as I was. I kept forgetting this was the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.
Finally, I found a good spot in a corner near 35th Street that police had barricaded, but were letting spectators occupy anyway. Remember, this was before 9/11, back before terrorism lurked around every New York corner. I found myself near one of the on-location RVs, and when I couldn't see the action in front of Macy's, I watched the action as people who probably were famous came and went. Although I didn't see anybody I actually recognized as being famous, by the way they acted, a couple of people apparently thought they were anyway.
Before long, yet far sooner than I expected, Santa Claus suddenly rolled through Herald Square, and without any fanfare, the parade was over. No announcer wishing the crowd "Happy Thanksgiving!" No encore. No scrolling of credits. Santa's sleight turned the corner headed to Madison Square Garden, and that was that.
Turning Towards Home
I turned around and went back to my apartment, the excitement of the parade fading with each block I walked. I couldn't escape a nagging disappointment that watching the parade on TV is actually better than being there live. The weather didn't make that much difference, the crowds didn't make that much difference. Even the lousy amplification - we could barely hear what was going on - didn't make up for the sheer confusion taking place within one short block in front of Macy's east entrance. So many acts, so many people, so much activity was churning through this small piece of real estate, that you didn't know what was what. Things were obviously being orchestrated for the TV audience, and those of us in the crowds were part of Macy's window dressing.
But did that mean the morning was a waste? Surprisingly, I didn't think so. Sure, it's all part of the commercialization of a holiday whose original intentions were faith-based. But considering how garish Christmas has become, a parade down the west side of Manhattan's Midtown seems almost tame these days.
Besides, as I turned to walk up my block, my mind shifted to the Thanksgiving feast I would be joining later in the day in Brooklyn with my aunt and family friends. Delicious food, loving family, good friends, a warm house...
Thankfulness has its privileges!
_____
Enjoy your Thanksgiving weekend! See you back here on Monday.
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Friday, November 19, 2010
Art as Solace of the Mind
Show and Tell
"Majesty of God" by Judy Franklin, 2010
"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder."
"I don't know much about art, but I know what I like."
"To each his own."
You'll be happy to know I'm not going to get into a lecture on art appreciation or how beauty should be defined. These popular phrases above reflect the subjective nature of our cultural encounters with the creative arts, and there's little point in anybody telling anybody else what they should or shouldn't appreciate.
Right?
Yet I'm not convinced that, overall, our society has done a good job of maintaining a beneficial interest in the creative arts. Maybe because over time, we've let subjectivism generate a nihilistic mindset concerning things that used to be important. Particularly in western civilization, we've become extremely pragmatic and efficient, to the point where if something doesn't serve a practical function, save us money, or make something easier, we're not interested in it. So art loses its importance.
Which is a bit perplexing, considering that compared with less sophisticated epochs in history, Westerners have more free time and expendable income at our disposal than ever before. But many of us fill this time with quantitative things like superiority-oriented sports, destination-centric travel, instant-pleasure amusements, passive movies, intense video games, and other goal-oriented activity. We measure things by scores, distances, fun, proficiency, and the like.
Just as I'm not going to set parameters for that which constitutes art, I'm not going to rate the ways we spend our free time as good or bad. I'm simply trying to point out that very little of what we choose to do involves the solace of the mind.
By "solace of the mind," I'm not talking about dumping everything that's in your brain into a bucket. Or abdicating common sense, propriety, and ethics. By "solace of the mind," without sounding like a New Age guru, I'm trying to convey the concept of engaging with beauty for beauty's sake.
Consider the infectious joy conveyed by the "flash culture mob" in Macy's downtown Philadelphia store a couple of weekends ago. Several hundred singers from the Philadelphia area convened in the main hall of the former Wanamaker's store and broke out into an unannounced rendition of the "Hallelujah Chorus" from Handel's Messiah. Shoppers, caught off-guard, were delighted by the "random act of culture" which has been viewed on YouTube over 3.6 million times.
At the risk of sounding flaky, esoteric, or goofy, may I suggest that as our society has given up on the classic arts, which were intentionally designed to express beauty, we've lost a little bit of the humanity that has helped to smooth life's rougher edges? Is that a silly thing to suggest? I realize that here, my brave attempt at not telling you what I think good art is has faltered a bit; I can't deny having the "Hallelujah Chorus" soaring throughout the vast atrium at Macy's proved far more pleasurable than if it had been a rock anthem instead. But take the question in the spirit with which it is intended: have we forgotten how beneficial good art can be?
Museum attendance across the country has stagnated, dependant more on clever marketing and hip new buildings than the public's insatiable demand for timeless paintings, sculpture, and other visual media.
Symphonies, orchestras, opera and ballet companies, and live theater troupes have all begun strategizing for both their short-term and long-term survival as their audiences consolidate into an older, smaller, and less committed demographic. Perhaps now more than ever, the arts are perceived as being elitist and old-fashioned, which society at large automatically translates into unnecessary and hard to appreciate. Fun is far more easily obtainable from pop culture, even if pop culture doesn't provide the same rewards.
Which is the real issue here, isn't it? Not all art is as universally appreciated as the "Hallelujah Chorus," which while not everybody's cup of tea, certainly didn't cause anybody to erupt in anger in Macy's. But how many of those shoppers would prefer purchasing tickets to a rock concert instead of using free tickets to hear Messiah in concert? See what I mean?
Some paintings require more than a quick glance for their beauty to be seen. Sometimes you have to sit still and be patient as a musical score unfolds. Most sculpture requires at least a couple of complete 360's for the entire piece to make sense. Yet today's culture actually conditions most of us to expect instant gratification instead of expending much effort for a reward.
For something to be a solace to the mind, how much extra work is involved, really? Not that people can't find comfort in their favorite non-classical pursuits. But should we expect all of the bits of information and stimulation we stuff into our heads to be sufficiently dislodged by quick and/or easy entertainment? Can we mentally relax with good art in the same way we enjoy a video game or skiing? All pastimes provide fleeting encounters with enjoyment, but the afterglow of good art sticks with me longer than the afterglow of a B movie. Maybe I'm just different that way?
Not that art provides a magical cure-all, or is the fountain of youth. Great art can cure a gloomy day, but it can't cure diabetes. Nor am I advocating a revolt against pop culture entirely, because moderation in a variety of activities and interests can be like diversification in one's financial portfolio.
Just don't dismiss good art as irrelevant or outdated. And don't assume I'm some snobby Renaissance man who can tell his libretto from his ritornello. I'm not crazy about opera, and I don't care for ballet at all. But play anything by Bach, Beethoven, and sometimes even Mahler, and my mind can find its solace quite nicely, thank you very much.
You don't even have to pay a lot to get a bit of culture. My church hosts an annual arts festival, and the photo in today's essay shows one of the entries, a cut-glass and crushed-glass mosaic by Judy Franklin. Entitled "Majesty of God," Franklin's work uses the birth of Christ to express a grand theme of the Incarnation with a pastel palette suitable for swaddling an infant.
So maybe it will never hang in MoMA or the National Gallery. But it's good therapy to consider the crushed glass as not only snow, perhaps, but diffusers of light. Amidst all of the pastel coloration rises the golden sun (Christ as "beauteous Heavenly Light") and the stark red field punctuating the cross. Indeed, at the center of Franklin's work is the Cross of Christ, Trinitarian triangle, and further afield, a beveled gold radiance.
Why is it good therapy? For one thing, each of these components gives testimony to the deity and holiness of Christ. Perhaps we don't actually see a visual representation of Christ, but that's not an entirely unBiblical consideration, is it? Franklin does not concern herself with what God Incarnate may have looked like, because she's creating a depiction of His majesty, which for us today is far more important.
If you just glance at this work and tick off its obvious attributes; "broken glass: check; fang-looking things: check; pretty colors: check; cross in the middle: check;" then you're not engaging with the message Franklin has woven into each of her components.
Here's a challenge for you: don't look at this photo - gaze at it instead. No matter how much theology and doctrine you know about Christmas, what is this composition telling you about the Christ child? As you work these truths over in your mind, do you realize how things you were thinking about before you began reading today's essay here have been placed on your brain's back burner?
That's the solace of the mind I'm talking about.
_____
Monday, November 15, 2010
Making Music at Macy's
People may accuse me of many things, but being at the cutting edge of cultural fads will never be one of them.
For example, I'm just now getting around to talking about the October 30 "flash culture mob" event at the old Wanamaker's Department Store - now a Macy's - in downtown Philadelphia. Over 2 million people have already viewed the YouTube video of several hundred singers gathered in the department store's main hall who break into an unannounced rendition of Handel's thrilling "Hallelujah Chorus" from the Messiah.
You may recall that earlier this year, the City of Brotherly Love was plagued by a violent social phenomenon called "flash mobs," in which large gangs of rowdy teenagers would congregate and storm through city streets en mass, destroying private property, injuring passersby, and generally inciting chaos which wreaked havoc on businesses, imperiled racial harmony, and generally make Philadelphia life miserable. One flash mob even tore through the very same Macy's which hosted the "Hallelujah Chorus" singers, with punks punching stunned shoppers and destroying store fixtures and merchandise.
What a great juxtaposition, then, to have this event at the very same venue, showcasing the best of Philadelphia against its worst. In case you haven't yet seen it, click here for the most wonderful five minutes of Christmas shopping you'll ever spend.
Of course, the accolades reverberating around cyberspace by people responding to this video don't need repeating here. They're simply proof that the arts remain capable of moving the soul. As part of the "Random Acts of Culture" project by advocacy group Knight Arts, the Philadelphia event wasn't the first such production, nor will it be the last. The purpose for these events is to remind average Americans that the arts provide a surprisingly humanizing balm to our lives. Good art is good because we don't need somebody to explain to us why we're enjoying it. Sure, there were probably a lot of shoppers in Macy's who would never list classical music as their favorite, but they could still appreciate the grandeur they were witnessing. Chances are, blasting a rock anthem throughout the store would probably not have the same effect at all.
And kudos to Macy's, which could have just as easily nixed the whole idea, fearful of offending customers who might object to a Christian song being belted through the sales floors of the historic shopping mecca. Granted, Philadelphia's flagship Wanamaker's makes an ideal venue for just such an event, with its soaring atrium and historic pipe organ, the world's largest. And art lovers of many different faiths can appreciate the aesthetics of Handel's music on a purely artistic level, even if, as I've said, the oratorio genre isn't their favorite. Still, Macy's could have approved the general idea but insisted on a different song. As it was, however, with Christmas shopping underway and the doldrums of a weak economy to shake off, the right choices were made all around.
Oddly enough, I've watched the video several times with both the sound on and with the sound muted, and either way, I get kind of a goose-pimply vibe when I realize that black and white, young and old, are joining together to sing this incredible piece of music. At the end, there's a broad, tall black man, raising his right arm as he sings the final "Hallelujah," a wide smile breaking across his face. Indeed, the expressions on so many faces in this video - spontaneous wonderment, joyful surprise, incredulous awe, and realizing they were witnessing something incredibly special - tell a story all their own.
And yes, that story needs to be told in this day and age, as our society slides into sociopolitcal frustration, economic despair, and personal anomie. Not exactly because of the Biblical text enshrined by Handel's Messiah, although even those who consider this masterwork as just a nice piece of music will be forced one day to acknowledge what it says.
If we could start at a base level, however, of acknowledging that great art has value, we all have five minutes in our day to stop and be personally touched by it.
I can't resist wondering if the impact would have been the same if the singers had performed something more saccharine like "White Christmas," "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree," or even "Hey, Santa Baby." As well-known as these songs may be, they don't make you stop in your tracks or otherwise pause to take in the moment. But the "Hallelujah Chorus" does, doesn't it? There's some element of transcendency about it that takes us away from the everyday and adopt a comparatively reverential demeanor, even if you just appreciate the music as music, not as a triumphant anthem of Christianity.
Indeed, doesn't it make you stop and bask in the beauty of something that takes a bit of ourselves and flashes visions of your "happy place" across your brain?
That's why this video has become a YouTube sensation. And probably why you'd like to see it again - so here's the link, again!
See? A little bit of culture does a body good!
____
Sneak peek: I'm planning a follow-up to this essay later this week!
