How Do You Want to Be Remembered?–A Sermon

How Do You Want to Be Remembered?

A Sermon Preached by  Rev.  S. Randall Toms

On Sunday, November 8, 2009

At St. Paul’s Reformed Episcopal Church, Baton Rouge, LA

I thank my God upon every remembrance of you,  Always in every prayer of mine for you all making request with joy, For your fellowship in the gospel from the first day until now;  Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ: Even as it is meet for me to think this of you all, because I have you in my heart; inasmuch as both in my bonds, and in the defence and confirmation of the gospel, ye all are partakers of my grace.  (Phil. 1:3) 

            We often hear people say, “I want to be remembered as ….”  Fill in the blank.  How would you like to be remembered?  Sometimes we hear presidents talk about the kind of legacy they would like to leave.  I suppose that within many of us there is this desire to leave behind us something that would cause other people to remember us favorably.  The great poet John Keats asked that on his headstone the following words would be inscribed:  “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”  For the time being, we can say that Keats was wrong, for there are still a few of us who devotedly read Keats’ poetry; but, there will probably come a day when no one will remember Keats and the beautiful words that he wrote.  Like Keats, many of us feel that when we are gone, we will be forgotten.

            We are still in the octave of All Saints’, so we are still remembering all of the people who lived their lives in devotion to Jesus Christ.   But as we remember them, I want to ask you, “How do you want to be remembered?”  When I ask that question, I am not only asking you how you would like to be remembered after your death, but how you would like to be remembered now whenever your name is mentioned.  When the Apostle wrote this letter to the Philippians, he begins it by saying, “I thank my God upon every remembrance of you.”  What a wonderful compliment!  This should be the desire of every Christian—to be remembered with thanksgiving.  Each Sunday morning, in our prayer of intercession, we say, “And we also bless thy holy Name for all thy servants departed this life in thy faith and fear; beseeching to grant them continual growth in thy love and service, and to give us grace so to follow their good examples, that with them we may be partakers of thy heavenly kingdom.”  This is how we should want to be remembered, both in this life, and after we are gone.  We should desire to be remembered as those who set a good example for others to follow, and that when people think of us, they would thank God for letting us have a place in their lives, because we provided a life for them to imitate. 

In our service for the burial of the dead, there is a prayer that says:

Almighty and everliving God, we yield unto thee most high praise and hearty thanks, for the wonderful grace and virtue declared in all thy saints, who have been the choice vessels of thy grace, and the lights of the world in their several generations; most humbly beseeching thee to give us grace so to follow the example of their steadfastness in the faith, and obedience to thy holy commandments, that at the day of the general Resurrection, we, with all those who are of the mystical body of thy Son, may be set on his right hand, and hear that his most joyful voice:  Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.

 Wouldn’t it be wonderful if one day, people could stand at your graveside and give God thanks for the grace and virtue he had imparted to you?  Wouldn’t it be wonderful if people could say, “This person was an example of steadfast faith and obedience to God’s commandments.  Thank you Lord for this holy example, and grant me the same grace that you gave to this person.”

As we enter this Thanksgiving season of the year, it is appropriate that we should give thanks for all the blessings that God has given to us, especially those people in our lives who bring us so much happiness and joy.  It is natural for us to give thanks for our family members and our friends who provide for our necessities and comforts in this world.  But as the Christian thinks of those for whom he should give thanks, he is most thankful for his brothers and sisters in Christ, the members of the Church of our Lord Jesus Christ.  As we approach this Thanksgiving time, I want all of us who are members of St. Paul’s to give thanks to God especially for one another.  Get out your church directory in the next few weeks leading up to Thanksgiving and go down the list of all the members in our church, and bless God’s holy name that he has allowed you to be in a church where you can have fellowship with that person.  I hope and pray that every person in this church could look at every other person in this congregation and say, “I thank my God upon every remembrance of you.”

            As we look at the other members of our congregation, there are all kinds of reasons to remember them with thanksgiving.  Some can give God thanks for the close ties of friendship that have been formed as a result of being brought into this church.  There may be some people in this congregation that you don’t know very well, but even if you don’t you can still give God thanks when you remember them for their faithfulness to this church, for the way they support its worship and work, and for the words and acts of kindness when we have gone through trying and troubling times.   

But there is one other reason to give God thanks for one another that the Apostle Paul spells out for us in this epistle reading for today.  Paul thanks God for the Philippians and their fellowship in the gospel.  This fellowship in the gospel is something that binds all of us together in this church.  Some of us in this congregation may not be united to others by anything else.  We come from different backgrounds, different cultures, different interests, and different likes and dislikes.  Some of us love art, some of us love books, some of us love football, baseball, basketball,  golf, and some of us, inexplicably, love soccer.    Some of us love cooking, some of us love rock and roll, and some of us love opera.    We are a diverse congregation of doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers, builders, homemakers, couples, singles, parents, children, and spouses.  For such a small congregation we are quite diverse, but there is one thing we all have in common—one thing that unites us all—the fellowship of the gospel.

What has brought us here?  Why have we been willing to struggle as a small congregation for nearly 7 years now?  The fellowship of the gospel!   We have a common love for the inspired, inerrant, infallible word of God.  We have a common love for the form of worship that is guided by our Book of Common Prayer.  We have a common goal of influencing and shaping the culture in which we live.  We have a common desire that Jesus Christ would be exalted and glorified in every institution of our society, whether we are talking about government, education, or business.  We are united by a common desire that all people would come to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ.    This is our fellowship in the gospel.  When we think of one another, we can say, I thank God for that person, for God has given me that person as a brother or sister who desires that the gospel of Jesus Christ would be known in all the world.   

In his commentary on Philippians, William Hendriksen points out several features of this fellowship:  it is a fellowship in love for one another; it is a fellowship in helping one another and contributing to one another’s needs; it is a fellowship in promoting the work of the gospel; it is a fellowship in separation from the world; and it is a fellowship in warfare.  When we think of how we share these things with one another, shouldn’t we give God thanks for one another?  

 It is a fellowship of love for one another.  Jesus Christ has drawn us to himself by the power of the gospel, and we all love him.  Since have this common love for our Lord and Savior who died for us, since this Christ lives in each of us, how can we not have a fellowship of love?  Since we love one another we also have this desire to help one another in times of need, to rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep for we have been united into one body.    We have a fellowship in promoting the gospel, so we join together to sacrificially contribute our time, our talents, and our money so that the gospel would be spread in this city, our nation, and our world.  We are united by a common separation from the world.  Though the world is constantly calling to us, telling us to forsake the path of obedience to God, we are encouraged by our brothers and sisters in Christ to stay the course.  Though we may be few, we are not alone in the world.  We have brothers and sisters who have bid farewell to the way of the world, to walk in it nevermore.  In the church, we find those who love what is true,  honest,  just,  pure, and lovely.  We are bound together as we fight a common war against the world, the flesh, and the devil.  Ask almost any military person, and they will tell you that nothing unites you to another person like standing side by side, in times of great danger, fighting against a common enemy.    We are all soldiers in the army of the Lord and have been called to arms, to see that gospel prevails, so that “Jesus shall reign where’er the sun, doth his successive journeys run.”  Having experienced this kind of fellowship with one another, what else can we do remember one another with thanksgiving?

As a pastor, I can say, I thank my God upon every remembrance of you, for you have been willing to be faithful to the gospel and what it teaches, so much so that you would be willing to be steadfast to this tiny congregation with all its limitations.  Yet, you believe that what we are doing here is according to the will of God.  Not many people in this generation are willing to do that, so I give God thanks that he has worked in your heart and life in such a way that you are willing to join us in this fellowship of the gospel.    Our fellowship is in the gospel.  Think of it.  Were it not for the gospel of Christ, most of us would have probably never met.  It is the gospel of Jesus Christ that brought us together, and it is the gospel of Jesus Christ which sustains our fellowship.  We often sing the hymn, “Blest be the tie that binds our hearts in Christian love.”  But what is that tie that binds us together.  It is the gospel of Jesus Christ. 

How do you want to be remembered?  There are those who want to be remembered as  powerful military leaders.  Some want to be remembered as  famous entertainers.  Some want to be remembered as great statesmen.  Some want to be remembered as great athletes.  But no matter how well known you may become in any of those fields, ultimately, your name will be writ in water.  Remember the words of St. John:  “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.  For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world.   And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever” (I John 2:15-17).  Only those who do the will of God will be remembered for ever.  The Psalmist said, “The righteous shall be in everlasting remembrance” (Ps. 112:6). 

Today, we continue to remember those who have lived for Christ, some of them dead for nearly 2,000 years now.  But we remember them with thanksgiving.  There are many others whose names have been erased by time, but who are remembered forever in the heavenly city.  Why?  One reason—their fellowship in the gospel.  How do you want to be remembered?  Whenever other people think of us, we should hope that we have lived our lives in such a way that people would bow their heads for a moment and offer a prayer of thanksgiving for the blessing that we have been to their lives.  They will remember us with thanksgiving if we have shared in the fellowship of the Gospel.  Amen.

Worthy to Wear White – Sermon

Worthy to Wear White

A Sermon by S. Randall Toms, Ph. D.

Preached on Sunday, November 1, 2009

At St. Paul’s Reformed Episcopal Church, Baton Rouge, LA

Thou hast a few names even in Sardis which have not defiled their garments; and they shall walk with me in white: for they are worthy (Rev. 3:4).

Last week at our Youth Sunday School, we were having a discussion about the meaning of All Saints’ Day, and I was explaining to the young people why we wear white at this special time of the year.  I also explained that I also wear a white alb every Sunday, even if it is not All Saints’.  As I was describing the meaning of wearing white, I said that white represented purity of life.  When I said that, one of our young people said, “Wow!  That’s saying a lot about yourself.”     When she said that, it may me not ever want to put on the white alb again, because if it does indeed stand for purity of life, which one of us could ever wear the white alb in good conscience?

When we read verses like Rev. 3:4, “Thou hast a few names even in Sardis which have not defiled their garments; and they shall walk with me in white: for they are worthy,” it confuses us a little.  After all, isn’t the whole point of the Bible, the whole thrust of the gospel, to show us that we are not worthy to wear white?  Don’t we emphasize over and over that we are not worthy of any of the blessings that God has ever given to us?  Don’t we constantly cry out with Jacob, “I am not worthy of the least of all the mercies, and of all the truth, which thou hast shewed unto thy servant…” (Gen. 32:10).  We are like the centurion who told our Lord Jesus Christ, “I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof” (Matt. 8:8).  Each Sunday morning, before we take Holy Communion, we say, “We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy table.”   We say with John the Baptist that we are not worthy to even unloose the latchet of our Lord’s sandals.  Whenever we baptize a child, such as we did a couple of weeks ago, I present the child with a white garment and challenge him to bring it unstained to the judgment seat of Christ.  How could we possibly go through our lives and hope to arrive at the judgment seat of Christ with an unstained garment?  Whenever we think of all the sins that we have committed, doesn’t it seem that our garment will be so dirty and soiled that there won’t be a single speck of white showing through?

Yet, when we read the descriptions of Christians, both in this world and in the world to come, we find them described as wearing a white garment, which does indeed represent purity of life.    This passage in Rev. 3:4 says that there were some people there in Sardis who had not defiled their garments.    Then, we read  that those who have gone on to heaven are clothed in white garments.  “He that overcometh, the same shall be clothed in white raiment” (Rev. 3:5).  “And round about the throne were four and twenty seats: and upon the seats I saw four and twenty elders sitting, clothed in white raiment; and they had on their heads crowns of gold.” (Rev. 4:4).  “After this I beheld, and, lo, a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, stood before the throne, and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, and palms in their hands” (Rev. 7:9).  “And the armies which were in heaven followed him upon white horses, clothed in fine linen, white and clean” (Rev. 19:14).  Thus, on All Saints’ it is appropriate to wear white since the saints are described as wearing it.

