clarity « seanrants

clarity

Posted September 7th, 2005 by Sean Williams

So, one interesting thing that happens when you produce a show is that you find out just how clearly you communicate ideas. When you are writing a musical, you have three writers (sometimes more, sometimes less) and so even from the first moment, you have a combination of ideas.

Coming clean, somewhat, and speaking for only me, I felt that we were writing a Dadaist musical, and anti-musical. It’s tough for me to try to follow up on it, because I thought the basic point of this musical is that musicals are completely absurd. In order for that to have been the clear message, we would have needed to be a lot more aggressive in how we produced the play.

In some ways, the problems are systemic, because we don’t ever have one person on stage who is deriding the ridiculousness of the circumstances. We’ve asked the audience to be the person calling bullshit on the show, and for a lot of people, they just dismissed it as “silly” instead of reading our minds and realizing that we consider the entire genre somewhat silly.

But the truth is, we didn’t make that show. Our show had a sweetness and a purpose that snuck it’s way in. It happens with every one of our shows, somehow we can’t help but add a second layer of something completely seperate. Sometimes it’s like adding vinegar to oil and putting it on the salad, but this time it was more like adding a second dressing to an already dressed salad.

How can we claim that the show was meaningless when it so clearly has a political point that we were trying to make? How can we claim that we were mocking musicals when we so clearly worked so hard on crafting the songs? We ran into a problem early on because I hate parodies that aren’t as good as the thing they are parodying. “Wet Hot American Summer” is amazing because the thing it’s choosing to make fun of, retarded 70s camp movies, is actually dumb to begin with. I didn’t like “Urinetown” as much as I might have because I actually really love the musicals they were mocking.

Anyway, one can’t complain when one’s writing is not taken in the tone that it’s given, it means there is a flaw in the writing, not in the audience.

So, let me clarify what I was saying in my post about Christianity.

I believe that the love the Christ child received is what made him the messiah. I believe in the parable. I have made my own Christianity, and I feel allowed to do that because everyone else does it too, and in my mind Jesus isn’t a real man, he is a story. His lessons are all told in parables, and I’ve chosen to believe that the story of his life is a giant parable.

A child is born in desperate circumstances, in abject poverty. His mother never had sex with his father, but his father doesn’t ask any questions, he loves her and he loves the boy without question. Out of nowhere, shepherds came and stood watch over the sleeping baby, giving him love. Three men, in their wisdom, brought gifts to a baby they didn’t know, out of love.

When this boy because a man, one by one people turned to him and said, “I will give you my devotion, my love” and because he received their love, he became more and more divine. He was able to turn the love he was given into a source of magic, he was given so much love that he could heal the sick and feed the hungry, always claiming that the power came from a source beyond him, the source that created him. He said “God is love”.

His father was love, that which made him divine was the basic human element of love.

He said things like “what good is it to love only those who love you? Anyone can do that. Love those that don’t deserve it.” And he said that because he knew that, as a baby, as a boy, he was given love for no reason. I don’t believe in a corporeal Christ, I don’t believe that these words mean what Christians think they mean. I’m just saying what the story means to me.

I have been remade because of the love I’ve received, love that I didn’t deserve. My brothers and my sister love me despite my years of not giving a shit about them. My parents love me despite the years I spent disregarding them. My wife loves me despite the fact that I have never treated women well, despite the fact that I never deserved it. I’ve been remade because of the love I’ve received, and that is the story of Christ to me. It’s why the story means so much to me.

So when Jesus says “the path to my father’s kingdom is through me” what he means is, in order to become a holy man, you have to love your enemies and pray for your persecutors, to be forgiven for one’s trespasses, one has to forgive those who’ve tresspassed against one. I’ve decided that my love for the story, and my belief in its truth, makes me more a Christian than any other religion. It’s one man’s decision, and it isn’t that important.

2 Responses to “clarity”

Steve says:

September 8, 2005 at 3:13 pm

You love Jesus. Homo.

nrw says:

September 22, 2005 at 12:24 pm

I was interested in this post, Sean, especially given your earlier post about how little respect you have for people who, too lazy to think for themselves, simply regurgitate what they hear. I’m interested because, as an atheist, I think that most religion is exactly that: the regurgitation of unexamined stories. But when I read your post, I was surprised with just how, well, unbiblical the story is. Here’s the Christian story, in your words.

A child is born in desperate circumstances, in abject poverty.

Not in the bible, by the way. There’s not word one in the gospels about Joseph and Mary’s financial situation. The bible does say that they were in Bethlehem to pay their taxes, so we know that they at least had the money to do that. And we know that one of the wise men brought gold to Jesus. If it was a substantial amount of gold, Jesus might have grown up quite well. The truth is, we just don’t know much about Jesus’s upbringing and childhood. Three of the gospels don’t mention anything about his childhood at all and the fourth has just one story – the story about Jesus sneaking away from his parents when he was 12 to teach at the temple.

His mother never had sex with his father, but his father doesn’t ask any questions, he loves her and he loves the boy without question.

The biblical account says that, caring about Mary, Joseph didn’t turn her out. It doesn’t say that he wasn’t angry with her or that he didn’t ask any questions. That’s more romanticism. Plus, the account says, in at least one of the gospels, that an angel visits Joseph and tells him that Mary was impregnated by God, or something to that effect. Trusting your pregnant wife when she says she’s been faithful is one thing. Trusting her when an angel is backing up her story is another thing entirely. One requires a lot more love than the other.

Incidentally, the bible doesn’t say anything about Joseph loving Jesus, or about what kind of father he was. There’s almost nothing about how Jesus was raised, and there certainly isn’t anything about how Jesus received lots of love as a child. For all the biblical accounts says, Joseph could have beaten Jesus mercilessly every chance he got. We just don’t know.

Out of nowhere, shepherds came and stood watch over the sleeping baby, giving him love.

This is more romanticism, Sean. All the biblical account says is that the shepherds were commanded by an angel to go see a baby in a manger and to spread the news of what they saw. And the bible says they did exactly that. They went, saw the baby, and left. All this watching over the baby while he slept stuff is invention.

I won’t go on. I catch that you get my meaning. The stories Christians tell about Christmas are pure fiction. The stable, the animals, the innkeeper, the little drummer boy. They’re all fabricated because the biblical story can’t hold its own. It’s not a great narrative. It’s not well written. So Christians have spiced it up a little. That probably won’t bother anyone who believes, like you, that the bible is all allegory. If Christianity is all made up anyway, who cares whether the person who made it up was the author of the gospels or the pastor at your local church? And I don’t challenge your contention that that the story you write has some legitimate claim to be called “the Christian story”. Even if it’s not in the bible, Christians all over the world tell it to each other every Christmas. That alone makes the story “theirs” to some degree. But it bothers me. It bothers me for the same reasons that you’re bothered by the unoriginal thinkers who parrot the talking heads they see on tv. It bothers me because it expresses the value that having an opinion that’s right about how Christ was born isn’t nearly so important as having an opinion you like. We don’t know the details of Christ’s birth, so we fill them in in a way that makes us feel good about Jesus, instead of boldly admitting that we don’t know. And everybody seems okay with it because, God, that drummer boy is a great little ditty, isn’t it? Those aren’t the values I embrace, and that’s (part of) why I’m not a Christian.

My apologies for the long post. I think we disagree pretty substantially about matters theological, Sean, but I’m glad that you’re putting views like this out there. It’s brave in a way that I’m not, and I admire it about you. I’ve enjoyed reading your blog.

Nate