Is Reel Life Real?

MARY ELLEN ASHCROFTMary Ellen Ashcroft teaches part-time at the College of Saint Catherine in St. Paul, Minnesota.

For awhile I thought my dislike of video cameras was sour grapes: I’d missed filming my children’s first staggers across the room, and I have no reel-to-reel memories of exotic places I’ve visited.

But my regret flamed into something hotter last summer. Picture the scene: Three parents lounging in deck chairs by the lake, their eyes alternating between magazines (propped dutifully against their knees) and the lake (in order to count the kids occasionally—one, two, three, four, all there).

Suddenly, a shriek: “Daddy, look! look! I’m swimming! Look!” Even the two of us whose progeny this isn’t drag ourselves a little straighter to goggle at the child’s discovery of buoyancy. Splutter, shout, swim.

I turn to congratulate the proud father, but his chair stands mysteriously empty. I twist around to follow the sound of breaking twigs and see the father bolting up the hill, heading frantically for his cabin. My friend and I pipe up the obligatory parental praise to the new swimmer, “Hey, good work, John, nice job.”

Four or five minutes later, the frantic father appears. He is sweating profusely, jiggling his video gear, and plugging the sound cord into the relevant hole. The star, meanwhile, has hauled himself out of the water and stands shivering (not exactly the kind of footage that will inspire Grandma on a snowy evening). “Hey, son, I want to catch you swimming!” But it’s no good—the swimmer’s moment of glory has passed, and Dad has missed it.

Later that same day we meet another video whiz, this time a mother with four children. The children are riding model trains, and they are shrieking, “Look at me, Mom!” Mom cannot ride or shriek because she is filming from the platform. What would posterity say if she did not preserve these memories? Fun cannot just “happen”; it must be engineered and recorded. As the kids cruise into the station, mother shifts Tom so she can get Randy in the picture, and she adjusts Franny’s hat so that you will be able to see Bill’s face.

Magic In Mothballs

Why are video cameras such a hot item? One reason, I suspect, is because we finally have the technology to indulge our covert materialism. Despite what we utter in church, we suspect anything that we cannot touch, see, and hear. We want desperately to own and keep that which cannot be kept. We want to mothball Sally’s first steps and preserve the moment when John learned to swim (at only five years old!).

We don’t trust intangible memories; we want something we can store and access with the press of a button. We cling to the materialistic world view in which the visible is all important, and we struggle to capture and cage each “magic” moment.

But magic moments cannot be captured. We cage the memory, but it escapes. Pry open the cage (rerun, rerun), and the magic is gone—what crouches in its place is tame and boring. The filmer/reporter misses the essence of the experience: the sparkle in the child’s eyes as she toddles across the room; the seashore smell of salt, spray, and breakers as they are thrown onto the sand.

There is a distance, as if you were to contemplate the principle of kissing while in the act of kissing, or wonder if you’re really having a good time while in the act of skiing. When we view reality through an objective lens, we move to the sidelines; we are not swept into the tingling, the formidable, or the overwhelming. We are left holding an empty chrysalis: the life—the magic—has flown.

Forty or 50 years from now, I can picture retirement villages filled with people who struggle to catch vague memories of events they never fully experienced by watching tape after tape of recorded happenings—no memories evoked and considered because the participants were never fully present.

Bethlehem On Videotape

Epiphany is the moment of revelation. I try to imagine the wise men’s visit today: Mary to Joseph, “Joseph, will you grab the video camera? I’ve got to get this on tape”; to the wise men, “Say, would you mind backing up and approaching the house again, maybe a little more slowly this time, but with some eager expressions, please? Okay—no, that camel is blocking the angle.”

How did Mary manage without a video camera? Scripture tells us she stored up her experiences and pondered them in her heart. She fully lived them and then ruminated their significance again and again.

Scripture points to the lilies of the field and the birds of the air and exhorts us again and again to reflect on God’s sustaining care. The psalmist moves from depression to praise by remembering and meditating on God’s works (Pss. 77; 107). The children of Israel are commanded not to make tangible, graven images, but to remember God’s act of deliverance. Hundreds of years later, Augustine writes that without the “sweetness” and the “delight of truth” given in contemplation, the “burden” of action commanded by the duty of love would be unbearable (De civitate Dei, xix: 19).

Like the children of Israel, we need faith in order to throw ourselves fully into our experiences with our children, with God, and with his world. Paul writes, “So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” When we surround ourselves with our taped lives, we are like two-year olds who treasure the pile of glitzy wrapping paper but do not realize that the Savior is born; we squeal over foil-wrapped eggs in a pink-and-green basket when it is Jesus’ resurrection that has shattered the world’s despair.

Our lives consist of a series of experiences, some more photogenic than others. God, through his Spirit and his Word, breathes significance into and around these experiences so that they grow into treasure houses of faith that can sustain us in times of pressure or depression. Mary’s experiences of God were her treasure, and they were carefully stored where moth and rust could not touch them. She had her treasure with her when she scrubbed the kitchen floor, when she walked to fetch water from the village well, and when she suffered a mother’s anguish at the foot of the cross.

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