Facebook, the Great Lie?

Many people don’t understand Facebook’s charms. “It’s not ‘real,’” Aaron Sorkin, famously said, “It’s posing.” Not that Mr. Sorkin would necessarily know. While Sorkin wrote the movie about the founding of Facebook,The Social Network, he defiantly claims that he has never used Facebook.

We on Facebook do not consider our posts “real”. Most of us leave out the relentlessness that plagues our lives, the rapidity, and yes, perhaps the boredom. For most of us, it is a way to share good news: baby announcements, children’s achievements, the rekindling of friendships or love affairs, recovery of health, a new job, an athletic achievement.

Screenwriter Bob Kaufman (Love At First Bite, Freebie and The Bean) once told me, “Movies are not the way life is. Movies are the way life should be.” That’s the lens through which I view Facebook. The social network site is a long movie with many, many scenes or perhaps, a novel filled with nuggets held together with the glue that fuels all art: “a great lie that exposes the greater truth.”

Life is hard for most of us these days. Culture is in free fall. Change is happening so fast that we cannot take a breath to contextualize what we have lost in contrast to what we have gained. Most of us take some reassurance in Facebook and its happy posts. We enjoy the foodie pictures, cozy pictures of family on their best behavior. Yet behind the posing, we know the charm of what people are really trying to say. Inevitably behind the veil, we return to love, family, mercy, justice, and the beauty found in a singular instant which points to the eternal.

No, Facebook is not “real.” Facebook is “super real”.

Van Gogh and Victor Hugo Meet “in the center of the starry night”

“I dream of painting and then I paint my dream,” Vincent van Gogh reportedly said. In the case of his most famous painting, The Starry Night, he may not have dreamed it, but may have found it in the words of Victor Hugo. Victor Hugo and  Vincent van Gogh never met in person. However, an avid reader of fiction, Van Gogh was extremely moved by a passage in Hugo‘s masterwork, Les Miserables. This is, according to William J. Havlicek, Ph.D., author of the marvelous Van Gogh's Untold Journey, the passage from Les Miserables which inspired Van Gogh:

“He was out there alone with himself, composed, tranquil, adoring, comparing the serenity of his heart to the serenity of the skies, moved in the darkness by the visible splendors of the constellations and the invisible splendor of God, opening his soul to the thoughts that fall from the Unknown. In such moments, offering up his heart as the flowers of night emit their perfume, he lit like a lamp in the center of the starry night, expanding in ecstasy the midst of creation’s universal radiance, perhaps he could not have told what was happening in his own mind; he felt something floating away from him, and something descending upon him, mysterious exchanges of the soul with the universe.”

We often think of Vincent van Gogh as a nut job: a reckless artist who cuts off his ear as a gift to his lover, a man in so much pain he offs himself. If we take the time to actually glimpse the pentimento beneath the true portrait of van Gogh, we might find a very different painting. This portrait might show the artist as an avid reader, a thoughtful writer (writing over 1000 letters in his brief lifetime),  an artist devoted to evoking the divine in his work, and a follower of Jesus.

In a Letter to Emil Bernard on June 26,1988 van Gogh wrote,

“Christ lived serenely, as an artist greater than all other artists, scorning marble and clay and paint, working in the living flesh. In other words, this peerless artist, scarcely conceivable with the blunt instrument of our modern, nervous and obtuse brains, made neither statues nor paintings nor books. He maintained in no uncertain terms that he made…living men, immortals.”

This letter was written a year before van Gogh checked into the asylum in Saint-Remy France. He moved into the asylum for sleep disorders and fits. The latest information points to van Gogh suffering from chronic sleeplessness due to a combination of genetic epilepsy and brain damage from absinthe abuse. New information gathered from Pulitzer Prize winners, Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, indicates that Van Gogh did not commit suicide, but that he was killed by some local town ruffians when a gun malfunctioned. In a pointed assumption by the writers, they believe because of van Gogh’s “Christian nature,” he kept the incident from the authorities. It took several days for the artist to die, and while he was dying Van Gogh told the authorities that the wound was self inflicted (he was terribly sick anyway). The theory is that he did not want the accident to destroy the young lives of his assaulters.

