Oddities

Skinless

Standard

Human head, skin removedMy wife is fond of saying that when particularly bad things happen, they leave you walking around as if you had no skin on.

I like that metaphor. To skinless people, even the most helpful touch is painful. Skinless people react to everything as if it were a threat. Many end up in a perpetually wounded state, which they grow to embrace, and any attempt to talk rationally with them fails miserably.

Long ago, being thick-skinned was a virtue. But somehow, in our enlightened day and age, the skinless person rules. They are the true untouchables. Because they blanch at every word and cry out when even a hint of salt comes near them (for their entire self is a great wound), they are the equivalent of the victimized fortress, impregnable by its very sensitivity to everything.

I look around and it just boggles my mind how skinless we are in the United States. It has become impossible to carry on a conversation with anyone who differs from you on a subject or  who needs vital correction. The skinless person howls in pain the second you open your mouth to speak.

When a skinless person makes like a banshee, all important conversation grinds to a halt. We have been culturally conditioned stop everything we are doing, because the skinless person has a right to remain skinless, to dwell in a constant state of vigilance against the salty words of the wise.

The conservative-liberal conversation is a skinless one that somehow finds a way to lose even more skin as years go by. And sadly, skinlessness exists in record amounts in the Christian Church in America.

“Touch not the Lord’s anointed” is bandied about by the most skinless in our churches. Plenty of leaders hide behind those words. They stand afar off, immune to correction, and their flocks suffer for it.

We have a tendency to also treat as skinless those “weaker parts” about which Paul writes (1 Corinthians 12:22), though some skinless people are legitimately so. Yet in too many cases, skinless people hide behind their skinlessness and never make any attempt to rectify their condition. They set about them a cabal of supporters who will testify to their skinless state and why it must be respected. Such skinless people and their enablers become the logjam in the Holy Spirit’s flowing river.

How do we in the Church in this country accomplish anything with so many skinless people around? They’re everywhere. And as long as they’re occupying space, the French saying applies: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Haterz?

Standard

I’m not much of a TV watcher. I think that too many of us in the American Church spend far too much time watching TV and not enough doing what Jesus commanded us to do.

I watch two shows a week, and normally tape the one for viewing during peak downtime. I’ve enjoyed Antiques Roadshow for years (I think it’s the aesthete in me), plus I started watching the show Fringe this season. That show is much like a former obsession of mine, The X-Files. So as much as I said I wasn’t going to get involved in another series, I got caught up in Fringe. (And was devastated by the show’s story arc, which I’ll leave for another post.)

A weird thing happened in watching Fringe, though: It didn’t always start at 9 p.m.  sharp on Tuesday nights because it followed American Idol, which ran long many nights. Idolatry on parade?That meant I always saw a few carryover bits of the final Idol performances of the evening.

I can’t speak as an Idol aficionado, but Adam Lambert has to be one of the best performers I have ever seen—anywhere. He not only has a set of pipes, he was riveting to watch. His performance of “Mad World” was a tour de force. I thought to myself, How can this guy not win?

My tapes captured a couple performances by Danny Gokey and Kris Allen, and time and again, I kept thinking, How did these guys make it so far into this competition? They weren’t bad; they just had nothing extra going for them, something which Lambert had in spades, even from the limited number of performances I saw of him.

So, I was checking the news on CNN.com this last week, and noticed one of the most commented upon links from their entertainment blog was about the Idol outcome. Seems that Kris Allen won, a surprising and disappointing outcome, at least as I saw it. I mean, what was up with the voters?

Then I read the comments on the CNN blog. Here are some samples (all sic):

I guess we can thank those hatefilled, intolerant, homophobic Christians for this injustice. I am so sick and tired of those people. I used to be polite to them, but no more.

Another Christ loving Heterosexual male who wont sell albums… way to go America.

…yes it was a robbery because the only thing about Kris is that he’s a christian and you homophobic people would rather keep talent down to pump yourselves up. Kris is horrible he had 2 good songs all season and isn’t even as good as Allison is. he should have been gone a long time ago but he didn’t win and i mean didn’t win based on talent it was based on religion and that Adam is different and that shakes your whole damm world. Even he had to address the issue of religion and didn’t want to win based on that well he won and only based on that.

Obviously the Falwell coalition lives on and regardless of Adam’s true sexuality, the rumor flourished enough to cause “Jesus freaks to triumph. The sad thing is that Kris is really a cookie cutter talent. Vocals are along the lines of most boy bands of the past. Adam was the true talent and unique in his singing and stage appearance. He will do like Clay Aiken did and sell a hundred times more albums as Kris will become the winner, much like Taylor, where you scratch your head and say, “He won Idol? Really?!

I am sick of all you people (i.e BODEE!!! {Note: the first comment above}) . What is your problem???? Kris didn’t win because he is a Christian anymore than Adam lost because he is gay. GET OVER YOURSELVES!

NOBODY CARES! But if they did, you are going to have to face the fact that Christians ARE the majority in the country…no matter how much you , Perez Hilton, Obama and the Democrats stomp your feet and cry foul…

Well, the Christians spoiled the vote, but as they say †“ the devil has the best tunes.

Go Adam.

