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The City of God (2002)

CITY OF GOD

“For Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.”
-Gerald Manley Hopkins


Telling an honest story of a place just outside Rio Dejanero, where limbs are not lovely, and eyes are not lovely, Director Fernando Meirelles’ displays a genre-bending epic of a city of slums, and drugs, gang violence, and ten thousand places of rape and features of faces oppressed. Part documentary and story, and part social commentary, this film takes the viewer into the heart of the gun-ridden seemingly god-forsaken world of children who aspire to be a “hood,” and an entry-level position of drug-running and message delivery for the gang, can land you a corner office in munitions distribution and “territory” management. “Rocket,” is the narrator and hero of this film, navigating his way through the haze of crime and drugs in the 60’s and 70’s, and into the street war of the 80’s, saving himself, and ironically precipitating the end of the ongoing crisis, with nothing more than a 35mm camera, and an accidental misprint of the pictures he takes from the “inside” that lands him into a photojournalist role almost by accident. Characters develop as the landscape jumps back and forth between the generations, where the back-story on the leader of a senseless war with senseless killing, includes a murdered cousin, a raped wife, and a former life as a calm and quotidian bus-driver. We never get the perspective on the situation from outside the slum, and the limited perspective puts the viewer in first-hand accounts, with all the bleakness and hopelessness that is to be expected. The violence seems senseless, but to the little boys who live in the City of God, the violence is supposed vindication for a world that has pushed them aside, the sex and rape and inferred orgies followed by blood-spill and terror as well as laughter---all in the same cinematographic sentence---- is not Hollywood sensuality or sentimentalism, it’s little boys becoming men:

“Listen man, I smoke, I snort... I've been begging on the street since I was just a baby. I've cleaned windshields at stop lights. I've polished shoes, I've robbed, I've killed... I ain't no kid, no way. I'm a real man.”


In the City of God, justice is never served, the bodies of children, never vindicated, and the gang violence is perpetuated to the next generation---a far cry from our hope of a new earth, a renewed ‘city’ of God:

"Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away."
---Revelation 21:3,4

Film

I've been meaning to pursue my interest in film for some time now. Most of my "cultural engagement" comes to me through books and articles that purpose to inform the reader of the 'zeitgeist' of the day. Often, it seems, that what is spoken in acedemia can be a bit removed from the way things are expressed in the arts, relegated to a theoretical world of historical anylasis and morose philosophical dialogue. The last CD I was really excited about was Hootie and the Blow Fish: Cracked Rear Mirror, or something like that, and after a short stint with PASTE magazine, I found that I was more interested in the short section on films and the occassial shorts that come with the handy DVD than I was in the difficult-to-navigate world of music criticism. I still feel too far behind in music, and my taste-buds for music seem to feel like they do when you have a cold or the flu: there are only a few things I like. I'm open for learning, but also realize that music for me will most like not be my gig...pun intended.

I'm on a trial membership with Netflix, and yesterday was my first arrival. Last night I watched City of God. I'll post my thoughts later today. But I hope that this will be the first of more to follow.

CV Missions trip to Cambodia

post via John McCollum

Any Central Vineyardites interested in joining John McCollum in Cambodia October 1-22 for our first ever CV missions trip?

John's hosting an informational meeting at Element (directions at elementville.com > contact us) at 7pm next Monday, July 17. If you think there's even a remote chance you might be able to go, you should really attend this meeting.

If you can't make the meeting, but still want to go on the trip, contact John (john [at] elementville [dot] com) this week.

Also, if you know you can't go on the trip, but want to help fund someone else's trip, please contact John at the same email address.

mmm. breakfast

P6012067
Originally uploaded by jaredpatrickboyd.

Book Review: The Last Word NT WRIGHT

Like school children bickering over the spot where the ball has landed, inside or outside the box, in a game of four-square, the church for the past 60 years or so has wondered about the role of scripture in the life of the believer and how any text could have authority on this side of modernity. The difficult road for the postmodern church is the road through the path of textual deconstruction, authorial question, and the type of "naive realism" that Wright exposes. The enlightenment myth of history as fully knowable and discoverable has overshadowed a deeper problem of the church: fear of scholarship. Since Galileo, the church has been skeptical of where history and science often lead us. Wright has pointed out that though our method of exegesis is still very basic, it is nonetheless still subject to potential errors. While our goal should always be to know, "what the text said" and therefore "what might it say to me," we must come to terms with the reality that well-meaning people have gotten it wrong on both accounts at several moments in history.

