A Living Text

We watched The Fountain last week and I didn’t like it much at all. I sort of knew the plot from reading about it beforehand and I was not sure how it was going to be, but I had decently high expectations for it and it failed on most levels for me. It’s essentially pretentious, boring mush.

It’s a mix of Kabbalah, Mayan mysticism, reincarnation, and nonsense, with a dash of anti-Catholicism. The only thing I liked about the film was Aranofsky’s use of light, particularly the ‘modern’ scenes which occur in dark rooms mainly at night.

Somehow we are to believe that a Spanish Conquistador and Queen Isabella are later reincarnated in our day and then at some future point this same man (apparently again reincarnated) fly a bubble like craft with a tree in it into a star, from which all life again begins (I guess). I expected more from the past and future sections of the movie, but didn’t get it. The Inquisition is of course brought up, and the Inquisitor is portrayed as an evil power monger who is out to convict Isabella, the most Catholic Queen, of heresy. You hear him inveighing against her as wanting an earthly paradise rather than life in the hereafter. This is because she believes that the Tree of Life has been found in the New World, hidden by the Mayans. Somehow this tree’s sap will save Spain from “tyranny” although I’m not sure how. Apparently the Conquistador is to find the tree and return to Spain where Isabella will ‘be his Eve.’ Simple problems with this are: why couldn’t evil people also drink this sap and also live forever? How would living forever deliver Spain from tyranny? How could people like Isabella who believe in original sin think that living forever would solve anything in our current condition? Never mind all that, the bottom line here is that the Church was tyrannous and the mystical Mayans are closer to the meaning of it all with their astral religion, thoughts of rebirth, star-gazing and the Tree of Life.

The modern scenes are probably the best in terms of drama, and I think they are well played, if a bit over the top. Again the Mayans are venerated as having all kinds of knowledge that we have lost in the modern world. Let us remember that the Mayans practiced human sacrifice in a particularly brutal way. It is hard to see how this ‘civilization’ holds the key to freeing Spain or enlightening our present, but that’s what you have here. Against this type of nonsense our Apostle Paul says ‘Professing to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures.” Our modern re-interpreters of the ancient religions are probably not comfortable with worshiping bugs and animals, but they do like the mystical core of the religion which promises reincarnation, everlasting life and all without any apparent need to do anything other than gain knowledge.

Finally in the future you have an exceedingly boring trip in a quiet bubble towards an exploding nebula with a dying tree - perhaps an incarnation of the dead woman….or something, I’m not quite sure. The extra material on the DVD featured some guy talking breathlessly about the whole movie being about a journey from darkness into light. In the Mayan scenes we move from night into a lighted Mayan pyramid and eventually the Tree of Life, in modern times there is a dark hallway that the guy walks down, and in the future the space bubble journey into a Nebula. Wow. How profound.

To me this whole thing is cooked up by kids who saw the Matrix and wanted to do something cool. They wanted to re-invent sci-fi, so they threw together a bunch of incongruous ideas that make no sense together and then talked a lot about how it changes sci-fi, about darkness into light, about reincarnation and the meaning of life, about facing death, and so forth. See how serious Hugh Jackman is? He frowns a lot, he shaved his head, he’s in the lotus position or doing Tai Chi. I suppose shallow moderns who have had their culture evacuated of the wisdom of 19 centuries think this sort of thing is profound, it produces feelings of weird mystical stuff that is just beyond our knowledge but could be obtained if we only knew more and meditated a bit. Isn’t this getting a little old? These modern American mish-mash attempts at ’spirituality’ or so much shallow drivel. None of it in any way holds together, makes sense, or brings any change to a person’s life - only an encounter with the Living God does that. And this even fails disastrously at being science-fiction, much less changing sci-fi forever. I’m beginning to wonder if any of our post-modern filmmakers can sustain a really good narrative without the moorings of the Christian faith informing their stories. Star Wars descended into corniness and ‘downcenter on yourself’ inanities, the Matrix collapsed after one movie into another collage of incongruent, sophomoric talk, only the Lord of the Rings, written by a Christian, sustained a consistent narrative with hope for man.

