It's not very often when I get to spend an entire day at home that's why I looked forward to today when my calendar doesn't have anything written on it for this day. I resolved to do a DVD marathon-- well, four movies in all, with time to reflect on every one of it. My final movie for the day- The Legends of the Fall.
It brought back memories.
I remember being told I was too young to watch the film The Legends of the Fall, a film that got an R rating in 1994. I hardly understood what the reasons why I couldn't watch it. I was sixteen as I watched my brother and his friends go into the theater where it played while I had to go with a classmate to watch Santa Clause!
Three months after I turned 18, I rented a VCD with a mixed group of friends! Following a time preparing for a report on Religion and Culture for Prof. Alcazar's Sociology 101 class we finally saw the flick for the very first time. With a bowl of microwave popcorn on my lap and a can of Coke on a coaster on a carpet, I sat on the floor intently watching, never wanting for any scene to pass me by.
As I watched, I found myself deciding on a few childish-sounding things: First, having the resolve to grow my hair like Brad Pitt's- coming from a tradition where men are discouraged to grow their hair too long, I felt like I was chucking tradition altogether- which I really wasn't, I just wanted to grow my hair! Second, I wanted to learn how to ride a horse. Third, I ambitioned owning a ranch in Alberta, Canada (where the movie was filmed) where I will have a nice brick and wood house built and on which I may be able to ride my horse around.
Over dinner following the almost two-and-a-half-hour movie, one classmate asked what fall meant in the movie when there was hardly a scene about the season. Immediately, I remembered the Biblical meaning of the word fall. That explanation led to a time of sharing the Gospel story that addresses the essential human condition. While the person who asked was interested, the others were not. I figured why.
It’s our natural human condition: fallenness. Theologicans call it depravity. The reasons some of my friends weren't interested is because, we, people in general, often really don’t want new information, especially new information that will force us to re-organize our understanding of how we are put together and our complexity in its less attractive aspects. Exploring our fallenness is a path not many want to take because it will definitely lead to a time to resolve whether to address the fallenness with God's solution or not.
At the least it would seem to include a willingness to become defenseless in God’s presence. To lay down the armor, lay down the self-righteousness, lay down our perceptions of how the world ought to be versus how it is, lay down our arrogance. After all, its only human arrogance that presumes we have any defenses in God’s presence anyway.
But now, here’s the remarkable thing: Jesus says this is the pathway to real life; the pathway to authentic love; even, the pathway to joy. It’s a paradox, I know. The point isn’t to wind up in a permanent state of gloomy self-preoccupation. The point is to find out how the world is really supposed to function, how each of us is supposed to function. The point is to clear away the debris so we can finally see what lies beneath, and in the finding discover our lives remade, restored, re-configured into something that is much closer to the original design specifications.
-------------------------- Readings: - Museum Wisdom, Rev. Stephen Bauman (CCNYC), March 26, 2006 NY - The Legends of the Fall (wikipedia) - What's So Amazing About Grace, Philip Yancey 1997, Zondervan, Grand Rapids, MI
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