Under with Undershirts

When I spent a summer working and ministering in Yellowstone National Park, there were quite a few European students who had traveled across the pond for their American mountain adventure. Being a student myself at the time, a popular topic was the differences in atmosphere between European and American universities. I remember a French girl whose face lit up with a smile of disbelief when I explained that it was not unusual for girls in my school, to show up for class in their pajamas. “If I did that, everyone would talk about me!” she laughed in her disarming French accent.

In truth, I was not taken aback myself by the casualness of the American student. Indeed, I have found it natural and refreshing, a statement to the world that appearance, smooth faces, combed hair and pressed shirts don’t matter. However, perhaps showing my age, as well as the conservative, professional attitude of the city in which I live, I have noticed the rise of a fashion that is too casual by even my low standards. It is now cool among young men to walk around in their undershirts, without an overshirt to hide them.

I understand part of the appeal. They are very inexpensive, they breathe well (any material that thin and cheaply put together breathes well) and, for those who have it, they don’t hide the shape masculine broad shoulders and big biceps (though this is not a precursor to most of the young men who wear them).

However, these thin shirts are designed to be sweat-catchers, and nothing more. These sweat-catchers prevent, sometimes in vain, us men from fouling our offices with body odor or turning our nice work shirts a putrid shade of tan. Moreover, they are not designed for modesty. The unsightly man-nips can be seen, particularly when the classroom air-conditioning is cranking to combat the summer heat. Chest, armpit and even back hair sprout through the translucent  material like weeds through a city sidewalk. Any sign of sweat turns even the freshest white shirt into a shade of fleshy pink.

Undershirts also give an aura of mediocrity. It is by far the most un-creative of clothes, surpassing even tighty-whities. The white blandness simply lacks personality. Most rebellious fashion statements – tattoos, piercings, heavy-metal T-shirts – gave the wearer a sense of color and character. An undershirt that is not under anything seems to drain the wearer of all of these things. This does not mean our white-clad young friends are as colorless in their minds as they are in their clothes. However, our clothes, even the most mundane and casual, are a great way to express the quirky parts of our personalities that we don’t always get to put into words.

This is particularly troubling given the wide and cheap availability of T-shirts. Indeed, we are living in a golden age of cheap cotton garments. There are hundreds of competing websites where aspiring casual fashionistas can submit and sell their design or joke. The best ones usually end up in Justin's collection. Moreover, every event, sports-team, university and politician will have a cool T-shirt just for you. On Thursday night, I saw the Capitol Hill athletes of the DC soft-ball leagues. They were having their post-game drinks at the Southeast Capitol bars. The shirts were creative and had cool colors and pictures.  My favorites were a team called “big in Japan” and had an ancient, Asian-looking fish on the front. As I write this, I am wearing one of my favorite T-shirts: a kelly-green shirt from my Katrina-recovery days. Good work, good color, good memories, not to mention, much more exciting than any of my barely-threaded sweat-catchers that I wear under my button-downs.  

Forgiveness and Reconciliation in the Washington Post

This past April, I had the privilege of seeing Laura Waters Hinson’s excellent film, As We Forgive, on forgiveness and reconciliation in Rwanda. See the film, buy the film and tell your friends. This past Saturday’s Washington Post wrote about Laura – not just the film, but about how the lesson of forgiveness and reconciliation met her on a very personal level. Read all about here. As We Forgive should inspire all of us to a Christ-like forgiveness. His ministry was of reconciliation to God and to each other. It's beautiful to read how it started with the filmmaker herself.  

Jesus in Colorado Springs

While I was working in New Orleans, some of my colleagues were listening to a Mo Leverett live CD. Between spiritually laced folks songs, Mo argued that New Orleans was the kind of place where Jesus would hang out. I wish I remembered precisely what he said, but the gist was that Jesus was attracted to the “sinners” and the marginalized. Because of this, New Orleans is more of a place for Jesus than Colorado Springs, the "Vatican of the evangelical movement". I have been inclined to agree with him. 

The Civilians provided me (along with a few friends) some good food for thought, however. I had never heard of the Civilians before, but I love their concept of theater. They develop "original projects based on creative investigation of actual experience." As anyone who has darkened the sleek glass doors of a mega-church could attest to, they did this very well in This Beautiful City.

This Beautiful City explores the evangelical political movement in Colorado Springs, as well as those whom they rub up against, and those who feel left in the margins. If I understand it correctly, the characters in the play are Colorado Springs residents they met, interviewed, dined with and went to church with. It included Air Force cadets, church members, political activists, ministers, a transvestite and fallen pastors. One of the fallen pastors was none other than Ted Haggard. His scandal of homosexual prostitution and meth addiction broke during their visit, which, of course, gave a very public dose of reality to an already interesting backdrop.

