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you will not see god's face

a while back i delivered a "lecture" at l'abri with denis haack. he asked me, as the "younger" generation, to discuss the paradigms (or an important one, in my view) that my generation uses as it views films, and the ways that older generations can use film to mentor the younger. he spoke for a while, then showed a clip from american beauty (it was more timely then), after which my part of the lecture picks up. i'd like to update and turn this into an essay, so i'd appreciate any response/feedback/criticism. if you've already read the beauty essay i posted a few days back, you'll recognize the first few paragraphs. but do read on, please. so if you have any thoughts, i'd be grateful. click below. if you please.

(start with notes i jotted down after seeing American Beauty in theater):

I like to go to the movies by myself. And I play this silly game where I won’t go see a movie if everyone is raving about it (still haven’t seen Schindler’s List, e.g.) – yes, I am a film snob. However, since my movie boycotts are based on nothing but numbers (forget theme, acting, cinematography), I usually just end up missing good movies. For a while, in spite of all the Academy Award predictions and acclaim, both popular and critical, I managed to hold fast to my principles, like a jealous lover, and refused to go see American Beauty.
But late this Thursday night, during its last week in theatres, my principles and I had a fight. I got angry, they got angry; I said things I shouldn’t have, they cried; I stormed from the room, they yelled after me, using my whole name, and said they wouldn’t be home when I returned, that it better be a good movie. I stormed to the theatre, a sweet pang of excitement in my gut – I was going to see a popular movie.

Regardless of the cinematic value of the movie, something happened to me, or in me, tonight:

Ricky, the Burns’ next-door neighbor, manages to memorialize much of life on his video camera. He decides to show his girlfriend, Janie Burns, the “most beautiful thing he’[d] ever filmed.” His video screen enlarged until it filled the theatre screen, and I was in his room watching with him. A clear plastic bag started swirling on the screen, now a red brick wall. Ricky narrates:

It was one of those days where it’s a minute away from snowing, and there’s this electricity in the air – you can almost hear it. And this bag was just dancing with me, like a little kid begging me to play with it – for fifteen minutes. That’s when I realized that there was this entire life behind things, and this incredibly benevolent force that wanted me to know that there was no reason to be afraid . . . ever. Video’s a poor excuse, I know, but it helps me remember . . . I need to remember. Sometimes, there’s so much beauty in the world, I feel like I can’t take it, and my heart is just going to cave in.

There were only four of us in the theatre, but it wouldn’t have mattered if there were four thousand. The bag on the screen grabbed my eyes and ears and stomach and made everything and everyone else blurry and, eventually, disappear. I was stunned, had no other word but to agree with Ricky -- “beautiful.” It reached in and touched something tired and aching and deep in me, and I’m convinced that it did the same to others who saw the movie.
I’ve spent much of the last year of my life thinking about the nature of beauty – beauty is one of the few things that has kept me going during that time. So I write about it. Writing’s a poor excuse, I know, but it helps me remember . . . . I need to remember.

* * *

So, on occasion, I’ve found myself asking people, mostly people of my generation, what they thought of the movie, how it affected them, was it true? Often, someone would respond by telling me how it’s so realistic, that he grew up in a situation just like that, that she was a white suburban kid in a dysfunctional family. I don’t disagree that the film could have been powerful for those reasons, but I did doubt that it was even a significant reason (the film’s not strictly realistic, in terms of its genre and its intentions). In fact, most of the people I talk to didn’t grow up in a situation like that, and the film had the same impact on them as it did on the previous group – its impact transcends geographic and economic context. Its impact has been keen on my generation, maybe moreso than on any other. Denis asked me to think about this, so I present to you a few quiet moments’ worth of thoughts.

When we want to get a quick primer on the state of somebody’s soul, where do we generally look? I propose that we look into his face. When you meet someone for the first time, how often do you find yourself, or the other person, shying away from direct eye contact? I think, partly, that’s because it’s such an intimate act to look directly and purposefully into someone’s face, and we almost feel embarrassed to invite such intimacy with strangers. I think God has created our faces as "windows to our hearts," and as I talk to people, as I’ve talked to them about the themes in American Beauty, I’ve made it a point to study their faces, and when I have, what I think I’ve seen, overwhelmingly, is homesickness – capital H homesickness. I know that sounds a bit mystical, and I can’t do an adequate job of making that explicit to you, but let me challenge you to start paying attention to the faces of my generation, and see if you don’t detect the same. Along these lines, I came across this passage from Augustine. Just listen to the words, allow yourself to be vulnerable for a moment, throw yourself into the experiment that he proposes:

Imagine God appeared to you and said, “I’ll make a deal with you if you wish. I’ll give you anything and everything you ask: pleasure, power, honor, wealth, freedom, even peace of mind and a good conscience. Nothing will be a sin; nothing will be forbidden; and nothing will be impossible for you. You will never be bored and you will never die. Only . . . you shall never see my face.”

