When someone takes a Sunday drive in the south you are bound to see a church. Often you will also see church signs that read:
"Free Trip to heaven. Details Inside!"
"Try our Sundays. They are better than Baskin-Robbins."
"Searching for a new look? Have your faith lifted here!"
"When down in the mouth, remember Jonah. He came out alright."
One of my favor and most ‘Baptist’ not to mention ‘ambiguous’ church sign is , “People are like tea bags -- you have to put them in hot water before you know how strong they are.” I am sure they were going for thought provoking.
For most, these signs give us a good chuckle and I understand, I chuckle but often on the heels of my laughter was a haunting shadow. When the smile faded I found myself silent in a wordless melancholy. My heart was unsettled to deep for articulation. It was the silence discomfort of knowing something is as it ought not to be. When such shadows roll in over my heart it has been my custom and curiosity to ask ‘why’?
The death of tragedy
Hearts are like tea cups they are what they hold. It is a truth of human existence. To know the content of a person’s heart, one must look at the words of his mouth and the works of his hands. We pour out the substance of our hearts in unguarded word and unconscious deeds. This is true of an individual, and it is true of a culture. To know what a culture values, you must consider what it makes and what it proclaims. The heart of a culture can be measured by its message and fruit. That means looking at its art, architecture, music, poetry, and prose. This is why pop-culture is not just trivial but teaches us something at the heart of a modern culture.
Just like hearts, culture is not static. Change is a constant. Over time, value shift and things change as culture follows the deep drives of the many. In the 1800’s when the evangelists of modern science converted our culture with the allure of technological marvels, this had a repeal affect in our culture. One aspect rocked by this was literature. As modernism took hold, what we read and wrote began to change rapidly. The literature that flourished in the pre-modern age no longer suited people who believed that they were merely highly advanced animals, and that history was nothing but a chain reaction of natural cause-and-effect.
“It is a noteworthy fact that high tragedy began to disappear from the literature of our Western culture at the end of the seventeenth century, which was the very time that science first staked out its great claims,”(1) wrote Richard Weaver.
I did not realize till I studied it in graduate school but drama and morality are closely linked. Comedy and tragedy are moral categories to the degree they are human categories. They express, in varying ways, what it means to be human. Yet they can loose their moral footing if human experience is watered down. For example, tragedy is only meaningful if man is a moral being struggling against things beyond his control. We can feel the pathos when the finitude of the tragic hero is placed against the infinite or unalterable fate of His life. As the hero is asked, “what will you do with the days you have been given?” The audience or reader is drawn to the same question. You see, drama is moral for it asks more of us than our entertainment.
Modernity with its faith in the evolutionary process and trust in human ingenuity made this a silly idea. It says, “What force is more powerful than the scientific mind? We can make our own world.” In this way, science promised salvation from tragedy with its daily march toward a bright future. This cult of progress and its gospel is proclaimed ever time you turn on PBS. And just like the only people that watch PBS, the elite and intellectuals are the only ones fully given to this way of thinking.
By the end of the 18th century, “Man still had enough human ground to stand on for satire, however, and the following century was the great age of satire.”(3) Jonathan Swift in England and Mark Twain in American were respectably, satirist par exultance of this age. Swift's Gulliver's Travels was a "REVELATION' of satire; Opening the eyes of many to the plight of the desperately poor. Satire is about misdirection and indirect communication. The satirist gets you looking in this direction so you don’t see the truth till you’re faced with the weight of it. Satire is critical. It is a type of criticism, and at the heart of criticism is a set of values. What is at the heart of excellent satire; a moral principle with a keen eye, a creative mind and a sharp pen. The satirists, as a moralist, prodded men to be responsible, to choose the good and laugh at evil. But by the beginning of the19th century, satire waned as the scientific view of man waxed. Facts replaced truth, opinion replaced facts, and opinions multiplied like rabbits, until indifference upstaged criticism and took its place.
The 19th became the 20th century and culture needed something more entertaining and less convicting. So out of the boredom left beyond after the victory of indifference the modern novel was born. The modern novel was an innovation that replaced satire, and it quickly reflected the modern view of man as an organism reacting to his environment. novels were “increasingly chronicles of the abnormal, the aberrant, and even the criminal.”(4) Comparing these novels to the pre-modern fairy tale, G.K. Chesterton observed, “The fairy tale discusses what a sane man will do in a mad world. The sober realistic novel of today discusses what an essential lunatic will do in a dull world.”(5)
Despite these retreats before the advance of science, a germ of reverence remained. Literature continued to take man seriously, and continued to hint that things were not quite right with the world. Ironically, this was its undoing. Enter the comic strip, and the deception of the pleasant:
Whoever thinks he knows how the world ought to be feels a certain melancholy that it is not so. In all great art therefore there is a certain pessimistic overcast . . . But what occurs when life is made not the subject of a critique, but an occasion for relaxed joyousness and animal abandon? . . . the mass everlastingly insists that the world be represented as pleasant . . . I suppose that the truest index to this mentality is the comic strip, whose offenses . . . it would be impossible to number. But present in all of them is the unrelenting demand that the world . . . accord with our humor. . . [man] wants a pleasing fiction . . . what he wants is deception.(6)
Entertainment is the new rhythm of life. Now, even churches use comic slogans on elaborate marquees, promising to the world that life inside really is just as “pleasant” as the rest of our comic-strip culture. We have lost tragedy because we have lost ourselves in the enjoyment of ourselves. The glory of the Greek tragedy was that it forced men to ask themselves, what kind of life did they make in the days given them? What passion ruled their heart? What song defined them? The lamented truth in most English classes rises over why everyone dies at the end of a tragedy. This sad confusion is because we are people who forget all die! We have lost the plot of our own story make this grand narrative called life into our own personal three part play. We forget that death reminds us we should live for something bigger than ourselves.
