Dear Friends,
September was a big month for Megan and me for several reasons, not the least of which was we finally got the house (at least the first floor) set up so as to be able to welcome guests. We’re grateful to feel more “at home” in our home, affectionately called “The Fungalow,” so if you happen to be in the neighborhood (1605 Dial Court), don’t be a stranger.
On September 9, 11 of our 30 formal members of Exodus Church petitioned and was granted permission by the Presbytery of Northern Illinois in our denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America, to move from being a “mission” church with “borrowed elders” from other PCA churches to “particularize” and install our own local eldership. This is a significant step in the life of a local church. In response to the Presbytery’s affirmation, our congregation officially called planting pastor Stephen Lawrence to serve as Exodus’ pastor going forward, and we have three qualified men soon to be examined and voted on to become elders.
The Presbytery has set our official organization service for Exodus to be installed as a member church for Sunday evening, November 19, at 6 p.m. President Emeritus of Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis, Dr. Bryan Chapell, will be our guest preacher. If you are in or around Springfield that night, we’d love to have you celebrate with us at 2450 Taylor Ave, Springfield, 62703. We plan to provide refreshments for all members, guests, and friends.
On Thursday evenings, I teach a weekly symposium on Christian ethics called, The Good Country. The preparation has been demanding, but the discussions have been rich.
Here’s the list of symposium topics covered/still to cover:
September
7: The Exceptionalism of the Old Square World
14: The Cultural Mandate and Our Covenant God
28: Ecology and the Earth
October
5: Economics and the Poor
12: The Land
19: Politics and the Nations
26: Justice and Righteousness
November
2: Law and the Legal System
9: Culture and Family
16: The Way of the Individual
Finally, though word has been out in Bozeman for some time, we’re excited to announce that our oldest, Maddie, and her husband, Bruce, are expecting their first child in February. We’re thrilled for them and look forward to becoming grandparents to this new little one, who, by God’s grace, seems to be doing well in the womb by all measures thus far.
This weeknd, Megan and I are taking advantage of Springfield Christian School’s fall break to travel to Roanoke to see Chloe and her husband, Brian. The following weekend, Megan and all the girls will be in Bozeman for a baby shower for Maddie and a wedding shower for Katie, who will marry Josiah on January 1st in Colorado Springs. (I think there is also a week-late birthday party planned for Millie, who turns 20 today—happy birthday, Millie!—but I can neither confirm nor deny here since she is a Second Drafts reader.)
God is (always) at work, and we are grateful that he is. Thank you for your prayers on our behalf, and thanks as always for reading Second Drafts. I hope you enjoy this month’s edition.
With gratitude,
Craig (for Megan)
The Spectacle of Spectacle (Part One)
“There is not a more repulsive spectacle than an old man who will not forsake the world, which has already forsaken him.” T.S. Eliot
Combining my long-time appreciation for the band, U2, with the September debut of the entertainment world’s latest and largest technological marvel, Sphere, I had planned to wax semi-eloquent about the band and the venue in this month’s newsletter. Journalist Holly Thomas saved me some waxwork with her opinion piece, “The Sphere Raises an Important Question,” with which I resonated. She writes:
“U2 has taken up residence in Las Vegas’ newly unveiled crown jewel, the Sphere. The $2.3 billion venue is a pet project of James Dolan, the polarizing businessman whose empire also includes Madison Square Garden and the New York Knicks. It boasts around 18,000 seats and 160,000 speakers, and the pièce de résistance is a gigantic wraparound LED screen that encompasses the entire exterior, walls and ceiling. Its 268,435,456 pixels can transform the arena into a desertscape, outer space, anything that the imagination and visual technology can conjure, in 256 million dazzling colors. Its scale and ambition are extraordinary, unlike anything yet seen in live entertainment (though plans are already underway for a replica in east London). Early reviews are glittering. I hated it.”
While I didn’t have the good fortune of getting a chance (expenses paid) to “hate it,” I confess it wasn’t hard to imagine from a distance some of Thomas’ disdain for the U2/Sphere hype, particularly after enduring an entire summer (and now fall, thanks to Kansas City tight end/new beau Travis Kelce and the eyeball-infatuated NFL) of pop music goddess Taylor Swift taking over the world. (Seriously, Swifties, do we really need a movie documenting the summer…or a “Taylor’s Version” Advent calendar?)
But I digress.
As a U2 fan, I (along with millions of others) am no stranger to the band pushing the experiential envelope of concert-going. I’ve seen U2 live twice (Vertigo tour, May of 2005, with Megan at the United Center in Chicago; U2360 tour, June of 2011, with Megan and all four girls at Busch Stadium in St. Louis), and while the first was indoors, the second was outdoors, and the set lists were six years apart, they were both overwhelming spectacles. Regardless of whether you like the group (I always have), U2 as Sphere’s debut resident act makes all kinds of performance sense.
I just don’t know if I want it to.
Capturing (Versus Being in) the Moment
I can’t remember the name of the band that was playing, but I do recall having a visceral reaction to seeing the first concert footage/photos in which the majority of the audience was viewing the show through their phones. At the time (circa 2012?), it seemed folks were just snapping pics and maybe a few short video clips; now, however, some concert-goers are watching entire shows live—even when they’re in the first five rows closest to the stage—through their phones.
This, of course, is done in the name of “capturing the moment,” and I get it (to a degree), but our cameras are nowhere near our human capacity to take in, process, and catalog the multi-sensory experience of being there (and let’s not forget the storage capacity of our brains blows away your Android or iPhone). In other words (and this is the real point), there’s something to be said for being present in the moment.