I don’t know about you, but when I hear that, and when most of my generation hears that, our hearts stop at that last line. Our hearts congeal, catonate (if I may neologize for a moment), for, despite all the other apparent joys offered to us, we realize that they are not our real desire. We want to see the face of God. We may not know it, but he is the cause of our homesickness. His face is home. We are searching each other’s faces for his face, and we are not finding it. And because my generation seems to be searching more urgently than the ones before us, we are desperate to avoid the traps that we have seen our elders fall into, those things that we see as distractions, unsatisfying answers – we do not want our homesickness to lead us to false-front houses.

There are meaningful connections to be found here in the failure of modernity, and, thus, the concurrent change in our questions. Postmodernism has issued, among other things, spiritual hunger. And, lest I turn this into a mini-lecture on Postmodernism, I will defer you to our tape library and to Jock McGregor, who will be happy to answer your questions.

Briefly, though, there are pros and cons to my generation’s dissatisfaction. Do not hear me setting up our dissatisfaction as an inherent virtue. We are cynical, we are sarcastic, we are slow to trust.

We have paid a severe price for having grown up in the previous generation’s consumer society. And it’s not just economic consumerism, though that’s a great part of it. We have seen emotional consumerism, familial consumerism (we view divorce as a result of consuming, or using, the family for status and achievement). We look at our elders and see C.S. Lewis’s (and Rilke's) dog: its owner is pointing to dog food, but the dog is satisfied to just sit and stare at the finger, maybe give it a sniff or two. We have seen the results of short-sighted devotion and attention. Had our parents not done this, we would have, but because they have, and that proved unsatisfactory, we are left to hope that there’s something beyond the finger. We want to get past the finger-pointing to the thing pointed at. I realize that this attitude, this cynicism, can and has led to rebellion and apathy that’s equally as useless as our parents’ mistakes, and one is right to point that out, but I also think that we have been tagged as lazy, rebellious, useless, and even this might be a result of a consumer attitude toward behavior.

We want something different, and we often deflect the difficult search with our own cynicism (a guy during the American Beauty leaned over to my friend during the bag scene and said, "They're just using a leafblower'), but we view our cynicism as more honest than what we see in our parents’ lives. We view our cynicism as a noble, honest cynicism, cynicism for the purpose of moving in a better direction.

The first clip that Denis showed is so good in this respect. The parents are pointedly sarcastic, quite cynical toward each other, and Janie, the daughter, can’t stand it. She storms into the kitchen, and Lester comes in to apologize. And don’t you know that she longed for a heartfelt apology. And Lester even begins to do so, but his words catch, and he turns his apology into an accusation: “You know you don’t always have to wait for me to come to you.” Poof – a heartfelt apology replaced by a consumer attitude toward forgiveness. Then he says, “It’s nobody’s fault, Janie.” That’s not what Janie wanted, either. Janie wanted someone to find fault. We want to be called out on our sin (there's a beautiful illustration of this in You Can Count On Me), and we want this because we know that without a higher honesty, without anything transcendent, we have no right to denounce our parents’ failures. We know that without something bigger than ourselves, life is meaningless. And that prospect makes us angry - we are hungry for meaning. And this is where our brand of cynicism has the potential to be more healthy than the previous brand. Whereas Janie’s parents were cynical only of each other – their cynicism is directed only to other people – Janie’s cynicism, my cynicism, my generation’s cynicism, takes one more step toward home – we are cynical of God, and we are cynical because we are desperate for a different God than we see in the previous generation.

Listen to a dialogue between the searching Knight and Death from Ingmar Bergman’s film The Seventh Seal:

Knight: Why can’t I kill God within me? Why does he live on in this painful and humiliating way even though I curse him and want to tear him out of my heart? Why, in spite of everything, is he a baffling reality that I can’t shake off? Do you hear me?

Death: Yes, I hear you.

Knight: I want knowledge, not faith . . . I want God to stretch out his hand toward me, reveal himself and speak to me.

Death: But he remains silent.

Knight: I call out to him in the dark but no one seems to be there.

Death: Perhaps no one is there.

Knight: Then life is an outrageous horror. No one can live in the face of death, knowing that all is nothingness.

We are angry, rebellious, cynical, because we see emptiness and meaninglessness in our parents’ lives, and we know that there must be something more, but we don’t know how to access it, how to engage it. All we know to do is to sit behind a video camera and try to capture it on film.

