This book is pretty interesting.  Especially the way they explain the history behind so many of our western holidays and how pagan and Christian were blended together to form the culture that we live in today.

This afternoon I watched one of Zhang Yimou's older movies, The Road Home, which curiously is not at all the same meaning as the Chinese title for the same movie. 

Spoiler Alert!  Not that any of you are gonna watch this movie anyway, but if you are, skip this paragraph.  Anyway, the story is about a son who comes back to the village that he grew up in because his dad dies.  His dad, who was the village's schoolteacher for 40 years had been out of the village at the time of his passing.  His mom wants to do some big labor intensive march to bring the dad's body back to the village.  The village elders want to help but they don't have the manpower to fulfill the mom's request.  The son recalls the story of how his dad and mom met and fell in love.  This falling in love story constitutes most of the story. In remembering this story, the son decides to pay for laborers to hand carry the body of his father back.  As the laborers carry the dad's body back, ex-students stream in from the city and the neighboring towns to volunteer to help bring back the body out of respect for the father, with the laborers ultimately also refusing to be paid for their work. 

So yeah, the plot doesn't seem like a lot of fun when I put it like that.  I mostly just watched the movie because Ironman is next in my blockbuster queue and I needed to watch the movie to be able to return it.  In fact, I've been feeling slightly under the weather, so I started watching the movie lying down under the blankets, fully expecting to fall asleep during the movie.  As it turns out, the movie is a celebration of love at first sight, not unlike Disney's The Little Mermaid.  It made me think though. 

I've always been able to write off Disney movies as overly indulgent in irrealistic portrayals of love at first site.  I'm really not a hopeless romantic type.  I don't consider myself an idealist... probably more of a meliorist.  The two dimensional Disney characters are all too easy to write off as being over simplifications of real life.  In contrast, Zhang's characters are believable.  The father (as a young man) is an book smart educated guy, but obviously still green behind the ears and inexperienced with life in general.  The mother (as a young woman) is an illiterate country girl.  The movie doesn't really elaborate on their life after the initial romance, but suffice it to say, they were married for 40 years before he died, and she still wanted to honor him, so I assume they still loved each other.  I would probably never make it my motto or anything, but in general I'd say that I don't really believe in love at first sight.  I say this because I wonder how you can love someone you don't really know, and how can you know someone you just met?  This movie sort of makes me wonder though. 

Zhang Yimou's movies always seem to skip to a different beat than the American stuff.  He takes (mostly) a lot of unglamorous looking people and tells stories about life, celebrating small successes which we might take for granted.  I always start off thinking I'd rather be watching Speed Racer or Ironman, but end up glad that I threw some of his stuff in my blockbuster queue.

My rating - 9/10

More from Philip Yancey's "Prayer":

My travels have taken me to places like Myanmar and China, where governments are more likely to summon Christian leaders to prison than to the seat of power.  I have heard appalling stories of persecution, of twenty years in a frigid cell without a blanket, of beatings and torture and intimidation... "What can Christians in the rest of the world do for you?" I ask, and every time without exception I get the same answer. "You can pray.  Please tell the church to pray for us." 

The first few times I heard that answer, I wanted to say, "Yes of  course, but we honestly do want to help.  What else can we do?"  I have since learned that Christians who have no access to earthly power truly believe prayer gives them access to a greater power... They believe Paul's words: "For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms."


I think that Paul's words are hard to believe.  Yancey elsewhere attributes a quote to Vladimir Lenin, "Electricity will replace God."  In our scientific modern world, we are taught to think in a certain analytical way.  We believe in reproducibility, cause and effect, statistics.  If we see a problem we deconstruct it to find the problem and then look for the appropriate action to remedy it.  We have more power to control our world than Paul did when he wrote the above quote.  Paul seems to say that we should be concentrating on Satan and not on Osama Bin Laden.  I guess if the real enemy is flesh and blood, we can analyze and deconstruct and devise a plan to destroy the enemy.  However, if the real enemy is spiritual we are forced to realize our powerlessness and to pray for help.  Even though those words seem to make sense, they are still hard to believe, because that's just not the way we think in modern America.