The loss of tragedy and the thirst for a pleasant life poisoned our vision of what God is like. We see him with a white beard old man sitting on a cloud, reminiscing about how things use to be? Or some dotting granddad that gives you all the candy you want even if it makes you sick and never spanks you even if you need it. We form a mental image of him in our image and not as he reveals himself to be. He thinks and acts more like humanity than deity. In short, the modern picture of God is of a nice God. It’s a sad true; we have exchange a living God for a pleasant lie.
In modern culture many have given up a great big God for a travel size image of deity. In The Trivialization of God: The Dangerous Illusion of a Manageable Deity, Donald W. McCullough lays the blame where it should be. He puts words to the melancholy of my heart:
Visit a church on Sunday morning - almost any will do - and you will likely find a congregation comfortably relating to a deity who fits nicely within precise doctrinal positions, or who lends almighty support to social crusades, or who conforms to individual spiritual experiences. But you will not likely find much awe or sense of mystery. The only sweaty palms will be those of the preacher unsure whether the sermon will go over; the only shaking knees will be those of the soloist about to sing the offertory.
The New Testament warns us, "offer to God an acceptable worship with reverence and awe; for indeed our God is a consuming fire" [Hebrews 12:28-29, NRSV]. But reverence and awe have often been replaced by a yawn of familiarity. The consuming fire has been domesticated into a candle flame, adding a bit of religious atmosphere, perhaps, but no heat, no blinding light, no power for purification….When the true story gets told, whether in the partial light of historical perspective or in the perfect light of eternity, it may be well revealed that the worst sin of the church at the end of the twentieth century has been the trivialization of God.(6)
Modern man is less than a worshiper for we makes much of his laughter and in so doing trivializes the absolute. and Annie Dillard once asked "Why do people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?" She goes on to lament:
On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of the conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning...
The answer is best captured by McCullough when he writes:
We prefer the illusion of as safer deity, and so we have pared God down to more manageable proportions. Our era has no exclusive claim to the trivialization of God. This has always been the temptation and the failure for the people of God. Pagan gods have caused less trouble than the tendency to re-fashion God into a more congenial, serviceable god.(7)
So back to the church signs, I don’t think they are some great evil. I think they are what they are, signs of the times. They speak more than chuckles they tell us where we are at in this journey. They point out, although indirectly that we need to seek God as God. If we feel the disquieted unrest in our hearts, they can act to direct us to the problem, our little view of God.
So Let us not trivialize God. So our laughter does not cruelly suffocate our joy. He is big we are small. Instead of narrowing the gap between God and man, let us enjoy every light-year of its breath-taking, infinite width. Let us delight in our rightful, lowly, place before our mighty, transcendent God. The drama of life is in His grandeur filling our eyes, His greatness filling our hearts! All pleasures gain their sweetness in the ‘thank you’, left behind after greatness fills a heart! Only a big God makes life sweet.
So Let us not trivialize God but behold God as God. He is the main character in the drama of life, so he should be ever before our eyes. Constantly and consciously beholding a big God means the journey is never boring. It means our lives are in a drama bigger than your little stories. Only a big God can write the history of man and the details of our lives for his glory and our good. If we behold him and read our life as God has authored it, we can find joy in the ordinary and safety in God. If we read our lives as he has authored it, we will find our good is not always our delight but our delight can always be in His glory. The story he is writing with our lives is not about our happy ending but what we did with the days we where given. So I ask, what are you doing with the days you are given? What are you living: a comic-strip life or a life filled with the purpose for which God created you?
End notes
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1.) Richard M. Weaver, Visions of Order (Bryn Mawr: ISI, 1964), 146.
2.) Ibid.
3.) Ibid., 147.
4.) Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Orthodoxy (London: Hodder & Stoughten, 1996), 12.
5.) Richard M. Weaver, “The Humanities in a Century of the Common Man,” In Defense of Tradition: Collected Shorter Writings of Richard M. Weaver 1929-1963, ed. Ted J. Smith III (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000), 380.
6.) Donald W. McCullough, The Trivialization of God: The Dangerous Illusion of a Manageable Deity (Colorado Springs: Navpress, 1995), 12-13.
7.) Ibid. 13
me theology was useless. I thought, nobody needs dry and dusty theology. I like most westerners, I thought theology was an academic exercise whereby a group of people sit in an ivory tower and debate over ancient documents that have no relevancy for today. I was wrong.Theology is an inevitable activity of humanity. But as LaVar Burton of Reading Rainbow fame, (Yes, La Forge from Star Trek: next gen.) always said, "Don't take my word for it!"