Anyway, I don’t suggest watching this unless you are a huge sci-fi fan willing to be bored for a couple hours.

I’m wondering what the theological implications of water on planets other than the earth are? We are trying to find water on Europa, Mars and the Moon, and let’s just say it is there. Does it imply that water was splashing through space during the creation? That other planets once had water? Further, if there is microbial life or some other type of life in this water, what would that mean? Did God seed the universe with water for the future colonization of space by humanity? I’m interested in a theology of space exploration, and what water elsewhere means for us in the Church.

Green energy is something that I want to see as beneficial to the planet and a path to weaning ourselves off oil (and thereby imperial ambitions in the Middle East). By now I’m sure you are familiar with windmill power, solar power, and so forth, but now there is an idea so crazy that it just may work: sky wind power. The idea is to send a flying electric generator about 15,000 feet up into the jet stream, tethered to the ground and generating tremendous energy. The aircraft is pictured below:

the Sky WindPower website says:

An array of 600 Flying Electric Generators rated at 20MW each, a total of twelve thousand megawatts in capacity, operating over a ground space of a ten by twenty mile rectangle, would produce approximately three times as many megawatt hours per year as the 28,572,902 MWh produced by the Palos Verde Arizona nuclear facility in the year 2003, the most electricity produced by a single generating plant in the U.S. that year. While other power sources will, of course, always supply some power, 43 such FEG arrays, all operating at relatively remote sites with average capacity factors of 85%, but not located so far from metropolitan areas as to require very long transmission lines, could supply the same amount of electrical power as was produced in the United States in the year 2003, which was 3,883,185,000MWh.

To which I say, ‘cool’ and hope that it can work.

The housing market in the D.C. metro area peaked in the Spring of 2005. In the ensuing 2.5 years it cratered along with the rest of the country. The difference in this area is the amount of government money sloshing around. The taxes gathered from across the empire end up here at the imperial city and then contractors feed off that money and generate jobs in the city and the suburbs. So employment here is strong and money is everywhere.

With that said, housing prices have declined significantly. In the early years of this decade people were making 2-300 thousand dollar profits on homes in two or three years. When you saw a house you wanted, you had to make an offer on it in the car, and bid 10K over the asking price; bidding wars ensued and prices kept rising. But the situation is completely different now.

Now there is a massive inventory of homes on the market, many homes are foreclosures, some are 2 to 300 K less then what they were purchased for 2 years ago. Buyers are few and far between, and many homes for sale get converted to rentals. But with that said, I think we may have hit bottom. New home construction is down, so inventory isn’t coming online as fast as it was, interest rates have been cut, and some prices seem to be ticking up from the basement they were in locally.

The amount of work associated with living in the woods like we do is high. Add to it the fact that this is a commuting community, an exurb where everyone drives to D.C. to work - and drive a long time - and you realize that no one has the *time* to do all of this work. We have a thick carpet of leaves on the lawn, and we spent a couple hours working on it today, but the work will probably go on for months. And to date none of our neighbors seem to have even begun working on their own leaves, so we will have their leaves and leaves from the woods around us blowing around and into our yard going forward.

I really don’t want to live like this anymore, chained down to working a huge yard. It was impulsive to buy here and I didn’t think through all the aspects of what it would take. In the future I don’t want a yard, I want a townhouse or a condo. The American ideal of living on big land away from neighbors and in the country is not good for building Christian community in my opinion. And raking all these leaves also stinks - it’s a big waste of time.

The N.Y. Times has a map of concentrations of megachurches. It’s fascinating to see the states with no discernible megachurches.