Still, knowing our own sinfulness, how is it that we ever get a white robe when we are so unworthy of wearing it?      First, though it is true that we are guilty of innumerable sins, the Christian’s sins have been washed away by the blood of Christ.  For our closing hymn this morning we are going to sing, “Who are these like stars appearing.”  The inspiration for that song comes from Rev. 7:13-14, “And one of the elders answered, saying unto me, What are these which are arrayed in white robes? and whence came they?  And I said unto him, Sir, thou knowest. And he said to me, These are they which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.”  If we have white robes, it is because our robes have been washed in the blood of Christ.  If you were to dip a robe in blood, you might expect that it would come out red, but in God’s universe, when you wash your dirty robe in red blood, it comes out white as snow.  As we read in Isaiah 1:18, “Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.”  It is true that our sins are many, but the promise of Scripture in I John is, “But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin. If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.   If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (I John 1:7-9).    It is true that we are unworthy to wear the white robe, but we have been made worthy by what Christ did on the cross.  He shed his blood to wash us clean, so that our robes would be white, and that we might walk in heaven with him forever, in a robe as pure and white as that of his own, because any righteousness we have, any purity we have, comes from him, and him alone.  So, if you are a believer in Jesus Christ, if you are placing your faith and trust in him, you are in fact wearing a white robe.  When you see us each Sunday wearing these white robes that symbolize purity, always see them as white, because they have been washed in the blood of Christ.

But there is another sense in which the Christian is worthy to wear white.  He is worthy to wear white because he lives a life that is worthy of a Christian.    Notice carefully what I said.  I didn’t say that we are worthy to wear white because we are sinless.  I said that the Christian is worthy to wear the white robe because he lives a life that is worthy of a Christian. This is what St. Paul meant in Colossian 1:9-11, when he wrote, “For this cause we also, since the day we heard it, do not cease to pray for you, and to desire that ye might be filled with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding;  That ye might walk worthy of the Lord unto all pleasing, being fruitful in every good work, and increasing in the knowledge of God;  Strengthened with all might, according to his glorious power, unto all patience and longsuffering with joyfulness.”  Notice how Paul says that the Christian can walk worthy of the Lord unto all pleasing.  It doesn’t mean that the Christian is sinless, but it does mean that his life is characterized by obedience, by holiness, by a zeal and determination to please God in all things.   When we are fruitful in every good work, we are walking worthy of the Lord.   St. Paul said in Ephesians 4:1, “I therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you that ye walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called.”  You have been called to Christ.  You have been called to bear the name of Christ.  Now, walk worthy of that calling.  This is why the Lord gives us his Holy Spirit, so that we might be “strengthened with all might,” given the power to walk in obedience to the commandments of God.  In one of our readings for today, we read from one of the Apocryphyal books, The Wisdom of Solomon.  As you know, in the Reformed Episcopal Church,  we do not consider such books to be part of the inspired, inerrant, infallible word of God and cannot use them to establish any doctrine, but we can use them as valuable tools of instruction in morals.  In the Wisdom of Solomon 3, verse 5, we are told that God proved those who have gone on to heaven.  He tested them and found them worthy of himself.  This is what happens to in the course of our Christian lives.  We go through many trials and tribulations, but through them all, we walk worthy of the Lord who has called us.  This is what our Lord meant when he said that there were people at Sardis who had not defiled their garments.  He didn’t mean that they were perfectly sinless, but it did mean that they had not departed from the faith.  The great sin at the church in Sardis was that they were pretending to be spiritually alive, going through the rituals and the motions, but they were in fact dead spiritually.  But there were some at Sardis, though not perfect, who nevertheless, were spiritually alive and were living lives that demonstrated that they were alive.

Though the Christian is not sinless, it can be said of him that, overall, his life is characterized by godliness and holiness.  We read of Zacharias and Elizabeth, “And they were both righteous before God, walking in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord blameless” (Luke 1:6).  Does that mean that Zacharias and Elizabeth never sinned?  Of course not.  But it does mean that overall, their lives were characterized by obedience.  They walked worthy of the Lord to all pleasing.

The Christian’s worthiness to wear the robe is two-fold.  His robes have been washed in the blood of the lamb, and he lives a life that corresponds to the sacrifice that Christ made on his behalf, because Christ himself has given us his strength, a strength in the inner man, that enables us to walk worthy of the calling by which we are called.  “They shall walk with me in white, for they are worthy.”  How could they be worthy?  They are worthy because of what Christ has done for them and in them.

This morning as we gaze into heaven and experience the wonderful communion of saints, as I say, “Lift up your hearts,” and we are aware that we are worshiping now with all the saints on earth and all the saints in heaven, we should be a aware that they are wearing white.  By the eye of faith, see them now, “Clad in robes of purest whiteness,/Robes whose luster ne’er shall fade.”  But then, wonder of wonders, take a look at yourself, and by the eye of faith, see that you are also clothed in a glorious white garment, and fall upon your knees confessing your unworthiness to wear it, but at the same time, rejoicing that by his death, resurrection, and glorious ascension, Christ has made you worthy.  Amen.

The Politically Charged “Astro Boy” – Movie Review

Red States vs. Blue States:

The Politically Charged Astro Boy

by S. Randall Toms, Ph.D.

Warning:  This review contains spoilers.

I suppose that all films are political to some extent, but I must confess that when I went to see Astro Boy I did not expect to be hammered with such an overt political message.  Astro Boy borrows ideas from Frankenstein, Pinocchio, Oliver Twist, Transformers, Superman, Wall-E, and Jesus, just to name a few sources.  Any of these stories could have provided the inspiration for truly engaging plots and characters.  Instead, director David Bowers and co-writer Timothy Harris seem determined to turn this cartoon into a political parable about liberals vs. conservatives, good environmentalists vs. bad consumers,  peaceful scientists vs. evil  militarists,  or blue vs. red, if you will.    This animated feature  alludes so pointedly to 2008 and 2009 political questions , one wonders if anyone viewing this film 30 years from now will catch the references to the current political situation.

Astro Boy was originally created  in 1952 by Japanese manga artist  Osamu Tezuka.    Since the inception of this anime series,  Astro Boy has been the inspiration for countless comic books,  animated cartoons, and now a motion picture utilizing the latest in computer generated imagery.    The animators have done a nice job of making the film look up to date while retaining the feel of the older incarnations of Astro Boy from the ‘50s and ‘60s, although some fans of earlier versions may complain that it departs too much from the anime-look of earlier adaptations.

A few new wrinkles have been added to the storyline.   Toby (voiced by Freddie Highmore, Finding Neverland, Spiderwick Chronicles) is the intellectually brilliant son of Dr. Tenma (Nicolas Cage), well-known physicist and expert on robotics.  They live in a post-apocalyptic , utopian world, Metro City that hovers above an Earth that has become a waste dump because of  unfriendly environmental practices.  The people of Metro City are served by robots portrayed as mistreated slaves, forced to meet every need of their human masters and summarily thrown down to Earth once they have outlived their usefulness.  Earth is now a huge junkyard, populated with misfit robots and poor humans who are not rich and powerful enough to live on Metro City.

Dr. Tenma and his assistant, Dr. Elephan, have discovered a new form of energy that  they have harvested from a meteor.   This alien form of energy has two parts:  blue (positive and creative) and red (negative, destructive and unstable).    When General Stone (Donald Sutherland), the hawkish president of Metro City learns of these powerful forms of energy, he wants to use them for his own political purposes which involve starting a war with Earth, a move that he thinks will increase his popularity and help him win re-election to the presidency.   The evil President/General Stone orders that the red energy core be placed in a giant robot called “The Peacekeeper.”     Meanwhile, Toby, disobeying his father’s orders, has mischievously gained entrance into the room where the weapons experiment is taking place.  When the scientists  discover too late that the robot is uncontrollable, Toby is vaporized.  Unable to deal with his son’s death, Dr. Tenma takes a strand of Toby’s hair, extracts the necessary DNA, and creates a robot with human characteristics.  The good power of the blue energy is placed within this android creature, and it comes to life with the same appearance and all of the memories of the human Toby.  But when his father fully realizes that his creation is nothing more than a robot and can never be a replacement for his real son, he rejects his creation.  Abandoned like Frankenstein’s monster, Toby runs away, only to be attacked by General Stone who wants to harness the power of  the blue core that is in the Toby replica.

While trying to escape General Stone, Toby is struck down, but falls to the surface of the Earth where he befriends both human beings and robots who have been oppressed, cast away, and marginalized, by the Metro City society.    The Toby replica, now known as  “Astro” is taken in by a group of waifs who are led by the Fagin-like Ham Egg (Nathan Lane), who uses the children to collect mechanical  parts so that he can create robots to use  in an arena for gladiatorial entertainment.   Not realizing that Astro is a robot, they accept him as one of their own.  Unaware of Ham Egg’s purposes for reanimating robots, Astro uses his blue energy to bring to life a huge robot, ZOG, to be Ham Egg’s champion.  Astro is also befriended by three robots, calling themselves the Robot Revolutionary Front, who are going to lead a rebellion again Ham Egg.  Their hideout is decorated with posters displaying the names of Lenin and Trotsky. 

While being forced to compete in Ham Egg’s gladiatorial games, Astro is found by General Stone who carries him back to Metro City.  Despairing of his ability to ever fit in with either humans or robots,  Astro submits to his own death by having the blue core removed from his chest.    After his father removes the core and Astro dies, Dr. Tenma has second thoughts and replaces the core, bringing Astro back to life.  A battle ensues between Astro, having the good, blue energy, and the Peacekeeper with the evil red energy.  In the middle of the battle, when it appears that it will be a stalemate, Dr. Tenma tells Astro that if the red and blue ever combine, they would both cease to exist.    Astro,  seeing that the war will go on forever, decides to sacrifice himself and combine his blue energy with the red energy.    The Peacekeeper and Astro both die, but ZOG appears who shares the life-giving blue force that Astro had given him to reanimate Astro.

As I watched the film, I was trying to discard the distracting political message and enjoy the other aspects of the film, and there are others, believe it or not.  I began to think, “Maybe I’m reading too much of a political message into this movie.”  But then, displayed behind a podium where General Stone is about to make a speech, we see a huge banner with his campaign slogan, “IT’S NOT TIME FOR CHANGE.”  I don’t think I need to spell out the obvious political parallels.   What politicians have been accused of starting wars in order to win re-election?  What politicians are associated with the ideas that a strong military is necessary to preserve peace?   General Stone even flies in a ship called “The Spirit of Freedom,” again, associating Stone with who believe that strength is necessary to ensure freedom.  Granted, the Robot Revolution Front, following the teachings of Lenin and Trotsky are ineffectual buffoons who provide comic relief,   nevertheless they are portrayed in a favorable light, just one more unfortunate group of the oppressed on the Earth’s surface who are subjugated by the militaristic regime of Metro City.    When our news media constantly remind us of blue Democrat states and red Republican states and the various political stances associated with each, the images presented in Astro Boy are not subtle.   Blue and red are presented in this film as not merely states that vote Democrat or Republican, but as states of being.   When Dr. Temna tells Astro that if red and blue are combined, each will cease to exist, I thought that the message might be that we need to forget our political differences and come together.    But then, when Astro is resurrected by the blue power, the message seems to be that coming together is really just another way of becoming blue.

There are ideas presented in Astro Boy other than those that are political.  The film deals with issues of death, grief, rejection, conformity, and friendship.  For all of its political overtones, there is a sense in which Astro is a Christ figure.  In order to save the world from further destruction, he willingly gives his life sacrificially that other smight live.   Not only does he die for others, he is also resurrected so that  he might continue the fight against an approaching alien force.

Astro Boy probably tries to do too much.  While trying to entertain children with well-done action scenes, it attempts to deal with complex issues of politics, science, and philosophy, complete with allusions to Kant and Descartes.   If you take your children to see Astro Boy they will probably like the computer generated imagery.  They may enjoy the chase scenes and even the storyline about a boy who has been rejected by his father and friends, and yet becomes a hero, although the younger children may be very disturbed when the main character dies three times.    They will get a kick out of seeing Astro who has jet-powered feet and various body parts that become weapons.  Depending on how old they are, they may not recognize the  social commentary, but many adults will probably leave the theater feeling that they were made to sit through a political satire in the guise of a children’s cartoon.

-end

Where the Wild Things Are – Movie Review

If Only I Were King:

A Review of Where the Wild Things Are

by S. Randall Toms, Ph.D.

