hmmmtimes2's posterous
This blog is for the purpose of a semester focused on utilizing media in ministry and education.
This blog is for the purpose of a semester focused on utilizing media in ministry and education.
I’m not a parent, but I can’t help but notice that some of the greatest parenting advice is really some of the greatest living advice. Yesterday, I listened to Krista Tippett interviewing Sylvia Boorstein on the topic of What We Nurture on the APM program on Being.
Boorstein, a Jewish-Buddhist teacher, was talking about our reactions when dealing with the challenges that kids through at us. Often our first reaction is anger which usually comes out of our own fear or embarrassment. For example, a child running into the street – our own fear or a child screaming as the plane lands – our own embarrassment. Often we are dealing with these incidents out of our own needs and expectations. From our own needs what are we then able to nurture? Anger, fear, embarrassment?
What if …
“Rather than asking, "Am I pleased?" in any given situation, we can ask instead, "In this moment, am I able to care?"”[1]
And as I encounter friends and strangers, am I able to care?… Am I able to be present to you even when you are not presenting your best self? Can I suspend judgment for the sake of a nurturing relationship?
“What you’re experiencing is reality but it is not the ultimate reality.” Nadia Bolz-Weber said among many other profound and interesting things at the Book of Faith Jubilee a couple weekends ago at Luther Seminary. I’ve been giving a lot of thought about this… or should I say that repeatedly I am given new reasons to hold on to and to share this eloquent and graceful reality.
Life can be great, but it can also be just plain difficult and we can’t dismiss our current experience but Jesus didn’t come just for our current selves, Jesus came for what is to come, the ultimate reality…
Yes, “what you’re experiencing is reality but it is not the ultimate reality.” Amen!
Krista Tippett host of her radio program Being had an incredibly interesting show recently, Alive Enough? She spoke with Sherry Turkle author of Alone Together and director of the MIT initiative on Technology and Self. The conversation was an interesting 50 minutes of looking at the subjective side of technology, how technology affects us and how we allow it to affect us and those around us.
Sherry Turkle advocates for technology as something we need to continue to shape to serve human needs and she also studies the impact of technology on our perceptions of the world and technology. In the conversation she quotes her own book, "Just because we grew up with the internet ... we think we have a mature Internet but we don't." And she continued "we're in the baby stages and that's good ... that means we can make it right."
Some other interesting questions that came up throughout the conversation:
"Where are memories kept?" We don't write letters and we don't print
pictures...
"Is it alive enough for this purpose?" And a larger question is we losing a sense of what is means to be alive?
"What is served by having an always on, always open to everyone kind of life?"
But what was most interesting to me about her research … it's the parents, not the kids, who don't know how to unplug... have you seen this to be true?
“Your yes means nothing until you say no.” Said the facilitator at a Prepare and Enrich seminar held on campus last Friday. “Your yes means nothing until you say no…” Wow. Have you ever been instantaneously convicted by a comment you couldn’t see coming?... Especially one that was supposed to be directed elsewhere.
Prepare and Enrich is known as Marriage counseling materials for churches. The presenter was certain, and it seemed justifiably so, to point out that it was actually for people who want to work on relationships. “Your yes means nothing until you say no.” And it kept running through my brain…
To those of us, or maybe I should just speak for myself, who seem to let the word yes fly regularly off our tongues, I, we say, what exactly, do you mean?
“Your yes means nothing until you say, no?”
And how many times do we ask for clarification when we are just stalling, we know exactly what is meant. But knowing what is meant means owning it. I don’t always like owning it… there are probably more no’s I need to say then I want.
So how about you? “Your yes means nothing until you say no.” Do you need to say any more no’s?
Using the Arts to access God, to find faith and deepen our understanding is something that so many people do intentionally or by default. There are many messages of theological, philosophical and ethical significance considered in the Arts. We create and consume the arts for entertainment and again intentionally or by default, to get at our big questions to challenge and imagine beyond what we currently understand as good and bad, acceptable and repugnant, refreshing and exhausting.
I consider the Arts to reach far beyond film but for know I want to focus on film. Many films make an impact on our lives, they are relatively short in comparison, with let’s say with reading a novel, and we can view it with many people at the same time. Film can provide a communal experience just by virtue of how it needs to be experienced.
