By: Ben Seeder
Consider all of the messages that are sent to your brain through
social media every single day. At their core, they will be boiled down to one
of the following categories:
“I’m angry!”
“Here are pictures of my food!”
“Do you see how well I am doing?”
“My life is falling apart”
“Other people are idiots and I am not!”
“I’m sad!”
“The universe is one way and I want it to be the other!”
“I have friends!”
“Here are pictures of my children!”
“I’m having so much fun!!!!!”
“My life is definitely, definitely not falling apart”
“The Top 15 Roseanne moments you DON’T remember and why it COULD
cost you your diploma”
In the end, almost all these different categories are in fact
sub-categories stemming from one single underlying, unending message:
“Validate Me.”
It doesn’t take a genius to figure this out, and when I post
things I’m absolutely no different. Nobody is.
Now, amongst this vast ocean of sadness and despair, imagine a man
from Houston calmly transmitting these messages to you...true, and clear as a bell:
“Today, choose to be happy. Choose to be grateful for the day.
Choose to look on the bright side.”
“Even when it’s uncomfortable, even when you don’t like it, stay
in peace. When you do that, God will use it to your advantage.”
“God has made you a masterpiece. Start seeing yourself strong,
healthy, accomplishing your dreams, and living.”
“As long as you’re comparing yourself to others, you will never
feel good about yourself. Run your own race.”
“God knows how to get you to your destination. Take your hands off
the wheel and let Him take you where He wants you to go.”
“You’ll be fine when you know that you don’t have to impress
people.”
“If you keep replaying your hurts and bad breaks, you’re never
going to heal. It’s time to change the channel and think positive.”
“The first place you lose the battle is in your own thinking.”
“If you’re alive, you’re not an accident. No matter how good or
bad your situation is, God has a destiny for you to fulfill.”
…and, my personal favorite:
“You were never created to live an average, get-by life. You have
royalty in your blood. Winning is in your DNA.”
Certainly when walking the streets of LA there is no overabundance
of people accusing me of being a masterpiece or having winning in my DNA. Nor
are there people encouraging me to take my hands off the wheel and let God
drive. But these tweets tell me otherwise, and they are a welcome and inspiring
change of pace from the cesspool that is normally dumped into my brain by the
truckload every time I check one of my accounts.
The man I have to thank for this foresight and wisdom is in fact
Houston gentleman and mega-church televangelist Joel Osteen. To this day, I
can’t recall how his tweets were first brought to my attention. It’s possible
that one of my friends ironically re-tweeted him as a joke and I followed him
from there, but it’s also possible that one of his tweets were sponsored and
ended up in my feed that way. Possible even still is the chance that they were
sent my way by divine intervention. Regardless, what began as a joke has
quickly taken on a meaning of much deeper significance. They relax and inspire
me and I find myself checking in with them often.
But who actually is this strange Osteen whose philosophies
now guide my moral compass, what with his teeth and messages of hope,
acceptance and perseverance? A brief look at Joel’s Wikipedia page gives a
by-the-numbers but nonetheless interesting account of all the major milestones
of his life and career.
Texas born and bred, Osteen began preaching the week after his Dad
died. Very quickly amassing a following with his natural charm and smooth
delivery, Osteen opted for a more positive, uplifting approach to The Word as
opposed to the fire and brimstone methods so in vogue with preachers in east
Texas at the time. Fast forward some years and three best selling books later
and Osteen will not be stopped. He’s preaching in the old Houston Rockets
stadium in front of tens of thousands and being transmitted to hundreds of thousands
more worldwide. He’s preaching at Yankee Stadium and selling it out. He’s
advising the President on a regular basis. In short Osteen is on fire, but he’s
also got a tough line to walk. He’s got to be liberal enough for the masses,
his publishers, etc., but conservative enough for his grassroots congregation
back home in Houston.
Osteen has come under criticism for welcoming gay members into his
church while at the same time referring to homosexuality as a “process to be
freed from”. Osteen has also dodged accusations of promoting material gain as a
reward for being a good Christian, further prompted by the ten million dollar
mansion he and his family currently live in.
To me, what’s particularly interesting is to think about all the
creeps and charlatans Osteen has undoubtedly had to deal with, if only at
surface level events like dinners, fund raisers, etc. At some point during his
meteoric rise to international mega-church dominance and televangelical
superstardom he, without question, had to be around something ultra shady, and
I want to know what it is.
I wonder if he ever met and/or associated with Ted Haggard, the
fire and brimstone Colorado Springs pastor who condemned all homosexuals to
burn in Hell for eternity while quietly sneaking off for methamphetamine-fueled
male prostitute bonanzas. Or Jimmy Swaggart, perhaps the biggest and most
flamboyant televangelist in American history (and, interestingly enough, first
cousin of Jerry Lee Lewis) who got taken down for repeatedly ordering
prostitutes in the areas he knew he would most likely be recognized and caught.
