Counter Culture

I’ve only 48 pages left of Heretics and Heroes. Sigh. I hate finishing a good book. It’s just one more country I have to leave. And back eighty pages or so, he promised to talk about Anabaptists, and here we are almost done, and…nothing! Such suspense! But let me tell you what I’ve got so far. Plato. Yes.

Cahill pictures Western history as a giant tennis match between two great athletes. Plato serves first, insisting that we know so little of what is out there, and what we do know, we know “as through a glass, darkly.” The things we experience are but shadowy hints of a spiritual realm out of our reach.  Plato’s great opponent, Aristotle, counters. For him there is no world beyond what we can see. Our job is to divide our reality into categories: classify and divide, classify and divide. There is nothing else. To Aristotle we owe our scientific classification, our scientific method, even that filing system on your computer. I may owe my life to Aristotle.

But I owe my soul to Plato. Throughout the Middle Ages, Aristotle was winning the match, with all that systematizing of theology that Aquinas invented. The Middle Ages had theology down to a science. But Cahill’s book takes up where men in the Renaissance and Reformation started thinking that there was more out there. Maybe the Church didn’t have the truth sewn up after all. Maybe there was more to reality than meets the eye. Maybe there were different ways of reading Scripture, like in local languages--German, or English, even. Heaven forbid, said that Church. Such a thing has never been done, said the Church. Burn those books! Burn those heretics! The Grand Inquisitor was kept very busy trying to draw truth between the lines, and the newly invented printing press was not helping one bit. Those new, readable translations of the Bible were inciting an underground movement all over Europe. People were buying up secret copies and frantically teaching themselves to read (do you hear that, my English students? Let me repeat that just for you: “frantically teaching themselves to read!”) And they were reading the Bible and seeing for themselves Czech words and German words and English words that undermined the status quo. Welcome back, Plato.

A few months ago I opened a Pinterest account (yes, and spelled it Pininterest forever) for one reason, and one reason only. I missed my kids, both gone at college now, and wanted to stay connected, and came up with a plan to send Elai one image a day just for fun: cats, horses, ballerinas, Mexican VWs covered in beads, steampunk, a snow-frosted Bean in downtown Chicago, and…street art. Graffiti. And I stumbled across some of the most amazing art I have ever seen. Do you know who Banksy is? He’s this underground graffiti artist who wanders around painting subversive art. Not violent art, not crass art, not boring ole “let’s waste ‘em” art, but art that says, “There is more out there than meets the eye.” And I love that graffiti isn’t licensed. It’s a “here I stand” kind of thing. (To my disappointment, I wasn’t the first to introduce my counter-culture child to Banksy: she’d watched a documentary in class. Sigh. Oh, and when I tried my brilliant idea on my son, he quipped, “I’ve seen all those, Mom.” Sigh.)

But back to the point. Cahill has plate after plate in his book of Renaissance and Reformation art just like Banksy’s. My favorite is Pieter Brueghel’s The Fall of Icarus, (1558) on the cover, where life goes on, but in the water, two legs are drowning in the water and no one notices! (got a link to the story if you don’t know it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icarus). So what do you think? Are we sitting pretty with all the truth and all the versions of it sewn up in our churches, and as leaders, are we carefully drawing it within the lines, classifying it as a list instead of a Person? Or are we willing to let go, welcome Plato, welcome Reformation, and really SEE?

The Fall of Icarus (notice the legs on the right)

 Big Fish Eats Little Fish, (or dog eats dog; notice the ugliness of "survival of the fittest")

Ever since the Industrial Revolution, we Westerners have been living in Aristotle’s realm. We assumed we could solve world hunger with the Green Revolution and end world wars with the League of Nations. If we just classified enough, we would remake our world. Our seminaries filled with lists of theologies to master, and we graduated our leaders with “Masters of Divinity.” Masters of divinity! What a thought.  Years ago Robert walked into a classroom at church after a Youth meeting. A list on the board entitled “How to Be a Christian” read something like this:

·         Don’t drink

·         Don’t dance

·         Don’t sleep around

·         Do your devos

Today, Modernism has shown its rags, and our world, thankfully, has moved on. People all around us recognize that there is more out there than barren scientific fact. Plato is back. (For evidence, consider the missionary and mermaid in Pirates 4). Of course people come up with some pretty bizarre ideas about what is really out there, and we need to listen. But we have this going for us. The One that’s Out There has talked to us. Visited us. We know Him. Or are desperately trying to.

Here is some of Banksy's art. What is it saying? The last one made me gasp.

