Ash Wednesday

Remember, man, that you are dust,and into dust you shall return.

The winter skies hang over Seattle, heavy and gray. The air is cold and damp. Rain may fall or, perhaps, drizzle may drizzle. And even when moisture doesn't fall to the ground, and down our necks, it still floats in the air, chilling us through our coats as we struggle through it. The wind blows hard against us, changing direction in gusts. The unlucky homeless huddle on the streets, their cardboard signs soggy, waiting hopelessly to be noticed.

Next week is Ash Wednesday. Not an American sort of holiday, is it? No happy families, gathered cozily about the dinner table. No decorations. No buying frenzies by crazed shoppers. No Santa Claus, no Easter Bunny, no displays of fireworks. Norman Rockwell never painted a family celebrating Ash Wednesday. It's a quiet day, a sober day, a day to be introspective. It is not a social observance. It's a time for us all to recall that our lives are not forever, that each of our lives had a finite beginning, and that each will have a finite end. An opportunity to consider what that unsettling fact must mean for us.

In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying.

--T. S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday

And yet, un-American as Ash Wednesday may appear, Americans of all ages will stream into their churches next week to observe this most unfestive of days. We'll stand in the damp and chill of mid-winter, remembering who we are. Remembering that, seen in the context of the centuries and millennia of human history that precede us, our lives are brief and soon over. There was an Anglo-Saxon monk, a fellow named Bede, who pondered this brevity long ago. He wrote on ancient parchment that our lives reminded him of a tiny sparrow that flies out of the cold winter night, through a window, and into a warm, cheerful, brightly-lit banquet hall -- and then swiftly flies right out again, back into the dark.

In that time in which it is indoors it is indeed not touched by the fury of the winter; but yet, this smallest space of calmness being passed almost in a flash, from winter going into winter again, it is lost to our eyes. Somewhat like this appears the life of man.

But we do not despair. Even now, even in these most depressing depths of winter, when all our world seems dead and lifeless, we note the first brave crocus buds forcing their way through the soil. The tiny crocuses, so easy to overlook, offer us hope; their appearance prefigures a new life to come. They serve as a sign to us of the approaching warmth, rebirth, growth and excitement of a new Spring.

We can certainly endure another six weeks or so of winter, can't we? In fact, if wise, we actually embrace the cold, the wet, the hardship. The sober darkness and silence we confront today, and in days to come, prepare us all the more fully for the infinite beauty of our promised Spring, in the same way as the agonizing absence of one's lover enhances the joy of the ultimate reunion.

We button our collars more securely, put our frozen hands into our pockets, and walk purposefully into the icy wind. We may crack a smile.

We may even whistle a little.

Lyra's World at the Movies

No movie can fully capture the depth and complexity and magic of a good book. The Lord of the Rings trilogy perhaps came closest, but, good as the film versions were, they emphasized endless battle scenes at the expense of some of the more subtle messages of Tolkien's books. To me, a fundamental theme of the written LOTR trilogy was the theme of loss, the sense that when one fights a war, even the winner loses much that he had fought to save. Return of the King tried to convey this sense of loss in its final, much-ridiculed half hour, at the Grey Havens, but by that time it was perhaps too late.

Back in May, I wrote with anticipation of the long-awaited filming of the first book of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, The Golden Compass (published originally in Britain as Northern Lights). I concluded my post with the words: "Assuming the film bears any resemblance at all to the book, I say "two thumbs up" even before I see it! Don't miss it!"

The movie was released a week ago. The reviews have been mixed, and the first week's gross receipts, perhaps as a result, disappointing. Many have felt that the movie was less subtle, less complex, less intellectually satisfying, than the book. Well, duh! That's always the case. The movie presents in two hours a book that takes much longer to read, and that has room for far more complexity and development. Philosophical and theological ideas that develop slowly in the reader's awareness, absorbed from the plot itself, in a two hour movie must be presented either in narrative voice overs (parallel universes exist, a pompous voice exclaims at the outset, where humans have souls that look like animals!), or in unlikely lectures by characters, inserted in the midst of the plot. (If you hate such plot-slowing lectures, never read The DaVinci Code, where the author was unable to tell his story without such artifices even in a lengthy written novel.)

