I am a Godzilla fan and have been since childhood. Godzilla is for me what Star Wars and Star Trek are to others (though I am a fan of both of those franchises as well). My office is replete with Godzilla toys...

Proof!

… and I used to be a subscriber to a variety of Godzilla-related fanzines, the most famous of which (in North America, at least) is G-Fan. Older Godzilla fans like myself may recall a years-long debate that took place in the Letters section (which I believe was called “G-Mail” now that I think about it) regarding the mechanics of time travel in the 1990 film Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah.

This movie is preposterous and amazing at the same time

The film’s plot involves a convoluted plan concocted by people from the future to travel back in time in order to ruin Japan’s economy, because Japan has become too rich in the future and other, notably Western, countries want to put a stop to this. As you can imagine, this film was a bit controversial in its day.

This plan involves the “Futurians” traveling first to 1990 to let Japan know that there are time-travelers and that they want to help Japan solve its Godzilla problem. Which then involves the Futurians taking a handful of 1990 Japanese with them to the Bikini Atoll in the late 1940s, where they encounter a “Godzillasaurus” (Godzilla before he is mutated by atomic bomb tests—and who helps entrenched Japanese kill a bunch of American soldiers), and teleport the Godzillasaurus to a different location so that the dinosaur will never turn into Godzilla. The Futurians then secretly leave behind three critters called “Drats.”

These things

Which are then exposed to the nuclear radiation and become the fearsome, three-headed golden dragon known as King Ghidorah. Thus granting the Futurians their own city-destroying monster that they can control.

The implications of this is that the original 1954 Godzilla film never happens, and thus none of the previous films in the so-called “Heisei Era” happened either.

not even the one where Godzilla fights a Monsanto creation

Given that later films in the series will refer back to Godzilla having been around since 1954, Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah is notorious for being a lore-breaking film. Which inspired one of those great nerd pastimes: writing letters to fan publications attempting to patch plot holes and make sense of the lore.

Basically, the debate surrounded the “rules” of time travel. Much like the discussion in the film Avengers: Endgame, different movies and stories were cited as the basis for the “rules” of traveling through time, Back to the Future being the most common one. The debate went on for a few months and then vanished for a couple of years, until one letter-writer chimed in and made a claim that has affected my thinking on a lot of things over the years:

Given that we have never seen a real-world example of time travel, we have to assume that time travel “behaves” as depicted in the film as presented.

In other words, claiming that Back to the Future or The Terminator or The Time Machine serve as “the rules” for time travel is to import a narrative framework onto a film like Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah, as silly as it is, thus refusing to accept the story on its own terms. It is to insert an outside set of rules into a story, thus affecting the understanding of the story and attempting to view it according to a different standard.

It’s a refusal to let the story be. It’s an attempt to view one story through the lens of another, thus rendering it as a different story altogether.

Two other examples come to mind: the first is James Cameron’s reaction to the infamous discussion about whether Jack could fit on that floating door with Rose at the end of Titanic. In an interview, Cameron once said that the reason Jack couldn’t fit on the door with Rose is that “on page 147 that Jack dies. Very simple.” In other words, this is the story that Cameron wanted to tell: the grand ship as a symbol of class-divide and hubris is reduced down to a single piece of wood which becomes the catalyst for an act of self-sacrificial love.

I think I just wrote my Good Friday sermon.

The other example comes from the theologian Gerard Loughlin. In his excellent book about reading the Bible, entitled Telling God’s story, he challenges the “liberal” reading of figures like John Shelby Spong who deny the virgin birth of Jesus on the grounds that it doesn’t make rational sense, who argue that we are left with a choice between a Mary who was raped or who conceived by way of “parthenogenesis”. To this, Loughlin writes:

Of course the choice is not between parthenogenesis or rape; it is between the story we have, which mentions neither, or some other story. (see footnote 48 on page 121, emphasis mine)

Loughlin, like Cameron, invites us to consider stories on their own terms and merits. This includes the Bible. For Christians, traditionally, the scriptures present the story of the world. In those writings were/are the connective narrative tissues that reveal the meaning and purpose to what we see happening in the cosmos around us. But even in the Church, Christians have seemed to forget this relationship and now see the story of the Bible and the story of the cosmos as two separate stories, often inverting the relationship. As Loughlin later writes

The biblical story is to be fitted into the story of the world, rather than the world into the story of the Bible.

When we consider the long arc of the Bible, we see that the Bible tells us that God called forth a creation out of chaos, thus establishing a trajectory, a narrative. In the course of that creative work, something gave shape to nothing (as in, nothing being the place beyond the boundaries of something), and thus the possibility of us humans opting for an alternative trajectory—moving toward the nothing.

