Make your own Messiah: Exorcising the sex abuse scandal

Watch the video, speakers as blaring as you can get them,


The heart of the song is an appeal,

Say it. Say it. Say you'll be my messiah. It's drilled into out heads, and it feels good there. This song, like all of Prides'  songs so far combine all the synth-catchiness of Chromeo or FrankMusik with the type of stadium filling anthemic chants that no doubt has their big label backers reading good things in the tea leaves. The sound is right in the zeitgeist pocket with equal parts slick production and indie cred that I can't help but think of the career arc of Foster the People.

But what has me intrigued is the pairing of the song with its provocative video. The song itself is a plea, and like all pop music the easiest interpretation is a romantic one. The singer lays his hopes open for the audience. His desire to feel, to throw himself into his life is clearly missing something and the chorus gives us the answer. The messiah he wants is not supposed to save him, but deliver him to the future he wants. So the singer and the messiah leave the old life behind without even locking the door. They have a new life in a new place where he is the life of the party and they can build a life together.

That makes for a tight little love song. One where a boy full of potential needs a muse. He promises to drop everything because with her he can give her more, be more, than they could ever have on their own.

The video makes little sense in this context, and that is fairly par for the course for music videos today. There is a "concept"  which is supposed to memorable  because of its  humorous novelty and/or crass sexuality and/or aesthetic transgression (that's it, everyone go become music video directors now). If that was that was happening here the concept is an aesthetic bait and switch. "Oh wow, look at those cool hipster pries.....Oh my God they're murderers?!?...fin"

But if we read the video as media res then things get interesting.

First off, I love these guys. I want to play air-synth while groin thrusting in a convertible on the Isle of Skye and take adult catechism class just to hang out with them. And that surely is the point. We think "If priests were this cool I would be lining up to pop hosts every week!"

But the quick flashes work perfectly to make us know there is something under the surface while alsp perfectly not revealing what it is. The ominous  baseball bat seemingly is made friendly by the sad attempt of a European person to wield anything unrelated to cricket. But the feeling creeps. The pissing in the river just doesn't seem right, and they smoke too much.

Then the body comes out and I felt like I had been punched in the gut with a rusty knife. I had loved these men, loved their uncouth joie de vivre. And they were murderers. It was when the radio came out and was placed on the bag that the final connection is made though. The song is the story of the body.

This is what it looks like to put the hope of deliverance in the priests, in the church. By now the song has devolved into a chant, there is no hope or plan for a life built or of mutual provision. Just the plea to be my Messiah, but look what they deliver you unto. This is why the word choice is so important, why it is not just a romantic muse that the singer wants but something deeper with more overt religious feeling, a messiah. He was seduced by everything the priests offered, aren't they exactly the type of guys that would make you say "Hey he's coming too!" And with the reveal at the end all the positive feelings generated at the beginning are not just erased, they are inverted and magnified. How cruel, how evil they must be to be that happy, that flippant on their way to toss a corpse in a river with a Bible and a rosary sitting in front of them.

Macklemore's "Same Love" was credited with making a more persuasive artistic statement in favour of same-sex marriage than volumes of rights-based polemic. As an artistic outworking of the hope placed in and then betrayed by the Church I think this video makes the same type of statement. While none of the imagery involves children the very nature of a pop song makes us think first and foremost of the romantic reading. (Not that sexual exploitation is romantic, but as a perversion of the erotic it can be identified by its opposite) In the end there is no hope, no moral, only the sick feeling of wondering how we could ever have liked these characters, ever have seen any good in them.

The task of any Christian artistic response is not to say anything more about that sick feeling, but instead to show where the true hope for a Messiah is.



TL;DR Our idols, our false messiahs, will kill us. Even though we love them. Especially if we love them.

Eating the Kingdom

     There has been a lot of ink spilled trying to nail down the Kingdom of God. (multivalent pun alert) Used by Jesus as a term for something that is at hand and to come in the future, it is here and there both spatially and temporally. I do not want to try to map out what it is and means because it can mean many things and has been used to justify a heap of things, both good and bad. What interests me is a way to picture what an encounter with the Kingdom is like.

The Kingdom of God is an amuse bouche.

    Wait. What? Why? Why would I choose a metaphor associated with a privileged elaborate Western culinary experience? Because I need to own my own context, and since you are reading this on a computer and in English there is a good chance you share a lot of those same privileges. And again, this is not an effort to describe how we should act in the Kingdom, class structure in the Kingdom, ecological concern in the kingdom, etc. It is how we should understand our experience of the Kingdom.  Consider the following:

Our understanding of it is based on what we know is to come

     What makes an amuse different than an hors d’oeuvre (lit. outside the main work) is its connection to the main event. Maybe you have been to one of those receptions where a few trays of food get passed, and you leave immediately afterwards to go get pizza because two tiny spring rolls do not a meal make. The amuse makes us look forward (temporally) and anticipate (usually through intense salivation) what is coming

It testifies to the intentions and skill of the chef

     If every flavour is balanced, and the amuse is technically impressive, you are probably in for a great meal. If it looks like it came out of a grocery store freezer box labeled “appetizer medley” you might be at Boston Pizza.

The amuse-bouche delights us but does not satisfy us

    Somewhat like point one, the important distinction is that the amuse does not just make us think about its place in the larger framework of the meal, it also bends our desires forward. We are turned on to the experience of eating and are made conscious of a longing we did not know was there.

It lingers on your tongue

    An amuse is not a palate cleanser (like an intermezzo usually is). When done right, they are so small they are eaten quickly, yet so rich that they are not done. More time is spent in reflection on what you ate than actually eating.

It is best experienced in the company of others

    Partly because the experience is so fleeting, the best way to prolong the experience of an amuse is to watch others eat it, then to talk about it. “What did you think?” “How did they do that?” “Your eyes rolled back into your head!” You are not face down in a plate of food trying to debone a bird or trying to hide a piece of gristle in your napkin. And since the amuse for the night at a restaurant is the same for everyone, you can watch as new patrons come in, already “wise” from your earlier experience of it and watch knowingly as others encounter the wonder of the moment.

There are probably more levels of meaning in the event, and the function of the Eucharist as the great amuse-bouche is obvious, but like any good parabolic teaching, this is best left unfinished. That way there is room to reflect on the delight and yearn for the meal to come.