The temple thing, continued...

(and make sure you also check out the larger view)

Something about Buddhist temples* just makes the visual thinker in me happy. The idea that you can walk into a building and there is this Whole Huge Crazy Universe! Right In Front of your Eyes! I mean, I appreciate the Protestant tradition and all, but, well, here is a picture of the church sanctuary I spent most every Sunday in from grade 7 till my Junior year in high school:

(*Or Hindu Temples or even the right kind of Catholic Church)

See what I mean? Now I don't mean to disparage Beulah Presbyterian Church at all - in fact, it was one of my few safe harbors in my stormy sea of small-town adolescence - but c'mon! What's there to look at? At least let's get a few good ol' seventies felt tapestries in there, for crying out loud...

Actually, I take that back. What's missing from the photo on the left is people. Farm people, blue collar people, middle management from John Deere people. Choir people up front in burgundy polyester robes. Teenage people gossiping in the back. Bald people (of the younger and older varieties) and people with hair. A smallish group of people, to be sure, but an incredibly varied and beautiful group of people, from whom I learned a great deal.

This is probably not the time to revisit Martin Luther, or to discuss the iconoclastic controversy, or to even go on much further about comparative religion, but I do have a soft spot for works of art that try, however much in vain, to accomplish the impossible task of communicating the incredible vastness and variety of the human experience.

As another example, take a look (if you haven't already) at these two videos by the band OK Go that were making the rounds on the internet a month or two ago. I showed them to my media class students as proof that, yes, everything in the mass media is constructed: that is, that behind every single message that we consume there are usually hundreds, if not thousands, of people that have been involved in its making and distribution.



You may have to follow a link to YouTube to watch this next one, but I promise that it's well worth it. Especially if, like me, you've had any experience playing the baritone in marching band...


So because I have five (yes five) sections of this media class, I ended up watching these videos quite a few times. I found myself thinking that there is something fundamentally, well, American about them. Something about their initial silliness that, compounded by some wild creativity and a lot of hard work, becomes almost scarily profound by the end. We may be tiny and strange creatures, and we may not understand very much of anything, but let's get together, create something, and have a blast anyway, dangit! Which may be what the Buddhists (and the Hindus, Catholics, Protestants, and all the other builders of Sanctuaries) were on to in the first place...