For example, I'm just now getting around to talking about the October 30 "flash culture mob" event at the old Wanamaker's Department Store - now a Macy's - in downtown Philadelphia. Over 2 million people have already viewed the YouTube video of several hundred singers gathered in the department store's main hall who break into an unannounced rendition of Handel's thrilling "Hallelujah Chorus" from the Messiah.
You may recall that earlier this year, the City of Brotherly Love was plagued by a violent social phenomenon called "flash mobs," in which large gangs of rowdy teenagers would congregate and storm through city streets en mass, destroying private property, injuring passersby, and generally inciting chaos which wreaked havoc on businesses, imperiled racial harmony, and generally make Philadelphia life miserable. One flash mob even tore through the very same Macy's which hosted the "Hallelujah Chorus" singers, with punks punching stunned shoppers and destroying store fixtures and merchandise.
What a great juxtaposition, then, to have this event at the very same venue, showcasing the best of Philadelphia against its worst. In case you haven't yet seen it, click here for the most wonderful five minutes of Christmas shopping you'll ever spend.
Of course, the accolades reverberating around cyberspace by people responding to this video don't need repeating here. They're simply proof that the arts remain capable of moving the soul. As part of the "Random Acts of Culture" project by advocacy group Knight Arts, the Philadelphia event wasn't the first such production, nor will it be the last. The purpose for these events is to remind average Americans that the arts provide a surprisingly humanizing balm to our lives. Good art is good because we don't need somebody to explain to us why we're enjoying it. Sure, there were probably a lot of shoppers in Macy's who would never list classical music as their favorite, but they could still appreciate the grandeur they were witnessing. Chances are, blasting a rock anthem throughout the store would probably not have the same effect at all.
And kudos to Macy's, which could have just as easily nixed the whole idea, fearful of offending customers who might object to a Christian song being belted through the sales floors of the historic shopping mecca. Granted, Philadelphia's flagship Wanamaker's makes an ideal venue for just such an event, with its soaring atrium and historic pipe organ, the world's largest. And art lovers of many different faiths can appreciate the aesthetics of Handel's music on a purely artistic level, even if, as I've said, the oratorio genre isn't their favorite. Still, Macy's could have approved the general idea but insisted on a different song. As it was, however, with Christmas shopping underway and the doldrums of a weak economy to shake off, the right choices were made all around.
Oddly enough, I've watched the video several times with both the sound on and with the sound muted, and either way, I get kind of a goose-pimply vibe when I realize that black and white, young and old, are joining together to sing this incredible piece of music. At the end, there's a broad, tall black man, raising his right arm as he sings the final "Hallelujah," a wide smile breaking across his face. Indeed, the expressions on so many faces in this video - spontaneous wonderment, joyful surprise, incredulous awe, and realizing they were witnessing something incredibly special - tell a story all their own.
And yes, that story needs to be told in this day and age, as our society slides into sociopolitcal frustration, economic despair, and personal anomie. Not exactly because of the Biblical text enshrined by Handel's Messiah, although even those who consider this masterwork as just a nice piece of music will be forced one day to acknowledge what it says.
If we could start at a base level, however, of acknowledging that great art has value, we all have five minutes in our day to stop and be personally touched by it.
I can't resist wondering if the impact would have been the same if the singers had performed something more saccharine like "White Christmas," "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree," or even "Hey, Santa Baby." As well-known as these songs may be, they don't make you stop in your tracks or otherwise pause to take in the moment. But the "Hallelujah Chorus" does, doesn't it? There's some element of transcendency about it that takes us away from the everyday and adopt a comparatively reverential demeanor, even if you just appreciate the music as music, not as a triumphant anthem of Christianity.
Indeed, doesn't it make you stop and bask in the beauty of something that takes a bit of ourselves and flashes visions of your "happy place" across your brain?
That's why this video has become a YouTube sensation. And probably why you'd like to see it again - so here's the link, again!
See? A little bit of culture does a body good!
____
Sneak peek: I'm planning a follow-up to this essay later this week!
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Sagrada Familia's Exuberant Homage
So, there we were, my longtime friend Gretchen Schwab and I, browsing through Barnes & Noble, and suddenly she shrieks with excitement. To her noisy delight, she'd stumbled upon a big photo book of the architect Antoni Gaudi. Gretchen could barely contain herself. With giddy enthusiasm, she held it up for me to see.
"Isn't he the guy who designed wavy building facades in Spain?" I groaned, betraying my own personal distaste for Gaudi despite my friend's obvious admiration. Not that Gretchen, an avant-garde spirit herself, could be dissuaded. The fact that we didn't share the same opinion about such a polarizing designer didn't faze her one bit.
In case you've never heard of the Spanish architect Antoni Gaudi, he's not as obscure a historical figure as you might think. If you've visited Barcelona, you may have seen at least some of his striking apartment houses and curvaceous windows. But just by looking at Barcelona's skyline, you'll learn all you really need to know about him by his most famous commission. Indeed, his phantasmagorical Sagrada Familia basilica, which towers over the city, serves as an apt metaphor for his unusual life and ardent Roman Catholic faith.
After 130 years of construction, it remains unfinished, yet every bit as controversial and improbable as when he took over what was supposed to be a conventional neo-Gothic project in a conventional Spanish city. Indeed, even with completion still two decades away, a mere photo of Sagrada Familia will elicit an emphatic response. Not many buildings have that power.
Of Spain and Modernists
Gaudi is to architecture what Salvador Dali is to art, which since both men were Spaniards and cohorts in Modernism, probably shouldn't be surprising. Almost everybody has seen Dali's bizarre "Persistence of Memory" with its limp, dripping clock faces. Gaudi takes surrealism one flamboyant step further with his signature facades and windows. Only he's working in 3D, which meant that for Sagrada Familia, his only limitations came from physics and finances.
Interestingly enough, Sagrada Familia has been a pay-as-you-go, or expiatory, project for the Catholic church. In other words, faithful parishioners in Barcelona, not the treasury in Rome, have funded the construction of Gaudi's vision. That says a lot about the commitment to this vast undertaking by the people that have claimed it as their legacy.
But aside from special services, they've only been officially worshipping in Sagrada Familia for less than a week. After 130 years, the church has just recently been consecrated for regular use. On November 7, Pope Benedict XVI sprinkled "holy water" on the church's massive altar, making it suitable for use during daily Mass.
Tourists, meanwhile, have been visiting the site for decades, making it a stunning, world-famous attraction while masking its ineffectiveness as a working Catholic religious building.
Indeed, the church is still a living construction site. Its website even warns tourists that during strong rain or wind, the church will be closed because the elements can still enter the building. Officials hope to have the enormous basilica finished by 2026, the 100th anniversary of Gaudi's death. Even though Sagrada Familia has already become part of the Catholic lexicon in Barcelona.
Church as Really Expensive Art
As intriguing as it is, however, and as exquisite as many of its architectural flourishes may be, and as impressive as the hand-crafted engineering of the towering structures have proven to be, there's an uncomfortable question that remains: is it all worth it? Along with New York City's incomplete Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, Sagrada Familia pays hallowed homage to the ancient construction techniques of centuries-old cathedrals. It's no secret why Sagrada Familia and Saint John's are the only two projects of their kind in the world today: their exorbitant cost, the poor availability of skilled labor, and the sheer amount of time required to hand-craft key structural elements fly in the face of modern efficiencies. How viable a religious project is Sagrada Familia when this year's cost alone could reach $24 million?
Gray-suited accountants could quickly rattle off the conventional religious items $24 million could more readily purchase today. Protestant scholars could bemoan the extravagance as typical hubris by the Roman Catholics. Secularists would question whether the ancillary financial benefits to Barcelona's tourism industry exceed annual construction expenditures. Some critics even wonder if Pope Benedict's consecration, timed as it was after recent priest sex scandals in Europe, represented a splashy way to jump-start a moribund Spanish branch of his church.
Sagrada Familia certainly stuns the senses. Its size trumpets majesty. Its exterior embellishments put the "gaudy" in "Gaudi." Its soaring interior spaces audaciously subordinate mortal visitors. Its exquisite ceiling coffering is literally over the top.
Years ago, as an architecture student, I saw slides and photos of Sagrada Familia in lectures and textbooks, and scoffed at the absurdity of it all. At first, the tube-like latticework spires reminded me of war correspondent footage of pockmarked churches bombed during the World Wars in Europe. Indeed, even the novelist George Orwell called Sagrada Familia one of the world's most hideous buildings.
Maybe because Gaudi seems to be mocking the reverential classicism inherent in the great Gothic cathedrals, the traditionalist in me silently revolted against Sagrada Familia. Having already become prejudiced against Gaudi because of those silly windows and wavy building facades that we students had already encountered in theory lectures, Sagrada Familia just seemed like more of the same petulance and contempt for conventionalism.
Extra or Ordinary?
But now, looking at fresh images from the basilica, with more windows, parts of a roof, and a greater sense of cohesion as distinct components begin to resemble a spacial unit, I'm tempted to wonder if Gaudi's contempt for conventionalism may actually be appropriate for a house of worship. I still don't like parts of Sagrada Familia; the Nativity Facade looks like something sculpted from bleu cheese, the spires still seem caricaturish, and some of the vaults look like bats wings. Indeed, none of it is ordinary.
God is holy, which means He's set apart from the everyday. Yes, He's the Creator of the everyday, but only He is worshipped by all of His creation. Who else could possibly claim that? Do Gaudi's exuberant flourishes and garnishments draw attention to themselves as surreal elements of the structure? Or, do they individually and corporately point to the Deity towards Whom the activities within these spaces are intended?
I'm not going to get into the distinctives of Roman Catholicism vis-a-vis evangelical Christianity, particularly since arguments can be made that some aspects of Catholic liturgy are blasphemous to evangelicals. But ultimately, it is the God of both Jews and Christians to Whom acts of worship will be conducted in Sagrada Familia. Maybe not in ways most evangelicals, including myself, will embrace. Yet what Gaudi has envisioned for this basilica doesn't much depend on the forms this worship will take. By all appearances, his building embodies its own proclamation of the excellencies of our Creator God. Even if that proclamation defies convention.
Architecturally speaking, many religious structures today betray a slavish devotion to money and budgets more than they do a distinct acknowledgement of the deific properties of the Person being celebrated in the space. While prudence and fiscal discipline remain important Christian virtues, the story of the woman who broke open the expensive bottle of perfume to wash Christ's feet gets far less pulpit time.
Or household budget time. With many statistics showing less than half of all members contributing financially to their church, yet with many Christians enjoying discretionary income for a variety of unnecessary trinkets, trips, and trophies - and I'm preaching to myself here more than anybody else - no wonder Gaudi's effusive Sagrada Familia seems almost ludicrous next to our warehouse-looking megachurches. Even little country churches - which historically have embraced the best expressions of their local cultural aesthetics - now exude all the charm of a brick box.
What are we worshipping in these functional yet uninspiring places? Are we worshipping our hoarding mentality, spending just enough so that church members don't need to compromise their materialistic lifestyle? Or are we lavishing our Creator with material expressions of our love for Him?
Not that good design and inspiring architecture need to cost a lot of money. God-given creativity can do a lot with not a lot of cash. And not every faith community can - or should - come up with $24 million a year for their building fund. Sometimes, though, I wonder: don't we need to acknowledge that God doesn't want our ordinary stuff when we come to Him in worship?
Is He worth our ordinary effort, or our extraordinary effort?
_____
"Isn't he the guy who designed wavy building facades in Spain?" I groaned, betraying my own personal distaste for Gaudi despite my friend's obvious admiration. Not that Gretchen, an avant-garde spirit herself, could be dissuaded. The fact that we didn't share the same opinion about such a polarizing designer didn't faze her one bit.In case you've never heard of the Spanish architect Antoni Gaudi, he's not as obscure a historical figure as you might think. If you've visited Barcelona, you may have seen at least some of his striking apartment houses and curvaceous windows. But just by looking at Barcelona's skyline, you'll learn all you really need to know about him by his most famous commission. Indeed, his phantasmagorical Sagrada Familia basilica, which towers over the city, serves as an apt metaphor for his unusual life and ardent Roman Catholic faith.
