{"id":4527,"date":"2011-08-27T16:21:24","date_gmt":"2011-08-27T23:21:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/thedudeabides\/?p=4527"},"modified":"2015-03-10T10:03:16","modified_gmt":"2015-03-10T17:03:16","slug":"godstuff-liberate-eden-is-a-digital-meditation-on-the-contemporary-life-of-faith","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/thedudeabides\/2011\/08\/27\/godstuff-liberate-eden-is-a-digital-meditation-on-the-contemporary-life-of-faith\/","title":{"rendered":"GODSTUFF: “Liberate Eden” is a digital meditation on the contemporary life of faith"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\u201cThe man who can articulate the movements of his inner life,\u201d the late Christian apologist<\/a> and author Henri Nouwen said, \u201cneed no longer be a victim of himself, but is able slowly and consistently to remove the obstacles that prevent the spirit from entering.\u201d<\/p>\n

Throughout the ages, how Christian believers have chosen to articulate their inner lives has had many manifestations in literature, music, architecture and other artistic endeavors.<\/p>\n

As a means of communicating and wrestling with his inner life \u2014 his journey of faith \u2014 Greg Fromholz<\/a>, an American expatriate youth worker for the Church of Ireland<\/a> in Dublin, wrote a book titled \u201cLiberate Eden<\/a>,\u201d but traditional publishing houses found that his work was a bit too iconoclastic for their tastes.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is just too different to be Christian,\u201d one publisher pronounced.<\/p>\n

Undeterred, 40-year-old Fromholz, a native of Michigan who has lived in Ireland for the last 21 years, decided to take his book, a spiritual memoir of a kind that he describes as \u201ctheo-poetics,\u201d in a wholly unconventional direction.<\/p>\n

This spring, Fromholz, who directs the Church of Ireland\u2019s 3Rock Youth program, published \u201cLiberate Eden\u201d in a digital-only format for iPad, iPhone and iPod. The text of the book, written in lyrical, daringly self-revelatory prose, is interspersed with music and video of the author \u2014 sometimes speaking, sometimes not.<\/p>\n

In a video clip that accompanies the chapter \u201cSleepwalker,\u201d Fromholz awakens at 7 a.m., puts on a blindfold and goes about his day. The video concludes with the author running through the streets of Dublin on a rainy night, still blindfolded.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe is comforted by his lack of sight,\u201d Fromholz writes. \u201cWe have become so arrogant, cocky and comfortable, believing ourselves to have cornered the market on faith, or invented the Starbucks of Christendom. We first need to, indeed must, shake ourselves free from the belief that we have all the answers and need to acknowledge that God is much bigger than our churches, our egos and us.<\/p>\n

\u201cDo we possess the message of Christ or does it possess us? Repeat after me: I do not have all the answers\u2026What a sense of freedom, a beautiful void, a sensual vacuum that is created from not knowing,\u201d he writes. \u201cThere are some who stir from their sleep, awoken by the gentle breeze of the Spirit and who hear the whisper, see and are stirred from the slumber into response. There are those who reach past their blindfolds.\u201d<\/p>\n

[wpvideo cPjSEy4w]<\/p>\n

The communication theorist Marshall McLuhan<\/a> famously said \u201cthe medium is the message.\u201d How the message is delivered is as much a part of the message as what is literally articulated.<\/p>\n

In that sense, new media \u2014 smart phones, the Internet, social networks and the like \u2014 are for believers seeking to express their inner lives in the 21st century what stained glass windows were in for the church in the Middle Ages.<\/p>\n

Fromholz gets this. His digital \u201cLiberate Eden\u201d presents a message in a new medium, allowing readers to interact with the story and ideas through the written word, yes, but also through music and film \u2014 the global language of our younger generations.<\/p>\n

Scrolling through \u201cLiberate Eden\u201d on my iPhone earlier this week, I felt as if I had had an experience more multifaceted than simply reading a book. It engaged my senses in multiple ways, embedding the words of the message into my imagination in what became for me a digital meditation.<\/p>\n

Church also is a medium that should be a living, breathing work of art, changing and transforming as societal needs and sensibilities evolve. That\u2019s not to say the message of the Gospel should \u2014 or even could \u2014 change. But how it is expressed and presented needs to be dynamic, lest it grow lifeless and stale.<\/p>\n

\u201cChurch must be a place that does not suppress hunger but rather creates it,\u201d Fromholz says. \u201cA place that does not hide its limited knowledge of grace but projects it. A place with no walls and only open gates. The church must be a wild deer in the urban centers. The mess should be on God\u2019s apron. Justice is blind and equal \u2014 surely grace should be that and much more.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another passage from the book describes an exercise Fromholz led in a church where he invited the congregants to write words that they felt described themselves on a glass pane with a big black marker.<\/p>\n

Liar. Alone. Lost. Abused.<\/p>\n

The words we use to describe ourselves are emblems of our emotional and spiritual scars. \u201cEternal tattoos,\u201d Fromholz calls them. They can obscure the light, warping the image in the reflection.<\/p>\n

When the congregation finished inscribing their sacred graffiti, Fromholz smashed the glass with a baseball bat.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe beauty of broken glass is that it makes a sound, it crunches beneath our feet,\u201d he says. \u201cIf we listen closely, we will hear the crunch of broken glass under the feet of others and we will realize that we are all human, that we were human even before we were Christians\u2026.Jesus became human to be the way; we must remain human to show the way.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cLiberate Eden\u201d is extraordinary, a new paradigm and iteration both in message and medium. It is tangibly \u201coutside the box,\u201d a thoroughly contemporary ode to the a life of faith walking in the path of Jesus whose life and message is all about radical mercy and eternal freedom from the things of our own making that keep us penned in, boxed and tethered.<\/p>\n

In the flickering pixels of a video screen, \u201cLiberate Eden\u201d becomes words with a heartbeat, movement and breath, giving a contemporary face to an eternal story.<\/p>\n

\u201cLiberate Eden\u201d is available via iTunes and the Apple app store<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[wpvideo Y4V8LiTn]<\/p>\n

(A version of this post originally appeared via Religion News Service<\/a>.)<\/span><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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