A Christian Conversation about Steven Universe (Part III): We Are the Crystal Gems

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Back in 2011, when the movie X-Men First Class came out, I went to see it with a friend of mine who happens to be gay. As far as I knew, I was just taking in one more rollicking superhero romp, maybe not Academy Award worthy, but certainly worth the price of admission. My gay friend, however, had an entirely different take on the film.

“What did you think?” he asked as we were leaving the theatre.

I gave him my two-cent review: fun story, cool effects, though I’m more of an Avengers man, myself.

“Maybe,” he said. “But I thought it did a great job conveying what it feels like to be gay.”

If you’re scratching your head at that one, like I was when he said it, then maybe I should explain. One of the primary conflicts in X-Men First Class has to do with the search for a cure to the mutations that give the X-Men their powers. The feeling of being an aberrant “freak of nature” is a source of great torment for the super-powered mutants in the movie. Many of them hide, disguise, or suppress their mutations so that they can fit in with every-day society. One of the mutants, a blue-haired superhero named Beast believes he has found a way to medically “cure” their mutations and turn them into “normal” human beings; by contrast, the mutant named Magneto wants them to embrace their mutations and wage war against the human race.

The plot didn’t stand out to me on first viewing as an especially LGBTQ-themed story, but my friend helped me out. “Being gay,” he said, “in a world where everyone is straight and you don’t know if you belong, you can feel like that: like you’re a mutant with a mutation you have to hide, because if anyone knew you had it, they’d think you’re were a freak.”

It turns out that my friend was picking up on something the movie was intentionally laying down. At least, the screenwriters of X-Men First Class have since gone on the record confirming there was an intentional gay subtext to the story.

When I think back to that night watching X-Men First Class, though, two things stand out to me: one, how meaningful it was for my gay friend to see his own experience of queerness being metaphorically represented on screen like that; and two, how easily I had missed the metaphor, as a heterosexual man. That night at the theatre helped me to see my “straight world” through the eyes of someone who did not feel as though he fit into it, because the mainstream narratives of that world, where everyone found a romantic partner of the opposite sex, settled down with a family and set up a white picket-fence around it all, did not include his experience. It helped me see how painful the feeling of “being queer” can be for queer people, and how healing it can be when that pain is acknowledged.

This is one of the reasons I’ve been using the kid’s show Steven Universe as a starting point for this series on practicing hospitality for LGBTQ people in the church, because it too helps us to grasp what the “feeling of being queer” can be like for queer people. If you missed the background, let me explain that the central premise of Steven Universe is that a group of aliens called the Crystal Gems, beings that look and sound and more-or-less act just like you and I, have come to dwell among the “normal” citizens of planet earth. These aliens are really gems, whose only physical form are their gemstones, and whose anthropomorphic bodies are really projections of corporeal light that they emit.

As the show progresses, it becomes clear that the Crystal Gems are somehow meant to represent, if not the LGBTQ community, at the very least the queer experience. This is most obvious in an episode called “Rocknaldo,” (Season 4, Episode 18), where a character named Ronaldo is shown distributing pamphlets that warn the residents of Beach City about the “Rock People” living among them. The episode doesn’t dwell on this for long, and Steven quickly helps Ronaldo see the harm his pamphlets are causing, telling him that a term like “Rock People” is offensive, and that he is a Gem himself. With only a little bit of imagination, though, it’s easy to see this entire exchange as a way of exploring the problem of homophobia on a level that children would get. I may be reading too much into this, of course, but my experience with X-Men First Class suggests that even if this was not the main point of the episode, many queer people would resonate with it in this way.

If the Crystal Gems really are meant to help us to think about the queer experience, it strikes me as significant that whatever else they are, the Crystal Gems are alien. They do not fit the mainstream world of Beach City, and they frequently encounter situations that make them starkly aware of this reality. It is true that most often when this happens, and their alien natures are exposed to their human neighbors like this, the humans themselves tend to take it in stride, and life in Beach City sort of goes on more-or-less as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. This is one of the endearing quirks of the show, that the most bizarre of storylines—from intergalactic space travel to extra-terrestrial invasions—do not leave the least lasting scar on the tranquility of Beach City. It is almost as if the show is suggesting to queer kids that, yes, the feeling of “being the other” is real and painful, but however painful it may be, life on the other side of coming out will find a way of carrying on. It’s sort of like a sci-fi fantasy adventure version of the “It gets better” message.

I realize that in reading Steven Universe like this, as an allegory for the “othering” that so many queer people face, I may be guilty of “othering” myself. When I see an alien on screen and assume that the alien in question must be a metaphor for a gay person, it reveals something, perhaps, about what I really think about the gay people in my own community (do I really think they of them as “aliens”?) This is part of the brilliance of the show, however, that it holds up the mirror to all of us, queer and straight together, and asks us to re-examine what we see there.

If I am on to anything in this reading of Steven Universe, I think there is a lesson here for the Christian Church. I have written extensively on this topic before, but in a community like the Church, where the focus is almost exclusively on the family, where ministries tend to presuppose marriage as the normative way of following Jesus, and where gay people historically have not been welcome or affirmed, this feeling of “being an alien” can be intense. Like I had done with my gay friend at X-Men First Class, it is easy for Christians to under-estimate just how intense, and indeed, how painful, it can be to be made to feel like “the other.”

This is why we need to hear more stories like the one Steven Universe is telling, not just imaginative ones, either, but the real stories of real gay people; and not just hear them, but authentically engage with them. Only as we are able to acknowledge and address the alienation that our “heteronormative narratives” may be causing, will we be able authentically to include gay people into the life of the church. This will take more than watching a few episodes of a kid’s cartoon, of course, but if nothing else a show like Steven Universe might help us to understand how important it is to do this well, and give us some idea of where to start.

My Mother's Eyes, a short story

I have my mother’s eyes. That’s what they’ve always told me, anyways.

I’ve never really understood why, because she’s been blind since childhood and I can see perfectly well, but that’s what they say. She was only four years old when the doctors diagnosed her with a rare case of infantile glaucoma, but by then the disease had already advanced so far that the optic nerve was irreparably damaged. In every memory I have of her, her eyes have that impassive gaze of the unseeing: wide, and dark, and still.

It is true that my eyes are dark, too, and brown like hers. But that’s the only similarity I could ever see.

Still, they always said it, that Iris has her mother’s eyes. Her father’s sense of humor and her mother’s eyes.

I have to take their word on it for my sense of humor, too, though. If my mother is blind in every childhood memory I have, my father does not figure at all. There’s some secret about him that no one would tell me, but since growing up, I’ve sort of pieced it together that his relationship with my mother was something of a whim for him. When the realities of being with someone who couldn’t see became real inconveniences, he moved on and left us to fend for ourselves. Whenever I thought of him leaving, I always imagined him writing it all out in a letter, how it wasn’t her it was him, and then realizing she could never read it anyways and crumpling it into a ball. He left shortly after I was born and I’ve never met him.

So I was raised by a blind, abandoned teenaged mom. We lived with her parents for the earliest years of my life, but as soon as I was old enough that I could help to make it manageable, we moved into an apartment of our own. I didn’t pick up on all the nuances in my mother’s relationship with her parents at that age, but even as a young girl I knew that they bickered a lot. I’ve since come to wonder if they blamed themselves for my mother’s blindness, or if not that, then perhaps she blamed them. Whatever the case, my earliest memories of knowing real happiness seem to coincide with my earliest memories of us beginning to live on our own, my blind mother and her nine-year-old girl, together against the world.

Mom never got a service dog, though she could have, and when I was old enough to know the difference it might make, I begged her repeatedly to do so.

“Alison,” I’d say—I don’t know why but I always called my mother by her given name—“Alison, I’m sick of having to rush home from school to take care of things around here. And I worry like crazy about you all the while I am at school. Why can’t we just look into getting a dog?”

“Very funny,” Alison said. “You can look. I can’t.” She was not at all shy about resorting to these kinds of tactics when strict reason failed her in an argument. “Why don’t you look, and tell me what you see?”

“That’s not what I meant. And you know it.”

“I’m just saying that I don’t need a seeing-eye-dog. I got you. You’re my seeing-eye-girl.”

“Very funny yourself,” I said. She’s used that line before, and I’ve always hated it. “I just think that we’d be happier—that you’d be happier—if you were more independent. I mean, I won’t be around forever.”

We were having the debate this time in the kitchen, preparing supper. I had the water for the spaghetti already boiling and a pan for the sauce on the stove and ready to go. My mother could use the can opener entirely by feel and had opened a can of pasta sauce for me. I was managing the stove top, of course, but she was wonderfully adept with a kitchen knife, and started to dice up an onion. She had this way of curling her fingertips in and holding the onion down with the top of her knuckles, so she could guide the blade by running the flat of the knife up and down along the front of her fingers, with no risk of cutting herself. I’ve never been in a professional kitchen before, but I like to think she was as good as any bona fide chef.

“You mean you don’t want to be around forever?” She said. Her blind eyes still watered like anyone’s would, from the sting of the onion.

“It’s not that,” I said quietly. “I just want you to be, you know, independent.”

“I’m plenty independent,” she said, and it almost seemed as if she was slicing the onion with a bit of extra vigor as she said this. “Didn’t I raise you on my own? Didn’t we move into this apartment as soon as we could? Haven’t I been working a real job all these years to pay for it?”

