Spoils from Egypt
Posted By Fr. Jim Tucker on July 13, 2009
Why is it that we as human beings are attracted by fiction? We love a good story. We can get all caught up in the characters and situations . . . that don’t exist! Basically, fiction is one bold faced lie. Yet, we detest being deceived, but we love a good story. Sometimes, a good story will lead us in one direction, yet turn us to another, unexpected direction – and we are thrilled by it.
So why are we drawn to fiction, this huge, bold faced lie? It is because of beauty, the wholeness, integrity of a well crafted tale. Fr. Robert Barron, of Word on Fire Ministries once gave a talk about how true beauty reflects God:
Evangelize the Culture Lecture 4 – Evangelizing Through Beauty
In crafting a world through literature, we are tapping into our share of the creative mind of God. Theology tells us that all creation proclaims the glory of God, as Gerard Manley Hopkins once wrote. All of creation, everything in creation glorifies God, by its very existence. Even the devil, by his very existence, glorifies God.
So each and every one of us glorify God by our very existence. What we create glorifies God by its very existence. Yet, we as human beings often don’t grasp this. We often need something to jump out at us in order for us to recognize it. Especially nowadays, in a world which is so up-to-the-minute, where news and information is thrust at us as soon as it happens, we get overwhelmed by it all. We may not recognize this sense of being overwhelmed because we’ve grown so accustomed to it. But I say that we get overwhelmed because we are not given enough time to process the information fed to us.
The immediacy of information today is a topic for another time. What’s important here is how to process it all. Sacred Scripture gives us the foundation of this processing:
“Let love be sincere; hate what is evil, hold on to what is good.” – Romans 12:9
“Test everything; retain what is good.” – 1 Thessalonians 5:21
“Beloved, do not trust every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they belong to God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. This is how you can know the Spirit of God: every spirit that acknowledges Jesus Christ come in the flesh belongs to God.” – 1 John 4:1
The early Church Fathers often used the image of the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt, and their taking the gold from their former captors – the gold which had been used to fashion the pagan Egyptian gods – how they melted it down and fashioned the gold into elements of their own worship.
St. Augustine – quoted above – tells us that we are called to do the same thing with the various trains of thought, the philosophies that surround us, melt them down, if possible, and use them for the proclamation of the Gospel.
I submit that we are called to do the same thing with the stories that are told today, whether in printed form or through the media. And there’s a lot of sifting that needs to be done.
When the newly refashioned Battlestar Galactica took viewers by storm recently, I noticed that many whose opinion I trusted were touting the show as brilliant and very engaging. That it was engaging was not in dispute for me. Yet, what was in dispute for me was the fact that in order to tell the story, the writing team chose to use situations and circumstances that reflected more of the modern mind set, even when that mind set was at cross-purposes to the story. Yet, the acting was very effective in drawing us in, and the story-line not only led us on wild rides with all its twists and turns, but the story also drove the development of the characters forward. While the concepts of religion seem to clash with our understanding, and seemed to twist our understanding of God, if we suspend our disbelief, we see how their beliefs were deeply rooted in their psyche, and influenced their behaviors. Even if some characters said they didn’t believe, those characters changed their tune in the end.
As Christians who use creativity, we can melt down the ideas around us to use them to illuminate truth and virtue in a captivating way. Let us be immersed in the Gospels so that we can truly discern those spirits that St. John spoke of. Who knows, maybe someday we’ll see in our mind’s eye Moses leading flying saucers out of the desert.
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