SPIRIT WOW 008: RYAN REYNOLDS HAS THE RECIPE FOR THE COLE SLAW SYNOD
The Secret Ingredient is Meat Pies.
The first round of the Synod on Synodality—aka Big Church Jamboree—is about to finish up in Rome. It’s unclear at this point what’s going to happen next—Will there be more meetings around the world? Are we going to get a summary of what was talked about? Will each parish be asked to express their feelings at this point in a modern dance? (And that, kids, is how your grandma and I got into exotic dance.)
But there will be a second and final round of meetings in Rome a year from now, which will somehow bring to an end the process that the pope started in 2021.
And as the synod members enter into this in-between year, I have a suggestion as to something they might consider. And it comes from noted religious leader Ryan Rodney Reynolds. You know, this guy.
Don’t tell me you don’t see the face of God.
We begin, as we always begin, with a brief meditation on Hell.
HELL
A couple weeks ago I watched my first episode of Welcome to Wrexham, which is a Hulu show about a soccer team in England that has been trapped basically in Hell for the last 14 years.
*warning: I will now try to explain English soccer. Stand clear of the closing doors.*
English soccer is sort of like American baseball. There are a number of leagues from major to minor. But the English system has two big twists. 1) There’s a whole bunch of leagues in the upper strata that would be the equivalent of the major leagues. (That’s levels 1-4.)
2) Rather than players moving between leagues as they do better or worse, it’s whole teams that do so. So for instance, in the American League this year, the two worst teams—and boy were they bad—were the Kansas City Royals (56 wins) and the Oakland A’s (50 wins). Imagine instead of just being embarrassed and trying to be better next year, those teams were themselves sent down to Triple AAA ball, and the top 2 Triple AAA ball teams were sent up to the majors—not some of the players, the whole teams.
It gets crazier: Say Kansas City is terrible in AAA, too, and ends up at the bottom again the next year. (He says as a White Sox fan, trying to withhold his delight at this idea.) The year after that it’s going to be playing in AA ball. Etc. etc.
With each of these demotions come massive financial implications—less money from the league, way less money from advertisers. It’s brutal. And in English soccer, where a lot of these teams are located in small towns, a team can end up being the town’s main industry. As a result, demotion can literally crush a town.
Wrexham has been trapped in the National League—the first tier below what we might call the major leagues—for 14 years.
Seriously: Hell.
IN LOS ANGELES, HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE’S BOX OFFICE
Meanwhile in Hollywood Ryan Reynolds spent those same years securing a permanent place as the internet’s boyfriend.
But it hadn’t been easy. Because in 2011 he did this to himself.
Seriously, why are his eyes like that? Is he the hero or villain? And why is he made of CGI?
No one liked Green Lantern.
Really, no one.
Hollywood is a rough place. When you’re doing well, they love you like the child they always wanted. But when you fail, they stop taking your calls, lest the stink of you get on the furniture.
Reynolds spent the next five years doing voice work in movies like The Croods and Turbo, and playing cops in movies that did not do well.
Then in 2014, someone (wink wink) released test footage of Ryan Reynolds playing an insane Marvel super hero called Deadpool.
Reynolds claimed to know nothing about this (wink wink), but the footage was hot. Suddenly all the execs in L.A. were remembering how warm and alive they had felt when Ryan was in their lives, and started sending him late night “you up?”s.
And Reynolds’ career launched into the stratosphere.
All of which is to say, Reynolds knows something about climbing out of Hell.
RYAN AND ROB: A LOVE STORY
Meanwhile there was this very funny and nasty TV show called It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia created by this guy Rob McElhenney which was about, to quote Wikipedia, “a group of narcissistic and sociopathic friends who run the Irish dive bar Paddy’s Pub in South Philadelphia.” At this point it’s the longest running sitcom on television—it just finished its 16th season.
And for as mean-spirited and funny as it is, in its 13th season the show went deep. After long hinting that McElhenney’s character Mac might be gay, in the 12th season he finally faced that truth. And in the 13th, he tells his friends, “I don’t know where I fit in as a gay man and it’s starting to get to me. I’m not feeling very proud.”
There’s like this storm inside of me and it’s been raging my whole life, and I’m down on my knees, and I’m looking for answers, and then God comes down to me and it’s a very hot chick and she pulls me up and we start dancing.
The episode culminates in him going to the prison where his father is, coming out to him, and then performing that dance that he imagined. And rather than comedic, it’s this extremely raw and powerful moment.
