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Reflection for December 11 2005

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The art of special effects

The art of special effects has always been a part of the movie industry, even when I was a boy. You had explosions and windstorms generated by gigantic fans off stage. I remember that scene in the film Steamboat Bill of Buster Keaton leaning into a headwind at an angle of forty-five degrees. While in the movie San Francisco we watched with astonishment Hollywood's ability to replicate the great earthquake of 1906, with buildings collapsing, streets cracking open and fire plugs spouting geysers of water. But how primitive all that was compared to the special effects produced in films today. Minor explosions today are almost nuclear. The least gunfire is made to appear devastating. Raging prehistoric monsters make the King Kong of my day look like a teddy bear. Indeed, nowadays it's often the special effects people pay money to see. Who cares about the story or the acting? People like to see things explode and space ships disintegrate under a barrage of laser beams.

But has the human race ever been any different? Haven't we always had a taste for special effects? Look at the Lectionary's first reading for the opening Sunday of Advent. Speaking on behalf of Jewish captives in Babylon the prophet Isaiah cries out to God: "Oh that you would rip open the heavens and come down. Make the mountains quake the way you did for Moses and the Israelites in the desert (when you even held back the waters of the Red Sea)- things the eye had never seen nor ear heard of! Pull out all the stops now as you did then, for we have become like withered leaves." Or on the second Sunday of Advent the same prophet wishes God to arrive among his exiled people like a colossal bulldozer to fill in the valleys, level the mountains - sweep aside every obstacle that blocks Israel's way to freedom. He wants God to bring his fist down! Power, that's what we admire when it comes to God's intervention in our affairs. We want him to arrive like a cyclone as befits a righteous potentate.

Even the Gospel readings seem to echo that demand, except that they do seem to allow for some uncertainty as to just how God will respond to our appeal. True, John the Baptist will say, "Someone mighty is coming, mightier than I. But - you know - we don't know precisely how he will come or when. So all I can say is: get ready for a show that will be certainly marvelous but possibly in ways not quite in accord with your assumptions." But that doesn't stop us from keeping our eyes on the heavens above - looking for special effects, for someone riding upon the clouds in majesty to reach down and lift us out of the pit we've dug for ourselves.

And yet all the while this Savior it appears nowhere in the sky. And why? Because maybe he will prefer to creep up on us from the opposite direction, from somewhere down below, somewhere lowly - for instance, from a place called Nazareth about which everybody agrees, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" And from deep within the womb of a girl of Nazareth whom the high and mighty of this world know only as a census statistic - submitting to a nine month gestation period just like you and me, growing like a vine out of the earth instead of descending out of a bedazzling rupture in the sky. Quietly he may come as an infant who can't even talk.

And maybe that's why John the Baptist tells us to maintain a 360 degree circuit of watchfulness, to keep an eye on the cellar door of our consciousness, the staircase that ascends from the depths of your soul and mine - where God surely resides. Because God's intervention in your life may come surprisingly from behind us or below us or indeed from within us less evidently than from above. For instance, take Ebenezer Scrooge. . .

To be continued next week.

-- Geoff Wood