Un-Screening - Post 3

My favorite line of Iron Man 2 was when Pepper Potts and Tony Stark are on an airplane.  There is a smoldering guilt, under which Tony persists the whole movie about how awful he’s making Pepper’s life.  On the plane, he tries to distract from the gathering relational, corporate, and psychological chaos by suggesting a vacation.  “Everyone needs to recharge their batteries.”  But Pepper takes him literally.  “No, Tony, I don’t run on batteries.”  Tony has become the machine man.

Can technology save the world?  By wedding ourselves to technology, will we progress as a human race?  Will we be at peace?

These superhero movies are violent in a way that makes me wonder if the violence is inherent, latently present in our technology, or at least our visions of technology.  Charlie’s games with cars are always more violent than his games with faced, and presumably en-souled figurines.  Playing with cars, there are few alternatives to banging them into each other.

When I read Bruce Springsteen’s memoir, he made much of a charmingly flawed math equation.  To his way of thinking, one and one can equal three and this happens when band members make a sound or a moment greater than the sum of their parts.  For Springsteen, this is rock n’ roll.  If we think of humanity again, faced people, ensouled people (there are no other kinds!), we find that they have parts, they are complex, but not complex the way a machine is.  There is a depth to every person.  We describe all things in a way that they transcend the sum of their parts.  It strikes me that this is why we struggle to articulate this depth.  We use the language of religion and symbol.

I reminded a neighbor of this.  Yes, I’m a pastor.  But when I ask if you are religious, I’m not asking your opinion of doctrine.  I want to know if you know how deep we all are.  Everybody knows that a face is not just the sum of its parts.  Everybody.  We are all more religious than we let on.  No matter how many technological fireworks distract me from it, I’m thankful for Pepper Potts’ little line: “No, Tony, I don’t run on batteries.”

I was with a friend today and asked him if he was going to talk to somebody about prayer, how would he talk about it.  Ultimately, he wasn’t sure.  And I felt that was a good answer!  Religion has to do with the depths inside each human person.  It has to do with many things: memories, Scripture, spouses and children, mothers and fathers, tradition, bad desires, good desires, images, symbols.  Compared with how these things strike us in prayer, we often find words to be inadequate tools to get these things across!  We are more than the sum of our parts.  We are more than machines.  We don’t run on batteries.