As I read through Mary Hess’ reading on Freeing Culture: Copyright and Teaching in Digital Media with all of its challenges and the closing in and tightening down of regulation around use and reference of movies and music especially in academic publishing, I couldn’t help but think of … well, what else? A movie quote…“That's part of your problem: you haven't seen enough movies. All of life's riddles are answered in the movies.” (From the 1991 movie Grand Canyon.) See movies have a place she said with a wink...Then I thought wow … will I be in violation of a copyright by even referring to it? I promise that I know the quote because I own a copy of the movie.
Knowing that I would only be in the Twin Cities for a season of my life, I have sought to see and experience what the cities have to offer. Tonight I attended the Nordic service at Pilgrim Lutheran Church in St Paul. It was poetic, grounded yet slightly ethereal. It was a service of spoken word and music, a service of what was and what will be. It was a beautiful mix of rhythm, word and note all drawn from Nordic roots to worship and know God.
In the Bulletin where they wrote about this evening’s service it reads:
“A word about the use of Scandinavian languages in this service, from Carol Tomer. When I served as pastor of the International Church of Stockholm in Sweden, an English-speaking congregation, I discovered that some Swedes preferred to worship in English, because some of the words of the Christian tradition didn’t carry as much old baggage for them in the fresh sound of another language; they found themselves able to come anew to God in a new tongue. Similarly, we are hoping that some of these Scandinavian phrases in our service might become fresh new heart language for you as you sing the words of these services each month.”[1]
They achieved their goal, at least with me. How interesting to think about language and to think about how using language differently can alter (and often improve) our experience. Breaking free from the bonds of what we have once or always understood can create new space and even new life. Maybe this is where the Holy Spirit can be most active, in the creative space left open by the newness of a sister or brother’s language and thought…
***Tonight was the last Nordic Service of the season; they start up again in September. In two weeks they will have their last Celtic service of the Season.
Some reaction on reading Mary Hess' book, Engaging Technology in Theological Education - Chapter 6 ....
Our digital technologies offer great opportunities for growth and understanding. Unfortunately digital technologies also provide opportunity for further hate, division and strife. Yet “the internet is a place where race happens” Hess quotes Nakamura.[1] Then Hess continues, “And it can also be a place where we begin to deconstruct and reconstruct our social relationships.”[2]
I have mixed emotions about using the Internet for matters of dismantling racism. Not because I do not think there is racism to be dismantled, but because I am so committed to the idea that to know one another is to be in the presence of another. I am a believer in breaking down racism (or any other “ism”) by relationships … spending time, getting to know one another, seeing each other as people and not as other.
Yet there are situations and realities that are difficult to talk to and about. Racism can be one of them. The Internet can offer a certain distance in which to be vulnerable, and a certain intimacy in which to be known. It can be a place to work out one’s own understandings, difficulties and prejudices about others and themselves. For when we honestly (and with self-awareness) interact with others we begin to understand more fully ourselves and the cultures that formed each of us as we gain a better understanding of those with whom we interact.
I don't know if we can digitally dismantle racism, but why not try?
We’re reading from Faith as a Way of Life by Christian Scharen this week. Specifically the chapter on Leisure and the Arts… Where he’s talking about the challenges of integrating faith, culture and the arts. And he’s not talking about the arts and culture connection… faith, how do we get faith connected to culture or to the arts? Or maybe it’s through the arts that we might start connecting faith and culture. It seems so. Since what is art but interpretation of life, thoughts, reality and dare I say… faith.
Scharen talks about music and how we connect to music on a “deeply human” level and how music tells so many of the stories of our lives. [1]He writes, “What we sing, or the music we hum, says something profound about who we are and the world in which we live.”[2] So what does it say about me listening and resonating so strongly with the line from an Indigo Girls song, “Every five years or so I look back on my life and I have a good laugh”?[3]
But music does connect and in profound ways, ways much deeper than me laughing at myself. I wonder how much “secular” music might already be more Christian than we think. Maybe as a way to enter into and understand our own culture, we might do well to mine more of its music for faith and life, mystery and speculation, even misery and death.
Not to dwell on Clay Shirky and his book Here Comes Everybody, but I am bringing it up again. Not so that I can revisit its content but so that I can point out that everything can be found on the internet... Look at this old blog post ...
If the book is too much to read, someone can read it for you. You can go to Polarunlimited. And sign up for their one business book per week book summary.
Don't you sometimes wish someone was doing this with theology books? Or maybe they are?
