Useful Spiritual Analogies: A Post Not About Endgame

“I understood that reference.”

Marvel Avengers Assemble (2012)

I do enjoy the Subtle Christian Traits Facebook group. If you’re not familiar with it, content posted in this community consists of funny, relatable anecdotes and observations of a Christian and church-culture nature, along with a neverending avalanche of memes on the same subject, a steady trickle of ‘inspirational quotations’, and the occasional profound question or prayer request. Facebook friends, do ask me to add you if you fancy joining the party, though I’ll warn you now that you might want to impose some pretty stringent restrictions on the kinds of notifications you’ll let the group give you if you don’t want to find yourself promptly deluged by them.

Anyway, the reason I brought that up was because this post was prompted by something I saw on Subtle Christian Traits this weekend just gone. The below photograph was captioned by the one who posted it as follows: “Every sermon in every church everywhere this weekend.”

 

I want to credit the photo, but it seems inappropriate to use the name of the person who posted it given that Subtle Christian Traits is a closed group. I'll settle for initials: credit to JP.

And I thought – really?

I mean, yes, obviously, the caption was exaggerating and was perfectly aware of the fact, but equally, at the church in the picture and presumably quite a large number of others, whichever human was responsible for delivering the sermon put said sermon together deliberately around the theme of Avengers: Endgame. Now, as you may remember if you read my blog a lot, I went to a midnight screening of the film in question, so I am as acutely aware as anyone that the earliest possible point at which any ordinary Marvel fan could have completed her first viewing of Endgame was at some stage in the bleary-eyed small hours of the Thursday just gone. In order to have written a sermon about it in time for the service on the Sunday immediately following that Thursday, therefore, our theoretical ordinary Marvel fan must surely have done one of the following:

1) Blocked out that particular slot in the sermon-series calendar as a special one-off as soon as she found out Endgame’s release date, then spent the ensuing weeks and months blindly banking on the hope that a maximum of a couple of days spent contemplating the film’s contents would yield a Useful Spiritual Analogy worth forming a special one-off sermon around;

2) Hazarded, in advance, a guess at what the contents of Endgame might consist of, or at least what its broad intentions as a piece of cinema might be, decided that there was a Useful Spiritual Analogy in that hazarded idea, and then tweaked that analogy after viewing the film to make it fit with the actual contents;

3) Clumsily shoehorned some aspect of Endgame’s contents into what she was planning to spend that sermon talking about anyway;

4) Clumsily shoehorned some aspect of spiritual truth into a speech that essentially consisted of an Endgame review;

5) Bribed, blackmailed, tricked, or otherwise coerced someone heavily involved with the making of the film into spilling some major spoilers a long time ago, and happened to have come up with a Useful Spiritual Analogy off the back off those stolen spoilers in the intervening peroiod;

6) Or possibly, just possibly I suppose, genuinely had a flash of inspiration upon viewing Endgame and been so excited about the Useful Spiritual Analogy that thereupon occurred to her that she simply had to talk about it on Sunday, regardless of how well it fitted with whatever other sermon-series plan she might have been following (or, granted, not; maybe this is the sort of church where you really don’t know what the sermon’s going to be about from one week to the next).

Look, I love Useful Spiritual Analogies lifted out of the world of fiction, as you’ll know very well if you have any familiarity to speak of with me and my weekly ramblings. I’d be the last person to criticise the use of such analogies. But because I love them and I use them, allow me to assure you that I know how they work. They do not occur to one reliably. I can’t walk into a screening of a film knowing that the next couple of hours will definitely yield a blog post; equally, sometimes I leave the cinema spilling over with ideas for at least five. There are pieces of fiction I love that I can’t plausibly relate to gospel truths at all,¹ and others I really don’t care for that Useful Spiritual Analogies just fall out of without me having ever willed them to. I don’t personally have anything to say about Endgame right now that I think would actually edify any of you, but it’s quite possible that in several weeks’ or months’ or years’ time, I’ll be reading the scriptures and something will suddenly click in my brain to the effect of, oh, it’s like that bit in Endgame.

Thanks to CaptainThinker at newgrounds.com for the super cute Endgame fanart.

Which in fact brings us to another point, because sometimes, yes, the analogy occurs to you when you’ve got your head in the Bible, but more usually, it occurs to you when you’ve got your head in the fiction. And I’d say that’s the right way round, actually, because you very much want to have the Bible in your brain when you’re looking at fiction, and indeed all the rest of the time as well; you want to view everything else the world presents you with, with scripture as your lens² – whereas, by contrast, if my mind keeps straying onto Marvel or Doctor Who or Harry Potter or whatever when I’m trying to study God’s word, I tend to consider that more of a hindrance than a help. Makes sense, right? And this means that usually, when the analogies I blog about occur to me, they consist of things I already know about the gospel that are highlighted particularly well by some aspect of the fiction I’m currently enjoying.

Useful Spiritual Analogies are not, in other words, an exercise in going deeper into the meaning of scripture for myself. They rarely start with scripture; sometimes, indeed, I have to go on a bit of a hunt for a passage that makes the gospel point that occurred to me in a way that suits the context. I might perhaps be illustrating a point that’s a new one to some of my delightful readers, and crucially, it’s a very good thing to be reminded of the core gospel truths that one already knows from new and different angles, but Useful Spiritual Analogies are not and must not be the beating heart of a teaching ministry. They’re a great sort of side dish, if you will, but the main meal – the part without which the thing is not substantial – has to start with the scriptures. It has to be rooted in them and grow out of them; it can’t rely on any other material for its form and identity.

