Glory

I love movies! I always have, and I probably always will. One of my goals this year is to watch all 9 of the movies nominated for best picture from the 2012 Oscars. So far I have watched 5 out of the 9.

 Listed in order from favorite to least favorite, they are: (1) The Help, (2) Hugo, (3) Moneyball, (4) The Descendants, and (5) The Tree of Life.

 The Tree of Life is one of those movies I loved and hated at the same time. Its hard to explain, but sometime movies just do that to me. At first I hated it for mainly two reasons: (1) certain elements of it reminded me of painful aspects of my own life, and (2) I didn't full understand what the movie was about.

 Yet, the more I thought about that movie and read other people's take on it the more I like it. One quote in particular has stuck with me:

  Mr. O'Brien: I wanted to be loved because I was great; A big man. I'm nothing. Look at the glory around us; trees, birds. I lived in shame. I dishonored it all, and didn't notice the glory. I'm a foolish man. 

I wonder how often we neglect the glory around us. For me, I've been convicted recently about not seeing the glory in other people.

 C.S. Lewis wrote in "The Weight of Glory,": "It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no 'ordinary' people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilisations -- these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whome we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit -- immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously -- no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner -- no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment."

 May we never forget that we are all created in the image of God (Gen. 1:27).