Disney, the Manger, Fake, and What is Genuine

If you truly love Disney and cherish the time you have spent there with your loved ones, please do not read this blog. Really. I can’t come up with anything bad to say about someone who spent quality time with people they love at an amusement park. I’m glad you enjoyed it so much. Cherish your memories. Many people I love and respect think Disney is the best family vacation possible.  If you went to Disney, however, and wondered why you didn’t enjoy it, please feel free to read my blog.

One more time just to be clear: I AM NOT CRITICIZING ANYONE who enjoys Disney! Good for you. I didn’t. And that’s okay. We do not need to be the same. Instead, I am critiquing our culture, which is very different from than individuals.

I can’t stand matching bedroom furniture sets. I’ve never liked things that seem too perfect. I would rather have flawed than perfect anyday. And fake? Forget it. Fake makes me cringe.

Disney is fake. And when I say fake, I mean it is epic fake. I anticipated glossy, happy fake, but not disgusting-make-me-want-to-flee fake. Disney is so fake that I wondered if they vacuum up your farts as you walk through. Disney is so fake that the dancing-singing-parades are filled with wigged actors who don’t sing, but obviously mouth the words. It’s not like they even tried to convince you they were singing. I wondered if after each parade their faces hurt from all that forced smiling. Disney is so fake, they've created their very own fake American town that represents white small town Americana.

We just returned from Orlando. We’d never taken our kids before and it felt like an American parental obligation we had to fulfill. Not to mention, we are Harry Potter addicted. We went to visit Harry Potter Land at Universal Studio and drink butterbeer. It was thrilling to be physically inside our imaginations as we turned the bend into Diagon Alley and rode on the Hogwarts Express. The following day we headed to Disney for our nine year old. And she loved it, mostly. She couldn’t believe people did it every year, but she delighted as we sat in a half seashell to be taken under the sea and sing along with the little mermaid. I was pleased to spend time with my nine year old, grateful to be out of the routine.

Unfortunately, I could not shut off my brain, as much as I tried. I expected expensive commercialism. I didn’t expect to be repulsed by the collective embrace of fake.

There were crowds of multiple families wearing a t-shirt that read Best Day Ever. Something about this statement cut me like a knife. I wondered if this was their best day, waiting in lines and buying overpriced everything. How much of life were they missing?

Some of my best days have been unplanned, unexpected, and filled with flaws. In fact, some of my best days have been so flawed that it gave me the needed perspective to embrace the abundant grace in my life. One of my best days was spent in my childhood friend’s hospital room after she was diagnosed with leukemia. I snuggled in bed with her and later cropped her hair short in readiness for chemo. I anointed her shorn head with holy water from a sacred spring in Ireland as we sobbed. Perfect? No. Fake? Absolutely not! Filled with meaning beyond words as my dear friend bared her soul to me, crying her fear, and listening again to words of comfort from the Psalms? Yes. I learned about courage, miracles, and lasting childhood friendship that day. It was one of the best and hardest days of my life.  

I wonder if the day Mary gave birth to Jesus was the best day ever. From a distant view, the day God decided to come and live among us so that we would know love, sounds like the best day ever. But Mary was a homeless teenager, forced to give birth far from her mother and the women of her village. She had no place for her newborn child so she laid him in a dirty manger (a feeding trough). In fact, my guess is that the living conditions in which Mary found herself laboring and then later nursing her newborn baby were anything but perfect and definitely not hygenic. She labored among animals and their excrement. Did you really read that? Jesus was born, slept, and nursed right in the middle of animal shit. Does Not Sound Perfect To Me. My guess is that some of you will be offended reading Jesus and shit in the same sentence. Sorry. But that is the truth. That is real. That is not fake. God’s lungs filled for the very first time with pungent air.

Jesus’ arrival into the world was difficult. It was messy. It was dirty. It was anything but perfect. It was also real.

That same day shepherds arrived in the dirty space to glimpse the baby whose birth was proclaimed by angels. Angels who sang with their own voices music so beautiful that the heavens burst forth. They did not wear wigs or lip sync. The shepherds ran to see Jesus; they did not have time to wash weeks of filth from their faces and hands. Nothing about that scene in Bethlehem was perfect. Nothing was clean or orderly or even planned. Instead, God entered our world in the midst of the very real beauty and chaos of life: animal smells, filthy faces, an exhausted mother, angels’ voices, rummaged bands of cloth, and a repurposed manger.  

In a world of fake news, I still crave the truth. In a world of Best Day Ever t-shirts and fake magical kingdoms, I still crave genuine. Even if that genuine is a scary diagnosis, pending chemo, dirty barns, or chaotic gatherings of shepherds and angels. Genuine lasts more than a day. It lasts a lifetime, and it transforms a life.

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