Polaroids, Femininity, and the Curse of the selfie.
I recently took a break from my regularly scheduled televised events to cherish the unique moments surrounding the birth of my daughter Naomi Ruth Corsaut. She was born on her mother’s birthday and is the first Corsaut born in France for nearly 400 years. I am not meaning to brag, but she is a total babe. I could tell you how long she is and how much she weighed, but they use the metric system here and it wouldn’t really do you people who use things like ‘pounds’ and ‘inches’ much good. What I can tell you though, is that she is healthy and beautiful like her mother. It is odd having a girl after fathering two strong male children. I wanted to make the conscious effort to take less pictures, write less articles, and do less of the other stuff that would keep me from enjoying her entry into our world. This is one way of me explaining why I did not write one of these last month, and another way of saying that life on some level must be lived in places not located behind a computer screen. A healthy and playful life of the mind has always been a welcomed retreat for me, but sometimes you just got to hold your daughter in your arms and feel stuff. It was surreal to finally meet the one whom we have so anxiously waited to greet in person.
It was a blessing to hold her and read the book of Ruth to her for the first time and pray all kinds of truths over her femininity.
Time almost slowed to a halt as we counted fingers and toes. I can say without any doubt, that the way they fit in your forearms is an architectural design of the Divine. Coupled with her changing of our sleeping arrangements, were torrent floods of emotion beyond description. By the way, nothing invites you to enjoy the late hours of the night that you had forgot existed since college, quite like a new baby. At least that is what my wife who does most of the heavy lifting after midnight tells me. For the joy set before us, we endure all things. Honestly, when all the dust clears we would much rather have the joy of a child than a noiseless house.
We were also sobered by sharp realities that she will never be this young ever again and therefore we should drink deep the precious seconds while we still have them.
You have so few moments to stare into her deep and calm state of slumber and dream what her future might be.
Maybe not so oddly, I questioned what kind of woman our home might raise up and send into the world. I mean she will have the last name Corsaut after all and two ‘ride or die’ older brothers to mark her path. Many would be fortunetellers have informed me that I “needed” to have a girl. Those sages who questioned if I wanted to have a daughter instead of a boy were surprised to find that I was overly joyful about adding a girl to our family. G-d knows there is no shortage of testosterone in the Corsaut household. Even as we struggled with having another child, my mind raced to how many millions of daughters are discarded all over the world and how I longed to have an opportunity to tell a different story with how I might father my daughter. I was compelled by how fathers can uniquely show the Gospel in how they care for their daughters.
I want to tell a different story than what the world is publishing. I am not without my questions though about how best to pull that off.
I have kept coming back to the hope that she is courageous and faithful like my grandmother who raised me. My grandma was a woman of brute faith whose strength and tender forgiveness still ripples through our family to this day. It is striking how new life reminds you of those old saints who have passed on. You start to realize that they will never meet this side of heaven and yet are irreversibly tied together in ways only the few of us who knew them both can tell. Yes, this has been a season with more experiences to digest than my heart has time to process without carving out some extra space.
In this season of my life, I needed some unadulterated space to reminisce and fight back the slow forgetting that happens as you age.
You have to be reminded what pure vulnerability is. You memory must be jogged to the fact that they start out small and not like the goliaths that your boys currently are. Which makes you mourn in some ways the growing up of your kids. At different times I am struck by a sort of sadness because of all the ways in which I forget how they once were. To be honest, it is a real struggle to remember the boys as anything other than what they are now… tough, creative, and from the sound of things in the next room over, engaged in a cage fight that Deacon is losing #MiddleChildProblems. Their lives change and shift so subtly it goes unnoticed to those of us who live closest to them. It’s like the Aunt who only sees you at Thanksgiving once a year has a habit of going on and on about how ‘big’ you have gotten. Sometimes even after you have become an adult. It’s like the changing of the seasons, where it’s only after half the leaves have fallen that you notice that Summer has bid us adieu and Fall has come marching in demanding that we dress in layers until further noticed. I think fear of missing something has given rise to a whole score of wrong remedies. We look for ways to capture the fleeting seconds of our lives in our small hands only to find them slipping still through the crevasses in our fingers.
We search desperately for something to rescue us from letting all those memories slip through the crack.
Hence, the selfie-stick. Those of you who know me well, know that I have an ongoing war against the selfie-sticks and have been known to repeat things like, “On the bright side, selfie-sticks are also lighting rods”… which about sums up my position on the subject. All that being said, while recently walking around Paris I began to have a different feeling towards those who have one welded to their arm. That is, I felt pity. Pity for all the things they are missing because they cannot get out of the way. There are very few things that prove all the verses in the Bible about us loving ourselves more than our Creator more than the selfie.
Call it narcissism, navel gazing, or self-infatuation… either way, we are all guilty in one form or another of an unhealthy self-love.
