Is it the End? Or a New Beginning?

When I was a kid, I loved The Dark Crystal, a movie made by Jim Henson and filled with some pretty fabulous puppets. It’s a story about two elf-like creatures (called gelflings, if you must know) who must evade creepy buzzard-like creatures and battle gigantic beetles and, eventually, save their entire land. These gentle creatures turn out to be big players, cosmically speaking, and it’s no coincidence that they’ve made their presence known during something called the Great Conjunction.

“The Great Conjunction is the end of the world!” proclaims a weird womanish creature named Aughra. “Or the beginning.”

There are those who think we’re on the brink of the end of the world around here, and we we’re without a single gelfling. The long-count Mayan calendar is set to end Dec. 21, which has sent loads of New Age-y true believers running for the hills—in some cases literally. Some wanted to head to the French village of Bugarach, believing that the tiny town might be spared because of the cool mountain nearby. (The town said thanks, but commemorate the end of the world elsewhere.) Another mountain, Mt. Rtanj in Serbia, is also rumored to be a safe apocalyptic harbor. Living in Colorado Springs, I’m surprised we haven’t seen a surge of folks setting up shop on the slopes of Pikes Peak.

Experts say the only real “end” the Mayans were fortelling is the end of the calendar: Time to go to Hallmark and pick up another one.

But let me admit something to you. While I don’t believe the world will stop turning Dec. 21, there have been times when it’s felt like the end of the world.

The Newtown massacre hit lots of us pretty hard, and I think we might be excused for feeling, in the wake of the tragedy, that our culture was going a little wrong. There have been seven mass killings in 2012: Seven too many. It can feel as though we’re unsafe no matter where we go or what we do. A sick, unstable person has the power to take what’s most precious to us and tear our worlds apart.

We’re struggling with other issues, too. The Fiscal Cliff. Climate change. Uprisings in the Middle East. Economic strife in Europe. It’s hard to be a glass-half-full sort of person when the glass seems full of holes.

There’s a reason why the Mayans pegged Dec. 21 as the day their calendar ended. It’s the winter solstice—a natural completion of a year and the shortest, darkest day of the year. It was a time when the land was at its bleakest and gloomiest. Perhaps those not familiar with the cyclical nature of the seasons might wonder whether things would ever get better. The solstice was, in many cultures, a time of celebration—a seasonal understanding that, yeah, things may look pretty black now, but they’re bound to get brighter; bound to get better.

Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why the Christian Church chose to celebrate Christ’s birth on Dec 25, so very close to the solstice (most scholars seem to think Jesus was probably born in the spring or fall), and why lights—from advent candles to LED displays—are such integral parts of celebrating Christmas.

Really, what better time is there to celebrate the arrival of the world’s only true light, only true hope, but in the darkest part of the year?

Things may look pretty bleak right now. The world feels dark and cold. I feel the chill everywhere. But as Christmas itself tells us, sometimes the darkest of times can bring life to the brightest of hopes. And though it may feel like the end of the world, it might be just a new beginning.  

Hurting

No more.

This is my primal, belly-deep cry as we reel from the news of another mass killing—this one perpetrated against the youngest, the most innocent. My brain races with a thousand thoughts; my heart hurts for the parents and kids; my soul asks the same questions yours does.

But my gut, it hollers. It begs. No more. No more.

Another gunman, shrouded in a bulletproof vest and armed with multiple guns, made news this morning. He walked into Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., and opened fire. By the time he took his own life, at least 27 others were either dead or dying—20 of them children. A tragedy, we say.

But we’ve used that word so often in the last few years that it doesn’t seem to be enough. It can’t convey the anguish and desolation felt in Newtown tonight. Tragedy is too weak a word now. 

And I wonder … what were these children thinking about, talking about, five minutes before? Were they counting down the minutes ‘til Christmas vacation? Were they debating what to do at recess? Were they contemplating a mystery gift—a wrapped box underneath the tree—that they couldn’t wait to find out what it was?

Yesterday, I wrote of the infinite, that sense of promise and potential that youth feel so mightily at times. This evening, those words haunt me: For 20 children, that promise and potential was silenced. Twenty children found true infinite too soon.

We grieve now. As parents and children ourselves—no matter how distant we are from Connecticut, we grieve. We pray for the survivors, for the hurting parents, maybe the whole country. Perhaps, we try to console … if not those in Newtown, then at least ourselves. As Christians, perhaps, we try to offer what comfort we can. We remind (ourselves?) that God is with us in even these moments. That He feels our pain more sharply than we can imagine. That, even now, even in this, God is in control. That, perhaps even now, He embraces these little children and walks them into His eternal country.

