Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant man, seeking goodly pearls: who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it. -Matt. 13:45-46
Starting out as nothing,
Small dark worthless trapped An irritation.
So frustrated, yet
growing and needing
to be rescued from the dark.
Far off, unknown to you in your dark cage
One is coming.
He’s left His home
His position
His power
His pride
To find… you.
You grow and need,
it’s such a struggle,
and it hurts.
The dark cage shrinks.
You can’t move.
Light breaks through.
blinding…
Hands bloodied by the search gently
grab you, pull you and hold you
in a new comforting dark.
This is what we’re up against. On the bright side, as Eeyore once noted, we haven’t had an earthquake lately.
My oldest son, a bona fide expert in all things Super-hero-ish is having relatively serious issues these days: Disney has purchased Marvel. His Spidey sense is tingling, and he is climbing the walls: he knows danger is afoot. This is no doubt due to observing with the grief only children can summon the horrific results of the Disneyfication of Pooh Bear. He knows, if history teaches us anything, that Nothing Good can come of this.
In a misguided but well-meaning attempt to assuage his fears, I said, “Son, what’s the worst thing that could happen?” Big mistake. His deep blue eyes looked at me with a mixture of pain and dread, and he proceeded to tell me what he envisions could occur around conference tables at the ABC/Disney Conglomerate (or, OsCorp, as he likes to call it), and I confess, I was truly frightened:
Soon, he envisions, there will be (not there may be, but there will be) ridiculous song and dance numbers in all new Marvel films: “No one fights like the Hulk, no one bites like the Hulk, no one’s neck’s as incredibly thick as the Hulk. He uses green in all of his decorating! Oh what a Superhero! The Hulk!” The boy shudders at the thought of Spidey belting out “A Whole New World.” I felt his pain.
He fears there will now be 101 Avengers, and the next time we see them, their uniforms will be white with black polka dots. (because Disney’s all about mass marketing, and driving a franchise into the ground with over-exposure. Pirates of the Caribbean, anyone? Only Disney could make it hard to sit through more Johnny Depp.)
The plots of the films will indeed suffer: The Hulk will probably meet his long lost cousin, the big blue hairy dude Sully from “Monsters, Inc.”, and in a sequel to “Beauty and the Beast”, Pepper Potts will finally meet her grammy: Mrs. Potts, not to mention her cute Uncle Chip. A side-plot will have the Human Torch continually picking fights with Lumierre, until they finally become best friends. Belle no doubt will try to join the X-Men to gain access to Prof. X’s library, to no avail.
Oh goodness, my boy’s right. This could be very, very bad.
Somebody needs to give him a raise. The man’s work is never done.
What if these people at Disney continue their reign of entertainment terror with no adult supervision? There is no telling what could happen. Imagine the sequel to “The Little Mermaid”: Ursula and Doc Oc get married. Their children all have eight metallic legs, big lips, and though they can’t swim, they can sing, to everyone’s mutual misery. What if they try to make Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury the new Mary Poppins? What then? We’re gonna have to call in Winston the Wolf again, I can tell you that for a dang fact. Only The Wolf can clean up a mess of Disney-sized proportions.
What happens when they try to re-animate the X-Men franchise? Do you want Tom Hanks as the voice of Wolverine, giving us all P.S.A.s about motorcycle safety? “Wearing a helmet is really using your head!” Oh, help. Do we really need cute little talking animal sidekicks and preachy moralizing in every superhero movie? “Squirrel!”
Do you want these girls anywhere near your super-hero franchises? No. No. No. A thousand times no.
Do you want to see Beauty and Kelsey Grammar-as-The-Beast? I didn’t think so. Do you want to see Professor Xavier as the principal of Rosewood Day School from “Pretty Little Liars” instead of in his rightful place at Professor X’s School for the Gifted? For that matter, what are we gonna do when this one comes out: “Jean Grey and the Seven X-Dwarves”? Imagine the set of the X-Men’s gorgeous school when those Disney Princesses get done with that place…there won’t be a spare bit of pink satin ribbon or a blue bird left in the entire country, and all those mutants are gonna be worried about will be the Kiss of True Love. Gag.
And you know that The Mouse will want in on all this. So, soon we’re gonna have to suffer through Super Mickey (with the vocal talents courtesy of Justin Bieber), and his arch-nemesis, Dastardly Donald (voice talents courtesy of Sterling Knight from the riveting Disney film “Starstruck”). The film will include special appearances by Super Pluto, and The Green Goofy (voiced by Zac and Cody, God help us all).