After 130 years of construction, it remains unfinished, yet every bit as controversial and improbable as when he took over what was supposed to be a conventional neo-Gothic project in a conventional Spanish city. Indeed, even with completion still two decades away, a mere photo of Sagrada Familia will elicit an emphatic response. Not many buildings have that power.
Of Spain and Modernists
Gaudi is to architecture what Salvador Dali is to art, which since both men were Spaniards and cohorts in Modernism, probably shouldn't be surprising. Almost everybody has seen Dali's bizarre "Persistence of Memory" with its limp, dripping clock faces. Gaudi takes surrealism one flamboyant step further with his signature facades and windows. Only he's working in 3D, which meant that for Sagrada Familia, his only limitations came from physics and finances.Interestingly enough, Sagrada Familia has been a pay-as-you-go, or expiatory, project for the Catholic church. In other words, faithful parishioners in Barcelona, not the treasury in Rome, have funded the construction of Gaudi's vision. That says a lot about the commitment to this vast undertaking by the people that have claimed it as their legacy.
But aside from special services, they've only been officially worshipping in Sagrada Familia for less than a week. After 130 years, the church has just recently been consecrated for regular use. On November 7, Pope Benedict XVI sprinkled "holy water" on the church's massive altar, making it suitable for use during daily Mass.Tourists, meanwhile, have been visiting the site for decades, making it a stunning, world-famous attraction while masking its ineffectiveness as a working Catholic religious building.
Indeed, the church is still a living construction site. Its website even warns tourists that during strong rain or wind, the church will be closed because the elements can still enter the building. Officials hope to have the enormous basilica finished by 2026, the 100th anniversary of Gaudi's death. Even though Sagrada Familia has already become part of the Catholic lexicon in Barcelona.
Church as Really Expensive Art
As intriguing as it is, however, and as exquisite as many of its architectural flourishes may be, and as impressive as the hand-crafted engineering of the towering structures have proven to be, there's an uncomfortable question that remains: is it all worth it? Along with New York City's incomplete Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, Sagrada Familia pays hallowed homage to the ancient construction techniques of centuries-old cathedrals. It's no secret why Sagrada Familia and Saint John's are the only two projects of their kind in the world today: their exorbitant cost, the poor availability of skilled labor, and the sheer amount of time required to hand-craft key structural elements fly in the face of modern efficiencies. How viable a religious project is Sagrada Familia when this year's cost alone could reach $24 million?
Gray-suited accountants could quickly rattle off the conventional religious items $24 million could more readily purchase today. Protestant scholars could bemoan the extravagance as typical hubris by the Roman Catholics. Secularists would question whether the ancillary financial benefits to Barcelona's tourism industry exceed annual construction expenditures. Some critics even wonder if Pope Benedict's consecration, timed as it was after recent priest sex scandals in Europe, represented a splashy way to jump-start a moribund Spanish branch of his church.
Sagrada Familia certainly stuns the senses. Its size trumpets majesty. Its exterior embellishments put the "gaudy" in "Gaudi." Its soaring interior spaces audaciously subordinate mortal visitors. Its exquisite ceiling coffering is literally over the top.Years ago, as an architecture student, I saw slides and photos of Sagrada Familia in lectures and textbooks, and scoffed at the absurdity of it all. At first, the tube-like latticework spires reminded me of war correspondent footage of pockmarked churches bombed during the World Wars in Europe. Indeed, even the novelist George Orwell called Sagrada Familia one of the world's most hideous buildings.
Maybe because Gaudi seems to be mocking the reverential classicism inherent in the great Gothic cathedrals, the traditionalist in me silently revolted against Sagrada Familia. Having already become prejudiced against Gaudi because of those silly windows and wavy building facades that we students had already encountered in theory lectures, Sagrada Familia just seemed like more of the same petulance and contempt for conventionalism.
Extra or Ordinary?
But now, looking at fresh images from the basilica, with more windows, parts of a roof, and a greater sense of cohesion as distinct components begin to resemble a spacial unit, I'm tempted to wonder if Gaudi's contempt for conventionalism may actually be appropriate for a house of worship. I still don't like parts of Sagrada Familia; the Nativity Facade looks like something sculpted from bleu cheese, the spires still seem caricaturish, and some of the vaults look like bats wings. Indeed, none of it is ordinary.
God is holy, which means He's set apart from the everyday. Yes, He's the Creator of the everyday, but only He is worshipped by all of His creation. Who else could possibly claim that? Do Gaudi's exuberant flourishes and garnishments draw attention to themselves as surreal elements of the structure? Or, do they individually and corporately point to the Deity towards Whom the activities within these spaces are intended?
I'm not going to get into the distinctives of Roman Catholicism vis-a-vis evangelical Christianity, particularly since arguments can be made that some aspects of Catholic liturgy are blasphemous to evangelicals. But ultimately, it is the God of both Jews and Christians to Whom acts of worship will be conducted in Sagrada Familia. Maybe not in ways most evangelicals, including myself, will embrace. Yet what Gaudi has envisioned for this basilica doesn't much depend on the forms this worship will take. By all appearances, his building embodies its own proclamation of the excellencies of our Creator God. Even if that proclamation defies convention.
Architecturally speaking, many religious structures today betray a slavish devotion to money and budgets more than they do a distinct acknowledgement of the deific properties of the Person being celebrated in the space. While prudence and fiscal discipline remain important Christian virtues, the story of the woman who broke open the expensive bottle of perfume to wash Christ's feet gets far less pulpit time.
Or household budget time. With many statistics showing less than half of all members contributing financially to their church, yet with many Christians enjoying discretionary income for a variety of unnecessary trinkets, trips, and trophies - and I'm preaching to myself here more than anybody else - no wonder Gaudi's effusive Sagrada Familia seems almost ludicrous next to our warehouse-looking megachurches. Even little country churches - which historically have embraced the best expressions of their local cultural aesthetics - now exude all the charm of a brick box.
What are we worshipping in these functional yet uninspiring places? Are we worshipping our hoarding mentality, spending just enough so that church members don't need to compromise their materialistic lifestyle? Or are we lavishing our Creator with material expressions of our love for Him?
Not that good design and inspiring architecture need to cost a lot of money. God-given creativity can do a lot with not a lot of cash. And not every faith community can - or should - come up with $24 million a year for their building fund. Sometimes, though, I wonder: don't we need to acknowledge that God doesn't want our ordinary stuff when we come to Him in worship?
Is He worth our ordinary effort, or our extraordinary effort?
_____
Friday, November 5, 2010
Right Talkers Can Be So Wrong
By now, most of us know it was a hoax. Or, at the very least, a poorly-reported story.
As I write this, President Barak Obama is jetting his way across the globe with his wife and daughters to begin a 10-day trip to Asia that starts in India, where it was reported that security costs would run $200 million per day. It was estimated that over 30 warships, 40 planes, several bullet-proof limousines, 3,000 staffmembers, and dozens of hotel rooms would be involved in an excursion to break all previous records for a presidential state visit.
And right-wing elites were hopping mad. Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and other conservative pundits pounced on the story as just more proof about how out-of-touch the Obamas really are. First it was Michelle's lavish trip to Spain, which even drew gasps of surprise from the liberal press. There was the family's 27-hour snub of the oil-stricken Gulf Coast in favor of an impromptu weekend in Bar Harbor, Maine, and a longer vacation on Cape Cod, two New England havens of exclusivity.
At least when George Bush took his vacations, he usually went to his personal ranch here in Texas, which even his ardent left-wing detractors struggled to call fancy.
For Obama, the hapless limousine liberal, a $200 million-per-day junket to Asia, at the start of Diwali, no less, just seemed like more of the same wasteful spending from which Republican talking heads make their livings.
Except nobody bothered to run down the story's sources. Nobody checked leads. Nobody tried corroborating the validity of any facts. Nobody ran the security financials. Not even me when I posted a link to the story on my FaceBook page. I found the original story from an Indian news outlet on Google, and assumed media standards in India were at least as strong as ours. In addition, I figured the scathing implications from this story for our Democratic president would be enough to silence the American media, which would explain why nobody else was onto the story. The liberal media elite were still smarting over the results of Tuesday's elections; why would they heap any more bad news on Obama's plate?
I Apologize
But, I should have known better. Not that North America's leading press agencies report the news perfectly all the time, or exist in a vacuum free of bias. But it wasn't until yesterday that conventional media outlets decided the rumors had festered long enough, and spokesmen from both the White House and the Pentagon addressed the phantom scandal as nonsense.
So, to all my FaceBook friends and their friends who responded to my post, I'm truly sorry for being complicit in spreading falsehoods about our president and this Asia trip. Sometimes it may not seem like it, but I strive to make sure the things I tell my friends aren't rumors or gossip. I'll try to be more careful in the future.
Anybody Else? Rush? Glenn? We're Waiting...
There's more to this incident, however. I'm also taking this opportunity to prove why I don't believe Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck deserve much credibility. Not because I was gullible enough to think they might be right. And not even because we were all wrong. But because of what they haven't done.
Although this story has been proven false, neither of these two blowhards have acknowledged that. None have yet made any public retractions, which media personalities with any integrity would have done. They haven't even bothered to apologize for misleading their audience, which proves their sullen disrespect for people who hang onto their every word. And of course, they haven't apologized to the president. Apparently, free speech only goes one-way for these right-wingers.
For the record, Rush appears to have simply dropped the story. Like it never existed. But as of 11:56 am CST today, Beck's website still carried the story, "Financial crisis? What crisis? Obama spending $2 billion to visit Mumbai" on its home page.
This is what Beck says:
"If Mumbai sounds familiar to you it's because less than 2 years ago, radical Islamic terrorists carried out massive attacks that killed 173 people and wounded 308. It's so dangerous there that the President is traveling with 3,000 people, bringing 34 warships, and spending $200 million a day to make the trip. What in the world is so important to take such a risk, and the financial burden in the middle of a crisis? Something isn't right."
It's Not Right of the Right
Well, you are correct, Pontificator Beck. Something isn't right, and it's your own warped desire to make a name for yourself at the expense of somebody many conservatives don't like anyway. Obama's presidency, as ineffective and wasteful as it may be, is expendable in your pursuit of ratings and sensationalism. Granted, you couch your story in the form of a curious question, perhaps thinking that gives you the leeway to backtrack later and say you were just presenting a rumor to your audience without actually endorsing it yourself. But is that a hallmark of a trustworthy person?
What harm does any of this do? What's another negative story about Obama when so many already-angry voters have participated in one of the most anti-incumbent elections in history?
For one thing, it harms the conservative agenda by further obfuscating the relevancy and accuracy of the information they disseminate to their base. You can't say this is the first time Rush, Beck, & Co. have sacrificed integrity for ratings.
Second, it demeans the office of the US presidency, not so much for getting information wrong but failing to own up and apologize. Rush, Beck, & Co. hate it when their mortal enemy, the media, demeans Republican presidents, but apparently Democratic administrations are expendable.
Third, it shows to Third World idiots how easy it is to get Americans all worked up over something that isn't true. As new media takes more and more control of our information flow, propaganda can only become more insidious and more difficult to qualify.
Fourth, it's simply wrong ethically. If you make a mistake, don't we all still need to apologize and take steps to make sure it doesn't happen again? Have maturity, respectability, and integrity simply ceased to be important?
Two months ago, Glenn Beck hosted a rally in Washington DC with the slogan of "restoring honor."
See the discrepancy?
_____
As I write this, President Barak Obama is jetting his way across the globe with his wife and daughters to begin a 10-day trip to Asia that starts in India, where it was reported that security costs would run $200 million per day. It was estimated that over 30 warships, 40 planes, several bullet-proof limousines, 3,000 staffmembers, and dozens of hotel rooms would be involved in an excursion to break all previous records for a presidential state visit.
And right-wing elites were hopping mad. Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and other conservative pundits pounced on the story as just more proof about how out-of-touch the Obamas really are. First it was Michelle's lavish trip to Spain, which even drew gasps of surprise from the liberal press. There was the family's 27-hour snub of the oil-stricken Gulf Coast in favor of an impromptu weekend in Bar Harbor, Maine, and a longer vacation on Cape Cod, two New England havens of exclusivity.
At least when George Bush took his vacations, he usually went to his personal ranch here in Texas, which even his ardent left-wing detractors struggled to call fancy.