I believe it. I believe it all. I believe that God can work through even the worst of moments. I’ve written so in the past—back when Aurora was the tragedy.

Less than five months ago.

It’s comforting to know, I suppose, that the Psalmists walked through moments and months like this, where the world seemed sick to the soul and the poets begged for relief.

My heart is in anguish within me

The terrors of death assail me.

Fear and trembling have beset me;

Horror has overwhelmed me.

I said, ‘Oh, that I had the wings of a dove!

I would fly away and be at rest—I would flee far away and stay in the desert;

I would hurry to my place of shelter,

Far from the tempest and storm.

Psalm 55:4-6

And at the end of these anguished cries, the concluding lines are often the same. In Psalm 55, the last line is very simple: “But as for me, I trust in you.”

We hurt. We cry out. We long for the world to be made well—or, barring that, just better. Just saner. Just keep the killers from our children. Just keep the wolves from our door.

But God makes no promises. And so we walk on in the pit of tragedy, under the shadow of death. And in the end, all we can do is trust. That God will walk with us. That God, no matter what comes, is with us and cares for us and is, in his sometimes inexplicable way, leading us Home.

Perks of Being a Wallflower: Infinite

I belong to a local movie critic society and, with awards season already in full swing, I’m trying to catch up on some movies I haven’t reviewed for my day job. Tonight’s screening: The Perks of Being a Wallflower.

Stephen Chbosky’s coming-of-age drama (he wrote the book, the screenplay and directed the movie for good measure) has started showing up on some critics’ “best of” lists. And, even though I would’ve scribbled about 80 pages worth of “problematic content” notes had reviewed this for Plugged In, it’s pretty deserving.

The story focuses on Charlie (Logan Lerman), a quietly troubled high school freshman longing for connection. No, scratch that: He’s longing for a savior—someone to rescue him from his past, his imagined friendless future and his own anxious mind. And he finds it, after a fashion, in an eclectic group of compatriots, particularly gay senior Patrick (Ezra Miller) and his beautiful step-sister, Sam (Emma Watson).

Perks is littered with talking points and, on a personal level, I was swept away by the story. The movie captured the feel of high school as well as any John Hughes movie ever did—the highs and lows, the sense of high tragedy and wacky farce sometimes lumped into the same passing period. Sure, I stayed a lot cleaner in high school than the main characters here (a wild night for us was a soda-filled murder party), but the sense of possibility—that heart-in-the-throat feeling that all the horrors and raptures of life might somehow be condensed into one weekend—felt true. (And it didn’t hurt that the characters were listening to the same music I did in high school and college, either.)

As Charlie says in the end, “You are alive, and you stand up and see the lights on the buildings and everything that makes you wonder. And you're listening to that song and that drive with the people you love most in this world. And in this moment I swear, we are infinite.”

Infinite. For a pretty non-religious movie, its themes—and that word in particular—pack an almost spiritual punch.

In high school, I remember there were nights when I felt infinite, nights when I felt so in love—not with anything or anyone, but with life itself—that I’d almost want to cry. It was if the film on my eyes had thinned and I saw the world’s true possibility. Beauty coated every atom, every breath of breeze.

There are times when I still feel that way. But not like I did when I was younger.

I think that, in those moments—even if we’re not doing anything particularly holy—we see the world more as God intended us to see it, as God intended it to be. In the twinkling of the streetlights or the hum of the tires or the smile of the person sitting beside you, we see a glimpse of Eden. And it’s so beautiful that it hurts.

As time goes on, those moments of seeing Eden, fade. We grow up and get jobs and raise families and get older and creakier. And as we age, we learn we’re not infinite. Not in these bodies, anyway.

And as we do, we wistfully remember what we felt like when we were in high school or college or just starting out. We imagine we’re missing our youth (whatever that means to us), but in the end, I wonder if that’s really true. I wonder if what we really miss is that sense of the infinite.

I wonder, sometimes, whether that’s one of the reasons why people fall into temptations or addictions as they get older: They still long for that beauty, hunger for that infinite. They haven’t forgotten. They want it back. And so they turn to other things—alcohol or drugs or mistresses or money—to somehow reclaim that feeling.

But maybe that sense of infinite isn’t something we lose in our youth: Maybe we are infinite in Christ, which means we can’t lose it—not really. And those moments when we felt so wonderful and right with the world, those were just the before-movie trailers—teasers of what’s to come.

