on the feast of dionysus. . . or thoughts on specks and planks
when the problems in here are worse than the ones out there
So, I am not exactly known for my timeliness when it comes to addressing pop culture. There are a few reasons for this: 1) I am mostly disconnected from pop culture; 2) I like to give my thoughts time to marinate; 3) Sometimes, I forget the writing ideas I have.
Here we have the perfect storm: 1) I didn’t actually watch the Olympic opening ceremonies; 2) When I heard about the controversy surrounding The Feast of Dionysus/the parody of the Last Supper, I didn’t want to feel pressure to react right away (i.e. participate in Internet discourse); 3) I wrote down these notes two weeks ago and am only just now getting to this.
That being said, having ignored, reflected, and forgotten, I now want to offer some comments on the Olympic opening ceremonies (a month after the fact) and suggest a pattern for how Christians deal with things like this (a perennial, evergreen concern). What I am about to write will fall into two categories: 1) how learned, wannabe cool Christians responded; 2) how I think we should respond.
That people freaked out about this is obvious and intentional on the part of the event designer. He wanted to provoke a reaction and knew precisely what he was doing. I am just not that interested in the fact that a good number of Christians were (rightly, intentionally) offended by an egregious, unnecessary, and ultimately childish mocking of their faith. As I said, this is what the artist intended. There’s a word double move on the part of contemporary artists: on the one hand, they want to pretend to be incorrigible rabblerousers who don’t play by your rules, man; on the other hand, they throw up their hands in astonishment at the implication that they’ve offended someone. No, this part is to be expected. The funny part (not ha ha funny) to me was all of the cool Christians who rushed in and were all, “Nah, you uneducated rubes, this wasn’t mocking The Last Supper, this was a fun recreation of the Feast of Dionysus. Silly little backwater Christians. Be a big brain like me.” Jonathan Pageau (who rocks) recorded a video in the aftermath explaining the shortsightedness of this approach. To say, “Hey, everybody calm down: no one is mocking Christians here; the artist is only recreating a pagan, bacchanalian orgy using drag queens. Chill out!” is really selling short the horror of the repaganization of our culture. Pageau’s point is twofold: 1) the tableau was obviously a recreation of The Last Supper; any claim otherwise is straightforward gaslighting; 2) even if The Feast of Dionysus were the original intent, this is not exactly a cultural win. To praise a debauched pagan festival at one of the cornerstone cultural events in the West is not what the kids these days call progress. So, Christians who enjoy scoring points in the culture war by dunking on other Christians, maybe think twice?
Vrrr-clunk! (This is the noise ChatGPT suggested for an abrupt change of gears.) I am actually not that hot and bothered by the Last Supper tableau. This is par for the course when it comes to pagan art. All that postmodern art is capable of doing is parodying and mocking previous genuine artistic creations. What I worry about on my side of the culture war is how little too many Christians seem to care about cleaning up their own houses and how often the real evil is out there with those people. When I first started teaching, I enjoyed taking students through a poem by Mark Jarman called “Unholy Sonnet: After the Praying.” Here is how the poem begins:
After the praying, after the hymn-singing,
After the sermon’s trenchant commentary
On the world’s ills, which makes ours secondary. . .
Jarman’s point is pretty discernible: in the church’s preaching, the ills of the congregation are often secondary to the ills that exist out there. The world’s ills are so easy to spot and easy to mock and easy to chastize and easy to demean and easy to compare ourselves favorably to. But our own ills? Whoo, boy. You’ve got to be careful about those.
A couple of weeks ago, the campus pastor at my school asked our assembled faculty and staff an incisive question: “Do we weep over our own sin as much as we weep over the sins of the world?” This question ought to be a gut punch. It is so much fun to look at another person’s sins. Right/left, Democrat/Republican, Christian/atheist—it doesn’t matter. We all excel, we are each meticulous accountants when it comes to tracking how others fall short. When it comes to our own sins, we are full of grace, mercy, and understanding.
So, when I look at people getting miffed and taking to social media over the Olympic tableau, my problem is not that they are misinterpreting the sign (as I said, that is evident). My problem is that focusing externally can be a great way of never having to deal with your own stuff. There’s a reason Jesus uttered his famous line about taking the plank out of your own eye before removing the speck from your brother’s. We all want to get this order backward; it is our natural inclination. Jesus doesn’t say, notably, that we shouldn’t care about the speck in our brother’s eye (we should!). What he says is we need to clean our house before we can help someone else clean his.
And, it must be said, I am as guilty of this as the next guy. It is so easy to want to play the role of “thundering prophet,” the bold truthspeaker whose facts don’t care about your feelings. However, I think we would all do better to take some time for deep introspection, to ask ourselves if we have done our part to bring beauty, holiness, and wonder into this world. To repurpose a line from MLK, we cannot drive out darkness with angry tweeting; we can only drive out darkness with light.
Let’s be light, brothers and sisters. Darkness cannot overcome the light, as our Lord has said.