In 1963 Maurice Sendak wrote and illustrated a 338-word, ten-sentence children’s book, Where the Wild Things Are.  It was hailed as a groundbreaking work in children’s literature  because it seriously explored  a child’s deep feelings of anger, rejection, and loneliness.  Since its publication, the book has been made into an animated film, an opera, and now, through the wizardry of director Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation), a major motion picture. 

Since the book is only 338 words and the movie is 101 minutes long, we assume that Spike Jonze and writer Dave Eggers have expanded the story a great deal, but the basic premise remains intact.   Nine-year-old Max (Max Records) is dressed in a wolf suit, upsetting his home by engaging in all kinds of mischief.  In the book, he is trying to entertain himself  with a hammer and nails  and chasing the family dog with a fork.    In the film version, he builds an igloo and challenges his teen-age sister and her friends to a snowball fight.  When they destroy his igloo and leave him alone, Max responds to this desertion by storming into his sister’s room and tearing in pieces a valentine that he had given her.  The movie interjects into the plot that Max’s father is no longer living with his family, and Max is dealing with issues of abandonment, having a great need for attention, which neither his mother nor sister seem able to provide.  As his mother is trying to develop a relationship with another man, Max goes into a rage, becoming so uncontrollable that when his mother tries to hold him still, he bites her.    Although in the book, Max does not bite his mother, when he is sent to his room as punishment, he does threaten his mother that he will eat her up.

In the film version, after Max bites his mother,  he  runs away and eventually comes to  a seashore,  where he finds a boat and sails to a land where the wild things are.   In an interview with  Ramim Setoodeh and Andrew Romano of Newsweek, Maurice Sendak said that this was one addition to his story that he didn’t really like, for in the book, his mother calls him “wild thing” and sends him to bed without any supper.   Rather than running away, Max creates the world of the wild things in his own room through the power of imagination.

As in the movie, Max sets sail in a boat where he travels over a year to a place where there are huge wild things that have terrible teeth, eyes and claws.  Spike Jonze and his film crew, in conjunction with Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, created huge animatronic suits for the wild things that look exactly like the drawings in Sendak’s book.   Their facial expressions  were produced by means of computer generated imagery.  Though in the book the wild things have no names, in the film they are called Carol (voiced by James Gandolfini),  Alexander (Paul Dano),  Judith (Catherine O’Hara), Ira (Forest Whitaker), Douglas (Chris Cooper), and KW (Lauren Ambrose).  As Max arrives on the island, he finds Carol, who appears to be the alter ego of Max himself, engaged in acts of destruction, throwing a tantrum much like Max’s earlier in the film, because he feels that KW has rejected him in favor of new friends she has found.  As the wild things threateningly surround Max,  he convinces them that he is a king and that he can make things as they should be.  Like many children, Max believes that if only he could be in charge, he would know how to heal broken relationships and how to make himself and others happy.      

In ways that mirror Max’s own family, the wild things on the island are in conflict with one another and have difficulty being a real community.  They place their confidence in Max, hoping that he will be the kind of king that will show them how to live in harmony.   Carol, like Max, wants the island “to be a place where only the things you want to happen would happen.”  Unfortunately, Max, thinking as a child, believes that the solution to their problems can be found through fun and games.  In Sendak’s book, the most important section is the “wild rumpus,” a time of carefree frolicking that Max institutes as his first official act as king.  In the film version, the wild rumpus does provide a temporary respite from their problems, but eventually, the interpersonal conflicts begin to arise, with Max himself being at the center of them as the wild things begin to doubt his abilities to be a king.  Again, as a solution to their problems, Max suggests a  “playful” fight with dirt clods.  While the game starts out as fun, it eventually degenerates  into an activity that hurts others, just as Max’s earlier snowball fight had done.     Finally, the wild things become disillusioned with Max, and he realizes that his solutions have failed:  he cannot make things as he wanted them to be, even though he is king.  In Sendak’s book, Max has become the parent, an ineffective one at that, who sends the wild things to bed with no supper, just as his mother had dealt with him.

In the book,  Max begins to feel lonely on the island of wild things, and he wants to be with someone who loves him “best of all.”  He gives up being king, sails back home, and finds his supper waiting for him.   Spike Jonze’s vision of Where the Wild Things Are is much darker.  If someone thinks that Sendak’s book is rather gloomy, the film version amplifies the feeling.  Sendak said, “We don’t want children to suffer. But what do we do about the fact that they do? The trick is to turn that into art. Not scare children, that’s never our intention” (Setoodeh and Romano).  The character of Max in the film version is a little older than in Sendak’s book, and we have the feeling that Max is at that age when he realizes that childhood dreams don’t always come true, and childhood solutions to complicated problems are powerless to alleviate our emotional pain.    Disillusioned with himself and his abilities, Max returns to his home to find his mother waiting for him.

It is easy for both adults and children to identify with Max.  We believe that if we could be in charge, we would know how to make things work out perfectly.   In one scene, Carol tells Max, “This is all yours.  You’re the owner of this world.”   Max’s fantasy is our own, one that we usually do not leave behind in childhood.  Unfortunately, when we try to implement our solutions, we find that they are often just as childish and ineffective as those of Max.    Political leaders, educators, social workers, and religious leaders often think that they could solve the world’s problems if people were only made to submit to their ideas.  Eventually, we discover that we are “wild things” trying to help other “wild things,” all of us finding it very difficult to tame our destructive behaviors.

To say that this film has received mixed reviews is an understatement.    Some people have praised this movie as an instant classic, while others have said that it is so boring that both children and adults fall asleep while viewing the film.  Much like another film released this year, Shane Acker’s 9, Where the Wild Things Are has a difficulty finding an audience, looking like a children’s movie with animatromic suits and computer generated imagery,  but dealing with some very complicated human problems and philosophical  concepts.  Since this film is based on a children’s book, many adults assume that it is a children’s movie.  Spike Jonze said in a recent interview he had set out, not to make a children’s movie, but rather, a movie about childhood (Setoodeh and Romano).  This movie deals with the sadness, fears, and disappointments of childhood, giving it a melancholy atmosphere.   Expressing his appreciation for Jonze’s film version, Sendak said, “Children’s movies bore me to death. With Spike, I found a genuine, fierce little artist. It’s not cute and cuddly! It’s a real movie” (Timberg).

Though Sendak grew up in Brooklyn, he had eastern European relatives who were killed during the Holocaust.  Consequently, he has always had to wrestle with the danger of wild things, the fears and anger that we experience as children and adults, and our ineffectiveness to deal with the wildness in ourselves and others.  Max finds out that he does not have the solutions for complicated problems.  The best we can do is cherish the love that others are capable of showing us.

But even love is complicated.   Though our need for love and harmony is great, we cannot make others love us the way we want to be loved, nor can we make others love one another.  Max cannot heal the relationship between his mother and father any better than he could mend the relationship between Carol and KW.  Both the book and the film demonstrate that our need for love can be so all-consuming that it becomes destructive.  Like Max, we complicate matters by lashing out in anger when our own demands for love are not met, the way he tore the valentine he had made for his sister.   Max’s mischief stems from his need for love, the kind of need that eats others and ourselves.   Just before Max runs away, he stands on the kitchen table, looks down defiantly at his mother and commands her, “Woman, feed me,”  a request that is an appeal for much more than food.   In the land of wild things, Carol’s destructiveness stems from his feeling that KW does not show him the love that he needs.  In Sendak’s book, when Max is leaving the island, the wild things beg him to stay, saying that they love him so much that they will eat him up.  Our need to love and be loved becomes wild in its obsession to be satisfied.  Nevertheless, Max discovers that though the love that we look for others to show us can never be adequate to fulfill all our needs, unconditional love, like that of a mother for a mischievous child, provides us with the only real comfort we can have in this world of wild things.

Works Cited

Setoodeh, Ramim and Andrew Romano.  “’Where the Wild Things Are:’   Let the Wild Rumpus

Start.”  Newsweek.  9 Oct. 2009.  3 Nov. 2009.  http://www.newswekk.com/id/216997.

Timberg, Scott.  “Maurice Sendak Rewrote the Rules with ‘Wild Things.’”  Chicago Tribune.

11 Oct. 2009.  30 Oct. 2009.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/topic/la-ca-sendak11-2009oct11,0,7808912.story?obref=obnetwork

Lies We Tell Ourselves

Lies We Tell Ourselves

A Sermon

Preached on August 23, 2009

By the Rev. Dr. S. Randall Toms at St. Paul’s Reformed Episcopal Church, Baton Rouge, Louisiana

And he spake this parable unto certain which trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and despised others:  Two men went up into the temple to pray; the one a Pharisee, and the other a publican.  The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican.  I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I possess.  And the publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner.  I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other: for every one that exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.  (St. Luke 18:9-14)

I was reading an article a couple of months ago about a study that began back in the 1930s of some Harvard students that followed them throughout their lives down to the present time, trying to determine the things that made them happy or depressed, whether they felt that they had had a good life or not.  One of the interesting things that the study revealed was how people’s perceptions about themselves changes over the course of their lives, and how the stories we tell about certain events in our lives change over time.  For example, in 1946, when these men were asked about their experiences in World II, 34% reported that they had seen actual combat.  When they asked them these same questions 40 years later, 40% reported that they had seen combat.  In 1946, 25% of them said that had actually killed an enemy soldier.  Forty years later, only 14% said that they had actually killed an enemy.  Why did their stories change over the years?  It seems that we change the stories about ourselves in order to make ourselves look better, either in our own eyes, or in the eyes of others, depending perhaps even on how the culture around us changes.  Most of you know how I like to tell about my glory days on the basketball court.  After reading this article, I began to wonder if I really did all the things I said I did.  By the time I’m 70, who knows what my stories may be like?

A few years ago I was at a family reunion and we were sitting around reminiscing about old times.  We were talking about an annual event that we have in our family and the way some people worked so hard to make it a success.  One of my relatives began to talk about how she had worked so hard every year to cook and clean to make everything turn out well.  And everybody in the family was looking around at one another, because none of us could recall that she had ever lifted a finger to help.  We wondered how she could lie like that, but in her own mind, perhaps she wasn’t lying.  She had created this fiction about herself and she really believed it.

One of the New York Times Bestsellers from a few years ago was a book entitled, Water for Elephants.  It is a novel about life in the circus, back in the 1920s and 1930s.  But the story is told from today by a man, now in his 90s, who is in a nursing home.  He was in the circus most of his life.  There is another old man in the nursing home who also claims to have been in the circus, but the man who was actually in the circus can tell that the other man is lying, and it makes him so angry when this other man starts talking about his days in the circus.  One day he tells one of the nurses how the other man is lying, and the nurse says, “He’s not really lying.  It is common among elderly people that they create a past that they wish had been true, and eventually, they come to believe that it is true.

This same Harvard study that I mentioned earlier, at one point, sent to these men questionnaires and answers that they had filled out in their sophomore days at college concerning who they were, their beliefs, their ambitions, and so forth.  One of the men sent back his packet and said that it was obvious that they had mixed up his file with someone else because he could have never answered those questions in that way.  But he had.  We change so much over the years, at least in the way we see ourselves, and when we are confronted with what we were really like back then, it is difficult for us to believe.

It is difficult for us to believe what we once were.  It is difficult for us to believe what we are, so we often create a fiction about ourselves.  Some psychologist refer to this as one of our many defense mechanisms that we employ in order to keep from seeing ourselves as we really are, because the truth is just too painful to face.

