Mel Robeck on the Washington Post Editorial Cartoon

With Mel's permission, I post his reflection.

Dear Friends,

Nothing much has changed since 1906. We Pentecostals are still the laughing stock of the nation and perhaps the world. The first cartoon below was run in a Los Angeles newspaper in 1906. The second one appeared today in the Washington Post. Whatever one may think of Sarah Palin and her politics, this public portrayal of Pentecostalism runs close to blasphemy, and in my opinion it is at least as bad as similar portrayals of Islam. A lot of what is going on in the press regarding Palin and Pentecostals (and it is actually the Pentecostals for which I am most concerned) comes runs from voyeurism to pornography.

Most reporters typically do not know how to talk about the Divine-human encounter that runs to the soul. Please don’t get me wrong. It is difficult for Christians as well. Words betray us. We humans grope for ways to communicate the experience, the intimacy of a Divine-human encounter that features both the transcendent character of that encounter and at the same time features its very immanence as well. It is something akin to describing an abstract concept like intimacy. Perhaps we can take a note from filmmakers who seek to communicate the concept of intimacy as I seek to describe the nature of today’s press.

Filmmakers have yet to find a way of communicating an abstract concept like intimacy that adequately captures its depth, the sense of passion, of fulfillment, or of richness that makes it what it is. Sometimes they employ close-up shots of a person’s face, or they seek a particular look from an actor – a wink or a smile, or a loving act such as a kiss. In many cases, however, these tools provide only distant elements of the abstraction that may ultimately be lost on the audience. The closest film makers have been able to come to expressing the reality of intimacy is to throw a breathless and at times breathtakingly beautiful couple into bed with one another in order to enact before peering, voyeuristic eyes, the ultimate physical intimacy. Yet in that on screen act, the intimacy in which the couple is thought to be engaged (for they are only actors after all) is actually lost. As it is shared it is thereby diluted by those who watch it. And those who watch it feel nothing of the reality that the act can communicate except to those who do not act, but instead, engage in the action as it was intended to be – a gift of God – in the giving of themselves over wholly to one another.

Those who watch do not feel the breath of the lover or the tenderness of the lover’s touch, nor do they savor the smells of love, or the taste of the beloved, or sense the ecstasy of fulfillment in the ultimate intimacy of the most intimate of human acts. Indeed, if a single scene of the love act is taken from the film and published on the glossy pages of some magazine, we call it pornography. It lacks the intended context, a marriage relationship. It lacks the substance, a loving, committed relationship. It lacks the meaning, two becoming one in a spiritual as well as a physical sense. It lacks all the genuine marks of a real, intimate action or relationship. In the end it leaves us empty rather than satisfied, craving more to fill the emptiness of our souls.

Something similar may be said about the experience of Pentecostal worshippers and how their worship is frequently described by members of the secular press, especially the 85% or so who have no religious tradition of their own but seem to think that they are experts on all things religious. The reporter is reduced merely to the role of a voyeur or worse, of pornographer – as he or she turns a rich and intimate reality into a cheap action devoid of context, its content lost, and subject to ridicule. The intimacy of the Divine-human encounter or exchange is something that cannot be described well without losing much of the mystery of that encounter. Human words come up empty. It is something similar to what the Apostle Paul described in Romans 8:26-27 when he noted that “the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.” But when it is twisted as it seems to be in both cartoons below, it becomes blasphemous.

So much for my attempt to theologize about the intimacy of Pentecostal worship in light of secular press coverage.

Mel