3 Oct, 2006 in
Uncategorized by
KevinP
praxistheologia.com
Look Up.Near the end of the Matrix, Neo stands in front of an open door and squares of for those precious few matrix seconds while Agent Smith fires several shots into Neo’s body. Yet as we all know Neo isn’t dead, and shortly there after Neo rises from the floor. For the first time the scene switches perspective to show us what Neo sees. Instead of watching the three agents raise pistols at his body neo, and hence we, see the lines of matrix code raining down and superimposed upon the expected walls and agents. This seeing both what is and what could be, is the work of a tuned imagination attendant both to the needs of reality and the hope of faith. This is not to say that the matrix is an allegory for scripture. Indeed, the matrix is nothing if not a visual representation of gnosticism. One of the ways that the matrix is often seen as being gnostic is the above scene. The scene however illustrates the idea of seeing what could be, instead over and on top of what is. This is different than illustrating secret knowledge, and something Christians need to (re)learn. The enslavement of our imagination both collective and individual to the masters of entertainment has hindered the Churches ability to realize the in-breaking kingdom of God in everyday life. We have forgotten how to see God’s actions in the world. When we witness, even peripherally, a suicide we question “where was God?†because we’ve forgotten how to imagine God’s presence and actions. Instead of recapturing our imaginations we settle for cheap tricks of sermon illustrations and CCM music. The question is the, how do we recapture the imagination to see God’s Kingdom over and on top of reality? Well’s argues that it’s the practice of improvisation that tunes our imaginations to see the Kingdom. By practicing Improvisation, and it’s attendant practices of accepting all offers etc, the hope is that we can learn to relax enough to see beyond the world’s facets to see the kingdom’s solutions.
Danielle | October 5th, 2006 at 1:29 am #
Yes, we need to imaginatively see God in the world. I agree completely. What I am hesitant about is that we also need to clarify for the church that seeing God in the world is not always in miraculous healing or easy answers, and seeing God’s actions won’t necessarily give us the answers that we seek in hard situations. We may be retrained to see God even in the midst of tragedy, but that does not remove tragedy from our midst. I watched a friend slowly die from cancer over the last year, and I can name hundreds, perhaps thousands of ways in which God was present, but God’s presence does not remove the horror of watching a young life slowly extinguished by an illness that would not be present were it not for sin and the fall.
Let’s become schooled in the practice of improvisation, but not expect that it solves all our problems. There really aren’t easy answers to tragedy.
Nate | October 5th, 2006 at 1:38 pm #
The nucleus of your argument seems to be the contrast between the questioning that Christians do at the seen suicide and the numbing that goes on when CCM and sermon illustrations become surrogates for improvisational imagination. Were I to grade this bit, I’d ask you to expand on those phenomena. You touched on them and departed, not setting up a theoretical framework in which those phenomena make sense. After you expand those, a sentence or two illustrating what improv might look like would set up in the reader’s mind a strong contrast between the blind life against which you’re warning and the seeing/improvising life you’re advocating.
B-minus.