god

Act of God: Meditations on Lightning, Life and Chance

admin — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 01:00:00 +0000

What happens to a person whose life is touched by lightning? How does getting struck by lightning—or losing a loved one to lightning—change a person’s world view? Are such events random acts of nature or are certain people destined to be struck by lightning? Questions of fate, destiny, God’s will, and nature’s intention permeate Act of God: Meditations on Lightning, Life and Chance, a 2008 film directed by Jennifer Baichwal.

Baichwal says the idea behind the film was a simple question: how do people find meaning in randomness? Getting struck by lightning is the “quintessential example of the paradox of being singled out by randomness,” she says in an interview also included on the DVD. So what are different responses to that event? she wondered. “Is it possible to experience something so violent... and not ascribe meaning to it?”

The question, as it turns out, has a lot of different answers.

Getting struck by lightning feels like an act of destiny, intentional, speculates one of the film’s participants, a writer who feels he was forever changed by his close encounter with lightning when he was fourteen. Ultimately, though, he concludes that “there’s no meaning to this. It’s absolutely meaningless. And yet this is the way the world works.”

Every participant in the film has a different interpretation of what lightning means. One suggests that his fascination with lightning, his pursuit of it, allowed him to gain his soul. Another participant says that getting struck by lightning taught him what life was all about. He claims to have died, to have met some spiritual beings who showed him the shame of his past, but who reminded him that he has free will and he can change his life. “Lightning and change go hand in hand,” he says. “And in a single moment, I was changed.” One participant suggests that lightning and thunder indicate Shango’s anger (Shango is a Yoruba god, and likened to Santa Barbara in Santeria); the faithful must provide sacrifices to propitiate him, he suggests. Yet another of the film’s participants feels only grief about her children, who were killed as they knelt and prayed in front of a cross at the top of a mountain in Mexico. Finally, she decides that what God does is for the best. “The Lord doesn’t make mistakes,” she says.

The film’s premise is fascinating, the stories told compelling, and the speculations worth considering. It would have helped to have a narrator linking the scenes and meditations together, instead of a disembodied and disconnected voice occasionally providing some narration. I ached for more information on lightning itself, though Baichwal says that she deliberately avoided the physical and scientific aspects in order to focus on the metaphysical questions. Ultimately, the film feels fragmented and unfinished. But of course, this is another aspect of the film’s artistry. There are no answers to the metaphysical questions in this movie, only speculations. Is it possible to do anything but hypothesize about destiny, fate, nature’s intention, the will of God?

Written by: Jessica Powers, March 8th 2010

NIV: 39 & 27

admin — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 09:00:00 +0000

By Nicholas Alexander Hayes

BlazeVox

Hayes' new volume of poetry, NIV: 39&27 is theology that travels. Most people know a story of someone accosted at an airport with a copy of The Bhagavad Gita. Chris Kraus explains on the back cover that the Gideons have "place[d] bibles in motel rooms across America of the comfort of travelers who think they have reached the end of the road" since the nineteenth century. This book, also passed to me by hand, engages both texts, and read aloud, it evokes the resonance of ritual.

NIV: 39&27 is structured into a thirty-nine-line poem for each book of The Old Testament, one-line plates for _The Gita_, and a twenty-seven-line poem for each New Testament book. While each page is spare, the images are rich, inviting your mind to draw naked pictures of sin, suffering and redemption in the white space of the page.

Hayes' Old Testament G-d does his typical avenging but seems to be wearing a blindfold along with his sword. This is what we have asked for, and deserve: "the Lord, your God, destroys the land" (italics mine). Living and dead are engaged in struggle, and Hayes seems to acknowledge that they don't know why that is any more than we do. Instead, the struggle is a celebration of waste and excess, where the seven thin and fat cows I remember from my catechism days intermingle their numbers, and the result is that "His fierce word, anger, send fire into my bones, a net." As Hayes moves into _The Gita_, he seems to be criticizing his own austerity and presenting the idea that man creates this G-d.

In the Bible, we end with an apocalypse, a "happy ending" that reunites fallen mankind with G-d through the intervention of Christ. In Hayes' text, I don’t think Mom and Dad get back together: "the store house windows have poured out enough jewels to spare man's son." But there is hope; although "scripture is our enemy in the world," we can become "idols in the sight of knowledge."

Hayes' work both acknowledges the importance of the works he re-imagines and questions their power to shape the world. There are options, other doorways yet unopened because of the limitations we have put on ourselves. The beginning of the text recalls a command: "'Son of man, eat this scroll I am giving to you and fill your stomach with it.' So I ate it and it tasted as sweet as honey in my mouth."_ NIV: 39&27_ delivers on this promise.

