[ad hoc] Christianity

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After a long break, Travis and Matt are back talking about the ways people read the Bible.

Money – The Serpent – a faculty that lives persons’ lives

Consumption – Forbidden Fruit – Old, once common, term for wasting away of the body

Consumer – Adam and Eve – one who is bought

Consumerism – A Theology of the Divinity of Wealth

Environment – The Groans of the Earth

Pollution – Knowledge of Good and Evil

Resources – The Garden in the East

Sustainability – Noah in the Ark

Production – The Tower of Babel

Productivity – The Sweat of the Brow

Growth Forecast – The Deluge

Wealth Creation – The Golden Calf

Conservation – A Fig Leaf

Revenue – Temple Tax

Profit – Egyptian Years of Plenty

Loss – Egyptian Lean Years

The Economy – The Promised Land – just making do

Economics – The Holy Grail – Arts of Simon Magus

Discount – Manna from Heaven – a thing thought preposterous

Savings – The Seven Fat Cows – money not spent in a Fire Sale

Credit – The Thirty Pieces of Silver – on presumption put faith in a thing

Debit – The Kiss of Betrayal – that which is taken away

Owe –- The Strait Gate – a loan now overdue

Debtor – Pharaoh’s Baker – a prisoner nabbed and tagged

Debt – The Mark of Cain – Reciprocation owed for goodwill

Demand – Let My People Go – A bill imperative – due for payment

Supply – The Living Water – provision

Interest – Every Hair Counted – Solicitous concern for welfare

Bank – An Altar in the High Places – to invest confidence

Premium – A Burnt Offering – the best

Share – Lion lying down with the Lamb – all things in common

Stocks – The Desert Wastes – Apparatus for pillorying

Dividend – The Temple Treasure – Mutual society distribution scheme

Investment – The Potter’s Field – A good loaned gladly in hope of increase

Loan – The Early Rain – property temporarily passed for use to another

Lend – A Ransom for Many – to pass property temporarily for use to another

Borrow – Jacob’s Ladder – to enjoy temporarily property for use from another

Earnings – Unto This Last – income the fruit of work done

Income – The Moneychangers – amounts accruing over a duration

Remuneration – The Writing on the Wall – income as a return

Bonus – The Extra Mile – award over and above what is due

Finance – A Graven Image – the means to pay

Financier – Assurbanipal – person with means

Futures – Laying up Treasure in Barns – anticipated materials yet to exist

Competition – He who shall be the Greatest among you – overreaching to overtop

Stockmarket – The Division of the Spoils – Battle of Credit with Competition

Stockbrokers –The Philistines upon Thee – Croupiers

Shareholders – A Divider among you – Whited Sepulchres

Inflation – A Thief in the Night – overmatched avarice

Cut – The Two-edged Sword – a slice of meat or share of loot

53:5 But he[was] wounded for our transgressions, he was] bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace[was] upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.

It looks pretty conclusive that the OT considers penal substitution as a viable means of redemption from sin.

But I don’t want to get into a does/doesn’t argument about penal substitution. I do want to write down some things about how I think I, and people in general, need psychologically, our psyches need, to accept penal substitution, for the relief and restoration there is in the emotional understanding that another has been made to carry our burden for sin.

It goes back to types. In the UK, and in the USA even more clearly, public and political catharsis is carried on generally and obviously, and with common approval, by the use of penal substitution. Sometimes someone will put up their hand and take the blame. More often a person, normally a person more or less in the thick of the current scandal or outrage, will be traduced and hung out to dry in the press and by media, and our sense of having aired the closet is thus satisfied.

Of course this is not Christian, nor is it suffered voluntary, nor even commendable; but for us the catharsis is very much the same, and it is routed through very much the same psychological highways as those that a person as a Christian might use so as to prefer to feel that Jesus bears his iniquities and his pains, suffers the penalty he should suffer, and bears away sin and its pain and blame for his sake and on his behalf.

