Review: Food Inc.

Anyone that goes to Epic for even a short period of time will find out pretty quickly that we are quite the "foodie" conglomerate. Some of our most intimate interactions happen over lunch, house church potlucks, or a weekend dinner. We all enjoy a good meal, but more often than not don't really think about its origin, nor do we often prefer to.

Looking into the faults of our food system can seem like opening up a bottomless can of worms that is ultimately hopeless. Just about everything is wrong with it, so why even bother trying to fix it? Robert Kenner's documentary Food Inc. presents a wealth of starting points without overwhelming its audience with the multiple problems we can face when we walk into a grocery store or restaurant just trying to find a decent, affordable meal.

While I could attempt to rehash the film, I'd like to share a review written by one of my long-time journalism icons, Mary F. Pols, who can identify with those folks that may be a little sick and tired of hearing that doom is lurking around the corner if they eat a hamburger: Find Review Here.

I promise I am not pushing you all to go see this film just because I am "one of those vegetarians." It's really important to evaluate how our food choices affect the environment, our health, and the access our impoverished neighbors have to healthy choices. You shouldn't have to be middle class to be able to buy organic or get decent health education. One of the most heartbreaking scenes in the film was the story of a low-income immigrant family that faces the harsh reality that a fast-food hamburger is cheaper than a couple of apples. Guys, we need to take better care of each other, especially with something as simple as food. This movie is an easy place to start doing some research and learning how we can vote with the contents of our shopping carts for a more transparent food system that provides greater, healthier resources to Americans of every ethnicity, age and socioeconomic level.

- And if you want to watch a film that hits this point home right in our Los Angeles backyard, check out the documentary "The Garden." Just ask me if you want to borrow it sometime. :)

The Sound of Music

This weekend I had the pleasure of attending not one but two concerts with some of Epic’s fellow music aficionados. Upon retrospect, I would probably never recommend doing this, as it drives your energy level into seemingly irreversible low zones (but when two of your favorite bands are playing the same weekend, what is one to do?). However, this auditory overload allowed me to remember why it is that I love the musical experience so much.

I use the word “experience” because it goes far beyond just listening. Music is a deeply spiritual art for me; random combinations of sounds can make me feel close to God. Most people lean one of two ways in relation to how they enjoy music: listening for good lyrics or listening for good sound. I am definitely the latter, and can honestly listen to an album a dozen times without ever really paying attention to the lyrics. This is not to diminish the power of a well-written song; it’s just how I’m wired.

While they may seem confusing or even unnecessary to some, there can be such freedom in experiencing abstract, diverse sounds. Music takes me many directions either in memory, my current doings, or dreams of places I have never been. They can mean any million things to any one person; a song can make someone burst into tears while making someone else want to jump up and down in joy. Everyone has their own musical experience and their own musical tastes - no judging here! :) 

Most of the time, good music makes me want to move. When I was a kid and my mom played piano in our living room, my brother and I would run and jump and dance all around the room. When I learned how to drive, I discovered the joy of just travelling nowhere in particular, with a favorite CD turned up as loud as I wanted, until I’d gotten out whatever restless bug was in my system (I still love doing this now). It’s no secret that I have a passion for dance. It brings to life everything that I love both physically and emotionally, providing a rich spiritual experience for me. It's almost impossible for me to sit still when a rhythm really gets going. I may not understand what a series of sounds means, and certainly can’t explain that meaning in words, but I can communicate them through movement.

I think it is important for everyone to have some cathartic, creative experience they can use to communicate the incommunicable. For me, this is dance; for others, it may be painting, construction, a sport, or music itself. I cannot wait to experience community in heaven because I think our ability to create will only be opened up a thousand-fold. The better we understand who we are and what we love, the better we can express ourselves and encourage others to foster their own means of expression.

I love seeing creativity blossom at Epic, and I honestly wish we saw more of it. I totally understand the fear to share one’s own art; I am one of the worst with this. It’s easier to let things stay in your head than put them out there for someone to judge or re-define. But for me, keeping my creative output bottled up for too long makes me feel isolated and unfulfilled. I feel like no one really knows the true me, that there is no one that would be able to hear what I actually think a song means or read one of my essays without thinking I’m weird or incompetent or untalented. But the point of art is not to be perfect or the best; it’s to share our deepest experiences honestly, in love. I hope that we can learn to feel safe in this community to express what may be difficult but necessary.

As for me, I hope to have the time someday to bring dance to Epic, especially for our kids. I get such a kick out of seeing kids move to their own rhythm and make up all kinds of random stuff, just as I got to do to my mom’s piano at home. But for now I just want to get better at sharing my experiences with art and how I find God’s beauty in them, and I would love to hear about those of others.

St. Joseph Ballet's 2009 Annual Concert

From Here...

Saint Joseph Ballet's 2009 Annual Concert

Irvine Barclay Theatre, May 28-31

Internationally celebrated choreographers Jeff Slayton and Nami Yamamoto present World Premiere works and the legendary Mark Haim returns to reprise his acclaimed piece What Is Too Strong For Breaking. Show times are 8pm Thursday through Saturday, with a 2:30pm matinee added on Saturday and Sunday.

