hooked

God speaks through stories. I recently got caught up again in watching Steven Spielberg's film "Hook"and was impacted by what I see as its remarkable prophetic implications. Robin Williams plays a grown up Peter Pan, who, in the process of becoming a highly succesful atorney ("Peter, you have become a pirate!" exclaims a saddened Wendy) has forgotten who he really is. Throughout the course of the film Peter gets back in touch with his true identity, learns to fly again, and returns to the "real world" to take on the adventure of life from a radically new perspective.

This story can be viewed as simply another nice fairy tale for children (and adults). Or it could be viewed as an inkling, a suggestion of what truly is. How is it that humans have this capacity to imagine things so way out there, so beyond the reach of what we think could ever be possible, that we automatically label them as "fantasy", as fiction. Yet, as a wise man once observed, it is truth that is actually stranger than fiction, because fiction is obligated to stay within the realm of what we can imagine, while truth isn't. No wonder reality always has a way of blindsiding us, of catching us totally off guard!

The story "Hook", is for me, a picture of God's people. Like grown up Peter, I suspect that we too have forgotten who we really are. Tinkerbelle represents the Holy Spirit, tugging at us to bring us back to what has been lost. I like the way Gary Wills puts it in his book, WHAT JESUS MEANT, when he compares Jesus to other greater-than-life figures from antiquity.
"[Jesus] is the fulfillment of the myths . . . they are a reaching out toward him. They are a hunger and he the food. They are an ache, he the easement."

The Enlightenment was (in part) a time of breaking out of a calcified and superstitious religious culture that needed to be challenged by science and rational inquiry. But in our "growing up", have we lost the child-like ability to dream and believe in the impossible? Jesus broke through the strictures of the religious system of his day and challenged his disciples to such preposterous things as being born again, or becoming like little children in order to qualify for entry into the kingdom of heaven. He even promised that if they had faith as a grain of mustard, they could command mountains to move. "Truly I tell you," Jesus said in his farewell address to the disciples, "the one who believes me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works (Jn. 14:12)."

Have we forgotten who we are? Are we too grown up to believe that such words of Jesus might really impinge on our lives today? Or will we be content to read the Biblical stories to our children and leave them there, as simply stories from the past? They might as well just be fairy tales.

Somehow, somewhere, I got infected with the faith bug that from time to time challenges me in the deepest part of who I am with those words that I am convinced are more than fairy tale: "All things are possible to them that believe . . . What is impossible for man is possible for God."

I am hooked. Are you?