The Cross is My Anchor: On Learning to Dance Again

By Peter Kline

This is the sixth piece in our series on “Marry the Night.” For the previous pieces, click here.

“God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are…God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.

– 1 Corinthians 1:27-28, 25

“Surrender your own poverty and acknowledge your nothingness to the Lord. Whether you understand it or not, God loves you, is present in you, lives in you, dwells in you, calls you, saves you and offers you an understanding and compassion which are like nothing you have ever found in a book or heard in a sermon.” 


                                                                                    – T. Merton, The Hidden Ground of Love

“I wish that I could dance on a single prayer.”

– Lady Gaga, “Scheiße”

“Together, we’ll dance in the dark.”

– Lady Gaga, “Dance in the Dark”

Back in September of this year, we lost a little monster. Jamey Rodemeyer, 14, took his own life because he finally could not shake the messages he heard from his peers that his life was not worth living. Jamey was an avid Lady Gaga fan. Among his last words was an expression of gratitude to Mother Monster for fighting the fight he found he could no longer fight. Jamey was buried in a Lady Gaga t-shirt bearing the words, “Born This Way.”

Suicide, particularly when it strikes young people, forces a mirror up to ourselves and to our world. What kind of world have we created that someone would want to force himself out of it after such a short amount of time? How could it happen that a 14-year-old boy could experience such a profound loss of hope? Why wasn’t this precious and vulnerable child more fiercely protected? I LOATHE REALITY. On September 21, in response to Jamey’s death, Gaga tweeted the following: “The past days I’ve spent reflecting, crying, and yelling. I have so much anger. It is hard to feel love when cruelty takes someone’s life.” During her iHeartRadio set a few days later, she performed “Hair” in tribute to Jamey. “Jamey,” she sang, “you’re not a freak.”

I begin here with a reminder of what is at stake for Gaga in her art: life and death, real bodies, real persons. We miss a great deal in our analysis and reception of her art if we don’t register its driving passion: the yearning to make true the lie that this broken and darkened world is yet worth living in with abandon and joy. I’M A WARRIOR QUEEN/LIVE PASSIONATELY TONIGHT. Just a few days ago, responding to the moving video of another gay teenage boy, Jonah, courageously telling us his story of being bullied and his resolve, despite this, to keep living, Gaga tweeted: “Please everyone, take a moment to watch this. This is why I work so hard, this is why it’s wrong to hate.”

How does beginning here affect how we might view this remarkable new video Gaga has given to us? What we’ve been given is an intimate glimpse into the passion that drives this woman’s work. And I mean “passion” here in its literal sense – suffering. What we see in this video is the story of love being forged through suffering, strength being given in weakness, life finding its anchor in and through death. In an earlier essay, I suggested that Lady Gaga undertakes her art as a work of love for the Jameys and Jonahs of this world, for those who find themselves weak, low, and despised – in a word, monstrous. Where does such love come from? I’M GONNA MAKE IT…YOU KNOW WHY? BECAUSE I HAVE NOTHING LEFT TO LOSE.

Perhaps the answer is this: it is when life ceases to be the pursuit of things and becomes instead the pursuit of nothing – no-thing – that life opens up as hopeful possibility, as new creation ex nihilo, as a movement into the bedazzled darkness of love. LOVE IS THE NEW / DENIM OR BLACK. The line between despair and hope is razor thin. Both face the future anxiously as a kind of empty darkness. The only difference is that whereas despair cowers before the darkness in fear, grasping for some-thing to stabilize the dizzying anxiety (gummy bears? a knife, maybe?), hope leaps forward, dancing into the darkness with an inexplicable expectancy that love is present and that love will come. I’M GONNA MARRY THE DARK / GONNA MAKE LOVE TO THE STARK. Love is the impossible possibility of dancing the night away on the razor, treating it not as the precipice of despair, but as the edge of glory. I’M ON THE EDGE WITH YOU. (And there you have the whole sweep of Born this Way, from its first to its last track).

