...As Long As You Know You're Loved
My niece has been over this weekend, and she's exactly the same age as my daughter. It was a great opportunity to see Wreck-It Ralph, and it was a terrific movie. It was actually kind of slow to start, and I started to see some of the same formulaic plot devices that you see in all the Pixar movies.
But the key message is one I want to share with you here because it relates exactly with the subject of my latest home page piece.
I want to start by sharing with you something you may already know. I am a rabid San Francisco Giants fan. So it may go without saying that when they won their second World Series title in three years last Sunday night, I was ecstatic.
But I realized something a while ago that is quite profound about this ecstasy, and it is one of the most perverse facts of life that there is. For you see, the splendidly wonderful wonderfulness of that whole thing wouldn't mean a thing if there weren't
The Los Angeles Dodgers.
And not just the Dodgers, but the constantly winning Dodgers. The always beating-the-tar-out-of-the Giants Dodgers. The incessant just-always-being-better-than-the-Giants-for-years-on-end Dodgers. The ever-agonizing dumping-us-from-any-playoff-hopes-on-the-last-day-of-the-season Dodgers.
If there weren't a Dodgers, why celebrate about anything great that is the Giants?
So I actually have to accept that, yes, in that very weird, very ugly, very odd way -- ::gulp:: -- I like the Dodgers.
The reason I bring this up is because this was splashed all over the screen in Wreck-It-Ralph. Ralph is the video game character who always has to be the bad guy who wrecks the building so Fix-It-Felix-Jr. can fix things up and all that. Thing is, everyone in the video game hates him, except that they don't realize that without him, their life has no meaning. Technically, without Ralph their video game gets unplugged.
This is something I've called the activity antinomy. I've thought a lot about this, but in short: Even when everything is done we still need to do something. What do we do when we have everything we want? Mansion on an island with pools and billiard rooms and bike trails and butlers and maids and chefs? We get bored. We can never not do something. Once we do something great, we've got to do something else. But let's say everything is already done wonderfully and splendidly. We atrophy because we're bored. This theme (there's that formulaic concept again) was splashed on the screen in great big colors with another Pixar film, Wall-E.
Anyway, Ralph goes through the film trying to show everyone that he is good. Lots of fun things happen, but in the end Ralph realizes that he's just who he is, and if it seems that he's bad because he's got to do his job in the video game, that's okay because he at least knows that he's loved.
That was the end of the movie, and as simple as this is, it is phenomenally profound.
One key reason is not that he just has this bland "I'm loved whatever whatever" feeling, but that
He is actually loved by another individual who really does love him in real actuality.
That individual was this sassy little gal in another video game, Vanellope Von Schweetz, and the interesting thing was that she was both the princess of the video game but also that earthy, incisive, joyful, ambitious, wise-cracking person.
I seem to remember another individual who is just like that. Someone who is both the Son of the King and that friend who gets down and dirty and dives right into the messiness of life with you.
It isn't nearly as much whether or not you're good, it is whether or not you know what love is.
What is really interesting is that the film touches on the idea that for love to mean anything, this must be a person and not just some ethereal nothingness. This girl is first seen as a glitch, occassionally pixilating in and out of existence for very brief fragments of time. But later it is proven within the contextual reality that is the video game world, that she is indeed very real. A very real someone to love and be loved.
Jesus is exactly like the messed-with Vanellope for many people. To the particularly not-very-Christianly people He's an annoying glitch shoved in their face by overbearing religious folk, holding off the pixilating of Himself enough to require the formation of elaborate rationalizations why he's nothing to bother with. To the particularly Christian-churchy people He's a glitchy cool dude/domineering taskmaster who requires turgid explanations by robed officials, refusing to pixilate Himself mostly on Sundays when we must put on a smiley face for others.
Sorry, but I just don't see much true, lasting, authentic love in those scenarios.
I'd been reading Genesis in my devotional time and you'll see I'd even put in a reference from it on my recent home page. Genesis 18. But there's also Genesis 19, and I could never figure out why those immoral people in Sodom wanted Lot's visitors when he even offered them his virgin daughters! But it came to me.
They knew those visitors were sent directly from God, and all they wanted to do was have sex with anyone who they felt had some measure of value they could strip. Sure virgins might do the trick, but hey, here we have gods! It was all about human sacrifice -- what they so obsessively wanted to do was take and take and take some more, and it was all about love -- the fact that they thought love was merely doing as explosively immoral things with your body as you could.
So it seems people may walk away from Wreck-It Ralph thinking there really is no such thing as good and bad after all. This is sad because there is still wretchedly awful evil out there done habitually by common men and women, ones who live down your street and drive in the car next to you on the road. But the fact is that they do it and get away with it and are enabled to do it by powerfully selfish people in powerful positions under Caesar who haven't a clue about this magnificent truth.
That there is One Who Does Love.
This was just the heart-rendering message of this beautiful children's movie. Again, not just that love is. How pukifying is that.
It is that this awesome gal in the other video game showed that she deeply, deeply loved this hulking lunk of doubt and despair.
