Entries from April 24, 2005 - April 30, 2005
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watched this movie [again] on friday night.
i've been extremely surprised at some
of the reactions from friends about it. i saw it in the theater with a
friend of mine and we absolutely LOVED it. i recommended it to another
friend [who often enjoys and partakes in wildly inappropriate and
occasionally profane humor]... and he absolutely hated it. well,
actually i think the phrase was that he "found it very disturbing".
i've also gotten some middle-of-the-road responses as well.
the simplified version of the plot
basically revolves around the antics and crises of students in your
typical[?] christian high school in suburbia. in a sea of presumably
good but generic kids swaying mindlessly to the worship music, we focus
on a select few: a group of characters that are painfully broken...
just like the rest of us [huh, go figure]. some are characters, some are caricatures;
but there is a level of identification in each that is both painful and
eye-opening. crises of faith. searching for God's will. over-the-top
evangelism. moral ambiguity. rejection. touched by an angel this is not. this is a movie of messy faith.
skip: patrick, this is not a gray area.
patrick: dad, it's all a gray area.
skip: THE BIBLE IS BLACK AND WHITE!
ah, it all seems so easy. need an
answer? BOOM, look it up, chapter and verse, and you're ready to go.
right? riiiiight...? which doesn't explain all the schisms and splits
and stalemates found in the history of christendom. yes, the bible is
black and white on many matters. but between black and white there is
-- inevitably -- gray. problems arise when we assume that gray is bad.
that the gray must be solved. that there must be one answer, somewhere,
that is definitively correct, and can be -- must be -- found within the gray.
we desire black and white; we desire
straight answers. and certainly there is much about christianity that
is, indeed, black and white. but gray... gray is not bad. it's just
messy.
this is a life of messy faith.
mdog
4 Comments
i couldn't make this up.
receptionist: "um... your mom's on line 1."
me: "what??" [picks up line 1]
me: "yesss...?"
mom: "so, we got new color samples for couches..." [proceeds to explain variances of colors, patterns, lightness, darkness, and brocade (what the hell is brocade anyway??)]
me: "uh. yeahhhh..."
mom: "what do you think?"
me: "what do you mean what do i think?"
mom: "which one should we get?"
me: "are you kidding me?"
mom: "what?"
me: "i don't know what they look like!!"
mom: "but you saw three of them this weekend."
me: "yes. and none of them matched the new carpet."
mom: "well, the new samples don't have as much green in them..."
me: "GREEN?? the three that i saw didn't have any green!"
mom: "what? yes, they did. they were greenish."
me: "but -- oh, never mind. it doesn't matter because I CAN'T SEE THESE SAMPLES."
mom: "they're darker than the ones you saw."
me: "darker? i don't care how dark they are! it's the color -- THE COLOR that matters!"
mom: "well, which one should we get...?"
and so on and so forth. MY GOSH.
for a little background, i was "home" this weekend and indirectly found out that my parents are clearly colorblind. my childhood home of browns, tans, and neutrals [think 70's ranch style home here] is starting to undergo a transformation i can only politely describe as... eclectic. the new carpet in the living room is now an indeterminate shade of gray and/or brownish, and the adjacent kitchen linoleum has been replaced with large mauve-ish tiles. yes -- they're mauve, i swear.
i asked my mother why they went with pink.
she screeched.
"it's not pink! it's sandstone."
[ooooo... "sandstone". my bad.]
"um... there's definitely some pink in that 'sandstone' though."
she wasn't having any of it. sandstone means sandstone, and sandstone does NOT mean pink. sandstone is apparently its own stand alone color, and one cannot describe it with the usual garden variety of color titles found in a 12-crayon crayola box, as most normal people might attempt to do.
also, keep in mind my original description of my childhood home.
gray and mauve?
wtf?