And this, I think, is the point where my generation stutters, why we are so frustrated. My generation is pointed the right way, is looking past the finger, but we don’t know exactly what we’re looking for, and this is where we, as Christians, as those whose Home descended to earth and pitched tent in Israel, have the opportunity to lead people across the bridge that we share, to push them along to the rational conclusions of their Homesickness. This is why Denis keeps pushing for the principle that film is not merely entertainment, not merely art form, but a medium, a bridge, for embodying the stories of a generation, of a culture. This is why he wants us to engage these stories, not for the purpose of mere entertainment, but for the purpose of engaging our culture, of sharing the bridge with them and pointing them home.

That leaves a final question. How, then, do we engage my generation, especially in light of a film like this?

Listen again to the dialogue between Ricky and Janie as they’re walking home together:

Have you ever known anybody who died?

No. You?

No. When you see something like that, it’s like God’s looking right at you,
just for a second, and if you’re careful, you can look right back.

And what do you see?

Beauty.

I hear two important issues in this conversation: 1. Despite our intentions, we are failing to engage with reality (ever known anyone who died? a real person? something that affects your life?). And 2. I think that failure stems from a misunderstanding of beauty, a lack of true understanding/engagement with beauty.

I do think that this misunderstanding is an improvement on the earlier ones. Whereas modernity asked the question, “How does the world fit around me,” postmoderns now sit and watch a bag blowing around in the wind, realize that there’s something beyond them, and ask the better question, “How do I fit into the world around me?” And this is a step in the right direction, but it’s not far enough. The question is not inherently virtuous. It often leads to misdirected quests for enlightenment, for esoteria, as you can see reflected in recent films like Brokedown Palace and Holy Smoke, where people of my generation make pilgrimages to the East to find Enlightenment. But it’s not just in the movies.

I live in a part of St. Louis called The Loop. It’s right near Washington University (WashU if you ever visit), and it’s the cultural hotspot for my generation. Almost every day, I go to the same coffee shop and study and drink tea and talk to the people there, and it’s the same people day and in and day out, a remarkable community actually (more evidence, I think, of the longing for a home). I was sitting out on the sidewalk one day reading, and I got into a conversation with a girl my age, and she started telling me about her studies, about her boyfriend and what a beautiful person he was, and then she mentioned that she had been camping the previous weekend and went outside her tent one night to look at the stars. And she said that she was in awe, that it was one of the most beautiful things she’d ever seen. I looked at her and said, “Wow, that’s pretty intense. What’d you do after that?” She looked back at me like I had a tea leaf sticking out my right nostril and said, “What do you mean? It was just beautiful – that’s it.” And we exchanged dialogue:

I said, “Why do you care so much for your boyfriend?”

She said, “Because he’s a beautiful person.”

“So his beauty makes you want to do something in response?”

“Yeah.”

“So how did the beauty you saw the other night make you respond?”

“But that’s different.”

“Why?”

“Just cause.”

Ah, the blasted “just cause.” That story is representative of our problem: we recognize beauty, but we don’t know what to do with it, how to engage it, how to move beyond our cynicism and questions. My generation sees beauty as an aesthetic concept and fails to recognize it as a state of being, as a behavior, as a moral imperative. If you played the opposite game with us, and asked us to come up with the first opposite word that pops in our head when you say a word, and you say “beauty,” we say “ugliness.” We’re searching for deep truth, but we’re searching the surface. In God’s reality, the opposite of beauty isn’t ugliness but brokenness, not-the-way-it’s-supposed-to-be-edness. My generation recognizes that things aren’t the way they’re supposed to be, either in our parents’ generation or in ours, but we fail to see that beauty actually heals the wounds of brokenness, that beauty is an act, that beauty is not a concept but a Person. We are Homesick for the one we call Beautiful, and this world that he created is full of fingers pointing to him, and while it’s okay for the moment to look at the finger, we are made ultimately to look beyond them to him.

So many students come to a place like L’Abri looking for answers, looking for a mystical, spiritual experience. What they find are lawnmowers, dirty dishes, raspberries, and difficult and wonderful people. And these are the fingers that God uses to point them to Him. This is real spirituality, real beauty, contact with reality. By engaging people’s lives, and by engaging the world with them, we are helping them to engage beauty, and we are pointing them home. We are saying, “See that beautiful bag dancing around over there? Put your videocamera down and go touch it, dance with it, sense it, see that it is good.”

So when you see a film like American Beauty, and you see the faces of the people leaving the theater, ask how you can engage the Homesickness you see. Ask your spouse when you can rent a movie and have someone over for lemonade and gardening and conversation. Open your home as a signpost for a more beautiful home, and when you do, that’s when you’ve begun to engage my culture and its stories, that’s when you’ve understood and engaged our Homesickness. That’s when you’ve rightly opened the door to the one who calls us to taste and see that He is good.”

Posted by ghetto monk at February 25, 2004 12:31 AM | TrackBack