David Williams's Blog, page 8

My Favorite David Lynch Film

I was introduced to David Lynch way back in the day.

As a young man drawn to the subversive and the countercultural during the soulless pastel venality of the Reagan years, I'd seen the iconic image of the titular character to Eraserhead often.  It made a fine t-shirt and/or poster for those of a punky or anarchic persuasion.  

The film itself was a fever dream of paternal anxiety, fiercely unsettling.  I saw it first on VHS, natch, but hadn't "seen" it until I went for a viewing at the long-lamented Biograph in Georgetown.  I left the theater with a lingering sense that the world had been knocked slightly askew, as the movie seemed to warp the world around its claustrophobic vision.

When Blue Velvet dropped, I saw it the very first weekend, sitting alone in the theater, as I so often did as a socially awkward, anxious, and desperately lonely teen.  It was technicolor gorgeous and seethingly, subtly horrid, skewed and shaking, which utterly fit my grim adolescent cynicism about the world.  I found it so amenably disturbing that I immediately told my punkish friends that they had to get out and get equally shaken.  

I went with them for a second viewing two weeks later, but as it happened, in between first and second viewings I'd had my quite belated first kiss.  And my second.  And thirtieth.  My entire view of the world had shifted, and riding high on the bliss of fresh first love, Blue Velvet parsed as a darkly preposterous absurdist comedy.  My friends were shaken.  In the theater, I laughed and laughed and laughed, out loud and often.    

Which...er...wasn't quite the response of the rest of the audience.  It...um...may have cemented my reputation as being a little on the weird side.  

Love sees the world differently, eh?

Twin Peaks and Wild at Heart and much of the Lynch ouevre were staples of my edgy young adulthood.  I went back and gloried at the dark, grotesque, defiant humanity of The Elephant Man.  I lamented the corporate sabotage of his tragicomic attempt at Dune, a lingering reminder that mercantilism is and will always be the enemy of art.

But none of these are my favorite Lynch film, the one that stands out and away from every other one of his creative outputs.

My favorite Lynch film is...hands down...The Straight Story, and it is unlike almost every other thing he made.  It shows the same attention to craft, the same gift for visual composition, and bears all of the marks of an auteur.

It's based on the true story of Alvin Straight, an elderly man who was deeply estranged from his brother.  Upon hearing his brother had had a stroke and might not live, Straight determined to go and visit him to reconcile.  But he'd lost his license, and had no car.  Stubbornly determined to make the trip himself, Straight got on his ancient lawn tractor and traveled hundreds of miles, from Iowa to Wisconsin, set on restoring his relationship.

It is a David Lynch film, and as such is as deeply committed to concept as any other of his works.  Yet it is tonally unique.  The characters aren't caricatures, but neither are they warped and seething with madness.  They are human...and decent...and good.  The world through which Straight travels on the road to a hoped-for reconciliation is vast and glorious, dangerous and beautiful.  The whole film is suffused with light and fiercely, authentically kind.  It's marvelous and human, grounded and spiritual.

But it isn't subversive, you might suggest.  Ah, but no.  No no no.

I would contend that, of all of his films, The Straight Story is the most powerfully subversive.

And being weird, as I still am, of course it's my favorite.

Because love sees the world differently, eh?

Thanks for that reminder, David.