“Yes, yes, and yes,” I said. Her tone reminded me a lot of the one she used when she argued with my grandparents. They were regularly pressuring her to move back home. “I’m not saying you’re not independent. I just think that a lot of blind people find that seeing-eye-dogs help. That’s all.”

“Iris,” my mother said in that steady, soft voice she used when she needed the debate to be over. “Honey: I know you’re saying this because you love me. And I love you too. But I don’t need any help.” Her face was pointed stoically forwards as she spoke; though she knew exactly where I was standing she did not turn towards me. “Now,” she added. “Be a dear and help me put this onion in the sauce. I don’t want to burn my fingers.”

I stared at her blankly for a second. And then, because we had reached this dead-end often enough that I knew we’d come back to it again at some point, I dropped the matter and finished making the sauce.

That evening, when the dinner was done and the dishes cleaned, we were sitting together in the living room of our tiny apartment. I was on the couch, working on my calculus and she was plunking away at the piano. It was an old apartment-sized piano that I’d helped her to find on Kijiji a couple years ago. She worked at a call centre, one of the first blind operators they’d ever hired, and though the pay was steady, it was hardly princely, so it had taken her over a year to save up for the piano. It wasn’t no Steinway, not by a long shot, but she wasn’t no Ray Charles, neither. She had a pretty good ear, for sure, but her playing was still pretty halting and random. I had a really important test coming up, with college applications on the way and all, but there was nowhere else in the apartment to study, so I just put my head down and did my best, with Alison plinking away blindly in the background.

Suddenly she stopped playing and looked straight ahead.

“There’s one just stepped into the room,” she said softly. “He’s standing near to the couch, on your left.” I didn’t look up from my book, and didn’t say anything, but after a moment she said, “He is a glorious one, too; a real warrior of light.”

This is as good a time as any, I guess, to explain that my mother sees angels. I don’t know if “sees” is quite the right term to use or not, but she has, or at least she thinks she has, some sort of spiritual gift for detecting the presence of these heavenly beings. It’s been like this since I was a very little girl, mind you, so it’s never really spooked me out or anything. She’ll just be busy doing something, or sitting quietly thinking, or sitting on a bus maybe (these are usually the worst times for it to happen, in my opinion), and suddenly she’ll announce that there’s an angel present. There’s one standing at my elbow, she’ll say; there’s one sitting on the front stairs watching the street; there’s one sitting in an empty seat across from us on the bus.

She never talks to them, mind you. She’s actually quite strict about this, that we shouldn’t ever address them directly, and the only time her angel-detecting gift caused any real grief between us was once when I tried to speak to one. This was a few years back, when I was at the height of that bratty stage of being a teenager, and I only ever felt embarrassed about my mom and her “gift.” So one time when she told me there was an angel at the kitchen table watching us, I turned in that direction and asked if it would like to stay for supper. She scolded and told me that I ought never speak to an angel like that. “After all,” she said, when the wave of anger and alarm had passed, “they are only ministering servants like ourselves.”

Grandma and Grandpa are Pentecostal; or at least, I think they used to be when Alison was young, and maybe this is where she gets her superstitious side from. I know for sure that when Alison was first diagnosed, her mom and dad took her regularly to Pentecostal prayer meetings, healers and miracle workers and what not, praying that she’d have her eyesight restored. From all accounts they visited revival meetings from one end of the country to the other, hoping for a miracle that would make mom see.

For all I know, they actually found what they were looking for and never realized it, because, like I say, as long as I’ve known her, Alison has seen angels, and that’s something. Because it’s never spooky or creepy, when she welcomes one into our presence. Usually, in fact, I’m aware of a profound sense of calm and a deep assurance of goodness sinking into me, whenever she points one out.

This particular night, though, with that ominous calculus test looming over me, and the argument about the service dog still lingering at the back of my mind, I didn’t feel I had the patience for it. “Hmmm,” was all I said, still buried in the pages of my book. “Maybe I should slide over and make him some room on the couch?”

Alison sat perfectly motionless at the piano, though, and in the silence it really did feel like an illuminating presence had descended on us, or was revealing itself to us. At the very least, my nerves about the coming test were suddenly soothed, and even the tension between us over the dog seemed to have evaporated.

“Mom,” I said after a long moment of pretending I was still studying. “It’s just: I’m scared. I’m almost done with high school, and who knows what’s coming next, and it’s hard enough for any kid my age to figure all that out, without—” I trailed off.

“Without having to worry about whose gonna take care of their blind old mom?”

The calculus book in my lap had become blurry to me. There were some times when I was quite grateful that she couldn’t see. I wiped my eyes and hoped the tears wouldn’t sound in my voice. “Well,” I said. “I just want us to be prepared for the future.”

She sighed deeply. It wasn’t a sigh of resignation or of condemnation. If anything there was a note of contentment in it, though it was mingled with great sadness, like the color of autumn leaves. “I know sweetheart,” she said. And then after a moment: “Well, he’s gone now. They never stay long.”

The next day on my way to school, Alex sat down next to me on the city bus. He didn’t always take the bus, but he didn’t have gas money enough to drive his car to school every day, so every fourth or fifth day he took public transit with the rest of us mortals.

Alex is a year older than me, though he’s doing what used to be called Grade 13 and now, I think, they call it a “victory lap.” He’s the kind of guy that seems to own whatever the room he walks into, and though there’s some rumor about the real reason he’s back at J. Milton Collegiate for another year, still the honest truth is that I’m always wondering, when I get on the bus, if he’ll be riding it today. And I’m always a little disappointed when he’s not, even though he hardly ever says anything to me.

Today was the exception. “Hey Iris,” he said, getting up from his seat and moving over to mine while we were lurching away from the bus stop. “I was wondering if you’re coming to Heather’s tomorrow night?”

Heather’s in Grade 12, like me. When we were younger we were actually really close friends, though as we grew up, I was so busy helping Alison live independently from her parents, that I didn’t have much time for her, and we’ve drifted apart. I had heard from friends of friends that her parents were away or something, and she was throwing a party, though she hadn’t invited me.

“Nah, I don’t think so.”

“Don’t think so?”

“I’m not really interested in all those typical teenager clichés, you know?” I wanted to sound cynical, but the truth is, Friday night was when Alison and I always did our grocery shopping for the coming week, because she worked all weekend, and there was no way I could leave her to do that by herself. “House wrecking parties when the parents are gone? What is this, a bad episode of Riverdale or something?”

“Maybe so. If it is, you’d make a pretty good Veronica.”

I rolled my eyes. I was trying to look utterly disgusted at this transparent—and honestly pretty pathetic—stab at flirting, but the truth is, I was hoping the look I gave him would hide the deep down sadness that was welling up in me.

“And you’d make a great Reggie Mantle. Isn’t he the jerky one?”

He laughed effortlessly. “Okay, okay,” he said. “I get it. You’re not a fan. Fine. It’s just—” and a very subtle change slipped into his tone as he said this part—“It’s just, I see you, you know? missing out on life and whatever? And I don’t want you to look back with regrets. I mean: you only get to go through your high school years once.”

“Unless you come back for a thirteenth year,” I said allusively, looking straight ahead and fighting back the faintest of smiles, dancing at the corner of my mouth.

There was a grey-haired lady with one of those old-fashioned scarves—I think they call them babushkas—on her head, sitting on the seat across from me. I hadn’t noticed her before, but she must have been there the whole while, because the bus hadn’t stopped since I got on. When our eyes met she grinned at me, her wrinkled face folding up around her eyes, until the many sharp creases looked like beams of light shining out from a dazzling sun. I grinned back.

“Shots fired!” Alex was saying next to me, with another one of his effortless laughs. “Well: suit yourself, but I’m not gonna give up on you.”

That night over dinner Alison noticed another angel. This time it was standing in the doorway of the kitchen. “He’s got his hands raised in prayer,” she said. “And there are tears in his eyes.”

I took her word for it. True: I did feel the peace sweep over me that so often accompanied my mom’s angelic visitations, but there was so much on my mind in that moment that I didn’t know what to say; and anyways, I was getting to that age where I really didn’t know what to make of it all anymore. I wasn’t about to mock, but I wasn’t sure I believed her, either, like I had when I was nine.

“Alison,” I started tentatively. “Do you think we could do our grocery trip Saturday when you get home from work? Or maybe I could go on my own Sunday afternoon?”

For all her being blind, Alison was uncannily perceptive. “You want to go out Friday?”

“Well, there’s this thing happening with some of my friends, and I thought—” I trailed off. There were so many thoughts I was thinking, that I couldn’t decide which to say first.

“You thought you’d like a night of freedom for a change?” It wasn’t said passive aggressively, I don’t think, and honestly, it was the truth, but I was still young enough that I jumped on the opportunity to be offended.

“How could you say that Alison?” I said, letting my fork clatter on my plate and pushing back from the table. “What do you mean freedom? I’m not your slave. And you’re no prison! I just want to go out with some friends on a Friday night, like any normal kid my age. Why do you have to make this into a thing?”

I wondered if the angel had taken a step into the room, or if he had buried his hands in his face, because Alison had turned her attention in the direction of the kitchen door and held it there.

“I don’t have to make this into a thing,” she said steadily. “I’m working late Saturday, so that won’t do. Sunday might, but we’re out of just about everything, so it might be hard to wait till then.”

“Fine,” I said with an exasperated exhale. “It’s fine. I’ll be home Friday night like a good girl and we can go and get your groceries.”