I have recently noticed in Paris that there are many Asian tourists who have a selfie-stick nearly glued to their hands. The selfie-stick is not an instrument of Asians alone, but a tool for all of us who love seeing ourselves from a good angle (which is sort of an acknowledgement that we all have a bad angle or two). What has been unique among my Asian friends is the non-stop running camera attached to the other end. Unlike your local sorority girl who might take 100-200 of essentially the same picture of themselves, these Asians have went next level in videoing a reality TV show of themselves. Ceaseless footage of themselves doing whatever they are doing. I am going to go out on a limb here and say that nobody is ever going to watch all that 17 billion hours of tape. Not even them. I just want to ask them something like, “who has time to sit around and watch hour upon hour of themselves doing essentially nothing?” I do not want to start a conspiracy theory on the Internet, but if the government ever needs video footage of absolutely everything on the planet, then they know where to turn. Google Earth has got nothing on my homies from the East.
The real tragedy is that they are more conscious about the screen on their camera than the beauty tucked in every corner of France.
There is a marvelous world at their fingertips and beckons to be handled and they cannot see past themselves. They have the opportunity to taste and see this beauty first hand, but they are resigned to see it through a screen no different than if they had never traveled here at all. Their experiences are no better than what anyone can find at the end of a decent Google search. I hate that for them.
Some 83 million tourists come to France every year and I would bet the vast majority care more about SAYING they have been somewhere, than they actually care about BEING at the place they find themselves. The brag is a form of tragedy. As I have spent more time watching tourists, I have realized that most of us just want to impress those who follow us on social media, we do not really want to enjoy that place for all the worth G-d has hardwired into it.
Tourism instead of worship, what a horrible tradeoff. We are tourists in the worse possible way. What is even more dangerous is the reality that we do not even need to leave home to engage in this kind of tourism.
We work our way through an itinerary of events, but we cannot tell you what the roses smell like because we do not make those kinds of stops. When did food become something that is more important to put on Instagram, than to enjoy for long hours with lively friends over a warm fire. It is not that there is anything inherently wrong with taking a few snapshots; trust me if I didn’t take some pictures of our new baby to send to Grandparents back home, you would still be looking for my body at the bottom of a lake. Furthermore, I try to use photography to flesh out the story of our family working here in France.
Capturing images on a camera is not the evil, but how those photos can capture our souls to an invisible group of peers that we can never seem to fully impress, that is the poison. It’s when the “likes” become a narcotic and my view of the mountains does not exceed the size of a screen on a telephone. It’s when I let concern for a whole bunch of people who are not in the room interrupt my concern for people who are in the room.
It is why I am on this risky path of turning my phone off more when I have company and feeling okay with not answering my phone every time it rings. Sometimes when we raise the camera we are letting people cut in on a moment that is not theirs to neither kill nor share.
Which brings me back to my Grandma. She is the greatest Christian I have ever known and one who I owe a great deal more than I will ever be able to repay. For all of her fine traits though, she was the absolute worst at interjecting a camera into an event. She made every effort to capture absolutely everything. My grandma used to use a black Polaroid camera before the hipsters at Urban Outfitters even knew what they were. If you are unfamiliar with the progressive technology that was the black Polaroid camera, then you were probably born after the year 2000. As a side note, I often wonder how many millions of photos she would have taken with today’s technology within her grasp. I dare not think of it. Grandma wielded her instant photo spitting black Polaroid, like Indiana Jones wields a whip.
Grandma was never afraid to interrupt a moment to stage a photo shoot that would rival those that they used to have at the front of Walmart.
She spoke with a kind of authority that could herd cats and never had the slightest desire to negotiate whether everybody was going to be in the picture or not. I would reluctantly join whatever people or props she wanted to capture and begin the debate about smiling. Whether it is because I am part Native American (some of which are/were anti-photography), or because I had a rough childhood (which is another way of saying ‘rebellious’), or because philosophically I thought it was ‘fake’ to smile when I there is not immediate reason to… I detested posing for pictures. I am sure I probably took a few years off her life arguing with her about smiling in pictures. If I had a dollar every time I heard my Grandma say, “Now Colby… SMILE.” I would be a VERY wealthy man. After responding six or seven times with stuff like “this is just my face, I’m sorry… but its really you and my parents fault I look like this,” and “There is nothing that makes me want to smile, so you are just going to have to wait until something worth smiling about happens,” and “Grandpa doesn’t smile, why do I have to?” … she would just look at me with eyes that powerfully said, “I have done nothing but love you your whole life: YOU ARE GOING TO DO THIS ONE THING FOR ME.” Even if she was a habitual interrupter of a good time with her photo shoots, Grandma always won with her eyes.
We may not all be aware of it, but we probably have all been in a situation where the music is good and the hearts are merry and time is in full flight, only to be brought back to Earth by someone assembling what essentially amounts to a band photo from the 90’s.
