Back in the olden days, when we used to go to the cineplex… You remember movie theaters, right?
Back in the olden days, when we used to go to the cineplex, there would be movies in some of the other little boxes that I didn’t particularly want to see, but at least I knew what they were, knew that someone was going to see “My Little Pony: The Revenge of Spike” or “Friday the 13th: Escape from Mar-a-Lago,” knew what films were part of the broader cultural conversation. Or not.
These days, we’re all in our own homes streaming Netflix or Hulu, a trend that started even before the pandemic made public gatherings dangerous. And what we see when we open Netflix is what the algorithm decides we should see based on demographics and what we have watched in the past, another little part of the Matrix I discussed two weeks ago. But every so often, a program or film still breaks through into the broader cultural conversation. This has been true recently for the Korean series Squid Game, a smash hit with a serious promotional campaign.
Now, I’m delighted at this one aspect of globalization, not so much with moving all manufacturing to nations with no environmental protection and slave-like working conditions, but definitely with the multiculturalism. I remember feeling sophisticated and even a little smug when I went to the art house cinema to watch a French film back in the ’80’s. Now, I can and do routinely watch programming from Germany and France, India and Korea, at home. Though to be honest, I’m still not quite down with telenovelas yet.
Squid Game, however, is not my favorite import. I’m clearly just not that cool, but you probably knew that. The premise of the series is that hundreds of poor people are tricked into playing a set of children’s games, though with this twist: the losers are killed, the winners get some money. And the whole enterprise is entertainment for the truly rich. It is part Hunger Games, part Battle Royale, and thoroughly grim.
They say it is a metaphor. It doesn’t feel very metaphorical for me. The super rich play games with the lives of the poor every day in real life, kill the poor every day, though in ways that are slightly less obvious, like the Wisconsin millionaires who funded protests against Covid-prevention protocols or the California grocery chain heiress who helped fund the attempted coup d’etat of January 6th or the neo-fascist donors organizing the astroturf-roots violence at school board meetings. Or the Sacklers or Koch Industries, or… well, we could go on, couldn’t we?
The anti-Squid Game may well be another streaming series, one that has also created quite a bit of buzz, and recently wrapped up season two. It is the Apple+ series “Ted Lasso.” I didn’t originally have Apple+, despite the fact that I use a MacBook, an iPad, and an iPhone, but my clergy coach wanted me to watch the series for lessons in leadership, and I am glad I did.
The premise, and I don’t think I’m giving anything away here, is that a successful second-tier college football coach from America is hired to be a top-tier professional football coach in England, though, of course, it isn’t the same football, is it?
The thing about Ted Lasso is he’s a nice guy. Which feels off in our media culture that glorifies bullies and egomaniacs, where rudeness and cruelty are commonplace. And that is sort of the point, the charm of the series. But like any great comedy, Ted Lasso is also poignant, wrestles with tough stuff. And so it was that an episode I watched recently dealt in a deep and profound way with grief, a death in the show’s present and a death in Ted’s past. I cried. I laughed.
And I watched the first episode of Squid Game and this particular episode of Ted Lasso within a few days of each other. In one, you see dead people, lots of dead people. And they are absolutely meaningless. In the other, you don’t see a single body, and yet death is there, complex and real.
Death is complex and real. It will come for all of us, sooner or later. We wrestle with our own mortality, for some with existential terror, and for all, the empty space where someone important to us has been. In the last two years, death has not been so much an abstraction as it has been a skeletal figure riding a bike up and down our streets, ringing the bell, a neighborhood Grim Reaper with one hand on the handlebars, the other holding a virus. The Economist estimates a global excess mortality of more than 16 million people, mothers and sons and best friends and bus drivers and cops, and we know that over 100,000 U.S. children have lost a primary caregiver.
As a pastor, it is not uncommon for me to be asked by the dying “what comes next?” I am honest when I answer. I have to be. It is a promise I made to myself the first time I stood at a deathbed next to a swollen gray body in the dim light of an ICU. I always tell the truth. I say “I don’t know.”
I mean, as a constructive theologian, I can identify pretty precisely when the notion of existence after bodily death developed in the Hebrew religious trajectory and tell you why it was necessary, why it had utility.
As a scripture scholar, I can tell you all of the ways we misread scripture, looking for confirmation of the belief we have constructed for ourselves, even when it is not there.
As someone deeply committed to the historical context, I am pretty clear that Jesus believed in some sort of alternate existence, call it what you will, and that his followers experienced him as still present to them even after they had seen him executed.
Mostly, though, when it comes to the stories where we all stand before Peter at the pearly gates, and Grandpa and Rover meet us on the other side, I find it to be un-biblical and improbable.
But you know what else is improbable? Me. And you. And coral. And air.
We have no business existing. And the more scientists learn, the weirder it all gets. So maybe. Maybe there are ghosts and reincarnation and heaven. Heck, maybe Rover is there too.
Though I do hope there is a line somewhere, because I’d rather not face all those angry cows I consumed as Quarter Pounders.
In traditional Christian theology, death is not a tragedy. The faithful Christian is called to trust in the goodness of God and if necessary, all of the pretty myths we’ve painted onto that impenetrable curtain. We are called to celebrate the lives of those who have died.
That isn’t always easy, to be sure. We miss those we love, and some lives are taken in ways that feel cruel and stupid.
Christianity should not be a religion for dying. It should be a religion for living. And while there is nothing in the gospel that promises happiness, there is much that promises joy, the joy of a full life and alignment with the creative power of love in the world. For there is a creative power of love in the world, and “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
What happens on the other side? I don’t know. But I am on this side. And I trust the goodness of the God, for I am improbably here.
Death, even anticipated death, is a tear in the fabric of our reality. In those first days and weeks after we lose someone, we go through all that is grief, not in a singular or linear fashion, but in our own way, ping-ponging between anger and denial, depression and acceptance, a journey with an unknown destination until the day we know we have arrived because we decide we have arrived.
Back to that whole multiculturalism thing and media… Disney’s “Coco” lifted up the Mexican tradition of Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead, celebrated in conjunction with All Saints, November 1st. It if a fine family film, way better than any little pony, more kid-friendly than the children’s games in “Squid Game.” And while I may not believe that people travel to and from the afterlife, I love the idea that we might set up an ofrenda, a special little altar of remembrance, once a year, that our memory of our loved ones should be an excuse for a fiesta, for marigolds and sugar skulls. Because seriously, we need every excuse we can find for a good fiesta, and we best love those we have loved by living and living well, by being a people with a deep and abiding trust in the goodness of God, by being people with deep and abiding joy that we are now, that human existence is a daily choice, and that we choose life, love, joy, and the hard work of living well, each and every day.
Our celebration of our dead is a celebration of our living!
So live! Live boldly! And stay safe when the ghoulies and ghosties show up at your door tonight.
Amen.