Memorial Day Reflections with Owen and Shields

Memorial Day reflections, with help from Wilfred Owens' poem "Dulce et Decorum Est" and David Shields' work "War is Beautiful" - read on KateRaeDavis.com

How Sweet & Beautiful It Is…

British poet Wilfred Owen fought in the First World War; his poems were all written in the span of a year before he was killed in action at the age of 25. Perhaps his most famous poem is titled Dulce et Decorum Est, which highlights the contrast between one moment of war to the wider narrative that is told of war:

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

\\

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

\\

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

\\

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

The last lines are a Latin saying that was often quoted at the start of WWI. The translation: “How sweet and right it is to die for your country.”

“War is Beautiful”

In War is Beautiful, David Shields takes up Owen’s theme, carefully curating photos from the cover the New York Times to illustrate the ways in which the Times has led its readers to believe war reflects beauty, love, and God in Christ. Shields’s essay “War is Beautiful, They Said,” concisely articulates the ways in which the Times has taken the place of the WWI-era citizens who encouraged their youth to fight with the phrase “Dulce et decorum est.”

Fusion of Church & State

As a result of his experiences with war, Owen questioned and challenged religion, as is evident in some of his poetry. When the language of self-sacrifice and larger purpose is used by both religion and country, it is easy to equate the call to die for one’s country with the call “to die for one’s friends,” as one oft-misused scriptural verse says. When a soldier realizes that his country’s values have betrayed him, the feeling of betrayal is extended to the religion whose vocabulary and imagery the political leaders utilized. When the vocabulary of the State is the same as the vocabulary of the Church, and when the church quietly acquiesces to such misuse, betrayal by one is equal to betrayal by the other.

In his work, Shields curates a visual argument for the ways in which religious “visual vocabulary” is utilized to incite young Americans to war, or at least to encourage Americans to support the war (or perhaps, at the very least, to stop Americans from actively protesting the war). Shields suggests that in the Times, the imagery of the Church has been coopted for the purposes of the State.

The separation of Church and State is sometimes lamented as a problem in USAmerican society, but history can show us that the separation is for the purposes of protecting the integrity of the Church as much or more so than it is to protect the State. In Shields’s work, we see the modern-day effects of the fusion of these two institutions, making visible — behind the beauty — the death and degradation that come at the manipulation of religious symbols for political purposes.

God

On his section of photographs he places under the theme of “God,” Shields writes that “the Times uses its front-page war photographs to convey that a chaotic world is ultimately under control” (WiB p 9). The photos in this section, to my perception, fall in two categories.

The first: aerial shots. Obama (representative of American power) helicoptering over a city; a soldier (his face obscured so as to represent all soldiers, or perhaps American might) aiming a gun out of an aircraft.

Symbols of power that hover over a city, look over a city — benevolently or malevolently? in protection or battle? The same questions could be asked of these troops as we ask of God.

The second category: Middle Eastern people subjugating themselves — one man is nearly nude, on his knees in front of soldiers’ legs; another is kissing the hand of a soldier as one would a revered priest. They’re subjugating themselves before soldiers whose faces are always averted from the camera or out of shot; again, they could be any soldier, they are there to represent not an individual but a symbol.

The visual signs of prostration and reverence — traditionally religious symbols — are here applied to political and military might in a way that, as Shields theme title suggests, equates American forces with God.

Pieta

Another section is titled “Pieta,” which is a subject in Christian art that depicts the Virgin Mary cradling Jesus, recently dead and removed from the cross.

To summarize this theme, Shields write a succinct equation to illustrate the understanding of the Times: “War death = Christ’s death on the cross. The process of removing the body from the cross and battlefield is sacred” (WiB p 9). The images are solemn beauty; the overtones of sacrifice are palpable.

Beauty / Self-Sacrifice

Shields titles this theme simply “Beauty.” He summarizes the section as “portraits of the other…mostly women and children, beauties seeking salvation. Male sacrifice is consecrated in these faces — [they are] the rationale for going to war” (WiB p 9).