This video, at its heart, is a story about dancing. It is about losing the ability and the drive to dance, but then finding one’s feet again through love. The video opens with Gaga knocked off her feet, being wheeled into the clinic on a gurney. She comments on her heels CUSTOM GUISEPPE ZANOTTI (a glimpse of what is to come perhaps, a remembering forward), but her feet hang there motionless and stiff. Her whole body lies motionless and stiff. A turn in the video happens when Gaga tells us, “I have nothing left to lose.” “Do you need anything else?” the nurse asks. What does someone who has lost everything need? Some-thing? No, for things will eventually just be lost again. Things don’t bring healing; things don’t bring freedom. “Juste un petite part de la musique,” “Just a little bit of music,” she replies. What Gaga needs are her dancing feet, and so she asks for music, for an invitation to dance. As Beethoven’s Pathétique begins to play, she raises her hands over her head into a dance position and elegantly falls back into her pillow. Even at her bleakest point, stabbed in the back, even surrounded by madness, not least her own, the dance is present, the dance is possible, and she desires its call. But how? How could such possibility be present amid such despair? Notice the crosses on her bed. One at her head (as if a saint’s halo), one at her feet, anchoring her, bearing her burden, loving her. She utters, “I have nothing left to lose,” as the cross cradles her.

(I danced on a Friday when the world turned black 

It’s hard to dance with the devil on your back

They buried my body, they thought I was gone

But I am the dance, and the dance goes on)[i] 

We are then ushered into a dream-like sequence with Gaga dressed as a ballerina. Ballerinas are the most rigorous of dancers. To be a ballerina requires perfection – physical, psychological, emotional. It is significant that Gaga has said on a few occasions that she regards dancing to be her least developed skill. Compared with her musical ability, she thinks of her dancing ability as something of a weakness. And so we find this ballerina standing in impossible shoes, dancing tentatively a dance we’re not sure she can pull off. Gaga has said these shoes represent the “Everest of [her] existence,” the impossible obstacle that occasioned her downfall. In the next scene, we witness the downfall. The call that knocks her off her feet, the anger, the yelling, the destruction, the nothingness of little zeros filling her mouth and covering her body (h/t Laurence Ross). The whole scene comes across as a dance dissolving into chaos. It is interwoven with shots of ballerina Gaga alternatively falling, hanging upside down, lying at the feet of other ballerinas, looking up at them in despair. She finally falls into her bathtub as if dead, drowning in the waters of baptism – “baptized into…death” (Romans 6:3).

Halfway through the video at this point, the decisive turn takes place. Beethoven’s song ends, and we begin to expect Gaga’s own. We’re not told or shown how the turn happens – one could never see the transition from death to resurrection, for it happens “in the twinkling of an eye” (1 Cor. 15:52) – we just see Gaga sitting in her baptismal/bathtub, somehow raised to life, her hair teal with the transition from brunette to blond, “Marry the Night” gently floating in the background. “And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters” (Genesis 1:2). And then the next scene opens and we see them…the heels. Gaga on her own two dancing feet, striding confidently into the dance studio, once again looking up at other dancers, but no longer with the despair of failed perfection. She’s not haughty or over-confident, though; we can still sense some anxiety. But it is an anxiety full of expectancy, not knowing what will come, yet open and ready nonetheless. Notice that the camera focuses on one of the dancers on the balcony, a ballerina. Gaga once again looks up and faces her Everest, the obstacle of perfection. But her face says it all – no downfall this time. I WON’T CRY ANYMORE.

