A little more on Gaga

A few more thoughts on little miss Gaga (she is after all only 5 foot 1 I readJ) I heard her main stage performance live at the Radio 1 big weekend 15 May. Last night I watched the first ten minutes or so of the video… I suggested in the last post that her creativity in some measure reflects the creativity of God. Don’t mean to overstate my case - it’s obviously quite easy to end up idolising someone so ‘stand out’. Even just a little reading up on the woman reminds that, of course, in a frail human being, behind such a headlong pursuit of fame and attention is likely to lie a complex web of needs and motivations. She was bullied in school, and says that in her music she is often opening and probing that wound. Is there not often, propelling a quest for fame, a deficit in the experience of love? A misdirected search for unconditional and indeed limitless love - that can be found in God alone? A similar problem conceivably lies behind the wider public’s excessive interest in celebrities - an aspirational dream of beauty and success, which again finds its right fulfilment in the esteem of the One who holds us all in his hand.

Faith, hope & Lady Gaga

On Saturday I picked up a copy of last week’s Telegraph review supplement with a picture of a ghostly young female face with pouting red lips, framed with straight peroxide hair. The caption, ‘Excess all areas’. The sub heading: ‘Lady Gaga is the world’s biggest, brashest pop star - but… does her music measure up?’ I read the article by Neil McCormick, text framing a medley of shots of the star in a panoply of her outlandish costumes. It’s one of those pieces of writing that stays with you for days after, because it touches on issues that matter to you personally - and, not to get ahead of ourselves, you feel could even in some small way impact on your future.

The 25 year old New York ‘global pop sensation‘, formerly ‘Stefani Germanotta’, garnered her huge following largely through her extraordinary flair for self-promotion via eye-popping visual panache (those costumes), a mastery for marketing and social media - 36 plus million face book fans, pushing 11 million on twitter… underpinned by raw musical talent. I first recall coming across her through using one of her less known early songs ‘Money’ in a Christmas feature about the Bradford-based debt charity CAP (Christians against poverty), made with Whistling Frog Productions end of 2009. Her twitter page image has the appearance of an unearthly statuesque creature from a sci-fi myth. As a role model for supreme ‘girl power’ and exhilarating excess, she is adored by the young and not so young the world over. She went to a Catholic girls’ school - you’ve got to hand it to this church, for all the mess it’s got itself into, it does have a knack, as with Madonna before her, for inspiring or inciting some kick ass boundary-pushing pop creativity. Some of her stunts no doubt generate their share of finger-wagging in some quarters, including some ’Christian’ ones I’m sure; I’d counter that on some level at least she’s actually a fizzing little microcosm of the endlessly varied pulsating creativity which animates the universe. A pop ambassador for God? I’m not saying you have to wave your hands and say EVERYTHING she does is awesome - a meat dress in a world of hunger might make you baulk - but overall it seems churlish and indeed beside the point to censor her excesses.

For me, the whole Gaga phenomenon this article explored, stirred up a host of questions and challenges - about faith, morality, and personal dreams and ambitions.

Self-promotion - or perhaps more fairly, promotion of your act, on this kind of scale highlights questions at the heart of the whole celebrity enterprise - about pride, ego, the place of humility. Is it just massively self-serving? I don’t think it has to be. It can’t be easy to restrain the whispers of vanity on such a vertiginous ascent. But if you keep higher values and goals in mind, such as recognition that your gifts notwithstanding hard work are just that, gifts - and that limelight presents an opportunity to speak for good - surely it’s possible to be a ‘star’ and keep your soul.

On a personal note… I won’t be alone in seeing qualities in someone like Gaga that I aspire to, or at least value. It’s often things you feel you lack isn’t it? The energy, colour, pizzazz, flowering of talent through uncommonly hard graft… there’s a danger it can cast a depressing shadow over those unfulfilled dreams and ambitions, those thwarted achievements of one‘s own past. Those things you allowed to hold you back. But you - I - don’t have to stay there. You can instead rise up and say, today is the day, now is the time, I’ve been shaken from slumber, his compassions are new every morning and there are opportunities ahead. It can breathe NEW life into your dreams. Timothy was told to ‘ stir up the gift’ in him, the church at Sardis to ‘strengthen what remains and is about to die.’

