Blue Jesus

Lately Christianity has been pissing me off. 

I'm not trying to offend anyone by saying that; its just how I feel right now. I consider myself a Christian, I go to church every Sunday, I attend a Christian university - understand that I am not saying any of this out of spite or ignorance, I am saying this out of experience. 

Anymore when I look around me all I see is superficial religiosity. I see Christianity that has evolved from being about Jesus to being about replacing 'secular' music with 'Christian' music, pushing beliefs onto others, and tattoos in Hebrew that prove you are a 'trendy' Christian. I hate it. I hate the fakey, gimmicky, materialist version of Christianity that is popular in the US today. The profound love of God and the sacrifice of Jesus have been cheapened by WWJD? bracelets and ScriptureMints and horrible paintings of Jesus taking the shot of heroin so that the addict doesn't have to. 

What has our faith come to? It is no wonder that Christianity has replaced sex as the taboo in literature today. A religion that used to be known for its genuine love, unconditional acceptance, and eagerness to help the downtrodden has disintegrated into a cult for the goody-two-shoes. It is as if we think so highly of ourselves that we believe Jesus must love us. He's going to forgive us anyway, so we may as well have fun while we can. 

And as if to top off my annoyment with Christian merchandise, at the drug store today, while I was waiting for a friend to fill a prescription, I found a book in the "Inspirational" section about Christian pirates. Pirates! I couldn't make this up.  Amazon has the whole series. It just baffles me where we will strategically stick the name of God in order to convert people. Not only that, but we have the audacity to change Him into whatever is the most comfortable. Trying to reach the teenage punk scene? Shirts pop up saying "Jesus Loves Me And My Tattoos". The aspiring business men? Say the Prayer of Jabez and "enlarge your territory". Kids into action figures? Buy them the new plastic Resurrection Playset. I could go on. 

I'm reading Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children for my Contemporary Lit class right now. It's a fantastic book, and one of the scenes that I cannot seem to get out my head is when one of the Indian women (the book is set when India gets its independence) asks a priest what color skin Jesus has, pink like the Westerners or dark like hers? He answers as he as been taught: blue. "All available evidence, my daughter, suggests that Our Lord Jesus Christ was the most beauteous, crystal shade of pale blue sky," he tells her. The idea is that God is love, and the Hindu god of love, Krishna, is blue, so to make things easier Jesus is blue. 

To make things easier. Christianity isn't supposed to be easy to swallow. It's radical, and crazy, and seems unreasonable. People like Stephen (Acts 6) didn't die so that we could tell people Jesus was blue. 

In the Eye of the Beholder

One of the many things I love about college is the constant flow of things to stimulate your mind. I'm in a class on Aesthetics right now, and it is making me think about things like what makes things beautiful, how do you define art, and what it means to be truly alive. We've been reading a lot of different essays, from Plato and Aristotle to Kant and Hume to L'Engle (of A Wrinkle in Time fame). Needless to say these have brought up more questions than they have answered. Can you create a formula to define art? Is beauty in the eye of the beholder or are there some who have better opinions than others? Are things only beautiful because we have decided they are beautiful or would they be beautiful if there was no one to look at them?

In Aesthetics last week our professor had us watch the movie My Dinner with Andre. It's a fascinatingly simple movie, with two men sitting down to dinner discussing what they've been doing with their lives since they last saw one another. They talk of how it sometimes feels as if they are living in a dreamworld, nothing more than zombies, in a world that is nothing more than a play. The question comes when Andre argues that there must be more. Wally, on the other hand, believes that the simple things are all you need. He is happy with an electric blanket and a cup of coffee in the morning, while Andre wants to dive into the world and find everything it has to offer. I suggest watching it, not because it has great cinematography (it doesn't) but because its lack of visual interest will force you to think.

"Comfort can lull you into a dangerous tranquility."

Andre says this at one point, and I think it's true. I have experienced it first hand. We all have. You get into the routing of something, and the next thing you know, three months have flown by and you have no idea where they have gone. You are so comfortable in your ways that nothing matters anymore. It's like the narrator at the beginning of Fight Club. I freaking love that movie. I'm getting ready to read the book, which I have been told is even better. But I digress. At the beginning of the film, Edward Norton's character has gotten to the point that he can't even sleep at night, he is so discontented. He tries to fill his life with Ikea furniture and support groups but even that doesn't seem to fill the void. He realizes that his life is passing him by and uses Tyler to try and fill it. To some extent each of us have a Tyler.

