Archive | Spirit Matters
The Church of Eternal Sparkles
I wake and for a few seconds savor the uncharacteristic stillness of my neighborhood and the chirping of birds, agog: “I got the best crusts of panettone for christmas!” “The people in #3L gave me brioche crumbs!” Then I turn on all the holiday lights and put on my favorite holiday albums–Stevie, Jackson 5, Vince Guaraldi, Otis, the Supremes, Smokey, Mariah (yes), Prince (double yes). I’ve decorated my whole front room in a mermaid pagan Jewish Middle Church menagerie of gold and blue lights, green and red candles, birds and giraffes and cats, pine cones and pine branches (rescued from deli trash, for reals), and blessed blessed menorahs and Mother Marys. This is how I pierce the darkness of ambiguity and abnegation–with my own admixture of faiths, inherited and inspired. First and foremost: what pleases my inner 8-year-old, forever tapping her foot and mending her heart. Sparkling and soaring, that’s what she likes. So I decorate what I can, breathing in the joy of time with my loved ones in days before and to come (gosh, I’m the luckiest lady), and allow the loveliest permakitten to arrange herself decorously on my lap. From here I can dream up anything.
The Grind of ‘Silence’
It has taken Martin Scorsese nearly thirty years to make “Silence,” his adaptation of Shusaku Endo’s 1966 award-winning novel about spirituality in the face of profound human suffering. In the intermediary, he has released a bevy of less weighty films, most recently “The Wolf of Wall Street,” which treads as far from “Silence” as Donald Trump does from Barack Obama. Yet what distinguishes the Academy Award-winning director’s work is in full effect in both films: a fascination with ritual coupled with an epic scale. True, “Silence” trains its lens on abstinence and self-sacrifice, but it does so with the over-the top commitment with which the “Wolf” stockbrokers snort drugs off hookers’ asses.
Adam Driver and Andrew Garfield play Fathers Garrpe and Rodrigues respectively, two Portuguese Jesuit missionaries searching for Father Ferreira (Liam Neeson), their mentor who has gone missing in Japan. It is the seventeenth century and Christians have been intent on spreading the good word in Asia, whether or not that word is welcome. The rumor is that Ferreira has absolved his faith and taken a Japanese name and wife, but the younger priests feel in their hearts that this is slander and that their teacher needs rescuing. So they set off on a slow boat, armed only with what they can carry on their backs – mostly Christian artifacts. Continue Reading →