I’ve shared before that I have a hard time imagining heaven. The harps and eternal singing just doesn’t do it for me. But The Perks of Being a Wallflower reminded me that I have tasted the infinite; I have felt the glorious sense of the universe humming in me when the night is clear and my friends are laughing and everything is right. If that’s what heaven feels like, I can’t wait.

Cloud of Confusion

Yesterday, Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper signed a proclamation that officially legalized marijuana in my home state. This was not exactly a shocking development around here. November, voters gave legal marijuana a green light (so to speak) with a convincing (if not overwhelming) majority. “If the voters go out and pass something and they put it in the state constitution, by a significant margin, far be it from myself or any governor to overrule," he told reporters. "I mean, this is why it’s a democracy, right?”

That very same day, I read a timely article on the Relevant Magazine website: "Should ChristiansSmoke Pot or Not?"  by Mark Driscoll of Seattle's Mars Hill Church. Given that Washington state just passed a similar law to Colorado's, the issue was pretty front-of-mind for Driscoll, too—so much so that he wrote a whole ebook about it.

While Driscoll is very cautionary about marijuana use, saying he'd "never encourage anyone to smoke weed recreationally," he stops short of saying that it's un-Christian to do so. And as much as we might secretly long for a spiritual leader like Driscoll to tell us what to do (either a "Smoke up! I'm rolling a joint right now!" or a "Good heavens, no! A passage in 1 Esbithians clearly states that …"), I think Driscoll's response is the right one.

Alas, there is no 1 Esbithians to give us direction. God hasn't told us explicitly whether cannabis is an inherently bad thing to smoke or roll or bake in brownies. And so we're left to work out the details through our own powers of discernment.

Discernment. Even the word just screams “no fun.”

Now, let me just say this up front: I have no intention of using marijuana, legal or not. I grew up in the "just say no" generation, and we had anti-drug symposiums every other week, it seems—where some poor guy without any teeth told us that he lost his home and his job and his left kneecap to marijuana use. I voted against marijuana legalization, so you might fairly accuse me of bias.

But let me try to set aside all the potential physical positives and/or negatives of marijuana—be it no worse than alcohol or a dangerous gateway drug or whatever—and just focus on marijuana morality: Is smoking pot a sin? Could it potentially get in the way of our relationship with God?

Maybe Moses didn't bring down a commandment that said "thou shalt not toke." But I think for many folks, using marijuana might be a problem, spiritually speaking—perhaps not so much because of the substance itself but for the underlying issues that it's used for.

Driscoll says that marijuana often qualifies as a form of “self medication,” and that feels pretty fair to me. Some might use it to check painful issues they really should be processing through prayer. For others, it can be a temptation or distraction—something that pulls us away from our God-given calling. When we’re distracted by a drug or unhealthy pastime, we can lose sight of the people we're supposed to be caring for and the jobs God's asked us to do. And though proponents say marijuana isn’t all that addictive (at least compared to some substances), it still feels that it can be plenty addictive enough—threatening to become (as all addictions do) a substitute for God Himself: The medicine and master to which the user sacrifices his or her whole life.

That’s a whole lotta pitfalls, it seems to me. And frankly, I wonder whether our culture has far too many pitfalls as it is.

Says Driscoll:

As a pastor I have noticed that people tend to stop maturing when they start self-medicating. Everyone has very tough seasons in life, but by persevering through them we have an opportunity to mature and grow as people. Those who self-medicate with drugs and/or alcohol (as well as other things) often thwart maturity as they escape the tough seasons of life rather than face them. This explains why some people can be biologically much older than they are emotionally and spiritually.

That's true, I think. Even if pot's legal, our development can still be arrested through its use. And even more problematic: When we self-medicate, we're inherently turning our darkest problems and deepest longings over to a substance when we should be entrusting it to God. 

God v. Science: The Lamest Debate

“In the red corner, weighing in at 3.35 times 10 to the 54^th power, with a reach of 93 billion light years, science! In the blue corner, weighing in at his incomparable, indescribable glory, with a reach encompassing all of creation, God!”

Whether you’re a devout believer, a faithful atheist or just someone who’s interested in where God fits in this complex universe of ours, there’s few things that seem to interest us more than a good match between God and science. The typical bout consists of secular scientists facing down religious leaders on a college stage somewhere: Atheists trot out Charles Darwin and Carl Sagan and snicker at the Creation Museum in Kentucky. Religious debaters—well, you never know what we’re going to say. They might proffer some thoughts on intelligent design, or riff on Isaac Newton’s watchmaker God, or just say, “Hey, what’s so funny about the Creation Museum?!”