This sense of penal substitution goes very deep in me myself, and in us all. The civil versions of course lack the gratitude and the admiration and the love and the astonishment that the Christian version that Jesus brought into the world inspires in lots of people. The civil versions are a sort of palming off of personal responsibility and pain and guilt; a pointing of the finger, and a ganging up on the disgraced or the vulnerable, or the person in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Even when the case is grave, and an ugly character like a vicious murderer is the sacrificial victim of the penalty; it is the full burden of others’ bile and spleen and of others’ own ugly brutal sides (that such a murderer is made to bear in public show trials by media and after the fact) that is our noxious reservoir of standing effluent that we happily offload into such a murderer’s lap.

This act is the mirror image, the sinister side of Christ’s penal substitution; whereas Christ’s deed done for us is its inverse, and as such his is the ultimate reality and the beautiful and the ideal and the marvelous.

Much of this inverse ugliness is present, ironically enough, in the Easter story as it is written in the gospels. The almost maniacal anger and rage of the High Priests; their bitter rending of Jesus’ garments; the spit in his face, the mockery and the almost uncontrolled, uncontrollable outburst of hatred and wrath made against him – it strikes a normal person reading about these things that the Pharisees and the Sanhedrin during that night protested too much, over and above anything Jesus could have said or done to deserve such a response. It’s as if indeed that here is that outlet, that opportunity, that release, which the pinched Pharisees have felt previously only a minute inkling of, the mere trace of a sense that they stand in direst need to get their demons out of them, conveniently to burden this man with their almost possessed wrath and ire.

But of course, in any and in all of us such wild uncontrolled rages fuel the fires they start, and the demons who have possession take possession even more so and with greater and securer hold thereafter. This nurtures the mirror image of humility, which like its antithesis is also endless.

So this madness of the Sanhedrin is part of the scorn and anger and despite and vilification that Jesus bore for us; as if, almost, the High Priests were the surrogates for us and did and spoke and hated wiser than they knew and in our names. As if they, the High Priests were the media and the common consensus we share and that we happily acquiesce in when we murder the murderer in our daily publications and on our TVs and in our hearts, as we relieve by living them out our own malignities upon him. This is all in the very same vein of irony as that which Caiaphas mines as he prophesies that ‘one man should die for the people’.

This brings us to the odd conclusion that the vile murderer is in fact a type of Christ, in so far as he bears the wrath and sickness of we who revile him; attacking him with all the intensity over and above that which is due to him as a vile felon. Our rage eats us up. And we would that the vile felon was eaten up likewise.

Anyone who lives with their family knows how anger and blame can and too often does circulate and reverberate and spread like contagion to eventually trouble the whole household, unless, until, someone sometime steps in and does due service, and pours the oil of love into the wounds and binds up the hurt ones.

Our society is likewise a family that has too few relatives willing to step in and do due service. Christ in the UK is not known so well as he could be, should, be; and so the source of all redemption and the balm for all our ills is cut off from the knowledge of too many here. Were he known more widely and understood better we should then route more of our civic troubles and daily strifes through him and so live better, and have more honourable public lives.

Nonetheless it is still the case that Jesus today, in concrete fact, is present in many, many places and presides at numbers of events; he is here in a major way so as to carry away the wrath and dark and madness of our lives and so quell the strifes in our societies – today still he is here and able to carry our sins away and to take our unrighteous wrath and hectic blame upon his righteous self and carry it for our sakes.

We have a hymn titled ‘Take it to the Lord in Prayer’; we have secular songs like ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’; we have the great and amazing Isaiah, who for only coining the phrase should be remembered for all time, regardless of whom he thought he was writing for:

‘With His Stripes We Are Healed’

‘Thou still unravished bride of quietness’, is the opening line of John Keats’ ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn’. The title I have used is another quote taken from Keats, from his poem called ‘Endymion’.

His idea of an unconsummated (unravished) still (‘remaining present’ and also ‘without movement’) virgin object wedded to peace and silence (‘bride of quietness’) is astounding to me because he discovered such insight so young.

Keats was 26 when he died, and it is supposed he was 23 or 24 when he wrote the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’.

My subject is beauty and holiness – If you like, the Beauty of God.

I’m going to begin with art, and our experience of art. Not just painting and drawing, but, depending who you are, and your background and tastes, aesthetic experiences of most kinds.

But for me it’s particularly certain drawings and pictures, certain forms of drawing particularly; and very much so the written word.