We have an example of this ability to see ourselves as we really are in our gospel reading for today.  The Pharisee sees himself as a holy and righteous man.  He says that he fasts twice a week, and he is a tither, he gives God 10% of everything that comes to him.  So, he is very proud of himself.  Furthermore, he is not an adulterer, not an extortioner, not unjust, and certainly not a dishonest man like this tax collector who is standing nearby.  He is a very religious man.  But unfortunately, his religion has only blinded him to what he really is.  Though the Pharisee thought of himself very highly, you will remember that our Lord Jesus Christ did not view the Pharisees generally in very favorable light.  Remember our Lord’s description of the Pharisees in Matthew 23:

Then spake Jesus to the multitude, and to his disciples, Saying, The scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat: All therefore whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do; but do not ye after their works: for they say, and do not.  For they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men’s shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers.   But all their works they do for to be seen of men: they make broad their phylacteries, and enlarge the borders of their garments,  And love the uppermost rooms at feasts, and the chief seats in the synagogues, And greetings in the markets, and to be called of men, Rabbi, Rabbi….   Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye devour widows’ houses, and for a pretence make long prayer: therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation. Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves.  Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone. Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel. Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye make clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within they are full of extortion and excess.  Thou blind Pharisee, cleanse first that which is within the cup and platter, that the outside of them may be clean also.  Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness. Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity. (Matt. 23:1-7, 14-15, 23-28)

Yes, it was true that they fasted and prayed, but they fasted and prayed so that men would see them and think how pious and holy they were.  They put on a great show of being holy, they were very religious on the outside, but on the inside, they were full of hatred and prejudice.  They had all kinds of lists of rules and regulations for people to follow, but they had forgotten about justice, mercy, and faith.  So, Jesus said that they were straining at gnats and swallowing camels.  Much like the current controversy in Judaism concerning whether gelatin can be eaten within a milk product, since gelatin is an animal product and it is contrary to kosher law to eat meat with milk.  In Jesus’ day, they had minute regulations about what you could and couldn’t do on the Sabbath day, but if someone was in need, they might not help them because it might be a violation of one of their Sabbath laws.

It seems that they have created a fiction about themselves.  They took great pride in being holy, but Jesus said they stole from widows, they were guilty of extortion.  They had such a sight of themselves as being holy that they couldn’t see these glaring faults and inconsistencies in their own lives.  Sadly, we often use our religion to blind ourselves to what we really are.  Like the Pharisees, we think about all the good things we do and ignore all that is wrong in our lives.  And we create these fictions about ourselves.    I have spent all my life in churches, been a preacher for nearly all my life, and I have known Pharisees of all shapes and sizes.  I have been a Pharisee myself at many points in my life.  Like the Pharisees, we make all kinds of rules and regulations for ourselves and think that if we keep those, we are holy.  We give all our attention to things like whether we should drink or smoke, whether we should wear make-up, jewelry, or sleeveless dresses, and on and on the lists go that Christians have concocted over the years.  We think that if we live by these lists, we are holy, and yet these very same people do not know how to control their tempers, they gossip and hurt other people with their tongues, they are filled with jealousy and envy, have mean and critical spirits, but they are very holy because they don’t go to movies.  That is straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel.  But such rules help us to create this fiction about ourselves that we are very holy when we are the opposite.

But let us look at the tax collector on the other hand.  He creates no fictions, has no illusions about himself.  He will not even look up toward heaven, too ashamed to lift his eyes in the direction of a holy God.    Whereas the Pharisee had convinced himself that he was a righteous man, the tax collector knows that he is not.  And in great sorrow, he beats himself upon his breast, and says, God be merciful to me, the sinner.”  And Jesus says that it is this man, who leaves the temple and goes home justified, righteous in the sight of God.  This man, the man who recognizes that he is a sinner, is the one that God looks upon as being righteous.  Whereas, the person who does not see himself as a sinner, the man who thinks that he is righteous in the sight of God, is condemned.  Can you say with the tax collector, with all honesty, God be merciful to me, a sinner.  Is that the posture you take when you come to a worship service such as this—the position of humility, bowing your head in reverence and humility, just pleading that God would be merciful to you, because you are a sinner?  It is difficult to take a good look at ourselves, without all the fictions we have created, without all the defense mechanisms we have erected in order to shield ourselves from that sight, but it is the only way of salvation.

Everything in our liturgy is designed to make you come to God in that spirit, without the fictions you may have created about how good and righteous you are, so that you might see yourself as a sinner.    We start out by praying, “Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid….”  We begin our services with the acknowledgment that we cannot hide what we really are from God.  In our Morning Prayer service, we begin, “Dearly beloved brethren, the Scripture moveth us, in sundry places, to acknowledge and confess our manifold sins and wickedness; and that we should not dissemble nor cloak them before the face of Almighty God our heavenly Father; but confess them with an humble, lowly, penitent, and obedient heart.”  What was the Pharisee doing? He was dissembling.  He was deceitfully hiding himself from what he truly was.  He was cloaking his sin, trying to hide his sin, by living up to a few man-made rules and regulations.  Our liturgy is calculated to prevent us from cloaking and dissembling, but like the tax collector, confess what we are with a humble, lowly, and penitent heart.    Although you can’t see all of my actions during the common service since my back is turned, I think that most of you know that when I come to the line, “And although we are unworthy, throughout our manifold sins, to offer unto thee, any sacrifice,” I strike my breast three times, and I am doing that as your priest, on your behalf to indicate what great sorrow we feel for our sins, for our unworthiness to present anything to God.  And then, of course, in the prayer of humble access, we pray,  We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies.  We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy table.”  And then, after that, we come to partake of this Holy Sacrament, where we confess over and over again, I am without hope, except through the death of Jesus Christ in my place.  I am so sinful and so unworthy to be in the presence of  God, that the only way I could have been cleansed, was for the Son of God to die for me.  As we take the bread and drink the cup, we are saying, with the tax collector, “God be merciful to me a sinner.”

People might wonder why there is so much emphasis in our prayer book, so much stress in  our liturgy on sin, unworthiness, and our need for mercy.  The reason is, This man went this man went down to his house justified rather than the other: for every one that exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.           It is only those who acknowledge their sinfulness toward God and their need for mercy who are accepted by him.  Thus, in our services you hear us sing constantly, “Lord have mercy upon us, Christ have mercy upon us, Lord have mercy upon us.  O Lamb of God that takest away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us.”  Why do you hear that so often in our services?  Because this was the cry of the tax collector who went to his house justified.  The way to find peace, joy, and happiness, is not through hiding the truth about ourselves and lying to ourselves, but through acknowledging ourselves as sinners, without hope, except through the shed blood of Jesus Christ.

Amen.

Drag Me to Hell–Movie Review

Hell Hath Opened Her Mouth:

A Review of Drag Me to Hell

by Rev. S. Randall Toms, Ph.D.

Warning:  This review contains spoilers.

I am a huge fan of the Universal horror films of the 1930s and 1940s (Dracula, 1931; Frankenstein, 1931; The Wolfman, 1941, etc.) and the Hammer Horror of the late 1950s through the early 1970s (The Horror of Dracula, 1958; The Evil of Frankenstein, 1963, etc.).  Consequently, the more modern horror movies, especially those of the infinite sequel slasher films never seem to measure up to my favorites of the past.  Many modern film critics also seem to be quite unimpressed with most of the horror movies that are being made now.  So, when a horror film is released that most critics give rave reviews, I am always intrigued, hoping that it will really be worthwhile.  When I first saw the title, Drag Me to Hell, I thought this would be another of the many low-budget, mediocre horror films that are currently produced; but when I saw critics, almost across the board, giving it outstanding reviews, I had to see it.  I viewed this film on the big screen when it first came out.  Now that the DVD has been released, I have decided to write a review of the Unrated Director’s Cut.

I should have known that this film had real possibilities when I saw that it is directed by Sam Raimi, director of the Spiderman trilogy and Evil Dead series.  Drag Me to Hell is gross, funny, and campy, with a few startling scenes thrown in to make the audience jump. As Raimi said in an interview with Larry Carroll, “This film is trying to be like a ‘spook-a-blast,’ which is those cheesy carnival rides you get on and you’re jerked around in the darkness, wondering if a skeleton will pop out.”   In many ways, it is a tribute to some of the horror movies of the past, giving an especially strong nod to Night of the Demon (1957).  In the midst of all the horror and dark humor, the film raises some interesting moral questions, as well.

The title of the film hints that some of its characters are in danger of being dragged to hell.  In the Bible, hell is often presented as something that devours, swallows—something that has a belly.  Interestingly, the key images of this film center around food and eating.  The movie is so replete with issues concerning food and dieting that some reviewers have felt that one of the subtexts of the movie is eating disorders.  There is no question that the most repulsive and grotesque  images of the film play with an idea about  horrors connected with the mouth, both what goes in and comes out of it.

Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) is a farm girl who has moved to the city to make a career for herself in the world of banking.  Having shed some pounds, she is diligently trying to leave behind her past as an overweight, country girl.  In her first scene, Christine is in her car, listening to an audio recording designed to improve diction.  She is repeating the sentence, “Good sounds abound when the mouth is round,” but she still says “round” in a way that betrays her origins.

Christine is in love with Clay Dalton (Justin Long), who is a newly appointed psychology professor from a wealthy family.  Christine overhears Clay’s mother say that he needs a woman that can help him advance in the world, not a farm girl.  Christine is up for a promotion as assistant manager of her bank branch, but the manager is not sure that she can make the tough decisions that her chief competitor for the job, Stu, is capable of making.  Just as Christine has assured her manager that she can make the tough decisions, she finds at her desk, Mrs. Ganush, a gypsy straight out of a 1930s horror film, complete with a thick, Hungarian accent reminiscent of Bela Lugosi.  Mrs. Ganush has received notice that she is going to be evicted from her house because she is behind on her payments to the bank.  She has already been granted two extensions and begs Christine for a third.  At first, Christine wants to help this poor old lady, but when she is reminded that these are the kinds of tough decisions an assistant manager must make, she refuses to grant her an extension, though it is in her power to do so.

Mrs. Ganush is a grotesque character, especially when one looks at her mouth.  She coughs up mucous, attaching itself to her  horrible false teeth, which she proceeds to take out when sitting at Christine’s desk.  While Christine is asking advice from her manager, Mrs. Ganush swipes candy from the dish on Christine’s desk and stuffs as much as she can into her mouth.   After Christine denies Mrs. Ganush the extension, Mrs. Ganush attacks Christine in the parking garage.  In the course of their fight, Mrs. Ganush loses her false teeth, but still puts her gums on Christine’s chin.  At first it looks as though she is trying to bite Christine, but it could also be seen as an attempt to swallow her.   In the course of the attack, Mrs. Ganush rips a button off Christine’s coat and utters a curse over the button.

After the attack, images of the evils associated with eating continue to multiply.  When Christine goes home after the assault, she is looking through a cookbook, and an old picture of her falls out which shows her overweight, standing beside a sign that  “Pork Queen–Fair 1995,”  wearing a ”Junior Famers League” T-shirt,  and standing beside a huge pig that has won the blue ribbon. It becomes obvious throughout the rest of the film by means of constant references to food, that Christine is obsessed with the evils that are associated with the mouth.  Though good sounds come when the mouth is round, the round mouth is also the place where food enters, making one fat, and, in her view, undesirable.

That night, as she is sleeping, a fly enters her mouth.  Flies also figure prominently in this film, perhaps a reference to Beelzebub, or the devil, being sometimes referred to as “Lord of the flies.”  Flies are shown as the opening credits are displayed on screen.  At the beginning of Drag Me to Hell, a young Hispanic boy is brought to a medium because he is suffering as a result of having taken a gypsy’s necklace.  When the mother and father show the medium the necklace, a fly appears, again associating the fly with evil spirits.  After the fly enters Christine’s mouth as she is sleeping, she has a nightmare about Mrs. Ganush being in bed with her, who vomits insects, worms, and maggots into Christine’s mouth.  When she goes back to the office the next day, Christine hears the sound of flies buzzing and grabs her stomach, as though the flies are located there.  Again, there seems to be some kind of association with her fear of eating and perhaps the cravings she is experiencing.  When her rival, Stu, comes to ask her some questions, he irritatingly drums his fingers on her desk.  Finally, Christine blurts out, “And get your filthy pig knuckles off my desk,” again, recalling her memories of being a former Pork Fair Queen.  Soon after making that statement, her nose starts to bleed, and she spews blood all over the bank manager, who asks, “Did I get any in my mouth?”

Christine visits a psychic name Rham Jas, who informs her that the button that was ripped from her coat is an accursed object that will draw an evil spirit called a Lamia who will drag its owner to hell after three days of torment.    The Lamia of Drag Me to Hell bears little resemblance to the Lamias we encounter in most folklore and literature. The more usual description of a Lamia, such as the one popularized in Keats’ poem,  is of a creature that is half woman, half snake.  The one similarity that the Lamia of Greek mythology has with the one of Drag Me to Hell is that the Greek Lamia devoured children, again, invoking the imagery of something involved in a repulsive form of eating.