Whence this newfound strength? The courage to “[do] it all over again,” to bedazzle the scraps and fragments of her shattered life? There is writing on the wall in this scene, which typically signals impending judgment or doom. But significantly, the writing here is reversed (h/t Meghan Vicks). What might be a message of judgment is actually a message of hope. But this is hidden from us initially; to see it, we have to look in reverse, a conversion has to take place. The message on the wall itself bears this reversal, this conversion. Flipped around, it reads: “The Cross is my Anchor.” The cross? That instrument of torture, death, and shame? How could this become an anchor, a source of strength? For the New Testament, the cross is a source of strength because the death of Jesus is that moment in history when the tender heart of God is thrown open to the world, never to close. Here God bears eternally the weight and nothingness of the world. Its brokenness and violence are now forever cradled in the outstretched arms of that “man of sorrows, acquainted with grief” (Isaiah 53:3). For those who will relax into such love, as Gaga seems to do in the clinic – I’LL DANCE… / WITH MY HANDS ABOVE MY HEAD… / LIKE JESUS SAID – weakness and brokenness become no longer a threat, no longer an occasion for rivalry or mistrust. Rather, you are free, as Gaga has said in a recent interview about her video, to “trust yourself to make mistakes,” free to face your obstacles, internal and external, with expectancy, with hope, even with laughter. (And of course with a bedazzler).

And so we’re taken out into a moonlit night to watch Gaga marry it, to watch her bedazzle it, to watch her dance out into the darkness with abandon. Initially, we come upon what looks like wreckage and carnage – cars burning, Gaga thrown upside down, hanging out of the Trans Am, knocked off her feet. We’re reminded of the opening scene where Gaga’s feet lie motionless and stiff. But here there is movement, restlessness. Then a surge of life, her legs writhing in search of some ground, some anchor, on which to dance. She flips herself over, and the dance begins. TURN ON THE CAR AND RUN.

The video then moves into what is for me its most moving and significant sequence. We’re taken back into the dance studio to watch how Gaga inhabits and lives into her newfound courage and strength. She enters the company of dancers not out in front, but as one of them, with and among them. There is no presumption that she deserves to be a star. She has to prove herself. Before the dance begins, she lies low, nervously looking up and around, but with a quiet determination. She stands, takes a deep breath, and the dance begins. A break in the dancing occurs, and she looks relieved, but still nervous. What will they think of me? Was I good enough? She wanders around looking for someone to say something to her. Finally someone does, presumably selecting her for a smaller dance group in which she is now out in front – next to the ballerina. The dancing begins again. But then a stumble, a fall. The ballerina, that image of poise and perfection, shows herself less than perfect. She is fragile, broken. A reversal has taken place. It is now the ballerina who lies at Gaga’s feet, looking up in despair. And what is Gaga’s response? She bends down, picks her up, and kisses her. The one who could most easily become an enemy, an object of rivalry and contempt, becomes instead a friend, an occasion to give love. I’M GONNA MARRY THE NIGHT. The dance Gaga now dances is one of love, love for the broken, for the fallen, for the low and despised. Significantly, the ballerina Gaga stoops down to help appears to be transgendered or in drag, a “freak” in the eyes of the world. Marrying her own pain and suffering has freed Gaga to give herself to, to dance with, “the least of these,” to those languishing in their own nights of pain, suffering, and rejection. Her kiss says, “You’re not a freak.”

The dance begins again, and it eventually breaks out into an improvised celebration around Gaga, full of joy. Such joy can’t be contained in a dance studio, and so it spills out into the streets, into the night. Gaga now leads a group of dancers unafraid to be out on the streets at night, unafraid to find joy in the darkness, unafraid to be monstrous. I can’t help but notice her teal lipstick here, the same color as the dye she uses to turn her hair blond. Her mouth once full of the zeros of nothing has been freed to sing, now teal with the promise of joy. THIS IS MY PRAYER / THAT I’LL DIE LIVING JUST AS FREE AS MY HAIR. She pulls off her sunglasses and looks straight at us, as if to say: come dance.

---

[i] Sydney Carter, “Lord of the Dance,” 1963. Hymn.

Author Bio:
Peter Kline is a Ph.D. candidate in theological studies at Vanderbilt University. His real love, though, is a little church in Nashville where he and his wife serve as ministers.