"there is a great gulf fixed between those who want to prove the historicity of everything reported in the Bible in order to demonstrate that the Bible is "true" after all and those who, committed to living under the authority of scripture, remain open to what scripture itself actually teaches and emphasizes." ---pg. 95

All in all, we need to stop trying to support the theological categories as they have come to us from prior generations, and be open to a new and fresh reading of the scripture ourselves, allowing it to tell us things we might not have known were there all along, and some things that we hoped we wouldn't find. To think that all the historical work has been done in the modern period and therefore to resolve ourselves to embracing "modern" categories, is to make a category mistake. If we find pieces of history that help us understand better the historical document that we have before us, say, a letter of Paul's to the Romans, we should look to understand the letter as it is written, in light of our historical finding, irregardless of what our present or past reading of the letter might be.

The authority of scripture rests on the way in which we agree to come underneath the story that it tells and live in light of and part of the story. God has not given scripture for the sole purpose of saving human beings, "but to renew the whole world" (pg. 29). Authority, for Wright, is not defined by us as we stand on the outside and say of the text, "this has authority because it is from God." Authority is recognizing that God has given us a story that communicates the ways in which he has acted, and, if we are attentive and have the kind of ears for hearing, we will live as faithful characters of the same play, being the arms and hands of a sovereign God who aims to heal the world of sin and death. The authority comes from acting alongside and remaining faithful to the story.

Wright's gives a most helpful analogy to unpack the very difficult term of "authority". He calls it the "five-act" hermeneutic.

"The bible itself offers a model for its own reading, which involves knowing where we are within the overall drama and what is appropriate within each act. The acts are: creation, fall, Israel, Jesus, and the church; they constitute the differentiated stages in the divine drama which scripture itself offers....Within this scheme I am proposing, we are currently living in the fifth act, the time of the church.....Those who live in this fifth act have an ambiguous relationship with the four previous acts, not because they are being disloyal to them but precisely because they are being loyal to them as part of the story....We must act in the appropriate manner for THIS moment in the story; this will be in direct continuity with the previous acts (we are not free to jump suddenly to another narrative, a different play altogether), but such continuity also implies discontinuity, a moment where genuinely new things can and do happen. We must be ferociously loyal to what has gone before and cheerfully open about what must come next." (pp. 121,122, 123)

Living in the fifth act means living faithfully to the story-line, immersing ourselves enough in the story to become familiar with the play so as to live a life of faithful "impromptu" in particular contexts and settings. The story "stiffens our resolve, as we work to implement the resurrection of Jesus, and so anticipate the day when God will make all things new..." (pg. 115)

Lost in the Cosmos....

  
 
A few weeks ago I finished reading Walker Percy’s book LOST
IN THE COSMOS: THE LAST SELF-HELP BOOK.
 
From the inside flap:
 
Lost in the Cosmos
The last Self-Help Book
 
Or
 
How you can survive in the Cosmos,
about which you know more and more while knowing less and less about yourself,
this despite 10,000 self-help books, 100,000 psychotherapists, and 100 million
fundamentalist Christians
 
Or
 
Why is it that of all the billions
and billions of strange objects in the Cosmos---nova, quasars, pulsars, black
holes---you are beyond doubt the strangest?
 
Or
 
Why is it possible to learn more in
ten minutes about the Crab Nebula in Taurus, which is 6,00 light-years away,
than you presently know about yourself, even though you’ve been stuck with
yourself all your life?
 
The book ends with a series of questions, both addressing a
particular situation in the book, and candidly, the reader:
 
Are you in trouble?  How did you get in trouble?  If you are in trouble, have you sought
help?  If you did, did help come?  If I did, did you accept it? Are you
out of trouble?  Are you out of
trouble?  What is the character of
your consciousness?  Are you
conscious?  Do you have a
self?  Do you know who you
are?  Do you know what you are
doing? Do you love?  Do you know
how to love?  Are you loved?  Do you hate? 
 
There is now no genre for what this book is and what it
does.  It’s not a self-help book,
though wryly suggests itself as such.   It is helpful, however, in the discovery process of
the SELF.   The “I” in
statements that begin with “I am (this or that) …”  
 
 
The brilliance of the book, it seems to me, is the numerous
“thought experiments” that Percy creates. 
“Image you are this, or that person in this, or that situation…the
following conditions apply….(listing various conditions about which he has been
writing)…choose a response.”  

 
Percy lets us say it more than he says it himself:
The SELF, is lost. 
In sex, in distraction, in worry and anxiety.   Lost in all the things that we find ourselves getting
into, wanting so badly to get
out…debt…hurt…distraction…lust…boredom…anger…etc.  Lost.  
 
 
I think it is both interesting and telling that what the
television show LOST is about, is not so much about being lost on an island and
surviving the conditions.  There is
so little about survival.  So
little food-gathering, and water-drinking---it’s all about the self and the
individual “selves” trying to find a way to not be so Lost and confused about
who to love and trust and hate and manipulate.