Buy tickets here! http://www.thebarclay.org/custom/events/event10.asp?eventID=1195

For more information about Saint Joseph Ballet, click here to learn about the fantastic work it is doing to prepare at-risk youth to face the obstacles of life, embracing the hope and opportunity modeled by the intensive art-making process of dance.

Review: The Soloist

Even before the hyperemotional “August Rush” graced theaters, my threshold for sentimental musician films had been extremely low. Seeing the trailer for “The Soloist” did not really help my preconceptions of the film with its enthusiastic swells of Beethoven, a teary-eyed Jamie Foxx obviously pretending to play the cello, and twirling pigeons flying into a big blue sky. However, this cynic was pleasantly surprised, as the film never travels too far into the cheap sentimentality zone and attempts to shed an honest light on the story of an artist who has been devastated by mental illness.

It’s based on the story of Steve Lopez (Robert Downey, Jr.), a columnist for the Los Angeles Times who meets a homeless schizophrenic named Nathaniel Anthony Ayers (Jamie Foxx), who just so happens to be a former Julliard student. His mental illness has taken everything away from him except for his love of music, and Ayers now haunts the tunnels and street corners of LA struggling to express this love on a two-string violin. The visible talent of this man sparks curiosity in Steve, and what starts out as another good idea for a column unintentionally ends becomes a crusade to bring justice to Nathaniel’s broken life.

The film explores how our devotion to the things we love can be inhibited by the struggles of life and, in turn, how that devotion can inhibit our ability to recognize and deal with those struggles. Nathaniel lives music, but his illness stops him throughout his life from pursuing what he loves most. As a child, he experiences a hazy, delicate world interrupted by hallucinations; after entering Julliard, these hallucinations become extreme and terrifying, forcing him out of school and into a life of desperation he can never escape.

Nathaniel lands in Skid Row, surrounded by those like him that live each day hanging by a thread. There are an estimated 90,000 homeless living in Los Angeles, and their existence is anything but sugar-coated in the film. Skid Row looks like hell on earth, and as Steve follows his new friend into his backyard, his face reveals the fear, discomfort and astonishment that arises when one realizes that right next door are those living in constant pain. While some of these scenes are soured by their political tone, the honest faces on the screen make a compelling case for activism within our own community.

Steve lives with a different kind of hopelessness in the midst of a dying newspaper industry. His cool, cynical demeanor only acts as a cover for a man that really needs to rediscover passion for what he does, rather than continuing to live in the routine of a job that’s pretty thankless. While Nathaniel provides a source for a much needed story, he also demonstrates a joy that creates an itch in Steve he cannot ignore. The visual indulgences of the film show the beauty to be found alongside the terror of Nathaniel’s mind, including a “Fantasia”-esque clip that represents his interpretations of music in fantastic bursts of color.

However, the reality of Nathaniel’s situation grounds their relationship. Compassion can often be a one-way street, and Steve feels the weight of helping a friend that cannot help himself. He is simply a writer that sought out a good story and never wanted to be held responsible for the wellbeing of his subject. His guilt prevents him from leaving, yet it only leads to resentment and distrust from Nathaniel and those around him. The truth is that Steve cannot cure Nathaniel’s illness, and Nathaniel cannot cure Steve’s aimlessness. What they can offer each other is accountability and encouragement to make the most of what they’ve got.

If any of the film’s many subject points was made its focus, it might have been wonderful; unfortunately, it spreads itself too thin by trying to tackle them all. Their exploration is only partial, leaving the viewer wondering what this story was actually supposed to be about. Is it a documentary on homelessness? Is it an extravagant newspaper subscription solicitation? Is it a story about Ayers? Or is it a story about Lopez? The answer is all of the above, and yet not really any of the above. My advice is to choose what you will take away from it, just as Steve chooses simply to try helping a friend in need. Like the mind of Nathaniel, the story is a bit chaotic, but its moments of honesty are beautiful. 

The Art of Church-Hating

I apologize in advance for the lengthiness of this first post, but before I go off on too many tangents, I want to share the story of how I came to Epic and, more importantly, where I came from.

Epic is a place for those folks that want to connect with God, but don’t want the rigid legalism that comes with going to a church that believes your spiritual walk is all about reading your Bible every day, dressing modestly, praying before each meal, and shunning psychology and secular art as (probably) the roots of all evil. Welcome to my childhood.

When I was in the fourth grade, my Sunday School teacher began teaching us Greek. Note: When I shared this with Erin, he thought it was the coolest thing ever… nerd. :) Seriously, what nine-year-old dreams of spending their week studying to get a 100% on their Greek alphabet test? And honestly, what was the point? It wasn't like we were about to preach the word to the unsuspecting third graders (or even remember what we learned one week to the next). But I grew up the intellectual church, one that frowned on those other “fluffy” churches that didn’t use words like epistemology and justification and elitism.