I am hoping you can get at what I mean to say yourself by way of you relating it to the types of beauty that ‘do it for you’.

Let’s start with the written word; it’s easiest from me to write about and by lucky coincidence it is the medium in which God has spoken to us in revelation.

I don’t want to put off non-believing readers, so I hope my previous sentence didn’t sound too exclusive or certain for you to handle.

A saying from the Bible that is one of the most quoted, maybe over-exposed a little, but still astounding as a thought, is Jesus’,

‘Consider the lilies of the field, neither do they toil nor spin; yet I tell you Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these’

It is clear to me from this little snippet alone, taken from the small sum of words we have from Jesus’s mouth, that he was, I guess, susceptible in a high degree to the beauty of nature. Once again I am lucky because wild flowers are part of my own portfolio of aesthetic greats.

But it’s not just the subject of flowers, a lily of the field, but the wonderful way the thought is expressed, albeit as a translation from Greek into English. The Greek itself may be yet more fresh than the English I am quite willing to believe.

So it’s a happy combination of the subject (the lily) the thought (the comparison with the glory of Solomon) and the style (the beautiful King James Version prose) that unite to produce a portrait of Jesus speaking so real, so definite, so personal, so exact, that this saying had it alone come down to us would have indicated someone very, very special having thought and expressed it.

The whole combination is beautiful; and as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, we can adduce from the truism that Jesus himself was a very beautiful mind, soul, spirit, person. St Paul refers us to obtaining ‘the mind of Christ’ for ourselves, to grow day by day into the stature of the mind of Christ; and so to become beautiful after our Maker and Saviour.

This too is a beautiful idea, to be enabled by Grace to reach towards perfection in our day to day humdrum selves, by way of the love and sacrifice that was offered purposefully to us to obtain and enjoy, without coercion, without conditions imposed by decree, but from a revelation given that to grasp such a ‘last straw’ is to find peace, strength, joy, love and compassion, for oneself and towards others, to obtain and enjoy life, and receive life in abundance.

Where I am going is to claim for the whole gospels, and for much of the Old Testament and the New, that contain the Story of God’s gradual revelation of himself and his design for men and women and children, that they are beautiful, and tell a Story that is beautiful of itself, and as such are Artistic and Aesthetic Objects.

The language, the theme, the content, the expression, of much of the Story of God’s Design as it is told in the Bible are beautifully offered to us, as prose, as storytelling, as Salvation, as an offering we could not have hoped for otherwise, and in many more ways. All these aspects are aesthetic aspects.

Of course they are not only aesthetic aspects; indeed much of their beauty rests in their being tied, cemented, wedded, so forcefully to the terms of each of our individual existences; and to the existence of Creation itself. The technical literary terms to use to express this forceful connection with, (a word I don’t like using) ‘reality’; might be that the Bible has sincerity, authenticity, and verisimilitude. Everyone connects with it; even when they are against it.

The lines of John Keats, the words of Jesus, the narratives of the Creation and Salvation stories being beautiful in themselves also point in their subject matter towards beautiful things – Blake’s ‘heaven in a wild flower’ or Wordsworth’s ‘thoughts too deep for tears’ at him seeing ‘ the meanest flower that blows’ – and they all say something deep and half-hidden about the nature of beauty.

I’d like to suggest that the ‘stillness’ of the Grecian Urn; the ‘unravishedness’ of it, and the ‘quietness wedded’ to it are within us all three, and engendered within us by the contemplation of the lines of verse, prose, the drawing, whatever.. They are our responses to beauty – an acute awareness of a sense of permanence, of peace, and of partaking in full measure in the experience of being present.

At such times in our lives when the full holiness of beauty hits us foursquare on the forehead, we can say to ourselves, as Hamlet says to himself, ‘We know what we are; but we know not what we may be’.

Ours is the stillness, quietness, weddedness, of permanence, of partaking in eternity, of realising that eternity is present with, and within us, even though most of the remaining time in our lives we are almost oblivious of beauty’s existence and even hostile to the idea of it being here; since so much seems to go wrong in our lives or needs our bothersome and reluctant detailed attention. The necessities of getting and spending, of drinking and eating, and serving and being served, get in our ways.

