Stonewall, Hindenburg, Bats

150 years ago today, Confederate General Barnard Bee, seeing reinforcements arrive on a hill north of Manassas, Va., exclaimed:

There is a Jackson, standing like a stone wall!

…We seek God. We strive for the only truly worthy goal.

Every visible thing we see will lift us up to Him, if we let it. Creation as a whole serves as the ultimate parable. God made it all for one reason: to lead us to Him.

But we look and do not see. We hear, but we do not understand. The Lord whispers His declaration of love to us at every instant, but we have iPod buds in our ears, crackling with noise. The Lord smiles on us with delight at every instant, but we have our cool sunglasses on, so we cannot see Him.

The sun shines more brightly than the moon and the stars. But when it rises in the morning, bats go blind. We are spiritual bats: We live in a spiritual night, able to see what we need to survive—and even come up with some pretty good ideas sometimes. But we cannot see the Sun of Truth. The simple, infinite truth shines all the time, moving all things, attracting all things. But we cannot see it.

National Air and Space Museum!

Yet. The Lord said to His disciples, “Blessed are your eyes, because they see, and your ears, because they hear.”

What do we have in common with the disciples to whom the Lord Jesus first spoke these words?

With the first disciples, we believe this: The One Who spoke the parables also spoke the great parable of creation. Every thing comes from, and leads towards, the crucified teacher. It is Christ that we seek, and—blind and deaf as we are—He has come and found us.

…Earlier this year, they made a tv-movie in Germany about the Hindenburg blimp disaster of 1937. I can’t see why, because the 1975 George C. Scott “Hindenburg” is the best movie ever made. The critics panned it, but they were disastrously wrong.

George C. Scott makes George Clooney look like Pee Wee Herman. “The Hindenburg” has Charles Durning at his petulant best, romance of the most subtle kind, a genuinely evocative insight into the German soul in 1937, and a worthy ending. I think it is the first movie I ever saw. I was spoiled for life. Check it out at your local library.

Another thing…

…to keep in mind is:

In order to win the ACC tournament, the Virginia Tech Hokies will have to beat:

1. Georgia Tech on Thursday, which is eminently doable.

2. Florida State on Friday. (Tough.)

3. Duke on Saturday. (Been done!)

4. UNC on Sunday.

If Tech makes it to the final, I will root with the Blacksburghers. Otherwise, go Tar Heels!

…May I make one other observation?

If you are like me, you have watched “The Lord of the Rings” movie trilogy more times than you care to remember. The movies are now a decade old.*

When the movies were first released, I was livid because they departed so shamelessly from the books. But I soon persuaded myself to go easy. After all, film is a different genre, and some concessions must be made.

Does it make sense for Aragorn to be felled in a skirmish with Uruk scouts, only to be revived by a kissy-kissy from Liv Tyler? No, it makes no sense. But this is a movie.

Does Viggo Mortensen ‘own’ the role of Aragorn, as Peter Jackson put it? Um…Does Pierce Brosnan ‘own’ James Bond? Does Vivien Leigh ‘own’ Anna Karenina? Does Jim Caviezel ‘own’ our Lord Jesus Christ? NOT. No. Not at all. Good yeoman efforts, yes. But ‘own?’ Please. (By the by, in my opinion, George C. Scott does in fact own Rochester, so you can forget about this new Jane Eyre movie.)

However: I can live with Viggo Mortensen.

Should poor John Rhys-Davies, an accomplished Shakespearean, and poor Gimli son of Gloin, who could kick any of our butts before you can say the word ‘midget’–should the Dwarf warrior be reduced to silly comic relief? No. But…We will let it go.

So I have had a decade of peaceful coexistence with these movies. But two particular things still rankle. They both concern the final film, and they have helped me to realize exactly what these movies are.

1. How is it possible that the script-writers thought it was plausible for Elrond to demand that Aragorn “forget the Ranger,” and become the man he was meant to be? Makes NO sense. The Rangers are the Dunedain, the remnants of the most excellent men, the Numenoreans. Even if we leave that aside, Aragorn’s majesty derives precisely from his humble, hardscrabble Ranger resourcefulness. If he were no Ranger, he would be no king.

2. In the greatest betrayal of all time, how could Peter Jackson possibly have thought that it was alright to remove the most important part of the whole plot? The climax of the book is NOT the destruction of the Ring or victory over Sauron’s armies. The climax of the book is when the Hobbits return to the Shire and clear Saruman’s petty dictators out of it.

Oh–you didn’t know that Saruman went north into the Shire after Isengard was reduced to ruins by the Ents? You didn’t know that the evil wizard engineered a sinister take-over of the the Hobbits’ homeland by wastrels he found wandering the roads around Bree? You didn’t know that Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin had to show the punks who was boss when the heroes returned home from Gondor?

Well, that’s because you wouldn’t know it, based on the dagblame movie. Since the movie pretends that such things never even happened!

So, what are Peter Jackson’s movies? They are an extremely good comic-book version of the “The Lord of the Rings.” It is hard to imagine a better comic-book version.

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*This is the beginning of a LONG series of ‘Reflections on the Oughts Decade.’