In an effort to get rid of the curse before the three days are up, Christine tries to visit Mrs. Ganush, hoping to make amends, only to find that she has died.  When she goes inside the house, she finds herself in the midst of a memorial service for the old gypsy woman.  Mrs. Ganush’s daughter asks Christine, “You used to be a real fat girl, didn’t you?” As Christine is viewing the body of Mrs. Ganush, she accidentally falls on the corpse, but while trying to extricate herself, the toothless mouth of Mrs. Ganush again grips Christine’s chin, this time spewing a vile, green substance into Christine’s mouth.

Not being able to make restitution for what she has done, Christine asks Rham Jas for possible ways to escape her fate.  Now the question of the film becomes, “What will Christine be willing to do in order to rid herself of this curse?” She has been willing to do almost anything to get the job of branch manager.  Will she be willing to go against other moral scruples that she has in order to save herself?  One of Rham’s first suggestions is that she should offer a blood sacrifice by killing an animal in order to appease the Lamia.  When Christine protests that she could not possibly kill an animal, being so sensitive as to become a vegetarian, Rham replies, “You will be surprised what you will be willing to when the Lamia comes for you.”  After an attack by the spirit of Mrs. Ganush in which it shoves her whole arm down Christine’s throat, she decides to offer her pet kitten as a sacrifice, but the offering does not send the Lamia away.  Later, at a séance that attempts to free Christine from the evil spirit, the Lamia enters one of the members of the séance, and tells Christine, “I don’t want your cat, you dirty pork queen,” and then vomits out the kitten.   After Rham tells her of the medium we encountered earlier in the film who would be willing to help free her from the Lamia for $10,000.00, Christine sells everything she has, but when it appears that she will not be able to raise the money, she resigns herself to her destiny by sitting down and eating a half gallon of ice cream.

When the séance fails to deliver Christine from the Lamia, Rham tells her that the only alternative she has is to transfer the curse to another person, who will be carried to hell in her place.  Christine then deals with the question, “Who deserves this?”  While gorging on sundaes and becoming a more obnoxious person every moment, she tries to find a suitable candidate.  Being unable to deal with the guilt of sending another person to hell, she learns from Rham that it would be possible to transfer the curse if she gave the accursed object to the dead Mrs. Ganush, but she would have to unearth the body and make a formal gift of it.  On a stormy night, Christine digs into Mrs. Ganush’s grave which rapidly becomes filled with mud and water.  She opens the coffin, and stuffs an envelope containing the button in the corpse’s mouth, saying, “Choke on it…”  But the corpse won’t let Christine leave, dragging her back into the grave.   A huge silver cross from a neighboring grave falls on Christine, and she sinks into the muddy water.  But just as we think she has drowned, Christine’s hand comes up out of the grave, grasps the cross, and by it, pulls herself out of the grave.  It appears that Christine has been baptized, buried in the likeness of the death of Christ by baptism, and saved by the cross.    In the next scene, Christine takes a shower that washes away all the filth of the grave and we think the threat of the curse has finally been eliminated.

At the end of the film, Christine finally confesses to Clay, her boyfriend, that she could have given Mrs. Ganush an extension, but it was her decision not to do so.  Clay tells her that she has such a good heart.  But the movie leaves us with the question, “Is Christine a good person, or does she deserve to be dragged to hell?”  After all, she was willing to evict a woman from her house for the sake of a promotion.  In Matthew 23:14, Jesus condemns an avaricious group of people by saying, “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye devour widows’ houses, and for a pretence make long prayer: therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation.”  Interestingly, the name “Christine,” is derived from “Christ,” and when Christine first hears of Mrs. Ganush’s plight, like Christ, she feels compassion.  But when the choice is between helping a poor old lady and receiving a promotion, in an un-Christlike manner, she chooses her own advancement.  The Church also honors a St. Christina who was persecuted because she gave her father’s wealth to the poor.  She was cast into a furnace for her faith, but she was miraculously preserved.  Rather than showing compassion, Christine and the bank have devoured a widow’s house, yet at the end Clay sees her as having a good heart.  Christine seems to accept the compliment, though she spent the entire movie denying that it was her decision to throw Mrs. Ganush out of her house, choosing to blame it on the manager.

In an interview at the Cannes Film Festival, director Sam Raimi said, “We just wanted to tell the story of a person who wants to be a good person but makes a sinful choice out of greed for their own betterment at the expense of somebody else…and pays the price for it.  It’s a simple morality tale about how greed leads to destruction” (Festival de Cannes).  Though it appears that Alison Lohman was a last minute choice to play this role, it seems that she is perfect for the part of Christine  She has such an innocent face, and we are made to feel sympathetic toward her, though we may have an uneasy feeling that Mrs. Ganush’s daughter  was right when she tells Christine, “You deserve everything that is coming to you.”  Nevertheless, the audience probably identifies with Christine, knowing that we have also done things that were wrong out of greed.  Don’t we instinctively identify with the innocent-looking, beautiful Christine when the alternative is helping a grotesque witch of an old woman?   In an interview with Todd Gilchrist, Sam Raimi said:

…. it’s also a story about the digression of a character – how one bad choice leads to another and another and another until she really becomes quite a despicable character at the picture’s end, even though she’s very pretty and likeable, supposedly, and somebody hopefully who the audience wants to root for. …so that when she sinned against that woman, I wanted the audience to sin with her so that when Alison [Christine] was punished by having this demon called up from Hell chasing her down over the next two days, that like it or not the audience would know that they had made that choice too at that time and they deserved this thing coming for her….The theme was about greed and its effects.

Through our greed, we often destroy one another, devour one another, and drag one another to hell.  The imagery of connecting hell and demons with devouring, eating, and  swallowing is very biblical, especially in the King James Version of the Bible.  In I Peter 5:8, the devil is described in this manner:  “Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.”  Christine, the bank, Mrs. Ganush, and the Lamia are all devourers of some kind, thus associated with evil, the devil, and hell.  In Isaiah 5:14, we read another description of hell being a kind of devouring monster: “Therefore hell hath enlarged herself, and opened her mouth without measure: and their glory, and their multitude, and their pomp, and he that rejoiceth, shall descend into it.”  It appears throughout the film, that Christine and Mrs. Ganush, have been trying to devour one another, recalling the language of the apostle Paul who said, “But if ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another” (Gal. 5:15).  Our own greed and avarice seems to be matched by the greed and avarice of hell.  If we bite and devour one another, our just punishment is to be devoured by the greed of hell that is never satisfied: “Hell and destruction are never full” (Prov. 20:7).  Though the Old Testament references to hell might be translated as Sheol, or “the grave,” the basic meaning is that our sinful choices lead to an inevitable destruction, whether in the grave, or in the flames of hell.   Our obsession with food often mirrors our passion to have other things as well, even if the price is destroying other people in the process.  In Drag Me to Hell, the images of mouths, food, swallowing, and vomiting, not only recall Biblical images of hell, but our, often, uncontrollable urge to consume others by our greed, creating present and future hells for one another.

Works Cited

Carroll, Larry.  “Sam Raimi Won’t Say Whether ‘Drag Me To Hell’ Actually Takes Viewers To Hell.” MTV.com.   28 Oct. 2008.  27 Oct. 2009.

http:/www.mtv.com/movies/news/articles/1598026/story.jhtml

Gilchrist, Todd.  Interview:  ‘Drag Me to Hell’ Director Sam Raimi.’  Cinematical. 28 May 2009.

27 Oct. 2009.

http://www.cinematical,com/2009/05/28/interview-drag-me-to-hell-director-sam-raimi/

Raimi, Sam.  Interview.  Festival de Cannes.  24 May 2009.  27 Oct. 2009.  http://www.festival-

cannes.com/en/mediaPlayer/10041.html.

The Attitude of Humility

The Attitude of Humility

A Sermon preached on October 4, 2009
by the Rev. Dr. S. Randall Toms
St. Paul’s Reformed Episcopal Church, Baton Rouge, Louisiana

And they could not answer him again to these things.  And he put forth a parable to those which were bidden, when he marked how they chose out the chief rooms; saying unto them,   When thou art bidden of any man to a wedding, sit not down in the highest room; lest a more honourable man than thou be bidden of him; And he that bade thee and him come and say to thee, Give this man place; and thou begin with shame to take the lowest room. But when thou art bidden, go and sit down in the lowest room; that when he that bade thee cometh, he may say unto thee, Friend, go up higher: then shalt thou have worship in the presence of them that sit at meat with thee.   For whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.  (Luke 14:6-11)

Many Christians around the world will be celebrating today as the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi.  Francis has to be one of the most popular of Christian saints, honored and revered even by many Christians outside the Roman Catholic Church.  When people think of St. Francis, they often think of him as the patron saint of animals, since he had such a tremendous love for all of nature, referring all things in creation as brother and sister–brother sun, sister moon, brother world, brother wind, etc.  Even at the Episcopal school that my grandchildren attend, they will have a blessing of animals this week, as will many churches, in honor of St. Francis and his love for animals.  How many homes do you pass, even in Baton Rouge, that have a bird-feeder, statue, or a fountain, depicting St. Francis.  For some, Francis is the great worker of miracles and the person who received the stigmata.  There are so many legends that have cropped up around the life of St. Francis, it is very difficult to distinguish fact from fiction, though, I would have to say, in the case of Francis, even the legends and fictions often serve as useful parables.

The one thing that does seem to be certain about the life of Francis of Assisi is that he did become a living embodiment of the principle set forth by our Lord in our Gospel reading for today:  “For whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.”  This statement comes at the conclusion of a parable told which describes a rather comical situation.  Suppose a person goes to a feast, convinced of his own importance, and thinks that he deserves the most prestigious seat.  Back in these days, as is often the case now, seating arrangements at banquets are very important.  In the days of our Lord Jesus, the closer you sat to the most important person there, the more you were looked upon as an important person yourself.  But let’s suppose you were to walk into a banquet, thinking you are certainly one of the most important people there, and you seat yourself right next to the most honored guest.  How embarrassing it would be then for someone to walk up to you and say, “I’m sorry, but someone much more important than you has come in.  Would you please go find another place?”  What a humiliating experience that would be! What Jesus is teaching us is that we should never think more highly of ourselves than we should.  No matter what we may accomplish in this world, there are always going to be people who are greater than we are.  Instead, always take the place of humility.  In the end, it will be the humble who will be exalted.

Francis of Assisi is one of those people who decided to put that principle into action.  Born to wealthy parents, Francis was a person who loved to dress in fine clothes and enjoy fun and games with the sons of other noblemen.  He was someone who wanted drink his fill of pleasure and have great honors bestowed upon him.  But through a series of events, Francis came to see that the pleasures and honors of the world were vanity.  He experienced a dramatic conversion from his life of pleasure and glory-seeking, and became concerned for the poor, the sick, even lepers.  He gave away all his belongings and embraced poverty, always seeking to be the least of all.

Down through the centuries since his death in 1226, the life of Francis has been an inspiration to others to forsake everything for the cause of Christ.  I like to watch movies about the life of Francis.  I will admit that Franco Zefferelli’s Brother Sun, Sister Moon is laughable in some parts.  In that film we see Francis as a kind of hippie saint, complete with music of Donovan.  Nevertheless, the film does show how Francis wanted to associate with the poor, those that not many people, not even in the church, wanted to love and help.  But I prefer the 1961 film, Francis of Assisi with Bradform Dillman in the title role.  One of the interesting things about that film is that the part of Clare is played by a young actress named Dolores Hart.  Dolores Hart had starred in movies such as Loving You (1957) with Elvis Presley.  She also appeared in such movies as Where the Boys Are (1961) and Come Fly with Me (1963).  She was so pretty that many people hailed her as the next Grace Kelly.  But in 1963, breaking off an engagement with a very wealthy man, she gave it all up and entered a convent, and has been a nun ever since.  Like Francis, she no longer saw a need to exalt herself in the eyes of the world.  She was willing to become small, even forgotten.

