Beaux Arts Ball

On saturday I worked a show in Lexington called the "Beaux Arts Ball" and after talking about it with Eryn I think it has given me a new perspective on postmodernism. To understand that point though I need to do a brief description of the Ball.

The Ball is basically a masquerade rave. The costumes varried quite a bit, a few examples are: tetris blocks, S&M gear, rabbit suits, and stategically placed duct tape. The people were mainly 20-30 something with the few exceptions of older people in their 40s and 50s. The events for my stage were as follows:

8:30-10:30 - 1st DJ
10:30-11:15ish - Drag Show (fashion show with drag queens)
11:20-2:00am - 2nd DJ (with a fashion show at the begining)

To describe the event a little more it was basically a dark room with loud techno music with people "dancing" all over each other. It's hard to describe it without getting really graphic, but lets just say that I saw guys kissing guys, girls kissing girls, and guys kissing girls, I saw people wearing nothing but dog collars and chainlink thongs, and a bunch of other stuff. So the event was truly eclectic, to put it one way.

Ok, hopefully that gives you at least some picture of the event.

The event definetly transcended my normal experiences and was eye opening. I think the saddest part was the Drag Show and they way the croud reacted. When these women came on stage (they do like to be called women) the crowd (about 1,500-2,000 people) reacted to them with more excitement and more zeal than rock stars normally get by their screaming fans. It wasn't just the gay men that were excited but everyone was cheering them on with and was excited to see them "strut their stuff"(for lack of a better descriptor). It made me sad to see these men who found their fulfillment in dressing and acting like women, and buying into the lie of society. It almost made me cry, it was sad because they really seemed to be enjoying who they "were." Now obviously I tried to justify their joy by saying, 'well i bet they're really broken, they probably cry to themselves a lot, they probably aren't really happy, they're probably hurting really bad on the inside.' But ya know what, I can't make those kind of qualifications. That's just a stereo type I've been taught by society since I was young. These people may be truly happy with who they are, yes they're lost, they need Jesus, they're flling themselves with lies, but they may be happy with being drag. It was thinking back on this and the rest of the event that led me to my thoughts about postmodernism. Yes I'm finally getting to the point.

The experience was wierd, and my mind has images in it that I wish weren't there, but I wouldn't trade the experience for anything, i mean i really think that this event typifies a whole segment of the population, i think this was post modern america, not what we vaguely concieve of as postmodernism. I guess my thoughts on this issues aren't as formed as I would like them to be, but it just seems that we treat postmodernism like it's something that we can look at and examine in a lab. I feel like what we concieve of didn't match up at all with what I observed saturday night. I'm entirely sure how to describe the difference, but I know there was one and it seems to me that after observing these differences these people do not need postmodern ministries. They don't need us to understand postmodernism they don't need us to keep talking about it as if it's a static reality that we can fix once we crack the code. This is a whole group of society, they're all governed by different assumptions and different things make them tick, they may be postmodern, they may be modern, who cares, they are lost and broken people. What they need is for the church to stop dialogue over how best to reach them and to start being the church. They don't need the church to create new lame ministries that will reach to their inherent postmodern philosophies (or lack thereof) but what they need is for the church to be the church.

We spend all our time, especially in academia trying to asses the culture, asses the postmodern world thinking that we can crack this code, churches can implement the solution and then all the culture's probelems along with ours will be solved. Can we not see past this ridiculous fallacy? All the church was ever asked to be from God was the church. All we were asked to do was love God and love others. Creating postmodern christian raves is not the answer, creating christian coffehouses isn't the answer, sure they may be fun and good, but the answer is to renew the church, to call the people of God to set their focus on one thing and one thing alone - Loving God. We need to abandon, what seems to me to be, our faulty conception of postmodernism and embrace intimate love with the Holy Triune God, rather than embrace a newer more accurate conception of postmodernism.

I guess these really aren't new thoughts. I feel I've said this same thing before. I feel these people looked more like true postmodernism than what we concieve it to be. I don't know exactly how to describe it (for that I apologize), but I do believe that it doesn't matter how this differes from our conception, as long as we focus on being the real church, which is by nature overflowing with love.

~ Ben