The typical faith-and-fiction format of my blog is not, therefore, what I’d call a main-meal teaching ministry. I’d be worried, I mean to say, about any Christian who was receiving most of her teaching in a format like that, that makes the outside analogy a part of what it fundamentally is. If it imposes that on itself as a condition, then the goal has become something other than simply to open the scriptures to one’s brothers and sisters so that they might be built up by them. Doesn’t that strike you as very dangerous?

Now, I’m in no position to comment on the quality of the teaching at the church depicted above, or indeed any church whose sermon last Sunday was themed around Endgame. Maybe some of those sermons were really excellent, I don’t know. Again, I’d be the last person to deny that analogies lifted from fiction can be useful for highlighting spiritual truths. But I really don’t buy that all these preachers themed their Sunday sermons around Endgame because they had seen a genuinely Useful Spiritual Analogy in it that they believed would be more helpful for the edification of the congregation than anything else they might have spoken about.

I suppose the obvious question off the back of that is, well, why, if not for the sake of maximum edification, did all the preachers give sermons about Endgame, then? I suppose I can only assume it comes out of a desire to be making up-to-the-minute references. Maybe they don’t trust their listeners not to be thinking about Endgame all through the service anyway and figure they may as well as try to tap into that. Maybe they think that sermons of this type are a way of attracting more people into the church. Maybe they, like me, are just a little too fond of fiction and prone to getting carried away rambling about it. Any which way, the phenomenon worries me.

Please do your very best to put yourself in the way of proper main-meal teaching, adelphoi – teaching governed by no condition except that it should help the Church to understand what God has said and so be moved to love and serve him more wholeheartedly. And as far as your giftings allow, dispense such teaching. I’d be the last person to deny the value of Useful Spiritual Analogies taken from fiction, but I’d also be the last to say that that’s what the normal pattern of church teaching ought to look like.

Footnotes

¹ For example, the Japanese animated feature Your Name, which I have now decided is my favourite film, has never yielded so much as the germ of a blog post idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xU47nhruN-Q.

² Speaking of lenses, by the way, shout out to Pullen & Symes Opticians who recently supplied me with a gorgeous new pair of specs to replace the ones I broke at my baptism: http://opticiansinexeter.co.uk/.

To Hate the Mirror

“Tell me what’s wrong with me – my body, face, my hair.

Tell me all my many faults; tell me like you care.

When we both know you’re cruel and we both know you’re right,

I could listen to you like a fool all night.

What’s wrong with me? How I speak, how I dress?

What’s wrong with me? You keep me guessing.

Mama called me beautiful, don’t believe her any more.

Now I’m listening to you. What do I do that for?”

Mean Girls (2017)¹

This fancy three-glass mirror was already in the room I took when I moved into my current house. All the paraphernalia draped over and around it, needless to say, was not.

Well, it’s getting late and I’m already a post behind my usual one-a-week schedule, so I’m afraid this one’s going to be poetry. I wrote the below a little while ago out of a kind of sad frustration that we seem to expect women and girls to think negatively about their bodies and appearances. Like, I know there are countless projects out there devoted to fostering positive body image,² but, well, sometimes it feels as if the very preponderance of them is fuelling the fire by reinforcing that the opposite is some kind of ubiquitous norm. And maybe, I don’t know, maybe it is. Maybe it’s to some degree just another strand of the way in which we, in Britain at least, tend to treat a low opinion of one’s characteristics and abilities as some kind of virtue: for instance, the standard polite response to any compliment is to deny its veracity (even though I’d argue that that’s actually rather an impolite thing to do, since it insults the discernment of the complimenter). Or maybe it’s true that there are all sorts of insidious misogynistic influences at work in media and education and culture that quickly establish the negativity in question as a default that then has to be concertedly dismantled. At any rate, I’d be interested to know to what extent and on which particular points these few stanzas resonates with any of you.

They told me to hate the mirror.

They told me to duck my gaze down and away.

They told me that one vital trait

Of a girl who looks great

Is she thinks that she doesn’t, OK?

They told me to hate the mirror.

They said to disparage the way I was made.

They said it was normal to scorn

What my mother had borne,

What my God had designed and arrayed.

They told me to hate the mirror.

They told me that liking oneself is a feat

Accomplished by few and select:

I could hardly expect

To be counted among that elite.

They told me to hate the mirror.

They told me a fun game for girlfriends to play

Is to take it in turns to declare

One another most fair,

Then refuse to believe what they say.

They told me to hate the mirror,

To treat my appearance as some sort of joke,

And so I soon learned how to seem

To have low self-esteem,

Because that was the language we spoke.

They told me to hate the mirror,

And here comes the punchline: they told me to just

Wait around for some guy to say he

Thinks I’m pretty – ’cause, see,

His opinion’s the one I can trust.

They told me to hate the mirror,

But I got so bored of maintaining that lie.

If I’m being honest, I grin

At the skin that I’m in

When I look up and catch my own eye.

They told me to hate the mirror,

But I say, Nice work, God, and pootle on by.³

Footnotes

¹ If you’re frowning in confusion at the given date (Mean Girls came out in 2004, didn’t it?) and the given quotation (wait, at which point did they start speaking in rhyme?), then you’ll be relieved to know that there’s a perfectly straightforward explanation: I’m referring to the Broadway stage musical of this title, not the film it was based on. The soundtrack is top notch; here’s a sample: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiIi7STG3e0.

² The one I encountered most recently was a programme called Free Being Me, sponsored by Dove, that we ran at the Guide unit I assistant-lead: https://free-being-me.com/.

³ More of my thoughts on body image and how it relates to Christian hope are in Swallowing the Abacus: Thoughts on Self-Image, from way back in August 2015. I do find rereading some of my earliest posts a little bit cringey now, though I’d actually consider that a positive development, since it means my opinions and writing skills must have matured a bit since then. Which one would hope they would have done in three and a half years, you know?