Moving from Artifice to Authenticity (Better Than Normal 4)

First off, it helps to actually schedule a post to be posted. I wrote this last night and then forgot to actually post it. Duh. Hence the afternoon posting…

Also, this post has a few videos and a fair number of images. Likely going to be too long for email.

This is the fourth in my Holy Week series on MaryAnn McKibben Dana’s upcoming book Better Than Normal: Virtues for an Off-Script Life. It will be available in the coming weeks from all the usual booksellers, but you can order it direct from the publisher before the release date for 40% off if you use the code NORMAL40 and follow this link.

Onto shift #4

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“What is truth?”

Those are the words attributed to a 1st century regional Roman ruler named Pontius Pilate. It is in part of the Holy Week stories of Jesus and is recorded in John 18. In that story, Jesus has just finished saying “Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” and Pilate’s reply is simply, “What is truth?”

What is truth?

What is true?

What is real?

MaryAnn’s fourth shift is one that focuses more on community than the invididual and I believe that we are in a communal crisis of truth right now. With the spread of misinformation (a nicer word for lies), the increasingly imperceptible differences between human created and AI created media, and the general mistrust that is swirling around, Pilate’s question is pretty relevant.

What is truth?

So here’s a little experiment. Here are two videos of the tree that I have been photographing somewhat regularly so far this year. It is simply a slide show of all of the photos. See if you notice anything about one video instead of the other. You might need to swap back and forth a bit. But they are different…

What did you see?

Here’s are several of the photos in comparison with one another: (you’ll need to click the images to see the full frame - also the originals are on the left)

Here one of the young trees in the background is erased

The truck's headlights

The bench on the right

The drainage culvert and suddenly there's a new path!

The tree just to the right of the main one

The playground on the far right

The white sign on the far left and the small part of the path in the bottom right

Farewell church with a great view of the lake

I never liked that bank of clouds anyway

A whole bunch of things - lens flare, the bench, the church, the sign, a trashcan, a bench

What you may see in there are some small changes - few things that are major but in one, the church on the left side of the frame is gone. In another, one of the smaller trees is gone. Others have removed the yellow glow of headlights in the fog, the path in the bottom right, and so forth. How did I do it? Well, I could have done it with some fancy photoshop work which is way above my skill grade. But instead, I did it with the new AI remove tool that is in Adobe Lightroom (the software I use for photo organization). All I had to do was highlight the area that I wanted removed and you see the results. And the same can be done with a trashcan that is in a photo that “takes away” from the scene or that one random person who walked into frame. Or even, as I have heard people doing, removing people from family photos after a divorce or some kind of indiscretion. I have even heard of a church that did that with removing a youth leader from a photo from a mission trip from years before.

Probably if I hadn’t said anything about it, no one would have noticed. But what you have in the edited photos is artifice not authenticity. What you have in the edited is trying to hide what is really there.

In this chapter, MaryAnn has this simple, yet profound statment about this shift...

[With] Artifice we need to hide what’s true from one another.¹

One of the things that I love about the Holy Week stories is that they show the reality of the people involved. You have some of the religious leaders who are willing to go against their own beliefs in order to protect their power. You have political leaders who are willing to sacrifice an innocent in order to “keep the peace.” You have people who followed Jesus for years who betray and deny him when things start getting dicey. You even have Jesus himself pleading in anguish in the garden that a different way could take place. Whether one believes these stories are true or not, these are examples of authentic human actions and not just an artificial glossing over the hard stuff.

As Rachel Held Evans wrote in her beautiful book, Searching for Sunday,

And the truth is, the church doesn’t offer a cure. It doesn’t offer a quick fix. The church offers death and resurrection. The church offers the messy, inconvenient, gut-wrenching, never-ending work of healing and reconciliation. The church offers grace. Anything else we try to peddle is snake oil. It’s not the real thing.²

Amen. That’s authenticity, not artifice.

PS - In case you are wondering, in the vast majority of my photos, the only “AI edits” that I do are things like lensflares, etc. Beyond that, I try to let the image be as close to the real moment as possible.

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Yesterday, one commentor asked about Scout dressed up in rainbows…ask and ye shall receive. Full disclosure, this one was rather posed and highly edited (background, etc - ironic considering what I wrote above).

Scout, a superhero for inclusion!

Grace, Peace, Love, Hope, and Joy,
Ed

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1. McKibben Dana, MaryAnn. Better Than Normal: Virtues for an Off-Script Life (p68), Pre-release edition

2. Evans, Rachel Held. Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church (p. 209). Kindle Edition.