She was still looking with that piercing, blank gaze in the direction of the angel in the doorway, but with a very soft voice she said. “Just so you know, I made a call to the Guide Dog Association today. I’ve an appointment with them next month to see about finding a dog that’s a good match.”

She said this so softly, for all it being such a significant revelation, and my mind was swirling with so many other thoughts, that even though I nodded slightly the comment barely registered.

Alex was on the bus the next morning, waiting for me. This was the first time I’d ever seen him take the bus two days in a row. He was sitting on the bench-seat that’s normally reserved for seniors and pregnant moms, though the bus was pretty empty and no one needed the seats. It surprised me though, because he was sitting next to the old lady in the kerchief, the one that I’d noticed yesterday. Right next to her, in fact, sitting in that indolent way guys sometimes have, taking up far more room than he needed to, as if he didn’t even notice she was there.

“Hey Veronica!” he said with a bit of a laugh. “You comin’ to Archie’s party tonight?”

“Gee Reggie,” I said, and I hoped my tone seemed dismissive, not as though I were playing along. “I don’t know.”

The old lady didn’t seem at all shy to listen in on our conversation, though really, she hardly could have helped it, Alex was sitting so close to her. In any case, she grinned at me gently when I added. “Do you think Betty will be going too?”

Alex got up, steadying himself against the lurching of the bus, and made his way over to me. He didn’t sit down, but held on to one of the overhead handrails, standing right in front of me and swaying slightly as the bus rounded a corner.

“Seriously, Iris? Have you had second thoughts yet?”

I kept my gaze lowered, but a burning memory of the angel my mother had seen at the dinner table the night before—those crazy, infuriating, embarrassing angels—flared up in my mind. I squeezed my eyes shut against it.

“Sure,” I said. It was like I was listening to someone else speaking, through me. “Only, the busses don’t run after midnight. So how would I get home?”

“Hey, if that’s your worry, no problem. I can take you. You want? I could pick you up at nine.”

I inhaled deeply. “Could you make it six? My mom gets home at six thirty and I’d kinda wanna be gone before she gets home.”

“Your mom gets home? Isn’t she—”

“Yeah, she is. I usually meet her at the bus stop to walk her home. But, you know, she can manage with her cane, I’m sure.” I looked at his face for the first time. “At least, she has before. She won’t miss me.”

He didn’t seem to feel the gravity of what I was saying. “Yeah,” he said with a flippant laugh. “Yeah, sure. Six o’clock it is. I’m sure we can find something fun to do till the party starts.”

The rest of that day was a bit of a guilty blur for me. Whenever I let my mind wander I would see this image of Alison stepping off the bus and me not there; Allison standing on the curb and calling and me not there; Allison, when she finally accepted that I wasn’t coming, unfolding her cane and tapping her tentative way home down the street.

I did very poorly on the calculus exam that day.

That evening, however, I was dressed for the party and ready to go by five thirty. It was way too soon, I know, but I was full of nervous energy, terrified that Alison would come home early somehow and catch me. So I waited in the hall by the door, staring at the knob and breathing unevenly.

When the knock at the door finally came, I checked the clock and was surprised to see that it was only ten to six. Alex didn’t strike me at all as the kind of guy who arrived early. If anything I was worried he would arrive too late to sneak away.

I was even more surprised when I opened the door and instead of Alex standing there, it was the old lady from the bus, still wearing her babushka. The light in the hall was dim but I recognized her the instant that gentle smile dawned across her face.

“I’m sorry to bother you, dear,” she said. “But are you Iris Sullivan?”

“Yes? But … how did you—?” Although I had every reason to be unsettled, it occurred to me that my breathing had quieted down for the first time that whole anxious evening.

“It’s just, you dropped this on the bus this afternoon, and I found it.” She was holding out something in her hand that I didn’t recognize right away. “It had your address on it.”

It was my driver’s license. I'd gotten it last summer, when I turned sixteen. Alison didn’t have a car, of course, but in one of the only real bonding moments I’d ever had with my Grandpa, he’d let me learn on his car. He even drove me to the driver’s test. I haven’t driven anything anywhere since getting that license, but for some reason, at the time, it had seemed like the most triumphant achievement of my life.

I didn’t take the license from her right away, though. I just stood there, staring at it.

“Thanks,” I said at last. “I hope you didn’t go out of your way though. I don’t suppose I’d ever even have missed that thing. I don’t need it; at least: I never use it.”

“Oh,” she said quietly. “Maybe not. But you will. You will.” There was a strange note in her voice, unsettling, but only because it was so reassuring. Somehow, as she spoke, I had no doubt that what she said was true.

I took the card from her hand and looked at it hard, as though I were seeing it for the first time. The photo on it was hideous, even for a driver’s license. I’d hated it the moment I’d seen it, and I hated it all the more as I looked at it now. The look on my face in the picture was just so stunned, like a deer in the headlights. The flash on the camera must have caught me off guard, too, because the eyes were dark and wide and blank.

“Thank you,” I said, but the old lady had already turned and was moving down the hall. At the sound of my voice she stopped and turned back.

“It may not be my place to say,” she began. “But about that boy on the bus…”

“Alex?”

“Yes. Alex. I just want to say that I think you can do much better, dear.” And again the quiet assurance that what she said was true broke over me, and into me, driving away all doubt the way light drives away a shadow.

She turned again, but I didn’t see her go. I was staring with unseeing eyes once more at the driver’s license in my hand, knowing for certain that one day I would use it.

When Alex arrived some twenty minutes later, he found me sitting in the threshold of the open door of our apartment, crying bitterly.

“Hey Veronica,” he said, not noticing my tears. “You ready to party?”

He only paused when I lifted my streaked face and shook my head at him heavily.

“No.”

“No?”

“I can’t.” I said, trying to blink my eyes clear and grasping for resolve.

“Can’t? Why not?”

“It’s just—oh, you wouldn’t understand—it’s just like they’ve always said. I have my mother’s eyes.”

Lightning in a Jar, a song

This is a song I wrote about my wonderful middle child, Laine. I started writing it on the drive home after dropping them off for the start of their first year at university. It's about growing up with your kids, and holding them up to God with an open hand, trusting that He will realize his good plan in their lives. Hard to do, sometimes, as a parent, but a time comes when we have no choice.  It's also about, incidentally, Laine's amazing smile, which seems to light up the whole world each and every time it steals over their face. I hope you enjoy!



Like the leaves in early September
Still green but touched with a promise of gold
Or the red of a glowing ember
Just waiting for the breath of a flame to take hold
I can see her standing in the doorway
Between the days behind her and the days yet to come
Like the end of the prologue to the story
Or the start of a brand new one

But she … Oh then she stops and turns
She’s a cloud in its journey cross the sun
Cause I see my little girl in the shadow of
The woman she’s become

And then she smiles and just for an instant
All of the world is brimming with light
I see her shining there in the brilliance
Piercing the sky like a flash in the night
The past rushes by like the wind in her hair
Chasing the future with a song and a prayer
Spirit on fire and her heart like a lodestar
Waiting to break through the dark like lightning in a jar

How the leaves of late November
Rattle round on the street with the coming of the cold
When the summer is hard to remember
Like an epic story that’s waiting to be told
Oh I saw her standing in the distance
Like the dawn of a spring that’s ready to begin
And she rises with grace and persistence
To welcome it in!

But she … Oh then she stops and turns
She’s a cloud in its journey cross the sun
Cause I see my little girl in the shadow of
The woman she’s become

And then she smiles and just for an instant
All of the world is brimming with light
I see her shining there in the brilliance
Piercing the sky like a flash in the night
The past rushes by like the wind in her hair
Chasing the future with a song and a prayer
Spirit on fire and her heart like a lodestar
Waiting to break through the dark like lightning in a jar

We made it through the storm, rolling with the thunder
Dancing in the summer rain
Till the clouds broke with rays of wonder

The past rushes by like the wind in her hair
Chasing the future with a song and a prayer
Spirit on fire and her heart like a lodestar
Waiting to break through the dark like lightning in a jar
And then she smiles and just for an instant
All of the world is brimming with light
I see her shining there in the brilliance
Piercing the sky like a flash in the night
The past rushes by like the wind in her hair
Chasing the future with a song and a prayer
Spirit on fire and her heart like a lodestar
Waiting to break through the dark like lightning in a jar

Eating, Praying, Loving (Part VI): On Being What You Eat

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I don’t really think about myself as a “fad dieter.” Certainly when I was young, at that stage of life where many of our eating habits get ingrained in us, I ate pretty much what I wanted, when I wanted; and, having inherited my dad’s metabolism, I’ve never really had to worry much about the outcome. That said, as I was planning out this series on the biblical spirituality of food, it occurred to me that I have actually experimented with a wide range of unusual diets over the years. It surprised me, somewhat, to realize this.

When I was a poor University student I discovered 101 ways to prepare Ichiban noodles, and there’s a period in the middle of my second year where all I had in the cupboard was 2 weeks worth of this miracle food. But that of course, was by necessity, not by choice.

The first real “diet” I went on was in my mid-twenties, when my wife and I ate strictly vegan for approximately 2 years. Later this shifted to a vegetarian diet (so I could have cheese and milk). Some time later still, I read Michael Pollan’s book In Defense of Food and tried the Michael Pollan Diet for a while, which to this day I still think of as one of the healthiest diets going: eat food, not to much, mostly plants (especially greens). It’s simple and catchy, though it didn’t last. I went back to eating vegetarian for a while (it’s actually my preferred way of eating, though it’s hard to maintain), and then described myself as a ”flexitarian” and ate some meat on a periodic basis. I’ve told the story of how a visit to the naturopath last year had me eating a variation of the keto diet (high protein, low carbs) for about 6 months, and though I felt amazing on this diet, I found it really hard to do consistently.