Facebook and Religious Freedom

Back during the pandemic, my little church scrambled for a way to stay connected to one another.
Worship is the beating heart of congregational life, the place of shared experience that engages, sends forth, and re-engages.   It's an experience that is at its best incarnate, but that can be shared through media if distance or plague so demands.   As generally speaking the goal of my little church is not to send our worshippers to meet Jesus face-to-face before their time, that meant COVID forced our hand.  We had to livestream, and had to scale up to meet that need.
Our choice, for its ubiquity, was Facebook.  As we reasoned it back in 2020, Facebooks' depth of engagement and relative ease of use made it an good medium for streaming.  It allowed the sharing of invitation across our personal networks, which meant it was open to those who might wish to visit, and wasn't delimited to invited members.
It's worked for that purpose, more or less, but lately it's become...well...worse.  
Our worship is traditional, meaning the hymns we sing are...more often than not...reflective of this pastor's strong preference for sturdy old Gospel standards.  
They're meatier theologically than most Christian contemporary music, but they also rise to meet the vocal capacities of a little church.  They're lovely and totally singable if you can sing, which my fellowship can.  And if you can't, there's something about old gospel standards that brings beauty and grace to the heartfelt caterwaulings of even the most vocally challenged faithful.  
Almost every week, we're hit with copyright claims, as Facebook's avaricious algorithms flag the hymns we sing as violations of copyright.  
The latest ding was for singing a beautiful mid-nineteenth-century standard, Abide with Me.  "This is our music," said a subsentient fragment of code slaved to Warner/Chappell Music USA.  "It belongs to us. We demand our cut of ad revenues from this video."
To which I say, advisedly and with purpose, the hell it is.  
The music dates from 1861, so far out of copyright that it's utterly preposterous to even suggest ownership.  It's sacred music for a sacred purpose, one that goes deep back down into the evangelical tradition, back to the time of the founding of my humble historic church.  We're singing it from a hymnal, copies of which were purchased for use in public worship.
Our "ad revenue" is, of course, zero, as corporate sponsorship of worship isn't something we do.  These claims don't impact our worship...not yet.  But the needling annoyance of these mammonist machines seems a marker of a shift in our culture, as the crass profit-maximization of our increasingly false and decadent society stakes its claim.
Does this impact our religious freedom?  No.  Not really.
Facebook is not a public space.  It is an owned space, a place of radical venality, where we and our relationships are bought and sold like chattel, and where even our most sacred time is commodified.
Let me suggest, Mark, that reminding us of this on the regular is remarkably foolish.

The Shallows

If you're a predator, the shallows are your friend.  
When I and my family vacation at the beach, we sometimes get the opportunity to observe this reality at work.  Pods of bottlenosed dolphins prowl up and down the shoreline after daybreak, delighting the countless hairless bipeds who dawdle in the sands.   But unlike the homo sapiens sapiens who watch them, these cetaceans aren't vacationing.  They are, as a tribe, on the hunt.
You can see this when a patch of water starts to boil and churn, as a school of small fish is forced into a tightly knit ball.  The dolphin work together to herd them into a place from which there is no escape, where every possible path has been cut off.  The fish can't flee to the depths, because there are no depths.  Right above them, sky.  Below them, sand.  And pressed against the crashing waves of an unforgiving shore, there's nowhere to go but into shimmer in a tight trapped churning mass, moving as one.  From there, the tribe that hunts them can take what they want at their leisure.
Shallow water is a dangerous place if you're a fish.
But the shallows are no less dangerous for human beings.
We human beings have been induced to gather virtually, now, in the tightly controlled confines of the shallowest of mediums.  Our every social exchange, managed and moderated and sorted by algorithms designed to "serve" us in the same way that the towering alien Kanamits "served man" in that old classic Twilight Zone episode.  We are encouraged to burp out short fragments of thought, or regurgitate prefabricated memetic sentiment, devoid of depth and complexity, designed to maximize immediate emotive engagement and stir the greatest reaction in those around us.  
Those synthetic social exchanges shorten our attention spans, making even the most basic of concepts TLDR, stirring blind reactivity to our most immediate context.  We don't think long term, or even beyond whatever reaction has been triggered by the fish around us.  We flit and dart en mass and on impulse, driven into a place where our every connection is seen and known, and our every movement predictable and tightly constrained.
The shallows are a dangerous place for a soul.