Ryan Reynolds saw that and reached out to McElhenney to say how much he liked it. And the two became text buddies.
A couple years later, McElhenney sent him an email about buying Wrexham. Here’s how Reynolds tells the story:
One day Rob sends me an email that outlines his plan to buy a lower-league club and grow it into something more resembling a global force.
'I just saw the path that he laid out, the phosphorescence in the water so to speak, and I was in. I just thought it was so unexpected and so interesting and I love building businesses and this is a business.'
Though they had never until that point actually met in person, they decided to make a go of it and put in a bid for Wrexham.
LIVE FROM WREXHAM
Part of the deal of them owning the club seems to have been the production of an ongoing docuseries, which from the ads kind of seem like it’s going to be about these two Hollywood dumbos taking over a team. You know, It’s like a movie!
But it’s not that at all. First of all, Rob and Ryan take the work really seriously. And the show is about the successes and failures of the team, of course. But really it ends up telling stories of the greater Wrexham community. There’s a father with two young kids who’s going through a divorce; a local musician with cancer who married late, various players, staff—just about every episode you’re getting this much deeper dive into the people of Wrexham.
(And if all of that sounds familiar, Netflix did a show called Sunderland ‘Til I Die which is almost identical minus the celebrities. I highly recommend it.)
I had not watched the first season of Wrexham, but I decided to dip my toe in with an episode from the current season and see if I liked it.
The episode I chose was the second episode of the new season. Called “The Quiet Zone,” it focused on the team’s star player Paul Mullin, whose son Albi has been diagnosed with autism, and an ultra-likable 17-year-old fan named Millie Tipping, who is also autistic. Most of the episode is just them and their families telling their stories, which is plenty affecting on its own.
But then at the very end, kind of the out of blue, the filmmakers take us to a game. We watch Millie sit down and put on these big headphones, which she wears because the sounds of the game are too overwhelming for her.
And after she sits down, the show cuts to the game itself, and without warning the filmmakers take the sound out, so that we end up watching the game in the same way that Millie does. It’s such a small decision, and yet to be invited into Millie’s point of view like that turns to be profoundly moving.
FLAVOR NOTES FOR THE COLE SLAW SYNOD
Millie Tipping and Paul Mullin.
The whole premise of the Synod process, as I wrote about a couple weeks ago in a piece that has my friend Randy now calling it the Cole Slaw Synod (and now that’s what I find myself calling it, too), is that if you give people the space and freedom to share their own life experience, it will change those listening. And that will no doubt change how the church that they’re all a part of understands itself, too.
As I mentioned in that other piece, there’s plenty out there who want none of that, who think this whole exercise is just a sham that the Pope is using to justify the changes in the church he wants to make. Never mind that every time he’s done a big meeting like this, his final summary statement when it’s over has offered suggestions but always left it up to the local bishop to decide how to enact them. His whole papacy has been a critique of authority, but that includes his own. Where other popes have presented themselves as the ultimate repository of God’s wisdom—how much hutzpah does it take to stand in front of billions of people and say “This thing I’m about to tell you is absolutely true and you have to follow it, because I say so and I speak for God”?—Francis has been very much of the mindset that God’s Spirit lives out there in the wild (aka in the community). And so if you’re going to follow it you’ve got to go out there and listen.
To say instead, “Yo I’m Church Boss and what I say goes,” that’s not “protecting” God or the sanctity of the Church—How does a divine figure need protecting anyway?— it’s actually violating God and the Church.
I know the Synod people—Members? Representatives? Disciples? Can I get a collective noun for members of a Synod?—are going to be pooped after their month in Rome. All that gelato!
But as they and the bishops of the church and the rest of us take this next year to think about what they’ve heard and where things go from here, maybe we should take a little time to watch some movies and TV shows like Reynolds’ and McElhenney’s Welcome to Wrexham. Because listening to Millie Tipping and Paul Mullin and their families talk about their lives for a half hour in “The Silent Zone” pretty much captures how much just listening to a person’s story can change you. And that’s what this process is really all about.
The Collective Noun for Members of the Cole Slaw Synod
A Discernment?
A Cabbage?
A Francis? (God the folks on the right would hate that.)
If you’d like to support my cole slaw habit, I’m on Paypal at paypal.me/jimmcdsj, and my Venmo is scannable below:
See you Monday with the Wow!