His description makes clear that this understanding of beauty is connected to self-sacrifice for the sake of a common good, or self-sacrifice for the good of another — which is, of course, one way that Christians understand Jesus on the cross (or, more accurately, the singular way in which many USAmerican Christians understand the cross).

The cameras focus on women and children, clear-eyed and suffering, often surrounded by blood or fire. They are sometimes looking into the camera as though salvation from these surroundings lies with us, the American viewer; as if their salvation is dependent upon our support of this war’s continuation.

Differentiation and Memorial Day

Whatever you believe about the political realities or necessities behind the war, I think we can recognize that the daily reality of the war experience contains layers of horror. Even for those who manage to escape physically unharmed (though, arguably, the levels of stress-induced hormones that flood the brains of our soldiers in their formative years means that it’s near impossible to have no physical impact; in a very real sense, no one leaves unharmed) — but even for those who manage to come home physically intact, there is real pain involved: the emotional pain of losing peers, the trauma of living amidst death, the survivor’s guilt.

I know many Christians view war as a necessary evil in our world. Perhaps they’re right. But even so, Shields’s work suggests to me that for Christians to allow the political powers to use our imagery and symbols is to allow the State to displace the Church. To quietly allow the State to serve Death using the symbols that are meant for Life is a betrayal of the gospel.

If war is a necessary evil for the State, let us keep the Church intact so that those who come home from war still have safe place in society, a place that has not betrayed them.

Christ was meant to be the last sacrifice. To glorify soldiers as sacrifices for our society only calls us back to the cross, to a recognition of the two millennia that have passed in which we have failed to construct a society that recognizes Christ as the final sacrifice. Perhaps not only on Memorial Day, but every day, we can honor the soldiers who gave their lives by working for peace, by constructing a society which no longer demands their sacrifice.

Until that day, may we not only remember the soldiers who gave their lives, but also witness to our returning veterans — not only in their triumphs, but in their loss and grief.

May we free them from being anonymous symbols of power on our newspapers in order that they might become wholly human in all beauty and brokenness.

May we help work alongside them to re-connect to the goodness, light, and life that is in the world and in our hearts and theirs.

May we listen and witness to whatever shards of their experiences they’re able and willing to entrust to us, and may we do so as faithfully, attentively, and gently as we witness the breaking of the bread.

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For discussion:

What would need to be included in a photo of modern war for it to be more honest? What would need to be left out, or what editing left undone?

May 26, 2016June 8, 2019

Remixing Symbols: Rosemary and Holy Water, Remembrance and Baptism

In the Episcopal Church, there are certain days on which the priest takes branches cut from the church garden, dips them in holy water, and shakes the branches over the congregations’ heads. It’s a baptism symbol that holds a reminder of our baptisms, a reminder of our identity as the people of God, a reminder that we participate in death and resurrection.

Because my church is in Seattle, our garden holds a rosemary plant. Here, rosemary grows like a beloved native weed. The plant in our garden, bordering the parking lot, is always overgrown, so its branches are always the first to be cut when it’s time to remember our baptism.

Remembering our baptism carries a particular scent: equal parts incense and rosemary.

As a result of this, whenever I cook with rosemary, I find myself remembering my baptism.

My community hasn’t assigned any particular meaning-making to this happenstance connection between rosemary and baptism. If there is any intent in its use, it is to convey the connection between the church and our local place. Or, perhaps, a symbol of provision and abundance.

So I researched the meaning of rosemary — most plants have a symbolic connotation, even if we no longer live by what they once meant.

Rosemary is a symbol of remembrance for the dead. Mourners used to throw it into graves, the way we might today throw a rose onto the casket. (Roses, of course, are themselves symbols: red for love, yellow for friendship, white for youth.) In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Ophelia says “There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance.”