I So Basic

Why write a book on the Lord's Prayer? 
I mean, it's hardly a complicated thing.  It's one of the most familiar rituals of the Christian faith, and it's pretty danged simple.  This isn't a deep dive into the discursive techniques of Thomistic theology, or a treatise on the distinctives between Tillich and Berdyaev.
It's not particularly trendy, or buzzy, or pushing the leading edge.  It's just the Lord's Prayer.  We all know that already, right?
It's. Just. So. Basic.
I mean, of course it is.
But how are we at the basics?  How important are the basics?
If you're entirely new to the faith, how much do you know about the point and purpose of prayer?  What do you know about this core Christian practice, and the whys and wherefores of this thing Jesus asks his followers to do?  There was a time when most Americans were culturally Christian, but honey, that time ain't now.  Sure, it's basic. Basics, after all, are a good place to start.  And though the dying oldline denominations may have kinda sorta given up on sharing the message of Jesus with people who haven't heard it before, it's kinda sorta important.  
If you've left the church, burned by politicization or the mean-girls cruelty that often drives folks from communities, were the basics what drove you away?  Likely not.  I bailed on church in young adulthood after a totally pointless ego-driven fight tore the church I'd grown up in apart.  Watching Christians squabble and scheme over control of a church just made the whole thing seem like complete [bovine excrement].  When I finally returned, it was to the simplest practices of following Jesus, of service and prayer.  When you start again, it's a fine idea to start at the beginning.
But what if you're deep in, so far past the first stages of being a "Baby Christian" that talking about the Lord's Prayer feels like going back to read Hop On Pop or Horton Hears a Who.  You're sophisticated.  You're experienced.  You've got your doctorate in Presuppositional Apologetics, or host a podcast on Queering the Meta-liturgics of Contemplation.
You need this prayer.
Because when Jesus taught this prayer, he didn't describe it as a "starter prayer."  This isn't a prayer for beginners, to be replaced by more sophisticated mystic incantations as we advance to higher and higher levels of spiritual power.  This is.  The Prayer.   It doesn't matter if we've just discovered the grace of the Gospel, or if we're the Renowned Senior Pastor of a Gigachurch.  It doesn't matter if we're tenure track or if we've got 97,000 followers on ChristTok.   
This is the prayer we are meant to pray.
It is meant to shape us and form us and remind us of our purpose, no matter where we are in our journey.  
And as we're in a time when Christians have kinda forgotten the purpose of prayer, when we pray for wealth and material success, when we pray for political power, when we pray for influence?
Perhaps a refresher is in order.

Of Time and Traction

As the snow fell, the first notable storm in years, I found myself mumbling to myself that maybe I oughta have rented an SUV.

Unlike most Americans, I don't own a four-wheel-drive 'ute, because ninety-nine point nine seven five percent of the time, I don't feel the need for one.  Our old-school sedan does pretty much all that we need, and our battered but trusty old van does the rest.  Both are front drive, and if you can't figure out how to drive in the snow with a FWD vehicle, you shouldn't be out on the road in the first place.  

As a Virginian, for three hundred and sixty four days and twenty three hours of any given year, I don't require an SUV, and I don't want to consume thirty percent more fuel for the dubious privilege of maintaining excess capacity I barely need.

But when the snow gets deep, there's only so far skill and confidence can get you.  Anything more than eight inches of snow is borderline undriveable, and anything more than ten and you're just going to hang up.

Ground clearance matters, and so when it looks like we're getting more than twenty centimeters of the

white stuff, I'll rent me a Jeep or a big ol' pickup truck.  It's functional, allowing me to get to my rural congregation, and to check in on elderly parents.  And it's fun, because snow driving is a hoot.  But this latest snow was only supposed to yield about five inches, so I held off.  

In the hours before the snow fell, the forecast kept bumping up, until the average fell between six and twelve inches.  I felt a bit of SnoFOMO, but as my brother was still visiting with my Mom, and my father-in-law was doing just fine, and I didn't need to get to church 'cause it was Monday, there wasn't really a *need.*  

The day arrived, and the snow came down, eventually building to seven inches and change.  A fair amount for the mid-Atlantic, but hardly a blizzard.  That day, I spent my energies digging out.  The plows came by, once, then again, and by late the next morning, the roads were completely passable.

Did I need four wheel drive?  Nope.  Not for an instant.

All I needed was time and patience.

And I thought: which is the greater mark of a person's wealth?  Am I "wealthy" if I must always be on the move, fearful of being trapped in snows that come with less and less frequency, and have a vehicle that reflects that mostly-imaginary need?  The marketers want me to think so.

Or am I "wealthy" if I have the time to let a storm pass, to simply let the sun's warmth and the passing of a day melt away the snow?