Jesus’s lilies of the field appear to us so fresh and so stunning in our mind’s eye in great part because of the solemn and majestic picture of Solomon robed regally and stood in state that comes before us and that is just as quickly dismissively and instantly discarded by Jesus in praise of the ‘one (lily) greater who is here’.

Jesus is also saying a truth not acknowledge as often as it ought to be; that nature, the lilies, be they ever so insignificant and transient and ephemeral, take the palm, and that art (Solomon’s raiment) does not challenge nature and does not overcome nature for primacy in beauty, and holiness. It is indeed ‘the meanest flower that blows’ that is superior and has more of God in it than Ghiberti’s Baptistery doors, or Beethoven’s amazing ‘Hymn of Thanksgiving’.

That stillness we sense in the presence of severe beauty is for me a taste of Heaven, a sampler, a piece of evidence that Heaven is possible and even available around us. The absorption of our consciousness into the experience of beauty too is a foretaste of the possibilities for our rapture and bliss. It is an experience of the same denial of self, a sort of dismissal of and discarding of self, in the face of ‘a greater one’ being present, a sort of small scale likeness of that experience one imagines one will have when one stands before God and sees his incontestable glory.

The denial of self that Jesus preached and embodies is born in part out of the apprehension we have of his great personal inner beauty, and the beauty of his Way. The holiness of it all. It is no sweat to follow someone you admire to adoration.

You can find this kind of acknowledgement of the beauty of holiness in the Psalms again and again; when the singer sings of the beauty and delight of meditating God’s word in the nighttime on his bed.

With our sense of beauty, with our sense of holiness, comes a cleanness, a sense that what we behold is utterly pure and clean and free from stain, moral or physical. When we ourselves are sensible of having an uncleanness about us at a time when we are placed in the presence of refining beauty; we shrink away; even wince at ourselves, and feel unworthy. (‘For he is like a refiner’s fire, and who shall stand when he appeareth?’) Simon Peter has this experience when he pleads with the Lord; ‘Go away from me Lord, for I am a sinful man…’ when the great revelation that Jesus is Messiah suddenly has hit his inner awareness like a blow to the head, and he confesses his awe and shame before and in the face of pure love.

The title then, A Thing of Beauty is a Joy Forever, is Biblical and is religious. And John Keats perceived precociously another great truth which has been argued over for nearly two centuries, by this and that literary critic and by this and that academic aesthetician, who in their capacity as persons and spiritual beings might better acknowledge that there is no argument to be had. Keats writes to close his poem Ode to a Grecian Urn:

‘Beauty is Truth, and Truth Beauty,
That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know’

Episode #28: Back in the saddle Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

We’re back…again! Well, Travis and Steve, anyway. Steve discusses the effect of the show’s summer hiatus on his theological interests (or lack thereof). We also discuss the cardinal virtue that is the true opposite of fundamentalism.

ATW Radio – 25

ATW radio is a weekly Christian news show that throws off the shackles of serious religious discussion to embrace a more light-hearted, just for laughs sort of affair. Though we sometimes delve into the important question, we never take ourselves too seriously. If you are interested in religion, but you need a break from all the tension of serious debate, give us a listen and relax. (Due to the content of the show, listeners are recommended to be at least 16 or older.

iii) Marlin and Letting-go:

We looked at Marlin and Dory, their various disabilities, and how these are overcome by them in the movie; and even overmatched in Dory’s case

(See ii) ‘Dory and the Theology of Short-term Memory Loss’

We didn’t really touch on Marlin’s crippling disability, except to say how he overcame it; and yet the movie ‘Finding Nemo’ is as much the story of Marlin’s restoration, as it is the story of Nemo’s rescue.

Marlin’s is a journey of growth in character and towards mental wellbeing

Marlin’s central problem is that he is unable to just ‘let-go’. He has that sickness of attempting to hedge the future; he wants to make the future bulletproof. His energies for action are severely curtailed and diverted by his need into a neurosis about unseen, unseeable, and unforeseeable danger. Danger is apparent everywhere to his perception, except in that small place where he assuredly feels safe; be it his home dwelling, or his straitened view of what preserves life. His theme is thoroughly, ‘Fortress Mentality Me’

He’s had a terrible and shocking loss to violence of his wife and their children, excepting Nemo. So he is wounded; and has reason to be as he is; even though his outlook and behaviour are unreasonable when set against ‘normal’ outlooks and behaviours.

