Passover Animated: If Moses Had Internet

My home-church often has a seder to commemorate Jesus' final Passover and Christianity's Jewish roots. This year Passover will begin at sunset on April 18th, so here's something to get you in the spirit over the course of this next week...

Or just to geek out over an animated retelling of Exodus. Either one.

Why Don't You Want to Pray?

Wisdom from the film Then She Found Me (2007)


Source

This is not an extraordinarily memorable film, but I do appreciate the following scene in particular. Beautiful exploration of one's relationship to - and distance from - God, especially in times of fear, anger, and frustration.

At the hospital, April (Helen Hunt) is preparing for in vitro fertilization. Her mother Bernice (Bette Midler) accompanies her. It has been established that April is a practicing Jew and Bernice is essentially agnostic.

Bernice [to April]: "Do you want to pray?" [to the medical staff, smiling] "She does that. She prays." [to April] "Want to say a little prayer or something?"

April [curtly]: "No."

Bernice [to the staff]: "I'm so sorry to interrupt..."

April: "What is the matter with you?"

Bernice [to the staff]: "Could you, uh, give us a minute?"

April: "Bernice! Listen to me. Right now."

Bernice: "I know, I'm sorry. Just a minute."

Doctor: "Just find us when you're ready. We'll be around." [Staff exit.]

April [to Bernice, annoyed]: "What?"

Bernice: "Why don't you want to pray?"

April: "What do you care?"

Bernice: "I don't. I don't give a s---. But you do. You told me that. You pray before you eat a bowl of spaghetti! And now, right before you do the most important thing you'll do in your life, suddenly you're not interested?"

April: "This is none of your business." [She walks across the room, but Bernice blocks her.] "Get out of my way."

Bernice: "Say a prayer with me and I will."

April: "I don't want to pray."

Bernice [gently]: "One stupid little prayer."

April: "No." [Bernice blocks her again.] "Move!"

Bernice: "Maybe you just don't want it enough."

April: "You have no idea how badly I want this."

Bernice: "Then why won't you pray? Why?"

April: "Because I'm not going to hand this wish over to some..." [pause] "...whatever it is - who's supposed to be loving. Who..." [silence, then whispers weakly] "I had faith in. I thought... God was... good."

Bernice [gently]: "Maybe God is..."

April: "What?"

Bernice: "Difficult. Awful. Complicated."

April: "Like me?" [pauses in full realization of a past error] "I took the one man on earth who's right for me and I dropped him on his head."

Bernice: "Right. You did."

Just before the procedure, April sings the Shema, a beautiful prayer in Hebrew, thus beginning a journey of reconciliation - with God, with others, and with herself.

The Religious Society of F·R·I·E·N·D·S

Source

First of all, I have to say that for me this TV sitcom theme song has become inextricably connected to this video from comedian Rob Paravonian:



Second of all, my apologies to the Quaker community. This song was on a loop in my mind all throughout our last Church History class, and the only plausible remedy was to unleash a song parody unto the world. I do so in the spirit of peace and musical mnemonic devices.


The Society of F·R·I·E·N·D·S

So no one told you life was gonna be this way [four claps]
In fact it's true, no one said anything all day
But who needs speech when we've got God to hear?
Wait and listen for a day each week, each month of every year, 'cause...

There's a Light in you
(That you shouldn't ignore)
There's a Light in you
(The divine's at your core)
There's a Light in you
(And there's one in me too)

The churches' doctrine battles made George Fox irate
He preached his own ideas by 1648
And Will Penn brought this stuff across the seas
So then Pennsylvania was the place for Quakers to meet in peace

There's a Light in you
(That you shouldn't ignore)
There's a Light in you
(The divine's at your core)
There's a Light in you
(And there's one in me too)

No one could ever agree
No one could e'er be friendly
So pacifism is our way of living happ'ly
Have Friends to face the day wth,
Quake it through all our quests with,
And Friends we'll always laugh with -
Except we'll do that silently too, yeah

But who needs speech when we've got God to hear?
Wait and listen for a day each week, each month of every year...

