Facepalm Friday: More Honkings from Wild Goose

on March 28, 2014

As if the Wild Goose Festival wasn’t already enough of a spiritual circus with a chili cornbread Eucharist, same-sex marriage blessing imams and transgender advocates, organizers have announced that the upcoming June festival will feature “Carnival de Resistance”:

The Carnival de Resistance is an “art intervention” experiment, a rip in the veil, throwing off the yoke of social niceties, restless sanitation, and religious piety to provide a raucous expression of grief and longing and hope for Creation. The Carnival de Resistance is an arts carnival, a school, and a village demonstration project. Using symbols, song, theater, poetry, music and dance, the Carnival makes “church” happen under the Big Top, and then spills out shape-shifting-trickster style to engage with all using games, performance and interactive art projects.

Right. So basically this is the Emergent equivalent of an all-of-the-above burrito served at a clown mass (we’re also still trying to locate a definition of ‘piety’ online that would possibly allow “throwing off the yoke” of “religious piety” to be a good thing.) But wait, there is more:

The Carnival de Resistance is a school that teaches about movement history, resistance cultures and creates a space for the “other” voices to be heard. The Carnival also offers practical skills to build community resilience, support sustainability and strengthen our imaginations. The camp becomes a village where we demonstrate energy alternatives and attempt various sustainable practices in regard to food, waste, and transportation. Come join the Holy Game, and join the work to creatively live in tension against the culture of domination and expect for the Spirit to transform us in the process.

As we have for the past three years, IRD will again flock to our favorite jamboree of disaffected post-Evangelicals, crusty leftist oldliners and the “other”. Look for highlights from the gathering back here in late June.

Possibly the aforementioned "shape-shifting-trickster" (Photo: Wild Goose Festival)
Possibly the aforementioned “shape-shifting-trickster” (Photo: Wild Goose Festival)
  1. Comment by Donnie on March 29, 2014 at 9:25 am

    Whenever I think of Wild Goose, I always think of “everybody did what was right in their own eyes.” The bad thing is, WG think that is a good thing!

  2. Comment by Greg Paley on March 30, 2014 at 2:53 pm

    In all that goofballery, I did see a phrase I liked: “resistance culture.” Real Christianity was and always will be a resistance culture, a counter-cultural movement – but there is no “resistance” in this Wild Goose baloney, quite the contrary, they are culture-conformers to the Nth degree with their same-sex “weddings” and environmental hissyfitting. I see nothing in this conference that the most avid atheist would not approve of, this is basic CINO stuff, no one would guess it was Christian if it wasn’t there in the brochure.

    Check those membership rolls, lefties. Conforming to the secular culture may give the liberal-seminary-brainwashed pastors a thrill, but the laity have been heading for the exits for over 50 years now. Why? Because the people looking for God aren’t finding Him in the goofball church.

  3. Comment by Creed Pogue on April 3, 2014 at 6:42 pm

    We are, after all, the original “counter-cultural” movement!

  4. Comment by Jeffrey Walton on March 31, 2014 at 10:57 am

    That’s a great point, Greg. Christianity is strongest when it can critique the culture around it — certainly we are called to resist “sin, the world and the devil” as Christians.

  5. Comment by Rev. Bradford B. Wilson on April 7, 2014 at 5:20 pm

    I have to ask, what in the world is meant by, “throwing off the yoke of … restless sanitation.”

  6. Comment by Joey on July 11, 2014 at 2:47 pm

    The symbol of the circus is as an eschatological company in which all sorts and conditions of life are congregated.
    It is in the performance that the circus is most obviously a parable of the eschaton. It is there that human beings confront the beasts of the earth and tame them. The symbol is magnified, of course, when one recollects that, biblically, the beasts generally designate the principalities: the nations, dominions, thrones, authorities, institutions, and regimes.

    There, too, in the circus, humans are represented as freed from consignment to death. There one person walks a wire fifty feet above the ground, another stands upside down on a forefinger, another juggles a dozen incongruous objects simultaneously, another hangs in the air by the heels, one upholds twelve in a human pyramid, another is shot from a cannon. The circus performer is the image of the eschatological person – emancipated from frailty and inhibition, exhilarant, militant, transcendent over death – neither confined nor conformed by the fear of death any more. The eschatological parable is, at the same time, a parody of conventional society in the world as it is. In a multitude of ways in circus life the risk of death is bluntly confronted and the power of death exposed and, as the ringmaster heralds, defied. Moreover, the circus performance happens in the midst of a fierce and constant struggle of the people of the circus, especially the roustabouts, against the hazards of storm, fire, accident, or other disaster, and it emphasizes the theological mystique of the circus as a community in which calamity seems to be always impending. After all, the Apocalypse coincides with the Eschaton.

    Meanwhile, the clowns make the parody more poignant and pointed in costume and pantomime; commenting, by presence and performance, on the absurdities inherent in what ordinary people take so seriously – themselves, their profits and losses, their successes and failures, their adjustments and compromises – their conformity to the world.

    So the circus, in its open ridicule of death in these and other ways – unwittingly, I suppose – shows the rest of us that the only enemy in life is death, and that this enemy confronts everyone, whatever the circumstances, all the time. If people of other arts and occupations do not discern that, they are, as Saint Paul said, idiots. (cf.; Ephesians 4:17-18).

    The service the circus does – more so, I regret to say, than the churches do – is to openly, dramatically, and humanly portray that death is in the midst of life. The circus is eschatological parable and social parody: it signals a transcendence of the power of death, which exposes this world as it truly is while it pioneers the Kingdom.

  7. Comment by Joey on July 11, 2014 at 2:48 pm

    the last post is a quote from William Stringfellow

  8. Comment by Joey on July 13, 2014 at 3:48 pm

    “Throwing off the yoke of religious piety” makes sense if you understand it as : a belief or point of view that is accepted with unthinking conventional reverence.
    as in “the accepted pieties of our time”—when so much of the “christian” religious forms throughout history have been used to endorse crusades, inquisitions, genocides and slavery—we have to ask ourselves what is it we are actually devoted to and how has religion, when it is in bed with the state force our devotion to the wrong places?

  9. Comment by Joey on July 13, 2014 at 3:55 pm

    Throwing off restless sanitation means—Luke 11:37 When Jesus had finished speaking, a Pharisee invited him to eat with him; so he went in and reclined at the table. 38 But the Pharisee was surprised when he noticed that Jesus did not first wash before the meal.

    39 Then the Lord said to him, “Now then, you Pharisees clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside you are full of greed and wickedness. 40 You foolish people! Did not the one who made the outside make the inside also? 41 But now as for what is inside you—be generous to the poor, and everything will be clean for you.

    42 “Woe to you Pharisees, because you give God a tenth of your mint, rue and all other kinds of garden herbs, but you neglect justice and the love of God. You should have practiced the latter without leaving the former undone.

    43 “Woe to you Pharisees, because you love the most important seats in the synagogues and respectful greetings in the marketplaces.

    44 “Woe to you, because you are like unmarked graves, which people walk over without knowing it.”

    45 One of the experts in the law answered him, “Teacher, when you say these things, you insult us also.”

    46 Jesus replied, “And you experts in the law, woe to you, because you load people down with burdens they can hardly carry, and you yourselves will not lift one finger to help them.

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