Chronicles Of Narnia 3

It looks good to me, but I don’t remember many of the details of this story. My favorite was always the first book in the series, . . . → Read More: Back to Narnia with a new trailer, and a 2010 movie update]]> After a troubled history with Disney, 20th Century Fox has picked up the Narnia series and is moving forward. This December we’ll be treated to the next installment in the series, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.  The first trailer has just been released…

Chronicles Of Narnia 3

It looks good to me, but I don’t remember many of the details of this story. My favorite was always the first book in the series, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

Interestingly, Fox has released this trailer to “faith-based” publications, such as WORLD magazine, before mainstream outlets in an effort to emphasize its commitment to Christian audiences (which make up the primary, and most ardent, fans of the books). It has also made of point of announcing that they are “sticking to the story as C.S. Lewis wrote it and leaving in place the spiritual themes that inspired him.” For those who are confused by that, given the presence of the spiritual themes in the first two movies, I think it’s coming from a diminishing of the books themes in the second film, to the point where the focus of the movie was altered. As one commenter on the WORLD article put it:

The problem isn’t so much that the movies haven’t stuck to the story – The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was rather faithful to the story, but emphasized the wrong parts of the story as the climax. The problem has been ignorance of the themes of the story. One can rearrange details or flesh out characters on screen in ways that the book doesn’t do, but if one departs from the themes of the Narnia series, one loses the soul of Narnia. Prince Caspian lost this entirely, and became a story of revolution and not a story of restoration.

It’ll be interesting to see how this movie does. I’m positive I’ll be seeing it, but will it make enough money to secure the next movie’s place?

I also thought this would be a good time to see how I’m doing in getting through my 2010 movie list. So far I’ve seen 2 of the 4 movies that have been released that I wanted to see, Iron Man 2 and Prince of Persia. I enjoyed both. The Losers and the A-Team both received a poor response generally, though I still want to see both on DVD. Coming up quick: Toy Story 3, and Knight and Day, two movies that I put on the “maybe” pile, but which I’m leaning toward seeing if I can.

I want to end my life. Well, part of it anyway. I would prefer to continue breathing, let’s just get that straight right away.

I want to excise the part of myself that wants “stuff.” Wanting stuff is the pursuit of temporary pleasure. As soon as I get . . . → Read More: I want to end my life, but I’m too lazy]]> I’ve got a swirl of thoughts going on in my head at the moment. This one’s gonna ramble. Hopefully it comes out making some kind of sense.

I want to end my life. Well, part of it anyway. I would prefer to continue breathing, let’s just get that straight right away.

I want to excise the part of myself that wants “stuff.” Wanting stuff is the pursuit of temporary pleasure. As soon as I get something I want, I feel better for a little while, then I want “stuff 2.0.” All that stuff costs money. That means I have to work, because I haven’t figured out how to get paid for doing nothing yet. That takes time from other tasks I have to do. Time is finite, so I have to figure out how to get those other tasks done faster, which means either paying someone else to do it for me, or buying some other “stuff” that helps me get it done faster. But that means I need more money, so I can pay for that, which means I have to work more.

Nothing new there. You see where I’m going. It’s the same cyclical problem everyone has on one level or another.

I want to drop out of that cycle. I could. I know I could. For example, I could sell my current house and move someplace smaller and cheaper. It’s an option. Other people have survived with much less than I have. I won’t though. I like it here. It’s too hard to give up what I have now.

That makes me think of how hard it is for a rich man to enter heaven. When approached by a rich man wanting to know what he must do to gain eternal life, Jesus said he should sell all his possessions and give it away to the poor. In other words, he had to stop coveting “stuff.” (if you’re wondering, the passage is Matthew 19:16-30). There was a time when I thought I’d have no problem with that. That was before I had this much stuff. Intellectually, I knew what the story meant, but now I feel the guy’s pain. It’s hard. In fact, not only do I not want to give up stuff… I want more stuff.

That gets me to thinking about church. I used to be much more involved in church activities. Part of me feels like I’m not involved enough now, but I am in the choir and a small group, and I’m not sure I’m willing to commit more time right now.