Pop culture, along with sport and a host of other modern preocupations, can seem so BIG, faith and the church so small. I’m embarked on a quest, working in radio and media, to ‘re-embody’ faith and spiritual issues, in a potentially big creative fusion with mainstream popular culture. That’s one way of expressing my dream. It feels like still relatively uncharted territory, which makes it exciting. I’m still searching, the dream is still incubating.

Finally, a verse I chanced to read today put the whole topic of greatness and achievement back into healthy perspective. The path to true greatness, Jesus said, was to serve. In that, Lady Gaga is on a level with the rest of us. She’ll be ‘great’ ultimately through using her talent to serve. And in whatever sphere of life and work we move in, we’re each called to do the same.

Love wins?

Jason Byrne, whirlwind Irish comedian on his radio 2 late night show last Saturday asked the audience if they were all atheists and there was a general ‘yes’ murmur - good sample of the liberal secular British populace there then! One said ‘I’m an agnostic’ and there was a collective intake of breath. Breaking rank!

Been reading Rob Bell’s latest book ‘Love Wins’. He’s arguing against the ‘believe the wrong things and you’ll end up in a fiery pit’ way of thinking, for a more expansive, generous view of God’s love, that persists whatever it takes, including beyond death, to draw humanity back to Godself (RB doesn‘t like the gender pronouns). The image of a parent who lets the child suffer enough of the consequences of his/her own rebellion to persuade a return to the source of happiness. He cites a Revelation reference that the gates of heaven are not shut but open, allowing people to come and go. This parallels our best human experience here and now - a readiness to forgive as soon as there‘s a sign of contrition in the guilty one. But I’d be interested to explore how such a view fits with the range of other biblical stories, images and teachings about what lies beyond death.

Life force

As I’ve got older, and reflected on the world as someone raised in the Christian faith, I’m aware of some ways my thinking and feeling about the world has expanded. And I just want to ponder a few things. I started with the fairly black and white view that you need to explicitly ‘accept and follow Jesus’ to ‘have eternal life’, to be ok, assured of heaven not hell. But one of the things that life (and the media) make you aware of is that there are vast forces of power, creativity, ‘life’ outside the Christian or indeed any ‘religious’ confines. And that indeed this great tide and variety of life for a large part seems to outshine what Christ’s explicit followers appear to achieve. If God is the source of all, then ‘he’ (will there one day be a non-gender specific personal pronoun in English?) evidently puts no obvious limit on the capacity of non-Christians’ talents to flower and flourish - be it a great sportsman, media personality, scientist or whoever. And I recall a family member’s relishing of nature’s detail - specifically different kinds of animal tracks - in a way that made me just a little ashamed at my own hitherto relative lack of effort at such deep engagement with nature’s wonders.
I can feel at times, weak, powerless and small in comparison with a lot of the evident surrounding power and prosperity in the world. And there’s something undeniably good about this ‘life force’ that animates people’s lives - I guess it’s from God whether acknowledged or not. At the same time, I hold onto the conviction that spending time communing with Christ empowers and enables - no matter what degree of natural talent possessed – an impact on the world which is in some way ‘distinctive - ‘salt and light’.

Arctic

Recent bbc2 series, Arctic with Bruce Parry. High esteem for those with a close connection to nature and who treat it with respect. The fascination of travelling with him into a remote Russian village deep in the heart of the Boreal forest. The man who found the forest to be a friend, which helped him overcome past trauma. Northern lights. How does THIS connect with Christianity? How in the light of this kind of beauty and exploration can the faith be understood and appreciated?

