The Book of Eli

 Scenes from The Book of Eli

How Can You Mend a Broken Heart - Al Green's version (1972)

I can think of younger days when living for my life
Was everything a man could want to do
I could never see tomorrow, but I was never told about the sorrow

And how can you mend a broken heart?
How can you stop the rain from falling down?
How can you stop the sun from shining?
What makes the world go round?
How can you mend a this broken man?
How can a loser ever win?
Please help me mend my broken heart and let me live again

I can still feel the breeze that rustles through the trees
And misty memories of days gone by
We could never see tomorrow, no one said a word about the sorrow

And how can you mend a broken heart?
How can you stop the rain from falling down?
How can you stop the sun from shining?
What makes the world go round?
How can you mend this broken man?
How can a loser ever win?
Please help me mend my broken heart and let me live again

We had no idea what was precious

Solara: "Do you remember what it was like? I mean, in the world before?

Eli: "People had more than they needed. We had no idea what was precious and what wasn't. We threw away things people kill each other for now."

Walk by faith

It's a flower of light in a field of darkness, and it's given me the strength to carry on.

Solara: "Didn't think anything could make you give up that book."

Eli: "You know, for years I've been carrying and reading it every day. I got so caught up with keeping it safe I forgot to live by what I learned from it."

Solara: "Yeah? What's that?"

Eli: "Just to...Do for others more than you do for yourself. It's what I got from it anyway."

From Magnificat - Aug 7, 2022

Putting our faith in God can seem like walking blindly into the dark simply because God has asked us to—with no assurance that we have heard correctly or that God is there to catch us if we fall. 

Yet that is what Eli did. Let us pray for the gift of that same unshakable faith.

Ending prayer

Dear Lord, thank you for giving the strength and conviction to complete the task you entrusted to me.

Thanks you for guiding me straight and true through the many obstacles in my path.

And for keeping me resolute when all around me seemed lost. Thank you for your protection and many signs along the way. Thank you for any good I may have done. I am so sorry about the bad. Thank you for the friend I made. Please watch over her as you watched over me. Thank you for finally allowing me to rest. I am so very tired but I go now to my rest and peace. Knowing that I have done right with my time on this earth. I fought the good fight, I finished the race, I kept the faith (2 Timothy 4:7-8)

God provides opportunities...

"Let me ask you something. If someone prays for patience, you think God gives them patience? Or does he give them the opportunity to be patient? If he prayed for courage, does God give him courage, or does he give him opportunities to be courageous? If someone prayed for the family to be closer, do you think God zaps them with warm fuzzy feelings, or does he give them opportunities to love each other?" - "God"

Clip of new bells for Notre Dame March 2013 stirs memory of bell-maker's son Boriska in the movie Andrei Rublev

New bells for Notre-Dame Cathedral

(To view video click on the line above that starts with "New bells for ...")

The bells of Notre-Dame will soon have a new ring. The cathedral has commissioned nine new bells to replace four 19th-century bells that have gone out of tune. The two largest new bells are being made at a foundry in northwestern France.

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Seeing this news clip reminded me of something my mentor and friend Gil Bailie wrote about, a great Russian movie tribute to the iconographer, Andrei Rublev. In the final chapter of the movie, titled "The Bell," Andrei has find himself at a turning point in his life when he arrives at a village where preparations are under way to replace the bell in the village church tower. The old bell-maker has died, and his unproven son, Boriska, has inherited the task of casting a new bell. “My father, the old snake,” Boriska complains, “didn’t pass on the secret. He died without telling me; he took it to the grave.” 

Rublev is hearing this lament from a young boy whose father had neglected his task – that of passing on the faith through his calling as the bell-maker for the church.  

In Rublev’s fifteenth century, the casting of a new church bell was an elaborate procedure with enormous challenges and considerable social anxiety. Rublev had abandoned icon writing and taken a vow of silence. He nevertheless saw his own vocational crisis mirrored in the young bell-makers’ dilemma. Rublev watched silently as the drama of the bell casting unfolded. Under the pressure of social expectations and uncertainties, the young Boriska supervised the digging of the pit, the selection of the clay, the shaping of the mold, the firing of the furnaces, the pouring of the molten bronze, and finally the hoisting of the bell into the tower. When the new bell rang perfectly at the consecration ceremony, Boriska collapsed in tears. Rublev cradled the boy in his arms and breaking his vow of silence, he said: “Let’s go together. You’ll cast bells. I’ll paint icons.”