In the time available, I feel that the movie actually did a more than adequate job of presenting all the major events, characters, and plot developments of the book. This is a movie, like The Fellowship of the Ring, that will make far more sense and be more appealing to persons already familiar with the books. The movie moves quickly. The viewer has little time to mull over plot and character development before the next crisis, the next character, the next twist of plot, arrives on the scene. You can't turn back five pages to recall who had which daemon. But the film does a more than adequate job of laying the foundation -- and creating an appetite -- for the next of the series, The Subtle Knife.

Visually, the movie could hardly be better. In LOTR, we marveled at the integration of the computerized Gollum into the filming of the live characters. In The Golden Compass, an enormous number of animal daemons, witches, armored bears, and mechanical insects fight, talk, and maneuver along side the live action cast. It's all done so seamlessly that we hardly appreciate the technical skills involved.

And the daemons! As we gradually learn in the book, and as the voice-over informs us bluntly at the beginning of the movie, every human in Lyra's world has his or her appropriate daemon, an animal companion representing an embodiment of the human's soul. In the many mob scenes, all the humans have to be shown with their daemons -- whether these are large impressive animals for complex characters -- snow leopards, golden monkeys, wolves -- or small simple daemons for simple folks -- birds, small dogs. The filming is handled beautifully, and we quickly grow accustomed to Lord Asriel stalking into the room, his leopard at his side, or, more movingly, Lyra's loving daemon, still capable of changing into a bird or a cat when appropriate, but usually presented as an ermine with an expressive face. (The Texas pilot's daemon, a female rabbit with a sarcastic Texan drawl, is hysterically funny.)

Death in such a world is dramatic. In the book, when a human was killed his daemon quickly faded away. In the movie, his daemon explodes in a flash of light. Battle scenes are thus spectacular!

Finally, a serious concern even before the movie was made was how the director, Chris Weitz, would handle the religious question. In the book, Lyra's world was ruled by a version of the Catholic Church that had, in her world, adopted some aspects of Calvinism during the Reformation and had moved its headquarters to Geneva. The Church, in the book, is a malevolent force. Its leaders' objective is to maintain control over the people, and to protect them from "sin," which in the author's vision is the same as protecting them from true adulthood. In the first book's most devastating scene, only somewhat less affecting in the movie, the Church conducts experiments in an Arctic laboratory, experiments it hopes will find a way to eliminate sin by surgically cutting the bond between children and their daemons before the kids reach puberty. The vision of the little boy -- now effectively soulless -- crying all alone in the frozen North for his lost daemon is unforgettable.

New Line Cinema could not see any advantage to releasing a movie for young people that attacks -- even in an alien world -- an institution that resembles in any way Christianity in our world.

We knew that Pullman's professed atheism would have to be tamed to some degree in the movie. How much, no one was sure. This month's issue of the Atlantic Monthly contains a lengthy (and very interesting) article by Hanna Rosin arguing that the movie gutted the book, leaving behind a couple of hours of simple entertainment for the mass audience. "The studio opted to kidnap the book's body and leave behind its soul."

I disagree. First of all, the trilogy's "soul" was not a logical attack on religion. It was a fantasy with many themes. It described a malevolent, or at least sadly mistaken, Church. But it also described the Chuch's God as a pathetic, senile old man floating around in space, who in his elder days was dominated by his supposed subordinates. It presented angels -- good, bad, and a couple who were gay. It presented flying witches. It presented talking, armored bears of incredible strength and endurance. It presented pathways between universes.

No one, no child, would take any of this as anything but a ripping good yarn. A fairy tale, a story of "what if?" Insofar as it contained a message, it was a call for every person to grow up, take responsibility, seek out the unknown, be brave, sacrifice the self for the common welfare, and love others. Hardly subversive. Those who see it as an attack on religion should ask themselves why they see a greater relationship between the "Church" in Lyra's world and any religion in our own world than they do between any other of the story's fictional devices and anything we're familiar with. Both those who applaud and those who fear the movie -- as an attack on religion -- should ask themselves that question.