One way of looking at the history of the Church in the world is to see the Gospel spread over a society, followed by that society prospering and losing its desire for God, which in turn produces levels of apostasy and the decline of the Church. We can observe something like this in Europe where the Church is effectively in ruins and has been for some time. We might also see this happening in America where church growth is not keeping pace with population growth at all and where the lives of Christians show little to no difference from those of the nation around them. It is possible to see the Church in the USA falling off the cliff into oblivion like what has happened in Europe.
At the same time as the West is apostasizing there is massive Church growth in Africa and Asia. If the pattern I described holds then Africa will gain prosperity over the next century or two as the Church produces a virtuous society that sustains gospel living. When prosperity is acheived then the corrosion of the Church will ensue and Africa too will decline into a post-Christian stage. At this point we could point to one of two ways forward: the first would be for the world itself to spiral into ever greater decline until Jesus descends with a trump and the general judgment of the quick and the dead ensues. However, another possibility is that the sections of the world that have experienced this apostasy will also be the first to show the way out of the apostasy and back to a re-Christianized civilization, purified by our post-Enlightenment trial.
Using the later template, it is incumbent on the Church in the United States and Europe to find a way out of decline and a new dark age. If God assists us to find a way to again win our regions to faith in the Holy Trinity, then we can pave a way for Africa and Asia to do the same if they fall into decline, or perhaps to assist them in avoiding the pitfalls of Western history. All of the multitude of challenges and reverses that we have experienced can be seen as purifying trials from God to refine the Church in preparation for a new cycle of conversions and maturity.

James Jordan writes about the dominion church:

What is distinctive and new about the New Covenant is that God pushes the battle back to the citadel of the enemy. Now the enemy is defined as Satan’s legions, the fallen-angelic principalities and powers. The Church is called to destroy them. Now the war is against the Garden-enemy (Satan), not primarily against the Land-enemy (evil men). Church discipline is what is most important, and excommunication comes in as a more powerful tool than execution.

For this reason, the New Testament focuses almost exclusively on ecclesiastical warfare, which is liturgical warfare. We cannot rest with a mere victory against Cainitic culture. We cannot rest until men are converted, and Satan is fully bound from influencing the hearts and minds of men. We must cast down strongholds of ideology, not merely bring criminals to justice.

If the Church is faithful in her calling to prosecute liturgical warfare, there will be little need for the magistrate to carry out capital punishment. We can see that this has indeed happened in Christian societies, for there is far less tyranny, brigandage, and murder in them than in non-Christian lands. The crimes that brought the death penalty in the Old Covenant are not often committed in Christian lands. Of course, as the Western world has rejected Christianity, the old crimes of rape, incest, homosexual seduction, murder, and the like have once again become major concerns in our society.

God plants the Church in specific places to exercise dominion over those places. The Church does this by faithfully obeying God in worship: weekly communion with real bread and real wine; singing all the psalms and other Bible songs; excommunicating rebels; recognizing the government of other churches; tithing; praying specifically for the people within her area, whether believers or not; etc.

But there is more. The Church is to claim territory. The old word for this is “parish.” The Church governs a parish spiritually, and within her parish she oversees what is going on. A full parish is about the size of a political precinct in our state-centered age.

That question was put to Archbishop Rowan Williams:

Why should the youth stay in the Anglican church when the Pentecostal churches offer better music, more practical preaching and prayer that works?

My first answer has to be that they ought to stay in the Anglican church because the Anglican church offers more resources for growing up and maturing in the faith. Now I don’t want to make a vast judgment on Pentecostals by saying that but you know better than I that there are many Christian groups whose spirituality and discipleship and discipline seem to exist on a rather superficial level and where there is emphasis on immediate experience and feeling good. Not so? And indeed Bishop John Chew was saying something about this indirectly this morning. This is another feature of the post-modern cultural world, isn’t it? People look for immediate and dramatic experience. And so, my deepest level of reply will have to be, “We believe that the Anglican church is an environment in which by discipline prayer, by the use of the mind and heart, we grow into Christ in that Catholic wholeness that I spoke of earlier.

There is a new blog out there from an AMiA priest in Florida: Authentic Anglicanism