The six of us who visited the play were all Christians, and I noticed we laughed more than many of those around us. They were knowing laughs. The stage was set up like a mega-church with two screens on either side of it - during one of the sequences, words to the songs appeared on them.  We laughed knowingly as songs, inspiring words, calls to stand and technological savvy attempted to create a space for spiritual experience. There was a Pentecostal church called RHOP whose members saw visions of demons in every corner and prophesied whatever seemed to come to their mind. They reminded me of some of the Pentecostals who were in New Orleans after Katrina, such as the preacher who excitedly promised that every one of the dilapidated houses would have a big screen TV. It is a strange disconnect - yet these were the people who were the first to risk life and health to recover the city. 

There were a few things that were foreign to me. Politics from the pulpit is something I rarely experience. Seeing this play, one would think that is the only thing that New Life Church preached (I wouldn't know). 

Yet, behind the politics, behind the very human stories of those who felt abandoned and judged by the church, behind the nervous apologetics of inarticulate evangelicals, there were some dim lights of Gospel. One of the most compelling characters was a mother and New Life Church member. She loved her father deeply, in spite of his homosexuality and his abandonment, in spite of protests from other family members. The Gospel of Christ seemed to encompass her, because of and in spite of the church community. The Gospel and church community helped her and her family overcome drug addiction, to work and provide for her children. As she did with her father, she was out to love those whom others rejected. She wanted to create a group in New Life about loving homosexuals, but only two people came. My biggest criticism of the play is that they did not explore this character further. Her scenes are all before the Haggard scandal broke; I was hoping to see her reaction. 

"This Beautiful City" showed that even in a city with so many churches and Christians per capita, there were still "sinners" left in the margins. I wonder if Mo Leverett was wrong. Jesus came and loved those in the margins. He healed diseases, forgave sins and changed lives. He was no stranger to religious authorities, often rebuking them and warning of hypocrisy. Judging by the play, he might feel right at home in Colorado Springs. But not necessarily in the parts one might expect. 

Two Cheers for Soup!

My wife has introduced me to the pleasure of soup. Of course, I grew up with soup, but it was rarely associated with pleasure. My mother lovingly cooked wonderful meals and baked wonderful desserts, but whenever we had soup it was more of an afterthought - a quick meal before we needed to hurry somewhere or something to heat up to fight the flu that would hit our household like a hurricane every winter. (One notable exception to this - mom made, and still makes, a killer split pea soup) It was a quick can of Campbell's that had too much water and not enough substance. It didn't taste bad, but it was never something to savor.

When my wife makes soup, it is a brew of imported German spices and bullion, combined with enough noodles to make spaghetti jealous. I love watching her cook, combining an artist's intensity with a bird-like quickness and a very German sense of purpose, none of which covers up, indeed it highlights, the fact that she is pouring love into the concoction for its final perfection. When she is finished, soup is no-longer an afterthought or an efficient source of vitamins. It is a meal, hot, steaming and worth savoring. When I eat it, usually frazzled after a long day of work, I can feel its minerals healing my body, my wife's love awakening my heart (as the adage goes) through my stomach.

Soup isn't an American factory product that comes in a can. It is an art. Justin tells me that young French chefs are tested by the professionals on their ability to make soup. Daniela understands this.

Clemens, who has been married at least a quarter century, tells me one of the joys of marriage is if you are patient and adventurous enough, you can continue to explore your wife and discover nuggets of beauty that amaze you. Daniela's soup is one that I found early.

Song, Resurrection

On Easter, I wrote a song. At church, we played the song for the first time. It was an exhilarating moment. I had hoped it would be exhilarating, and I still wonder if that kind of hope is wrong.

The word resurrection is in the name of my church. The resurrection is something I never doubted. It was never that difficult to believe. If you can have incarnation, resurrection is not that much of a stretch. Yet, I have been struck by the number of people who have denied it, and have expended much energy trying to deny it. There are all sorts of apologist kind of debates, which became familiar to me growing up around evangelical circles. However, when I was in Freiburg engaging people in evangelistic discussion, the question was not about proofs. There seemed to be an overall consensus, right or wrong, that something so long ago could not be proved for certain, though the evangelicals are right in saying that the testimonies and behavior of the Apostles are worth noting. The question was more whether we need to believe in the Resurrection. Is it something truly so important? Can it be a symbolic myth, that folks could choose to believe if they are comfortable with it? It seemed to them an unnecessary and divisive miracle.

It occurred to me that, in a fashion not untypical to evangelicalism, I had lost the theology and the beauty of the Resurrection in the apologia. Easter was a holiday of uncomfortable clothes and sugary pastels. We sang beautiful songs about the cross, but the songs about the Resurrection seemed comparatively shallow.

Easter, while attending a church that purposefully celebrates the Resurrection, inspired me to write a song about it. I wanted to write a song that would manage to capture a drop of the rapturous joy, rich theology and weighty consequences that convinced Paul that any theology without it is hopeless. We will follow our Rabbi, our King, from death to life, and that joyful thought should be a sobering, happy weight on our hearts that we cannot ignore.