In any event, to answer the Atlantic's critique, I don't see that the movie seriously watered down the philosophical questions of the books, except insofar as necessary to make a short movie and to avoid unnecessary offense to Christians . The movie always refers to the Church as "the Magisterium," and in the only reference to the fictional God of that world calls him "the Authority." Anyone old enough to be interested in the movie, beyond the level of cheering for awesome fights between armored bears, will recognize the religious references. Anyone that old, I would hope, also recognizes a fantasy when he or she sees one.

So my pre-release verdict from last spring holds. "Two thumbs up. Go see it!"

(But you really should read the books first!)

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(12-16-07) -- The movie has drawn an extraordinary amount of comment on the internet, much of it from Christian writers. The majority of Christian commentators appear to feel that the movie, and even more the books, present a threat to children's faith. Others, however, view the movie as a well-produced fantasy, one that is not only entertaining but that presents parents with an opening for serious discussions of religious faith and theology with their children.

The Pullman trilogy is an "ode to the joy of living in a physical world, a hymn to flesh, to exuberance, to the here and now, to free thought, imagination and feeling, to nobility of spirit," according to a review by Washington Post book critic Michael Dirda.

"I happen to think that these positive traits are entirely compatible with organized religion and so I choose to focus on the positive rather than on any anti-religious themes in these books," said Paul Lauritzen, director of the Program in Applied Ethics at Jesuit-run John Carroll University in Cleveland, commenting on Dirda's review. Lauritzen is a contributor to dotCommonweal, a blog run by the Catholic magazine Commonweal.

--© 2007 Catholic News Service/USCCB

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Office for Film and Broadcasting gave the film, which is rated PG-13, a warm review. The film is not blatantly anti-Catholic but a “generalized rejection of authoritarianism,” it said.

While noting the story’s “spirit of rebellion and stark individualism,” the office said Lyra and her allies’ stand for free will in opposition to the coercive force of the Magisterium is “entirely in harmony with Catholic teaching.”

--MSNBC (11-30-07)

Easter 2007

Christ is risen!

He is indeed risen!

--Greek Orthodox Easter greeting and response

Happy Easter to anyone chancing upon this blog. Happy Easter whether you are Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Confucian, Animist, Agnostic, or Atheist.

"Happy Easter" to you all, just because you and I, and all of us everywhere, share a common humanity. And as fellow humans, not all may believe that God entered into his own creation as a human being 2000 years ago, but we do all share a common faith. An unconscious faith, perhaps, and maybe a faith that some of us try to deny with our "rational" minds. But it is a faith that gets us out of bed every morning and takes us through each day, a faith that makes life's greatest joys possible and its deepest sorrows meaningful.

I speak of the faith that each of our human lives has infinite meaning, a meaning far beyond that of an ant struggling for survival in an anthill.

Our faith cannot be argued or proved. From a purely logical perspective, we can theorize that we might be totally mechanical robots just like viruses, engaged in meaningless replication and perpetuation of our species, our consciousness of self and the world about us an accidental neurological illusion of no significance. None of us believes this to be true, do we? It's almost a cliche to point out that even those philosophers who argue professionally that life is meaningless and that our every act and thought is determined by the interaction of our genes with our environment don't really believe it. Otherwise, why would they bother writing down their thoughts for their fellow ants to read?

The greatest miracle of all existence, I suspect, is existence itself, the fact that there is any reality at all -- matter, energy, space, time, light, dark, distance, change, stability. Once I accept this miracle, once I take on faith that the perceptions of my senses reflect an exterior reality and that life is not just a weird dream, I have no diffficulty in believing further that our lives are imbued with meaning. The details of that meaning may be interpreted differently in subtle ways by different religious traditions. But our ultimate faith is the same: I am here for a purpose, and have been given an intelligence and a will with which I can contemplate and fulfill that purpose.

So Happy Easter, you world of wonders -- you six billion truly significant, awesome, diverse but yet similar, and infinitely precious individuals! I could have easily said Joyous Passover, or Blessed Mohammed's Birthday, or have given similar recognition to all the other religions and philosophies that are united in helping us discern, celebrate and fulfill the meaning of our lives, and ultimately, I suppose, of our Universe.

But I speak from my own tradition.

Happy Easter. He is indeed risen!