God's City: Far-Off but Very Real

PORT ORCHARD, Wash., Sept. 28

From a café-patio in this seaside town in Kitsap County, there’s an object-lesson in being able to see a place without being able to get there without considerable effort.  From where I write just now, at a coffee shop on the town’s northwestern waterfront, I can see across to the Bremerton shipyards and the Seattle-bound ferry staging to leave on its one-hour journey to the Emerald City.

But even though I can see Bremerton from here, to get there would take some doing.  The seagulls can fly a mile or so and arrive at the sunlit shipyards across Sinclair Inlet, and there’s a pedestrian ferry nearby—but it’s ten miles around by car.

That may not seem like much, so consider this: from the other coast of the town’s peninsula, such as the house where I lodged in the South Colby neighborhood last night, one can see all the way across to Seattle.  But this presents an even larger conundrum.  Seattle is only about 10 miles away in a straight line.  But to get there, you must either take a Washington State Ferry (the most direct route is via the Southworth–Fauntleroy ferry, for a door-to-door trip of about 15 miles and an added toll) or labor through Tacoma and I-5 traffic, which also requires a toll on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, for a total of 65 miles.  Either way, it’s often either a whole lot of traffic or a whole lot of money, so it’s good to keep your plans flexible with whomever you’re meeting on the other end.

It’s an adventure in being so close and yet so far, of seeing a destination but being unable to get there just yet.  The Scriptures are full of imagery of something grand, something extremely good just on the horizon—a new heaven and a new earth, the New Jerusalem.  At least one of our forebears even caught glimpses of what’s coming.  We may not know for sure just what John of Patmos was trying his hardest to describe in Revelation—the strange creatures, trumpets, and all the other weird imagery—but what he was able to see was that there’s no more sorrow or death, and there’s a new city with God as king, it’s on an actual planet earth (not in the clouds), and it’s where the party’s at (see Rev. 21:1–4).

From here in Port Orchard—a pleasant town in itself—you can see a city: but you can’t reach it.  Yet.  You have to travel a bit first, and it’s a long way around.

That’s how it is for us, too, on the shore of a fallen world which has started to be remade, but which isn’t quite yet reborn into the place God intends: a new earth, an earth without injustice, sorrow, oppression, starvation, or any of the other darknesses that plague us and cause untold suffering and misery.  Sometimes churchpeople talk about “the already-but-not-yet”: the very presence of Jesus as God-in-the-flesh, walking as God on our planet, means that the restored, justice-filled, liberated kingdom of God has already started to come among us even now.

But it’s not completely here.  The rich continue to spend opulently while the masses die of preventable diseases.  Oppression is still around.  Ferguson still happens.  Ebola outbreaks still happen.  Kids continue to die of malaria.  Entire people-groups continue to be disenfranchised.  If there’s a new city coming, it’s not here yet, and we have a ton of work cut out for us to build it.

But we can glimpse it; we might even hear from people who have glimpsed it and came back on the ferry, so to speak: people like John of Patmos, or modern-day visionaries like Dr. King.  But the best we can do, from this vantage on the shore, is to ask the Lord for direction and take the first steps in boldness, justice, and love, and thereby move, at God’s invitation and in God’s power alone, one step at a time closer on the road to a restored Jerusalem, the city that we can see in the distance, and which will get closer with every act of love in the power of the Holy Spirit.

The analogy to Port Orchard is imperfect, of course, in that I’ve found it to be very pleasant, populated with kind people, full of stunning scenery.  In a way, I feel strange comparing the town to a fallen world—and I hope my readers from there will understand my intention with the metaphor.

Because it’s still a helpful one.  From the Kitsap County side of Puget Sound, it would be just as erroneous to say that there is no Seattle as it would be to say that I am already there.  The same is true with the world: the Scriptures tell us that there is hope for a better, restored order of things.  It’s just not finished being remade yet.  But given enough time, and enough trust in the God who is ready to show us the way, it will be.

Shawshank: Still a Beacon at 20

Note:  This article contains spoilers.

“I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about,” says Red (Morgan Freeman) as a Mozart aria soothes the hard-bitten Shawshank State Prison world with sopranic caress.  “I like to think they were singing about something so beautiful it can’t be expressed in words, and makes your heart ache because of it.”

Many of our hearts have ached when we’ve seen The Shawshank Redemption, which was released in the U.S. twenty years ago today.  We sympathize with its sense of despair, resonating with the intensity of the injustice dealt to Andy Dufresne, the perfect storm of circumstance and betrayal that lands him at Shawshank, or the years of long-suffering it finally takes him to break free.

