The nuns leaning into the serious business of fun

The beats breaking down barriers

Jamie Mulvaney

Jamie is Vicar of St Michael's Chester Square, London.

Sister Marizele and Sister Marisa.

Summer is for letting your hair down and water pistols. But in an age where we're super-soaked with content online, how did a couple of nuns in Brazil emerge through the saturation? As Sister Marizele sang and beatboxed, Sister Marisa danced on a Brazilian Catholic television show. They've now recorded their song, 'Vocation'.

Even though their online content was more about vocation than vacation, it's attracted huge numbers. “Why did something so simple and spontaneous take on such a huge scale?” asked Sister Marizele, “Because the Holy Spirit wants to touch people’s hearts.” “But besides the Holy Spirit,” she told the New York Times, “there’s also the algorithm.”

The algorithm's clearly helped. One of the nuns' colleagues came back from vacation to keep the content going online. Instead of only a handful of prospective nuns per year, they had over 50 women get in touch in a matter of days to ask about embarking on the life of a nun ahead. The nuns believe that God wants to draw young people to church in a country where church attendance has dropped off a cliff. Perhaps they should seek advice from Whoopi Goldberg, who has given them her blessing as a 'real-life ‘Sister Act’.

They aren't the only ones. Father David Michael is an American Catholic priest on Instagram (sometimes breakdancing) with 1.2 million followers who combines an uncompromising message with a sophisticated understanding of the need to hook people in the first three seconds of a video. This all doesn't paint the the staid picture of the church we expect. The iconoclastic act of beatboxing on TV isn't just breaking down beats, but the image of religion as being fun-averse.

Perhaps there's more to fun than meets the eye. We might misconceive fun as shallow, frivolous and lacking in depth. But you can be both a nun, and fun. Maybe it's not just a case of unexpected possibility, but actually intrinsic to those with vocations in faith.

Yesterday I returned from a crematorium in the front passenger seat of the empty hearse. The driver, along with hilarious stories of funerals gone wrong, also told me about losing his own child ten years ago. 'They say time's a great healer. But it isn't. You don't get over it. You learn to cope with not getting over it.' Those who have suffered and still carry unimaginable pain can know what it is to laugh.

It's a similar depth of fun from the nuns that can speak into pain. Far from a gimmick, their skills haven't just been breaking down beats, but barriers. According to Sister Marizele, they've been "an instrument to become closer and break down barriers" with young women at drug and alcohol rehabilitation centres, where they otherwise had little to connect over.

It might seem an odd segue, but it's striking that Jesus' first miracle was turning water into wine at a wedding party. The sheer abundance of the wine signifies the abundance of what's possible when nuns lean into fun: restoration and community for addicts, purpose for people considering their calling, and – simply – joy. Joy for countless millions around the world watching on. Joy, as CS Lewis said, is the serious business of heaven.

Article

America

Creed

Justice

5 November 2024

6 min read

Is it okay to be mean as long as you are mean and right?

Here's what a mean street preacher really taught me.

Nathan Betts

Nathan is a speaker and writer on topics related to faith, life and God. He lives near Seattle, Washington. His writing is featured frequently in The Seattle Times. nathanbetts.com

Behind a passer by a street peacher holds up a large yellow sign with a message on it.

Street preachers on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

LaTerrian McIntosh on Unsplash.

A few months ago, my cousin was visiting my hometown of Seattle for work. We planned to meet one evening for a Mariners baseball game during her visit. I suggested that we meet near the wonderful Ken Griffey Jr. statue near the stadium gates. What I hadn’t realized was that this was the precise spot a street evangelist had also decided to station himself in order to share (mostly shout) his message of judgement and destruction the same evening. Kind of like a pre-game verbal hors d'oeuvres. I arrived at the meeting point a few minutes before my cousin, giving me ample time to hear the preacher preach.

Now, I grew up in church, and, in fact, am myself a speaker and writer on topics involving faith and God. In other words, I’ve had over 40 years to experience the church’s, umm, “quirks”. I’d like to think that very little coming from the mouths of faith preachers could shock me. Alas, I was wrong.