For Obama, the hapless limousine liberal, a $200 million-per-day junket to Asia, at the start of Diwali, no less, just seemed like more of the same wasteful spending from which Republican talking heads make their livings.
Except nobody bothered to run down the story's sources. Nobody checked leads. Nobody tried corroborating the validity of any facts. Nobody ran the security financials. Not even me when I posted a link to the story on my FaceBook page. I found the original story from an Indian news outlet on Google, and assumed media standards in India were at least as strong as ours. In addition, I figured the scathing implications from this story for our Democratic president would be enough to silence the American media, which would explain why nobody else was onto the story. The liberal media elite were still smarting over the results of Tuesday's elections; why would they heap any more bad news on Obama's plate?
I Apologize
But, I should have known better. Not that North America's leading press agencies report the news perfectly all the time, or exist in a vacuum free of bias. But it wasn't until yesterday that conventional media outlets decided the rumors had festered long enough, and spokesmen from both the White House and the Pentagon addressed the phantom scandal as nonsense.
So, to all my FaceBook friends and their friends who responded to my post, I'm truly sorry for being complicit in spreading falsehoods about our president and this Asia trip. Sometimes it may not seem like it, but I strive to make sure the things I tell my friends aren't rumors or gossip. I'll try to be more careful in the future.
Anybody Else? Rush? Glenn? We're Waiting...
There's more to this incident, however. I'm also taking this opportunity to prove why I don't believe Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck deserve much credibility. Not because I was gullible enough to think they might be right. And not even because we were all wrong. But because of what they haven't done.
Although this story has been proven false, neither of these two blowhards have acknowledged that. None have yet made any public retractions, which media personalities with any integrity would have done. They haven't even bothered to apologize for misleading their audience, which proves their sullen disrespect for people who hang onto their every word. And of course, they haven't apologized to the president. Apparently, free speech only goes one-way for these right-wingers.
For the record, Rush appears to have simply dropped the story. Like it never existed. But as of 11:56 am CST today, Beck's website still carried the story, "Financial crisis? What crisis? Obama spending $2 billion to visit Mumbai" on its home page.
This is what Beck says:
"If Mumbai sounds familiar to you it's because less than 2 years ago, radical Islamic terrorists carried out massive attacks that killed 173 people and wounded 308. It's so dangerous there that the President is traveling with 3,000 people, bringing 34 warships, and spending $200 million a day to make the trip. What in the world is so important to take such a risk, and the financial burden in the middle of a crisis? Something isn't right."
It's Not Right of the Right
Well, you are correct, Pontificator Beck. Something isn't right, and it's your own warped desire to make a name for yourself at the expense of somebody many conservatives don't like anyway. Obama's presidency, as ineffective and wasteful as it may be, is expendable in your pursuit of ratings and sensationalism. Granted, you couch your story in the form of a curious question, perhaps thinking that gives you the leeway to backtrack later and say you were just presenting a rumor to your audience without actually endorsing it yourself. But is that a hallmark of a trustworthy person?
What harm does any of this do? What's another negative story about Obama when so many already-angry voters have participated in one of the most anti-incumbent elections in history?
For one thing, it harms the conservative agenda by further obfuscating the relevancy and accuracy of the information they disseminate to their base. You can't say this is the first time Rush, Beck, & Co. have sacrificed integrity for ratings.
Second, it demeans the office of the US presidency, not so much for getting information wrong but failing to own up and apologize. Rush, Beck, & Co. hate it when their mortal enemy, the media, demeans Republican presidents, but apparently Democratic administrations are expendable.
Third, it shows to Third World idiots how easy it is to get Americans all worked up over something that isn't true. As new media takes more and more control of our information flow, propaganda can only become more insidious and more difficult to qualify.
Fourth, it's simply wrong ethically. If you make a mistake, don't we all still need to apologize and take steps to make sure it doesn't happen again? Have maturity, respectability, and integrity simply ceased to be important?
Two months ago, Glenn Beck hosted a rally in Washington DC with the slogan of "restoring honor."
See the discrepancy?
_____
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Striving Rivals? Competition's Place in Church
Here's a topic that doesn't often come up when discussing Christian disciplines: competition.
Yet within the past few days, I've come across two different Presbyterians with two diverse opinions on the subject.
One, Louis Weeks, used to be a missionary in Africa, and currently is president emeritus of Union Theological Seminary in Virginia. The other is Patrick Lafferty, currently on staff at my own Park Cities Presbyterian Church here in Texas. And while my personal prejudices may immediately be evidenced simply by introducing these two men, let's give Dr. Weeks the honor of setting the framework for considering the validity of competition as a Biblical characteristic.
Competition Good for Consumers, but Fellow Believers?
In his essay entitled Striving Together: Is There a Place for Competition in Ministry? which first appeared in Duke Divinity School's publication, Faith & Leadership, Weeks himself professes to never having seriously considered competition as a viable motivator for people of faith.
That is, not until a mentor of his boasted of its attributes.
This mentor had made competition the motivating factor for becoming a more educated Christian leader and preacher. He benchmarked his own progress in his professional faith life against other preachers and teachers, and whether the others knew it or not, engaged in a phantom race with them in his lifelong pursuit of learning.
Now, I understand that's not what most people would consider to be a negative form of competition. And, after all, it's the negative form of competition that raises the eyebrows in the context of things good Christians shouldn't do, isn't it? We think Christians should work together for the cause of Christ, and view competition as introducing unnecessary and even damaging behavior.
Competition, after all, implies that somebody is better at something than somebody else, and other people need to work harder to erase that lead. In economic terms, competition can benefit society by encouraging innovation and cost savings. At its core, competition involves discovering the weaknesses in competitors and exploiting those weaknesses for our own benefit. But it's one thing to invent a better widget through competition. It's another thing entirely to place yourself in competition with a fellow believer. To do so, you're forced to discover ways in which they struggle in their faith walk, lack the education you have, or have been led astray by the Devil. In reality, we end up using a fellow believer's weaknesses as leverage for us to succeed. Is that a proper demonstration of Christ-likeness? Isn't the world supposed to know we're Christians by our love for each other?
Sanctification Isn't Competition
Weeks appears to ignore these questions. He launches into an extrapolation of competition as a striving towards something in a fashion which God blesses because, after all, He gave us the desire to compete. Sports fanatics will abruptly stop here and endorse Weeks' theory heartily, because it appears to make a lot of sense. Many people derive considerable entertainment and even a physical adrenaline rush from participating in an intense sporting event. Even when I was watching the Texas Rangers play in the World Series this weekend, I found myself getting caught up in the excitement. And to a certain extent, there's nothing wrong with playing so as to prove who the better team is.
But when it comes to Christianity, we already know who the better team is. Indeed, we know Who is perfect at everything. So where does competition fit within communities of faith? Isn't it one of the weakest of arguments to justify doing something because "God gave us the desire to do it?" With that logic, we could sweep a whole ocean of sins under divine grace thanks to emotive proclivities. Any parent worth their salt can see right through the "it feels good, so it must be right" rationale, can't they?
Yet Weeks continues. He takes Paul's "running the race" analogy from 1 Corinthians 9 and "winning the prize" to validate the competitive spirit. If Paul did it, certainly we can compete against each other. But can we use such simplistic logic on this verse? Is Paul talking about running a race just to win a prize which will distinguish him as a purer follower of Christ than you and I? Instead, isn't he talking about the process of sanctification? In his analogy, a runner who values the significance of a race will train and discipline themself for their own good and the approval of the race officials. Where else in Scripture is sanctification compared to a competition between saints? When we reach those fabled Pearly Gates, will God be standing outside with gold, silver, and bronze medallions for win, place, or show?
Yes, we will get rewards of some kind based on what we've done with the opportunities God has given us for our earthly faith walks. But since He bestows the Fruits of the Spirit differently to His various children, can we tell what all of His benchmarks are for optimum performance so we can exceed what somebody else has done? Can we know how high-achieving somebody else's faith is? We can guess, based on their spiritual fruits, and we have Scripture to show us how to live lives that please God, but only He knows our hearts and the level of our true devotion to Him. Which means only He knows how well we're doing in the ministry opportunities with which He's blessed us.
Pegging our faith journey on what we see happening around us, how well we think other people preach, how well we think they teach or serve or cook or exercise their spiritual gifts, yadda, yadda, yadda... is this what Paul is talking about in his analogy of the race? We run so as to win the prize. But is God's prize based on a comparison between what you and I do here on Earth? Are we running against Paul, or Peter, or Billy Graham? Can you see how self-centered, humanistic, and ethnocentric such an approach can be? Is it really about us?
If Weeks' mentor wanted to please God as a preacher, and since being an effective communicator of Biblical exposition would be an appropriate use of the speaking and educational gifting God had given him, that still doesn't mean that pegging "success" on a pattern established by another preacher is a good way to gauge his own use of the gifts God had given him. Does it? Where in scripture do we receive instruction on how to quantify our faith performance and rank it against other believers? We can deploy Biblical discretion, but that's to help us be pure before God in a vertical relationship, not better than somebody else in a horizontal relationship.
The Personal Side of Competition
How does the concept of competition fit with the analogy of the Body of Christ as a physical body with many parts, organs, bones, and tissues? If the heart could compete against the eye, what would happen? If you left thumb wanted to race against your liver, what would happen?
No, I don't think competition is a good idea for fellow believers. Instead, let's move to Lafferty's viewpoint, which encompasses a far more holistically Biblical ethos.
Writing for Every Thought Captive, my church's weekly devotional e-mail, Lafferty takes a more relational perspective of competition, and in the essay from which I'm quoting him, talks about rivalry instead. After all, rivalry doesn't exist without competition, does it?
He writes: "Working out our own salvation [or, sanctification; what Paul was talking about when Weeks incorrectly applied the "running the race" analogy] first means to pause and reflect upon our priorities and practices — to take note of our patterns and how we conduct ourselves in them. Rivalry insists on proving ourselves right or better than others. It seeks to surpass them and it often manifests either in a delight over their loss or a despair at your own."
"If by what Jesus has done I am not only acceptable to God but beloved by Him, then my attempt to establish my worth through rivalry is not only a waste of effort, but entirely futile since it will only deliver a fleeting satisfaction, if any—in that is my folly."
"So rivalry offends God and destroys us as it seeks to best another. Whereas trust in the gospel assures us of an irrevocable acceptance by no less than God which a rivalrous spirit at first ignores, and then seduces me into a series of choices that will never yield abiding satisfaction. A preliminary grasp of the offensiveness and folly of rivalry is for now enough to move us to a new obedience—even if our walk by faith in that obedience is more often like a stumbling in it."
Reality Check
Seeking to serve God with the whole of your heart and being is certainly a noble ambition. But it's also a holy one. By invoking practices which require subjective interpretations about what God may or may not be doing in fellow believers, how do we position ourselves as their betters? To take Weeks' initial example, in the deceptively egocentric world of Christian preachers, benchmarking one's performance against someone else's may seem like an easy way to grade yourself and make improvements, but should Weeks and his mentor fall for such a beguiling trap?
Or should we? If we are to serve one another in love, bear with one another, and live in peace with each other (Colossians 3:12-15), where does competition fit in?
Maybe during a friendly round of golf or game of football. Or maybe even Scrabble.
But that's about it, isn't it? Not that this is a church rule or penalty meant to discourage improvement, but if we really love Christ and His people, we join with them in service.
Not against them.
1 Corinthians 9
24 Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize. 25 Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last; but we do it to get a crown that will last forever. 26 Therefore I do not run like a man running aimlessly; I do not fight like a man beating the air. 27 No, I beat my body and make it my slave so that after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified for the prize.
_____
Yet within the past few days, I've come across two different Presbyterians with two diverse opinions on the subject.
One, Louis Weeks, used to be a missionary in Africa, and currently is president emeritus of Union Theological Seminary in Virginia. The other is Patrick Lafferty, currently on staff at my own Park Cities Presbyterian Church here in Texas. And while my personal prejudices may immediately be evidenced simply by introducing these two men, let's give Dr. Weeks the honor of setting the framework for considering the validity of competition as a Biblical characteristic.
Competition Good for Consumers, but Fellow Believers?