Not every Christian is called upon to embrace abject poverty the way that Francis of Assisi did.  Not every Christian is called upon to enter a convent live and live away from the world.  As a matter of fact, a Christian might become very famous in politics, the arts, business or any other vocation.  But no matter how many honors the world bestows upon the Christian, he always has this humble opinion that he is a sinner saved by the grace of God.  I suppose that the Apostle Paul was the most famous of all the apostles, even during his own lifetime, but he always thought of himself as the chief of sinners, the least of the apostles, and less than the least of all the saints.  The Scriptures always command us to maintain this posture of humility.  As St. Paul tells us in Phil. 2:3, “Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory; but in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves.”  This is the attitude that the Christian must have of himself.  No matter how wealthy, no matter how famous, no matter how powerful, he must always think of himself as the least of all, always considering others better than himself.  It is this humble of opinion of himself that enables the Christian to take on the role of the servant, never considering himself to be too good to minister to those who are in need.

You remember the time when disciples are arguing about who was the greatest.  Jesus told them, “And there was also a strife among them, which of them should be accounted the greatest.  And he said unto them, The kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them; and they that exercise authority upon them are called benefactors.   But ye shall not be so: but he that is greatest among you, let him be as the younger; and he that is chief, as he that doth serve.   For whether is greater, he that sitteth at meat, or he that serveth? is not he that sitteth at meat? but I am among you as he that serveth”  (Luke 22:24-27).  All this is taking place as our Lord is instituting the Sacrament of Holy Communion.  Here is the Son of God, explaining to them how he is about to die on the cross, and they are arguing about who is the greatest.  Jesus tells them that they are missing the point.  In his kingdom, the person who serves is the greatest, because even HE is among them as one who serves.  He came into this world, not to be served, but to serve, serve in the greatest way a person can serve, by giving his life a ransom for many.  St. Paul put it like this:

Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name: That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth; And that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.   (Phil. 2:5-11)

Our Lord, though he was the eternal son of God, made himself of no reputation.  He was willing to be treated as a common criminal and allowed himself to be executed as a blasphemer.  He was despised and rejected of men and ridiculed by those in high places.  This was his service for us.  He did all of this so that you and I could be forgiven of our sins and have fellowship with him forever.

In our youth Bible studies on Sunday evenings, we have been studying that catechism question that states that when we were baptized, we vowed, through our sponsors to renounce “the pomps and vanity of this wicked world.” We have tried to understand the meaning of “pomps”, a word that our young people don’t use anymore, not even in terms of “pomp and circumstance.”  We have seen that “pomp” is ostentatious display, putting ourselves on display in such a way as to suggest that we are better than other people.  Whenever we see someone behaving in this manner, we say that they are “pompous,” that is, having an exaggerated sense of their own self-importance.   The parable before us this morning is a warning against being pompous.  Instead, the Christian must always be willing to take on the form of a servant, even as his master did.  We are told that just before Francis of Assisi died, he said, “A man is what he is in the sight of God and no more.”  No matter what other people might think of you, no matter what honors they may feel you to be worthy of, what really counts is what you are in the sight of God.  In God’s sight, the greatest are those who humble themselves.

Amen.

Longing for the Gold Old Days

Longing for the Gold Old Days

Job 29:2

A Sermon Preached on October 11, 2009by the Rev. Dr. S. Randall Toms
At St. Paul’s Reformed Episcopal Church, Baton Rouge, Louisiana

A few days ago my wife and I were listening to some old songs from the 50s and 60s, and I got the bright idea of looking on the Internet to see what had happened to some of these performers.  I’ll mention some names that most of you will not even remember, but I looked up Little Peggy March who sang “I Will Follow Him.”  She is 61 years old now.  Marcie Blaine who sang “Bobby’s Girl” is 65.  Bobby Vee,  “The Night Has a Thousand Eyes,” is 66.  And Ringo Starr of the Beatles is 69.  Can that be possible?  I didn’t have the heart to try to find current pictures of them, because I prefer to remember them the way they were.  Sometimes, I wonder if these teen idols ever wish that they were still like they were in the 50s and 60s—young, handsome, beautiful, popular.  A few Sunday nights ago, I got out one of my old high school yearbooks and showed our Youth Sunday School class some pictures of me when I was 17.  I’m sure that none of them would have recognized me if I hadn’t said, “That was me.”  As we get older and think back on our younger days, I suppose it is only natural to say, “I wish I was that young again.  I wish I was that strong and healthy—that full of energy.”

In your readings for Evening Prayer for the past week, you have been reading, and for the next few coming weeks, you will be reading the story of Job.  In our text for this morning, Job cries out, “Oh that I were as in months past.”  I suppose that there are many times in our lives when we say that.  I say it almost every morning when I  first look in the mirror.  “Oh that I were as in months past.”  Many years past in my case.  Many people long for former days, and not just because they are getting older.  Many  long for former days when things were going well in their lives.  They were prosperous, perhaps with a good job and what seemed to be a secure future, but then they lost everything.  Some people wish for the former days when they were healthy.  Some people have terrible accidents, injuries, or illnesses, and they do not know what it is to have a day that is free from pain and discomfort. Who can blame them for saying, “Oh, that I were as in months past.”  Some people have had terrible things happen in their families, relationships broken, and the joy of family is just not something they get to experience any more.     Those who are prone to serious bouts of depression look back on the days when there seemed to be no clouds of any kind on the horizon, but now the light of day seems to be constantly darkened by a gloomy gray, and we say, “Oh that I were as in months past.”    For some people, great tragedies have touched their lives.  Perhaps they have had to endure the loss of loved ones through death and it doesn’t seem as though there will be any more happy moments in their lives.  Oh that I were as in months past.  And then, some of us can remember the times when it seems that our relationship with the Lord was richer and more meaningful than it is today.  Some people can think about times when it seemed that God was so real to them, it felt as if they could have  reached out and touched him.  They walked about with that wonderful sense of God’s presence, every thought was absorbed with him, loving him, and desiring to serve him with all of their being.  But now a  kind of spiritual coldness has crept into their lives.  God’s doesn’t seem to be as near as he once was, and it appears that their love for him is not as strong as it once was, and their desire to serve him is not characterized by the same fervor as in days long ago, and they can’t help but say, “Oh that I were as in months past.”

Job is experiencing almost all of these same feelings.  We all know the story of Job.  Job was a wealthy and prosperous man—man who feared God and shunned evil.  But in spite of the fact that Job was a holy and righteous man, he lost all of his possessions, his servants, and even his seven sons and three daughters in a single day.  Then, he was afflicted with a horrible disease.  He had boils from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head.  His disease disfigured him so badly that when his friends came to see him, they didn’t even recognize him.  No one proved to be a good comforter to him.  His wife told him to curse God and die.  His friends told him that he was suffering that way because he had sinned against God.  No wonder that Job cries out, “O that I were as in months past.”

If you read chapters and 29 and 30, you see Job remembering the good old days– how it used to be before he had lost everything.  Job remembers the times when God was watching over him and protecting him.  You remember how Satan had told God that God had built a hedge around Job so that nothing bad could happen to him.    But God took down the hedge, and Job suffers loss.  In chapters 29 and 30 he compares his life now to what it had been.  One of the things that Job seems to miss the most is how much people respected him.  He talks about how the elders and leaders of his people kept silent when he was around because they wanted to listen to the words of wisdom that came from his mouth.  He was known as the man who helped the fatherless and the widows.  He helped the sick, the strangers, those who were oppressed, and he comforted those who were sad.  Everybody praised him for what he was and for all the good that he did.  But now, how different things are!  In chapter 30 he describes how the young people make fun of him.  How humiliating!  Job says that he wouldn’t have allowed their fathers to help his dogs keep his sheep, and now these people think he is so disgusting that they spit in his face.  But that’s not the worst thing.  For Job, the worst thing is how God appears to be treating him.  As the Good New Translation has it, God throws him down in the mud, and when he pleads with God for help, God doesn’t answer him.  Rather God continues to persecute him with all his power.  Well, who can blame Job for saying, “Oh that I were as in months past.”

Why can’t we be as we were in months past?  Why can’t we turn back the clock and be like we were in better times?   Why can’t we always be young, healthy, filled with energy, successful, prosperous, admired and respected by everyone?  Of course, one of the reasons is that we live in a fallen world.  Ever since the fall in the Garden of Eden, death and decay have been built into the world.  If Adam had never sinned, we would have always been strong, healthy, and exuberant.  But still, even though we live in a fallen world, couldn’t God protect us from some of the things that happen to us?  After all, there seem to be so many inequities in God’s providential dealings with us.  Doesn’t it seem that some people just seem to get more than their fair share of this world’s trouble, especially those who try to serve God and please him?  Why doesn’t God just stop time for us, as it were, and just let things always stay the way they are?

God hasn’t revealed to us all the answers to those questions.  Even Job never got an answer to the question of why he had to suffer the way that he did.  The most simplistic answer to the question is that this suffering, as terrible as it was, was for Job’s good and God’s glory.  But how could all of this loss been good for Job?   If you had gone to Job and tried to comfort him by saying, “Job, I don’t understand why you are complaining so much.  After all, don’t you know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to his purpose,” Job would probably thrown a bloody piece of pottery at your head.  Job would want to know, “How could this work together for my good?  Would you explain that to me?  You tell me how losing all my children, losing all my possessions, losing my health and the ability to do good to others—you tell me how that is going to work together for my good?”  Why didn’t God allow Job to always live his life as it had been in the good times?  You couldn’t give Job a satisfactory answer.  This is something that Job would have to find out for himself.

Part of the answer is that  no matter what we think we know of God and his purpose for our lives, we have to grow, we have to mature, we have to move on, and it is only through moving on from times past that we can come to a deeper understanding of God.    Instead of looking back and longing for the good old days, we have to learn from our present experiences and move on.  As difficult as it may be for us to comprehend, whatever is happening to us right now is preparing us for something better than the good old days.    I remember that some years after the Beatles had broken up, someone asked John Lennon, “When are the Beatles going to get back together,” and John replied, “When are you going back to the second grade.”  What John was saying was that that phase of his life was over.   For him, getting back with the Beatles would have been like going back to elementary school.  As we say now, he had been there, done that.   It was time to leave that behind and move on.     In a spiritual sense, when we have a longing to go back to these former days, we are wanting to go back to a time of immaturity.  Some of you remember the 1962 film with Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane.”  It’s certainly one of the most disturbing films I ever watched.  Bette Davis plays an old woman who lives in the past, remembering the days when she was a child star.  She still dresses as a little girl.  In one scene she looks into a mirror, and it dawns on her that she is an old woman still trying to be a child, and she breaks down in tears.    So much of our longing for the past is just like that.  We are wanting to go back to the days when we were children.    But it is not God’s will that we should be spiritual children, so he brings us through some very rough, very difficult times, so that we might grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Sometimes, it is so easy to love God and serve him.  There are times when God builds the hedge around us and blesses us in every possible way, and we sing his praises and never doubt his love and favor towards us.  But what about when God takes down the hedge?  Can we continue to love and  serve him when we are poor and sick?  Are we not guilty, at times, of loving him because of the loaves and fishes that he provides for us?  Can we continue to have faith in him when there are no outward comforts to convince us of his love and favor towards us?

Our women on their Thursday night Bible studies have been studying this concept of the “dark night of the soul,” described so eloquently by St. John of the Cross, but experienced by most Christians at some point in their lives.  There are times, particularly at the beginning of the Christian life, when we are very sensible of the presence of God.  We feel that our sins are forgiven.  We have very high emotional experiences where we know the Holy Spirit is leading us and guiding us.  But then, there comes that time when we feel totally dry and barren.    God seems distant.  Prayer, which used to be such a joyful time of fellowship and communion becomes a dull exercise.  We have no emotional or outward experience of the comfort of God.  That is the dark night of the soul.  Can you continue to love God when you have absolutely no inward or outward evidence that God loves you?  Can you continue to love and serve God though it seems, as Job put it, that God has thrown you in the mud?