So from vegan to vegetarian to keto to Ichiban, I’ve been all over the map when it comes to diets.

I should state it clearly, though, that these diets were never really fads for me, and certainly never to lose weight or salve a poor body image. Truth be told, every time I’ve ever experimented with a specialized diet I was motivated almost entirely by a concern for my physical health. I'd heard that veganism would improve energy levels and maintain good health; I was told that a little animal protein in the diet was good for you; my naturopath told me that carbing up in the morning was causing me to crash in the afternoon, and so on. Each of these diets have had a positive impact, I think, on my overall sense of well-being, though whether that’s because of their real nutritional value or mere placebo effect, I can’t say.

What I can say is that I've learned from experience that our health really is connected intricately to our diets, and a change in the one really can effect a change in the other. This point may seem so obvious that it goes without saying; hasn’t your mother been telling you all your life to eat your vegetables cause you are what you eat?

But from a biblical perspective, I think it needs saying, however obvious it may sound. One of the reasons to pay attention to our food, besides all the reasons I’ve offered already, is that simply put: eating well makes us emotionally and physically healthy; and the healthier we are the more good for the Kingdom of God we will be. This is why, I think, that in the midst of all kinds of lofty theological claims about the trustworthiness of the Gospel, and all kinds of detailed instructions on how to order the worship life of the community, Paul gives his young protégé Timothy this all-too practical advice in 1 Timothy 5:23. “Oh yeah,” he says: “Stop drinking only water and use a little wine because of your stomach and frequent illnesses.” There’s probably some back story behind this dietary directive that we’re missing, but whatever else it means, it suggests that a good servant of the Lord will take care to take care of himself, when it comes to his food choices.

In theological terms, the concept we are touching on here is called “stewardship.” “Stewardship” refers to the truth that everything that is—the whole of creation in fact—belongs solely and exclusively to God. Our time, our treasure, our talent, our possessions, our property, it’s all really his, and if we can lay any claim to it at all, it’s only as a steward, holding it in trust for the real owner, to whom we will give our account in the end. The theological basis for a Christian view of stewardship comes primarily from the creation account of Genesis 1, where God makes the world and then entrusts it into our care, though it is a concept often present in the teaching of Jesus and the church’s understanding of the Second Coming.

We don’t usually think about our physical bodies as belonging to the Lord, one more thing he has entrusted to us to steward well, but biblically it is very clear that the New Testament writers saw it this way. “You are not your own,” Paul said, “therefore honor God with your body.” If this idea is taken to its logical end, we would have to conclude that even our physical health is a gift from God and we are stewards of it, just as much as we are stewards of God’s money, God’s resources, and God’s property.

From a biblical perspective, then, we could say that healthy eating is simply a matter of good stewardship. We eat properly to steward our health so that we are better able to serve the Lord well throughout our lives.

In saying this, I want to offer a disclaimer or two, though. I’m not saying here that you have to be healthy in order to serve God well. I have seen some amazing prayer warriors and faithful servants of the Lord serve him devoutly while going through very serious and very real health crises—but even there, I would suggest, that one of the ways they have done so is by stewarding their health as well as they could as they went through it.

The other disclaimer is just to acknowledge that it is possible to become so focused on the food we eat that we cease to be servants of God at all, because we’re giving our diets all the attention that should go to him. For this concern, see my previous post on the dangers of making a god out of our stomach.

But even given those two disclaimers, I think the point still stands, and probably deserves more consideration in the North American Christian Church than it gets.  I don't know if healthy eating needs to rate up there with reading your Bible, praying everyday, but certainly if we want to "grow, grow, grow" for the Kingdom's sake and for God's glory, we would do well to give some thought to how we're feeding the body, while the soul is busy doing all that growing.

Of Games and God (Part VI): Gaming in the Realm of the Hungry Ghosts

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There’s a poignant teaching from the Buddhist tradition about something called “The Hungry Ghost.” It’s a way of talking about a certain spiritual condition that people can sometimes find themselves in. A hungry ghost is a spirit with a very narrow throat and a huge distended belly, so that it’s always trying to stuff itself full, but can never get enough in. It’s an image of human emptiness and spiritual despair at it’s worst.

I’m a Christian pastor, of course, not a Buddhist monk, but still I’ve thought about the image of the hungry ghost a lot over the years, ever since I heard about it from a doctor named Gabor Maté. He worked for years among the heroin addicts and homeless people of Vancouver’s downtown east side, serving one of the most severely addicted populations in the country, and he uses the image of the "hungry ghost" to describe what it is like to be an addict—always eating, never full.

Maté’s book about his experiences working with drug addicts is called In the Realm of the Hungry Ghosts, and it’s the kind of read that will linger with you for years after you close the final page. Because Gabor describes in pretty stark terms what it is like to live among the “hungry ghosts” of Vancouver’s downtown east side; but then he goes on to argue that in a sense, we are all of us hungry ghosts, in one way or another. Addiction, he argues, is a way of trying to compensate for the lack of love, belonging, and nurture that we did not receive in the most formative years of our lives, which our parents, or our peer group, or our communities were unable to give (because who, really, has been loved the way they most needed to be?).

In Maté’s view, an addiction is simply a strategy that the brain has latched on to, to salve the psychological pain of the deepest wounds it has experienced. The problem with heroin, as a strategy for self-medication, is that its physiological effect is so powerful, flooding the system with opioids, short-circuiting the brain’s natural ability to produce endorphins, and making the user physically dependent on the chemical just to feel normal, let alone “good.” Some addictions are more destructive than others, in other words; but Maté argues that everyone, really, has some “ghostly hunger” or other in their lives—obsessive work habits, compulsive viewing of pornography, impulsive spending, over-indulgent eating—that we use to avoid or cope with inner pain. He talks sincerely about his own addiction to classical music—which might crack a smile or two—until he explains how his compulsive buying and listening to classical music did for him on a psychological level, the very same thing heroin did for his patients. (Here's a Ted Talk he gave a while ago on this subject; very much worth a listen.)

Turns out we are all hungry ghosts.

I’m thinking about Gabor Maté and the Realm of the Hungry Ghosts this morning because for the last few months we’ve been exploring video games from a theological perspective, trying to develop a “theology of video games,” as I’ve been calling it. And we’ve looked at time and worship, freedom and providence, original sin and problem solving, each in turn. I stand by my work, of course, and do indeed think that each of these themes are ways to think theologically about what’s going on whenever we sit down to game.

There is, however, a shadow side to gaming, one that is quite serious, I think, and one that any serious theology of gaming would be remiss if it didn’t address at some point: simply that gaming can be, and certainly for many people it is, a “ghostly hunger,” something that does for the gamer on a psychological level what heroin does for the drug addict.

To be clear, I am not trying to say anything beyond my particular expertise, about the existence “video game addiction” as a genuine and diagnosable mental disorder, on par with alcoholism, say, or other kinds of substance abuse. There is some controversy around the idea that “video game addiction” should be recognized in this way. The World Health Organization did include “gaming disorder” in the 11th revision of the International Statistical Classification of Diseases, but the American Psychiatric Association did not include it in the 2013 edition of the DSM-5. The APA held that there was insufficient evidence for its inclusion, though they considered it “worthy of further study.” From a strictly clinical perspective, then, there are none of the standardized definitions or diagnostics that we would need if we were to talk about compulsive gaming as a mental disorder.

That said, it should also be noted that “problematic gaming” is on the rise in our society. A 2016 study of Ontario teens, conducted by Dr. Robert Mann found that 13 percent of participating teens “reported symptoms of a video gaming problem.” This was up by 9 percent from 2007, and included such problematic symptoms as preoccupation with gaming, loss of control, withdrawal, and disregard for consequences. On an anecdotal level this rings true as I consider my last eleven years as a pastor, and I think about the number of times I’ve seen compulsive gaming steal the happiness from young married couples, or spoken to parents who had concerns about their teenager’s obsession with video games.

So: whether or not video game addiction qualifies technically as a clinical condition—and I’m speaking as a gamer myself when I say this—it certainly qualifies as an addiction in the spiritual sense, as an activity people use to avoid, self-medicate, or numb the spiritual fears and pains all of us carry in the deepest part of our selves. Certainly when I am most honest about my own experience of gaming, I would have to say this is true, that often I turn to gaming as a superficial way to salve my emotional distress or soothe my emotional turmoil. An hour or five roaming the mythic land of Skyrim, for instance, where all my problems have straight-forward solutions and every success is rewarded, as I move forward in a compelling story where I am always the hero, can help me to forget, by transcending it, whatever emotional unrest I may have brought with me when I first sat down to play.

This does not mean that gaming is intrinsically bad—anymore than classical music is, even though Gabor Maté used it to feed his ghostly hunger. It simply means that we must handle video games with real care and self-awareness, recognizing that we are all of us hungrier ghosts than we think, and unless we’ve found a real way to fill our spiritual emptiness, we’re just as likely to try feeding it with video games, as we are with booze or drugs or classical music.

