Saturday, January 29, 2011

Fantasia The Next Generation

Many years ago I saw Fantasia at the Indian Hills theater with my friend Barb Briggs and her teenage brother.  At that time you could smoke in the  theater.   I'm not at all certain what Barb's brother was smoking.  I know I thought Fantasia was amazing.  As I went through college and beyond, every friend I had thought  people needed to be high to enjoy the film.  Today I watched it with my son.  And nothing could be further from the truth.

I expected James to be bored, but  I wanted him to hear the music.  From beginning to end he watched with attention, with the exception of the dancing hippos and alligators.  We were ready to have a perfect movie watching experience.  Then we had a break, and the ostriches and hippos and alligators  came out, and I lost him.

The truth is if we had gone straight to the end with the Night on Bald Mountain and the Ave Maria, then he would have gone clearly and purely from the dawn of the world to the dawn of Christianity.  But we had the detour through Greek Mythology.

Does anyone else see their own educational history in this?  You are cruising along, learning lots, and then you hit the Edith Hamilton at Freshman year, and all of a sudden your faith is shaken by the notion that resurrections have been a part of religion from the early Egyptians.

Suddenly you realize that every nation has anticipated the coming of a savior.  It's easy at that point to decide that Jesus is not that savior.  He's just the one some people in a tiny little country decided would be their savior.

If that were true, how did his particular religion last for 2000 years?


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