As the book of Job begins, Satan tells God that the only reason that Job serves God is that God has blessed him.  Satan challenges God to take away everything from Job, and he will find that Job just serves him because of what he can get out of him.   There is always the danger for the Christian that he will love the blessing more than the one who gives the blessing; that he will love the creature comforts more than the creator.    When Job loses all his blessings and loses the respect of the people around him, he is convinced that God has deserted him, and even worse,  that God has actually become his enemy.  But in the end, Job sees God for who he really is and worships him, in spite of all that he has lost.  Through all of this, Job has gained a clearer sight of God and has come to a greater faith than he had in times past.    And we are told in Job 42:12, “So the Lord blessed the latter end of Job more than his beginning.”    In the end, Job’s experience will be ours.  No matter how wonderful things may have been in the beginning of the Christian life, it is going to be better in the end.  No matter what the trial, at the end of it, we are going to know God better, we are going to be more mature, and our faith is going to be stronger.  To go back to the former times, before the trial, would be to go back to a time of immaturity, a time before we had come to know God in this richer and more meaningful way.  Should we live to be very old, and at last all our strength and vigor completely taken from us, it will be only a short while before we will be given a body like the glorified body of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Sometimes, we must leave the things that are past, so that we can see what God has planned for us in the future.  We may get so attached to things here, that we lose sight of God and his glory.  There is always something greater than the times past.   Remember how the Apostle Paul said, “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”  Spiritually speaking, the same has to happen to us.  There was a time when we were babes in Christ, and that was a wonderful time, a time to be looked upon with fondness and joy.  But we cannot remain babes.  When we were babes in Christ, we received sweet comforts.  Quite frankly, they were comforts for babies.  We would think it strange if a fifty year old man wanted his mother to cradle him in her arms and make cooing sounds.  The spiritual comforts are different now than when we were babes in Christ–different, but much more meaningful, much richer.    We must grow into mature Christians, for as wonderful as childhood might have been, there is something better—a deeper, more mature faith in Christ.  Even the loss of physical health, beauty, strength, possessions, respect, and prestige can be used of God to mold us into the mature people he wants us to become.   Our motto should not be, “O that I were as in months past,” but rather, “Forgetting those things which are behind , and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.”  We shouldn’t want to turn back the clock, because God has something even better in store for us than the times past.

Amen.

Baptized into the Army

Baptized into the Army

Preached on October 18, 2009
By the Rev. Dr. S. Randall Toms
At St. Paul’s Reformed Episcopal Church, Baton Rouge, Louisiana

And he said to them all, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me.   For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: but whosoever will lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it.  For what is a man advantaged, if he gain the whole world, and lose himself, or be cast away?   For whosoever shall be ashamed of me and of my words, of him shall the Son of man be ashamed, when he shall come in his own glory, and in his Father’s, and of the holy angels. (Luke 9:23-26)

We live in a time when many people do not approve of any kind of militaristic images to be associated with the Christian faith.  Thus, we have some Christian groups who take out from their hymnals songs such as Onward Christian Soldiers, because they don’t like to think of the Christian faith in terms of a warfare.  But militaristic imagery is part of Holy Scripture in both Old and New Testaments.    The Apostle Paul tells us that the Christian life is a struggle against all kinds of spiritual wickedness, and we must wrestle with them, and  put on the whole armor of God.   He told Timothy “Fight the good fight of faith, lay hold on eternal life, whereunto thou art also called, and hast professed a good profession before many witnesses” (I Tim. 6:12).    In his second epistle to Timothy he said, “Thou therefore endure hardness, as a good soldier of Jesus Christ.  No man that warreth entangleth himself with the affairs of this life; that he may please him who hath chosen him to be a soldier” (II Tim. 2:3-4).  When we become Christians, we become soldiers in the army of the Lord.   We enter the battle against the world, the flesh, and the devil.

When does this battle begin?  For this child, the battle begins today.  There is a wonderful part of our baptismal ceremony in which we make the sign of the cross on the forehead of the child.  Sometimes, when we make the sign of the cross on someone or over someone, it is a symbol of pleading for a blessing or asking for some kind of protection.  But when we make the sign of the cross on the child at the time of baptism, the significance is different.  Our baptismal order of service says that we “sign him with the sign of the Cross, in token that hereafter he shall not be ashamed to confess the faith of Christ crucified, and manfully to fight under his banner, against sin, the world, and to devil; and to continue Christ’s faithful soldier and servant unto his life’s end.”  From this moment, the shadow of the cross will loom over this child, and it will be inescapable.    From this day forward, he will always be associated with Jesus Christ, and that means an association with the cross of Christ.

At the center of the Christian faith is the cross, and because of that, there is always a certain amount of shame connected with being a Christian.    First of all, people do not like the idea that Jesus Christ had to come into this world and die on the cross for our sins in order that we might be redeemed.  Oh, the world likes the idea of Jesus being an example of love and kindness to others.  The world likes the idea of Jesus being a great moral teacher, someone who taught us the Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”  The world doesn’t mind that kind of Jesus, and there would be no shame attached to following Christ, teacher of the Golden Rule.  But we do not dedicate this child to Christ, teacher of the golden rule.  We dedicate him to Christ crucified.  Today, this child becomes, not the follower of Christ the great moral teacher, but Christ the crucified Savior.   People will ask him throughout his life, “You don’t really believe that Christ had to die in our place do you?  I mean, people aren’t that bad, aren’t that hopeless.  As long as we live a pretty good life,  that will be sufficient to get us into heaven.”  So, throughout his life, he will always have to defend the doctrine that the only way we could be saved is for Christ to have died in our place.  And there will always be a certain amount of shame connected with believing such a truth.   But what we will tell this child as soon as he is able to understand, “You were signed with sign of the cross so that you would never be ashamed to confess the faith of Christ crucified.”  We want this child to always have the courage of the Apostle Paul and say, “For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek” (Romans 1:16).    We want him to be able to say with the Apostle Paul, “But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world” (Gal. 6:14).  Far from being ashamed of the cross of Christ, we want him to go through his life saying, “The thing that I glory in the most, the thing I boast about the most, is that I follow a Savior who was crucified for me.”

In our culture, as we drift further and further away from the Christian faith, those who believe that it was absolutely necessary for Christ to be crucified for us will be ridiculed more and more.  But this has always been the case.  St. Paul said in I Cor. 1:23-24:  “But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness;  But unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God.”  Christ crucified has never been a popular doctrine.  The Jews hated the idea of a crucified Messiah.  The Jews didn’t believe that the Messiah was going to be crucified.  He was going to be a political leader who would deliver the Jews.  The Greeks believed we could be delivered from our evil actions and come to know God through reason.  The idea that it was necessary for a man to die on a cross in our place was absolute foolishness to these Greek intellectuals.  It is no different today.  So, we want this child to go through his life saying, “No matter how much this world hates this truth that it was necessary for Christ to die on the cross, I am always going to say that Christ crucified is both the wisdom and the power of God.”  The cross is the only way mankind could have been redeemed, and it is this great power that draws men to God.

Nevertheless, it will always be a great temptation to be ashamed of Christ and his cross.  For those who would follow Christ must not only believe in a Christ who was crucified on a cross, but, as our text for today brings out, they must also take up the cross themselves and follow him.  When we become followers of Jesus Christ, we take his cross upon ourselves.  Today as we make the sign of the cross upon this child, he takes up the cross today and begins to follow his Savior.  That not only indicates that he will be called upon to suffer for the cause of Christ, but again, it means that he will endure the shame connected with living the Christian life:  the shame of believing things that most people don’t believe; the shame of living a life in obedience to the commandments of God when most people are determined to disobey God.

In our day, we cannot imagine the horror that people must have felt when Jesus said, “If you are going to follow me, you are going to have to take up your cross.”  The cross was not only a painful form of death–it was a shameful form of death.   It was reserved for common criminals.  It was considered such an ignoble form of death, that under Roman law, no Roman citizen could be crucified.  Whenever we think of the shameful way in which our Lord was treated–stripped naked, mocked, ridiculed for the whole world to see–no wonder many people would draw back and say, “There is too much shame connected with being a Christian.”

But today, we sign this child with the sign of the cross, so that from this day forward, he will never be ashamed to confess the faith of Christ crucified, so that he might manfully fight under his banner.  Christianity has always needed people who lead the heroic life.  In the days and years to come, as our culture turns more and more away from Christ, we will need a generation of heroes as never before.  But what kind of heroes will we need?  There are many kinds of heroes, such as those who fight on the battlefield as soldiers for their country.  But every Christian, whether or not he ever is enlisted in the armed forces, must be a soldier for the cause of Christ.  And this kind of soldier is different from all others.  The soldier of Christ is a soldier of purity.  The manful fight that is described in our baptismal service is the fight against sin, the world, and the devil, the most difficult battle of all.  You may remember that in the legends of King Arthur and the knights of the round table, the knight must not only be a skilled warrior, but also morally pure.  Lancelot, started out with that purity of heart, but he succumbed to the lusts of the flesh in his relationship with Guinevere.  Galahad, on the other hand, retained his purity of heart and went on in his search for the Holy Grail.  In Tennyson’s poem “Sir Galahad,” Galahad says,

My knees are bow’d in crypt and shrine,
I never felt the kiss of love,
Nor maiden’s hand in mine.
More bounteous aspects on me beam,
Me mightier transports move and thrill,
So keep I fair thro’ faith and prayer
A virgin heart in work and will.

This is the kind of purity that is demanded of the soldier of Christ—a heart that is kept pure by a single-minded devotion to Christ.  In a few moments we will present this child with a pure white cloth and admonish him to bring it with him unspotted to the judgment seat of Christ.  If he is able to do, what greater act of heroism could there be than to live a life of pure devotion in the sight of God.

John Milton, who wrote the great epic, Paradise Lost, thought he might write a great poem on King Arthur and the knights of the round table.  But he discarded that idea in favor of writing what he considered to be a greater epic.  Milton said that too many great poems had been written about soldiers and their exploits in battle.  Instead, he would write about what he called “the better fortitude of patience and heroic martyrdom.”  When we are on the shores of heaven, recounting the great victories and heroic deeds of the past, what will be remembered are the battles that the people of God won when faced with great temptations and overcame them.

The heroic soldier of Jesus Christ is the one who lives  not only a pure life, but one who lives his life motivated by love, the love of Christ for others.  This is what it means to fight manfully under his banner.  His banner over us is love.  The battle we fight is the battle of love, bringing love into a world where everyone else is motivated by anger, hatred, and prejudice.  To love in such a world, strangely, brings the wrath of the world, just as the world unleashed its anger on our Lord.  Did anyone ever show love the way he did, and yet, that love resulted in his being put on a cross.   The most heroic thing the soldier Christ does is to love, love so much that he is willing to sacrifice himself for others.  This is what it means to take up the cross of Christ.  This is what it means to fight manfully under his banner.  He bore the cross out of love for others, and the soldiers enlisted in his army do the same.  The soldier of Christ is the one who loves those that no one else will love.  He is the one who gives his life in sacrifice to others, refusing to living for himself and his own pleasures.  It is this kind of soldier that in the end, will bring peace to the world.  As we sing in our great hymn, “Lead On, O King Eternal:”

Lead on, O King Eternal,
Till sin’s fierce war shall cease,
And holiness shall whisper
The sweet amen of peace;
For not with swords’ loud clashing,
Or roll of stirring drums;
With deeds of love and mercy
The heav’nly kingdom comes.

This is how the Christian conquers the world.  He conquers it in the way his Lord conquered it.  Not in organizing an army and killing all those who disagreed with him.  No, the Christian triumphs through holiness, love, meekness, mercy, and forgiveness.  Though the rest of the world may look upon those characteristics as weakness, it is through these means that we conquer the world.

It is very difficult to continue Christ’s faithful soldier to the end.  It is very challenging to live a sacrificial life of holy obedience.    And that is why we bring this child today to be baptized.    Today he is given new life.  Today, the Holy Spirit is given to him.    We will pray for him, that all sinful affections may die in him and that all things belonging to the Spirit may live and grow in him, and that he would endued with heavenly virtues.    What a wonderful thing that at the beginning of his life, all these things will be implanted within in him and will have the opportunity to grow and flourish in his life!

Of course, one of the most important things that happens to him today is that he becomes a member of Christ’s Church.  He will have Godparents, those who take vows for him and take vows to do certain things for him.   The Church is God’s armory through which they are equipped, through the word, sacraments, prayer, and discipline, to fight the Lord’s battle.   All this is done so that he might continue Christ’s faithful soldier unto his life’s end.

What a privilege we have today of seeing a new soldier enrolled in the army of the Lord.  And as we look upon this baptism today, let us think back upon our own baptisms, and recall that when we were baptized we also became soldiers of Christ.  Have we been ashamed to confess the faith of Christ crucified?  Have we failed to soldiers of purity and love?  If so, let us use this occasion today to renew our baptismal covenant and ask for grace that from this day forward, we would fight manfully under his banner.