He’s on the edge. He is impatient, short-tempered, anxious, and dismissive. He sees nowhere to turn to for help, nor anyone to turn to for help. He is mentally purblind. His trauma subsists on a loss to his spirit. His whole being concentrates on preserving from danger his last and only child, Nemo.

His obsessive fear for Nemo’s welfare is a natural extension of his own Fortress Me Mentality. Plenty of obstacles for the movie to address then: and it addresses them by showing us how Marlin is led by the delightfully gracious Dory into a willingness and a bravery and a trust to just only ‘let-go’ – of his awful experience, the resultant trauma and pain; and all the consequent pathological disorders. So first up we claim that:

‘Letting go is liberation to the spirit’

What can Jesus say about this?

‘…. when they deliver you up, take no thought how or what ye shall speak: for it shall be given you in that same hour what ye shall speak’.

This is to his disciples, the twelve, concerning a time coming when they shall be facing interrogation by authority about their faith; a time at which in fact, their lives are likely to be on the line.

So, the disciples are merely to just ‘let-go’ of that nagging and persistent worm that eats our equanimity when we suffer severe testing, often of much lesser endurance than this..

It’s crucial to see Jesus saying to his disciples, ‘It shall be given you’ – and not ‘You will find something apposite to say when the moment arrives’. No, it’s not a mindless insubstantial reassurance fielded just to fob them off, satisfying their fears for the time being.

Instead his disciples are instructed that there shall be a Providential intervention of some kind in their behalf. It shall allow them to give an account of themselves and their faith; an appropriate account to the occasion.

They will not be let down unable to say anything to the purpose. The message is firm: don’t fret yourselves; don’t apply your mind exactingly to the problem situation; allow it freedom to lay itself open to what God shall provide to you, and promised Providential words will fall to your use. Thus,

‘Letting go allows general trust in things’

Because Marlin is not just liberated in the course events that occur on his journey seeking his son; but the journey is his path towards self-discovery.

Dory’s circumstances and behaviour manifest the pattern that releases him.

Marlin begins incredulous of Dory, that she should and could and does just spontaneously trust in such a motley range of sea creatures, to their dispositions, without any precautionary qualm.

Dory’s experiences are repeatedly genial and he shares them. They are the repeated lesson that vindicates her willingness to trust; and to allow herself to be seen as vulnerable; by others; about the future; for outcomes. They eventually work upon Marlin showing him the way. Once he has seen, he is freed immediately. Fortress Marlin’s is a ruin; vanished; he rests his burden on a trust by which to live his life.

‘Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? And one of them shall
not fall on the ground without your Father. But the very hairs
of your head are all numbered. Fear ye not therefore, ye are
of more value than many sparrows’

Again Jesus addresses his disciples, this time sending them out ‘two and two’ into the cities of Judah preaching the Good News. In both addresses he encourages his disciples to eschew worry. He is concerned with Last Things: the death of a sparrow and being on trial for one’s life.

He is precise; even in the face of death we shall; ‘take no anxious thought how we present ourselves’, ‘God is with each sparrow that dies; we are worth many sparrows to him’.

Do not fear, not even in the extreme. Bear in mind that ‘every hair on your head is counted’.

This is an astounding expression of tender, attendant solace. Thus,

Letting go eases vexation of spirit

Relief is larger than their sharp adrenaline rush as Marlin and Dory shoot out of the whale’s spout to freedom. It’s greater than just physiological uplift upon duress overcome; for Marlin it’s cessation of chronic spiritual malaise.

It’s Marlin turning elatedly to the whale, thanking him, in ‘Whale’, while Dory looks far less excited. Marlin’s new acceptance that Dory can actually speak ‘Whale’ completes his wholehearted welcome embrace of her open person and gracious character. His model for life

Dory has little pride; her memory loss has humbled, if not humiliated her.

Marlin’s distrust of goodwill and co-operation from others looks like a function of his conceit; we certainly don’t like him when he is turning Dory away as a liability and a nuisance to him. He gives off that sense we recognise after nasty events happen to us, when self pity nurses our pride, and we just will not turn to others for comfort. We would rather feel hurt pointedly and alone.

