“Would you like to add something to the wall?” he asks.
“Oh! No thank you. I’m Jewish.”
“Hey, that’s okay, everybody needs to confess sometimes.”
I decline as politely as I can, and dismiss myself, thinking that maybe I should have added a quote from the Tony Kushner play, Angels in America, “We Jews don’t have confession. We have guilt.”
I was initially wary of this group’s efforts, having seen their bold banners and booths displayed across the UCSB campus. The college has, after all, experienced its share of zealots in the past, with demonstrations occurring as early as the week before from a group who aggressively spoke out against gays and atheists, citing their actions as “confrontational evangelism”. The campus’s relationship with these groups have usually been a tense policy of tolerance (although this event required police involvement on account of the noise), and any time an event of this nature would erupt, op-eds in the Nexus grudgingly reminding us of the First Amendment would be quick to follow.
Oppressive to the senses in red and black, these new displays bear messages like “I Confess That I Am Selfish, Vain and Prideful When I Should Realize I Am Nothing Without Christ” or “I Confess That I Am a Sinner and That Christ With His Death and Resurrection Frees Me From the Confines of Sin”. People involved in the project in turn wear red T-shirts with “I Confess” written in the front in large, static letters. Some people wear jackets, cutting the message down to just, “Confess”. There are other signs with messages like “I Confess That the Lunatic Christian that Does Nothing but Condemn and Accuse, Infuriates Me,” but I was sure that these were a prank, an act of retaliation from a rival campus group against a new onslaught of intolerance. No way could these be related.
Still, I can’t help but be interested in this project’s approach. Unlike the previous groups, this one encourages participation from passers-by by inviting them to write their confessions on the big red board. No one is forced to do this, and when I read the responses, I can see that some people took the chance to express things they really needed to say. I decide that they deserve a second look. The next day I ask the group with the booth outside the Ucen about the public confessions.
“It’s not really about confessing your sins,” one of the organizers explains. “As the Christian group on campus, we’re just seeking to confess to people how we don’t live up to Jesus, how a lot of the time Christians are hypocrites and they hurt other people.”
She directs me to the guy who came up with the idea for the public confessions, Real Life organizer Brett Jensen. Real Life is the Christian group on campus that is running the whole project, which they are calling Confessions Week.
“The cards I just came up with,” he says. “I thought it would be something that would draw people around it, kind of stir up conversation about it. I just thought it would be kind of a cool idea. The real design for this--” he says, gesturing towards the red booth struggling to stay up against the wind, “--we got from a book called Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller, he talks about it, where they actually build a booth and they do this confession thing-”
“Like a private confession?” I cut in.
“Yeah, that’s what people go in there expecting to do,” he explains. “What it really is, is someone inside confessing the sins of Christianity to them, like one on one, saying, ‘Hey I’m sorry about this and that, and I’m sorry if you’ve been hurt in your life’,”
The concept of Christians apologizing is an inventive one, and it ranges from offenses done in the name of Christ (the examples that Real Life cite are the Crusades and the Inquisition), to everyday evils committed by Joe Everyman Christian.
“I haven’t loved people the way that Jesus did,” says fellow organizer Jeff Pauls. “He spent time with prostitutes and the poor. I ignore homeless people, and all sorts of people that I meet.” According to Jeff, people are really responding to this.
“I know people who have stepped into confession booths and they’ve been confessed to and they’ve just teared up. A lot of people have been really hurt by Christianity.”
Jeff is a CCS alumnus but continues to participate in Real Life after graduating. He has a broad, friendly grin and towers over me. He’s eager to answer my questions and clear up misconceptions I have about the project. Firstly, their goal is not conversion. If they get people interested, great, he says, but what they really want to do is to present a picture of Jesus separate from what he is commonly associated with, or as he puts it, “to look at Jesus through the crap.” Jeff is confident that if people understand who Jesus really is, the product will sell itself.
“People are going to choose what they want.” He says. “I’m not gonna argue someone into Christianity, that’s a ridiculous idea.”
