You will be the man who mashed their feta cheese
A few weeks ago Captain Wow sent me a video clip of Gary Brolsma's Numa Numa Dance. I thought it was hilarious! I didn't realize how widespread the video had become, and that it's been around long enough to be parodied to the point of becoming an annoyance. I was procrastinating doing my homework Friday night and looked at one parody after the other (the best one in my opinion is the Napoleon Dynamite one, also sent to me by Wow). The song title is really Dragostea Din Tea, sung by the Moldovan band O-Zone.Anyway, it's a fun song and I smile every time I hear it. It's sung in Romanian, and to English ears it sounds like they're singing about razor blades and feta cheese.
I love this stuff. I used to make up words to the choral parts of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony which, when sung in German, sounds to me like a tribute to sausage, cheese and tuna.
So Dragostea Din Tea soars in popularity as the Numa Numa song, a joyful, flamboyant euro-techno wonder. What the song is really about is an "outlaw," I guess a renegade, calling his lover on the cell phone to reminisce about their love under the linden trees, and while not expecting anything asks if he is still wanted. Granted, the tune is a bit bouncy for such a heavy story, but we really got it wrong with the feta cheese!
I know I get a lot of things wrong. Headless and I were talking Saturday about C.S. Lewis, and how people tried to analyze his Narnia story by putting it into an evangelical box. Lewis resisted that, to the extent that he insisted Narnia was not an allegorical story. Of course, if you asked Dorothy Sayer (quoted at top of page) she would insist that everything is allegorical. But the point is, we have a habit of taking works of art and digesting them into things that are nothing like the original. The intent of the work is lost in the popularization process.
I don't think this happens at first. I think we first are awed or impressed by our first glimpse of something new or beautiful. But in order to stay in that moment we have to alter it, to make it fit comfortably, portably into our lives. In that transition, the original beauty is lost. I think of this sometimes when I look at my picture of Adam's finger meeting God's. It is a small part of a much larger work by Michelangelo that was meant to inspire worship. It was intended to be one of a kind, but now we don't have to go visit it. We can buy it in retail stores cropped and cut into whatever way suits us.
It seems to me that there is a fine line between reinterpreting art in a creative, insightful way and commonizing it - like turning a symphony into elevator music. I doubt that Michelangelo ever thought as he worshipfully painted the Sistine Chapel that a snippet of his masterpiece would hang in my diningroom. I'm not certain he would be flattered.
I think the Church's greatest challenge is to experience the wonder of God's glory without building tabernacles around it so that we may bask in its dying rays. God is always singing a new song, always running on the mountains to new adventures. He invites us to sing with Him, to run with Him. But we tend to settle for the memories of glories past. We pull our cloaks around our shoulders, remembering past comforts. We tell the Lord that what we have experienced is serving us quite well, and new adventures will only expose us to the damp and cold.
God commanded us not to worship idols that cannot see or feel or speak. This is not just about idols made of wood or gold, but also about mental images and comforts. God is many things. He is peace, providence, healing, love, truth and light. But He is not comfortable. If we find Him so, we are worshiping something that is not God.