Moments like these are so easy to kill and yet we hardly realize that after the photo we forget what we were talking about, the song changes, and somebody now has to leave. Whatever we were just having left when the camera flashed. It is weird how that works sometimes. I thought of this recently because I realized that the more I am in the moment and actually enjoying the environment that I find myself in, the less I remember to take a photo. Nothing makes me forget to take a picture like having a REALLY good time. That is not to say that there has never been a time when we regretted not taking a photo, but its just an acknowledgement of how prone our hearts are to not be present where our feet currently happen to be standing.
The true investment of myself into a setting causes a sort of amnesia towards reaching for my phone. This is a grace G-d is more and more gifting to me, as He turns me away from being a person divided between where I am and where I am not.
What is amazing is that as this process unfolds, how many more colors I can see along my path, how many more sounds I can hear without my headphones, how many more scents I can smell with my head up, and most importantly how many more people besides myself that I can see.
The height of this truth became clearest to me at Church. We attend a new Church plant in our neighborhood south of Paris that is frankly a joy to be a part of. I have always found Church to be a place of creative inspiration and time of earnest reflection about the big things of life. Good or bad, I do some of my best writing at Church and I am sure that is not an accident.
There are these people in our Church who lead worship with hearts that earnestly desire to meet with the Lord afresh and invite others into that holy rendezvous.
I have forgotten all of their names at least 3 times (with the exception of Fredrick the guitar player). The lead singer looks like the actor Terrance Howard from Empire and the drummer looks like a skinny version of Russell Wilson who plays quarterback for the Seattle Seahawks. I am about half convinced that it is these resemblances that keep me from remembering their names. At least that is what I keep telling myself. The whole group is full of high caliber musicians who are desperate for Jesus and that just sort of radiates a joy you want to join into for yourself. You hardly notice that it is in French after a while and you can just get swept away into the presence of the Lord if you are not careful. I had found myself at that very spot some time ago, when I realized that they were playing the French version of a song we used to sing back in the States. My mind quickly thought of a few people who would be stoked to hear it in French and so I reached for my phone to snap a video recording (BTW I am now head of security at the Church and this is totally not allowed in France). So I looked for a good angle and readied my device. As I lifted my phone I felt a clear rebuke in my conscience that the act was crazy wrong.
I felt this rush of feeling telling me that I was invading sacred space.
I was ruining it. I could be here in unison with my French brothers raising my voice and hands in worship, but I have felt that documentation of the moment was more important. I was no longer in the room with them, but ws in a different place altogether. In that moment I felt like the scribes at the time of Jesus who merely wanted to document the words of the Bible and not actually wash the feet of Him who is the Word with my tears when He pays me a visit.
I was acting like a tourist at Church. Listen, if I meet with Jesus in Bible study then the world will know regardless if I ever tweet it or not.
Our pictures at conferences and our videos at worship services is a far cry from ‘not letting our right hand know what our left is doing.’ Jesus warns about the unique dangers to our souls when we practice our righteousness before men. I will never have those moments in worship back, but I do hope to learn from the loss of them. While I sometimes fancy myself a knock-off storyteller who is just trying to take after his Grandpa who always have better stories, I have resigned myself to be okay with having less documentation of my every tale.
I want to be so present in the places that G-d has placed me that I do not fail to be drastically changed by the ways that I meet Him there.
At the end of my life, I want to have good stories to tell and I realize that will mean refusing to try to capture elusive moments that are slipping off into eternity regardless. I have stumbled upon a phrase that I hope spills out of my lips more often that not. It is the phrase, “you had to be there.” What a beautiful explanation of how I want to live. I want to have tons of stories that are best explained with the phrase “you had to be there.”
That phrase speaks of times of our lives that are beyond what any camera could ever hope to capture.
If you have ever slept on the Himalayas and then saw some picture of them in a book that did them no justice, then you know full well the meaning of “you had to be there.” If you have ever been a scared to death kid staring across an altar at your bride to be, only to look back years later at your wedding photos with some young buck about to take the same plunge, then you understand fully the “you had to be there.” If you have ever held your first daughter in your hands like you were holding precious gems worth more to you than all the treasure in the world, then compare it to a photo with their likeness copied on a piece of paper, then you would fully comprehend the sentiment that there are some things that you just “had to be there.”
Before we can tell people that they "had to be there," we first have to be there ourselves.
It is for this reason that I pray that your story is filled with “you had to be there” moments. I pray that the invisible jury of peers will grow increasingly more invisible. That we can see etched in our soul a thousand priceless moments which were too good to dumb down to a mere photo. I pray you carve some space for opportunities that are only going to pass by you once. I pray that you see others than yourself. I pray that wherever you are, that you would realize that G-d is there and that wherever He is, it is a good place to be.
I pray G-d rescues you from being a tourist.