What Could Be More Biblical, More Redeeming, than the Non-Stop, Screwed-Up World of Glee?!

 

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"