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A Religion Against Itself: Lady Gaga, God, and Love

By Peter Kline

I’d like to offer a theological read of Lady Gaga’s project. But let me begin with a little about me and why I’m interested in our current queen of pop.

I’m what you’d call a “religious person.” I attend church on Sundays, I have a seminary degree, I preach and lead worship regularly at my local church as well as at the local jail, and I’m currently studying for a Ph.D. in theology. And yet, I don’t particularly like religion. In fact, I’m often rather disturbed by it – as one is often disturbed by one’s own family, I suppose. I recognize that all religious speech and action – including my own – is always only a hair’s breadth away from ideology and propaganda (and usually it just is ideology and propaganda). In our current cultural and historical moment in the West it cannot help but be this way. Once religious language and institutions lose their taken-for-granted authority – which they have in modernity – all attempts simply to carry on with either the language or the institutions necessarily take on an air of insecurity and desperation about them. (This is not to say that pre-modern religion was any less ideological, only that in modernity we have become self-conscious about the ideological nature of religion).

I say this as someone still committed to Christianity. By “Christianity” I don’t necessarily mean “the Christian religion,” although my commitment to Christianity has and will, I think, be played out amidst all the trappings of “the Christian religion.” Christianity, for me, is reducible to one claim, and my belief in the truth of this one claim is what keeps me wading through all the muck and nonsense of the Christian religion – including, again, the muck and nonsense that I myself produce along the way. The claim is this: that poor peasant from Nazareth named Jesus, executed for blasphemy, is somehow the Mystery at the heart of all things. 

And so I’m constantly asking: is there any sense in which religious terms like “God,” “Jesus,” and “worship” can be categories of truthful and liberating (rather than ideological) speech and action? Which is to say, can they be rescued from “religion,” from the quest to secure ourselves against our finitude by pretending that “God” or “transcendence” or “eternity” or “the holy” is within our grasp as some identifiable bit of the world – whether it be a nation, institution, person, text, idea, or ambition?

It is for these reasons that I find myself deeply fascinated and compelled by Lady Gaga’s project – precisely as a religious person, as a theologian. The terms I just mentioned, (“God,” “Jesus,” “worship”), are terms not infrequently employed by Gaga herself. It is the way she inhabits and enacts these categories that compels me. We are often told that there is nothing really new in what Gaga is doing, especially with regard to religious themes and symbols. She is just another disgruntled post-Catholic who employs the images and tropes of religion for shock value. The standard (and by now tired) line is: she’s just doing what Madonna did.

But this is to fail to understand and appreciate Gaga’s project and the role of religion within it. She can’t be categorized or written off as a disgruntled post-Catholic who finds that the only way to deal with her religious upbringing is to profane it. This is a fundamental misreading of her art. There’s something much more subtle going on, a positive and appreciative appropriation of religious identity, but with a twist. Gaga’s performance of religious themes and identity is utterly sincere and serious. She’s not just after shock value. I’m convinced of this. The twist, though, is that this sincerity and seriousness is not entirely sincere or serious about itself.

This is the paradox and irony at the heart of Gaga’s entire project: a kind of earnest flippancy. I remember vividly one of her sermonettes at the particular Monster Ball I attended in Nashville. With a fiery conviction that would outdo any southern preacher, she proclaimed to us: “Jesus loves every fucking one of you!” And I have no doubt that she was aware of the signs being picketed about outside the arena before the show, urging “homosexuals” and other “sinners” to “repent.” Gaga assumed the role of counter-preacher, and she wasn’t kidding around. But her sermonette didn’t lead into some moralizing or tear-jerking song. It led into a raucous performance of “Boys, Boys, Boys,” as if to say, the only proper theological response to bigotry and hatred is to dance in its face to the tune of a (seemingly) vapid pop song.