Do you really want to have to surf through these shows next Fall:
The Super Hero Babies
Cloudy with a Chance of Ultron
The Suite Life of Ironman (actually, I might watch that one…)
But, though evil tries to prevail, there is still hope in this world: the inevitable protest marches, boycotts and other assorted public temper tantrums are all being organized by true heroes Sheldon Cooper and Leonard Hofstadter at their local Pasadena Comic Book Store. Prizes will be awarded for best protest iphone app, best costume, and best use of silly string theory at Stan Lee’s home. My son and I will be there, dressed, of course, as Spidey and Aunt May. You coming, or what?
She gets out of bed
and heads to the bathroom
to begin her well-honed
process
of making herself presentable to the outside world.
She emerges from the shower at looks at herself
in the humid haze.
So ugly, she thinks.
She covers up cleansed skin
With garments designed to herd her disobedient body
Into pleasing silhouettes.
Clothes are chosen for the lines they draw,
The flaws they hide,
The rules they obey,
The beauties they highlight,
The eyes which will judge.
Her clean face is covered with
paint and powder
engineered to be “natural looking.”
Scars and blemishes are hidden,
Eyebrows and lips are re-constructed out of
the artful manipulation of sharpened pencils.
Youth is colored back in,
Eyelashes appear out of thin air.
Perfumes deceive.
Her hair is tamed,
burnt and trapped
and then forced into submission,
forbidden to interact with the wind.
She now looks like a Lady;
modest, reserved, proper,
ready for the office,
appropriate for church,
not calling attention to herself.
Oh Pandora, how I love thee… It’s only taken me about three years, but I think I’ve finally done it: I have created The Perfect Pandora Station. Here’s how I did it:
Create a station for your favorite singer/songwriter. That’s a person who both sings and writes their music. An actual musician. Usually, these folks can’t be pigeon-holed into just one musical genre. For me, my favorite is Mary Chapin Carpenter.
Like any Ray Charles or Otis Redding song that happens to play.
Dislike all current country music. Real country music was only made before 1988. Then, like the Wild Frontier, it just disappeared (or, more truthfully, we killed it). What has replaced it is just wishing it was actually country.
Like some good rock that wanders in, like Sublime.
Add some variety: throw in a Christian singer/songwriter like Rich Mullins or Ashley Cleveland (or, if you’re really living on the edge like me, both). This really freaks Pandora out, but you get some neat music.
Add more variety: throw in a wild card like Primus.
Consult a beloved teenager and add in their current favorite. My beloved teenager recommended Evanescence and Paramore. That really gave the station some current spice.
Stir carefully, as though making candy or no bakes, for about three years.
Now when I listen to my Perfectly Stirred Pandora Station, I hear stuff like:
Statisticians Blues-Todd Snider Fortune Teller-Alison Krauss and Robert Plant Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain-Willie Nelson Right Now-Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris Hello-Evanescence Ideas are Like Stars-Mary Chapin Carpenter What I Got-Sublime Toes-Norah Jones Come Thou Fount-Fiddlesticks Long Time Gone-Dixie Chicks Pour Some Sugar on Me-Def Leppard Seven Spanish Angels-Ray Charles
I think one of the things God must truly loathe about being God is all of the Sonic orders and WalMart lists He gets.
This occurred to me recently after I heard someone pose this question, “What do Calvinists pray for? Since they think everything is already set in stone, what in the world do they ask for?” While that’s interesting to ponder (what do Calvinists pray for, really? Since they believe His will is already ironclad, asking God to intercede in any given situation seems sort of silly.), it draws attention to the fact that most of us as Christians are still in our infancy. Our conversations with God have yet to evolve from “I need…I want…Give me…Bless me…”
Why do we think praying is only about asking for stuff? We’ve diminished speaking with God to the level of conversations we have at drive-thru windows or WalMart lines.
“Cookie. Now.”
Consider the evolution of relationships between parents and children: at first, little Johnny can’t speak mommy and daddy’s language at all. He just cries, coos, and grunts. Then, he discovers mommy and daddy can be manipulated with his pudgy little index finger and an ear-piercing scream. Mommy and daddy let that go on for about half a second if they’re smart, and then little Johnny learns his first word, the all-powerful “NO!” Even after little Johnny has full fluency in mommy and daddy’s native tongue (which comes from hearing them…), their conversations center largely around what Johnny wants, and when they’re going to get it for him. Johnny may love his folks, but that love is largely based on the fact that they provide for his needs, not because of the human attributes they possess.