In his essay entitled Striving Together: Is There a Place for Competition in Ministry? which first appeared in Duke Divinity School's publication, Faith & Leadership, Weeks himself professes to never having seriously considered competition as a viable motivator for people of faith.
That is, not until a mentor of his boasted of its attributes.
This mentor had made competition the motivating factor for becoming a more educated Christian leader and preacher. He benchmarked his own progress in his professional faith life against other preachers and teachers, and whether the others knew it or not, engaged in a phantom race with them in his lifelong pursuit of learning.
Now, I understand that's not what most people would consider to be a negative form of competition. And, after all, it's the negative form of competition that raises the eyebrows in the context of things good Christians shouldn't do, isn't it? We think Christians should work together for the cause of Christ, and view competition as introducing unnecessary and even damaging behavior.
Competition, after all, implies that somebody is better at something than somebody else, and other people need to work harder to erase that lead. In economic terms, competition can benefit society by encouraging innovation and cost savings. At its core, competition involves discovering the weaknesses in competitors and exploiting those weaknesses for our own benefit. But it's one thing to invent a better widget through competition. It's another thing entirely to place yourself in competition with a fellow believer. To do so, you're forced to discover ways in which they struggle in their faith walk, lack the education you have, or have been led astray by the Devil. In reality, we end up using a fellow believer's weaknesses as leverage for us to succeed. Is that a proper demonstration of Christ-likeness? Isn't the world supposed to know we're Christians by our love for each other?
Sanctification Isn't Competition
Weeks appears to ignore these questions. He launches into an extrapolation of competition as a striving towards something in a fashion which God blesses because, after all, He gave us the desire to compete. Sports fanatics will abruptly stop here and endorse Weeks' theory heartily, because it appears to make a lot of sense. Many people derive considerable entertainment and even a physical adrenaline rush from participating in an intense sporting event. Even when I was watching the Texas Rangers play in the World Series this weekend, I found myself getting caught up in the excitement. And to a certain extent, there's nothing wrong with playing so as to prove who the better team is.
But when it comes to Christianity, we already know who the better team is. Indeed, we know Who is perfect at everything. So where does competition fit within communities of faith? Isn't it one of the weakest of arguments to justify doing something because "God gave us the desire to do it?" With that logic, we could sweep a whole ocean of sins under divine grace thanks to emotive proclivities. Any parent worth their salt can see right through the "it feels good, so it must be right" rationale, can't they?
Yet Weeks continues. He takes Paul's "running the race" analogy from 1 Corinthians 9 and "winning the prize" to validate the competitive spirit. If Paul did it, certainly we can compete against each other. But can we use such simplistic logic on this verse? Is Paul talking about running a race just to win a prize which will distinguish him as a purer follower of Christ than you and I? Instead, isn't he talking about the process of sanctification? In his analogy, a runner who values the significance of a race will train and discipline themself for their own good and the approval of the race officials. Where else in Scripture is sanctification compared to a competition between saints? When we reach those fabled Pearly Gates, will God be standing outside with gold, silver, and bronze medallions for win, place, or show?
Yes, we will get rewards of some kind based on what we've done with the opportunities God has given us for our earthly faith walks. But since He bestows the Fruits of the Spirit differently to His various children, can we tell what all of His benchmarks are for optimum performance so we can exceed what somebody else has done? Can we know how high-achieving somebody else's faith is? We can guess, based on their spiritual fruits, and we have Scripture to show us how to live lives that please God, but only He knows our hearts and the level of our true devotion to Him. Which means only He knows how well we're doing in the ministry opportunities with which He's blessed us.
Pegging our faith journey on what we see happening around us, how well we think other people preach, how well we think they teach or serve or cook or exercise their spiritual gifts, yadda, yadda, yadda... is this what Paul is talking about in his analogy of the race? We run so as to win the prize. But is God's prize based on a comparison between what you and I do here on Earth? Are we running against Paul, or Peter, or Billy Graham? Can you see how self-centered, humanistic, and ethnocentric such an approach can be? Is it really about us?
If Weeks' mentor wanted to please God as a preacher, and since being an effective communicator of Biblical exposition would be an appropriate use of the speaking and educational gifting God had given him, that still doesn't mean that pegging "success" on a pattern established by another preacher is a good way to gauge his own use of the gifts God had given him. Does it? Where in scripture do we receive instruction on how to quantify our faith performance and rank it against other believers? We can deploy Biblical discretion, but that's to help us be pure before God in a vertical relationship, not better than somebody else in a horizontal relationship.
The Personal Side of Competition
How does the concept of competition fit with the analogy of the Body of Christ as a physical body with many parts, organs, bones, and tissues? If the heart could compete against the eye, what would happen? If you left thumb wanted to race against your liver, what would happen?
No, I don't think competition is a good idea for fellow believers. Instead, let's move to Lafferty's viewpoint, which encompasses a far more holistically Biblical ethos.
Writing for Every Thought Captive, my church's weekly devotional e-mail, Lafferty takes a more relational perspective of competition, and in the essay from which I'm quoting him, talks about rivalry instead. After all, rivalry doesn't exist without competition, does it?
He writes: "Working out our own salvation [or, sanctification; what Paul was talking about when Weeks incorrectly applied the "running the race" analogy] first means to pause and reflect upon our priorities and practices — to take note of our patterns and how we conduct ourselves in them. Rivalry insists on proving ourselves right or better than others. It seeks to surpass them and it often manifests either in a delight over their loss or a despair at your own."
"If by what Jesus has done I am not only acceptable to God but beloved by Him, then my attempt to establish my worth through rivalry is not only a waste of effort, but entirely futile since it will only deliver a fleeting satisfaction, if any—in that is my folly."
"So rivalry offends God and destroys us as it seeks to best another. Whereas trust in the gospel assures us of an irrevocable acceptance by no less than God which a rivalrous spirit at first ignores, and then seduces me into a series of choices that will never yield abiding satisfaction. A preliminary grasp of the offensiveness and folly of rivalry is for now enough to move us to a new obedience—even if our walk by faith in that obedience is more often like a stumbling in it."
Reality Check
Seeking to serve God with the whole of your heart and being is certainly a noble ambition. But it's also a holy one. By invoking practices which require subjective interpretations about what God may or may not be doing in fellow believers, how do we position ourselves as their betters? To take Weeks' initial example, in the deceptively egocentric world of Christian preachers, benchmarking one's performance against someone else's may seem like an easy way to grade yourself and make improvements, but should Weeks and his mentor fall for such a beguiling trap?
Or should we? If we are to serve one another in love, bear with one another, and live in peace with each other (Colossians 3:12-15), where does competition fit in?
Maybe during a friendly round of golf or game of football. Or maybe even Scrabble.
But that's about it, isn't it? Not that this is a church rule or penalty meant to discourage improvement, but if we really love Christ and His people, we join with them in service.
Not against them.
1 Corinthians 9
24 Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize. 25 Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last; but we do it to get a crown that will last forever. 26 Therefore I do not run like a man running aimlessly; I do not fight like a man beating the air. 27 No, I beat my body and make it my slave so that after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified for the prize.
_____
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Today's Been a Long Time Comin'
Today!
Today, something will take place half-way across our continent that many people thought would never happen.
Today, even people like me, who hardly pay any attention to sports, will cheerfully acknowledge that life will never be the same. At least here in Arlington, Texas, home to the American League's Texas Rangers baseball team.
Because today - in, of all places, San Francisco - the Texas Rangers play their first WORLD SERIES game.
"So What?"
If you've never followed the Texas Rangers, you're not alone. You also probably don't have a clue as to how big this is for us here in the Dallas - Fort Worth area, where for 39 years, the Rangers have proven you don't need to be good to have a strong fan base. And that's not really a compliment for the team. Or even, sometimes, the fans. Because if you're a real strong sports fan, there have been seasons where the Rangers abysmal performance didn't give anybody any reason to support them. Yet year in and year out, through better seasons and worse, a core of optimistic baseball nuts kept hoping that this year would be better than last year. Sometimes they were right - and many times, they were wrong.
But this year, the Rangers kept winning, and our local press - which has never treated baseball as royally as it does football, even during baseball season - started putting last night's scores at the top of the sportscasts, instead of burying them at the bottom like other years. By the All-Star break, some people had even mused about the Rangers' playoff potential. When new owners Chuck Greenberg and Nolan Ryan finally won the right in court to purchase the team, many North Texans were downright giddy.
Now, the Rangers haven't been so perennially awful that they've never before reached the playoffs. Under the celebrated leadership of Johnny Oates, the 1996, 1998 and 1999 teams played in the American League West championships, but they only won in '96. Still, that was better than nothing. And it gave the team's long-suffering fans hope that they could do better.
Someday.
Well, today, someday has arrived for this team and its fans. Some people may wonder what I'm gushing about, this supposedly-recovering cynic who probably can't think of enough good things to say about the sterile business America's Game has become. And yes, the stink being raised about Cliff Lee and his being wooed by the New York Yankees for next year has put a kind of pall over this season. Particularly after Lee's wife complained about being spit at in Yankee stadium, and Lee himself pooh-pooh'ed her sensitivity. I suppose Lee and his agent figure with the hundred million or so they're expecting from New York, Lee and his wife can afford some good marriage therapy.
Win or Lose, Arlington Wins
But that's an issue for another day. Today, in what there is of "downtown" Arlington, the local dive bar and grill, J. Gilligan's, is setting up tents and chairs in their only parking lot for a watch party tonight, with a mammoth remote screen on a truck parked to one side. Employees were unloading boxes of huge, brand-new flat-screen monitors for inside the joint. And of course, beer trucks were lining up around the block.
Over at the Rangers Ballpark in Arlington, crisp new "World Series" banners were being unfurled over the First Base gates, and I wasn't the only person with a camera taking photos of the historic sight.
Hopefully, the history made in San Francisco tonight can be the start of a new era for our boys of summer from here in Arlington, Texas. Perhaps I'm kinda excited because Arlington has never really been in the international spotlight like this before. Maybe it's because we taxpayers helped pay for the stadium - and even bring the team to town from DC to begin with - and now we're starting to see a return on that investment. Maybe it's even because my long-time baseball favorites, the New York Yankees, were ultimately the team we beat to get into the World Series, and their $206 million payroll has been consigned to watching the Fall Classic on TV along with the rest of us.
Which just goes to prove that money can't necessarily get you into the World Series. The Yankees haven't fielded a team in years; they've fielded overpriced super-stars who insist there's an "I" in "team." On the other hand, this year's group of Rangers players have performed like a genuine team all season long. And it's paid off.
And maybe that's what I like most of all.
_____
Today, something will take place half-way across our continent that many people thought would never happen.
Today, even people like me, who hardly pay any attention to sports, will cheerfully acknowledge that life will never be the same. At least here in Arlington, Texas, home to the American League's Texas Rangers baseball team.
Because today - in, of all places, San Francisco - the Texas Rangers play their first WORLD SERIES game.
"So What?"
If you've never followed the Texas Rangers, you're not alone. You also probably don't have a clue as to how big this is for us here in the Dallas - Fort Worth area, where for 39 years, the Rangers have proven you don't need to be good to have a strong fan base. And that's not really a compliment for the team. Or even, sometimes, the fans. Because if you're a real strong sports fan, there have been seasons where the Rangers abysmal performance didn't give anybody any reason to support them. Yet year in and year out, through better seasons and worse, a core of optimistic baseball nuts kept hoping that this year would be better than last year. Sometimes they were right - and many times, they were wrong.
But this year, the Rangers kept winning, and our local press - which has never treated baseball as royally as it does football, even during baseball season - started putting last night's scores at the top of the sportscasts, instead of burying them at the bottom like other years. By the All-Star break, some people had even mused about the Rangers' playoff potential. When new owners Chuck Greenberg and Nolan Ryan finally won the right in court to purchase the team, many North Texans were downright giddy.
Now, the Rangers haven't been so perennially awful that they've never before reached the playoffs. Under the celebrated leadership of Johnny Oates, the 1996, 1998 and 1999 teams played in the American League West championships, but they only won in '96. Still, that was better than nothing. And it gave the team's long-suffering fans hope that they could do better.
Someday.