It’s clear then that my initial reaction to the project is quite different from what they are actually about and this brings up an interesting point. For a group that appears to be ecumenical, open minded and ready to take responsibility for the wrongs committed in the name of their savior for anyone willing to listen, why choose such an abrasive looking set of displays?
“We wanted a color that would stand out,” says Jensen. “We knew that some of the government parties were probably going to be doing something this week, so we tried to stay away from the colors that they normally pick like blue and green. Somebody proposed it we were like ‘Oh, that’s great!’”
Jeff also says that the colors were useful in confronting people, without being, well, confrontational.
“We’re trying to be more submissive and admit ‘Look we’ve been aggressive for years, we want to humble ourselves and say we’re sorry.’ And to be louder than the people with bullhorns and not preach hate speech we have to have loud colors,”
It’s a clever idea, it may help that people are intimidated by the colors at first, says Jeff.
“They expect us to be political, and I think they’re excited [when they discover] that we’re not. We’re not trying to preach a message, we’re just trying to say the message has been preached and it’s been really misinterpreted, sorry.”
The Main Event
Confessions Week culminated in an event called Confessions of a Modern Day Christian, a night of music, poetry, dance, and a sermon of sorts by speaker Ken Virzi. As I look for a seat in I.V. theater, I can see that this is a closer crowd than most. People greet each other like they haven’t spoken in years. Girls are hugging everyone in sight, guys are sneaking up and tackling each other in the aisles. Almost no one sits alone, save me. Finally the lights dim and the first act takes the stage, a young woman reading a poem about breaking her promise to God and sleeping with her boyfriend before marriage. She says she is sorry that she broke her promise, but sorrier that she made it before she truly understood what she was promising.
“I sleep with my boyfriend, and I don’t feel the need to change.”
Then a guitarist and a guy drumming on a wooden crate play transitional music as the dancers take the stage, three girls who stare at the floor, standing in formation. Their music begins, they begin to dance, sometimes together, sometimes not, violently pirouetting, begging and being pushed away. Finally the girl in the middle is left prostrate on the ground as the other two walk away. The lights dim, the guitarist and drummer continue to play music. The next act assembles on stage left. It’s two guys with mics and one begins to beatbox. Is that what I think it is? Yes. It’s Christian rap. The crowd begins to hoot and holler and the second guy starts rapping.
“C’mon everyone let’s tell the truth / we all hypocrites both me and you / we say one thing and we do the next / like a girl who don’t drink but smokes a lot of cigarettes”
The crowd claps through all three verses and finally it’s time for the speaker. Ken Virzi has a calm voice that falls at the end of every sentence like disappointment. He stands before the crowd and catalogues the wrongs of those who practice his faith.
“On behalf of this huge dysfunctional family, I confess.”
He starts out with Christians at the top of the heap “In politics Christians have way overstepped their bounds…I confess there has been dishonesty, there has been manipulation there has been power struggle…I will confess there have been Christians at the head of some of the ugliest stuff that happens,”
He then moves down the ladder to the clergy and religious leaders that are trusted and respected, mentioning people who have abused that trust by stealing from church coffers, and committing adultery and pedophilia. He then moves down even further to the normal and the everyday, to the indifference and subtler evils of the average citizens.
“When I have friends tell me that they would never even consider becoming a Christian, I see a lot of reasons why.”
But he turns it around and begs forgiveness for these offences, citing the love that Christ had for people as a reason to follow him. He talks about the impact Jesus made over the centuries in literature, music, government and art. But for him, it’s not good enough to say that every action has an opposite reaction and I believe him when he says he’s sorry, for what he’s done and for what his faith has done. Maybe he’s a bit too sorry. He relates a story when he and his friends traveled to Italy and were stuck in Pittsburgh for two days. He was annoyed and took it out on the people around him, and in telling he makes this out to be such a horrible unchristian act. Unpleasant I can see, but unchristian? His constant self flagellating reminds me of my state of mind when I was in highschool, where I felt I could do no right and all of my motives were ugly and wrong. It’s true that Real Life emphasizes on ones own relationship with God and discourages judging others, but what about over judging oneself?
No comments:
Post a Comment