Just thought I’d post some writings from the annals of time. This place needs some more content, so content I shall give it! I wrote this last year, after a less than satisfying movie:
So I just watched Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium, a pretty cut and paste(though eccentric) kid’s movie about a toy store owner who’s owned a magical toy store for hundreds of years.(spoilers ahead, if you really care about this movie) He tries to pass it onto his apprentice, because he is going to die soon. His apprentice resists at first, unable to believe that she can run the store without him. After many useless antics, and time-wasting scenes, Mr. Magorium “lives his life to the fullest”, and prepares to die. The apprentice wants to sell the store, not believing that she can do it. But in the end, She “learns” that all she needs to do is believe in is herself and the magic will happen. It ends with a grand, robust, theme as she restores the store to its former glory, and they all live happily ever after, and I’ve wasted my evening, or so I thought.
Cut! Not whimsical enough!
Me and my dad got into a discussion afterwards. Now, I didn’t think it was horrible, in fact it had a couple monologues that almost touched on profundity, but in the end it resulted in what I like to call “the Disney Crapfest”. Believe in yourself, express yourself, and believe in what YOU can do and everything will come into place and you can do whatever you want. I normally just shrug it off, stick it in the crap file, and move on with my life. But we discussed more about what’s behind it.
On the positive side, it does move past the nihilistic standpoint of “there’s no meaning to life and nothing exists for us to believe in.” It recognizes that we’ve been given life, and we need to live it the fullest. However, with that phrase, there comes a given. And that given is that we’ve been given life. Therefore, there must be a giver. But this world, our society, has rejected the thought of a God who loves us, who cares enough to send a Son to die for us, and the idea that if we believe and put our faith in HIM, not ourselves, we’ll find our real purpose in life.
My dad put it very well when he said we live in a ”Post-Christian society.” If this movie came from a culture that didn’t know about God and what he’d done for us, it would be the valuable step towards Christianity(e.g. you recognize that we need to believe in something. Here is that something.) But in our “Post-Christian Society”, We already know about Christianity, we have rejected Jesus as the one true way to salvation, and are back at square one. We’ve turned our backs on that one answer, and are now left wondering what to believe in. Left with nothing else, we say that we should believe in ourselves, and live our lives to the fullest, and everything will come into place if we just put that faith into ourselves. And maybe in that movie, belief in ourselves brings new meaning and life to our, well, lives. But in the real world, we are dancing around, dazzling ourselves with the idea. But ultimately, we are still just as empty as before. It’s like we’ve been running a race. And we’ve taken all the right steps to the finish line, and once we get there, we run around it, rejecting that it could possibly be the finish line. And so off we run from what we want, and try to find the end to our means, what our goal is, and run a path that will never bring meaning or wholeness.
One of my favorite bands, Mute Math, put it well in one of their songs:
“And we Stare at the Sun
But we never see anything there
Just a glare has become
All that we’ll ever see there.
The sky is always wondering
What are these arguments about
You think we would notice
Our eyes are burning out
We should’ve learned by now.”
We’ve looked past our goal, and are now looking for meaning, when we’ve already passed it. Now all we do is Stare at the sun, burning our eyes out in hopes of something to hope for. But we never see anything there. And without coming to a full understanding of the selfless love of Christ, we never will.
And so after this “uplifting, whimsical” movie, we’re actually left with one of the saddest worldviews. Eat, drink, and be merry(and believe in yourself), for tomorrow we die.