Well, today, someday has arrived for this team and its fans. Some people may wonder what I'm gushing about, this supposedly-recovering cynic who probably can't think of enough good things to say about the sterile business America's Game has become. And yes, the stink being raised about Cliff Lee and his being wooed by the New York Yankees for next year has put a kind of pall over this season. Particularly after Lee's wife complained about being spit at in Yankee stadium, and Lee himself pooh-pooh'ed her sensitivity. I suppose Lee and his agent figure with the hundred million or so they're expecting from New York, Lee and his wife can afford some good marriage therapy.Win or Lose, Arlington Wins
But that's an issue for another day. Today, in what there is of "downtown" Arlington, the local dive bar and grill, J. Gilligan's, is setting up tents and chairs in their only parking lot for a watch party tonight, with a mammoth remote screen on a truck parked to one side. Employees were unloading boxes of huge, brand-new flat-screen monitors for inside the joint. And of course, beer trucks were lining up around the block.Over at the Rangers Ballpark in Arlington, crisp new "World Series" banners were being unfurled over the First Base gates, and I wasn't the only person with a camera taking photos of the historic sight.
Hopefully, the history made in San Francisco tonight can be the start of a new era for our boys of summer from here in Arlington, Texas. Perhaps I'm kinda excited because Arlington has never really been in the international spotlight like this before. Maybe it's because we taxpayers helped pay for the stadium - and even bring the team to town from DC to begin with - and now we're starting to see a return on that investment. Maybe it's even because my long-time baseball favorites, the New York Yankees, were ultimately the team we beat to get into the World Series, and their $206 million payroll has been consigned to watching the Fall Classic on TV along with the rest of us.
Which just goes to prove that money can't necessarily get you into the World Series. The Yankees haven't fielded a team in years; they've fielded overpriced super-stars who insist there's an "I" in "team." On the other hand, this year's group of Rangers players have performed like a genuine team all season long. And it's paid off.
And maybe that's what I like most of all.
_____
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Big City Lite
As a closet urbanist, I found an article on DallasNews.com today amusing.
Writer David Flick, of the Dallas Morning News, reports that people who grew up in the suburbs and are now living closer-in to downtown Dallas are having to re-learn urban survival skills. Usually, these are the same skills their parents abandoned when they also abandoned urban cores four decades ago or more, taking their families to the brand-spanking-new suburbs.
However, now that career professionals and empty-nesters have re-discovered the energy, efficiency, and convenience of city life, they're moving back into town in droves. They're paying premium prices for new lofts carved out of old warehouses, old office towers turned into condos, or new apartments erected on what had been abandoned lots. Abandoned, ironically, back when middle America couldn't move out to suburbia fast enough.
For suburbanites who keep moving the other way - not back to urban centers, but to the new frontiers of exurbia, only the nasty problems of urban decay can be seen: bad schools, crumbling streets, high crime, no backyards, few big-box stores. But moving downtown instead of further out of town isn't as dangerous, dirty, and confining as people think. Unfortunately for Dallas, whose crime rate has been notoriously high for years, one does need to be more careful in Uptown than in Frisco, but things aren't nearly as bad in Oak Lawn as they are in Oak Cliff. And by all accounts, Dallas is still much safer than downtown LA or Miami.
Faced with a daily commute from the exurbs to Big D, which can sometimes take 45 minutes to an hour one-way if there's a wreck, many logical people from the suburbs sit in gridlock and start thinking. About how all the freeways start looking the same. About why they're living so far away from their job. About how their new subdivision is aging faster than they thought it would.
As soon as the kids are in college - or before they decide to have any, lots of people have realized that setting up one's abode ten minutes from major employment centers literally means time added to your day. Even if you buy a condo on Turtle Creek and work near LBJ & Central, your commute is against traffic, which keeps it shorter than if you had to drive in from north Plano. And if you home-school your kids - another pro-urban trend - it doesn't make any difference if you like the big-city school district or not. Which in Dallas' case, leaves homeschooling as the only way upwardly mobile parents who don't want to pay for private school will settle in town.
Indeed, young families have begun taking advantage of all that can make big cities great places to raise children: existing park infrastructure, multi-cultural neighborhoods, legacy museums and concert halls, and other social institutions that pop culture has made suburbanites forget about.
Urban Living Takes Practice
Yet, as Flick points out, all is not rosy on the new urban frontier. For one thing, higher-density populations generate higher-decibel noise. Street parking can also become an issue, since people moving downtown from the suburbs have never made mass transit a part of their lives. Where can you fit all of those BMW's and SUV's without the acres of concrete parking lots the suburbs boast?
I've seen more than my share of laugh-out-loud examples of really bad parallel parking. You know - the one thing you probably flunked on your driver's test, but that even the DMV official figured you'd never need to know. At least Dallas drivers try to not hit the cars they're squeezing between. I remember watching careless drivers in New York City parallel parking - by bumping their vehicle back and forth between the fenders of vehicles in front and in back of them, working their way into their space one bumper-bump at a time.
Sometimes I get downright angry when I see enormous pickup trucks hogging two "compact car" spaces, or full-sized SUV's squeezed into one space - but with wide-angle rear-view mirrors that render the two spaces on either side unusable. This being Dallas, however, it's not just drivers of oversized vehicles that hog parking spaces. Along Oak Lawn's Lemmon Avenue, I once saw the prototypical urban vehicle, a SMART car, parked over the line, in a compact car lot - a true testament to either the driver's incompetence or narcissism. How can there be an excuse for not being able to fit a SMART car into any parking space?
Sure, it's Big D, but...
The more I read of Flick's article, the more I chucked about how good urban Dallasites have it here. For one thing, housing costs in most inner-city Dallas neighborhoods pale in comparison to those in places like San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, and New York City, where big city life can only be afforded by super-wealthy elites and welfare recipients. Dallas also doesn't have Manhattan's 18.25% parking tax or monthly garage rates that can exceed your monthly car payment. There's also no alternate-side-of-the-street parking here.
Dallas' new urbanites can choose from a good stock of relatively-new, amenity-choked apartments, townhomes, and condos that, although smaller than the sprawling homes in the 'burbs, don't lack any of the creature comforts they've come to expect. Meanwhile, back in New York City, many older apartments don't have dishwashers, the only air-conditioning comes from noisy window units, you're fortunate if your building has a washing machine in the basement, and those fancy doormen all belong to a union.
Yes, if you live in urban Dallas, you're living with over a million other folks in one of the Lone Star State's signature cities. I suppose there's some cachet in that. You're close to everything the tourists come here to see and do. And chances are, you're a lot closer to work than your office buddies who drive in from Collin County. If gasoline prices rocket past $4 a gallon again and stay there, you'll also be the envy of every poor schlep driving their Chevy Suburban back and forth from Allen every day.
Parallel parking may still be a challenge, and street noise much more noticeable, but take advantage of the fact that in Dallas, urbanity is a lot less expensive and challenging than it is in other big cities around the country. It's also a lot less crowded, as a friend of mine who lives across the street from the flagship Neiman-Marcus downtown can testify. Even though several office buildings have been converted into condos, and some restaurants and hotels attract big business, street life after dark is still nil.
Town and Country
When I drive to Dallas from my humble, aging, first-ring suburb of Arlington, sure, I enjoy the world-class concerts and chic restaurants that never seem to make it west of Stemmons Freeway. I marvel at the skyscrapers, people-watch all the hipsters and yuppies, and drool over the ultra-luxury foreign cars worth more than many homes in Arlington. But I also enjoy the fact that I can come home to a simple house with trees towering overhead and a creek in the back yard, where foxes and raccoons raise their own families. Last night, a possum waited for me to get out of its way when I got home after my walk.
I've done the urban thing already, and maybe I'll do it again someday. For now, however, at least I know that whenever I need my urban fix, Dallas is just down the freeway, ready to oblige. Even if it is only big city lite.
_____
Writer David Flick, of the Dallas Morning News, reports that people who grew up in the suburbs and are now living closer-in to downtown Dallas are having to re-learn urban survival skills. Usually, these are the same skills their parents abandoned when they also abandoned urban cores four decades ago or more, taking their families to the brand-spanking-new suburbs.
However, now that career professionals and empty-nesters have re-discovered the energy, efficiency, and convenience of city life, they're moving back into town in droves. They're paying premium prices for new lofts carved out of old warehouses, old office towers turned into condos, or new apartments erected on what had been abandoned lots. Abandoned, ironically, back when middle America couldn't move out to suburbia fast enough.
For suburbanites who keep moving the other way - not back to urban centers, but to the new frontiers of exurbia, only the nasty problems of urban decay can be seen: bad schools, crumbling streets, high crime, no backyards, few big-box stores. But moving downtown instead of further out of town isn't as dangerous, dirty, and confining as people think. Unfortunately for Dallas, whose crime rate has been notoriously high for years, one does need to be more careful in Uptown than in Frisco, but things aren't nearly as bad in Oak Lawn as they are in Oak Cliff. And by all accounts, Dallas is still much safer than downtown LA or Miami.
Faced with a daily commute from the exurbs to Big D, which can sometimes take 45 minutes to an hour one-way if there's a wreck, many logical people from the suburbs sit in gridlock and start thinking. About how all the freeways start looking the same. About why they're living so far away from their job. About how their new subdivision is aging faster than they thought it would.
As soon as the kids are in college - or before they decide to have any, lots of people have realized that setting up one's abode ten minutes from major employment centers literally means time added to your day. Even if you buy a condo on Turtle Creek and work near LBJ & Central, your commute is against traffic, which keeps it shorter than if you had to drive in from north Plano. And if you home-school your kids - another pro-urban trend - it doesn't make any difference if you like the big-city school district or not. Which in Dallas' case, leaves homeschooling as the only way upwardly mobile parents who don't want to pay for private school will settle in town.
Indeed, young families have begun taking advantage of all that can make big cities great places to raise children: existing park infrastructure, multi-cultural neighborhoods, legacy museums and concert halls, and other social institutions that pop culture has made suburbanites forget about.
Urban Living Takes Practice
Yet, as Flick points out, all is not rosy on the new urban frontier. For one thing, higher-density populations generate higher-decibel noise. Street parking can also become an issue, since people moving downtown from the suburbs have never made mass transit a part of their lives. Where can you fit all of those BMW's and SUV's without the acres of concrete parking lots the suburbs boast?
I've seen more than my share of laugh-out-loud examples of really bad parallel parking. You know - the one thing you probably flunked on your driver's test, but that even the DMV official figured you'd never need to know. At least Dallas drivers try to not hit the cars they're squeezing between. I remember watching careless drivers in New York City parallel parking - by bumping their vehicle back and forth between the fenders of vehicles in front and in back of them, working their way into their space one bumper-bump at a time.
Sometimes I get downright angry when I see enormous pickup trucks hogging two "compact car" spaces, or full-sized SUV's squeezed into one space - but with wide-angle rear-view mirrors that render the two spaces on either side unusable. This being Dallas, however, it's not just drivers of oversized vehicles that hog parking spaces. Along Oak Lawn's Lemmon Avenue, I once saw the prototypical urban vehicle, a SMART car, parked over the line, in a compact car lot - a true testament to either the driver's incompetence or narcissism. How can there be an excuse for not being able to fit a SMART car into any parking space?Sure, it's Big D, but...
The more I read of Flick's article, the more I chucked about how good urban Dallasites have it here. For one thing, housing costs in most inner-city Dallas neighborhoods pale in comparison to those in places like San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, and New York City, where big city life can only be afforded by super-wealthy elites and welfare recipients. Dallas also doesn't have Manhattan's 18.25% parking tax or monthly garage rates that can exceed your monthly car payment. There's also no alternate-side-of-the-street parking here.
Dallas' new urbanites can choose from a good stock of relatively-new, amenity-choked apartments, townhomes, and condos that, although smaller than the sprawling homes in the 'burbs, don't lack any of the creature comforts they've come to expect. Meanwhile, back in New York City, many older apartments don't have dishwashers, the only air-conditioning comes from noisy window units, you're fortunate if your building has a washing machine in the basement, and those fancy doormen all belong to a union.
