Some time ago I read an interview with George Miller, co-writer and director of 2015’s “Mad Max: Fury Road.” It’s a phenomenal but brutal-to-watch film about a post-apocalyptic world of cultural and environmental destruction. In the interview, Miller reflected on a pivotal scene in which Furiosa, played by Charlize Theron, receives some devastating news: The Green Place of Many Mothers, where Furiosa had lived as a child and the place to which she and Max (Tom Hardy) have been trying to escape, no longer exists. Furiosa had been clinging to hope that they could find refuge there from the dystopian hellscape that bound them. The destruction of the Green Place is also the destruction of her hope.
How would Miller capture Furiosa’s reaction to this news? He knew he wanted to film her from a distance, surrounded by barren sand dunes. Unfortunately, the wind in the African desert where they filmed that day was blowing, well, furiously.
“Instead of cursing the wind,” Miller says, “I looked behind us and saw that the dunes had this wind blowing sand across them and the sun was getting low in the sky. I thought, ‘She could walk across the bridge of the dune and into the sun and just respond however she would, having completely lost all hope.’”
With that vague instruction, and not much of a plan, Theron staggered onto the dune like a wounded animal, dropped to her knees, and screamed into the sunset. In an epic film, full of bizarre and arresting images, this one may be the most iconic — and wrenching.
What struck me is that Miller called this approach “surfing the problems.” The expression resonated with me instantly, though it’s probably one of my biggest growing edges in life. I know people who surf the problems well (I’m married to one, in fact), who come alive amid a certain amount of chaos, who are at their best when things are at their worst. That is not me. In my good moments – in my very good moments –
when life is going well, I can approach the world with flexibility, curiosity and intuition, with a spirit of improvisation. But what happens when everything’s going haywire? That’s when we need to improvise the most — to accept the challenges as they come and use them as creative fuel… or at least resolve not to be defeated by them. Sadly, that’s exactly when my resistance often takes over, when my need for control and my sense of justice flare up. (What difference does it make what’s “fair”? What’s happening is what’s happening.)
As I think about the work of congregations and denominations in this post-Christian reality, I wonder how we might be called to surf the problems. Many churches are struggling with the proverbial three Bs: buildings, bucks and butts. We chase after the latest fad or look to new members to alleviate our workload and restore us to solvency. Meanwhile, we become so obsessed with our challenges that they become all we see. But surfing the problem is different. Surfing the problem means accepting on some level that many “problems” cannot be solved. They can merely be managed, weathered… maybe even befriended.
A friend who’s begun studying yoga shared the definition of equanimity she learned in her practice: “the art of meeting life as it meets you, calmly, without drama or fuss.” Equanimity strikes me as a key component in surfing the problems. When have you seen this done well? What resources are helpful in this task? And what might the church look like if we embodied this approach more fully?
MARYANN MCKIBBEN DANA is a writer, pastor, speaker and coach living in Virginia. She is author of “God, Improv, and the Art of Living.”