For the Christian especially, this understanding of gaming as "ghostly hunger" is especially helpful, I think, because a Christian would say that in Christ we have found the one thing that can truly feed the ghost within. Didn’t the Lord himself say it, that anyone who was thirsty could come to him and he would feed them with the only wine that really satisfies (Isaiah 55:1-3)? And didn’t Jesus say that he himself was the bread of life that would fill our spiritual hunger so full we would never be hungry again (John 6:35)?

The answer to these questions, of course, is yes. And if we have truly satisfied our spiritual hunger in him, Christ then sets us free to approach gaming from any of the theological perspectives we’ve explored so far, appreciating it for what it can do, without depending on it to do that one thing that only He can do: to feed the hungry ghost.

The Last Dance of the Night, a short story

No one could have predicted, the year of Bethel Academy’s first and only high school dance, that it would have ended so spectacularly as it did; but then again, given the number of people so set against it, few could have predicted that it would have happened at all. The administration only entertained the notion of a school dance because that year the president of the PTA, the one who had actually proposed the idea, was the wife of a member of town council. Even that would not have been enough, in any ordinary year, to sway the decision, but the school had petitioned the city to install a traffic light on its intersection, to keep the kiss-and-ride for the elementary grades moving more smoothly, and they needed all the help they could get. So they had agreed to let the PTA add the item to the agenda of their next meeting, trusting holier heads to prevail.

The PTA was split, however, into number of distinct camps. There was the old guard, of course, who wouldn’t dream of sullying Bethel Academy’s long legacy of providing quality Christian education in a pure Christian environment, with something so unseemly as a school dance. And even within that camp the tents were not all pointing in the same direction. Some simply dismissed dancing as a frivolous distraction from more godly pursuits; others wondered what Seductions of Jezebel the school would be proposing next. Would we be opening a tattoo parlor? Teaching classes in yoga? Mrs. White, who kept the meeting’s minutes, was in fact the leader of this camp, so there’s no guarantee that anyone in the meeting actually said the words “abomination that causes desolation,” but certainly the term is recorded, to this day, in her account of the heated debate that was held that night.

There were other camps, however. The most vocal of these was a group of parents who were mostly new to the Bethel Academy PTA, and tended to be relatively young. The PTA President, Mrs. Heather Smythe, had been wanting to see Bethel Academy move in a more “progressive”—this was her word, though again, the official minutes of the meeting read “worldly”—direction for many years. It would make the school more attractive to prospective students, she argued; it would build community and camaraderie among the student body; it would be plain-old fun. No one questioned her sincerity, though one or two of the moms did mention it between themselves, after the meeting, that recently the pastor at Heather’s church had censured her for enrolling her daughter in dance class—and jazz dance, of all things—and they wondered—just wondered, is all—if she wasn’t pushing this crazy dance idea to prove a point.

Whatever merit there may have been to this speculation, this year Mrs. Smythe had enough support to win the day. One mom who had enrolled her daughter Emily in Bethel after Emily had been expelled from public school stood and asked if someone could please explain to her where was the harm in boys and girls of a certain age dancing together? A few knowing glances flitted about the room when she added, innocently enough, that she had actually fallen in love with her first husband at a high school dance, though she laughed and added that she had met her second while chaperoning a dance when Emily’s older sister was in high school. These unfortunate admissions notwithstanding, Mrs Smythe felt that her point was well taken.

John Windsor was the only teacher on the PTA who actually supported the idea, but the support he offered was warm to the point of being effusive, and carried much weight with those who had not yet made up their minds. It was about time, he declaimed, that Bethel stepped into the new millennium; and the kids these days, he explained, can do worse in a half-hour alone in their rooms with their cell-phones than they could ever do at a high school dance; and anyways can anyone show him, he exclaimed, where it says in the Bible thou shalt not dance? Mrs. White did note down that Mr. Windsor taught English Literature (one of the more liberal disciplines) but still she recorded his comments in the minutes as faithfully as she could.

In the end the dance was approved, by a vote of seven to six.

For our part, the student body of Bethel Academy was not quite so factious as our parents, but there were still very definite, and, indeed, polarizing opinions about the coming event. Adam Clarke, the president of the Student Council, also happened to be the son of Heather Smythe’s pastor, so publicly he toed his father’s line, that dance was simply a gateway sin into much more sensual debaucheries. Emily, whose mom met her father at her older sister’s prom, kept dropping suggestive inuendoes about the kind of things that might happen behind the bleachers or in the far corner gym’s mezzanine once the lights went down.

These only represented the far ends of the spectrum, however, and most of us landed somewhere in between these two extremes. Alison Smythe was also on the Student Council, and because it was her mother who had hatched this plan, she was a natural pick to serve on the planning committee. As such, she scowled whenever Emily regaled us with stories about finding herself alone with some boy or other, at the last dance she went to at her last school.

Alison insisted that this was not going to be like that, that it would be a classy affair, and whatever else, wholesome. She festooned the hallways of Bethel Academy with all kinds of hand-made posters promoting the dance. The planning committee had chosen the theme “Bethel Beach Ball.” They went with this primarily because Mr Windsor was on the committee, and he couldn’t resist the alliterative pun, but also because the beach theme generated no end of ideas for décor. Alison was totally chagrined when, a few days later, someone had surreptitiously modified all her posters so that they read “Bethel Beach Bikini Ball!” Her chagrin grew to horror when, later that day, the principal issued a stern announcement over the intercom reminding everyone of Bethel’s long-standing dress code, and warning them that absolutely no swimwear would be permitted at the upcoming Bethel dance. The planning committee worked late into the afternoon to replace the vandalized signs.

The next morning the signs had been modified again, however. This time they read “Bethel Babylon Beach Ball?”

Around this time someone started up an Instagram group chat, where the student body discussed the coming dance in far less reserved terms, and, shall we say, less filtered, than they ever did with their parents and teachers. Here Emily was much more graphic in describing the things that she was looking forward to at the dance. In general, the students took far more interest in discussing this than they did when she brought it up in public. One or two of the boys, in fact, messaged her to find out more. Here, too, the student body discovered Adam’s real feelings about dancing. He was only saying all that stuff about a gateway sin, he explained, because he had to. If his dad found out otherwise there would be hell to pay, though he’d be damned if he was gonna miss out on the first high school dance ever to happen at Bethel. He even used the words hell and damn, though outside of Instagram he only ever spoke like that when he was discussing doctrine. Other students weighed in: some were nervously looking forward to it, others were going to boycott, others still were wondering what all the fuss was about.

The only two students who said nothing—and since it was a private school, the student body was small enough that their silence on the matter might have been noticed, although it was not—were Star and Autumn Cardinal. They were just starting their first year at Bethel, the Cardinal family having moved to the city that summer, from a place up north in the country. Mr. and Mrs. Cardinal had been prominent members of their church community back home, and just wanted their girls to get a good Christian education, so they enrolled them in Bethel, the only faith-based school in the neighbourhood.

Looking back, no one thinks that they had been intentionally excluded from the Instagram group chat. It’s just that they seldom said much of anything, so it was easy to over-look them. They kept to themselves and tended only to speak when spoken too; and even then they spoke softly and in clipped syllables. No one meant to avoid them, either; at least if asked, no one would have said so. It’s just that no one wanted to make anyone uncomfortable asking awkward questions about the new kids and where they were from. As a result, whatever Autumn and Star thought about all the furor of high school politicking and adolescent theologizing that was raging around the school’s preparation for the Big Bethel Beach Ball, no one could say.

Not that anyone much cared, really; there was enough politicking and theologizing going on to keep us all busy for days. Rumors started on Instagram that Emily had already snuck a bottle from her step-dad’s liquor cabinet and was planning to bring it to the dance. Alison started a disastrously ill-advised poll about what kind of music ought to be played. It might have been better if she had done this in person, but as it was, her poll exploded into a veritable minefield of controversy. Some insisted that only contemporary Christian music should be played. Others still said that the last thing Contemporary Christian Music should be used for was a high school dance. Many requested the latest tunes by Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran. One or two parents somehow got a hold of the suggested playlist and threatened not to let their kids attend if “trash like that” was going to be played. Someone even sent Mrs. White a YouTube link to the video for Ariana Grande’s “7 Rings.” Adam Clarke took the blame for this, but he denied it on Instagram in the saltiest language he knew, as a pastor’s son. At any rate, Mrs. White wrote a stern letter, as secretary of the PTA, to the principal of Bethel, and the outcome was that she was given executive veto power over the music selection.

The Instagram group chat was lit up for days over this development, and everyone wondered what kind of Gospel Jamboree their first dance was going to devolve into, now that Mrs. White was the head DJ.

There comes a moment in the unfolding of any epoch marking-moment, however, when the best-laid plans of everyone involved cease to matter much, because some inexorable force, greater than the sum of all these individual parts, seems to have come into being, driving events forward to an outcome no one individually would have chosen. Looking back, that’s what seemed to happen the night of the first ever Bethel Academy’s Big Beach Ball.

Despite the constant threats to boycott the party, the entire student body did attend in the end, and for the most part, all were dressed appropriately. The closest anyone came to wearing a bikini was Alison Smythe, who wore a strapless summer dress. It is true that Adam Clarke wore shorts, but he also wore a shirt and a tie. When the final playlist had been thoroughly vetted by Mrs. White, there was far more Gaither music in the rotation than anyone—even the chaperones—could bear, but as a concession she had permitted a handful of ABBA songs, though Dancing Queen was not among them.