Yes, if you live in urban Dallas, you're living with over a million other folks in one of the Lone Star State's signature cities. I suppose there's some cachet in that. You're close to everything the tourists come here to see and do. And chances are, you're a lot closer to work than your office buddies who drive in from Collin County. If gasoline prices rocket past $4 a gallon again and stay there, you'll also be the envy of every poor schlep driving their Chevy Suburban back and forth from Allen every day.
Parallel parking may still be a challenge, and street noise much more noticeable, but take advantage of the fact that in Dallas, urbanity is a lot less expensive and challenging than it is in other big cities around the country. It's also a lot less crowded, as a friend of mine who lives across the street from the flagship Neiman-Marcus downtown can testify. Even though several office buildings have been converted into condos, and some restaurants and hotels attract big business, street life after dark is still nil.
Town and Country
When I drive to Dallas from my humble, aging, first-ring suburb of Arlington, sure, I enjoy the world-class concerts and chic restaurants that never seem to make it west of Stemmons Freeway. I marvel at the skyscrapers, people-watch all the hipsters and yuppies, and drool over the ultra-luxury foreign cars worth more than many homes in Arlington. But I also enjoy the fact that I can come home to a simple house with trees towering overhead and a creek in the back yard, where foxes and raccoons raise their own families. Last night, a possum waited for me to get out of its way when I got home after my walk.
I've done the urban thing already, and maybe I'll do it again someday. For now, however, at least I know that whenever I need my urban fix, Dallas is just down the freeway, ready to oblige. Even if it is only big city lite.
_____
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Columbus Daze - Part 2
For Part 1, click here
Christian or Catholic? (continued)
You see, it’s not good enough to simply assume the flowery Christian-esque writings of Columbus adequately testify to his orthodox Christian faith. Catholicism and the Christianity of Martin Luther – and by extension most present-day evangelicals – are two different things. While you can be saved and call yourself a Roman Catholic, you cannot be a papist Catholic – what we would consider to be a conventional Roman Catholic – and believe that Christ offers the only way to salvation.
So how do we know that Columbus wasn’t saved? Well, we don’t. But we can prove that he was probably a papist, or Roman Catholic, by virtue of his very own writings and admissions.
Historians claim that his professed favorite prayer, which he would recite in Latin, was Jesu cum Maria sit nobis in via, which means "may Jesus with Mary be with us on the way."
Any evangelical can see right away that ascribing relatively equal significance to Mary as to Jesus represents heresy. The mother of Jesus may indeed have been most favored by God, but He never made her a deity. Mary cannot save anybody, nor can she convey prayers to God which people have sent to her. Nobody but Christ is our mediator.
In addition to his supposed favorite prayer, Columbus’ personal writings betray a man of stunning narcissism and religious fantasy which make it extremely difficult to qualify his Christian orthodoxy. For example, in his Letter of 1490 to his royal patrons in Spain, in which he outlined one of his expeditions, he enumerated 16 bullet points of content. One has to do with the provision of priests for conversion of the natives, two deal with provisions for civil affairs in the “New World,” and a whopping 11 bullet points detail the ways he intends to safeguard the gold he hopes to seize for Isabella and Ferdinand.
Maybe this is simply a good example of honoring one’s employers, but the focus on material riches appears to trump what some modern evangelicals have claimed to be Columbus’ overriding burden to see natives in the “New World” redeemed through the preaching of the Gospel.
Ethnocentrism Run Amok?
Speaking of redeeming the natives, Columbus doesn’t appear to have had a very good track record when it came to diplomacy and evangelism. Historians believe they have evidence of brutality and human rights atrocities committed, if not by Columbus himself, then by his men. Was Columbus at least complicit by his acquiescence to such things? Other explorers who claimed to have witnessed some of the atrocities committed by Columbus' crew actually convinced Spanish authorities to prohibit Columbus from being a ruler in the very land he “discovered.”
Indeed, liberal historians who have been accused by conservatives of revising history have been able to find substantial evidence that Columbus wasn’t as much a finder of the “New World” as he was an exploiter of it. He seemed less interested in validating the legitimacy of heathen cultures he encountered as he was estimating everything's value. His Spanish Catholic ethnocentrism marginalized the people groups he found here and allowed him to justify the abhorrent way he and his crews treated them. That’s not exactly the type of Christian I want to celebrate.
Self-Proclaimed Prophet?
Even more troubling than Columbus' motivations and actions - whether they were for the conversion of heathen natives or the fantastical visions of riches awaiting discovery - are his own writings. In them, Columbus ascribes disjointed and marginally heretical apocalyptic prophecies to his own self. In other words, Columbus appropriates Biblical passages foretelling the end of the world, and presumes to be the heir-apparent of God’s promises to send Christ back to the Earth after His Gospel is proclaimed across it.
Finding the missing link to Asia would, in Columbus’ mind, usher in an era when the Catholic Church could proselytize across the planet. Islam had already been defeated, or so he thought. What else was left except reaching the farthest corner of the globe for the Roman Catholics?
For example, in his mystical Book of Prophecies, Columbus quotes from the Old Testament book of Jeremiah, with God telling Jeremiah: "I formed you in the womb. I knew you before you were born. I set you apart. I set you as a prophet to the nations" (Jeremiah 1:5).
Then, in reference to this passage, Columbus speaks to the Lord, "This is what You ordained beforehand according to Your good pleasure, such as were written in Your book about me, in conformity with your secret purpose" (Book of Prophecies, Folio 15).
Don’t you have to be mighty confident in yourself - if not a little removed from reality - to even presume to place yourself as the equivalent of Jeremiah in the year 1492?
The Legacy of Columbus
In a way, the story of Columbus represents the typical conundrum faced by succeeding generations attempting to analyze the actions and accomplishments of such extroverted, Type-A, pivotal people. Indeed, he defies simple classifications and ascriptions. And he's inordinately blamed for much that would have happened eventually anyway.
Did Columbus and his crews introduce previously unknown diseases to the indigenous tribespeople of the Western Hemisphere? Probably. Did they take back syphilis to Europe? Maybe. But wouldn’t any explorer from any part of the world have done the same thing unintentionally, back when the science of diseases remained in its infancy? What if explorers had come from Asia to the western coasts of the Western Hemisphere? What diseases might they have brought?
Did Columbus and his crews perpetrate unholy and inhumane practices on the indigenous people groups they discovered here? Did they deceive them and plunder from them? Almost certainly. Just as any other discoverer hundreds of years ago likely would have done.
Did they foist authoritarian, foreign regimes and religion on the natives? Did they establish practices to exploit natural resources to the detriment of the natives? Did they exponentially expand the reaches of the burgeoning international slave trade?
Yes, yes, and yes. But from a historical perspective, how much does it really matter that it was Columbus who did it, and not another explorer working for another empire-building nation or the already-lucrative African slave industry?
World history is as imperfect as its participants. And hindsight is always 20/20. If our world lasts long enough, what will generations 400 or 600 years from ours say about us? By no means do I mean to imply that Columbus did no wrong. Just because Columbus opened up a completely new chapter of world history doesn't give him bonus points, free sins, or the legendary indulgences of his contemporary Catholic church. None of this is to absolve Columbus of any culpability for what today we would consider crimes against humanity. We're all responsible for what we do and don't do in life, no matter who we are. My purpose here is simply to indemnify Columbus as the only explorer capable of such things. Who knows? Somebody else could have been much worse.
Columbus in Light of God's Sovereignty
Columbus' expeditions remind us of the power of history's trajectory. But the epic tale of Christopher Columbus also raises questions that black-and-white conservative ideology can't answer. By allowing Columbus to establish the trade routes that contributed to the eventual exploitation of the Western Hemisphere, was God blessing Columbus and rewarding his faith, or simply allowing a more beneficent scenario through Columbus as opposed to a tyrannical despot from Asia or England? Was God indeed intentionally moving to establish what would become the United States? Was Columbus the key component in establishing what right-wing conservatives unfortunately misquote as "a city on a hill?"
Or was he just an ego-maniacal bounty hunter, twisted by anguishing visions of salvific authority and brainwashed by vainglorious papist rhetoric? Somebody who makes for a great hero, but a lousy human being?
In the end, from the perspective of God's eternal sovereignty, how much does that really matter to us? I'm not sure. But can't we at least appreciate the stunning and completely history-changing precedent Columbus managed to set? Not as the discoverer of the "New World" per say, but as the first maritime explorer to chart his way to and from our vast hemisphere. Can you imagine what a feat that was in his day and age? For better or worse, his story rings with amazing parallels to other epic struggles of history, including the strife between Christendom and Islam, the gap between technology and the lack thereof, the blindness of ethnocentrism, and the rubric that money never buys contentment.
Does it matter if God used Columbus instead of somebody else to establish a viable trade route to the Western Hemisphere? Eventually, anybody sailing west would have hit our eastern shores and found their way back home; does it matter that God allowed Columbus to be the first? I'm not sure. That's the thing about God's sovereignty: it's His, not ours.
Evangelicals and Their New Love for Columbus
Does it matter that Columbus probably wasn't somebody whose faith modern evangelicals should embrace? Yes! That does matter!
It's been a relatively recent phenomenon, this urge by right-wing people of faith to redeem historical figures to orthodox Christianity. They've done it with Washington, they've tried to do it with Jefferson and Franklin, and Columbus has also been subjected to their own version of revisionist history.
God has allowed perfectly evil men to accomplish astonishing things throughout history. Consider Herod, Hitler, and Mao. Yet He always fulfills His perfect will no matter how heinous the motivations of mankind. Could it be that despite the fallacies of Columbus' exploits, God ordained for the United States to flourish anyway?
We don't know for certain, do we? So why bother with idle speculation? Let's just take what we do know about Columbus and marvel at how God's ageless plan for our universe continues to unfold.
Exploration exists as a God-given motivator. With it, we can learn more about His Creation, and by example, more about Him as the Creator. Just like everything else, it's what we do with our opportunities for exploration that counts. On that score, you have to ignore an awful lot of history to redeem the personal legacy of Christopher Columbus.
Maybe that's why it's best we leave that task to God.
_____
Christian or Catholic? (continued)
You see, it’s not good enough to simply assume the flowery Christian-esque writings of Columbus adequately testify to his orthodox Christian faith. Catholicism and the Christianity of Martin Luther – and by extension most present-day evangelicals – are two different things. While you can be saved and call yourself a Roman Catholic, you cannot be a papist Catholic – what we would consider to be a conventional Roman Catholic – and believe that Christ offers the only way to salvation.
So how do we know that Columbus wasn’t saved? Well, we don’t. But we can prove that he was probably a papist, or Roman Catholic, by virtue of his very own writings and admissions.
Historians claim that his professed favorite prayer, which he would recite in Latin, was Jesu cum Maria sit nobis in via, which means "may Jesus with Mary be with us on the way."
Any evangelical can see right away that ascribing relatively equal significance to Mary as to Jesus represents heresy. The mother of Jesus may indeed have been most favored by God, but He never made her a deity. Mary cannot save anybody, nor can she convey prayers to God which people have sent to her. Nobody but Christ is our mediator.
In addition to his supposed favorite prayer, Columbus’ personal writings betray a man of stunning narcissism and religious fantasy which make it extremely difficult to qualify his Christian orthodoxy. For example, in his Letter of 1490 to his royal patrons in Spain, in which he outlined one of his expeditions, he enumerated 16 bullet points of content. One has to do with the provision of priests for conversion of the natives, two deal with provisions for civil affairs in the “New World,” and a whopping 11 bullet points detail the ways he intends to safeguard the gold he hopes to seize for Isabella and Ferdinand.
Maybe this is simply a good example of honoring one’s employers, but the focus on material riches appears to trump what some modern evangelicals have claimed to be Columbus’ overriding burden to see natives in the “New World” redeemed through the preaching of the Gospel.
Ethnocentrism Run Amok?
Speaking of redeeming the natives, Columbus doesn’t appear to have had a very good track record when it came to diplomacy and evangelism. Historians believe they have evidence of brutality and human rights atrocities committed, if not by Columbus himself, then by his men. Was Columbus at least complicit by his acquiescence to such things? Other explorers who claimed to have witnessed some of the atrocities committed by Columbus' crew actually convinced Spanish authorities to prohibit Columbus from being a ruler in the very land he “discovered.”