So I am hearing about beauty and love and art from all different directions right now. The speaker in Chapel on Monday spoke on "the presence and possibility of beauty in our lives" and how being close to Jesus and letting his beauty into our lives can transform us from ugly to beautiful. The Lecture Artist Series on campus included guest speaker Dr. Walter Brueggemann, who was here on Tuesday March 4th. The series this year is on Imagination and the Kingdom of God, and Dr. Brueggemann spoke about the fact that believing in Jesus takes a lot of imagination, among other things. Some other lines of his that I wrote down:

"The kingdom of God is ultimate, and all else is penultimate."

"The real stuff by which we are human comes in elusive artistic form."

"It is hard for us to embrace God's kingdom because we like to think we can do better."

and finally, my favorite line,

"Our society does not need anymore educated conformists."

I love that. A big frustration of mine is conformity. I do not think it is worth it to pretend to be just like everyone else just to be liked by others. And I see that happening around me all the time, especially with girls here on our campus. It is sad how many of them come here not to get an education but find a husband. I actually know young women who are majoring in Family and Consumer Sciences just to learn how to be a wife and mother. That really bothers me. If you meet someone in college that you fall in love with and marry, that's all fine and well, but college is not a $20,ooo a year dating service. Personally, individuality is a big thing for me. I get really annoyed when a girl changes her entire character just to impress a guy. A friend of mine started dating a guy a few months ago and since then has changed her wardrobe, her sense of humor, her whole outlook on life. We, her friends, are frustrated because wanting the admiration of this one guy has completely changed her.

I don't know where I am going with all this, or what conformity has to do with beauty. Maybe nothing, maybe everything. It doesn't matter. I've rambled on long enough.

Yeah Right

I started this blog hoping that I would start writing again. I told myself that I would post every day to get back into practice, or at least once a week. As it turns out, I don't have time for that. Or anything interesting to write about, for that matter. This week I have ... finished reading The Scarlet Letter and Wide Sargasso Sea for my English classes. Designed and pitched two logos for organizations on campus. Eaten an entire bag of Easter SweeTarts. So much for an exciting lifestyle. 

The English Honors Society on campus is putting out a literary journal. I would love to publish something in it, but I haven't written anything of merit in a really long time. And it is really lame to publish something that you wrote two years ago for your creative writing class. I did design their logo, though. I guess that counts for something. 

I guess I could work on a piece to put into the journal. Maybe a short story or an essay or even a rework blog entry on some interesting topic. It gives me a reason to get back to writing again. Remember back in junior high when they would ask you to make a story from three random elements drawn from a hat? You'd end up with something like a character who only dressed in yellow, a remote jungle, and a teacup and have to write a story about it. Those kinds of things always intrigued me, especially when you got to see how everyone else interpreted those three objects. I should try something like that again. How did that teacup get to that remote jungle, anyway? 

Theme Wanted. Inquire Within.

I really want to write a book. 

I've always wanted to, actually. Ever since I was a kid and learned how to read, I wanted to create my own book. If you're reading this, then you probably haven't read my first entry about this, since posts are displayed newest to oldest. If you have read it, I am sorry to repeat myself. 

 

It's just that lately, I have been having this nagging feeling that I need to be  writing. Not that I should write again, not that it would be kind of nice to be working on a story again, but that I MUST WRITE. I've been taking notes on things unnecessarily,  thinking of chapter titles, all sorts of ridiculous things that I have been using like rice cakes to curb my hunger to write. 

 

The only problem is, I have absolutely no idea what to write about. I know that sounds like a cop-out, but it's true. I have discovered that fiction is not my strong point (i.e., my characters all turn out the same and my plots are lame. No one wants to read that.) and have decided to try my hand at non-fiction. I googled 'writing non fiction' to see what kind of stuff I came up with. Most of it was How to Publish Your Nonfiction and articles like that, but I did run across a few helpful hints from seasoned authors. For example, write frequently. Even if you don't feel like writing or have nothing to say, write anyway. That's a good idea, I guess. Hence this blog of me rambling about writing. Another tip suggested that as a writer you should specialize in something and write about that. Think about the things that you are interested in or that you have experienced or a truth that you have discovered and write about that. Unfortunately, I don't think I have anything worth writing about. I'm only in my early twenties, I come from a stable home in a nice town, there's not a whole lot of exciting events in my life. I'm not even out of college yet, I can't say that I am an expert in anything. 

 

And yet, I feel as if my voice needs to be heard and my fingers itch to put words to paper. There has to be something about me that I can write about, something people could relate to and take inspiration from, something that needs to be heard. The hard part is going to be figuring out what that is. 