The branches dipped in holy water is one of those moments where symbols align and intermingle and remix without intention on behalf of the artist. I must believe that the Spirit is at work in such remixing.

Because what the practice does — without any need of human intention (though it does require attention) — is it connects death and resurrection. The priest takes rosemary — a symbol of grief, mourning, and death — and uses it as the means to sprinkle the assembly with baptismal water — a symbol of joy, new life, resurrection.

Using rosemary to sprinkle holy water on the congregation connects the remembrance of my baptism more solidly to the remembrance that, in some way, the person I used to be has died.

I remember her. Remember who she was, how she behaved, how it felt to be her. Sometimes, I even miss her. I miss the height and depth at which she experienced emotion, the high degree of passion in her relationships, her quit wit and cutting tongue. She moved through life with little discernment, often finding whichever option meant less pain (bruises were so much easier to tolerate than loneliness). In many ways, it was easier and more fun to be her. Rosemary, that’s for remembrance.

And that memory, the memory of who she was and what my life as her was like, makes the droplets of cool water that much more powerful. The water connects me with my baptismal identity, my post-baptism reality. The water reminds me that I not only died but rose again with Christ.

The impact of remembering that new identity is much more powerful when remembered in contrast to what died.

As I’ve grown in my baptismal identity, I’ve gained a capacity to understand my emotions and care for myself in ways that are less destructive. I’ve developed stable and loving relationships that I can actually experience as loving. I’ve learned to tolerate pain in the present because of my hope for the future.

And then I reclaim my baptismal identity. It may have been easier and more fun to be the person I used to be. But the person I’ve become is more loving, more joyful, more compassionate.

And I think I’d rather be as someone who loves joyfully than as someone who has fun.

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May 10, 2016May 4, 2016

Christian Ritual & Developing Eyes to See God in Secular Culture

Developing Eyes to See God in 'Secular' Culture - the processes of Christian symbol and ritual - KateRaeDavis.com

Maybe it’s confusing that Christians can’t seem to see rain in a film without naming it baptism. Maybe you’re a Christian who would like to more readily see God’s active presence in the novels you read and movies you watch. Either way, this post will help by explaining how Christian sight is formed to see God in secular culture.

For context: this is post #3 in a series on symbols. The first post covered the origin of symbol and ritual, using the example of water. The second discussed Jesus’s remix of symbols, his followers’ ritualization of that remix, and the way we understand those rituals today, continuing with the example of water.

In this post, I’ll discuss the way some Christians — or, at the very least, how I — understand cultural narratives that use elements of symbolic or ritual meaning in the Christian community. I’ll stick with the symbol of water and point to the presence of baptism is present in the film The Shawshank Redemption. (Although this could also be done with many other symbols and concepts, such as breath and blood or the practice of witnessing martyrs; maybe future posts).

If you’re interested in other narratives that contain symbolic baptisms, click here to download my list of 15 movies and novels!

Pointing to the Shared Nature

Ok. So we covered how symbols develop based on the natural, inherent function of an object or element. And we discussed how those became symbols and rituals within just one community of people — Christians.

An object used in a ritual or as a storied symbol is always pointing back to its inherent function.

And in a sense, if you begin to see that object as important in a certain way, you learn to see that object as a living symbol. The object’s presence is always pointing to the inherent function because it now has become inseparable.

And if you’re in a community that uses the ritual, the presence of an object will trigger associations with both its function and its symbolic and ritual meaning.

I tried to make a simple diagram of this and it got complicated quickly, but maybe it helps:

The linking factor is actually the natural function of the object that is inherent to the object and that the object cannot avoid. Spiritual formation simply trains sight for the link. The link doesn’t necessarily exist “naturally,” but it does exist, in a very real way, in our worldview.

This is getting a bit abstract, so let’s turn back to our water example.

Water and Baptism Share Rejuvenation

Water always points back to its inherent function of providing, sustaining, renewing life.