As a culture, we are fortunate that Hugo and van Gogh met not in real time, but “in the center of the starry night”. For without Hugo’s writing, van Gogh may never have been inspired in the way that he was to paint what has become one of the most beloved and recognized paintings of the modern epoch.

(Painting by Vncent van Gogh)

Go and do likewise

In rereading Victor Hugo's collected works , I was struck by the ire the author held against the church. Victor Hugo had no issue with the divine but rather with the bureaucrats with “large mitres” who built institutions to “administrate” the sacred. Today, we are made to feel small in the modern church . If we haven’t brought in new “pelts” to the pews, we haven’t lived up to Jesus’ great commission.

I recently had the privilege of spending time with Knox Thames, Director of Policy and Research at the United States Commission at the U.S. Department of State. Yes, he is Christian who works under Obama. Knox revealed to me the harrowing levels of persecution that is going on in the rest of the world to Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists – and of course, in most cases, these are Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists doing violence to one another. I am not a Universalist. I am a Christian. I believe that Jesus is the Way. But in the face of the violence that is happening, it seems that the first order of business is to aspire to charity and kindness toward the other religions.

As Knox Thames, so eloquently put it, we need to look at Jesus’ example of loving. In the story of the Good Samaritan, the priest and the Levite passed the half dying man who had been beaten and robbed on the road. It was the Samaritan, the lowest of the low in that society, who stopped. The Samaritan ministered to the fellow in the road, and carried him into town. “Go and do likewise,” Jesus instructed his followers. Perhaps we should be more focused on loving our neighbor before we start judging or converting them.

As Victor Hugo said, “What a grander thing still, to love!”

(Painting by Vincent Van Gogh)

A Dieter's Prayer at a King's Table

A DIETER'S PRAYER

Lord, grant me the strength that I may not fall Into the clutches of cholesterol. At polyunsaturates, I'll never mutter, For the road to hell is paved with butter. And cake is cursed and cream is awful And Satan is hiding in every waffle. Beelzebub is a chocolate drop And Lucifer is a lollipop. Teach me the evils of hollandaise, Of pasta and globs of mayonnaise. And crisp fried chicken from the south— Lord, if you love me, shut my mouth.

The more I live, the more I realize that we all need to be discerning about all things. That includes the ambiguous food of this ambiguous world. We have to be as percipient as the prophet Daniel when he arrived at king Nebuchadnezzar’s table.

We live in a consumer-based economy, if we don’t consume, the economy collapses. It’s as simple as that.  We are constantly being pitched a zillion things that look good, sound good, smell good, but are terrible for us.

Having recently read Salt Sugar Fat from Pulitzer-prize winning author, Michael Moss most major food empires heavily engineer food intake for a “Bliss Effect”, which is the perfect combination of fat, salt and sugar. It makes us want more, but isn’t good for our long-term health. Indeed, it messes with our cardiovascular system, including our blood chemistry.

The real truth is that American processed food appears to be putting the average American in a constant state of inflammation – not for hours, or days, or years, but for decades. What this essentially means is our poor God-given bodies are constantly in a state of rejecting that blissful food we are all injesting.

Sadly, even our daily bread, made from genetically engineered dwarf wheat, not the Einkorn wheat of the past, is making us tired and bloated.  What’s the solution?  Get away from as much processed and fast food as possible, eat as fresh as you can – vegetables, fruits, some grains, some protein.  Stay clear of sugar, salt, and limit your dairy intake. Push clear of the king’s table. That royal food is not only giving our teenagers pimples. Long term, it’s killing the rest of us.

(Painting by Jan Davidszoon de Heem. Source of the poem is unknown but it can be found is The Jesus Habits by Pastor Jay Dennis where it appeared in a blog by Stephen A Pickert, M.D.)