ICON – The Holy Trinity

 When I meditate upon this icon – entering into the mystery represented in it, I often pause and reflect on Boriska’s complaint: “He died without telling me; he took it to the grave.” 

Gil wrote in one place: "This lament should haunt those of us who, though no merit of our own, have been the beneficiaries of Christian truth, a gift we received from the imperfect but nonetheless earnest hands of our predecessors in the faith. Were we to fail to pass on this faith to those who come after us, or if we pass on a lifeless replica of a once living faith, we will be as culpable as the old bell‐maker."

The film makes it perfectly clear that Christianity is not merely, and not primarily, a set of beliefs: it is a way of life, a participation in an ongoing historical drama of re-creation.  

"As the ancient hymn Veni Creator Spiritus says: “kindle the senses with light, infuse love into hearts.” If Pascal was right to say that faith moves, not from the mind to the heart, but from the heart to the mind, we might add that it enters the heart through the senses. 'You cast bells,' said Tarkovsky’s Rublev, 'and I’ll paint icons,' for these things play an important role in preparing us for an encounter with the Truth and thereafter in reminding us of our place in the drama of its historical outworking."

Christ calls us beyond ourselves and in truth calls us into himself

Fr. James M. Sullivan, O.P. in Magnificat, "One Feast Day Lost, One Feast Day Found." February 22 is usually the Feast of the Chair of Saint Peter which we would be remembering if today was not Ash Wednesday. The Feast of the Chair of Saint Peter "recalls not only the relic of that chair, but more importantly we celebrate the 'Holy Spirit-giving' authority which makes that chair unlike any other" (Magnificat, 309). The authority comes from Christ himself and as Father Sullivan goes on to say, "It is this authority alone that can call us to be freed from our sins, to imagine that this Lent can be different. It is this authority of Christ that gives us hope to live a new life in him, to fine for the first time perhaps our place in this world. It is this authority of Christ to take up a difficult penance knowing that we don't have the strength to do it all ourselves. It is this authority of Christ that calls us beyond ourselves and in truth calls us into himself" (309).

This clip from the movie, "Courageous" gives us a glimpse into living lives in this authority of Christ.

A Dragon's Tale

I was recollecting this story by Marjorie Thompson today and I discovered that the movie of CS Lewis' book, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader will be coming out next month.  Awesome.  Before you get swept away by the movie check out this little piece called, A Dragon's Tale.  And below I have a link to a great Radio Theatre Drama of this very segment of the book.

A Dragon’s Tale*

by Marjorie Thompson

There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. His parents called him Eustace Clarence, and his schoolmasters called him Scrubb. I can’t tell you how his friends spoke to him, for he had none… Eustace Clarence liked animals, especially beetles, if they were dead and pinned on a card…. Deep down he liked bossing and bullying; and though he was a puny little person who couldn’t have stood… in a fight, he knew that there are dozens of ways to give people a bad time…
So begins The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the third Narnian Chronicle by C. S. Lewis. What follows is a story from that world – a story of lions and dragons, a story of transformation.

To begin with, Eustace Scrubb had no imagination and no patience with his cousins who did. He taunted and pestered them because they childishly believed in a land called Narnia, ruled by a lion named Aslan, whom no one in the world but the four of them had ever seen. Scrubb prided himself on being unsentimental, scientific, and cultured; others might have described him as rude, boring, and haughty. Having been raised on Plumptree’s Vitaminized Nerve Food, Scrubb’s tastes were, in fact, deplorably narrow. It took little to turn his delicate stomach and sheltered eyes. To be quite bald, Eustace was the world’s original “wimp.”