I can’t imagine Osteen ever being up to anything quite as sordid as those two
clowns, but either way, there’s no chance he hasn’t been around at least something
and I began to think about it more and more.
I’m not naturally inclined to take advice from televangelists or
anyone from Houston, and you don’t become head of an empire by being a good
person, so I began to feel conflicted about my enthusiasm. Then it occurred to
me that one of the only other people whose quotes have been collected into a
Twitter feed that I check with regularity was another thoroughly devout
Christian and my main man, Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy.
Comparing these two
as writers is like comparing Michael Jordan to Craig Ehlo, but let me hit you
with some of my favorite Tolstoy jams:
“Don’t despise or overly respect anyone”
“You think the person you’re angry with is your enemy, but your
main enemy is the anger toward your brother that’s in your heart.”
“Do good in secret and be sorry when someone finds out about it
and you’ll learn the joy of doing good for your own soul.”
“Do not make great plans, or think too much about what will result
from your efforts, which seem to me as the efforts of an ant or a tiny insect.
All you have to do is live your life, avoid the bad, and try to do only what is
good.”
“Even in the most trivial matters, you must not allow yourself to
lie.”
“The longer a person lives, the more his life will be revealed to
him. The unknown becomes known, and this happens until death. At the moment of
death, everything is revealed and we can understand all about this life.”
...and finally, the quote that ideologically divides these two men
who are otherwise delivering such similar messages:
“A rich man lives an uncomfortable life as he is always afraid to
lose his riches. The wealthier he is, the more worries he will have. A rich man
can meet and be friends only with the rich, because he cannot be a real friend to
the poor, for then the sin of his wealth will be too obvious.”
Towards the end of his life, when he was rich and internationally
famous, Tolstoy had a hall of fame crisis of faith that lead to him
contemplating his own suicide night and day, arriving at the conclusion that
all of life is ultimately meaningless. He realized he was one of the smartest,
most celebrated men in the world and he was miserable. Gradually, it dawned on
him that the wealthiest friends he had were also the most miserable, as they
were often the ones with the most idle time on their hands to sit and
contemplate the inescapable and infinite black void of death that awaits us
all. Meanwhile, the happiest people he knew were the serfs who worked on his
land from morning until sundown. Tolstoy wondered how this could possibly be,
so he disguised himself and lived amongst his serfs to see if he could figure
it out. Tolstoy eventually discovered that since these serfs’ lives consisted
almost exclusively of toiling the land, resting at night and observing the
Orthodoxy, they were by default the closest ones to the Earth and therefore the
closest to God. Once Tolstoy had this epiphany, he immediately freed all of his
serfs, renounced himself from the state-officiated Orthodox church, and absolved
himself of all his riches, giving much of them to a world class pile of shit
named Chertkov.
Now, I’m not saying I wholeheartedly endorse all of this. If you
don’t have any money bad things happen, and I don’t suggest Osteen should live
in squalor to legitimize his message. Tolstoy never had to live in modern Los
Angeles. And for the sake of argument, lets examine the other side of the coin.
Tolstoy got to exist in a time before religion had become big business, and
before a box of cereal cost seven dollars. Also, it’s necessary for the Osteens
to live in a home with a more complex (re: expensive) security system to
protect themselves from unwanted visitors who would be numerous, uninvited, and
would certainly show up unannounced if given the opportunity. Besides, who’s to
say Osteen’s not entitled to enjoy some of the benefits from writing three
best-selling books? There can’t be any shortage of ambitious young pastors
attempting to publish books on how to live, only in Osteen’s case people actually
purchased his. I’ll additionally say that he seems harmless enough and like a
really nice guy. It’s an interesting contrast though.
I stole part of the title for this piece from a line of dialogue
from “Glengarry Glen Ross” by David Mamet. One of his lesser known but equally
exceptional plays, called “Speed-the-Plow,” is about two Hollywood executives,
one much more powerful than the other, and how they behave when things begin to
fall apart. It’s hilarious and frightening and fantastic. Anyway, the paperback
version begins with a passage from Thackeray that includes this:
“Which is the most reasonable and does his duty the best: he who
stands aloof from the struggle of life, calmly contemplating it, or he who
descends to the ground, and takes his part in the contest?...to each some work
upon the ground he stands on until he is laid beneath it.”
I suppose at the end of the day, Joel Osteen’s just a dude. I
should continue to read his tweets because they help me and not worry about the
things he’s done or the people he’s had to associate with on the way up,
especially since I couldn’t know less about it. And above all, I can’t begrudge
him taking part in the contest.
You should read his tweets though, they’re fucking fantastic. For
real.
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