As I began to listen to the preacher, lines like “weeping and gnashing of teeth” scorched through the preacher’s megaphone. Yep, nothing new there. The preacher used the word “judgment” a lot. Actually, impressively a lot. I’ve never before heard the words “God” and “judgment” used in conjunction more times within a two-minute span. There was a raging intensity to the sermon, but still in the range of normal for street preaching.

Then, my cousin texted me that she was outside the ballpark but might have gotten the location wrong. I realized she and I were at two different locations. While I texted my cousin back, I tuned out the preacher’s message. That is until I heard him shout through his megaphone, “He hates you.” I stopped texting. I looked up at the preacher. Did he just say that God the Almighty hated all of us outside the ballpark? Families, little boys and girls, and elderly? Did God hate all of us lining up for the game? It was “bark at the park” night so even the dogs were casualties in the preacher’s line of fire. If nothing else was gleaned from the man’s message, it seemed, we were all to understand that God hates us.

Minutes later, when my cousin and I finally found each other, I told her that she had had the good fortune of missing out on the street preacher informing her that God hates her. She replied, “Oh, I have plenty of others who tell me that!”

Sadly, many of us have received that negative message from different sources in our world and too often from people sharing some association with God.

In America, as election season comes to the boil, I’ve noticed (and maybe you have too) the not-so-subtle attitude that it’s okay to say mean things about another person as long as that person is on “the other side”. A verbal dig here, an eyeroll there, name-calling and slanderous nick-naming the enemy for the sake of ridicule have become all too common, if not a soft virtue in political discourse. It has become hard to discern where the moral line is, or if such a thing still exists within political dialogue.

Conversations like the following happen so frequently following a political debate or interview, they’ve become cliché: “I almost cannot believe he said that!” Response: “Well, yes, that was pretty bad. But he’s right, isn’t he?” Translation: it’s okay to be mean as long as you are mean and right.

Evangelicalism has gained a hard edge with little resemblance of the good news from which it has its very name.

The meaning of the word ‘evangelical’ here in America is a complex thing, to be sure. But perhaps one of the reasons it is understood as a political word more than a religious one is because the combative and rude nature of discourse seen in politics has become increasingly acceptable even in Christian settings. As a friend of mine said to me years ago, “It feels as though Christians have turned rudeness into a spiritual gift.”

The thing is, you probably don’t know the preacher I heard in downtown Seattle, but you’ve probably heard or know a person who makes Christian claims in the same kind of rude ways. The result is that evangelicalism has gained a hard edge with little resemblance of the good news from which it has its very name.

I’ve had the privilege of speaking to audiences on topics of faith and God for around 20 years now and I’ve lost count of the number of people I’ve met who feel unlovable, already hated, and unforgivable for the decisions they’ve made in life.

So when I hear a preacher shouting a message through a bullhorn in the name of God and I hear not words of hope, peace, grace, love, and forgiveness, but strictly judgement and burning, I fail to see how this God can be the one who came to earth out of love for people in the person of Jesus Christ.

It’s true that the Bible does depict God enacting justice and judgement. But equally true is that the Bible not only displays, but out-and-out defines God as being love. My concern with the street preacher’s message is that although he might have communicated the justice of God (albeit in a warped way that would make old-time revivalists look tame), his message left little room for hearing about and feeling the love of God.

If there is anything we need to hear today, it is the message that God, in his very nature, is love. One particular writer of antiquity, and a close friend of Jesus Christ, once penned a letter to first century churches. In attempting to explain what God is like and what people of faith should be like he wrote: “Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.”

For those of us who have never been to a church, we only need to watch or attend an American football game to see a sign with the words John 3:16. That reference, taken from one of Christ’s biographies states that, “This is how much God loved the world: He gave his Son, his one and only Son. And this is why: so that no one need be destroyed; by believing in him, anyone can have a whole and lasting life.”

This is a message we need to hear. It’s something we need to let into our bones—that those of us who feel beyond the reach of love, are in fact loved by God.

In a strange way, I can’t help but admire the guts those street preachers have, banging out an unpopular message to strangers in crowds. The problem lies in the fact that often their message, so boldly proclaimed, is God’s disappointment, disapproval, or outright hate for people.

Because this is the truth and too important to miss: God doesn’t hate you. He loves you. He always has and he always will.