There's a Light in you
(That you shouldn't ignore)
There's a Light in you
(The divine's at your core)
There's a Light in you
(And there's one in me too)

There's a Light in you
There's a Light in you
There's a Light in you
(And there's one in me too)

Extreme Makeover: Campus Edition

The Extreme Makeover team scored big this season, completing their assignment in an all-time record of one month.

BEFORE: DECEMBER 2010



AFTER: FEBRUARY 2011



Unfortunately, despite its astounding record and choice of aesthetically-pleasing sparkly accents, the team lost points because the new design made it virtually impossible for everyone to navigate the campus without slipping on the path or being impaled by falling icicles.

Shame.

If Dr. House Solved Theological Mysteries

And now for something completely different:

A script!

Sort of.

Meet Dr. House's new team: St. Augustine of Hippo, Pelagius, and Julian of Norwich.

Yes. Yes, I went there. And you're coming with me.

This will serve best as a review for those who took Church History I (up to late 15th century). Everybody else, it might just - dare I say - tempt you to read these authors' works...

...or convince you to avoid them like the plague. (But that's a House/Church History crossover for another day.)

---

[Deep Announcer Voice] You're watching House, M.D., episode: "Damned If You Do" "Deception" "House vs. God" "Human Error" "Saviors"

...Yeesh. All the good ones are taken, aren't they? Fine then.

[Resume Deep Announcer Voice] Episode: "Sin."

Fade in.

House: "Okay, Hippo, what have you got?"

Augustine: "Patient's a chronic liar."

House: "Everybody lies. Tell me something I don't know about him."

Pelagius: "Mates with anything that moves." (Pointed glare at Augustine.) "Steals food even when he is not hungry." (Second pointed glare.) "Prays for forgiveness of sinful behavior but never actually changes said behavior. I could go on."

House: "Please don't. Theories of origin?"

Augustine: "Inherited from the first human."

Pelagius: "Socialization. Culture. Habit."

Augustine: "Exacerbated by habit. Originated in the first human."

House (already bored of them): "Julian, you're awfully quiet today. You forget how to interact with other human life during your long career as an anchorwoman?"

Julian: "Anchoress, Dr. House."

House: "Same thing. So you have something to contribute, or do you want to think on it for another 25 years first?"

Julian: "I think the patient was just doing his best. He couldn't help but stumble, but he only stumbled because he wanted so greatly to please his Lord."

House: "God help us. Pelagius? You have a diagnosis rolling around in that perfect little head of yours?"

Pelagius: "Maybe it's lup-"

(House glares.)

Pelagius: "Uh, loop-de-loops. Terrible things. Everyone should walk the straight and narrow, I always say. We're all perfectly capable of avoiding spiritual detours."

Augustine (adding insistently): "God willing."

House: "Fine. We've established that it's sin. We don't know how it got there, but we know we want to get rid of it. Julian, they're a lost cause. I'm looking at you for a prognosis."

Julian: "All shall be well."

House: "That's not funny, Julian. You said that about the last three patients. We're trying to save a life here."

Augustine: "Salvation isn't in our hands, House. It is by God's mercy that--"

House (losing patience...no pun intended): "Okay, Hippo, I get it. Could you just tell the anchoress here that she can't give the same prognosis for every patient without even considering the nature of their illness? A guy could be wheeled in here on a gurney after being hit by a bus and she'd still say the same damned thing."

Julian (bristling at the use of 'damned'): "Just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it can't happen."

House: "Wilson, is that you? You've done something to your hair. And voice. And..." (looks down her body and prickles)

Julian: "What I meant was what is impossible for you is not impossible for--"

House (sighs dramatically): "Pelagius, go break into Sinbad's house and look for some dirt on the man."

Pelagius: "I can't."

House: "Can't what?"

Pelagius: "Break into his house."

House: "Oh, for Christ's sake."

(Team members exchange glances.)

House: "That's it. You span 1000 years of church history among you and you still can't even fathom the basis of sin. How the hell do you expect to be able to figure out how it's treated?"