Flying Saucers ( OR Ezekiel OR What Happens When I Have a Quiet Peaceful Day)

Flying Saucers (or Ezekiel or What Happens When I Have a Quiet, Peaceful Day)

The pewter angel I wrote about a while back got me thinking about angels in general, and I decided to tackle the books in the Bible that have angels all over them. The Glory Books, they seem to me: Ezekiel, Daniel, Revelations. It seems to me I have seen plenty of human angels lately, angels with heart conditions, with bald heads, with big Persian eyes, or eternally blue shirts, but I wanted to check out the other kind. The alien kind. I have just finished Ezekiel, so I want to write about it (lucky you, it's one of those quiet, peaceful days) but to tell the truth, the angels were not on center stage as far as I could tell, which is not what you’d expect if aliens showed up somewhere on our planet, today. No, we’d be making a big Hollywood film, for sure. Somehow Ezekiel avoided getting sidetracked by the whole alien thing and even forgot all about them as he moved on to his prophetic message. That’s how you know he was really a prophet. Man, there was no distracting him. This is what I got from Ezekiel, if you’re interested.

I made myself speed read the book, taking in big gulps of it all at once, whole concepts. I like reading like this, unless it’s a book like Heretics and Heroes, where I have to slow down to a donkey’s pace to catch the juicy stuff. Ezekiel has detail galore, but some of it’s boring. Can I be honest? Do you enjoy reading that “He measured the east side with his measuring rod, and it was 875 feet long. Then he measured the north side, and it was also 875 feet. The south side was also 875 feet, so the area was 875 feet on each side(!) (emphasis mine) Don’t get me wrong. There is a reason for these details, and they need to stay in Ezekiel, and some day they will fill me with wonder. Just give me time. Meanwhile, I’m speed reading.

The chunks of Ezekiel look like this:

·         Angels looking like flying saucers lift off the Jewish Temple when God’s presence abandons it.

·         Ezekiel thrashes everyone for being so idolatrous and disobedient.

·         God promises them a new heart, eventually, when the punishments are all over.

·         He promises they will know who sent their troubles and why.

·         Trouble, trouble, and more trouble. To everyone all around. Looks like nuclear holocaust to me. Horrible stuff.

·         Then the people come back, and the Temple comes back, and it’s picture perfect. Fits the plan to the micron.

·         Glory comes back. The Law works. The Prince is not corrupt but does his duty.

·         There is a River that can heal anything, even the Dead Sea.

·         Ok, this is the one that got me in the throat. This last one. The last chapter. Are you ready?    THE LOST TRIBES COME BACK.

So if this is not getting to you like it’s getting to me, let me explain. See, when the Northern Kingdom of Israel fell to the Assyrians, the people didn’t go into Exile together like their Judean neighbors would later do in Babylon. No, the Assyrians had a much crueler policy. They would take their prisoners and scatter them throughout their kingdom, mixing them up with every other kind of people. Those prisoners would not have any chance of keeping their culture intact, much less their political identity. When the people of Israel left their tribal lands, they were lost for good, never to return in any recognizable way. So what is God promising here? What is Ezekiel saying? How in the world do those tribes come back and know it is their own God who brought them? They don’t even know they were ever Hebrew. Today most of them are scattered throughout the Middle East without any trace of Jewishness in their memory. How can this promise be possible?

I can’t answer that question. Nor can I answer the question of why God threatens them all so harshly before he gives that promise. He looks like he’s just out to punish, but I KNOW that’s not his way. What am I missing here?  I have a theory, and you can tell me what you think: There is no way to reach heaven without going through hell first—no way to reach forgiveness without repentance. When we mess up, mess happens, and that is the way God set up Science, so it’s His doing, if you want to see it that way, but let me tell you, not one drop of consequence gets wasted. I mean there is not one tear, not one stab of pain happening to anyone anywhere that we don’t need as a race to turn us around. God chases us down until we come back. He refuses to let us go. He haunts us. Inexorably, as George MacDonald pegs it. God stops at nothing, even Holocaust, to get us back. He was willing to suffer and die to have us back, and he’s willing to let us suffer and die to get us back, but he’s getting us back, and He hates the hurt it takes. And when He finally gets His way, the suffering ends. So Ezekiel paints the story in pictures: angels taking away the glory when we fail; God coming after us, even cruelly as it seems at the time; our returning in pure, repentant love; dead bones coming alive; then—THEN--perfect GLORY.

So it seems to me that Ezekiel is about not taking shortcuts. It’s about the pain of the process and the relentlessness of God. It’s about how he never lets go, no matter how utterly lost we are.  And it’s about aliens watching this with myriads of eyes and endless wonder.