Not The Religious Type

Thoughts on Celebrity Funerals / Jeff Heidkamp (Minneapolis, MN)

It's been interesting watching the reactions to Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett.  I grew up in a very conservative home, so I literally had no exposure to Jackson or Fawcett. 

I was at Costco yesterday and found a DVD with a bunch of Michael Jackson music videos for 8 bucks, and thought I'd pick it up (my wife nixed the boxed set of Charlie's Angels reruns, however).  The production is obviously dated, but I found that several of them were quite moving- particularly "Black or White" and "You are not alone".  At first they seem corny, but he seemed to have that knack for putting universal issues in very broad, approachable terms. 

What really interests me about the remarkable public response to these deaths is the degree to which both Jackson and Fawcett clearly connect to flawed aspects of humanity.  With no judgment intended, it is impossible to think about Jackson without thinking of the rather public personal unraveling in his later years.  And I don't think it takes Jesus to think that while there is something harmless about the sex-symbol status of a Farrah Fawcett, there is also something of misogyny at work in that persona.

And yet, both figures are beloved, and in a way that seems to me to reflect something good rather than bad about society.  I can't imagine not being moved by the image of Jackson's daughter weeping and proclaiming, against all public sentiment, that she loved her dad and was glad he was her father.  And while I know less about Fawcett, her courageous battle with cancer resounds with so many struggles I've watched even in my relatively short life.

Perhaps there is something important about faith in all this.  We look at Jackson and Fawcett and we see ourselves- yes, we are flawed.  Yes, there are things about us that are deeply embarrassing.  There are responses in us, sexual or otherwise, that at times we'd rather not admit to.  And yet we are capable of courage, beauty, love, and compassion, even in the midst of our flaws.

And, perhaps, this insistence is something of the reflection of the divine within us.  We will not be owned by our flaws, by our mistakes, or our personal demons.  We are made for something larger, something better, something infinite.  There is an almost messianic streak in some of Jackson's music- heal the world, we are the world, we don't want to be alone.  I wonder if some of that resonates in everyone.

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Are You a Patriot?

So, okay, we've got this conversation on homosexuality going, which I interrupted just a skosh yesterday, and I'd love to keep that ball rolling if there's any more to be said at the moment than what we've said.

But Independence Day got me thinking about patriotism and my muse is so astoundingly fleeting, I thought I should run with this for the common good.

And, for one more note in the preamble, I'm away again for the rest of this week.  (I'm taking my three young boys on a "boys trip" to New York for two days, upon which the left-at-home girls will join us for three more days.  A Mets game awaits!  [For one thing,  the Mets are at home while the Yankees are not.  And it's probably for the best, as many years of Yankee-revulsion could be hard to overcome as we stepped across the threshold.  But there's probably another great post on the Yankees/spiritual darkness theme, so I don't want to spoil that here.])  All to say, please indulge your "I want to write a post for this blog!" instincts and get them to dan@notreligious.org. And thank you very much to the couple of you who have indeed submitted posts recently that we haven't yet run.  I'll get back to you!  I haven't forgotten.

All to say, I'm not sure why patriotism has repelled me from a pretty young age.  It's not a Jesus thing--though these days I have lots of Jesus-based ammunition for it.  I had it at least by my atheistic mid-teens.  Graduating seniors in my high school could pick a quote to go under the picture in their yearbook, and for whatever reason mine was a political comment from the noted firebrand Neil Simon.  It was from his flop early play The Star-Spangled Girl and went thusly: "I love absolutely everything about this country except people who love absolutely everything about this country."  Somehow that was what I wanted to be remembered by.  It's a mystery.

if you track with some of the terms of this blog, you've probably jumped ahead of me and diagnosed my anti-patriotism as a stage 3/stage 2 thing (note the button on "Stage 4 faith," above, for a description of this).  And you're probably right.  I'm sure patriotism represented a world I was eager to leave behind.  (I was recruited by three service academies.  My dad said I should take them up on it--they would make a man out of me.  I looked at him with wonder, thinking that he profoundly didn't know to whom he was talking.)

Transitioning to follow Jesus included an easy transition on this front.   As followers of Jesus, our loyalty was to God's kingdom on earth, not to one nation or another.  Yes, we were to obey the ruling authorities, but clearly Jesus wasn't a cheerleader for Rome (or for Israel--he left that to Simon the Zealot). 

And July 4 reminds me that I remain in this uneasy place today.  On the one hand, I'm a massive America fan.  I'm so glad to have been born here.  I love Boston, just as I loved San Francisco before it.  I couldn't imagine living in a repressive country (Iran seeming to carry the banner for that in the media at the moment).  I couldn't be happier that America won the Revolutionary War and that Hitler was defeated, and I feel a big thank-you to all those who fought and died in those efforts.  (Some other conflicts are harder to cheer for, through no fault at all of the servicemen and women who fought in them.)  My family had a truly fantastic time at a local fireworks celebration on Saturday.  So in all those ways, I suppose I'm a patriot.

But I nonetheless don't feel like a patriot.  My loyalties flow much easier towards Jesus than they do towards America.  Maybe those two things aren't at odds, but they can stubbornly feel at odds to me.

So help me out.  Are you a patriot?  Why or why not?  Help me out of my muddle.

My Bad

Thanks so much to each of you who've participated in this past week's conversation about the challenging question of homosexuality-and-faith.  It's been really noteworthy to me that, thus far, we've had quite a high degree of agreement here--maybe because we've done the pre-work of reading Andrew Marin's book together.  I'll very much look forward to keeping this conversation alive, particularly if we can learn from one another about actual ways forward.   Thanks so much.

That said, I think I got caught betwixt and between with my last post, which I've pulled from the blog.  Like a basketball player caught betwixt and between--deciding, say, to cut left when they've committed to go right--I may have snapped an ankle.

My mistake probably was in mentioning this article I was putting together before it had actually happened.  Once I mentioned it, when it turned out not to be helpful to run in the magazine in question, that left me feeling I owed it to you all to run it, just because I'd mentioned it.  The problem was how to do that without lobbying against or embarrassing the folks at the magazine in question, whom I respect entirely.  I entirely understand the reason why this article might not be helpful for its mission at the moment.  My thinking at the time was, while that was completely understandable, perhaps a setting like this one might be the place for whatever conversation it was hoping to get started.  The problem was that, at this point of the storyline, "the article" was tied up in its publication history, so it was hard to run neutrally.  So I think I was naive to post it--and in point of fact it's not clear that it says much that our previous entries haven't already touched on.

All to say, it seems to me I owe an apology to the good people at this magazine, Cutting Edge (a complete favorite of mine and a must-read each month--if you're not a reader and you like this blog, you should run not walk to get your subscription).  I one hundred percent understand and respect their decision in this case and have had endless history with all of  the folks involved, all of which has reinforced that we are absolute partners in these sorts of things. 

To reiterate: My bad. 

Tomorrow, another post.  Thanks again so much to each of you for such an engaging conversation this past week.

PS: I'm not especially trying to stop whatever conversation this article might engender.  I'm just sold that for the moment I've made this blog a particularly unsafe setting for it.  If you have any interest in the article, feel free to email Dan Littauer at dan@notreligious.org and he'd be happy to email it to you.