Who can't relate to that?
Yet that love is so scary we pixilate ourselves so much that we glitch our way out of existence.
_
But the key message is one I want to share with you here because it relates exactly with the subject of my latest home page piece.
I want to start by sharing with you something you may already know. I am a rabid San Francisco Giants fan. So it may go without saying that when they won their second World Series title in three years last Sunday night, I was ecstatic.
But I realized something a while ago that is quite profound about this ecstasy, and it is one of the most perverse facts of life that there is. For you see, the splendidly wonderful wonderfulness of that whole thing wouldn't mean a thing if there weren't
The Los Angeles Dodgers.
And not just the Dodgers, but the constantly winning Dodgers. The always beating-the-tar-out-of-the Giants Dodgers. The incessant just-always-being-better-than-the-Giants-for-years-on-end Dodgers. The ever-agonizing dumping-us-from-any-playoff-hopes-on-the-last-day-of-the-season Dodgers.
If there weren't a Dodgers, why celebrate about anything great that is the Giants?
So I actually have to accept that, yes, in that very weird, very ugly, very odd way -- ::gulp:: -- I like the Dodgers.
The reason I bring this up is because this was splashed all over the screen in Wreck-It-Ralph. Ralph is the video game character who always has to be the bad guy who wrecks the building so Fix-It-Felix-Jr. can fix things up and all that. Thing is, everyone in the video game hates him, except that they don't realize that without him, their life has no meaning. Technically, without Ralph their video game gets unplugged.
This is something I've called the activity antinomy. I've thought a lot about this, but in short: Even when everything is done we still need to do something. What do we do when we have everything we want? Mansion on an island with pools and billiard rooms and bike trails and butlers and maids and chefs? We get bored. We can never not do something. Once we do something great, we've got to do something else. But let's say everything is already done wonderfully and splendidly. We atrophy because we're bored. This theme (there's that formulaic concept again) was splashed on the screen in great big colors with another Pixar film, Wall-E.
Anyway, Ralph goes through the film trying to show everyone that he is good. Lots of fun things happen, but in the end Ralph realizes that he's just who he is, and if it seems that he's bad because he's got to do his job in the video game, that's okay because he at least knows that he's loved.
That was the end of the movie, and as simple as this is, it is phenomenally profound.
One key reason is not that he just has this bland "I'm loved whatever whatever" feeling, but that
He is actually loved by another individual who really does love him in real actuality.
That individual was this sassy little gal in another video game, Vanellope Von Schweetz, and the interesting thing was that she was both the princess of the video game but also that earthy, incisive, joyful, ambitious, wise-cracking person.
I seem to remember another individual who is just like that. Someone who is both the Son of the King and that friend who gets down and dirty and dives right into the messiness of life with you.
It isn't nearly as much whether or not you're good, it is whether or not you know what love is.
What is really interesting is that the film touches on the idea that for love to mean anything, this must be a person and not just some ethereal nothingness. This girl is first seen as a glitch, occassionally pixilating in and out of existence for very brief fragments of time. But later it is proven within the contextual reality that is the video game world, that she is indeed very real. A very real someone to love and be loved.
Jesus is exactly like the messed-with Vanellope for many people. To the particularly not-very-Christianly people He's an annoying glitch shoved in their face by overbearing religious folk, holding off the pixilating of Himself enough to require the formation of elaborate rationalizations why he's nothing to bother with. To the particularly Christian-churchy people He's a glitchy cool dude/domineering taskmaster who requires turgid explanations by robed officials, refusing to pixilate Himself mostly on Sundays when we must put on a smiley face for others.
Sorry, but I just don't see much true, lasting, authentic love in those scenarios.
I'd been reading Genesis in my devotional time and you'll see I'd even put in a reference from it on my recent home page. Genesis 18. But there's also Genesis 19, and I could never figure out why those immoral people in Sodom wanted Lot's visitors when he even offered them his virgin daughters! But it came to me.
They knew those visitors were sent directly from God, and all they wanted to do was have sex with anyone who they felt had some measure of value they could strip. Sure virgins might do the trick, but hey, here we have gods! It was all about human sacrifice -- what they so obsessively wanted to do was take and take and take some more, and it was all about love -- the fact that they thought love was merely doing as explosively immoral things with your body as you could.
So it seems people may walk away from Wreck-It Ralph thinking there really is no such thing as good and bad after all. This is sad because there is still wretchedly awful evil out there done habitually by common men and women, ones who live down your street and drive in the car next to you on the road. But the fact is that they do it and get away with it and are enabled to do it by powerfully selfish people in powerful positions under Caesar who haven't a clue about this magnificent truth.
That there is One Who Does Love.
This was just the heart-rendering message of this beautiful children's movie. Again, not just that love is. How pukifying is that.
It is that this awesome gal in the other video game showed that she deeply, deeply loved this hulking lunk of doubt and despair.
Who can't relate to that?
Yet that love is so scary we pixilate ourselves so much that we glitch our way out of existence.
_
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