The rumors about Emily turned out to be mostly true. She had snuck a bottle in with her, though when she revealed it to a group of us, up on the mezzanine of the gym and beyond where the chaperones could see us, it turned out only to be a bottle of her step-dad’s homemade wine. Despite our disappointment, though, still one or two did stay up on the mezzanine to drink it, and someone even produced from somewhere a contraband package of cigarettes, though no one had ever smoked before.

This was not the biggest surprise of the night, however.

To this day, everyone agrees that this honor goes to the moment when Autumn and Star arrived at the Bethel Beach Ball. No one knew for sure if they were even coming, though we’d all made our assumptions. What none of us expected was that when they did arrive they would come dressed so stunningly in the traditional dance regalia of their Cree heritage.

Few even knew that Star and Autumn were, in fact, Cree. No one had bothered to ask.

There was no need to ask, though, when they walked through the doors of the Bethel Academy Big Beach Ball, dressed in two shimmering jingle dresses, brilliantly colored and beautifully crafted, tasseled and beaded and plumed. The music of “Because He Lives” that just happened to be playing over the PA system when they arrived kept playing, of course, but other than that a kind of hush fell momentarily over us all. They stood there, these two unassuming girls whom we had been passing in the halls unnoticed for months now, but here looking so striking and noble and strong; it’s not that we didn’t want to welcome them. It’s just: no one knew what to say.

It was Mr. Windsor who finally broke the tension of that moment, though for all his being an English teacher he was unusually clumsy with his words. “Autumn! Star!” he said. “You two look—well—it’s fantastic—I’m so glad you—those gowns—are they?—dresses—they’re fabulous!”

“It’s our dance regalia,” Autumn explained. “For when we go to Pow Wows back home. We’re not supposed to wear them out like this. Not to something like this. But dance—” She looked hesitantly at her sister, but something larger than any of us was at work in that moment, so she pushed past whatever had given her pause—“Dance is very big deal for us—and we thought—maybe—”

“We hoped it would be ok?” said Star.

“Of course! Of course it’s okay!” said Mr. Windsor. “You two look wonderful.” He made a wide sweep with his arm, as if to welcome them onto the dance floor.

There was no need for anyone to make space for them, though. There were very few students doing any actual dancing that night. This is might have been because so little of the music that had passed Mrs. White’s exacting scrutiny was even danceable, but more likely it was due to the fact that so few of us actually had any idea how to really dance. Even Alison Smythe, despite all the hubbub it had caused in her church when she started taking jazz dance, was all toes when it came to doing anything graceful out there on a bona fide high school dance floor.

One or two of us made a timid attempt at pairing off when a slow dance came along, but it was more than awkward, trying to sway together in time to “Something About that Name,” of all tunes. A couple of Taylor Swift songs did make the final cut (mostly because Mrs. White had been made to see the wisdom of “shaking off” the world’s “hate”), but even when these came up in the rotation, no one really knew how, in fact, to shake anything. Whatever the quality of the Christian education we’d received at Bethel Academy, it had not taught us much at all about what to do with our bodies. The eternal destiny of our disembodied souls—we all knew how to guarantee that—but to move at peace with the limbs and lungs the good Lord had given us—not even Mr. Windsor’s poetry class could give us that.

For all our clumsiness with each other, however, Autumn and Star seemed to have no doubt what was needed that night. Regardless the tune warbling from the PA speakers in any given moment—Abba, Gaithers, Jesus Culture or Hillsong United (though only a few of their songs passed the Mrs. White smell test)—the Cardinal sisters danced their hearts out, at the centre of the gym, stomping and leaping and soaring and spinning as though they’d done it all their lives (for, in fact, they had), and all the while jingling with the glorious noise of a hundred scintillating bells.

If most of us gave up dancing and stood simply to watch, it was really only in awe. Not even Adam Clarke, who was the preacher’s son and had inherited his father’s theological acumen, could find anything to say. It was like a world was suddenly opening up before us, one that we had no right to enter but were hospitably welcomed into, where the body and the spirit both are celebrated as gifts of the creator, and together they can become instruments of healed healing. No one knew—except perhaps Mr. Windsor, but only theoretically—and I myself have only learned it since, through many hard trials and false starts—that this truth had been there in our faith all along, that the body and the spirit both are indeed gifts of the creator (otherwise why would he have taken on flesh?) and only together can either be instruments of healing. But none of us could have said so that night, at seventeen. The best we could do was to stand there silently and watch the dance, deeply aware that we were standing on the threshold of a great grace, and as clumsy in our awe as we would have been, had we tried to join the dance.

The moment was not to last though. We probably should have known it. Such moments seldom do. Because towards the end of the night, as the last dance approached, Autumn and Star became suddenly aware that they were at the centre of the room and intently being watched. There was a moment of silence as the final song of the night was being cued, and the silence was in fact palpable, because no one was saying anything, and only watching.

Autumn was a bit short of breath, but Star found the words. “This dance,” she said, “is Healing Dance. We used to dance it at Pow Wow.”

It wasn’t clear at that moment if she had given some cue to the person at the sound system or if it was simply a coincidence, but whatever the case, suddenly the final song of the night started. And if Mrs. White had personally chosen the tune, it couldn’t have been better suited, because at that moment the Hallelujah Chorus of Handel’s Messiah blared out over the gymnasium. And the last dance began.

Autumn and Star started soaring once more, inaccessible to all of us and awe inspiring to most, and then the very next moment, completely forgotten by everyone.

Because right at the spot in the song where the choir was belting it out, how the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth, at that very moment two teens who had made themselves ill on Emily’s step-dad’s homemade wine slipped coming down the stairs of the mezzanine and got sick again trying to right themselves, sending up a squeal of disgust from those closest to the mess. At the same time, a garbage can up on the mezzanine that had been smouldering unnoticed for hours suddenly burst into flames--we found out later that Emily and her compatriots had stuffed their cigarettes into it in a panic when one of the chaperones happened by and almost caught them smoking—and the brilliant orange flame leaped up suddenly like the wings of a hundred burning seraphim.

That’s how it seemed in the ensuing chaos, at least, because the fire set off the alarm. It was an old-fashioned hammer and bell fire alarm and started blaring deafeningly over the gym. No one thinks the DJ at the PA system intentionally turned up the music to be heard over all that blare. More likely he was at the controls when the alarm sounded, and as he leaped into action he probably just bumped the volume slider up as loud as it would go, accidentally. Regardless the reason, though, suddenly the sound of a thousand human voices declaring the truth that He Shall Reign Forever and Ever! shouted out thunderously over the alarm.

And at that very moment came the flood. Because the alarm activated the school’s archaic sprinkler system, which sprang to life, raining down a shower of water over the whole assembly. Now: the inquiry that the board of directors conducted in the follow up to the dance concluded that the administration had been negligently lax in keeping up with regular inspections of the fire-sprinkler-system, but for all of us there that night, this sort of went without saying. Because right at the crescendo of the song, as the music was swelling to that final glorious Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hall-e-lu-jah!, and the whole student body was scurrying about in glee and terror and utter pandemonium, suddenly, six or seven of the sprinkler heads burst off their fittings, beneath the pressure of the water, and the shower became downpour.

In a matter of seconds the gym floor was pooling everywhere with water, and every student in the place was looking for all the world as though they ought to have worn swimwear to the dance, they were so sopping wet and bedraggled. Except for, miraculously—and I was there, so I can confirm this was the case, though the commotion that night, in that moment, was so great that no one can be quite sure of anything, but regardless, to my dying day I will swear this was true—there was a spot in the center of the gym, where the sprinklers inexplicably had not started up; and even when the other sprinkler heads had burst, this one spot in the centre of the gym stayed mysteriously, miraculously dry,

And there, in that spot, in the centre of the room, perfectly dry and oblivious, it seemed, to the chaos around them, Autumn and Star Cardinal finished their healing dance, entirely removed from this world of rain and fire and thunder and flood—or perhaps more a part of it than anyone there could ever know.

A Christian Conversation about Steven Universe (Part II): All the Fuss about Fusion

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One of the most intense debates I ever had my kids when I first started watching Steven Universe with them, was whether or not fusion was a metaphor for sexual intercourse.

I suppose a statement like that needs some careful unpacking, so let me open the suitcase. As I mentioned in my last post in this series, Steven Universe is a cartoon that aired from 2013 – 2019 on the Cartoon Network, and one of my kids’ favorite shows. It follows the adventures of a half-gem/half-human teenager named Steven Universe, as he defends planet Earth from invasion by the Gems of Homeworld. The Gems are an alien species of sentient gemstones, hellbent on colonizing the galaxy. These aliens themselves have no human form, but are able to project physical, anthropomorphic bodies from their gems (their gemstones then become “fixtures” on their projected bodies, allowing the gem itself to move about with the body it is projecting). Steven is aided in his mission by a band of rebel Crystal Gems, who themselves have revolted against the Gems of Homeworld to become the self-appointed guardians of planet Earth.

So far this simply seems like the stuff of a good, old-fashioned Sci-Fi adventure. Original, to be sure, but nothing especially controversial.

Enter the concept of fusion.

Because at some point in Season 1 of Steven Universe, the show revealed that most gems have the ability to “fuse” with another gem, so as to create a more powerful new gem, one that is a combination of the character, qualities, and powers of them both. In order to initiate fusion, two consenting gems (that is to say, the “physical forms” of two consenting gems), engage in an elaborate and, truth be told, somewhat sensuous dance, at the end of which their two bodies come together and merge, forming a new body in a blinding flash of light.

