I’ve been in a bit of a spiritual quandary lately (you know, what with my upcoming unspeakable-th BD and the specter of the Grim Reaper breathing down my neck), so I had this inspirational idea of attending a function the church we periodically attend was sponsoring. They were promoting family night by showing a movie Sunday night, so I thought this would be a good substitute for our own traditionally held Friday night home movie event. I naively figured they were going to show some old Disney film or something with free popcorn and what not, so how could you go wrong?
Unfortunately, it turned out to be a very sappy Christian production of some kind with the general theme of “Lets just all get along, hang all that sticky theology business and let’s just love one another,” (as long as your general theology accepted that Jesus Christ is Lord and Savior, who was the key character in the film, disguised as the mysterious stranger that does all kinds of miraculous things. “Ooo, who could he be?”) Anyway, there was a part in the film where one of the big-hearted, cuddly, but speech impeded characters falls several feet, presumably to his death. Interestingly, there is never any attempt at CPR or having anyone with medical expertise confirm his condition. They just expeditiously lay him out in the church and get busy with funeral arrangements. Then “Joseph,” our mysterious stranger, goes in and lays hands on the “corpse,” which, of course, immediately jumps up from his resting place sans stutter, a little bewildered, but speaking fluidly and eloquently. Evidently, the fall knocked the stutter right out of him. A note to speech therapists everywhere: Drop your patients from high elevations and see if that does the trick.
I was a little concerned about this portion of the film because Vaughn has a very sensitive disposition and anything smacking of the melancholy will trigger a black mood. The whole movie, frankly, was over the average 6-year-old’s head. Vaughn kept saying, “I know I’ll understand in the end.” Yeah, well good luck there. After this particularly disturbing scene, since they resolved it so quickly to be a happy ending, Vaughn seemed none the worse for wear. However, he leans over to me and whispers, “Can that really happen? Can a guy really make someone alive again.” I, stupidly, wanting to be completely forthright (I have no idea why I have this compulsion in religious settings for unadulterated honesty when I still firmly insist to him that there is a Santa Claus), said, “No, hon. Not in real life.” His face immediately scrunches up and he gives me his supreme death stare, angrily clutching his arms across his chest, thoroughly PO’d.
“What?”
“I’m angry at you.”
“Why?” truly not knowing what in the world I said that caused this reaction.
“Because…what you said.”
It then hit me that what I had done was the equivalent of telling him Santa’s a fraud. There is no Easter Bunny. When you wish on a star, you get jack squat, and your goldfish did not go to goldfish heaven when it died. I flushed it down the toilet.
“I’m sorry. I was wrong. Sometimes a person can do that.” Specifically, in the New Testament of the King James Bible.
“Really? You could make him come back alive? Is it magic? Does he have magic hands?”
“Yep.”
Later that evening, on our way home, we made a pitstop in Safeway’s parking lot, where our family van was temporarily deceased, suffering unspecified car trouble. Dave wanted to take another shot at it (we’d made several attempts already) to see if somehow, this time, we could resuscitate the thing long enough to dash it across the street to our house. I remarked that it would take one of us performing a small miracle to get the van to move.
Dave: “Maybe Vaughn should lay hands on it,” referring, of course, to my son’s ongoing delusion that he is the second-coming (it’s going around).
Vaughn, unbuckling his seatbelt and briskly rubbing his magic hands together, pipes up: “OKAY!”
I’ve created a monster.
Does this make me the Virgin Mary?
No comments:
Post a Comment