Or we might identify with the film’s powerful images of hope amid that same darkness.  Maybe it’s Andy playing music over the P.A. system, or maybe it’s him emerging from solitary confinement two weeks later, smiling (“I had Mr. Mozart to keep me company . . . . That’s the beauty of music: they can’t get that from you”).  Maybe it’s Red daring to play a few quiet notes on the harmonica that Andy gives him, a flicker of music, smaller but no less real, in the dark night of the cell block and the soul.  Or maybe it’s the film’s climactic moment of release—Andy, spilling from the sewer pipe, standing tall in the rain, hands spread aloft in freedom.

Somewhere, deep in our culture’s collective spirit, The Shawshank Redemption touches a wound that needs the power of its comfort.  We need to walk through the hell of Andy’s imprisonment for an hour and 59 minutes and 36 seconds—a cinematic eternity—before we get to see him splash into liberation, because that’s what living in a fallen, unjust, broken world is like sometimes: long seasons of “How long, O Lord?”, seasons of rights trampled, of families broken, of personhood betrayed by impersonal systems.  Andy spends two decades in prison; God the Son spends two nights in death.

But it doesn't stop there, because the lamentation does end, the stone does roll away, Andy does pour forth from 500 yards of pipe—and we know it’s all right, there’s a joyful ending coming, it wasn't all for naught, and he’s going to be okay.  As the viewers, we are with him: through the trial and false conviction, through the first years of adjustment and abuse at Shawshank, through the grueling passage of time that, as Red says, “can draw out like a blade,” through the murder of his adopted son and protégé.  We have to know he’ll be all right, we have to know that we’ll be all right: that the broken world of Shawshank is not all that there is.  We and our whole world will be, must be, shall be, redeemed: we will, like Andy, tumble from the pipe into the wall-less, oppression-less freedom of the cosmos as God created it to be.

As it happens, the film itself bears witness to the same message of delayed hope that it sought to tell.  “It got good reviews” when it opened, writes Roger Ebert in The Great Movies, “but did poor business.  Its $18-million original gross didn’t cover costs; it took in only another $10 million after winning seven Oscar nominations.”  Shawshank didn’t win a single one.

Instead, the film caught on after its run had finished.  “In one of the most remarkable stories in the history of home video,” writes Ebert, “it found its real mass audience on tapes and discs and through TV screenings.”  By 1999, he says, the film was topping the IMDb top-250 of users’ favorites.  Fifteen years later, it’s still at number one.

That’s not bad for a movie whose name itself was hard for its audience to remember.  In interviews, actors would joke about fans complimenting them on “Shinkshank Reduction”, for example, or “Scrimshaw Rejection”.  But then, the very anonymity of the film, and its attendant success over the years, runs parallel to Red’s initial perception of the protagonist: it “looked like a stiff breeze would blow him over.”

We’ll recognize the same phenomenon from our life as Christians.  Jesus the Messiah “had no form or majesty that we should look at him, / nothing in his appearance that we should desire him” (Isa. 53:2).  Andy, the man who enters the prison identified as “that tall drink of water,” the movie that fails to win any of the Academy Awards for which it’s nominated: the savior who is crucified by the Romans.  All this must come to pass—“and then the end will come” (Matt. 24:14).  An hour and fifty-nine cinematic minutes of life must come, yes, but there will be redemption: injustice will be reconciled, sin will be done away with, “mourning and crying and pain will be no more, / for the first things have passed away” (Rev.21:4).  Jesus himself will be victorious.  Our hope, as Edward Mote wrote in 1834, “is built on nothing less.”

“I tell you, those voices soared,” says Red, as Andy plays Mozart into the yard. “It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those walls dissolve away.  And for the briefest of moments, every last man at Shawshank felt free.”  In a cinematic landscape often as forlorn as the culture in which it resides, here’s thanks to God that Shawshank has stood these twenty years as the pillar it deserves to be, and for the beacon of profound, victorious hope that our Lord is and toward whom, deliberately or not, the film hints our attention.

Sources as named, and:

           

“Hope Springs Eternal: A Look Back at The Shawshank Redemption,” directed by Constantine Nasr (Castle Rock Films / Warner Bros., 2004); featurette on The Shawshank Redemption, 10^th anniv. special ed. (2 DVDs), directed by Frank Darabont, disc 2.

“Shawshank: The Redeeming Feature,” written by Mark Kermode, directed by Andrew Abbott (Channel 4 Television Corporation, 2001), featurette on The Shawshank Redemption, 10^th anniv. special ed. (2 DVDs), directed by Frank Darabont, disc 2.

Special thanks to the Collins Memorial Library at the University of Puget Sound.

Doughnuts and Passionate Living

PORTLAND, Ore., Sept. 6

Doughnuts are an important part of a trip to Portland, and they can also tell us something about human creativity as a reflection of God’s love.

