The Senseless, Beautiful, Topsy-Turvy World of Glee
Glee has hit the world running exposing all the best and
worst of the human spirit. It focuses on the disabilities and insecurities of our
impersonal societies and heartless spirits. From its nastiness to its beauty –
from humanity's warts, pimples, byoptic near-sightedness, weirdness, and ugliness, to its wonder,
amazement, incredibility, incredulity, and soaring hopes and dreams. Glee is
the Disney version of the Bible’s exposure of our hearts, minds, souls and
spirits. It shows to mankind the worst and the best within us. From our
disabilities and disbelief, to our insecurities and inner turmoils. From our gross
frailties and failures, to our impossibly unchained ambitions and soulful
concessions.
God’s Word exposes us. And so did Glee as we sat glued to
the TV waiting breathlessly for the next big blowup, the next devastating heart break, the next miraculous
human touch that would make sense of the senseless world thriving around us. It’s
topical pop music lifts our spirits giving hope, healing, and a steely-eyed reality
of strength to the deep complexity and oft-times senseless destruction that
overwhelms us. A destruction that never quite ends in our teen years but
seems to hang-on through our later mature years of denial. Our bigotry. Our
unresolved hurts and harm. Our need for compassion, mercy, understanding. For
real friendships that stay with us through all that we are and hope to be.
Postmodernity and
Glee
At Glee’s essence is the struggle of the human spirit to
know and express love beyond its bounded freedoms and chained disappointments.
To find a group of friends - and especially that one close soulmate - who sees and
accepts us at our most unvarnished exposure. Who brings out the best in us when we fail
to be at our best. Who might endure our meltdowns and unkindness to help us
become less toxic to those family and friends around us bewildered by our too-hasty actions,
misspoken words, and intolerable cruelty. To reach a place that we might see
sin’s ugliness in our lives and accept God’s world of love, hope, healing in
bonds of unbroken fellowship. To find-and-recreate communities of redemption,
hope, mercy and forgiveness. Here is the teenage world of postmodernity at its
deconstructive best and reconstructive heights binding human souls into depths
of fidelity unthought and undreamed.
To modernity’s excesses and brutalities, its impersonal
arguments for-or-against God-and-country, comes postmodernity’s reach of the human touch
admitting froth and failure, helplessness and lost, disappointments and reality. The youth-of-today give to
the-world-of-tomorrow a pageantry of hope wrapped within the tenuous tissues of
God’s redeeming love that would rescue the worst of us from the ugliness waiting within
the cesspool of our loneliness. Tissues that tear too easily and yet cling tenaciously
until our human souls might find the exit doors to its dilemmas and confusions,
anger and hate, denials and destructions. God’s love is that fibrous tissue – so seemingly frail
and yet spidery strong. It is everywhere around us to the one brave enough refusing to give-up or give-in. His Spirit mighty enough to grant a strength we fail to
have against such impossible odds of self and world. His Cross wide enough to take a world of
suffering and give to it a resurrected hope little understood until personally
found, claimed, and received. This is the world of Glee. The world of the Bible. Our
world of God’s love and reach and depth. Cling to it and “Don’t Stop Believing”
in the renewing worlds of tomorrow.
R.E. Slater
May 10, 2013
Glee - Don't Stop Believing
Short clip
Glee 3D Movie - Don't Stop Believing Performance
http://www.foxtv.de/serien/glee/start.html
Addendum
Below is a video produced by resident philosopher/theology Peter Rollins of Belfast, Ireland. His observations fall in-line with the biblical idea of redemptive introspection that was written of above. And is a consistent message of God's directive love and care through our own moments of implosion and failure, griefs and torments, where the bond of forgiveness and understanding through Jesus can bring restoration and healing by the hands and hearts of those God brings into our circumcised lives. - R.E.Slater
For Further Reference - Peter Rollins, "The Idolatry of God"
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