Let me confess something: This whole God vs. science narrative is beginning to drive me up the wall.

The most recent showdown between God and science took place last week as part of an Intelligence Squared Debate in New York City. Secularists Lawrence Krauss (director of the Origins Project) and Michael Shermer (founding publisher of Skeptic Magazine) squared off against Ian Hutchinson (professor of Nuclelar Science and Engineering at MIT) and Dinesh D’Souza (who we know a little about), and was dutifully reported by Fox News under the headline “Science vs. god: doesprogress trump faith?”

But in the end, we all know that this narrative of science and God locked in eternal opposition is just lame.

We’re given two choices here: Either God is a fiction, leaving the battlefield empty on one side; or God is real, and He and science are in cahoots. 

God, who is typically understood to be outside the realm of time and space, is by definition impossible for science (under the domain of both) to either prove or disprove. And so the arguments are forever lacking.

For instance: God proponents might point out the astoundingly outlandish odds that the universe just, by chance, created itself and in such a way to support life. (And indeed, you’ve got WAY better odds of winning the Powerball jackpot every week for the rest of your life.) But atheists will note, as Krauss did, that “we would be surprised to find ourselves in a universe in which we couldn’t live.”

Atheists will claim that our fondness for faith and belief in God is just a trick of our genes—that (again as Krauss said) “we may be programmed to believe in certain things.” But Krauss’ own word “programmed,” of course, suggests a programmer.

These debates are impossible for anyone to win. God, for whatever reason, doesn’t want to come down (yet) and say “I told you so.” And secularists have never had much success in dispelling the notion of a deity despite hundreds of years of bluster. Despite the radical advances science has made, atheism hasn’t made any real intellectual progress since Darwin’s day. Only the volume has changed.

Admittedly, the advances we’ve seen in science and technology have also been powerful tools for atheists as of late. If they can’t disprove God outright, perhaps they can suggest He’s no longer relevant. Who needs God when you have Google?

But D’Souza, and most other Christians, know the answer to that.

“The questions to which God is the answer are not scientific questions,” he said during the debate. “Science can show us how we got a universe, but not why.”

And that’s what it comes down to—the why. Why are we here? Why do we hurt? Why do we dance like crazy when we hear a certain song? Why do we gasp a little when we see a beautiful sunrise? Why do we laugh? Why do we care about beauty or integrity or love? Why?

Science can’t answer. Most non-believers don’t want to. Because a world without a why is a bleak one indeed.

Running on Faith: New Shoes

When we’re little, the only thing separating us from awesome, near-superhuman powers is the right set of shoes.

 When I was in first grade, I assumed I was horrible in gym class because my shoes were lame. I was sure if I could just talk Mom into buying a pair of popular sneakers—something that had some cool racing stripes on the side, maybe—I’d be way better at kickball and dodgeball. And running? I’d be a tiny blur, able to run faster than our station wagon and leap over small ponies.

 Yessir. A pair of the right set of shoes would make all the difference, I thought.

 And you know what? I was right.

 Last week, I bought a new pair of running shoes. It was time. My old ones were looking like a couple of unidentified bits of roadkill (they smelled suspiciously like that, too). After a five-mile run, they felt as forgiving as a pair of tiny granite countertops.

 And while my new shoes, alas, didn’t give me superhuman powers—I was still just as stubbornly slow as ever—the difference was nothing short of revolutionary.

To run in new shoes is like running on cotton candy, tho’ not as sticky. Lacing them up is like strapping a pair of singing rainbows to your soles. Oh, sure, that sense of luxurious tranquility may be long gone by the time you hit mile seven. But runners take what comfort we can.

As I’ve said before, I think running has something in common with our walk of faith. And I think there are times when our spiritual journeys can use their own set of new shoes.

I gotta be honest: I’d recently been in a bit of a Bible-reading funk. While I try to read the Bible pert near every day, a few months ago, I hit a wall, right in the middle of Proverbs. I’d had enough of hearing about wise men and fools and virtuous women and children in need of a whuppin’—at least for a little while. I put down the Good Book and told myself I’d pick it back up in a few days.

After a couple of months, I figured out something was amiss. Turns out, I think, I might’ve just needed some new shoes: Or, more to the point, I needed a new plan for reading the Bible.

Well into my home Bible-reading drought, the ministry I work at launched into Biblica’s Community Bible Experience. We were given New Testaments that had been stripped of their chapters and verses, and the books themselves had been shoved into an unfamiliar (though, the folks at Biblica tell us, a more historically accurate) order. We were asked to plow through the Testament during our normal devotionals.