The Chinese theologian and spiritual writer Watchman Nee speaks of this, in his tiny but rich book Sit, Walk, Stand:

Since the day that Adam took the fruit of the tree of knowledge, man (sic) has been engaged in deciding what is good and what is evil. The natural man has worked out his own standards of right and wrong, justice and injustice, and striven to live by them.

What Nee is getting at is that, as a result of humanity’s giving into temptation in the garden, we fostered a trajectory that moves apart from God’s trajectory, thus giving space to impose a different narrative onto the world. The reason why the world feels so given to “wrong” and injustice is because we are experiencing the long-gestating outworking of a sense of rightness and justice that comes from an ultimately empty narrative—“some other story.”

Nee goes on

Christ is for us the Tree of Life. We do not begin from the matter of ethical right and wrong. We do not start from that other tree. We begin from him; and the whole question for us is one of Life.

Nee builds on this to say that we have a tendency to seek out even good things like love, but defined apart from Christ Jesus, thus rendering them lifeless and void. “If we only try to do the right thing,” he writes, “surely we are very poor Christians. We have to do something more than what is right.” Elsewhere he puts it “With [Christ] it is a question of his grace and not of right and wrong.”

This notion of grace is crucial because grace, by its God-defined nature, is effortless. Grace is the fabric of creation, the force that guides the trajectory of the cosmos. When we attempt to impose our own narrative, we deny grace and wind up doing violence to the story of the universe.

This explains, I believe, how we got ourselves into the mess we see today. People professing the name Christian are embracing fascist ideas because they’ve allowed another story to be the definitive story, a story rooted in the void of chaos, the nothingness that exists beyond the bounds of the something that God called into being. And it is this story—not the story rightly told in the scriptures—that has stirred the ire and rage of people who now hate Christianity. Because it is some other story, told under the banner of Christ.

Nee writes

Nothing has done greater damage to our Christian testimony than our trying to be right and demanding right of others. We become preoccupied with what is what is not right[…] But that is not our standard. The whole question for us is one of cross-bearing.

Those in the MAGA movement who use the title Christian got that way because they came to believe that theirs was a story of being right. Being right involves drawing lines in the sand and building walls and closing borders. Being right involves deporting those who don’t look or act the way one has determined is “right.” But the actual, biblical story is one of grace. A story of love.

A graceful story is a story that is open to emergence, of allowing things to unfold and being open to the discovery what comes next.

Once, about twenty years ago, I had gone snorkeling with friends in Fort Pierce, Florida. It was early in the morning and we were riding the outgoing tide alongside the jetty at the state park there. I was taking lead. The water was fairly clear, but there was still a limit to our visibility—which was maybe fifteen feet or more. As the current pulled me along I saw a large, dark shadow immediately in front of me. It was oblong and gray, at least seven feet in length. My mind went to exactly one place:

Shark.

I tried to slow my movement, but the current was strong. I was moving inexorably toward a tooth-filled death, helpless.

As I got closer, things began to come into focus. The gray creature was awfully still, and definitely more rotund than any shark I’d ever seen. Plus I couldn’t make out a dorsal fin. Then suddenly, everything became clear and I realized:

Manatee.

*Sup?*

In front of me was not God’s perfect seafaring killing machine. It was instead maybe the most gentle creature on earth. We all watched in awe as it rolled over on its back and swam alongside us before departing into the murk.

Was I “right” in thinking this was a shark? When I only had limited knowledge, sure. My fear and rising panic were entirely justified because I was working off of both limited data—which in turn caused me to impart a different story onto what I was seeing. But grace allowed the story to unfold, to emerge, and I received new data and the realization that I didn’t need to panic. If I had stopped moving and jumped out of the water, claiming that this was a shark, I would have been “right” so far as anyone knew. But my “rightness” was exposed as “wrong” as more things unfolded in the story.

What has happened for a lot of us in the world is that we’ve determined was is “right” or “wrong” based off the experience of the world as we see it. We foster a note of willful ignorance because our being right has maybe served us.

But grace moves us past arbitrary lines of “right” and “wrong,” and allows us to accept the story as it unfolds. It lets the story be. Having to be “right” risks us telling some other story, of foisting the rules of a different story onto the story as it is.

The world is God’s story. Let the story speak.

—

The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

#Theology #Bible #film #Godzilla #Jesus #Episcopal #Church

A very stupid thing I made a few years back

I’m writing this on “Fat Tuesday,” the day before Ash Wednesday. I have numerous bulletins to make, as well as preparing the ashes, but the brain God gifted me with needs the dopamine produced by posting this entry before it can get to work on those other things. Plus, I’m trying to develop a discipline of writing, which means I really ought to be doing this right?

