My friend Ryan Schroeder dared me to blog about this, from whence the above picture was obtained. My first thought was, well that's kind of like shooting fish in a barrel isn't it?
It did get me thinking about artificial bubbles of reality (which gives you some idea what I think of the above picutre). So I'm going to cop out and not touch the above picutre with a ten foot pole. Instead I'm going to talk about a documentary and let you make the connections between the documentary and the picture above.
The documentary is about North Korea.
YouTube links:
Hopefully the links don't break, just in case, original source is on vbs.tv
[WARNING: MOM. BEFORE YOU CLICK THAT LINK. vbs.tv is NOT Vacation Bible School TV. The Vice Guide to Travel isn't a site you'll want to visit. I intentionally provided aseptic Youtube links. Also, the documentary contains swearsies. That is all.]
So, for a year and a half these guys try to get into North Korea (DPRK) to film. They can't. They end up going to China, handing over the appropriate bribes, heading to the DPRK as tourists and filming on the sly. Smart? Probably not. But what an amazing glimpse into this strange strange place. The short version is the DPRK is like cold war Russia in the 50's, it's the land that time forgot in a really scary and bizzare way.
You'll have to watch the documentary to get the full jist, but afterward I thought, man a whole bunch of Korean people are going to be pissed off when they find out about the outside world. I'm pretty sure the cognitive dissonance between party speech making and their actual lives is fairly evident to them. But, being cut off from the outside world, the cognitive dissonance has no matrix by which it might resolve. They have nothing to compare their lives to, so the cognitive dissonace waves just bounce off the inside of the cultural bubble. It must make them nauseous at times, but they wouldn't be sure why.
Then I realized this all felt oddly familiar. I recognized that land-that-time-forgot feel, the disconnect between the words spoken and action on the ground. The rabid fear of anything "outside." The drive to control how things worked inside the bubble, the drive to control what of the outside got in. The control was maybe originally out of a desire for the better good of those under one's care, but, seemingly more and more, the control was ostensibly for the better good of those in one's care and had just become comfortable for those in charge. In short, it was a lot like the way I experienced evangelicalism in the 70's and 80's.
I've come a long way in sifting out what is my own broken anger and what is to be legitimately left as part of a prophetic calling speaking back into the church for the sake of the church. I take to heart Jeremiah's charge to "take apart and demolish and then start over, building and planting." (Jeremiah 1:10 MSG) In my anger I found that "taking apart and demolishing" came pretty easily. I'm slowly maturing into the much more demanding "building and planting" part.
Here's the thing though, the taking apart and demolishing part comes from hope. It has to, otherwise it isn't worth it. Jeremiah always lived in hope. Most of the people I know who are accused of being nothing but taking-apart-demolishing party poopers are actually people of hope. I live in hope. I constantly live in hope, for the the church, for my neighbourhood, for my city, for the world. It's a fools errand most of the time, but I can't help it. I naturally look to the future and I can't help but hope for a better one. No matter how much I get the stuffing kicked out of me I end up, sometimes to my own consternation, coming back to hope.
Okay, I've picked up the ten foot pole, let me make some connections. Recently I've fallen in love with the word "generative." I'm on a building and planting kick. I'm around generative, hopeful, building and planting people. I've gotten very used to looking ahead. So, when I see an image like the one at the top of this post I get a bit of whiplash. Wow. I get that post-North-Korean-citizen-whose-seen-the-world feeling. I get that thing I used to get so often back when I was in the bubble, a little taste of bile in the back of my throat from sitting there so assured of everything being as it should be, but deep down feeling slightly nauseous from vertigo because something is askew, something is off, something is not right. It pains me to think people are, and there's no way to say this without sounding like a arrogant git, but it pains me to think people are still in a place I have come to consider "back there." I imagine the pain and sadness is similar to what one would feel looking at North Korea from the outside.
When I look at the top picture, whether taken literally or as a metaphorical view of the inside of a religious subcultural bubble gone awry, I feel most for the prophetic voices with that exact view from that exact perspective. I see the artists, the poets, the prophetic voices sitting right there seeing that very scene. They are the voice that reorients God's people and they have been bullied into silence. How else is that picture even possible?
It pains me to think of the artists, the poets, the prophetic voices sitting right there in that exact spot and thinking something is wrong with the way they see the world, something is wrong with them because of the way they see the world. They don't even know they're prophets. They don't even know we need them. They don't even know God made them the way they are and that he did it on purpose. How can the church hear the prophets when the prophets don't even know they're prophets? Crazy fantasy words and fear bully people into silence, or happy shiny words and fear bully people into silence, in the end is there a difference?
Artists. Poets. Prophets. It's time to think and consider. It's time to taste the bile. It's time to live into the person God made you to be. It's time to take apart and demolish and then, more importantly, it's time to build and plant.
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