But, Johnny grows up. And if he’s gained any wisdom or thoughtfulness, when that happens, he’ll see that his folks are people with layers. He’ll see they are people who struggle, fear, love, laugh, dream, create, and wonder. It will freak him out at first, but if he loves them, he’ll make the effort to work through that. And if Johnny loves them, he will want to know them for who they are, not for what they can do for him. In fact, Johnny will really be a man when he starts doing things that will please them, without them even having to ask, and when he begins talking to them about their lives, their hopes, their dreams and he finds he no longer needs to be the center of their universe, he’ll have the opportunity to have a real mature relationship with his parents. The bravery and honesty required to get to this place is nothing to gloss over. It’s huge.
Our relationship with God is sort of like that, but the analogy is off, because God is supposed to be father/friend/husband all at once, which is really a diffcult thing to get a handle on, especially when one gets out of the drive-thru line and looks in the window.
Prayer is a conversation, an exchange of thoughts and ideas, hurts, victories, struggles, griefs, dreams. It’s a deep meditation, a personal minefield, a terror, a quiet. At some point, the relationship should evolve past “Lord, please bless this food and my job and my family and help me win that bid on Ebay. Amen.” Intercessory prayer is a whole other level of prayer, and, then, there’s a very sacred personal level of prayer where there are no words at all.
Sometimes, though very rarely, because I’m still growing, and it takes time and a level of personal discipline I’m still far from, we just sit quietly together. No words. Just sitting still, considering in awesome wonder the worlds His hands have made. Then sings my soul…with His.
Just got a phone call from Chelly. Because she’s brilliant, she’s realized something that should make all of us shudder from the pure abject evil of it:
There’s an American Idol Conspiracy.
It would appear those crazy kids at FOX are messing with fate. Like all of the best conspiracies, it’s hidden in plain sight, and you won’t even notice it until it’s too late, and then, BAM, just like that, your little life will be ruined.
We will not let them get away with this. We shall expose them, and then, we shall go to Walgreens. (It’s what we do.)
We know what you’ve done, you little weasel.
Now, personally, I think all of this was Ryan Seacrest’s idea. That little dude walks out looking all dapper and cute every darn week, for years and years, and years, and no one has asked him to sing a stinkin’ note. The dude’s pissed. He can warble as well as two or three of those people from the premiere episodes! Hollywood is such a cruel world. Really, I think the continual rejection just made the man snap. I’ve done some investigating, and here’s what happened: he walked right into the programming office at FOX while they were all trying to figure out how they were gonna compete with Game of Thrones and Homeland (there’s really only so much Kiefer Sutherland can do, you know), sat down innocuously at a keyboard in the Dilbert pit,typed a line or two with his perfect little manicured digits, hit enter, and set his devilish little plan into motion. Now who knows what’s gonna happen if we don’t get this mess straightened out.
What’d he do, you ask? Oh, I’ll tell you what he did. It’s diabolical. It’s dastardly. It’s messin’-with-the-fabric-of-the-universe-dangerous. It’s shameful. (Shame on you Ryan Seacrest. Shame.) Ryan Seacrest, you see, did something heinous.
It’s stuns me what they allow these people to wear in public, but let’s just solve one crisis at a time.
He changed the date of the show. I KNOW!! It comes on tonight instead of its rightful night-tomorrow. He really did it, didn’t he? It’s the final performance show, the last chance for Jessica and Phillip to dazzle and amaze us, the last chance for Randy to wax philosophical while wearing his mother’s tablecloth, the last chance for us to evaluate the Final Two. And he moved it, like Benjamin Linus moving the island. Un-freakin’-believable. You think you’re mad? Shoot. You should have heard Chelly! (It was bad. Actually, you may have heard her.) You woulda thought CBS had re-cast Sheldon Cooper!
We can’t let Seacrest win. I’m watching tonight. Who’s with me?
p.s. Phillip. That Jessica has pipes, but I think she’s an android. Anyone who can do this should win, period:
You grow and need,
She emerges from the shower at looks at herself
It would appear those crazy kids at FOX are messing with fate. Like all of the best conspiracies, it’s hidden in plain sight, and you won’t even notice it until it’s too late, and then, BAM, just like that, your little life will be ruined.