Pulpits, Platforms, and Publishing

There, on the concrete slab of my carport, was a box.  It had arrived in the dark of mid-evening, as packages so often do.  I picked it up, a little uncertain as to what it might contain.  Was it a belated Christmas gift?  An early Christmas present?  I was, for a moment, genuinely fuddled.
When I got inside, I peered at the box, but my reading glasses weren't on me, and the label was just the sort of blur that most things are when you're well into middle-age.   "Hey honey," I yelled.  "Were you expecting anything?"  She wasn't, so I figured I may as well just open the thing up.  I popped my knife out of my pocket, and did so.
Inside...books.  My books, as it happened, fresh off the press from my publisher.  Oops.  Guess I wasn't going to make the now-obligatory Author Unboxing Video.  
The Prayer of Unwanting is my first swing at a devotional, a tart, playful little read that recenters the Lord's Prayer as the heart of the Christian prayer life.  The book pushes back against the dominant prayer ethos of American Prosperity religion, which pushes prayer as a means by which we get what we want.  We pray for material attainment, we pray for success, we pray to get and to have and to manifest, for shine and for fame and for glory.
This paradoxically carnal spirituality has nothing at all to do with Jesus, and everything to do with consumer culture.   What Jesus wants us to do is set all of that aside.  
This is why the prayer he taught has not a danged thing to do with having anything more than what we absolutely need.  It's not about getting what we want.  It's about changing what we want, conforming us to God's grace rather than feeding our bottomless hunger for [stuff] and fame and power.
The challenge, now, is that I'm expected to market the book, to leverage my platforms to maximize the reach of the book.   So...how do I do that?  
Firstly, it ain't like I'm oblivious to the irony of marketing a book about not desiring material success.  I'd like people to read the blessed thing, of course.  But the moment I'm grasping about it, the moment my pride and my desire for recognition and lucre become the impetus for my efforts, I'm in a difficult place.   
It's a tricky wicket.
And secondly, I'm fiercely aware that desiring the "platform" that is such a prerequisite for success for Christian authors these days is the enemy of my calling as a pastor.  Celebrity pastors and Jesus-influencers are in a dangerous place spiritually, as the siren song of growing follower counts and maintaining influence can easily supplant the dual demands of humility and servanthood.  To stay relevant, you need to get into every theological fight, you need to court controversy, you need to pitch out hot-take after hot-take...and wisdom and grace slip from your fingers.
As a committed servant of small congregations, I think this is doubly true.  Small church ministry demands that you set aside the trappings of platform and get your hands in the dirt, honoring and supporting the spiritual gifts of your sisters and brothers.  Again, you're not to desire a platform.  You may have a pulpit, sure, but it's more for the convenience of your congregation's sightlines than a marker of your exalted status as the Most High Jesusy One.  
As small church guru Karl Vaters put it in his fierce little volume De-Sizing the Church:  

"..when we elevate leaders through their ability to become celebrities, giving them power over our feelings and decisions while having no genuine proximity in our lives, that celebrity culture always elevates, alienates, then devastates its prey.  When you have power but no proximity, you have little to no accountability.  And power without accountability always--absolutely always--leads to an us/them, have/have-not, rich/poor dynamic that ruins everything it touches."  (p.83)

But celebrities and influencers actually sell books.  In an era when the publishing industry struggles to survive, it's hard not to walk their path.  Hard, but necessary.
All the more reason to keep oneself centered in prayer, eh?

The Wind is a Wolf

The Wind

Is a Wolf

That Howls in the Night

Its breath is so cold

And sharp is its bite

On the Moral Purpose of Guillotines

The mechanism for human beheading that got its name from Joseph Ignace Guillotin is quite good at doing the job for which it was designed.  

Dr. Guillotin was an Enlightenment reformer, a progressive, eager to eliminate the brutality of public executions.  Hangings and other unpleasantnesses inflicted on the condemned among the lower classes were ugly, but so too were the choppy choppy sword and axe executions inflicted on the rich.  It being the enlightened, modern era, Guillotin argued that the purpose of executions was not egregious suffering, but swiftly dispatching a soul to their maker. Oddly enough, he personally opposed the death penalty, and the naming of this machine after him is one of the peculiarities of history.  

It is, as mechanisms go, quite simple.

A grooved wooden frame, into which a weighted blade is set at a height.  Below, a pillory, into which the person about to meet the Deity of their Choice is secured.  Activate the mechanism, and ssssshunk.  Off goes the head.  Instakill.  Neat, precise, swift.

Guillotines were pressed into service most famously during the French Revolution, when they were used to remove the heads of the aristocracy from their bodies.  Kings and queens, lords and ladies, lined up and slaughtered, their heads piling up, as mobs of Jacobins and peasants cheered.  Jacobins were, of course, the primordial leftists who gave the Left its name, as they sat on the left side of the French National Assembly at the dawn of that popular uprising.

That, I think, is the image that for some reason strikes a chord with left-leaning folk, every time some new capitalist depredation is noted.  "Time for the guillotines!  Nothing a guillotine wouldn't solve!"  Memes get memed.  This is meant only kind of in jest, the sort of joking-not-joking that defines so much of our life on social media.

The problem is, of course, that the guillotine isn't progressive.  It's simply a machine designed to allow the powerful to swiftly kill the powerless.  