The first time I saw a scene in Steven Universe depicting the fusion of two gems, it seemed so obviously a cipher for intercourse that I almost blushed. I was, admittedly, watching it with my two middle-school-aged daughters at the time, and, well, I’ll let you be the judge:



I have not delved very far into the Steven Universe universe online, but my understanding is that there is a bit of disagreement in the fandom over whether or not fusion really is meant to be a metaphor for sex. Certainly my family had our own debate after the show. To be honest, my kids were somewhat chagrined and more than a little offended to hear my wife and I suggest that fusion could be anything other than the innocent merger of two superheroes’ super powers for the sake of creating an even greater super hero.

Here are the arguments they advanced against our reading that fusion was an intentional, if subtle metaphor for intercourse. A) The gems are asexual aliens. Yes, their physical forms are always female, but that’s part of the aesthetic; these bodies are merely projections of each gem’s gemstone, and the gems themselves are gender neutral. B) The gems are able to fuse with each other in all sorts of combinations (even three gems at a time), on and off pretty much at will. If fusion were really a metaphor for sex, the gems would be grossly promiscuous. C) Dad, this is a kids show!

Over the course of five seasons, however, the evidence seems to mount, that the show is using fusion as a narrative device for exploring and discussing sexual relationships. A) Steven fuses with his best friend Connie (creating a hybrid human named “Stevonnie”), proving that under certain conditions, humans are able to fuse, too. B) It’s revealed that Garnet, one of the main characters in the story, is really a fusion of two gems, Ruby and Sapphire, who fell in love with each other back on Homeworld and were sent into exile for engaging in fusion with gems of a different variety (normally, rubies can only fuse with other rubies, and so on). C) Later on in the series, Ruby and Sapphire get married, fusing into Garnet at the end of the ceremony. D) When Pearl is threatened by Greg (Steven’s human father), because Rose Quartz is falling in love with him, she fuses with Rose to form “Rainbow Quartz,” as a way of making him jealous. E) And then, of course, there’s the sensual nature of the fusion scenes themselves.



In the eyes of a heterosexual middle-aged male, it’s hard to see how fusion couldn’t be about sex, whatever else it is about.

But this brings me, at last, to the real point of this post. As I mentioned previously, one of the reasons I’m spending time exploring an obscure kid’s show like this—besides the fact that my own kids were such fans—is that I think it allows us to look at LGBTQ issues with a fresh set of eyes, from a perspective that is one step removed from the issues themselves, and so, hopefully, more objective.

When I look at fusion from this perspective, one of the things it helps me to understand—and this is so crucial for understanding same-sex relationships in the church—is that sex isn’t just about sex.

What I mean is that our sexuality is this integrated part of ourselves that touches on, and is touched by, all other aspects of our lives. Our emotional well-being, our financial stability, our status in community, our prospects for the future, our physical health, our spiritual maturation, and more, all impact, and are impacted by our sexuality. If I am married, for instance, I have more financial stability and career options than I do if I am not. If I have a consistent, faithful, sexual partner in my life, I am more likely to be physically and emotionally healthy. Shoot: even my life expectancy increases if I’m in a committed, monogamous sexual relationship. The benefits are more pronounced if I am married and part of a church, where I have all kinds of ministries devoted to me—from marriage enrichment seminars and well-run nurseries—and all kinds of preaching series tailored to me—from how to have a happy marriage to how to enjoy God’s plan for sex.

If fusion really is about sex, then the truth is that it’s not only, or even especially about sex; because sex itself is not only about sex. Sex is a thread woven into the big woolen sweater of human life, and you can’t start pulling on it without all the others bunching up and coming with.

To be clear, I’m not saying that sexual activity is itself necessary for a person to be healthy, happy, well-adjusted, and so on. Far from it (you can read my series on celibacy, if you want, to get a sense just how far I am from saying that). Chastity and celibacy, properly understood, can both be vibrant expressions of human sexuality, in their own right.

So I’m not saying “you have to have sex to be happy.”

What I am saying is that often discussions of LGBTQ issues in traditional Christian circles focus almost exclusively on the physical “sex acts” in question, as though a gay relationship is only about sex; only a means to a strictly sexual end. Statements like “It’s okay to be gay, just don’t act on it,” tend to communicate this. So do statements like “love the sinner hate the sin.”

To do better, we must recognize that people are integrated wholes, and as such our sexual experience is connected to all the other things that make us who we are. We can’t talk about the one without touching on the others, and if we want to talk about the one well, we will have to address the others also. To have the theological conversation about same-sex sexuality honestly, we will have to acknowledge first that same-sex relationships are about far more than just sex, just like gay people are far more than just a “sexual orientation.” More than merely acknowledge it, we will have to compassionately and humbly admit the ways in which our posture towards same-sex sexuality, whatever that posture may be, may be impacting, influencing, or causing harm to these other areas of the LGBTQ person’s life.

Strange as it may sound, as someone who has been working at a doctoral level on this stuff for more than five years, it was the concept of fusion, in the kid’s show Steven Universe, that made me wrestle with this fact most profoundly. Seeing Garnet and Amethyst fuse on Steven Universe actually helped me notice the prejudices, the presuppositions, and the assumptions that I had when it came to same-sex sexuality. In an ironic twist of logic, I looked at fusion, and because it was clearly about relationships, togetherness, mutual love, care, support, friendship, and even sensuality, it must therefore be about sex; and then I turned around and assumed that, if it’s about sex, than it can’t be about any of those other things. It’s only because it was a kid’s show that I realized how unfair I was being.

But thank God I came to see.

It may not be a kid’s show that does it for you, but what ever it is, I hope you, too, have opportunities to come to understand how much more same-sex relationships are about, than simply some particular sexual acts. And may you find the conversations you are having with the LGBTQ people in your life becoming deeper, richer, and more compassionate, as a consequence.

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Eating, praying, Loving (Part V): The Sixth Deadly Sin

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When my daughters were children we enrolled them in an art course run by a retired art teacher in our community. He taught from his home, and it was a bit of a drive to get there, so usually I would take them both for the class and then wait in the make-shift waiting room he had set up in the rec room, adjacent to his studio, and read.

Well: sometimes I’d read. Other times I’d just sit and mindlessly watch the television set he had there. This was always on, and it was always tuned to the same channel: The Food Network.

Our family has never really had TV in the house, so I never knew till then, that there was such a thing as a television network devoted entirely, non-stop, 24/7, to food. It was always Diners, Drive-ins and Dives playing when I got there, and I’d get part way through Chopped before it was time to go. This was pretty much the only time I watched TV all week back in those days, so I got to say, far more Food Networking than reading got done while I was waiting for art class to end.

I’m thinking about The Food Network today, however, because we’ve been working our way through a “Biblical spirituality of food,” for the last month or so at terra incognita, and last week I posted some effusive thoughts about the pleasure of food, and what it tells us about God, the fact that he made the world so chock full of good things to eat. The shadow side of that coin, however, is that too much of a good thing—especially when it comes to food—can be sin. At least, the Christian Church has always thought so, and has traditionally listed the sin of gluttony, that is, an over-indulgence in food, as one of the seven deadlies. In the modern world, a world where you could, if you wanted to, spend 24 hours a day, seven days a week, watching television programs devoted (and I mean that in the theological sense) devoted exclusively to eating, the concept of gluttony seems somewhat antiquated. Even the term—gluttony—sounds quaint; the idea that giving full reign to one’s appetite might actually immoral sounds outright puritanical.

In fairness, though, I should make it clear that the Bible itself says very little about gluttony, per se. The closest Hebrew approximation we have for the English word gluttony is zâlal which has the sense of  eating that is “wasteful” and “rowdy.” The word shows up especially in the Book of Proverbs, where it warns that the glutton will come to poverty in the end (Prov 23:20, 21, 28:7). In the New Testament there’s even less to go on. The Greek word phagos (an over-eater) is about the same as the English word “glutton,” but the only time it appears is when the Pharisees use it to insult Jesus, calling him a “drunkard” and a “glutton.” So that’s hardly firm data against gluttony. Certainly there’s no direct commandment that says, “thou shalt not be a glutton,” like we have in the case of murder, theft, and adultery.

I haven’t studied this out, mind you, but my hunch is that the Christian teaching that gluttony is a sin comes less from concrete biblical interpretation, and more from Aristotelian ethics. Aristotle was the Greek Philosopher (ca. 300 BC) who taught that any action, character trait, or personal quality could be called a virtue only if it occupied the golden mean between the two extremes of having too much of it, or too little. Courage, for example, was a virtue because it expressed the golden mean between foolhardiness (too much courage), and cowardice (not enough courage). Generosity was the golden mean between stinginess and profligacy. In Aristotelian ethics, then, we might say that gluttony expresses an extreme at the opposite end of neurotic abstinence, for which the golden mean is temperance.

Certainly Aristotle has had a strong influence on the development of Christian ethics over the years (Thomas Aquinas (ca. 1274 AD) was a Catholic Theologian whose whole theological programme was an attempt to integrate Christian Theology and Aristotelian Philosophy), but there is probably a better place to turn to find a basis for our understanding of gluttony as sin.