Amen.

Bright Star – Movie Review

Diving into Poetry:

A Review of Bright Star

by S. Randall Toms, Ph. D.

Since my Ph.D. is in English literature, and John Keats is my favorite poet, I have been anxiously awaiting the release of Bright Star, a film about the romance between Keats and Fanny Brawne.   Keats, one of the most famous of the Romantic poets, (usually mentioned in the same breath with Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, and Shelley), met Fanny in 1818, but he died of tuberculosis in 1821 at the age of 25.  Though they were informally engaged, they were never married.

Directed by Jane Campion (The Piano, The Portrait of a Lady) Bright Star tells the story of the romance primarily from Fanny’s perspective.  Since Keats’ death, there has been much discussion about the actual nature of the relationship between Keats and Fanny Brawne.  For many years after his death, some painted Fanny as a heartless flirt who had no real affection for Keats and did not appreciate his poetic genius.   Since all of her letters to Keats were destroyed at his own request, we have little information about how she felt about him in her own words.  This scarcity of material describing Fanny’s feelings has led to the belief among some people that the love affair was one-sided on Keats’ part, Fanny not having the same kind of passion for him.  Others have maintained that the fervor revealed in Keats’ letters to her would not have been expressed if he did not think that she had some measure of strong feelings toward him.

In Bright Star, Campion offers her own interpretation of the nature of their romance, relying heavily on Andrew Motion’s 1997 biography of Keats.  In this biography, Andrew Motion presents Fanny as someone who was devoted to Keats, though Keats’ own ambivalence made it difficult for her to express her feelings for him.  After Keats’ death, Fanny cropped her hair and wore mourning for three years, just as if they had really been married, never taking off the ring he had given her (Motion 568).  She did eventually marry, but evidently rarely spoke of her relationship with Keats.  For many years after Keats’ death, most of the admirers of his poetry were unaware of Fanny’s identity. Thirteen years after her death in 1865, her family made public the letters that Keats had written to her.  Many of Keats’ admirers thought it was in bad taste for Fanny to have even kept the letters, much less that her family should allow them to be published.   In 1937, Fanny’s letters to Keats’ sister were published.  In one letter she writes of her continued feelings for Keats:   “They think I have [forgotten him].   But I have not got over it and never shall” (Motion 568).

Though Bright Star portrays her as the girl who has a reputation for flirting and having an obsession with fashion (Beau Brummel was her father’s cousin), Campion presents her as being very much in love with Keats, a girl who, though finding his poetry difficult, hangs on every word of his letters and becomes ill when he does not write to her. Bright Star depicts Fanny as a daring young woman who refused to conform to convention, in love with a dying, penniless poet.

The choice of the title Bright Star may indicate Campion’s opinion that Keats’ own attitude toward love and romance complicated the relationship.   The phrase Bright Star is from the opening line of one of Keats’ sonnets which begins, “Bright Star! Would I were steadfast as thou art—.”   In this poem, Keats expresses a frequent wish of his that his love and devotion could be as permanent as a star.  Yet, the sonnet reveals that the constancy of a star is not an adequate symbol, for though the star is steady, “unblinking,” it is alone, remote, and detached, almost like a religious hermit. Keats wants to be as steadfast as a star, but, at the same time, a living human being that can feel passion:

Pillowed upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel forever its soft swell and fall,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death. (Bright Star, 10-14)

If Campion’s film at times does not seem to present a sizzling romance that modern moviegoers are more used to seeing, it is probably because the actual relationship of Keats and Fanny was complicated by his ambivalence about romantic love.    He was torn between his love for poetry and his love for a woman, having a fear that a torrid romance would distract him from his work as a poet.  Keats’ friends, such as Charles Brown,  splendidly portrayed in this film by Paul Schneider, also feared that Fanny was a threat to Keats’ poetic genius.  Keats, and some of his closest friends like Brown, felt that the poet needed to be transcendent, like the bright star, standing apart from the world.  At the same time, Keats wanted to be involved in the passionate side of life, experiencing that “sweet unrest” that so often accompanies a passionate love affair.  This movie shows how Keats felt the need to withdraw from Fanny in order to write, and how these separations tormented him, often giving rise to suspicions, jealousies, and accusations.  Though Keats tried to keep away from Fanny as much as possible for the sake of his poetry, she did become, as Motion puts it, “the focus of his faith in Beauty…his whole universe in miniature” (470-1).

There was a period when Keats and Fanny lived in the same house, Keats and the Brawne family’s rooms being separated only by a wall.  There is a tender scene in Bright Star where Keats and Fanny, aware of the other’s presence on the other side, place their hands on the wall, reaching out, “touching” one another through the wall.   The wall between Keats and Fanny was composed of various materials:  Keats’ poverty and illness, 19^th moral customs, Fanny’s reticence, and Keats’ own ambivalence.

But Bright Star is more than an attempt to depict the romance between Keats and Fanny Brawne.    It is also an effort to let us experience the poetry of Keats.  Whether or not this portrayal of the love affair is accurate,  Bright Star is a beautifully filmed representation of the romance, every scene a form of poetry itself.  One of the most famous of Keats’ poems, Endymion, begins with the lines:

A  thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing. (1-5)

Campion’s film is a thing of beauty, one that I hope will not pass into nothingness.

Though Abbie Cornish and Ben Whishaw do a wonderful job of portraying Fanny and Keats, I can’t help but believe that the real star of the movie is the poetry.  In an era where moviegoers favor action thrillers and horror, it would seem difficult to make a movie about a poet that would be interesting.  If the theme of a movie is romance, then we expect to see the couple giving way to their passionate desires, not holding back because of internal constraints.   Since the life of a poet like Keats would consist mainly of reading, meditating, and writing, it would be difficult to portray such activities in a dramatic fashion.  But Campion manages to interest us in the work of the poet by staging scenes where the composition of poetry is taking place in beautiful settings where he is seeking inspiration and where the lovers meet.  The way the film portrays nature in the splendor of the various seasons makes one wish that one had the gift of language that Keats  had to describe such beauty.  The interior scenes are also set with meticulous care:  those taking place in front of windows are stunning in their use of light and color.  Several of the scenes in Bright Star are reminiscent of a portrait by his friend and artist, Joseph Severn, of Keats reading beside an open window.  As a matter of fact, several scenes seem to make use of famous paintings of Keats, Ben Whishaw appearing  to deliberately strike some of the poses that we find in familiar portraits of Keats.  There are also scenes of rooms with books piled high on tables as the poet researches, looking for the exact word, phrase, or idea to construct his poems. Campion also chooses to let various characters read or recite various portions of Keats’ poetry, trying to integrate such recitations seamlessly into the film.    Weaving the poetry into beautiful and powerful images of the film allows us to experience Keats’ poetry in a new way.

I have been analyzing poetry for many years.  I have approached poetry in almost the same way I handle Scripture as I prepare a sermon–doing exegesis and trying to interpret the text.  Sometimes, when we handle poetry so long from an academic standpoint, we forget some of the basic elements of poetry, such as how compelling the imagery of poetry can be and the emotional impact that it can have upon a person.    No doubt, some viewers of Bright Star may get caught up in arguments concerning whether Fanny and Keats were really as passionately in love as the film depicts them to be.  Whether the film is historically accurate is beside the point.  The important thing is how the text of the film is interwoven with the poetry of Keats.  The haunting images in Keats’ poetry are juxtaposed with the provocative images of the film.  This mingling of film and poetry has, in effect, created a new text which opens entire new possibilities for examination of the poems, the text of the film and the text of Keats’ poetry providing a kind of intertextuality whereby the meaning of both texts is shaped by the other.  Just as the dramatic reading of a poem in a certain way can enhance or subvert the meaning of the text, film has the ability to do the same.   From now on, when I read La Belle Dame Sans Merci, perhaps I will see Abbie Cornish and  Ben Whishaw reciting it to one another.  When I read Ode to Nightingale, I will hear Ben Whishaw’s voice reading it the way he did as the closing credits rolled on a black screen.

Keats’ poetry, whether I’m reading, Lamia, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, The Eve of St. Agnes, or any of this other poems, always has the ability to move me emotionally.  But I must confess that I was never so stirred by Ode to a Nightingale as I was when hearing it read by Ben Whishaw at the end of this film.  Of course, that doesn’t mean much coming from me, because I am the most sentimental and emotional of moviegoers.   After sitting through a beautiful film for two hours, seeing the presentation of a tragic love affair, and watching  Abbie Cornish’s heart-wrenching performance when Fanny hears of Keats’ death,  we have a new experience of the poem when we hear Ben Whishaw read Keats’ words that he would like to fade away into the forest with the nightingale,

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs;
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow. (21-30).

Experiencing the imagery of the film combined with the imagery of the poem gives us a whole new set of emotions and interpretations.

At one point in the film, Fanny asks Keats to describe for her the craft of poetry.  Keats replies:  “A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore; it’s to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out.  It is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery.”  Far too often, when we read poetry such as that by Keats, we try to “work it out,” or examine it analytically and arrive at an interpretation of its meaning.  So much of the meaning of poetry must remain shrouded in mystery, but it moves us nonetheless.   In an article by Peter Keough, Jane Campion describes an experience she had in college with Keats’ poetry that may sound familiar to many people who take literature classes:  “I had this ridiculous professor who thought there were many different interpretations of a poem. I was fascistic and thought there was only one. That it was a puzzle to be cracked. Later, I learned that the experience of immersing oneself in beauty without the need for final answers was more rewarding.”  A film like Bright Star helps us to experience the sensation of poetry, allowing the poetry, with the help of powerful images, to experience poetry at a level beyond thought, not needing final answers about meaning.

Before viewing the film, I would suggest that you read the poems Bright Star, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, and Ode to a Nightingale. (I have included them at the end of this review).  Don’t leave the theater when the final credits begin to roll.  Sit in the dark and listen as Ben Whishaw reads Ode to a Nightingale.  You may never experience the poem that way again.  Campion is quoted as saying in an article by Maria Garcia, “Poetry is like an object that you can constantly turn around in your mind….It’s a garden you can keep returning to. It allows you to have this really close relationship to people hundreds of years apart.”  Through Bright Star, we can return to the garden of Keats’ poetry and experience it afresh. We can dive into the lake of poetry, not trying to “work it out,” but simply allowing ourselves to be moved by its mystery.

Works Cited

• Garcia, Maria.  “A Sweet Unrest: Jane Campion Recreates Love Affair between Poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne.”  Film Journal International. 21 Aug. 1999.  18 Oct. 2009.  Link here
• Keats, John.  “Bright Star.”  John Keats:  The Complete Poems.  Ed. John Barnard.   New York: Penguin, 1988.
• —.  “Endymion.”  John Keats:  The Complete Poems.  Ed. John Barnard.  New York: Penguin, 1988.
• —.  “Ode to a Nightingale.”  John Keats.  The Complete Poems.  Ed. John Barnard.  New York:  Penguin, 1988.
• Keough, Peter.  “True Romance:  Jane Campion Directs the Best Movie ever Made about John Keats.”  The Boston Phoenix.  23 Sept. 2009.  18 Oct. 2009. Link here
• Motion, Andrew.   Keats.  New York:  Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997.

Bright Star

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art–
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors–
No–yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever–or else swoon to death.

La Belle Dame Sans Merci

Oh what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.

Oh what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel’s granary is full,
And the harvest’s done.

I see a lily on thy brow,
With anguish moist and fever-dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too.

I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful – a faery’s child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.

I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She looked at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan.

I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A faery’s song.

She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild, and manna-dew,
And sure in language strange she said -
‘I love thee true’.

She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she wept and sighed full sore,
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
With kisses four.

And there she lulled me asleep
And there I dreamed – Ah! woe betide! -
The latest dream I ever dreamt
On the cold hill side.

I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried – ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci
Hath thee in thrall!’

I saw their starved lips in the gloam,
With horrid warning gaped wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
On the cold hill’s side.

And this is why I sojourn here
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.

Ode to a Nightingale

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
‘Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness, -
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs,
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast fading violets cover’d up in leaves;
And mid-May’s eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain -
To thy high requiem become a sod.

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now ’tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music: – Do I wake or sleep?