(Team members exchange glances. Then: uproar, chaos, heated arguments. House takes his cane and Vicodin and heads for the door.)

House: "We're missing something."

End scene.

Pandora's Sense of Humor

What should come on the radio the other day just as I was writing about salvation but none other than "Save Me" by the Dave Matthews Band?



Now I'm holding out for the Beatles' "Ballad of John and Yoko."



Thank you, Pandora Radio. You get me. Like on a creepy level.

Roman Catholic: The Entertainment Factor

by C.M. Schott, contributor

Whenever something more-than-natural is afoot in film and TV—and often even when it isn’t—the protagonists turn Catholic. I had this realization brought home to me recently when, during an episode of Heroes, of all things, Peter Patrelli found himself in St. Patrick’s Cathedral trying (not quite in vain) to strike a bargain with Jesus.

This scene led me to think of so many situations in film, TV, literature, and music when the “je ne sais quoi” of Roman Catholicism seemed irresistible to artists: there are fallen-away Catholic characters like Sydney in The Pretender (remember that series?) and Grissom in CSI; sci-fi is rife with religious metaphor—even the “Gridlock” episode of Doctor Who features heavily Christological (if not Catholic) themes; and the explanation for all things Supernatural and Buffy always comes around to some (usually distorted) echo of Catholic dogma. And for that matter, can we forget the Jewish-born, irreligious Paul Simon with his “crayon rosary” and the poet’s crooked rhyme reading, “Holy holy is his sacrament”?

I think, before we pronounce a knee-jerk condemnation of the travesty that mainstream art usually makes of Catholic doctrine, it’s worth asking what exactly attracts even atheists to the Church when they deal with things greater than man—to the Church specifically, not just to theism or even to Christianity in general. The answers, I think, are not just positive but even hopeful, despite all appearances.

The obvious answer, which leads us into the more meaningful one, is that Catholics still do creepy.

Exhibit A: exorcism.



Exhibit B: well, do we really need an exhibit B? Let’s face it: Catholicism is second only to Voodoo when it comes to believing in things that go bump in the night. And despite whatever bad feelings remain toward Catholics from our brother Protestants or from mainstream entertainment at large, Catholicism is just more socially acceptable than Voodoo. More than that, it is somehow at once eerily foreign and deeply familiar, as a little of Catholicism runs in the veins of every social element with roots in the Middle Ages and beyond. The Catholic faith is an open playing field for entertaining situations that butt man up against anything that is bigger than himself.

Of course, sometimes that “bigger-than-man” opponent is nothing more than a corrupt hierarchy. We do have to admit that the Church plays no second fiddle when it comes to being a long-lived institution that has, at times, suffered legendary bouts with corruption, greed, and all the most human institutional failings. It provides a rather broad target for iconoclastic artists. See in this category: Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Kingdom of Heaven (or for that matter practically any crusade movie), and perhaps most of all The Da Vinci Code.

This use of the Church I feel to be (if saddening) a generally pedestrian anti-institutionalism, often having less to do with the Church itself than with the modern individualist taste for conspiracy theory. It must serve as a reminder to us, as members of the Church, to be always on our guard against corruption and the corrosive influence of power and human greed; it reminds us that we must present more than just our personal incarnations of Christianity to the world but rather we must represent the whole Church in our lives; but I don’t find much in this anti-institutionalism that has to do with the souls of its advocates.

What interests me is when the “bigger-than-man” opponent is indeed supernatural. We could go back further than Dracula, no doubt, to find instances of the ritual and beliefs of Catholicism being brought to bear as weapons against preternatural evil, but why bother? Here we have it in spades: Dracula, the menace-cum-seducer, is powerless before the Eucharist. In the same way, the demons in TV’s Supernatural are subject to the ritual of exorcism, and in that old Schwarzenegger movie End of Days, where he is of course single-handedly responsible for staving off the apocalypse, the scene they showed in all the previews was our hero on his knees in a Catholic church (to be interrupted by a dragon-Satan bursting through the floor, but more on that later).