In Philippians 3:19, Paul refers to some false teachers in the early church who were “living as enemies of the cross,” and he makes an interesting claim about them. “Their god,” he says, “is their stomach; their glory is in their shame. Their minds are set on earthly things.” Earlier in the chapter Paul was discussing a group of Jewish Christians who were insisting that the Gentile believers needed to be circumcised to be saved. Given this, it’s quite possible that here, when Paul mentions some people who have made “their stomachs” into “their god,” he’s referring to the same group of Judaizers, who would also have insisted that the Gentiles needed to follow the kosher food laws of the Jewish Torah. As such, they were making their “stomachs” their “god” by insisting that what you ate could save you.

This verse is probably not about gluttony specifically, then, or at least, it’s not only about gluttony. But in its application for Christians today, Philippians 3:19 forces us to wrestle with the possibility that we may have let food take the place that God rightly ought to occupy in our lives, turning to it for the sense of identity, the sense of belonging, the assurance that things are going to work out okay, and/or the spiritual comfort that really only God can give.

Does anyone really do this? (you may be tempted to ask). Well: what is a “foodie” except someone who has allowed their appreciation for “gastronomical esoteria” to define themselves? What are we doing when we binge-eat after a break-up? What is happening when we stress-eat to get through a hard season at work? What’s really behind that latest health-food fad that’s guaranteed to give you the looks, the libido, or the longevity you always dreamed of? What is the food network really celebrating, when it broadcasts food-focused programming for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week?

It turns out it’s far easier than we might have guessed to make a god of our bellies, counting on food to do for us what God alone can do. As such, it’s also far easier to fall into the sin of gluttony than we might have thought, too. Because the sin of gluttony has less to do with what you’re eating, or how much; it has everything to do with why you’re eating it. To be sure, usually one of the signs that food has replaced God for you, is if you are uncontrollably overindulgent when it comes to eating. But I’m trying to flesh out this definition of gluttony more broadly, because it’s also true that you can have your eating obsessively controlled and also be sinning the sin of gluttony. The health-food guru who tracks every calorie with hawk-like precision, so that they can remain in complete control of their well-being, may be just as gluttonous (on this definition) as the one who eats himself into a food-coma at every meal.

The alternative to gluttony, then, is not obsessively under-eating. This is just making a god of our stomachs in the other direction. The alternative is simply (more simply said than done sometimes) to let God be God in your life. If we will give him his rightful place, he will put our stomachs, our appetites, and our eating into its proper place, too. This will not mean a wholesale rejection of the delight the food can give us (see my previous posts on that), nor a denial of the importance of careful, healthy eating (see upcoming posts on this). But it will mean tasting and seeing how good the Lord himself is, and in that knowledge discovering that food is nothing more and nothing less than what it was always supposed to be: a healthy, wholesome, pleasant gift from him.

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Of Games and God (Part V): Gaming with the End in Mind

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Back in the year 2000, my brother loaned me his unused Nintendo 64 game console, and a copy of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. I was twenty-six at the time, and this was the first video game I had played since the old days of the original Super Mario Bros. He assured me, when he passed it on, that video games had come a long way since I had seen them last, and that I would absolutely love the Ocarina of Time.

My brother knew me well, and his prediction proved prescient. To this day Ocarina of Time still stands in my mind as one of the greatest fantasy adventures of all time (though, admittedly, I have not yet played Breath of the Wild, which, by all reports, blows even Ocarina out of the water for sheer epic awesomeness).

I logged untold hours exploring the richly detailed, beautifully 3-D world of Hyrule, enjoying every nook and cranny. Enjoying it all, that is, until I found the nook and/or cranny that housed the infamous Water Temple of Hyrule. If you’ve never heard of the Water Temple before, you can bone up on the details at the “Water Temple (Ocarina of Time)” Wikipedia page. The fact that this one level in the game has it's own dedicated Wikipedia page perhaps says it all. The Water Temple is considered, by various gaming critics, to be the all-time best, or the all-time hardest (or sometimes both at once) level in the greatest video game ever.

I’ll let the aficionados duke it out over that grandiose claim. In the meantime, I want to focus down just on the factor that has made completing the Water Temple such a fabled rite of passage in gaming lore. I’m talking here about its difficulty level. Anyone who has attempted the Water Temple unaided would agree, I hope, that even if you can’t rate it the best level of all, you'd concede that it is one of the hardest puzzles ever to grace the screen of a Nintendo adventure.

Certainly when I came at it for the first time, it had me stumped for the better part of a month. Granted I had recently become a young father and a new high school teacher at the same time in those days, so I wasn’t playing Zelda non-stop over the course of that month; but even so, I repeatedly flung down the control in despair of ever figuring it out. Keep in mind that this was in the days before the solution to every video game known to man could be found online, with a nice, neat tutorial video on Youtube to walk you through it. Back in my day you slogged your way through, trail-and-error, mis-step by mis-step, with nothing but your wits and a bit of luck to guide you. Kids these days have no clue how easy they have it.

But I digress. The point of all of this is that, however tough the going got with the Water Temple, I never “got going.” That is to say, I stuck it out. I kept coming back at it. Even when my frustration with the puzzle was visceral and my reaction to yet one more failed attempt was physical, still I kept on, hoping against hope to crack the nut at last. As one of the best levels in one of the best video games ever, the Water Temple awoke in me what all the best video games awake in their players, a deep down desire to solve an intractable problem.

In his book Homo Problematis Solvendis – Problem-Solving Man: A History of Human Creativity, David Cropley traces the history of modern human innovation through a close examination of the solutions to basic human problems that our species have developed over time. He argues that a defining characteristic of modern human beings is our fundamental ability to solve problems. Besides opposable thumbs, what sets us apart from the rest of the creatures on God’s green earth is this innate desire we seem to have to solve a problem. Other creatures problem-solve too, I’m sure. I’ve seen our family dog do it trying to get a pound of cooked bacon left lying out to cool on the counter. But unlike any other animal, the human creature seems to go looking for the problem, and seems to delight in solving it for its own sake.

Video games tap in to this desire, I think. It’s part of their appeal. But they also reveal something underlying that desire. Because back in my Ocarina of Time days, you could have laid a big exercise book full of random math problems in front of me, and I would not have tackled them with anywhere near the same verve and dedication as I did the Water Temple. There was something unique about that puzzle in particular that drove me relentlessly to tackle it.

I want to suggest that the “something unique” that makes video games so irresistible is the teleological nature of the problem solving they present us with. Unlike the math exercises in the illustration above, which are all random, self-contained puzzles that don’t seem to have any real purpose, the puzzles we encounter in the best video games are problems with an end in mind. That is to say, the puzzles themselves serve the purpose of advancing the story, solving the quest, defeating the villain, saving the world.

In fancy theological terms, we would say that when something is moving towards a very clear, and especially a very meaningful “end”—when things happen for a purpose and that purpose moves things towards an ultimate resolution—we would say that it’s “teleological.” In Greek, telos means end or purpose; and something is teleological when it begins with an end in mind.

In Christian creation theology, for instance, the real question is not “did the world evolve or was it created in 144 hours.” The real question is: is the universe teleological, or not? Was it created for a purpose, or was it a meaningless accident?

In Christian theodicy (the theological explanation for suffering), the problem of evil is not resolved by mere logical arguments, but by teleological arguments. Roughly speaking, a Christian theodicy would say that there is a higher purpose in our suffering that allows us to transcend it as we go through it.

And in Christian Video Game Theology (a new field I’m developing), the importance of video games is that they reveal—not just that we like solving problems—but that we want the problems we solve to be teleological. That is to say: we have this deep-down desire to tackle problems especially that move us towards an ultimate end as we solve them.

I’m drawing this connection because all Water Temples aside, the world is brimming these days with problems to be solved. Thirty seconds on my Facebook feed would probably be enough to convince you of that: the planet’s getting warmer, time-honored political structures are devolving into junior high shenanigans, gross injustices against people of color are being brought to light, pandemics are raging, locusts are swarming, and people are hurting. It’s easy, and perhaps tempting, to approach all these problems like so many math sums in an exercise book, a bunch of disconnected and especially non-telelogical difficulties that don’t have any meaning beyond simply the discomfort and consternation they cause us.

Of course, if I’m on to anything in my analysis of Zelda’s Ocarina of Time, approaching the really big problems of this world atelelogically won’t give us the resolve or the resources we need really to solve them well, not when the going gets really tough we won’t.

A Christian, by contrast, should tackle the big problems of our world something like how a dedicated gamer would tackle the Water Temple: by trusting that each problem we face feeds into a bigger, single challenge—the problem of sin in the world—and that there is an underlying purpose for us in tackling this this problem faithfully, a real reason to do it well.

I say this because, from a Christian point of view, we are all moving to an ultimate end. According to the Apostle Paul’s Gospel, we will all stand before the judgment seat of Christ on the last day, to receive our due “for the things done in the body, whether good or bad” (2 Corinthians 5:10). And on that day, he says elsewhere, we will all give our account (Romans 14:12). Surely what we did or didn’t do to be a healing presence in the creation, how we did or didn’t offer a cold drink of water to the parched and starving, how we strove to be peacemakers in a warring world, how we lived as ambassadors of Christ's reconciliation—surely these “good or bad things” will be included in that reckoning on that day.

What if I tackled the problem of evil in the world with the same tenacity and determination I poured into trying to figure out how to get the water levels in the Water Temple raised and lowered just so, so that I could advance to the Room of Illusion and defeat Dark Link, my alter ego in the game? There would probably be a lot less hurt in the world if I did, and more likely than not, when the ultimate quest of life was finally complete, I would have the reward of hearing the Divine Designer of the Game say to me, as he will say to all of us who tackle sin with the end in mind: “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

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