If my song (or the words above) could catch a drop of that endless waterfall, it is by God's merciful grace. These were my thoughts as I wrote it, and I hope they were holy, as much as they could be so, and I hope that these were words that God could smile on.

I wanted to share it with my church, and dread set in. It seems arrogant to want to even write something about it, something almost too beautiful to utter. I worried that the song structure would not be compatible to group singing or that my theology would be off. I wanted it so badly to be accepted that I spent too much time worrying. Not exactly a Resurrected way of looking at things, free of pride and fear.

In any case, we sang it, and it went very well. People sang and seemed to truly worship (as did I), which is all a praise song can ask for. I reveled in it a bit, fantasizing about selling the rights to Chris Tomlin and growing rich off the royalties. I have always dreamed of being some sort of artist, and I wonder if others, particularly Christian artists, struggle between worry and pride, to the point where the beauty of the message is lost in self-reflection (the blog itself perhaps is an attempted to exorcise this). C.S. Lewis seemed to know this. Biographers marvel at how humble he managed to stay among is fame and success. He wrote that God wants us to be the kind of creatures that can make a cathedral or symphony, know very well that it is good, take joy in this goodness, and go along our way. He said that true humility dispenses with modesty. As little creators we can revel in the joy of the Creator, in as long as we are learning to reflect him, as long as we are learning to follow Christ, out of pride and into art, out of self and into Him, out of death and into life abundantly, resurrection.

Wine, Quickly

Once again wine makes for interesting conversation and cultural commentary. Good New York Times article by Roger Cohen:


Of Wine, Haste and Religion

Hirshhorn

There were two things that especially struck me at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. I almost bought one of them.

We braved Sunday's storms to take advantage of D.C.'s free pieces of culture and made it there with soaked ankles and a couple of soy-based granola bars, courtesy of a storm that did not apologize for danger, excitement, wetness and inconvenience, and some hippies who did not apologize for believing the world would be safer and cleaner if we all ate more soy.

Hirshhorn is in a cylinder-shaped building with bronze sculptures dancing in the grass all around it. They did not seemed to mind the rain, and I tried to follow their example. The building is also skirted by a convenient roof so we could enjoy the wet, delicious air and watch the hippies run for shelter as we squeezed rain out of our pant-legs.

The first thing that struck me was a current exhibit called The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality and the Movie Image, Part I: Dreams. According to the Hirshhorn website, Dreams "addresses film’s ability to transport us out of our everyday lives and into a dream world. Using a series of artists’ installations, the exhibition moves us through the different stages of consciousness and dreaming, from those moments between wakefulness and sleep to the darker recesses of the imagination and fantasy. Dreams is curated by chief curator Kerry Brougher and associate curator Kelly Gordon."

It succeeded for me, and it seemed to succeed for other museum goers. The darkness of the whole exhibit, each installation, kept me in a constant, isolated feeling between awake and asleep. (Incidentally, the effect gave my wife a headache, but she was nice enough to wait for me while I meandered through to get the whole effect) These were not Disney dreams, but honest explorations of the subconscious. Parts were strange, fascinating, morbid, beautiful and frightening. It explored isolation, fear, sexuality, violence, desire, love, abandonment, and many other abstract echoes from the deep that we have all felt waiting for morning to approach. Each installation was a piece of film, set up by artists from all over the world (most of whom found their way to New York, London or Berlin). The use of film, screen, sound, light were all different. Some were interactive, some were traditional. In "You and I Horizontal" the viewer feels himself to be part of the light of the film itself (I won't explain it more than this - see it yourself). My favorite film was called "Eight," which follows a little girl in a dream-like loop through a party (her eighth birthday, perhaps?) drenched by a dark storm. Ok, it's better than I'm making it sound. I'm looking forward to part II.

The other thing that struck me was a book I browsed in the gift shop called Street: The Nylon Book of Global Style. Perhaps the title is a bit unfair. It only explores interesting fashion cities - New York, Paris, Berlin, Hong Kong, etc..., leaving important populations and styles unexplored. It really was not the style that interested me. I had never heard of Nylon the magazine before. Indeed, I am not that interested in reading the magazine itself, but I loved the concept of the book, nonetheless. They found interesting people, the kinds of people that I used to be drawn to in Germany as we would carry a tray of soggy salad and strange noodles to speak with isolated students about Jesus. They would take a picture each person and fill the page with it. They would ask them their name, occupation, what they were wearing and fashion icon (I can imagine the puzzled looks many gave at this one. My favorite answer was the young woman who said her grandmother). Many of the clothes were hand-me downs, many of the occupations were artists, many were too thin but attractively cool. They were pictures of people who cried for a spirituality, the kind of people I hope for, pray for, want to meet.