Playlist Notes: A lot of Christian music reflects the feminine nature of our relationship with God. Which is a valid and good thing, but I’m at a place in my life where I need a deeper understanding of the masculine aspects of following God, of being an authentic and complete Man of God. These are all songs which have helped me in my journey, and I pray they help you in yours. In Christ. Dr. Ernie

[Read More] for the song list (good until Aug 2006).

I recently revived an old story, because of several ongoing discussions on truth and love:

The Mountain of God
or
The Marriage of Love and Truth

http://radicalcentrism.org/marriage.html

I just realized it could also be summarized in Apothegm form as:

Healthy Truth Promotes Love
Healthy Love Pursues Truth

or more explicitly:

Healthy Truth uses Facts to Promotes Love
Healthy Love uses Feelings to Pursues Truth

While apparently tautological, in fact this creates a virtuous cycle: the closer you are to genuine truth and love, the more they reinforce each other and widen the circle of authentic relationship. Conversely, attempting to build relationships on false ‘truth’ and false ‘love’ leads to ever-more inauthenticity and deception.

[Read More] for the backstory.

I’m collecting raw material for a new kind of worship song, focused on the Fatherhood of God:

* This is My Father’s World (music)

* The Living Years (commentary)

* Leader of the Band (music) (interview)

* Pass the Flame

[Read More] for the backstory.

I heard these lyrics this week, and found them quite a propos to the ongoing meditations. [Read More] for the full lyrics.

http://www.elyrics.net/go/f/five-for-fighting-lyrics/superman-(It_s-not-easy)-lyrics/

Artist	Five For Fighting
Title	Superman (It’s Not Easy)

Even though I enjoyed Batman Begins much more than Revenge of the Sith, it still left me with that same nagging sense of incompleteness. Well, not quite the same. The Jedi were distinctly unbalanced, and needed to find the radical middle between a weak Light and a strong Dark. Batman, however, did find that balance. Yet something was still missing. What?

In my terminology, Batman had found the radical middle, but was not yet radically centered. I don’t often differentiate between those terms, but I will now. The radical middle is a tool for interpolation: given two partly-true poles, find the balanced perspective which affirms all valid truths and denies all invalid falsehoods. By contrast, the radical center takes two poles, and extrapolates a third pole containing truths both sides have completely missed. I illustrate it thusly:

In particular, the Batman in this movie is incomplete in the two areas I am particularly wrestling with:

* how to lead an ongoing movement, rather than merely inspiring individual men

* how to become complete enough to love a real woman with your whole heart
Alas, the comic book (or movie) is unlikely to ever explore this territory, because either one would mean the end of Batman as we know him. If Gotham ever became a ‘redeemed’ city — with honest politicians, unafraid and involved citizenry, and reliable police — the only justification for Batman would be the self-perpeuating stream of equally neurotic “bad guys in tights,” thus losing the psychological grounding Christopher Nolan worked so hard to attain.

Conversely, if Batman himself ever matured enough to love a woman and raise a family, he’d no longer be able to live a double life. Yeah, I know people do it all the time, but not well: you can’t be a half-man and love a wise woman and raise whole kids. Yet, he would/could only give that up if a) Gotham became a safe place, and b) he conquered his own compulsions.

Which (at least to me) begs the question, “How could that happen?” What does it take to redeem a city, as well as a man? What is a sufficiently greater good that would allow a caped crusader to honorably hang up his cowl?

The answer, I believe, is Spiritual Leadership. In other words, the Dark Knight needs a Bishop. [Read More] for my three-volume “fan-fiction” impression of what that might look like; maybe I could get John Grisham to write a screenplay…

I saw Batman Begins this afternoon (Saturday). I liked it. A lot. So much so I got up at midnight to blog all the thoughts it inspired…

At their best, comic book stories are myths, manifesting the great truths of human nature in fantasy form — much like fairy tales or Greek tragedy. Sure, a lot is drivel, but the best have deep power to illumine the human psyche. Alas, most movies reduce such complexity to facile truisms: they become mere Heroes, and not Men. One exception was the Spider-Man movie, which brilliantly incarnated the struggles of adolescence. Another is Batman Begins, which better than any fiction I’ve read since Hamlet shows what it means for a man to conquer — and redeem — the shade of his father.

“Read More” for my thoughts on the Man behind the Bat [Warning: Spoiler alert].

Other reviews:

* Breakpoint: Batman’s True Father

* Plugged-In

* K-Punk: Shades of white

* The Piker Press: Father Knows Best, or Bat to the Basics!

* Roger Ebert

* New York Times: Dark was the Young Knight

* Toronto Sun: New life for a dark hero

* James Berardinelli

* Edmonton Sun: Holy blockbuster, Batman is a knockout

* Rocky Mountain News: Standing Tall

I just got back from seeing Return of the Sith with Sandhya and my parents (who are visiting from Illinois), and I found myself enraged. Not by Lucas: the film had its flaws, but overall I enjoyed it. Not by Palpitane, though I found his twisted shaming of the boy painful to behold. No, what really enraged me was the Jedi Council: their sanctimonious, detached self-sufficiency were as much to blame as Palpitante for Anakin’s turning to the dark side — and more importantly, they mirrored my own anti-emotional intellectualism which induced my own ‘dark side’ phase over the previous decade.

When I was a child watching Star Wars IV-VI, the Jedi seemed the epitome of all that was good and noble, and their destruction by Vader a horrific tragedy. Now, Lucas (wittingly or no) did a fantastic job of demonstrating how their own near-nobility was their undoing. Like them, I lived much of my life seeking to a) serve others, and b) avoid emotional connection — though I never explicitly acknowledged the latter. In so doing,I denied my emotions, which thus became dark and dysfunctional.

The Jedi themselves mirror the monastic orders which gave birth to Western Civilization, when the ‘darker’ forces of romanticism and nationalism rebelled against the Church of Medieval Europe. The monks, for good and ill, had previously ruled on the basis of their superior power, wisdom, and discipline, and even their enemies adopted many of their habits (also for good and ill). Which is one reason I’m trying to reinvent/replace Western Civilization.

Ultimately, the solution to the so-called Dark Side is to bring it into the light, so that it can fulfill its healthy role in complementing what we -thought -was the light. I’m told Lucas now has no plans for Episode VII, though I know there’s endless books on “what happens next.” But, here [Read More] is a brief sketch of what I’d like to see. I don’t know how good a movie it would make, but at least it would give me closure.

I’ve been experimenting with paraphrasing the Lord’s prayer to capture various perspectives. Today, somewhat unintentionally, I used the Lord’s prayer to help me cope with unmitigated rage. The result came out rather like a punk rock song. A bit unorthodox, but somehow I think the Psalmist would approve. [Read more] and let me know what you think.

Yet another take on the Lord’s Prayer, this one from the first person volitional perspective of “I want.”

Another take on the “Our Father.” This one perhaps more from the heart, and less from the head.

On Geekz2Men, my friend Robby Butler of TheMissionNetwork suggested praying the Lord’s prayer daily, in our own words, to gain a better understanding of what Fatherhood and Manhood are. Here’s what I came up with, with a little help from Chris Hahn.