Voodoo Doughnuts, known throughout the Northwest for the tasty and eccentric confections it makes, had a line 39 persons deep this afternoon when I arrived to buy a dozen, and that’s only counting the persons outside the lobby, wrapping down SW 3^rd Ave.  I queued for about 20 minutes this time, which, according to a nearby restaurant hostess who recognized the signature pink doughnut-box, is less than it could have been.

What draws so many people?  Doughnuts, doughnuts and more doughnuts, in virtually every shape and color imaginable: doughnuts with Froot Loops or Cap’n Crunch on them; the Bacon Maple Bar (yes, a maple bar with bacon on top); doughnuts with grape dust; the Oreo-crumbled “Dirt” doughnut; even the mysterious, Rice Krispied and peanut buttered “No Name” doughnut.  You name it, they’ve probably got it, or something very close.

Sure, doughnuts are nothing new, and no, they don’t require a 300-mile round-trip to obtain.  The Safeway and Fred Meyer stores near my home will carry doughnuts, which, at a cost of $3.75 a gallon for gas to and from Portland, would probably be a cheaper alternative when I get a hankering for some dessert, even if the bacon-maple bar is worth what you pay for it.  (It is.)

But there’s something about the way Voodoo approaches the art of doughnut-making that is inspiring for the unorthodox nature of it.  Dunkin' Donuts will sell a decent jelly-doughnut with white powder, and Krispy Kreme lets you know when the cakes are hot.  But Voodoo puts fun into it, taking an old idea—fried cake batter with frosting—and dishing it out with a layer of artistry (the chandeliers, stained glass, and glittered bricks in the facility, plus the doughnuts themselves), a tongue-in-cheek, stylized sense of humor (the four-foot wood coffin loaded with 36 doughnuts available for sale), and social conscience (the company supports a list of organizations).

It’s classic Portland.  The local spirit of “Keep Portland Weird”—the city’s famous slogan, painted in all caps on a building across the street—is in full bloom at Voodoo.  Or perhaps it’s classic Northwest: the Westside’s pioneer-rooted fascination with putting new spins on old ideas, of challenging what’s accepted, of living life for the pure fun and adventure of living life.  It’s reflected in every doughnut here.

Couldn’t we church-people take a lesson from something as creative as the Tangfastic Doughnut (vanilla icing, Tang powder, marshmallows), served up with love to a waiting public?  What if we allowed ourselves to be as geeky, as adventurous, as creative with our own passions and gifts as the people at Voodoo have been in making their battered-and-fried creations?

Look at the way the Psalmist can’t contain her or his explosive worshipfulness in Psalm 66.  “Make a joyful noise to God, all the earth” (66:1), or maybe sing something (66:2), or say something (66:3), or tell some kind of story about God’s deeds (66:5), or give some kind of gift (66:13, 15), or just explode in a yell (66:17)—anything, just do something!  Let it out.  Paint something.  Make something with Popsicle sticks and Legos.  Jam on your guitar.  Write a social-justice manifesto.  Dance.

What do you need to let it out?  Maybe your creativity isn’t from being a doughnut-maker, but maybe you have some other form of passion, some other “place of geek” in your spirit, that you can give to God in praise and worship.  Are you an artist?  Do art for God’s glory.  Are you a biologist?  Do biology as worship to the Lord.  Are you a science fiction writer?  Then write the next Star Trek series for the glory of the Lord.  Are you a sportsperson?  A graphic designer?  A dentist?  A student?  A compassion-giver?  “Whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him” (Col. 3:17 niv).  Live life.  Let your geek out.  Set someone free.  Do something new.

“What will your verse be?” asks Apple’s new iPad TV ads, invoking Walt Whitman’s immortal “O Me!  O Life!”  “The powerful play goes on,” he wrote, “and you may contribute a verse.”  Voodoo isn’t a faith-based organization, but they incidentally teach a lesson to those of us that are, we who also want to see a broken world restored, and justice and peace for all people.  The lesson, it seems to me, is this: take an idea, something you know how to do, and do it with joy, with passion, and an eye to the community.  That’s all it takes to have 39 people lined up outside to experience the results of that passion, to ask what all the fuss is about, to go out of their way for a taste of something better, something out of the ordinary—a little taste of what the world could be.  May you learn how to contribute your verse, indulging in God’s creativity by letting yourself be yourself, or maybe just by making a doughnut.

Author’s note: as this is a personal blog of my own reflections and travels, Voodoo Doughnuts has not endorsed this article or my reflections or conclusions.  Also, for the record, the author does not endorse the practice of voodoo itself, nor any particular products or services at Voodoo (fair warning: some of the products may not be family-friendly)—just their awesome sense of creativity.

Quotation from The Complete Walt Whitman: The Collected Works (Bybliotech [via Google Books], 2014), accessed September 6, 2014, no pagination.