It is this holding of one’s convictions firmly but of oneself lightly that is Gaga at her best. It is a posture that embraces finitude, contingency, and freedom. The problem with “convictions” and “ideas” – even and especially good and right ones, like, “Jesus loves every fucking one of you!” – is that they quickly imbue the holder of the conviction with a felt eternity and transcendence of contingency. We wield our convictions and ideas to shield us from the actuality of life, from the threats of having actually to live with and for others in all their singularity and finitude. (If I’m aware of the plight of the poor, convicted about the injustice of their lot just enough to vote for the politician who has the best ideas about how to help them, that is enough). Gaga seems to intuit something of this, which is why she holds all of her ideas and convictions (and there are a number of them) ironically and absurdly, being always ready to drop the chatter and simply sing and dance with and for her fans.

This is why the performative core of Gaga’s art is constantly undoing its own conceptual pretensions, even and especially with regard to its religious dimensions – in a way that parallels, and here is my central claim, the way in which the performative core of Christianity undoes its own religious pretensions. What is the performative core of Christianity? It’s that mutilated blasphemer dying on a Roman device of torture and execution. What is the performative core of Gaga’s art? It’s that bloodied pop-star hanging dead before the murderous gaze of the MTV audience at the 2009 VMAs. This, I submit, is the central religious image in her entire oeuvre – a figure we’d like to make capital off of (whether religious or cultural), but who instead confronts us with our own violence, and in doing so calls us to freedom.

Jesus was put to death by the religious and political authorities of his day. Gaga was put to death by the cultural authorities of our day. Both died at the hands of those trained in the arts of death: the former at the hands of Roman soldiers; the latter at the hands of the paparazzi. Both walked straight into centers of cultural power to face their deaths: Jesus into Jerusalem, Gaga into Los Angeles. Both submitted to the violence of the powers freely and intentionally. Jesus: “He began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed…” (Mark 8:31). Gaga: “I imagine that my pop career could be quite long and people will wonder for a very long time what my demise will look like, so why don't we show them?”

Notice just what this means for how we should understand Gaga’s art: it all takes place under the shadow of its already enacted demise. But this is a demise that she herself has enacted as art. Just here is the subversive or “salvific” move of her entire project. By enacting her own death, by submitting to the death-gaze of the pop-media world and turning it into her own art, she has taken the power of death out of their hands. She has exposed their violence, just thereby subverting it. Her death opens a space of freedom for her art and for her fans, creating space for all those “little monsters” who otherwise would be excluded and ignored by the very cultural powers that Gaga allows to crush her. By death she has overcome death.

This is exactly how the New Testament understands the death of Jesus – just replace “art” with “love,” and “little monsters” with “sinners.” “God shows God’s love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). “No one takes [my life] from me,” says Jesus, “but I lay it down of my own accord” (John 10: 18). “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lays down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). The apostle Paul taught that Jesus’ death “disarmed the rulers and authorities by putting them to open shame” (Colossians 2:15). Jesus’ death shames the very powers that enact his death, because by turning their violence into his own act of love, he turns their violence against itself. The power of violence is enfolded within his act of love and is thereby rendered impotent and mute. “I’ll just never forget when I spoke with MTV for the first time and I explained the whole performance with them, and I remember the second that I finished, it was crickets.” Gaga’s art makes mute the power that is MTV, and out of this silence emerges the freedom of her music, just as the silence of Holy Saturday gives way to the new song of Easter Sunday.

What I’m claiming is that Lady Gaga is a “parable” of the good news about Jesus I believe in. A parable is an extended metaphor, an indirect enactment or proclamation of some truth. Jesus himself told lots of parables about “the kingdom of God,” and part of what it means to believe that Jesus is not confined to the past, that somehow he continues to be present to us, is that he continues to enact parables among us – even and especially outside of “church,” outside of “religion.” Anywhere that genuine human freedom and liberation is happening, anywhere that the powers are being shamed, there Jesus is alive and at work.