The French Revolution quickly descended into the Reign of Terror, and started taking the heads of any who stood against the most radical of the Jacobins.  Calls for moderation were met with more beheadings, including those of the Jacobins themselves.  Does the name Danton ring a bell?  No?  It should.  Here.  Watch this entire classic movie.  In the end, even Robespierre, the architect of the Reign of Terror, ended up decapitated. 

And also...y'all were paying attention in history class, right?  What the guillotine accomplished politically was a transition from an autocrat to an autocrat, from Louis XVI to Napoleon, from a king to an emperor.  

It's not an instrument of positive change.  If anything, the guillotine is the symbol of self-annihilating progressive overreach.

But perhaps you're still grumbling and doubling down about guillotines as a tool of the People's Revolution.  

Here.  Let me raise the blade.  Let me set the mechanism.  Let me separate you from your childish notions of redemptive violence.

Who else, in history, used guillotines on the regular?  

One guess.  You know it.

Nazis. 

By the 1930s, that system of execution had been improved by German engineering.  Same mechanism, but made of metal, with a much heavier weight bearing down on the much sharper blade.  Neat.  Compact. Efficient.  You could fit them indoors, in an execution chamber, for ease of processing and quietly eliminating those who opposed the Reich's fascism.

The Nazis executed over sixteen thousand "enemies of the state" with their guillotines.  

The communist charged with setting the Reichstag fire.  The Dutch Christian students who circulated anti-Nazi pamphlets as the White Rose.  Franz Jagerstatter, an Austrian Catholic farmer who refused to swear allegiance to Hitler.  

It's a tool used by Power to kill the powerless.  Nothing more.  Nothing less.

Morally speaking, there's a word for that.

Care to guess?

The Pastoral Anxiety Dream

"So," I said, over my cup of coffee.  "Here's a question.  Do you have a pastoral anxiety dream?  You know, one that keeps coming back to you at night?"

I was chatting with the rector of a neighboring Episcopal church, dishing and talking shop and sharing about our ministries.  She thought for a moment, and then told me her dream.

That dream that recurred, popping up like a bad penny in the churn of her subconscious mind?  It was essentially the same as mine.  

As it happened, the evolution of our dreaming was the same, too.   Her specific dreams were hers, so I ain't gonna share what ain't mine to share.  My dreams, though?  

When I started in ministry, my dreams were essentially a riff on the "I'm-back-in-school-and-haven't-prepared-for-the-test-and-I'm-not-wearing-pants" dream.

I'd be up in the dream-pulpit, but couldn't find my sermon.  Or my printed dream-sermon would be in disarray, sheaves of numberless pages, with no evident start or finish.  It was "printed," so you know I'm "old."  Or there was no musician or music.  Or the service was starting to fall apart, because I didn't know the order of worship.  I'd be failing, publicly, in front of an increasingly impatient and muttering throng of strangers.

Fear of crowds, fear of judgement, fear that I lacked competence, all woven up together into one tidy little package, wrapped about with the bitter bow of anxiety.  That dream showed up a whole bunch in the first five or six years of pastoring.

But as the years passed, that changed.  Discipline in practicing public speaking in all of its forms changed me.  In my actual ministries, I preached with a text, with a deck, with only an outline, with nothing but my memory and a timer to keep me on track...and the hold of that fear was broken.  The dream would surface, and even in that dream state I could spin up an impromptu riff on the heart of the Gospel.  The daimons of anxiousness beat a tactical retreat. 

Anxiety, once defeated, regrouped and returned in another form.  

In the new dream, it wasn't that I didn't know what I was doing.   Instead, it was that no matter how well I did, no-one cared.  

I'd preach with passion to a room where my voice was of less interest than the music playing in the background at Harris Teeter.  People would chatter over me.  Get up and wander about.  I'd call for the worship to begin, and people would just muck around on their phones.  And then, eventually, everyone would just...leave.  

I would be speaking to no-one, because the message I shared meant nothing to them.

For my Episcopal colleague, that was her anxiety dream, too.  

That the message of Jesus...of grace, of selfless love, of mercy, of justice...just wasn't something that mattered at all to anyone any more.  That the purpose we'd devoted our lives towards was irrelevant and meaningless to those around us, and by extension, so were we.  

And I got to wondering...does anyone else have this dream?

Spark and Current

The world is full of souls

Who spark

That spark, spark, spark
They flicker brightDancing wildWith the energyOf the ephemeral instant
And there are also souls
Who areCurrent
That flow, flow, flow
They turn the wheelsThat light the darknessWith the energyThat sustains