Sermon for Southern Comfort

We don't own a television, my husband and I.  This lack drives some of our family members bonkers and limits our social lives to the extent that we can't invite people over to watch the Oscar awards or the election results or the NCAA tournament, for example.  (Note: my husband only cares about maybe one of those things, so really it only limits MY social life).  I know fewer and fewer pop culture references.  I don't know what to say to my students when they tell me I look like Silver from 90210.  I take it as a compliment, because whoever Silver is, she's got to be a better comparison for me than Shannon Doherty.  Then I think, wait, I watched 90210 in high school.  Wednesday nights.  At Aileen's house.  I can't be old enough to have my youth recycled yet, can I?

Neither my husband or I wanted a television to become the center of our living room, the star around which the planets of our lives orbited.  We hoped for more silence, more books.  Silence is a precious commodity these days.  Our plan only worked a little bit.  We do have a quiet home and that provides us some solace.  When our families visit, we do have more conversation with them than we would otherwise, perhaps.  But we still watch TV, only now we watch it on our laptops, on Hulu or Netflix, and so our lives have slowly crept from the living room to the bedroom where we can catch up on the latest episode of Downton Abbey or Project Runway with our legs stretched out.  House of Cards is our new favorite.

So the real beauty of a TV-free home, for us, lies not in silence or a lack of distraction, but in the absence of too much mediocrity.  If I want to watch trash now, I have to seek it out.  I have to actively decide: I want to watch a Kardashian load a dishwasher for the first time in her life and sink into a cesspool of stupid.  I never do this.  I never do this the way I rarely stop at the bestseller shelves in the bookstore, not because there won't be a few good books there, but because I know what I want and because I know most of the beauty and truth in the world lives outside the mainstream.  If I sound like a snob, I don't mean to.  As Rilke reminds us, a true poet can find beauty in anything--witness Tony Hoagland's "Poor Britney Spears" or Olafur Arnald's "Found Songs." A writer or viewer can find richness and texture anywhere if she has the patience to sift through all the junk.  Or, as David Foster Wallace reminds us:

But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

So what's my point here?  Most of us aren't David Foster Wallace or Rilke.  Without primetime and regular scheduling, my husband and I are forced to think outside the box and often get surprised by something so unexpected and resplendent it restores our faith in the screen as a medium of high art.    Last night, we watched a documentary called Southern Comfort, the story of a transgendered man and his chosen family in the last year of his life before he died of--irony of ironies--ovarian cancer.    The director clearly had a small budget and a big, giant heart, as well as an eye for character and story arc.  Robert Eads, the man at the center of the story, was refused cancer treatment by over 20 doctors, but died well-loved by his parents, his children, his friends, his lover, and his 3 year old grandson who only ever knew him as a man, as his Papa.   His people are Southern, hard-smoking, small-town, God-fearing, his transgendered friends as good ol' boy as you can get.  In a scene that shoots straight through any neat or callow binary opposition of liberal-conservative, the audience watches Robert Eads speak about coming out and loving all people while meticulously cleaning his rifle.

When Robert finally clears from the morphine haze meant to stave off his cancer pains long enough to make it to his last Southern Comfort--an annual conference in Atlanta for the transgendered community--he gives a speech asking the conference attendees to love other people like him who need a place to be who they are.  Then he buys his lover, Lola, a corsage and dances all night with her.  At this point in the film, I turn to look at my husband.  Are you crying?, I ask.  How could I not be crying?, he answers.

I wish more people would see this film and films like it.  More Christians.  More family-oriented people.  More teachers.  More politicians.  More watchers of television and film.  But you won't see such things between 7-10pm on NBC or ABC or certainly not on Fox.

Why do we read? I ask my students.  Why do we watch TV or go to the movies?   They always respond with some teenage-speak version of We want to be entertained or We want to be reassured.  We do--I do too--but I hope we also want to be opened up, challenged, invited into empathy as what seems "other" and apart becomes recognizable to us.  There is not a decent person in the world who could have watched the story of Robert Eads and consider him godless or inhuman.

If we are going to fill our silences with noise, let that noise be artistic (not artsy!), let that noise be story-noise.  Let us, viewers, choose story over silliness, the unknowable over the knowable, the meaningful over the mundane, the provocative over the mind-numbing.  Watch your Housewives of Atlanta--no judgment from me, I like Nene, and she is a kind of southern comfort--but don't stop there, please.

Amen.