Imagine, then, the poor lad’s dismay when the “fictitious” land of Narnia suddenly became a living reality, and Scrubb found himself affected by the very Magic he had ridiculed with such disdain! I am sorry to report that when this took place, the boy’s already ungracious character became absolutely unbearable. He made out his cousins, and everyone else in Narnia, to be ogres; he refused to take responsibility for anything in the course of their adventures; he insisted on viewing himself as the only sane individual; and he expected exceptions to be made on his account alone – assuming that he always got the short end of the stick, no matter how civil, even generous, the others were to him. So there you have Eustace Clarence Scrubb, for better or worse – and mostly, I’m afraid, for worse.

As the story progresses, the adventurers’ ship survives a devastating storm and finds harbor on an unknown island. Eustace, unaccustomed to work, creeps off to take his ease while the others set to repairs. He manages to get thoroughly lost and ends up in the valley of a dragon! Now the dragon itself is scarcely a cause for alarm; Eustace comes upon the elderly creature just in time to watch it expire. Then the real adventure begins. A blinding rain drives Scrubb into the dragon’s cave; and there, as his eyes grow accustomed to the dark, Eustace realizes that the sharp objects he is sitting on are not rocks. They are crowns and rings and heavy necklaces – all gold and precious jewels!

Of course, you and I would know right away that a dragon’s cave is filled with treasure; but Eustace had never read the sort of books that tell you these things. Gazing at the sheer magnitude of riches, his eyes grew large and his hands grew itchy and his heart filled with desire. “They don’t have any taxes here,” he astutely observed. But he had no sooner slipped a heavy gold bracelet over his arm when fatigue overtook him. He fell asleep on the treasure heap, and when he awoke, he discovered to his utter horror that he himself had turned into a dragon! Lewis writes, “Sleeping on a dragon’s hoard, with greedy, dragonish thought in his heart, he had become a dragon himself.”

Time out. Is sin a word you have trouble identifying with? I suppose most of us don’t really like to call ourselves “miserable sinners,” or sing and mean “a wretch like me.” I once knew a woman who told me, “I hate the prayer of confession in our worship service; I can never identify with all those awful things we say about ourselves. I’m not like that; I live a good life.”

Perhaps many of us feel this way. One thing seems clear to me: that sin results in a certain blindness to the truth of our condition – the condition of being alienated from God, from one another, and from our deeper self. Sin is not simply a matter of the wroungheadedness of particular thoughts or deeds. Sin is a deeper orientation of life from which all of us suffer. If we have trouble recognizing our basic brokenness, might it be that this difficulty itself is a sign of our disease?

Eustace saw himself as an intelligent and superior sort of person; others could see his tragic flaws more clearly. In effect, Eustace’s character was beastly all along, but he couldn’t recognize it until it got so inflated that it took visible form. Then he could see his beastliness reflected back to him.

What prevents us from seeing our tragic flaws? Certainly we want to be perceived as good, as right, as intelligent, as attractive. We often feel as if we should be all these things at all times; so, whether we think we are or not, we expend a great deal of energy trying to prove to others and to ourselves that we are. These very human patterns have other names: pride, envy, anxiety, defensiveness, rationalization, and self-justification, to name just a few. Each has a way of blinding us to our real predicament. We all indulge in such protective illusions at one time or other, individually and as communities – even nations. Fortunately, there are mirrors around. Sometimes we catch our reflection and, for a moment, see ourselves as others see us.

When Eustace realizes that he has actually become a monster cut off from the human race, he begins to look back on his life with different eyes: “An appalling loneliness came over him. He began to see that the others had not really been fiends at all. He began to wonder if he himself had ever been such a nice person as he had always supposed. He longed for their voices.”

When we recognize our inner distortions and see how they have cut us off from real relationships, we too discover a deep longing for human community. We often want to refashion our behavior to fit our changed perception and attitude. But at this point, most of us will find that the desire to change and the capacity to change are not evenly matched.

Paul speaks with hard-hitting honesty in Romans 7: “though the will to do good is there, the deed is not. The good which I want to do, I fail to do; but what I do is the wrong which is against my will… it is no longer I who am agent, but sin that has its lodging in me…”

I know what the old apostle is talking about. One of my weaknesses is procrastination. Suppose I have a major task ahead, and I promise myself I will start working on it early, both for quality and sanity’s sake. As the time approaches, I invariably find myself placing far less urgent tasks before the critical one – checking the mail, watering the plants, clearing off the desk. Any little excuse will suffice. I am aware of indulging my avoidance but can hardly resist the urge to put off the real work until pressure reaches a critical peak of discomfort.