And so we protract our own miseries.

Joy in release from vexation is revealed on our ‘letting-go’. Our selves, our worthy estimates of ourselves, and our reciprocal unworthy estimates of others, are overtaken. Letting-go is of self-image, self-illusion; the self- estimation that interferes with, does not tally with, how and who we are.

Letting-go, placing ourselves at the disposal of – whatever – a big event, other people, a vocational job, a great task, any of lots of things – it’s the first steps towards acknowledging God’s claim on us. Thus to lose ourselves is to find the path to God. To let-go is to invite in, surrendering ourselves is to welcome into our lives something greater.

To let–go, then, is the source of joy that affirms life

Nothing is of greater sublunary importance in the movie ‘Finding Nemo’ than its statement that; To serve; to relinquish self; to drop pretensions; to pick up others’ bills; to put other persons, other good things, before oneself and ones desire and place; is a liberation to joy in the spirit. This is Dory, who amongst them all, is in the Type of Christ

‘I am come that they might have life, and that they might
have it more abundantly.’

And a last word:

‘Letting go is not: ‘Que sera sera’

A great American religious poet wrote commending us to ask God:

‘Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still’

The Boring Bible’s Disneyworld

ii) Dory and the Theology of Short-term Memory Loss

Well, let’s start this one straight in at the deep-end:

‘For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.’

To Bible buffs like sad old me, this is one of the most (deservedly) well-know and well-loved verses of the King James Bible.

Looking ‘through a glass darkly’ is perhaps a bit like being underwater, especially when you don’t wear goggles and you open your eyes. Things are harder to discern, for your vision to make sense of; even though your brain and your experience tell you firmly that those things you are seeing as being apparently fluid and amorphous are actually, truly, and factually solid and static; and that it is your own perceptions that are in error.

Water is a medium, just as is air and atmosphere. Both are transparent. Both suffer movements and tumult. Both allow light to shine and illumine objects via their medium. Maybe air and atmosphere themselves, like water, also allow only apparent perception to us and to our senses; and maybe we are taking for granted that what is provided to us through vision in air and atmosphere is our firmest reality?

But to hit the ground again and begin proper: we can see better in air and atmosphere than we can underwater. We have a better set of clues to go on, and these are telling us where we are and what surroundings to avoid or to embrace. Let’s say this is the norm for normal human beings like most people.

Conversely, we are not in our native element when we are underwater, and so the visual signals there are those we are by nature less able to cope with.

Let’s make a shift of gear and suggest that a person of average mental faculties is the person with the 20/20 mental vision: is the person who sees with her eyes in the medium of air and atmosphere. And that the person who, like Dory in the movie of ‘Finding Nemo’, has to bear with an affliction like short-term memory loss, is the person underwater, seeing the world, not as a picture or full set of pictures perhaps, but seeing what she can make out of the world in so far as her disability allows her. Building from it her world as a unified rational construct

Dory, as ‘seeing through a glass darkly’

In general Dory gets (or retains) less sensory information for herself to work with, and so build up her world picture. But she does build admirably; and as Marlin’s mentor, she has attained a firmer grasp of reality than Marlin has.

Scholars may perhaps be among the persons who bother to read through this piece, some of whom will be familiar with ‘The Allegory of the Cave’ in Plato’s ‘Republic’. In that allegory, able-bodied or otherwise, we are all of us are unable to see what (a higher) reality might truly look like. It can only be inferred, intuited, hinted at.

So here we have Disney, Plato, and St Paul; all being in agreement that, in some sense, all of us have to, and do of necessity, contend with a certain amount of disability in order to come to trust upon a better understanding of what the world might truly be and mean.

And this learning to Trust in things unseen, or unforeseeable, is the journey that Marlin, Nemo’s father, has to travel in the company of his unlikeliest guide.

It is the Trust that is essential. The Cave dwellers, the Christian, and the Memory-impaired Dory, put their deepest trust in things they can only dimly perceive; and they trust that these dim perceptions are indications of a better, higher way of life than the lives we all commonly know and live right now.

