This week's edition of Our Sunday Visitor featured an article from Father Barron regarding the way in which powerful spiritual truths are often conveyed by flawed human vessels. These vessels, then, can be effectively used the in work of evangelization.
Some weeks ago, I gave a sermon in which I mentioned Keith Richards, the lead guitarist for the Rolling Stones. I recounted how struck I was by a passage from Richards’ autobiography,“Life,” in which the guitarist described the almost maniacal dedication with which he and his bandmates set out to learn Chicago blues. “Benedictines,” he said, “had nothing on us.”
I urged my listeners to approach their spiritual lives with the same “Benedictine” focus and fervor that the young Rolling Stones had in regard to the blues.
Last week, Father Barron saw the summer sci-fi blockbuster which has recently been the subject of many an interpretive analysis, Christopher Nolan's Inception. Read his review below.
The sleeper (pun intended) hit of a rather weak summer for movies has been the Leonardo DiCaprio vehicle
Inception. One reason that it has done so well is that many people have been returning for a second or third viewing, most likely so that they can get some inkling of what’s going on. The film is, to say the least, confusing. It has to do with a team, led by DiCaprio’s character, Cobb, who specialize in the invasion of people’s dreams so as to extract hidden information from their unconscious minds. As the movie opens, a wealthy client approaches Cobb with the novel request that instead of extracting an idea, he implant one in the mind of one of the client’s business rivals: hence the “inception” of the title. If I were to rehearse the details of the plot, we’d be here all day; suffice it to say that in order to pull off this implantation, without the subject’s being aware of the ruse, Cobb has to open up an entire series of dream worlds: dreams within dreams within dreams. As the film unfolds, the characters move back and forth between these universes and it’s never entirely clear to the viewer (at least to this viewer) precisely where they are and, to riff on Aretha Franklin, “who’s dreamin’ who.” ...