Abstract Prostitutes

Have you ever had something you’ve thought about for a long time suddenly become clear? Depending on what it is this clarity may not always be pleasant but the illuminating effect never seems to be detrimental.

It is late as I write, about 2 in the morning. I was sitting on the couch reading, enjoying the quiet. The television was on with the volume low. The Outer Limits (the new version) came on and I briefly diverted attention from my book to check it out. I used to watch the Outer Limits when I was a boy in the early sixties. Of all the programs on television at that time I was thoroughly transfixed when the show came on. The control voice would take over, telling me in that quiet but supremely confident, authoritative tone that control of my television set had been taken from me. I was now about to take a journey that reached from the awe and mystery of the inner mind to the Outer Limits.

So what does this have to do with illumination? Well, I’ve long compared in my mind the new Outer Limits with the old. The new is, quite frankly, pathetic by comparison. For a long time I’ve thought about why. Not just the Outer Limits but a lot of remakes be they songs, movies, television series, etc. The old shows often had cheesy special effects by today’s standards. But the older shows had real stories. The question that has lingered in my mind was why the new shows seemed to substitute great special effects for pathetic stories and still think they were producing something people really cared about.

The first Bruce Lee movies were really cheesy with some special effects. They even had peoples’ lips moving and saying words their lips didn’t form like the characters in the old Godzilla movies. But nobody cared. We would all gladly subject ourselves to a ton of cheesy effects to bathe in five minutes of martial arts glory Bruce Lee style. And now, over thirty-five years later, I still feel the same way. We will put up with breaded chicken if the meat is good. But if it’s all bread and hardly any meat we feel ripped off.

So as I looked at the Outer Limits and thought about how it prostituted special effects and denied me a character or plot I could identify with as the old series routinely did I had a flash of intuition, for want of a better descriptive term. I remembered the times as a boy I tried to lie to my parents in order to avoid the punishment I knew would follow behind some stupid or disobedient thing I’d done. I remember trying to carefully craft a lie in my mind that I felt would be the best fit for the situation. But even if I were able to come up with a suitable enough rhetorical fog that would shroud the issue for a time it would usually be found out to be the falsehood it was later.

That was because the lie was always an abstract thing. I would always come up with something that had a slight ring of truth, a verbal chameleon that would briefly take on the color of truth only to be seen for what it was at some point. The lie was plausible but it didn’t have that solid sound like knocking on a desk made of real oak. It had that weak sound as my parents relentlessly knocked on lies made of plywood. And they had that sound because they were abstract, a thing separated from concrete reality. I had thought I was clever enough to substitute the abstraction for the reality in my boyish, inexperienced deviousness. I was proven wrong time and again. It happens to grown people all the time, also. Just watch any of the forensic crime dramas.

That’s when I saw the connection and it became clear. The new Outer Limits was an abstraction. On the old one the stories had certain themes that were time tested and resonated with that core that links every human being to every other. And as long as that part of a person is being reached they don’t really mind putting up with a little cheesiness. On the new one the characters fell into hurtful situations or were killed and I felt no connection to them. I didn’t care if they lived or died because it all felt dead from the beginning.

And so I realized that I couldn’t connect for the same reason my lies never had the solid sound of reality. My lies had been abstractions. Things I thought would pass that parental truth detector because they were plausible. But I didn’t know that my parents didn’t depend only on plausibility. They depended on experience and instinct as well. They drew from a body of shared human communal experience. They had told the same lies when they were young while in the same frame of mind I was in.

Abstractions have no juice in them. They are to reality what the scarecrow is to the farmer. Crows perch on the scarecrow and eat corn from the field the scarecrow is designed to keep them out of because they have no respect for it. It’s an abstraction. It doesn’t command the necessary awe. The more self-righteous we become the more our arguments become abstract because self-righteousness, however presented, is our righteousness and requires ever more intricate arguments to justify itself whereas one who stands for God can even afford to remain silent (Matt. 27:14).

In the twelfth chapter of Mark the Sadducees put a lot of energy into concocting a very abstract scenario in which they thought to trap Jesus. But after letting them blow all their abstract smoke Jesus says…

And Jesus answering said unto them, Do ye not therefore err, because ye know not the scriptures, neither the power of God? For when they shall rise from the dead, they neither marry, nor are given in marriage; but are as the angels which are in heaven. And as touching the dead, that they rise: have ye not read in the book of Moses, how in the bush God spake unto him, saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? He is not the God of the dead, but the God of the living: ye therefore do greatly err. – Mark 12: 24-27.

Jesus, never out of touch with God and therefore reality, leaves erring greatly to those who love their abstractions. But when we come to ourselves (Luke 15:17) we realize that everything real and concrete was always in our Father’s house. The Latin meaning of "prostitute" means to cause to stand in front. When we are in love with our abstractions we are prostitutes, standing in front of Christ's righteousness, not having enough sense to take ourselves off the corner.

Article Source: http://christian-topics.info

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