And then there’s the heart of the matter: the choir connection that at some level probably kick-started this post much earlier today (well, yesterday, at this point as I write this after 3am). A friend of mine from choir has cancer. It’s apparently progressing very quickly, and hospice has recently been mentioned. I haven’t seen him since early this summer, before he was diagnosed. He and his wife are very active in our church. He’s a very nice, happy, intelligent, funny, godly, loving man. He’s one of the first people to offer help in any circumstance and has been a source of support when my family was going through some tough stuff over the last 5 years. I have an immense amount of respect for him, and it pains me greatly that he’s going through this, as does the knowledge that he may not be around for much longer.

Thinking about that and other reminders of mortality coincided with another friend of mine reflecting on “Hurt” as performed by Johnny Cash. He noted that the video for that song shows Cash “sitting there looking back on all that he had accomplished and realizing that, save a few precious things (his faith, his wife, his kids), it was all meaningless.”  “Stuff” isn’t in that list. I imagine my choir friend is having some of those same thoughts.

I need to end this life as it currently exists, and refocus. The way I want to live and the way I’m living are not lining up as well as I’d hope. I’ve got a lot of inertia, though, and I’m lazy. It’s hard to get started.

The book is Surprised by Joy by C.S. Lewis, author . . . → Read More: C.S. Lewis on living by hope]]> Last week I started doing something I hardly ever do – I started reading a non-fiction book. Even more amazingly, it’s an auto-biography. That’s a genre I almost never delve into. In fact, I can’t even remember the last non-fiction book I read cover to cover. It’s not even a recent book. I ran across it literally by providence, and decided to bring it home.

The book is Surprised by Joy by C.S. Lewis, author of The Chronicles of Narnia, among others. It’s not a standard auto-biography, though. The short description on the cover summarizes it as Lewis’ “search for joy, a spiritual journey that led him from the Christianity of his early youth into atheism and then back to Christianity.”

While his writing is frequently either outside my experience or above my head (in the first few chapters he discusses his very early life, including English and Irish boarding schools and social circles, and manages to write in a few Latin phrases and references to other works that he apparently thinks are common knowledge), I do get the drift. He had a tough childhood, emotionally and intellectually. The cruelty of his first boarding school headmaster was random and violent, and the academic lessons for the most part without merit. I get more of a sense of the atmosphere of the orphanage from “Oliver Twist” (or in my case, Oliver! the movie), than I do of Harry Potter’s Hogwarts, which is patterned after an English boarding school, as I understand it.

But at the end of the description of this time in his life he says this:

Life at a vile boarding school is in this way a good preparation for the Christian life, that it teaches one to live by hope. Even, in a sense, by faith; for at the beginning of each term, home and the holidays are so far off that it is as hard to realize them as to realize heaven. They have the same pitiful unreality when confronted with immediate horrors. Tomorrow’s geometry blots out the distant end of term as tomorrow’s operation may blot out the hope of Paradise. And yet, term after term, the unbelievable happened. Fantastical and astronomical figures like “this time six weeks” shrank into practicable figures like “this time next week,” and then “this time tomorrow,” and the almost supernatural bliss of the Last Day punctually appeared.

He continued to describe the deep, nearly breathtaking delight that that day held. He also went on to acknowledge the other side of the same equation: that at the beginning of each time at home, the next school term was as unrecognized as a young man in good health would recognize his own mortality. It may be acknowledged, but never truly realized, until time moves forward and the inevitable occurs.

In all seriousness I think that the life of faith is easier to me because of these memories. To think, in sunny and confident times, that I shall die and rot, or to think that one day this universe will slip away and become memory . . . is easier to us if we have seen just that sort of thing happening before. We have learned not to take present things at their face value.

I haven’t had the same kind of circumstances in my life that he had, but I can come up with a few situations (though laughably smaller in intensity) that help me draw that same parallel. It’s helpful to have a new frame of reference for living in hope of a new world to come—to be able to work through the day to day grind of life while keeping one eye on the prize.