When I got comfortable in my seat in the cinema and began to watch ‘Finding Nemo’, a Disney film which of them all has such an unpropitious beginning, I soon became an even greater sceptic about where the film was going; about what sort of movie storyline this was; and about what could possibly be made of such unpromising material as a co-protagonist who cannot remember who on earth she is for five minutes consecutively?

That preconception turned out to say more about me than it did about the movie show.

Like Dory’s co-protagonist Marlin, I was peremptorily delimiting my outlook, presumptuously closing doors on situations and so therefore upon opportunities, without having adequate reason.

But Marlin has better reason to pamper his prejudices that I had; his experience is that he has much reason to fear for the future and so to over-protect Nemo, to the point of control freaking, and nurturing life-denying phobias. This is his disability.

Interestingly we recognize Dory’s disability straight away; she sits in the first place as the immediate focus of disability in the film. Only gradually do we become educated to understand that it is Marlin who is far the more severely disabled, and that Dory has marvelously blossomed to overcome hers, and is able to compensate more than adequately.

The pivotal point of the movie occurs in the whale’s throat. Is this monster friend or foe; is it going to end their stories or fulfill them? Neither Marlin nor Dory know, and then the following dialogue between them:

Dory: Get in his throat; do like the whale says,

Marlin: Is it going to be alright?

Dory: I DON’T KNOW!!!

…and they then bite the bullet and together go for broke. They surface in Sydney Harbour Bay.

It strikes me that at this point is expressed the kernel of the crisis in Marlin’s need for a faith, in the future, in others, in a sense of Providence even, and that his situation here chimes pretty closely with that sick child’s father in Mark’s Gospel, who cries out in his anguish:

‘And straightway the father of the child cried out, and said with tears,
‘Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.’’

Marlin torn; Marlin wanting, yearning for a happy ending, but Marlin not quite able to believe that there is a saving grace embedded as a jewel in reality; that informs us that, as another children’s story says: ‘Miracles are made in the heart’.

The experience of being with her at last convinces him that Dory’s is not just an idiotic blind faith of a fairytale kind. Dory may be scatterbrained, annoying, perplexing, lovable, constant; but she’s divined a truth about life that Marlin has not yet. And for us too as beholders, the whole point about Dory is her character; and it is for us to learn and to internalize within us that her matured character is what super-compensates for her inability to hold onto a common thought for two minutes straight.

Dory is a character who is secure, constant, and joyously upheld by her sense of trust in the General Goodwill; in that to ask for help will be obliged; in that there is, in spite of all its threatening unknowns, a common thread under the sea that sanctifies all creation there; a thread of common kindliness. The trauma Marlin has undergone had shattered utterly any germinal sense of such a trust and goodwill in his heart; but maybe, just maybe, he had to undergo that ordeal before he might be able to become liberated from himself?

‘…and deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage’.

So, to go back to the beginning and to take up the theme: Dory’s eyes are the clear and certain ones, and Marlin’s eyes are the eyes that are bleared. Dory sees life more truly than does Marlin. St Paul writes of his experience of meeting the Risen Christ, that ‘the scales fell from my eyes’. So did they for Marlin, courtesy of his ‘damaged goods’ friend Dory.

You might ask, Why give any metaphysical significance to the film ‘Finding Nemo’? Isn’t it just about a recovery from post traumatic stress syndrome; about the social reintegration of a psychologically wounded father? And why dig any deeper?

The truth goes back to that jewel discerned by us as though ‘through a glass darkly’ and embedded in our reality; to its objective and independent life and presence; in the experience of the lives of so many earnest men and women who have pledged their lives and sometimes their deaths on its intimations of something greater than Solomon, and greater than Jonah, being here.

These Disney pieces I am writing are just threads taken up from what I must tentatively propose might be a woven fabric of beneficent natural law; they are being taken up to show them off as things of natural and transcendental beauty in themselves: and their positions within that fabric are as binding parts that might well be vital to its completeness, but yet remain just some few among myriad.

There are in our world I believe, these threads of the Divine, partly beheld by us, and that bind reality.

I believe that history, literature, movies, and story-telling of all kinds; is one fresh wellspring and source of living water, whose flow, and purity, and flavour is replenished continually and continuously by the spirit of God as he is to be discovered by any of us in The Bible.