Ring By Spring

Yesterday I was walking across the courtyard to my apartment complex and saw that one of my neighbors had put up some new decorations in their window. It looked all red and cutesy, and I rolled my eyes, annoyed that they had Valentine's Day stuff up and it's not even February yet. 

Then I saw the wedding bells. Those annoying, 1950s, 3D tissue paper wedding bells, hanging from their outside lamp like a pair of fuzzy dice for your car. It was only when I got closer that I saw the Congratulations banner on the door and the badly made sign that read, "The Future Mrs. Lewis*". I wanted to throw up a little. 

"Marriage is an epidemic here," I heard a character in an old black and white movie say the other day. My apartmentmate and I laughed, joking that we should get shirts with that quote on it. And it's true here on our campus, marriage is an epidemic. Just since classes started in the fall, I have heard about five (six, counting The Future Mrs. Lewis) couples who have gotten engaged. That averages out to about one couple per month, and that's just the people I know, not including everyone else on campus. Christian colleges like mine are the only place in the world that you can find this phenomenon.

People here seem to believe that marriage is the be-all-end-all to human existence. Don't get me wrong, I don't have anything against marriage. I myself hope to get married some day. But on my campus, people tend to think that if you've been dating for five minutes that you're in love and should get married. Guys come here looking for a girl that will make him dinner and do his laundry while he's out doing his job: reaching people for Jesus (we have a lot of ministry majors). Girls come looking for that perfect guy  so that they can have a beautiful wedding before settling down and starting to have babies. In all honesty it's an unhealthy situation. No one knows what to do with a girl who wants to have a career outside of taking care of children, or a guy who wants to drop out of school in order to care for the homeless. Heaven forbid they break out of the traditional mold and live up to their full potential. (Disclaimer: this is in no way saying that stay-at-home parents aren't living up to their full potential. I am just pointing out that not everyone is meant for that type of lifestyle.) 

I wish that Christians, especially those that I interact with here at school everyday, could see that there is more to life than something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue. More than that, not everyone is meant to be married. Now that is something you don't often hear in the Christian world today. If you listen closely you'll notice that when youth group leaders teach abstinence, the phrase is "saving yourself for marriage" - not keeping your mind and heart pure, not learning to deal with lust, but waiting until you get married. No one ever talks about the call to be single, or how to interact with couples without feeling like the fifth wheel, or what to say at family reunions when all your cousins have babies and your Aunt Edna is harping on you, wanting to know when you'll be the one with the baby. That's the kind of stuff they need to write books about. Not all those Christian young adult dating advice things. News flash: life isn't all about sex. 

Sometimes I wonder if I am the only one here who has noticed that.

When I Grow Up

Ever since I was a little kid, I wanted to be a writer. I hoped that someday I would be able to go to the library and see books with my own name on the front cover. At the time I could only read picture books, so I assumed I would have to be an artist as well. This is evident in the "books" that I would make back in the first and second grade. Loose-leaf notebook paper exquisitely bound by three staples, they were only about eight pages at the longest, but included everything that an actual book did. Not only did I draw a cover with crayons, but I also had a dedication page, chapter headings, and best of all, on the back, reviews from imaginary newspapers telling how this would be the next bestseller. (I was quite the self-assured child, apparently.) My story marched across the pages, with illustrations close in step. I was so proud of my book. 

Now that I am older, I can see how those young dreams have shaped my life. I continued to write stories and create my own books, newspapers, and magazines. Little did I know that it was possible to actually grow up to do all of the things that I dreamed of as a little girl. At present I am in my third year of college at a small university in my home state of Ohio, planning to graduate two years from now with BAs in both English and Graphic Design. I have found myself falling in love with Helvetica, Bansky, Vonnegut and Pantone - things I never would have been exposed to otherwise. I sometimes sit back and am flabbergasted by the fact that I have become exactly the kind of person I wanted to be in Kindergarten. 

Which is why I have started this blog. (I am somewhat of a blog-addict; at one point I was posting either by myself or with groups on seven different blogs.) I want to write more, but in a more sophisticated style than I use when I write in my journal-type blogs. I admire the style of Donald Miller and his sitting-across-from-you-telling-a-story type prose, and will most likely talk to you as if we have known each other all of our lives, possibly referring to you directly, as Charlotte Bronte refers to her Dear Reader in quite possibly my favorite book of all time, Jane Eyre. I'm holding my copy of it now, the one my mom bought for $3 back when I was in eighth grade. The pages are stained from being spilled on, the binding broken in to the point that the novel itself is soft and pliable, notes written in the margins. There is nothing in the world like a cozy and worn in good book. My new goal is to someday write a book that becomes someone's Jane Eyre. And this is my starting point.