Your “Achilles’ heel” may be different: perhaps overindulgence in food or TV; perhaps a habit of being sarcastic or critical despite a hundred self-administered lectures on biting your tongue. Each of us has at least a few areas where “willpower” just doesn’t carry enough voltage, no matter how we try to convince our actions to fall in line.

“Miserable creature that I am, who will rescue me from this body doomed to death?” Paul’s anguished cry is born of just such human experience. But Paul has an answer for his own existential question. It is the same answer discovered by our young friend, Eustace – turned – dragon, who now wants nothing so desperately as to become himself again. Not only is he odious to himself; he is a burden to his Narnian friends who must take him with them on their continued voyage – and however will he fit into the ship?

At this critical point – when the desire to change is real, but the capacity is not – Eustace meets Aslan, the great lion, “Son of the Emperor over Sea,” who saved Narnia back in the days of the White Witch. Eustace does not know who Aslan is, but senses his authority, fears him dreadfully, and obeys without hesitation when the lion bids him follow.

Aslan leads Eustace a long way to a mountaintop garden, in whose center lies a wide well of pure, clear water. Eustace longs to bathe in it, but the lion first commands him to undress. Our dragon friend succeeds in tearing off his outer skin and scales, rather like a banana peel. But when he approaches the water, his reflection still reveals a dragon skin. Twice more he scratches off his rough and wrinkled suit, and twice again finds himself yet encased in the vestment of a beast.

Then Aslan speaks: “You will have to let me undress you.” Eustace later recalled the experience in these words:

          The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right to my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt. The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff come off.
          … Well, he peeled it right off – just as I thought I’d done it myself the other three times, only they hadn’t hurt – and there it was, lying on the grass, only ever so much thicker, and darker, and more knobby looking than the others had been. And there I was as smooth and soft as a peeled switch. Then he caught hold of me – I was very tender underneath now that I’d no skin on – and he threw me into the water. It smarted like anything, but only for a moment. After that it became perfectly delicious and … I found that all the pain had gone. And then I saw why. I’d been turned into a boy again… After a bit, the lion took me out and dressed me.

Eustace Clarence Scrubb will tell you from experience that you cannot achieve your own inner transformation. We can neither take off the old skin of sin, nor re-dress ourselves in righteousness. That is why, in the words of one of our familiar hymns, we ask God to “re-clothe us in our rightful mind.” Our desire to change is a necessary preparation for the painful but wonderful process of being changed by God’s grace. When Christ strips us of our dragonish self, he goes much deeper than we do – right to the heart. Real change means giving up much of what we assume is natural to us. That’s why we cannot do it ourselves; we simply do not see how radical the surgery needs to be, and even if we did, we would be powerless to perform it. Yet the pain of this radical transformation quickly becomes joy as we see and feel genuine health emerging underneath.

Eustace found that he was a boy again, although a boy with a much improved character. His old self was fast withering away; a new person, his true self, was now free to emerge. But if his encounter with Aslan marked a fundamental change of heart, it did not yet mean that Eustace was perfect. The end of his story is an apt reminder to each of us of the ongoing character of transformation:

It would be nice, and fairly nearly true, to say that “from that time on Eustace was a different boy.” To be strictly accurate, he began to be a different boy. He had relapses. There were still many days when he could be quite tiresome. But … the cure had begun.

It takes time for our new self in Christ to be fully realized. But if you have ever tried to change yourself and been disappointed; and if you have then given yourself over to the One whose love alone can transform us; and if you have seen even some part of your life turned around through the mystery of this encounter, then you, too, can be sure that the cure has begun. Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory!

Prayer: Lord, thank you for loving us even when we are beastly; for your patience when we are tiresome and blind; for your stern yet tender love which longs to heal us from this painful disease called sin. Help us to see our need; to desire your touch; and to receive your transforming love, offered to us through Christ our Lord. We pray in his name. Amen.

* Article appeared in the March/April 1991 Weavings publication

Here is short clip that captures Eustace and this dragon-self from The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

Eustace |To The Stars| Dragon Heart