Indeed, liberal historians who have been accused by conservatives of revising history have been able to find substantial evidence that Columbus wasn’t as much a finder of the “New World” as he was an exploiter of it. He seemed less interested in validating the legitimacy of heathen cultures he encountered as he was estimating everything's value. His Spanish Catholic ethnocentrism marginalized the people groups he found here and allowed him to justify the abhorrent way he and his crews treated them. That’s not exactly the type of Christian I want to celebrate.
Self-Proclaimed Prophet?
Even more troubling than Columbus' motivations and actions - whether they were for the conversion of heathen natives or the fantastical visions of riches awaiting discovery - are his own writings. In them, Columbus ascribes disjointed and marginally heretical apocalyptic prophecies to his own self. In other words, Columbus appropriates Biblical passages foretelling the end of the world, and presumes to be the heir-apparent of God’s promises to send Christ back to the Earth after His Gospel is proclaimed across it.
Finding the missing link to Asia would, in Columbus’ mind, usher in an era when the Catholic Church could proselytize across the planet. Islam had already been defeated, or so he thought. What else was left except reaching the farthest corner of the globe for the Roman Catholics?
For example, in his mystical Book of Prophecies, Columbus quotes from the Old Testament book of Jeremiah, with God telling Jeremiah: "I formed you in the womb. I knew you before you were born. I set you apart. I set you as a prophet to the nations" (Jeremiah 1:5).
Then, in reference to this passage, Columbus speaks to the Lord, "This is what You ordained beforehand according to Your good pleasure, such as were written in Your book about me, in conformity with your secret purpose" (Book of Prophecies, Folio 15).
Don’t you have to be mighty confident in yourself - if not a little removed from reality - to even presume to place yourself as the equivalent of Jeremiah in the year 1492?
The Legacy of Columbus
In a way, the story of Columbus represents the typical conundrum faced by succeeding generations attempting to analyze the actions and accomplishments of such extroverted, Type-A, pivotal people. Indeed, he defies simple classifications and ascriptions. And he's inordinately blamed for much that would have happened eventually anyway.
Did Columbus and his crews introduce previously unknown diseases to the indigenous tribespeople of the Western Hemisphere? Probably. Did they take back syphilis to Europe? Maybe. But wouldn’t any explorer from any part of the world have done the same thing unintentionally, back when the science of diseases remained in its infancy? What if explorers had come from Asia to the western coasts of the Western Hemisphere? What diseases might they have brought?
Did Columbus and his crews perpetrate unholy and inhumane practices on the indigenous people groups they discovered here? Did they deceive them and plunder from them? Almost certainly. Just as any other discoverer hundreds of years ago likely would have done.
Did they foist authoritarian, foreign regimes and religion on the natives? Did they establish practices to exploit natural resources to the detriment of the natives? Did they exponentially expand the reaches of the burgeoning international slave trade?
Yes, yes, and yes. But from a historical perspective, how much does it really matter that it was Columbus who did it, and not another explorer working for another empire-building nation or the already-lucrative African slave industry?
World history is as imperfect as its participants. And hindsight is always 20/20. If our world lasts long enough, what will generations 400 or 600 years from ours say about us? By no means do I mean to imply that Columbus did no wrong. Just because Columbus opened up a completely new chapter of world history doesn't give him bonus points, free sins, or the legendary indulgences of his contemporary Catholic church. None of this is to absolve Columbus of any culpability for what today we would consider crimes against humanity. We're all responsible for what we do and don't do in life, no matter who we are. My purpose here is simply to indemnify Columbus as the only explorer capable of such things. Who knows? Somebody else could have been much worse.
Columbus in Light of God's Sovereignty
Columbus' expeditions remind us of the power of history's trajectory. But the epic tale of Christopher Columbus also raises questions that black-and-white conservative ideology can't answer. By allowing Columbus to establish the trade routes that contributed to the eventual exploitation of the Western Hemisphere, was God blessing Columbus and rewarding his faith, or simply allowing a more beneficent scenario through Columbus as opposed to a tyrannical despot from Asia or England? Was God indeed intentionally moving to establish what would become the United States? Was Columbus the key component in establishing what right-wing conservatives unfortunately misquote as "a city on a hill?"
Or was he just an ego-maniacal bounty hunter, twisted by anguishing visions of salvific authority and brainwashed by vainglorious papist rhetoric? Somebody who makes for a great hero, but a lousy human being?
In the end, from the perspective of God's eternal sovereignty, how much does that really matter to us? I'm not sure. But can't we at least appreciate the stunning and completely history-changing precedent Columbus managed to set? Not as the discoverer of the "New World" per say, but as the first maritime explorer to chart his way to and from our vast hemisphere. Can you imagine what a feat that was in his day and age? For better or worse, his story rings with amazing parallels to other epic struggles of history, including the strife between Christendom and Islam, the gap between technology and the lack thereof, the blindness of ethnocentrism, and the rubric that money never buys contentment.
Does it matter if God used Columbus instead of somebody else to establish a viable trade route to the Western Hemisphere? Eventually, anybody sailing west would have hit our eastern shores and found their way back home; does it matter that God allowed Columbus to be the first? I'm not sure. That's the thing about God's sovereignty: it's His, not ours.
Evangelicals and Their New Love for Columbus
Does it matter that Columbus probably wasn't somebody whose faith modern evangelicals should embrace? Yes! That does matter!
It's been a relatively recent phenomenon, this urge by right-wing people of faith to redeem historical figures to orthodox Christianity. They've done it with Washington, they've tried to do it with Jefferson and Franklin, and Columbus has also been subjected to their own version of revisionist history.
God has allowed perfectly evil men to accomplish astonishing things throughout history. Consider Herod, Hitler, and Mao. Yet He always fulfills His perfect will no matter how heinous the motivations of mankind. Could it be that despite the fallacies of Columbus' exploits, God ordained for the United States to flourish anyway?
We don't know for certain, do we? So why bother with idle speculation? Let's just take what we do know about Columbus and marvel at how God's ageless plan for our universe continues to unfold.
Exploration exists as a God-given motivator. With it, we can learn more about His Creation, and by example, more about Him as the Creator. Just like everything else, it's what we do with our opportunities for exploration that counts. On that score, you have to ignore an awful lot of history to redeem the personal legacy of Christopher Columbus.
Maybe that's why it's best we leave that task to God.
_____
Monday, October 11, 2010
Columbus Daze - Part 1
What you think about Christopher Columbus says a lot about your heritage.
- If you're a Native American, a Caribbean native, or a native of Central or South America, you probably consider Columbus to be a barbaric marauder who introduced previously unknown diseases to the Western Hemisphere and pillaged its natural resources.
- If you're a white, Anglo-Saxon protestant, you probably consider Columbus to be the great explorer who discovered the New World.
- If you're a super-conservative church-going WASP, you may consider Columbus to be God's gift to western civilization.
- If you're a liberal Ivy Leaguer, you probably consider Columbus to be the seminal cause of every problem western civilization has known since 1492.
- If you're Spanish or Italian, you probably gush with pride over the accomplishments this intelligent, long suffering, single-minded, and quintessentially charismatic man managed to achieve when everybody else thought the world was flat.
Sailing the Ocean Blue
Well, like most characters of history whose legacy has grown larger than life over the intervening centuries, Columbus really was a little of everything.
Except the first person to say the world wasn't flat. Greeks had been claiming the Earth is spherical since the Third Century BC. And Columbus's four voyages didn't necessarily prove the Earth is round, either. Ferdinand Magellan did that in 1521.
But Columbus did indeed achieve a stunning global feat with his exploits in search of a new spice route to Asia. He persuaded Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain to bankroll his excursions and let him share in the profits. And while he wasn't the first person to discover the New World of the Western Hemisphere (where'd all those natives he met here come from?), he did establish nautical trade routes to this land mass, even if it wasn't the Orient. That is his claim to fame which nobody can deny. A master navigator, Columbus literally charted new waters to open up new territories... for exploration, as his supporters see it; or exploitation, as his detractors see it.
Either way, "discovery" of the "New World" was unavoidable.
For even in 1492, the world was becoming increasingly smaller and global. Eventually, somebody in Europe or Africa was bound to want whatever lay west of the world they already knew. You see, "go west, young man" isn't so much an American expression as it is one of western civilization as a whole. And for the Spaniards, fresh from defeating Islamists and restoring Roman Catholicism after generations of war, the close of the 15th Century brought heady days of victory. Their newfound sense of invincibility helped grease the wheels of ambition driving Columbus across the Atlantic.
Had Asians been the first to establish a globally-relevant sociopolitical beachhead on the Western Hemisphere, world history would have taken a completely different course. America's pioneers would have said "go east, young man" in a decidedly Asian accent. The natives who were here when Columbus arrived obviously hadn't the sophistication or inclination to establish robust ties with Asia, Europe, or Africa, so our continent was ripe for incursion from across either the Atlantic or Pacific. Was it Columbus' fault that he possessed both the technological ability and the audacious determination to secure a stronghold here before the British, the Dutch, or the Chinese?
Villain or Hero?
Today, educated elites like to join in the Columbus-bashing that "New World" natives and Columbus' own rival explorers began during his day. For a man who really only plotted the coordinates to a new source for raw materials, Columbus has been vilified for so much more. It's easy to forget that if he didn't discover the new trade route which he mistakenly thought had landed him in Asia, somebody else would have. Maybe somebody with less loyalty to European royalty, yet even more narcissism in his own personal fate. Would somebody else other than Columbus have been better? We'll never know.
You see, Columbus was himself a piece of work. He considered himself an emissary of God to trigger the Apocalypse and a Biblical Heaven on Earth. His writings, which have been characterized as either delusional by critics or prophetic by admirers, depict his voyages as not only an emphatic coda to the demise of Islam (oh, if only that were the case!), but also the extension of the spreading of the Gospel. He believed that once everyone on Earth is taught Christianity, then Christ will return to reign over the world. Columbus even claims this as his motivation for exploration in his treatise, The Book of Prophesies.
Some scholars claim The Book of Prophesies merely represents his desperate bid to cajole Isabella and Ferdinand to keep financing his trips to the Americas. Others claim that it was a reverential exegesis of Columbus' personal faith, and as such represents a manifestation of divine providence in the founding of what became the United States.
Indeed, having become the caricature of New World exploration, Columbus has been enshrined by many right-wing conservatives as a Christian hero who was directed by God to establish a beachhead of Christianity upon these previously heathen shores. And while it's impossible to deny that God allowed Columbus to be the explorer who navigated the first commercially-viable route between the Western Hemisphere and Europe, it's not entirely possible to claim that Columbus believed on the Lord Jesus Christ as his Savior.
Christian or Catholic?
As a glorified emissary of the Spanish crown, Columbus would have been well-versed in the stoic imperatives and colloquialisms of the Roman Catholic Church vis-a-vis sovereignty. He desired fame. He became obsessed with end-times prophecies. Some have even even suggested he may have been Jewish and the victim of anti-Semitism. Might all of these factors have combined to make him a gifted mariner as well as a skilled salesman with extraordinary drive? Evangelical in tone, his writings gush with lavish, well-honed euphemisms from the Catholic lexicon validating his zeal and self-aggrandizement. Columbus certainly knew how to extract favors from his royal patrons.
European monarchs generally contrived their authority from misquoted Biblical texts, which the Roman Catholic Church was only to happy to promulgate as long as it fit their interests. So for Columbus to serve both the church and the crown by his voyages to the Americas, he would have to meet with their favor. Especially after his first return voyage, when he proved he knew how to get back home, contrary to the fatalistic expectations of his sovereigns. It's worth noting that the contract for his first trip rewarded Columbus handsomely upon his homecoming in part because Isabella and Ferdinand never thought they'd see him again.
Part of the problem with ascribing saintly affection to Columbus involves the murky character of the Roman Catholic Church during this time. You see, 25 years after Columbus first landed on our continent, Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to a Roman Catholic Church door in Germany, marking the beginning of Protestantism's split from the faith of Columbus. Doesn't this challenge the generally Christianized interpretation of his God-given destiny, the assumed parity between Roman Catholicism in Columbus' day and orthodox Christianity, and the validity of his personal faith in the Trinity?
Tomorrow: Conclusion (and it's not as anti-Columbus as you may think!)
_____
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)