In all fairness, the people at my church really did love each other. We were a small church of about 200-250, and our families grew up together. The countless home-school clubs, evening potlucks, volleyball games and camping trips were a testament to the fact that we genuinely liked being together. However, while I had the “second family” a church community becomes to some, I did not associate it with my definition of Church because our worship services were unflinchingly academic. Thus, I grew to believe that the most important factor in choosing a church was not its community or its outreach, but its theological soundness (which, for us, existed in a narrow space defined by Calvinism) and ability to answer tough questions about God and the Bible correctly. Now, these things are important, but they can create a very one-sided approach to one’s relationship with God – one that doesn’t allow much space for mistakes and, especially, doubt.

I think the “church-haters” to whom Epic folks refer are those that, like me, grew up in the church and then woke up one day to realize they didn’t actually know why they went and, in fact, they didn’t really want to. My time came when I started attending Biola, and the list of proper Christian habits grew a bit suffocating. My childhood church had come to a pretty traumatic end (which is a story for another time) soon before I finished high school. So when I moved to Southern California, I wasn’t connected to any Christian community and thus began a church-hopping trend that lasted through the end of college. I really hated it; my spiritual self-concept swung between feeling like church should have shown me deeper truth and feeling guilty for having the pretension to think church should have been about me at all.

One issue was that I had moved into a culture of Christian discontent, foreign from the church I grew up in where people just did and believed as they were told. Most of the people around me had something to complain about regarding church, Biola’s chapel services, our Bible classes or whatever their particular religious annoyance was: “The worship was weird,” “The speaker wouldn’t get to his point,” “I’ve heard this all before,” or “I don’t get how this applies to me.” My main complaint was about all of the complainers. I felt like every church I visited had its own set of complaints that I didn’t care to hear about over and over. Why couldn’t people just deal? Why did things have to be so emotional? Why couldn’t people see that it wasn’t all about them? Actually, I was being quite the hypocrite, accusing these people of being judgmental and moody when I myself refused to show them acceptance and a sympathetic ear.

But this was simply a symptom of a deeper problem: I was unhappy in church and didn’t really believe it could be a good thing in my life. I hadn’t felt connected to God in a church since I was in high school, if truly ever. I wanted so badly to have the sense of Christian family I’d felt as a kid, but it never occurred to me that maybe church wasn’t going to provide the kind of community I sought: one where I could grow into who I was emotionally and spiritually without having to hide all the messiness that arises along the self-discovery route. So, I finally just stopped going. While everything in my upbringing told me this was “jumping off the deep end,” releasing my death grip on church attendance helped me to shed the guilt, irritation and subsequent apathy I had felt in my faith. I knew that if God was truly who he said he was – Goodness and Beauty and Love – then having a relationship with him had to be about more than all of the graceless expectations.

Not going to church was ironically one of the best things I could have done for my spiritual health, as during this hiatus, I began to explore God’s love and its unimaginable variety of forms. “Following my heart,” if you will, I dove into the arts, movement, conversation and solitude. I spent a lot of time just wandering off and writing for hours, letting God move in my spirit and work through the millions of questions I had about who I was, what I understood about spirituality and how I connected with God. It was really tough; I had to let go of many of the definitions and guidelines I had followed my whole life. I unearthed a lot of disappointment and anger towards my childhood church, the pastor of that church, the leadership at my Christian high school and Biola, and especially myself. But slowly I felt God stir in my heart in ways that were sometimes overwhelming, yet so natural.

See, I realized that God is not some shapeless form that exists across a giant chasm, out of touch with our everyday experiences. He reveals himself in simple, personal ways. God showed himself to me in the wind at home on the San Francisco Bay, lovely little films I discovered by accident, conversations over tea with a good friend, and the way my little cousins laughed and gave me spontaneous hugs. He continues to show himself to me in the graciousness of my co-workers, the ethnic diversity of Southern California and all of the culinary perks that come with it, the gorgeous wildflowers of the Santa Ana mountains, and quiet moments at home just listening to good music. And he has shown himself to me through Epic.

By the time I graduated from Biola, I had been consistently away from church for about a year and had developed a rather cynical view towards the whole thing. But rather than reaching graduation day shouting, “Finally! Freedom from all Christian structure!” I decided I wanted to try again, with the hope that I might just find something good. Not perfect, not the product of a PhD in Theology, but honest and good. About a month after moving to Fullerton and looking around, I found Epic. I’ve still got a lot of healing to do in the whole church area, but I feel like Epic has been appropriately described as a watering hole for those wandering through their faith. But rather than describing it as the happy ending to my battle with church, I think it's just been an opportunity to get a picture of authentic Christian community, in preparation for whatever role I take in the future to nurture it.

So while I’m here, I would love to share some of the ways that God is moving in my life, hopefully creating a space to honestly share the ways that God connects with all of us, whether through art, athletics, literature, music, nature, conversations, work… whatever. I want to learn about the many dimensions of love, and I think that starts with following the things that tug on our heartstrings all the way down to their roots, finding God in both our complex passions and the simple things we think are beautiful. Church can be pretty damaging (I and my family are living proof), but when God is allowed to permeate who we are individually, we can collaborate as a community in service and creativity and just pure joy. At the end of the day, I personally think it’s worth taking the chance.