And on and on…

Well, I had no idea that Kris was a Christian, though he exuded plenty of that harmless Michael W. Smith boyishness that so many young women adore. And as far as I can tell from Googling, Adam’s never come out and said he’s a homosexual, so I don’t exactly get that point.

But none of this, in the long run, has to do with American Idol. This post has everything to do with the comments on CNN’s blog. As there are almost 1,500 of them, they make for interesting reading. Definitely a good representation of where America is in 2009.

Over at the Huffington Post,  Michael Giltz commented on this phenomenon of Christians voting as a bloc for the most Christian of the contestants. He posted this partly t0ngue-in-cheek, but I’m not so sure he’s wrong. I know many Christians who watch Idol, and some do almost as an obsession. I can imagine they are voting for their faves en masse. And until this disputed outcome of the show, I had no idea that people could vote more than once. Seems like the Bible Belt was certainly throwing a few multiple votes Kris Allen’s way.

So here are my questions:

1. In the same way that we have the Ugly American, have we created the Ugly Christian? What are the characteristics of such a creature?

2. Are Christians the majority? And if they are, what kind of Christians are they?

3. Are Christians obligated to choose a Christian over a non-Christian, no matter what the focus of the choice might be ?

4. What’s up with Christians supporting blandness? What Christian artists of the past rocked the world with their controversial works?

5. Suppose one of the finalists on Idol were openly homosexual. Would it be a sin to vote for him/her? What does that answer say about the Church in this country?

I’ve talked with a few folks over the holiday weekend about this, and their answers surprised me. What do you think?

Dying of Thirst in the New Social Desert

Standard

My neighbor told me a few weeks ago that he bought his fifth-grade son a cell phone. As my neighbor is a bit of a Luddite and has resisted such things in the past, I was surprised. What surprised me more was his reasoning, which was nowhere on my radar screen.

Seems he bought the phone because his popular son had seen that popularity dwindle to zero.  And that sudden dive was strictly because the son was out of the texting loop. No cell phone meant no connection to the social structure of today’s tweens and teens. In reality, the boy had ceased to exist.

This last year has seen a sea change in social connection here at the Edelen household:

1. A Christian small group we were a part of for eight years ceased to exist. One by one, families dropped out until there were just two, each unsure what to do going forward. That group now no longer meets.

2. Another Christian small group we are a part of has now decided not to meet during the summer. That it also seems not to meet during the winter holidays means it’s  meeting only half the year now. Given that scheduled meetings are only twice a month anyway, that translates into about a dozen meetings a year total.

3. The writers group I am a part of has had its meeting schedule disrupted from the last Monday of each month to whenever we have enough submission work to warrant a meeting. The meetings have grown more and more sporadic as a result.

4. The worship team at my church attempted a regular practice schedule, but work responsibilities, involvement in outside sporting events for children, and on and on have translated into two practices in the last six months.

5. The Audubon group I’m a part of (as treasurer) had no scheduled events for spring and nothing scheduled so far for summer, the first time that has happened that I can recall.

The irony of all this is that many of the people in the groups mentioned above have joined Facebook in the last six months. We seem to have no trouble meeting in cyberspace.

I know that I’m kind of a crank on this subject, but do a handful of less than a hundred word comments on Facebook constitute social connection?

We all know this passage:

And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.
—Hebrews 10:24-25

I can’t read that passage and not shake my head. We seem to be becoming the some mentioned, the ones we are cautioned against.

When an 11-year-old boy vanishes from the social network of an elementary school for no other reason than his lack of a cell phone, something is horribly wrong. A dry, weary place without waterWhen we begin  to retreat into electronic worlds, abandoning the real one, we have, perhaps, reached that point of no return.

A child who merely wishes to put together a game of Kick the Can finds no playmates in the real world. Either the play is regimented according to schedule (organized kids sports) or relegated to an online world (Neopets, Webkins, et al.). Without a cell phone, even a child becomes a non-entity.

In recent days, I have considered seriously whether to begin extricating myself from the online system. While that will effectively make me invisible in today’s world, I wonder how much more of this we can take before we are no longer a society. If most communities go from face to face to virtual, I believe we will lose the very cues by which we understand each other.

Yet some are preferring this distant means of interacting. Tweet me, baby.

I don’t believe the new thing is better. While it may serve some basic purpose in communicating brief bursts of info, those brief bursts are increasingly ousting the longer forms of communication that define us as human beings. We are preferring them to meeting together face to face. We no longer assemble.

Our faith in rapid bits of impersonal communication may very well be creating a new social desert. Twitter’s 140 characters  cannot replace genuine interaction, though, despite how much some laud it.

I don’t have an answer for this. My thoughts on the subject swim against an increasingly powerful stream that is sucking everyone in. Going against the flow means becoming even less “connected,” even if that connection is all smoke and mirrors anyway. At least a mirror reflects something, even if it’s just an illusion.

You’d think the Church in America would have something to say about this. It has: satellite churches that beam the televised service to different substation halls. And people are eating that up. Rather than getting together during the week, some Christians prefer to connect online. So much for the real definition behind assembling.

Our society is already at that “every man for himself” stage. If we lose what little genuine community we still have, I don’t see how that will ever turn around.