If there’s three things I know about my sister, it’s that she loves pickles, the color pink, and The Muppets. Her love for Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, and the rest of the gang is pretty incredible. I’m pretty sure if you set her in front of a television and played Muppet Show reruns or Muppet movies (yeah, even Muppets From Space… yuck…) she would be left in an utter stupor of pure joy. Because of my sister’s slight obsession, I always take notice when there’s any big Muppet news floating around (as I’m sure most of you are… pretty standard).
Well, it should just so happen that today, August 23, 2011, a Muppets tribute album headed up by the band Ok Go was released in anticipation of the new Muppets movie being released this November creatively entitled, The Muppets, which is the first Muppets film to be released in theaters in 12 years and is hoped by fans to be a return to form for a pop culture franchise that has largely disappeared from our collective conscience over the past decade. Many of the bands on the appropriately named Green Album are some of my favorites so I decided to check it out on NPR’s First Listen when some music critics started buzzing about the album a few weeks back.
Admittedly, my sister’s love for the Muppets has rubbed off on me. Thanks to her, the Muppets have carved out a soft spot in my heart. How couldn’t they, right? There’s something about the Muppets that harkens back to the nostalgia of childhood innocence and a comedic delivery that appeals to both children and adults alike, a lost art in our day of demographic studies and targeted marketing. For me, I’m a sucker for The Muppet Movie, which is the Muppets first and, in my humble opinion, the best movie of the lot. So, when I started listening to the Green Album, I was immediately drawn to the song, “Rainbow Connection,” which appeared on The Muppet Movie and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Song.
The more cynical among us might write off “Rainbow Connection” for being nothing more than sentimental fluff. If that’s you, I don’t blame you. I’d probably feel the same if not for some nostalgic pulls at my proverbial heart strings (sniffle sniffle). But even if your cynical leanings have sucked your heart dry of any childhood innocence that was left after you found out Santa wasn’t real (While I said I wouldn’t blame you, I didn’t say I wouldn’t try to make you feel really really guilty.), I would still like to suggest to you that “Rainbow Connection” hits on something truly profound, something at the very heart of what it means to be human.
If you watch the video linked above and you listen to the little green frog wax poetic, Kermit reflects on the longing within the human soul for transcendent truth and beauty. The lyrics speak to the inextinguishable desire of humanity to worship, to find unspeakable joy in what we perceive to be beautiful. Sadly, too many of us settle for a cheap beauty that will ultimately leave us in a vanity.
C.S. Lewis once said:
If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered to us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.
The things human beings so often make ultimate (power, sex, money, etc.) are in the end, as Lewis says, mud pies in a slum. Those things were meant to be shadows of something far greater and foretastes of a joy that would not fade or leave you asking, “Isn’t there more to it than this?” In reality, we were all made to be worshipers but not worshipers of created things. We were made to worship God and enjoy Him forever. The truth of Scripture and the love of Christ revealed in his death and resurrection gives us an incredible glimpse into the unimaginable joy that awaits those who have put their trust in Christ. It’s not power, sex, or money that awaits us but God Himself: the infinite, uncreated, all-powerful, all-knowing One. When we are finally in the presence of the Lord, we will never be bored. We will be enjoying communion with the only person with whom we can truly find permanent joy and satisfaction.
It is so easy in this life to settle for mud pies. Life has a way of choking out of us the wonder we all know as children. In the here and now, it becomes very easy to settle for things that make our immediate circumstances seemingly more tolerable, but they really don’t. Instead, they leave us emptier than we were before and searching for the next high, like a drug addict. True joy can only be found in the transcendent presence of God. And while Kermit never explicitly states in his song, he reminds us that what is truly worth pursuing is not found in the mud pies at the slums but in the holiday at the sea, even if you’re called a fool.
The world loves to call those who pursue and long for transcendent beauty fools. But the true fools are those who convince themselves that life is without meaning and devoid of anything objectively true and beautiful. As Christians, we cannot settle for cheap beauty. As Dostoevsky once said, we must:
Believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, for all the blood that they’ve shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened.
Only that is worth pursuing with all strength and passion. Only receiving God as our prize is worth giving all for. As Christians, we cannot accept the idolatry of cheap beauty but only what will truly satisfy: Christ. Anything less than receiving Him as our reward is too sorry to be mentioned.
