The Sin Gene

I have lately been wondering about the traditional wisdom which insists that man is born with a "sin nature" - an hereditary bent towards evil. Jesus, as the idea goes, avoided this by way of the virgin birth. Since everyone else is and has been born of man and woman, we cannot escape our inevitable fate.

Yesterday we watched on an unltrasound as our new little guy - developing in Erika's womb - did a somersault and squirmed around. Were these movements somehow sinful? Can sin really be a potential energy as well as an actual one? How can he/she really be a sinner - an avoider of God - before ever having the chance even to interact with another person?
Later on, when he she begins to scream because of pain or hunger should we see this as sinful? Or is it, rather, in some way the very essence of what sin is not? Perhaps maintaining such an attitude of complete "self-helplessness" is exactly what Christ meant when he spoke of having faith like a child. I think we are forgetting that sin is not really a disease or defect so much as it is a silence, an absence - stubborn dis-communication.

[At any rate, it is difficult to maintain that Christ was sinless because he did not inherit sin. It is tantamount to saying he was a sort of spiritual eunach who simply had not the capacity to be interested by sin. It is tantamount to saying that the temptation he endured was all for show.]

I can't think that my little one will be "full" of sin at least until he sees how every-man-for-himself the world has really become. Then perhaps he will begin to feel the loneliness of mortality that stabs us all.

Repeat Repeat

Is the spate in the last ten years of un-original source material for films merely a result of greedy film executives capitalizing on the nostalgia of the present generation of young adults, or does it bely a time of stagnation in which, having been cut off from our past by a modernist culture, we have ceased to make our own stories and are desperately scratching to reclaim whatever it was that made us who we are? Are we really so identity-less? Are we so terrified of offending someone with our perspectives that we have to continually fall back on something that is tried and true - that someone else came up with - to communicate with each other? I feel like the whole trajectory of cinema - which is a major means of societal communication in the West - is a larger version of the pathetic cliches we often cling to in conversation and relationships. Or maybe it's just greedy executives cashing in on my childhood.

Aside

The last week has been a really rewarding and productive time for me creatively. On Sunday we finished production on the short film series that I wrote earlier this year. It was a really startling and rewarding experience to watch not only the ideas we'd formulated coming to life, but, even more, the dialogue I had written and developed being performed and taken seriously by two professional actors who had no other impetus for working with us than that they believed in the project.

I also had the privelege of seeing a little of my writing published on a respectable arts publishing site. (Check it out here)

The opportunity to have people enjoy my work - even if only in small ways and forums - really gives me courage to keep going on.

Essays - part three

Well, here's the third and, for now, final installment in my series of little essay letters to my dad. For me, this one is the most important because it deals with (to varying degrees of success) some of the really tough issues surrounding this "relational" way of understanding things.

Read Here