I'm speechless

a condition I rarely find myself in....especially in the written word. But I am today. I have mentioned this before, but Lewis describes how man can either observe life or experience life. The observation is like the scientist with an experiment who watches, and records. Even the experience can only be put later in words too futile to truly express the moment. Do we live moment by moment? and once the moment is gone is it lost forever due to our inability to understand what happend?

I am going to express my weekend in artistic terms. No judgements or emotions considered during the expression of the experience.
First, I must explain that in college I studied the artistic movement of surrealism in art and literature. My thesis project was about the literary theorist Walter Benjamin and his study of surrealism. He saw the surrealist movement as having the potential to truly liberate humanity..in the same way that he had a hope in communism, and marxism. He saw the potential of surrealism in what he terms "the profane"--the non-sacred. Surrealism's goal is to bring two contradictory worlds together, and watch the disjunction that occurs between them. It is overall about shock, and creating confusion. For example, one might take an ordinary event, and place it in an extraordinary place, or vice versa. Our experience tells us these events are irrational, and therefore create confusion by bringing these two disjunct things together. Walter Benjamin sees the brillance in this in the fact that surrealists brings everything down to objects(materialism...i.e.comunism). The subject--the "I" or "you" is not important but rather the importance lies in the object which brings us together.
A ritual or tradition is the opposite of "the profane" because it is trying to put understanding of abstract ideas into a way we can understand it. There are parts of ritual which might be considered profane--or connected to objects, but we perform ritual in order to understand a great idea, or thought. We understand it because of its repetition--it's rational. We expect it. We know where it is started and where it ends. Communion for example is important not because of the object itself(although one could make an arguement for this), but because of the symbolic meaning (culturally constructed meaning) of the object.

But what happens when you bring the profane and the CONCEPT of the ritual together? The ritual itself becomes profane, or at least becomes new by the explosion which subsequently occurs. The alarm clock that rings sixty seconds every minute. It jolts. It shocks. It confuses. And perhaps for the first time one is liberated to think clearly. The mind is opened and expanded to no longer just go through the motions, but realize the borders and limits we put on our profane world, and our ritualized world. We COULD come away from it, and realize that this is the most "true" world. The ritual holds no truth outside of the real world, or profane world, and the only way it CAN hold truth is to bring it in collision with the profane world.
Or we could also come away with a greater understanding of the ritual itself. Having long forgot its meaning, we see it afresh and anew. Something which should be washed clean, and refreshed...no longer just the motions, but rather the words, and the experience put back into its context has meaning once again.

So.....i say all of that to say...my dear friends Chrissy and A2 got married this weekend at their halloween party as a suprise for all their friends. The surrealistic moment of spiderman marrying a 50's carhop, while Jason the priest watched over them, and prayed for them will never be forgotten. I love you both, and am so glad that God has brought you into my life. I wish you all the happiness in the world, and many tiny spider-car hop children in your future. (j/k)
Thanks for the shocking artistic moment.:)...and thanks (or perhaps you say no thanks) to mike for starting me on this tangent of thought......:)