Now, I’d be lying to you if I said the experience radically changed the way I think about my faith (though some people apparently have). But I did come away with a new appreciation of the Scriptures that inform that faith. The books, stripped as they were of their standard biblical trappings, seemed to take on new resonance and urgency and power.

For instance: There were no red letters in the Community Bible Experience.

Now, I know that many of you may love those red letters. And that’s great. But I come from a newspaper background, where copy was just black letters on white newsprint. My editors were constantly stripping all sorts of emphases out of my stories—my clever italics and my moments of ALL CAPS. They said that my words should carry the story. If I needed to utilize extra bells and whistles to convey a point, perhaps I should use stronger words. And ever since then, italics (which I still use often) and other typographical doo-dads have struck me as visual cheats.

Red-lettering Christ’s words always feels a bit like a cheat to me—as if readers can’t be trusted to pay attention otherwise. It’s not like Jesus, when he walked the earth, had angels angels playing trumpets before he spoke (at least not too often), or his disciples shouting to the crowd, “LISTEN! THIS IS IMPORTANT!” Jesus’ words should be powerful enough on their own that we shouldn’t need a colorful cue to tell us to pay attention.

And, through the Bible Experience, I discovered Jesus’ words carried plenty of oomph even when they weren’t red. In Mark’s sturdy prose, Jesus’ words sounded like poetry. In John’s beautiful, graceful book, Christ’s voice still carried above all.

It’s amazing what a few little changes in a familiar book will do.

I don’t think Bible readers in a funk, like me, need to turn to the Community Bible Experience. They might need to just plow through a new reading program or pick up a new translation. Cruising through a few books in The Message can be kinda revelatory, too. It doesn’t mean you have to punt your trusty King James or NIV. I’ve still got my regular Bible by the nightstand—and I’m reading it again, too, beginning again at the beginning as I’m prone to do. But I’m eager to read it again. I just needed something new to get me going again.

As long as we’re Christians, the Bible’s going to be with us always. We should turn to it day after day—for inspiration, for guidance, for comfort. Its words are constant, its message eternal. In the beginning was the Word, John says. And in the end, the Word will be with us still. It’s as important to us as—just as important, and more, as shoes are to most runners. They’re both with us step for step, mile after mile. They make, for many of us, the run possible.

But every now and then, it doesn’t hurt to get a new pair of shoes. It doesn’t hurt to look at the Bible in a new way, with fresh eyes. The experience can be rejuvenating, invigorating. Even beautiful.

A Deal Even Bruce Wayne Couldn’t Pass Up

What would be the perfect Christmas gift?

Naturally, it’d be indescribably cool—both entertaining and inspirational. It would be something you wouldn’t have to wrap. Oh, and ideally, it’d be free.

But where could you find a gift like this? Shangri la? Never Neverland? The North Pole?

Well, OK, so probably all those places have really great gifts, too. But they’re pretty hard to get to on a budget and their Internet connectivity is spotty. And let’s face it: When it comes to the North Pole, those elves can be a cantankerous bunch.

But thankfully, there is a gift that you can get right from the comfort of your own computer (or tablet or smartphone or other super-techy device). And unless my eyes are deceiving me, you’re at one of those devices right now. Which means you’re just a click or two away from a gift that will make you a legend among your family and friends, a gift that, if your place in heaven was based on works, would surely get you a place in a trendy heavenly neighborhood.

What gift could do all this? An e-copy of my book, of course. Tyndale is offering God on the Streets of Gotham: What the Big Screen Batman Can Teach Us About God and Ourselves absolutely free starting right now and lasting through Dec. 8. Naturally, you gotta have some sort of e-reader like a Kindle to actually read the book. But trust me: Spending a few hundred dollars on a tabletish-like device is a bargain for the wit and wisdom found in this book (if I do say so myself). It looks like it’s available through Amazon and the Apple bookstore and who-knows-where-else.

Of course, if you wanted to have a real, paper-and-ink copy of the thing, I’m sure Tyndale has a few of those available, too. But you’ll have to pay for those.

At any rate, I’d love it if you passed this bit of information onto anyone you think might be interested … or, as I say, give it as a gift. I’d like to think that it’d be a nice little addendum to a Dark Knight Rises Blu-Ray.

Alas, I cannot sign e-books. But, should you download one and wish to drop me a line, I’ll send back a picture of my signature that you can print out and paste on whatever nifty device you happen to use.

Best wishes, folks, and happy reading.