Elie Wiesel has suggested that the 20th century was the age of the expatriate, the refugee, the stateless and the wandered, with Iain Chambers saying that Diaspora, Stranger and Migrancy are the dominant metaphors of our time.
I read something a few years ago about the Wizard of Oz and postmodern homelessness, it's something that has really stuck with me over the years and has helped me to think about Christian faith in a culture of diaspora. The Wizard Oz can be interpreted as a modernist myth where Dorothy dreams for that which is better - the place over the rainbow - and so discovers the wonderful multi-coloured world of Oz.
However, when she gets there she just wants to return home; home to the greys of Kansas, where her ''hearts desire can be found in her back yard'. There can be a sense that we're back in Kansas now, the multi-coloured utopian dreams of modernity have been tried and found wanting and now we're back in Kansas and still singing somewhere over the rainbow - but not singing it hopefully, singing it as a lament, knowing that there is a place over the rainbow, a place better than this but we don't know how to get there. I'm pleased that it is a lament, it suggests that we still have in our corporate memory a hope that there is somewhere better.
The antitode to exilic homelessness is memory and so as I reflect on the role of Christian faith within this it is to keep the memory alive, the memory, not of modernity, but of dreams for a better world. Dreams that we can make a difference.
Tags: Home, BenEdson, WizardofOz
Blimey. What an amazing thought. This has struck a nerve with me. I guess my own Oz experience is my idealistic YWAM days back in the eighties. Like it or not I'm currently stuck in the greys of Kansas (or Sheffield).
Posted by: Andrew Wooding | December 08, 2009 at 05:56 PM
it's not my thought...i nicked it! Read Beyond Homelessness by Walsh and Bouma-Prediger - esp. chapter on Postmodern homelessness
Posted by: benedson | December 09, 2009 at 08:59 AM
yes, yes, but what do the red shoes signify? ;-)
Posted by: Liz | December 10, 2009 at 12:45 PM