With my children getting older, I don’t watch as many Disney movies as once I did. And I am not certain how many lessons for the church there may be in Disney-produced video products – though I recently attended a workshop for United Methodist Boards of Ordained Ministry that made a fair amount of use of video clips from animated movies, including Disney movies. Truth be told, there are life lessons to be found in Disney movies, life lessons appropriate to the Christian witness of faith. We should judge the heart and not the appearance as Beauty and the Beast told us, for true beauty is beauty in the heart. Running away from one’s leadership responsibilities is likely to leave things in worse shape than trying to assume leadership amidst one’s own doubts – that’s the pertinent lesson of The Lion King. Toy Story teaches the value of friendship and community, even when our friends differ from us considerably.

Well, Disney has done it again. Last weekend I attended a stage version of the Disney movie High School Musical. I had seen the movie – having a daughter at home who still tunes into the Disney channel from time to time – and if you tune in you are likely to see the latest movie for they run with amazing frequency. I attended the stage version of High School Musical primarily because the male lead was played by a young man whose family attends my church. I wasn’t really pumped up to see the story again, but lo and behold, there I was and there was Disney again offering another lesson for the church.

The basic story line of High School Musical is of a young man, a star basketball player, who wants to use his gift for singing, and of a young woman, known as an exceptional math student who also can sing. They want to play the leads in the school musical, but their friends are reluctant, at first, to see them in these new roles. One song is entitled “Stick to the Status Quo,” and it could be a theme song for countless churches. Many faith communities go well beyond the admirable attempt to pass on the ancient wisdom of their faith tradition and make every conceivable change a matter of compromising the faith. “We’ve never done it that way before” is heard all too often in churches, and not to their benefit. The play also includes a song entitled “We’re All In This Together” a celebration of community that also appreciates the different gifts people have and rejoices that people might have gifts that surprise us. While it may be a bit of a stretch, I couldn’t help but think of some of Paul’s words in the New Testament where he compares a church to a body, where we need the differing gifts of each part and need each other. Churches would do well to be in tune with the song, “We’re All In This Together” and let go of singing “Stick to the Status Quo.” Unfortunately, unlike a Disney movie, such transformation usually doesn’t happen in ninty minutes.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

P.S. Almost lost in all of the news of the meltdown of our financial system, the price of oil, and the election campaign was the September 12 suicide/death of author David Foster Wallace at age 46. I have not read his most famous novel Infinite Jest, which weighs in at over 1000 pages, but have read some of his short stories and essays and thoroughly enjoyed them. Wallace was considered a genius by some, even receiving a MacArthur “genius grant.” I appreciated his intelligence, his wit and his humanity. He could make me laugh and make me think. I sometimes wonder about the connection between a certain self-destructiveness and creativity. Some of my favorite artists lived brief lives – Bix Beiderbecke, Charlie Parker, Jack Kerouac, Thomas Wolfe, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton. But many others lived and worked creatively into later life – Louis Armstrong, Bob Dylan is still going as he nears 70, Walt Whitman, Mary Oliver whose new book of poems I am reading and enjoying, and the list goes on. Human beings are too complex for any stereotype of self-destructive creativity to be accurate in more than a limited way. One need not generalize about this death to feel the tragedy of a lost voice – an voice that rang with intelligence and humor, compassion and appreciation for the depth and breadth of the human condition. The more campaign ads I hear, the more I long for such voices.