When the evil moving about is not manmade but is an arm of the devil himself, the storehouse for solutions is inevitably the Catholic Church. And I believe it’s not just because of the ancient, mysterious ritual that surrounds Church proceedings, but rather, I think it is because Catholicism still admits to something many “religious people” have sidelined in favor of more appeasing and pragmatic approaches to spirituality: we still believe in ultimates. Ultimate truth and ultimate falsehood, ultimate evil (whence the interest from cinema), but most importantly, ultimate good. All these, working actively in today’s world just as they did in the days of the Bible. We may believe in possession, but we also believe in miracles. Grappling with the devil we have the angels.

That’s what entertainment so often lacks: why its demons, ghosts, and monsters leave us always a little dissatisfied, a little unconvinced, a little sheepish at how cheesy it all is. When our salvation rests on the success of a human being—whether unlikely hero or dashing heartthrob, whether played by Keanu Reeves or Sarah Michelle Geller—salvation always seems to fall short. At the very least, it’s temporary, at best lasting until the next sequel. Without the real ultimate good—let’s go ahead and say aloud the word “God”—the ultimate evil will never ring true, and victory will always feel incomplete. There’s just something woefully inadequate (or, worse, comically ridiculous) about arming the Governator with a grenade-launcher and thinking he could conceivably win out over the powers of darkness. Without God, the devil is a dragon to be charged at, or a cheat snatching at models and action figures; without heaven, hell is just an uncomfortable place to lodge somebody for the duration of a two-part episode. The sham is exciting enough, but it always leaves us wanting more than it could give.

Yet, that is exactly why I see such hope in art today. People seem to find it easier to believe in evil than in good, yet isn’t the draw of a compelling demon or vampire at least in part the secret desire for its salvation? If the good-versus-evil shadowplay of media leaves its consumers dissatisfied, might it not lead them to question what it is they really wanted in the first place? And what they really want (as much as even Christians would often like to deny it these days) is Christ. And he may be more politically correct in a church where “Jesus is your friend,” but he is all we could ever want when he is not only a friend but a lord, flanked by his angels and riding the clouds of heaven to harrow hell. When the world abandoned the hierarchy it lost something of the hero as well.

Popular movies and books and music appeal to the romantic in us, even if it is only to try and quash romance with cynicism. It is the romantic that wants happy endings without corniness and wants evil punished without gray areas. That’s why I think Catholicism always shows up in these movies: it is a romantic religion in which there are weapons to fight against what goes bump in the night (the things children recognize naturally and are only convinced don’t exist by a self-confident and jaded adult culture). It is a faith which promises a dawn without shadow. And at the same time it is a religion hard-as-nails (nine-inch nails, in fact) in which there are no excuses for not at least trying to be a hero. All roads can lead to God, and that is why when I look at entertainment these days I take more pleasure—even joy—than I take offense.

Unfortunately, of course, even if all roads can lead to God, it doesn’t mean they do. When Schwarzenegger’s kneeling plea for help is answered by the thunderous entrance of a monster, when the promise of the first seasons of Supernatural falls flat because it turns out that God is on vacation, all that potential I feel building in the set-up disappears in a puff of cynical cinema-smoke. I don’t know if there is room in the film world for a dogmatically correct Dracula, or in the TV world for a theologically sound Buffy or True Blood. I half doubt it (for what would those shows be if everybody kept their clothes on?).

But there is room for ultimate good alongside ultimate evil—Lewis and Tolkien (and their immensely successful recent film renditions) have proven that. And perhaps there is a role for entertainment in salvation, even if it serves aesthetics ahead of religion: if what people see reminds them that they really do want someone to save them—if it touches that deep-seeded desire for something that is both more real and more epic than CGI demons and their grubby gladiatorial opponents—then people of faith must declare the name of the savior. Art is already pointing its consumers upward, however inadvertently: let us stand along the roadside to open the gate, direct them toward heaven, and—pardon the expression—evangelize the hell out of them.


C.M. Schott likes blockbusters probably more than she should, and likes serious cinema “less than half as well as it deserves.” She is a student of literature but moonlights as a movie fan, music enthusiast, and (as of this post) a freelance blogger.


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