Written by: H. V. Cramond, December 18th 2009

Oh My God

admin — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 18:46:00 +0000

Directed by Peter Rodger

Gussi S.A. & Mitropoulos Films

Oh My God is the kind of documentary that holds you in wonder from start to finish. Once the credits begin to roll, you finally exhale and find yourself muttering “Wow.” Peter Rodger's trek across every inhabited continent in search of the answer to one of humankind's ultimate questions—“What is God?”—is both a revelation on the unifying conceptualization of something higher and a celebration of what elevates us. It is an unflinching and holistic search for answers among all who seek to fill voids, satisfy ethereal desires, and comprehend the lives that we lead—which is most everyone—by searching for meaning.

In two parts, this film seems to attempt to tackle first the unifying attributes of a belief in God and then some of the unfortunate, but seemingly inevitable, discord of the extremist fringes of modern organized religion. In one of the film's most poignant scenes there is a bulletin board at a school with pupils from various religious backgrounds. Each child expresses a different faith, but similar beliefs, and it is clear they are all friends and view their different faiths not as something to be challenged and contested, and experience a commonality of belief that is recognized and celebrated. Fittingly, the bulletin board reads: “There is gold and multitudes of rubies, but the lips of knowledge are a precious jewel.” At this point in the film one wonders where in the process children lose their jovial collegiality and transform into adults who preach religious and spiritual exceptionalism.

Oh My God also explores the anthropocentric qualities of modern conventions concerning the divine: Is it arrogant to assume that the human mind is capable of comprehending God? As one of the documentary participants eloquently states: “An ocean can see the drop, but a drop can not see the ocean.” Is it natural for sentient species to attempt explanation through religion of the “effulgence of existence?" While we witness a panoply of answers, these are the types of questions brought forth by Rodger's inquisition-traveling and challenge those of us who have a faith, or lack thereof, that is steeped in tradition and family inertia rather than self-reflection and other inner endeavors.

The best aspect of Oh My God is its successful effort at compiling many different answers to the central question that constitutes the documentary's purpose. Rodger's film is an exercise in collaboration between Rodger (who films) and the ones who are filmed in order to expose shades of gray rather black or white absolutes. Rodger has made a film in which common folk and celebrities alike the chance to share their own unique portion of “the precious jewels of [personal and inner] knowledge.”

Written by: Brandon Copeland, November 21st 2009

Judah's Lion

admin — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 00:12:00 +0000

By Anne Caston

Toad Hall Press

I was a bit wary when I received Judah's Lion. Its title and that of many of its poems made clear to me that we were going to be talking about The Almighty, and not in a sort of New Age everything-is-divine kind of way; I’m talking about Old Testament smiting and personal conversations. As a member of the liberal elite who often chuckles evilly as she writes, I had a hard time getting into it at first. Cruddy, I thought, throwing it down. I’ve wasted a good poetry pick on a nurse who writes about Jesus.

The second time I picked it up, I read it straight through and loved it. This change of heart of manifested as an activation of latent Catholicism. No, I haven’t forgotten what il papa said about contraception. I’m referring to a visceral appreciation of spectacle, and more specifically, carnage.

University of Alaska Anchorage professor Anne Caston is, at best, ambivalent toward G-d, despite biblical allusions a-plenty (don’t worry, there are endnotes). He is depicted alternately as Craftsman, Potter, and One-Who-Has-Torn-and-Departed. Caston’s characters are angry, half-formed, and ill, but He doesn’t stick around to fix what invariably breaks once creation has been set in motion. Her poetry, written in deceptively simple language, captures particularly well the disgusting beauty of hospital work, of the futile attempts to give a moment of happiness to those whose lives are on the verge of snapping.

She opens with a poem called “What Seems To Be” and questions her authority as observer and writer throughout the text. How dare she claim and record experiences that also belong to others? The first section, “Judah’s Lion,” focuses on a son who shares his mother’s madness and her gift for poetry, despite his literal bent. The City of God, he claims, is near Stone Mountain, Georgia. “The Story I Sometimes Tell Myself” is a personal mythology; its poems follow the growing-up of a woman and two doomed marriages: one wherein she loves something that will destroy itself and another that she loves after it is gone. The final section, “The Gathering House,” is a house of death: manifold, gruesome, heartbreaking.

The combined force is that of a life where suffering is without end, yet this is not a sad book. In the end it is, I think, a book about love. Her “Last Psalm” celebrates “what I have loved in this life/ the blossoming branch and the locust horde/ the beauty each is, and the terror.”

Written by: H. V. Cramond, August 19th 2009