Crash and Relational Truth

Another brief delay in the second (and last?) installment of the Comics post…

I saw the movie "Crash" recently and liked its premise very much. I've heard the movie described as another "race movie" and while that is completely true (the theme of racial prejudice and profiling IS a blatant theme) I found its more "subtle" theme more intriguing. The movie follows a handful of characters through a period of two days and in the end we see how all these characters' lives are woven together to intimately effect each other – even though few are aware of this fact. I've always been attracted to this idea because I am often struck with how dependant we all are on so many people.

(Homework: Tomorrow morning while you're eating your Lucky Charms, think how many people made this simple act possible: truck drivers, grocery store shelvers and checkers, the manufacturer and all its employees, the employees of the equipment the manufacturer uses, the farmer, the sales people who sold the farmer his seed and fertilizers, the ad agencies, the wholesalers, the company that bags and sells the grain, on and on… It's really amazing.)

Anyway, besides the interesting "fact" of how interconnected all the characters were, the main point I was left pondering was how isolated each of them felt. They were all connected and yet very alone with their "own" problems and concerns. That, in turn, reminded me of a podcast I listened to this week.

The podcast was from the Emergent Podcast (look it up in iTunes) and was by a guy named Jake Wobbrock. He was talking about "Relational Truth." His point was that we spend so much time talking about "propositional truths" that we forget that the Gospel is, at its heart, relational. God created us for relationship, and it's the one thing we all desire. On our deathbeds we care about each other. Weddings and funerals strike deep and true chords within us. All our songs and movies and books deal in relationship. We talk about how we're gaining, loosing, deepening, neglecting our relationships. We were created out of community – there are three in the Godhead after all – and created for community. Created for relationship(s).

He also mentioned how we spend so much time concerning ourselves with do's and don'ts, and forget that relationships are what matter. And are what people are dying for. He made the point that Judaism is about law. Islam is about submission. But Christianity is about relationship. According to Christ, Truth is Love.

Thinking about that and watching the characters in Crash made me wonder what we'd be like if we'd remember how connected we all are. How we really are, in so many ways, one.