Wallander: 'the secret'

I’ve been following the re-broadcast first series of the Swedish version of Wallander on bbc4. I also saw ‘Side-tracked’, the first of the Kenneth Branagh English language versions, last night (do I need to get out more?!)
Both are very good, but there are some uniquely intriguing qualities in the Swedish version, qualities indeed common to all authentic foreign language drama. It feels properly rooted in the local community of Ystad. I like hearing the Swedish language spoken - don’t know it at all, have to follow the subtitles - but it gives you that pleasant feeling of being exposed to and absorbing something unfamiliar and novel, like foreign cuisine. And I love the under-stated-ness of the Swedish actors performances.
Last week was the last of 13 episodes, called ‘the secret’ - tackling the topic of child abuse. It packed a big emotional punch; and I’m interested why.
Stefan, a character we’d got to know over the series, had an aggressive style of policing and a tumultuous, impetuous nature - prone to occasional violence. I recall from earlier episodes being amused sometimes by his take no prisoners style of questioning suspects.
But in this episode, tragedy strikes. Though meant to be on leave to get professional help, he gets embroiled in a case involving child abuse. Aids and abets a friend in killing the man who’d abused the friend’s son. His colleague and friend Linda, daughter of the eponymous Kurt Wallander, tries to offer him some support while he’s on compulsory leave. Stefan has already said if he can’t work he’ll go mad, and she drives this point home by telling her father that Stefan’s job is the only thing that means anything to him. Round at her flat one night, he confides that he’s never felt so lonely. So we know he’s a man on the edge, but don’t quite understand why. And then we see him in a scene with a gun threatening to blow the head off an ex cop under suspicion of implication in the child abuse, who, somehow knowing Stefan’s no murderer, leaves him in a state of clear anguish. And it transpires through flashbacks that Stefan was as a boy himself abused by this man. Stefan loses the struggle against these personal demons that have been uncaged, and one evening Linda comes to his flat and finds that he’s taken his own life. The discovery of the photograph lying next to him, of Stefan as a boy, taken by the abuser, floods Linda with the realisation of the past pain that has made Stefan the troubled man he is, and she breaks down. And when Kurt tells her Stefan was ‘not suitable for police work’, she remonstrates with him for his ignorance, insensitivity and not having listened to Stefan, and exits, leaving Kurt to discover for himself the photo which unveils the tragic truth, and break down in tears himself.
A full exploration of the insights gleaned and questions raised by what one reviewer called ‘this extraordinarily rich and absorbing drama’ would need another whole post or three.

are christian stand-ups too safe?

Been thinking about comedy. I’m a big fan of mock the week. Especially hugh dennis. He’s a superb and hilarious actor. I especially used to like his double act with Frankie boyle, where boyle would feed the ‘PR’ line from some politician or other public figures’ mouth, and hugh would say what they really meant. The pause before he delivered the line, the razor wit of the actual punchline, the narrowing of the eyes after he said it which self-mockingly seems to say ‘is that what I meant to say?.. is that quite good enough?’… brilliant.

And I’m intrigued by Milton jones, one of the guest panellists. He’s a Christian – was a star turn at greenbelt, where he was a big fish in a small pond. On mock the week he’s a smaller fish in a bigger pond. He’s certainly different from the rest. An absurd, surreal brand of humour, and very pun and word play based. Like tim vine, another Christian one liner merchant. But something bothers me about them both. Does their Christian standpoint, which keeps their humour very clean, also make it too safe? No swearing, no attacks on public figures… and no satire. An intriguing question. The others show a greater freedom to be dark, edgy and let’s face it sometimes a bit dirty. And I find them often hilarious. Whereas with Milton, the need to be clean can sometimes feel like an inhibitor, leaving me wondering when he’s about to say something… will this actually be very funny? To be continued…

Stephen Hawking's Universe

Last part last night on C4. The ball bearings on college floor perfectly aligned and still, remove a few and see how they re-pattern - illustration of process of formation of universe, the removal of the few ball bearings representing the inherent ‘imperfection’ that gravity could get its teeth into, leading to the clustering of material and formation of galaxies, stars, planets… The revelations of science enthrall the modern mind. The awe I have seen from atheist bloggers like billy jonathan and lee in past comes from here. Hawking’s response to the suggestion ‘surely there must be a higher design at work’ - ‘not necessarily’, and posit’s the notion of multiple universes of which we happen to be inhabiting one conducive to life.