Anyway, Lent begins tomorrow. It marks 40 days of fasting and spiritual discipline for the majority of Christians around the world (Evangelicals not included—they don’t really observe Lent), kicked off for Western Christians by the observance of Ash Wednesday. This is a day where we go to church and have ashes smeared on our heads (or sprinkled on them) as a reminder of two things: we sin and we die. It is meant to get us in touch with the frailty of our humanity as a way to underscore the magnanimity of what Jesus did in re-orienting our humanity through His life, death, resurrection, and ascension.

But I look at things in much of the world right now and I’m not so sure we need the ashes to remind us of these facts. Ukraine and Gaza (as well as the under-reported turmoil of what is happening throughout Africa, particularly in the Congo region) are stark reminders of the ubiquity of death. And the current state of things in the United States is perhaps the clearest reminder to us that sin is far from gone in the world—and also demonstrating to us how sin and death inform each other. Furthermore, Lent itself is a season of voluntary austerity and deprivation. Lent, in a way, assumes a degree of “affluence” as the “norm” and “deprivation” as the outlier. Given the direction of the economy, Lent feels less like a thing we Christians choose to enter into for a time and more the general reality in which we are moving.

So, why bother? I mean, can we even afford to do Lent this year? Since much will likely be taken away as this administration goes on, wouldn’t we be better off using the time we have as a sort of extended Mardi Gras and treat ourselves until we can’t? Shouldn’t we take the advice of the wise Preacher in Ecclesiastes and “eat drink and be merry” since everything around is “a puff of smoke” and “chasing the wind?”*

Well, this more or less assumes the Western Christian view of Lent. Eastern Christianity (think Greek or Coptic) has a different mindset. For Eastern Christians (whose theology is arguably more reflective of ancient Christianity), Lent is about balance. See, in Eastern Christian practice, one fasts for about half the year and feasts for the rest. This serves as a kind of balance for the earth and our bodies, similar to the YinYang thinking of East Asia or the Ku/Hina thinking of ancient Hawai’i. And this can have notable economic repercussions in Christian societies.

There’s an old tale that gets repeated (one that I’ve been known to parrot myself) that says that fish was deemed appropriate for Lent due to the lobbying of fishmongers. Apparently there is no evidence to support this story. But this does not negate the fact that fasting can carry implications for resisting the “principalities and powers” of our current economic reality. The food industry, for instance, wants to dominate our kitchens and push the kinds of foods they want us to eat. They want us to lean into excess. In his 2016 documentary series Cooked, food author Michael Pollan notes that the sort of foods pushed on us are foods that, if we were to cook them ourselves, would be excessively time-consuming. Think about French fries, for instance. We view them as basically “filler.” But consider what it takes to make French fries: growing potatoes, peeling them, slicing them, blanching them, then frying them. Think about all the little prepackaged cakes or tubs of ice cream in our freezers. Their delectability is largely informed by the difficulty that comes in making these things ourselves. But that labor is outsourced and now these things are largely treated as staples in the Western diet and not the exceptional items they’re really supposed to be.

And the food industry is making bank on that fact.

Pollan’s documentary further notes that the food industry sold us on these things by hammering us with messages that reinforce how stressful our lives are, thus pressuring us into buying their products as a means to relieve some degree of stress. Capitalism selling us their solutions to the problems they created. And the messages are only getting stronger and stronger. The stress and chaos of this administration in the United States is very good for business (and probably why so many CEO-types have gone hard for Trump in the first place).

So, fasting becomes a form of refusal, a form of resistance. It also becomes self-empowering in a way because it can help us remember that we can make choices free of corporate and political pressures.

Saint Paul asserts that while we are at war, our war “is not against blood and flesh”. Which means that we don’t fight this war in the same way we might fight others. The Chinese theologian Watchman Nee notes that Saint Paul’s instructions in this passage are rooted in a defensive stance and not a march into battle. Which means, quite literally, that our war against the spiritual forces that assail us is waged as resistance.

So, food can become a tool in that resistance. Refusing to eat certain foods becomes an act of resistance against the very forces that capitalize on our stress and fear.

But the fasting of Lent is not only a curbing of the foods we eat. It’s also the giving up of certain activities. There’s been much press about the various economic blackouts people are participating in right now. What if we made every Wednesday and Friday (the traditional days of general fasting for ancient Christianity) in Lent a “buy nothing” day? And alongside that maybe consider using any money we save from our refusals and give it to various people (software engineers, journalists) that could really use the money?

Yes, we are facing a reality of involuntary austerity. But Lent is more than just a time of tightening the belt for some vague spiritual benefit. It is about a life of balance. It is a tool in a war of resistance against the very power of Satan itself, manifested in the economic pressures foisted upon us by billionaires addicted to wealth and gaining it at our expense.

The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

#Lent #Christianity #spirituality #religion #Church #Jesus #Episcopal #politics #economy