Spiritual/Political/Philosophical Blog on the Nature of Truth and Falsehood and Heaven
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| Sunny Days in Heaven Spiritual/Political/Philosophical Blog on the Nature of Truth and Falsehood and Heaven |
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Thursday, May 02, 2002 Thought for a Sunny Day (from my book, Contentions) 81 While at my daughter's High School performance of a Broadway musical (editor:I wrote this two years ago), I realized a feeling of inner discomfort. I did not like being a passive part of a live performance. It seemed viscerally wrong. I thought of the Mass, how it is a shared event, and how that is much more satisfying. Theater has often broken the "fourth wall", but it always strikes us as contrived and hollow, whereas the Mass breaks that wall by making God (who has no walls) the focus of the actions of all participants. I have often noticed before that for secular minded people, theater, movies, and music performance serve as communion with entertainers as ministers; but who rather satanicly focus the attention on themselves, their emotionalism, and performance to win the audience's love and adulation. A kind of: "I feed the audience and they respond with love." Witness young people at a rock concert, or middle aged folks at some adult romantic singer's show. The varieties of dionysiac rapture, sensuality, animalism, maudlin sentimentality which approximate pagan ritualism or urbane emotionalism. Classical music concerts serve the same function of trying to provide an aesthetic exaltation and experience of communion with an artist and his audience. Go to any performance where people are avid fans and you will see a worship service going on where people are expecting an emotional payoff and release from cares and responsibility; or where they think that they are getting 'truth' in some form or other from a hero, composer, artist, or storyteller. posted by Mark Butterworth | 12:39 AM | |
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