This of course cannot be proven; it can only be believed. But as Gaga herself is wont to say, freedom is living halfway between fantasy and reality, believing in a liberation that cannot be seen or even thought, but that can only be lived, against all odds. Her art, she says again and again, requires a massive faith; it is, she tells us in her recent VMA promo, a “huge lie,” meaning that it is true only in the actual doing of it. “I’m a free bitch” is a not a propositional statement meant to correspond to some state of affairs in the world as we know it. It is a cry of hope, an absurd leap into an impossible possibility. Reflecting on her HBO Special performance at Madison Square Garden, she says, “I look out into that crowd and I’m like, when the fuck did this happen? How did this happen? Who created this? Because I didn’t create this, I for sure didn’t. It’s God. It’s for sure Jesus. It ain’t me because I’m not ridiculous to think for a second that I’m that powerful.”

What exactly did Jesus do? Make her rich and successful? No, not that. Right before saying “It’s for sure Jesus,” Gaga says, “My faith in my creativity and artistry has nothing to do with making it, because we kinda had already made it, right? I mean, when we were playing for nothing downtown, it was still like we’d made it, we still felt like we were superstars.” What she is talking about here is a freedom for creativity and art independent of the powers, independent of the pop-machine. What is astonishing to her, what to her can only be received as a gift from God, is that she has been given to share this freedom for creativity with so many fans. “Little monsters…they are the truth. They are my reason for everything.” Her art has turned into a work of love, and that is a transfiguration no power in this world can produce. “It’s for sure Jesus.”

It is here where Gaga is most intensely religious, invoking Jesus as the driving force behind her art. And yet it is here where religion undoes itself, refusing to be a border or gate-keeper of “the holy,” and instead becoming a total abandonment to the freedom of love. “This is my chance to release / And be brave for you…Tonight I will return / The fame and riches earned / With you I’d watch them all be burned.” Gaga once described her album Born This Way as “bad kids going to church.” That album, we might say, is at its core a sermon about the prodigal generosity of God that is no respecter of religion. “It doesn’t matter if you love him / or capital H-I-M /….God makes no mistakes.” “God,” accordingly, is not some Big Other who demands our servile obedience, but simply and sheerly the Freedom to love every other. “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born [this way] of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love” (1 John 4:7-8). That dead pop-star hanging in front the 2009 VMA audience just might be, for those who have ears to hear, an absurd witness to such love.

Let me conclude by citing one of Gaga’s own prayers. This comes from one of the previews to her HBO Special she released a few weeks prior to the special’s airing. In it, she is getting ready for her Madison Square Garden debut, struggling to make sense of it all. After an intense moment of vulnerability about her abiding insecurity, she offers the following:

“Let’s say our own prayer. Dear Lord, thank you so much for the blessings of all of my friends and my family. And thank you for all of the amazing screaming fans that are here tonight. Dear Lord please give me strength to be a winner for all of them and not for myself. Dear Lord remind me to empower not myself, but to empower those around me, because that is my gift. My gift is not self-worship, but my gift is the worship of others. So please help me to be strong, and please help me to know my own strength. Please help me to be brave, Lord. Dear God, give me courage. Do not let me give into those feelings. Do not let me give into my own insecurities. Allow me to walk in your light. Allow me to live and breathe and sing and dance for all the dancers on that stage, for the band, for the music, and for you. Amen.”

In the holy moment following the prayer, she turns and says, “Now I got some shit to do.”

Bibliography

http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1669406/lady-gaga-video-music-awards-performance.jhtml

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZScnfH7vxE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNUiDMUrBw4

http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1653302/lady-gaga-release-first-born-this-way-single-february.jhtml

Lady Gaga, “The Queen,” Born This Way, Interscope, 2011.

Lady Gaga, “Born This Way,” Born This Way, Interscope, 2011.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXYpDC9qecs

Author Bio:

Peter Kline is a doctoral candidate in theological studies at Vanderbilt University. He ministers to prisoners in Nashville. 

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