Water, for Christian practitioners, has a storied meaning: the Spirit hovered over water before the creation of the cosmos; the waters of the Red Sea parted to liberate the people of Israel; Jesus refers to himself as living water.

On top of that, water is used in the ritual of baptism, which carries all those stories and then has its own stories on top of it — both the community stories in the ways we “remember our baptism” (for instance, in my church, the priest uses rosemary branches to “sprinkle” water on the congregation) and also in our individual stories.

Much of our time in spiritual formation is spent near water, wet from water, telling stories about water — all in ways that point it back to water’s inherent function as life-giving and add texture to that narrative by saying that God (and God in Jesus) is life-giving.

With water and baptism, that visual looks something like this:

The link is that both water and baptism point to renewal of life — the former on a physical level, the latter on a spiritual level. Through stories and practices that link water to this spiritual level, it becomes natural to begin to see water as operating at both levels all the time. The world is infused with the holy. The lines between the sacred and the secular blur to the point of becoming inconsequential.

Christian View of Symbols

In film and story, objects that are often used only for their original, natural, inherent function.

And then Christians claim that there’s something more going on, that it’s a symbol for this Christian ritual or moment.

We’re not claiming that the director/author/creator intended the moment to point to Christ. Rather, we’re claiming that Christ — the force that energizes the cosmos with an abundance of goodness and love — is present in the object that the director chose to use.

Baptism in The Shawshank Redemption

Let’s look at the infamous “baptism” scene in The Shawshank Redemption. Imagine Andy’s escape from prison on a cloudless night. He crawls through the sewer and emerges into the clear night sky, covered in shit, wipes himself off, walks away. Pretty anticlimactic, right? Lacking in some sense of hope and rejuvenation.

On a very practical level, the rain is necessary to clean off the protagonist for the audience’s eyes, to literally wash away the shitty image of despair and to give the audience a feeling of cleanliness and newness.

On a non-religious symbolic level, the filmmakers may have thought the rain provides an image of freshness and of cultivating new life — the rain marks the possibility of new life for Andy just as it does for young plants.

Water is more than just water when it's part of your story of salvation - read more on KateRaeDavis.com — Photo from The Shawshank Redemption, Warner Bros. Pictures

But Christians have a storied history of water, moments and narratives that adds texture to the way we view water. In the Episcopal Church, the following prayer is spoken over the water immediately before baptism, summarizing the stories that we remember when we engage with water:

We thank you, Almighty God, for the gift of water.
Over it the Holy Spirit moved in the beginning of creation.
Through it you led the children of Israel out of their bondage
in Egypt into the land of promise. In it your Son Jesus
received the baptism of John and was anointed by the Holy
Spirit as the Messiah, the Christ, to lead us, through his death
and resurrection, from the bondage of sin into everlasting life.

Through the lens of Christian narrative and symbol, Andy is being delivered out of bondage, is moving through a resurrection moment, is entering everlasting life right in the midst of this world.

That is not to claim that the director intended the moment to be baptismal. The link exists because water by its inherent nature sustains life. The symbol will always be connected to baptism for those whose eyes are trained to see — not as its progenitor but as a sibling — because both have their root in water.

Some More Baptisms

If you’re curious about other baptismal moments of film and literature, I made a free resource for you! In the free resource library, you’ll find a list of baptismal scenes from film and literature. It’s good for discussions with your friends about the meaning of baptism. Some of them are great to talk with kids about the transformation that occurs in baptism. If you’re in a preaching position, it’s an excellent resource for sermon illustrations. Get access here:

Christian Spirituality of Symbols

When Christians point out the ways in which non-Christian narrative hold Christian truths, the intent isn’t to oppress or appropriate the art for their own purposes.

The intent is to show that God is active and alive in the world, to reaffirm for ourselves the truth that there is something in the world that is concerned with humanity’s well-being and sustenance and rejuvenation.