I’m intrigued by the questions this raises. The mind of course pushes back further.. So, ok Mr H, you’re saying this universe is like a cosmic roll of the double six (with the odds magnified exponentially methinks). But still, still we ask why, why are we here, and intuitively we ‘know’ there’s something deeper going on. What drove the formation of the universe? - a question posed early in the programme. Answer: gravity.. And you say, yeah, of course that’s the science, but, come on, the mystery and marvel of existence and life, there’s more to it…
Does not biblical truth need ‘unpacking’ with the same love and reverence scientists devote to their science, so the richness of its truth may be seen in place of the cut out cardboard cartoon caricatures some of the Dawkins disciples laugh at?

a jesus to get excited about

Jesus. What a guy. Look, gonna be honest here. He can often seem pretty remote. You can imagine if you were there in the crowd or one of the disciples back then, being pretty excited.. But I’m probably not alone in finding it often not easy to locate his presence, relevance, activity in my 21st century daily life. Not easy doesn’t mean there’s no point - it could just be especially challenging. There may be ways my eyes need to be opened to ways he’s already ‘doing stuff’ with me. Maybe I partly need to just chill and learn to savour a little more.
But I’ll tell you one thing. Compared to a lot if not most stuff I’ve read about jesus in christian books or songs, I do LOVE the way he’s portrayed in the gospels. I mean compare and contrast. In that popular book the shack which got a fair bit of attention in the christian world, I frankly cringed at many of the passages about the jesus figure. In jeans, smiling broadly, like some glowing all american boy saying corny movie lines, jesus smiled gently, jesus just gave me a big hug etc. sentimental yuk some of it. (ok who knows maybe I got some issues here;) ). But then I read a passage like mark 9 vv 14 to 29 this morning, jc healing a demon-possessed boy. The stripped back raw drama. The crowd enthralled with him. ‘how long must I put up with this faithless generation?’ no mincing there. his cool authority over this nasty, ugly, violent demon, telling it where to go. The boy suddenly looking like a corpse so most think he’s dead, and - imagine it - the thrill of awe as he is raised. THIS is a jesus you can get excited about.

friendship across boundaries (cont'd)

I appreciate the feedback from both Billy and Lisa, helps bring some of the questions and issues into relief. For starters, belief is not (just) a head thing. Billy you’re tending to view it as ‘mental propositions you assent to’, when of course to a christian it’s so much more. Trust, faith - which are larger, richer words than belief - in God shapes and colours and transforms my entire being and the way I live my life. It also gives my personal sense of purpose and direction. It’s not hard to see how in a close relationship where you are seeking to walk and flourish together, there is potential for conflict and limitation of intimacy if you are at odds at such a profound level.
Also billy it’s you who are using this word struggle. I don’t feel I’m struggling with this, but exploring with a light heart and curiosity.
Actually I feel it’s partly the boldness and sense of adventure I have developed through the life of faith that has propelled me to seek out new friendships in the first place. I think I was in the past sometimes too timid and restricted in my views of how to relate to ‘non-believers’. Jesus himself is my inspiration in this, his mould and barrier breaking approach to relationships.
You are right about treating people as people, not to be pigeon-holed. I feel the faith and love growing in me as a christian - not that Christians monopolise either! - motivate me to truly listen, get to know and respond to the ’hidden country’ of each person’s heart I meet. That’s the goal anyway!