TRAGEDIES FOR EVERYONE!

Where to start? Where to start?

How's about at the beginning?

Okay, so we started today with Georgia Lee by Tom Waits. A song that very obviously poses the question "Where is God when we need him the most?" with the answer never coming. The gruff vocals gave a sense of authenticity to the lyrics of a hard-working man trying to take care of his wife and the daughter they took in off the streets. It is a most haunting song which set the stage for today's session of the Gospel as tragedy.

Next we heard a poem, The Prayer of the Little Pig by Carmen Bernos de Gasztold. The final line "Lord, teach me to say Amen" is what disturbs this funny little poem and makes it all too real for me. Amen means "so be it". So the little pig is saying that he doesn't want to be sliced up into bacon although he knows his kind are sought after for their tender meat, but he says "so be it". Your will be done God. This pig has more faith in God concerning his life than many Christians, and truthfully more than me. So where is God when we need him? Perhaps He is right there with us, or perhaps he is not. Perhaps all that matters is that we continue to trust Him when He is silent in the confident hope that all will be well.

...

But if you thought that was enough to digest, sit back down again because there is more.

The next course of what was a feast of crow for me at least was a short film called Small Hands by Keaton Henson. I thought, son of Jim Henson, Jim did the Muppets. This is undoubtedly a lighter film. ... I have never been so wrong.

What followed the hopeful introduction was a delightful little diddy about something or other. (I didn't pay attention to the song.) The video that went along with it showed a series of forest creatures and their friend/partner/spouse doesn't matter. Then evil intervenes on this happy setting. A snake eats one of the frogs, a fox gets one of the hares, and a hunter bags an owl. The survivors are shown just barely surviving as the weather turns cold. Until soon they are gone. Dead, migrated we don't know and don't care. Bottom line is: evil won here.

The last two films were the longest but I shall attempt to be brief as this is turning into a lengthy post. Fridge is about a couple of drunks trying to help a boy named Jonah who has been locked in an abandoned refrigerator by some bullies. Even though the scene is surrounded by scores of people, no one cares to help or even to phone a rescue squad. In the end, Jonah is saved and taken home by one of the bullies. (The ending was kind of unclear. Was the guy his dad, his brother? I don't know.) This leaves the drunks to another night on their stoop, far worse for wear after this little adventure, and cursing at all those who watched the goings-on and turned a blind eye. Evil is prevalent, but it failed to do its job completely here. This led up into the final film, World of Glory. A Swedish assembly force a large number of naked wretches into a truck and then murder them with the engine's toxic fumes. That set my blood boiling and nearly had me cursing like the cast of the Fridge. But a story comes out of this tragedy, this injustice, this...

Okay, I'm back. This movie violently disturbed me. Not only did it show a man who had done horrible things slowly become unglued by the weight of his guilt which not even his faith could lift. No, this film shone through in the last line where the narrator's wife tells him to sleep or "it will be too hard tomorrow". "IT" will be to hard tomorrow. Life. The Guilt. Who knows. The truth is that the nightmares that keep us awake, regardless of what spawned them, scare us because they feel like a godless place where we have no control and where not even the Almighty can reach.

This capped off my morning and has been on my mind all day. In short, the theme for this class session has me walking into trees. Happy Mr Leeper?