On a physical level, perhaps that something is simply the intermixing of hydrogen and oxygen molecules. But on a spiritual level, that something is the divine force of the created cosmos who manifests in molecules and manipulates them for the sake of our

I want to hear from you!

What are some of your favorite symbolic baptism scenes in movies and novels?

What are some of your favorite songs that include water imagery?

May 3, 2016April 26, 2016

What Bing Bong Can Teach Us About Christ

Bing Bong Christ? What does Bing Bong teach us about the crucifixion? - Literate Theology / KateRaeDavis.com (image property of Disney/Pixar)

It started with a casual suggestion: Bing Bong’s sacrifice is a model of substitutionary atonement.

Summary of Substitutionary Atonement

Substitutionary atonement is one understanding of what happens at the crucifixion of Jesus. This understanding says something like: humanity is sinful/behaved wrongly/is bad, so God is angry with humanity and demands that they be punished and God be “satisfied.” Apparently, the way to satisfy God is with blood and suffering and death of an innocent. So God sends Jesus to satisfy God (the economics of such a transaction baffles me). Jesus suffers in place of you or me or humanity as a whole, which somehow makes things a-okay with God.

It’s obviously not my favorite way of understanding the atonement. Truthfully, it isn’t a beloved atonement model in many Christian circles as it fundamentally relies on an abusive understanding of God, then acts as though a benevolent victim Son makes up for the violently abusive Father as though that doesn’t pose problems for trinitarian unity.

Substitutionary atonement is also known as the atonement model that, it’s been said, “commits the sin” of thinking it’s the only singular way to understand the crucifixion — as though the generations of Christians who understood the crucifixion differently, before this model was developed, “weren’t really Christians.”

Thoughts on Bing Bong & Atonement

All that to say: When a student casually made this suggestion in the school Commons area, it couldn’t go unaddressed. We love Bing Bong, we cried at his memory-dump fade-away death. Certainly he wouldn’t be representing something that’s so problematic. … Right?

But the seeds of doubt and uncertainty were clearly planted, and an increasingly heated conversation followed.

I maintain that Bing Bong may be a model of Christ (and maybe a great way to talk to kids and adolescents about Christ), but that he is not a model of substitutionary atonement. There’s no angry third-party involved; the only third-party is Riley, the being they live and move within and for whom they want to do what’s best (which could make Riley into a God-figure, in this one way alone). But Riley isn’t angry and demanding the pain and death of one of the beings inside her. Riley doesn’t need to be “satisfied.” So Bing Bong isn’t substituting himself for Joy’s wrongs; he’s simply doing what is best for Riley — Joy has very little part in his decision at all — and it’s not about paying any kind of debt or covering over wrongdoing.

Which is when another student jumps in and says: There is a kind of debt and wrongdoing, at least in Joy’s emotional experience. Joy feels responsible for their circumstances, feels responsible for getting Sadness back safely, and feels responsible for Riley’s overall well-being. It’s the emotional “debt” of her guilt that Bing Bong pays. So if he’s a Christ figure, it is a model of substitutionary atonement.

And then another student: Why is this even a question? Bing Bong isn’t like Jesus in any other way, so he’s not a Christ figure.

To which I object: No literary Christ figure is ever like Christ in every way, or even in many ways. We use cultural (and human saint) parallels to give an image of just one aspect of Christ’s identity, life, death, or resurrection. (Which I do with Mad Max and Christ, and with a Rothfuss character and God, and will definitely keep doing, so if you’re interested in that, you should subscribe!)

Join the Conversation!

We never came to a conclusion. Is Bing Bong Christ-like in any way? Not at all? Does Bing Bong point us, in some way, to Christ? Does Bing Bong’s sacrificial death conform to the pattern of Christ’s death? What is it that pulls at our heartstrings, if not Christ? Are we just a group of people who take Pixar movies way too seriously?

Month: May 2016