That said, as much as U2 is known for “connecting” and “creating intimacy” (at least as much as any rock band can; I’ve felt it…kind of?) with the fans at their live shows, in playing Sphere, I wonder if U2 can compete with…U2; or, that is to say, with the version of themselves that features “four humans, each of them the size of the Statue of Liberty,” as Bono observed in this YouTube short. As good of a show as U2 puts together for the live stage, it seems to me that real “connection” seems a tall order.
Thomas wonders about this connection potential (or possible lack thereof) as well, pulling up a particular concert memory from her own Gen X past in reflection.
“Fleetwood Mac in concert is one of the best things I’ve seen in real life. I was in my twenties, and I’d crossed every square of the Mac bingo card: I was recently dumped, in a complicated new situationship and attending on the same night as my ex (naturally we were both fans). When the lights dimmed and Christine McVie took the mic for ‘Songbird,’ I was sobbing before the chorus. It remains one of the most memorable evenings of my youth, the perfect confluence of nostalgia, love, heartbreak and music.”
She continues:
“I realize I sound like a curmudgeon. I should stress that I don’t think one has to be weeping at a guitarist on a bare stage to have a meaningful concert experience. I may be partial to the occasional bit of 1970s folk rock, but I’ll fight to the death to defend the right of Ariana Grande to cram her shows with backing dancers. What bothers me about the idea of the Sphere is its encapsulation of a hyper-stimulated world in which the performers and their music alone can no longer be trusted to sate an audience’s expectations. We’re not content to sing and dance along to our favorite songs: we want shock and awe.”
I don’t necessarily share the same passion for (nor a deathwish in defense of) Ariana Grande or her backing dancers, but Thomas’ comment about shock and awe seems right to me. In watching a portion of the Sphere concert video and its barrage of (let’s face it) undeniably amazing visuals, the actual music-making seems more than a little lost in the mix. Fans weren’t recording the band; they were recording the walls.
Our Collective Terror of Being Underwhelmed
But what if our desire for shock and awe isn’t even about the music or the visuals? What if it’s about something altogether different, with our ability to connect with a band (or anyone else) the loser as a result? Thomas writes,
“When I was a kid, I simply sat down in the evening and watched the only thing that was available on TV. Now I scroll a dozen streaming platforms, playing YouTube videos on my laptop lest I get bored in the process. Our collective terror of being underwhelmed has left us unable to chance a moment of peace.
It goes against all my natural inclinations to tone things down. Just one episode? Nah, I’ll smash the whole season. Fancier chocolate, but less of it? Absurd, I’ll finish every morsel. Moderation has always had the hollow ring of something that was someone else’s idea, someone who did not understand that there should be no ceiling to the pursuit of pleasure.
Unfortunately, I’ve learned with age that moderation and pleasure have a sometimes uneasy, but undeniably symbiotic relationship. What is true of sugar and TV is true of almost everything heady and seductive: The dose makes the poison. Experiences that rely on igniting a dopamine frenzy tend not to be so satisfying the second (or third, or fourth) time around. I knew in my heart the second I saw the Sphere that it was the audiovisual equivalent of a white chocolate Frappuccino with whipped cream and caramel sauce. Too overwhelming, too far removed from the original magic of what inspired it.
To be able to tap into the emotions that make live music or indeed any experience meaningful, we need to allow some space for our responses. I cannot believe that audiences blasted into oblivion by millions of lights will connect with U2 as they might have in their raw 1980s heyday, or in the way I did with Fleetwood Mac.”
I would suggest that any “collective terror of being underwhelmed” has much to do with our collective terror of feeling disconnected. (If you don’t believe me, when was the last time you went to the bathroom without your cell phone?) We have adopted a media mentality (a la Sphere) that amping the inputs and overwhelming our senses is the solution to dealing with our loneliness. Privately, we tell ourselves we don’t want to be overwhelmed, but even more privately, we confess we want to be more whelmed than the alternative, lest we realize how disconnected we might actually be.
I see this twisted terror play out in churches, manifesting itself every week in the creation of full-blown light shows, turned up volumes to ear-damaging levels, and elaborate video presentations in the name of “worship.” Though the production values are not as enormous as Sphere’s, the constant effect of oncoming light, sound, and visuals can very much feel like a small-scale version of Thomas’ aforementioned “dopamine frenzy.” How does this help us hear God’s “still small voice?”
Don’t hear what I’m not saying. I’m not saying worship should not raise our affections, but there’s a difference between elevating them and manipulating them with over-the-top, multi-sensory abuse done on Sunday mornings. Are we really “addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord,” as Paul urges in Ephesians 5:19, when we can’t see, hear, or pay attention long enough to each other to do so? Could the reasons that it takes so much to elevate our affections in worship have to do (at least partly) with flatlined dopamine tolerance?
Bread & Circuses
Getting back to U2 and Sphere, Thomas finishes her article, tying into the strange and silly (but intriguing) men-thinking-about-the-Roman-Empire trend, writing,
“To take this argument to its inevitable Gen X dad conclusion, when I look at the Sphere, I think of the Roman Colosseum. It’s long been recognized as an architectural marvel, but it wasn’t constructed simply to enrich the citizens’ lives. Its scale and majesty, and the often-bloody spectacles it hosted, were also intended to distract—to be so astounding that they wouldn’t think too much about anything else. This is the feeling I get from the Sphere. It’s not here to entertain us. It’s here to engulf us.”
Indeed, “panem et circenses”—“bread and circuses”—defined the day in terms of Roman entertainment and its many distractions, a foundation upon which so many of our modern gladiatorial contests (also known as professional sports) is modeled and built. Civil religion of American football (among other examples) aside, we have allowed spectacle to not only become its own idol, but authorized it to become its own monster.
Unfortunately, humans have never done well with idols or monsters.
I’ll write about that in part two of this post next month.
(Note: Have something to say as part of the conversation? Email me and I may include your thoughts (anonymously) in next month’s “Part Two” post.)
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