They Don’t Believe We’re Made in God’s Image, but Their Nutrition Advice is Spot On!

I came across an interesting post at the Resurgence website the other day, titled, “Pastor, You’re Probably Fat: 6 Things to Do About It” by John Catanzaro.

I am not a pastor, but I wanted to see what the Resurgence folks had to say about the cross-section of nutrition and Godly living. This particular post was part of a larger topic about the theology of the body. I briefly read through some of the previous articles, and liked what I saw – humans are made in God’s image, the body is a temple, it will be resurrected again, God cares about how we take care of our body, no physical/spiritual dichotomy, etc. etc. All good stuff.

But tip #5 on “Pastor, You’re Probably Fat” really threw me for a loop:

Cut your calories by 50% and get them from wholesome food. Eat more green vegetables and quality protein (fish and organic sources of meat). There are wholesome weight reduction programs that include excellent food choices and assist in changing the negative hormone behavior. When a person is fat for a long time the body forgets how to metabolize fat and needs help. I would recommend you see a qualified doctor who can assist you with this. (Emphasis mine.)

This is great. Christian theology of the body is this awesome, awe-inspiring thing and is way better than the secular/materialistic view of human bodyness, but let’s still the follow the out-of-date nutritional advice of the secular humanists to take care of God’s special creation!

Eat more vegetables and organic meat? Who’s been pushing that nutritional worldview if not the secular humanists who run our government health agencies and environmental non-profits? The science behind “more vegetables, less meat – unless it’s organic” becomes more dubious by the day. Everyone at Resurgence is so culturally aware and on top of things, but somehow they missed this study released last summer that found there’s no nutritional difference between organic and non-organic foods.

They also apparently aren’t aware of the latest realization that saturated fats – mostly found in red meat – are actually pretty darn good for you, and that it’s not the caloric intake that matters, but rather the kind of caloric intake that determines your healthiness. The American obesity plague is a result of diets high in carbohydrates (not fat) – especially of the white flour/sugar carbs.

Gary Taubes wrote the monolithically impressive Good Calories, Bad Calories (roughly 1 billion pages long and very technical) and is following it up this December with the streamlined, easier-to-read Why We Get Fat. He debunks decades’ worth of bad fat science that resulted in the detrimental Food Pyramid, among other things. Taubes gets to the heart of the modern diet/nutritional paradigm and why, based on science, its premise – saturated fat is bad for you – has never been proven.

(Here’s a great article by Taubes that serves as a phenomenal introduction to the ideas in his books; I’ll post more nutrionally-oriented links at the end, too.)

I guess the point of all this is that, if Christians are going to have a theology of the body, how much sense does it make to have a theology of nutrition that isn’t backed by verifiable science and that follows the narrative of very non-Christian sources? It just seems a little self-defeating. I don’t necessarily know what a Christian theology on nutrition would look like, and it’s definitely not a “Gospel” issue, but I’m pretty sure the prophet Daniel got fat because he didn’t eat the king’s ribeye.

On a personal note, I really have a hard time when Christians advocate for organic foods. If we’re supposed to be stewards of God’s planet, organic food production is about the last route we want to pursue (requires more land, resources and money to produce same amount of food as “conventional” production methods; it is therefore less “environmentally friendly” than conventional agriculture). The United States hasn’t fed the whole world by using organic production methods. Guys like Norman Borlaug used those eeeeevil genetically-modified foods to feed starving Indians and Africans. In other words, conventional agriculture has performed some of the greatest “whatever you did for the least of these, you did for Me” acts in the history of mankind.

The advances in food science are also amazing fulfillments of the Cultural Mandate: we have taken God’s creation, and in light of the obstacles of a sin-cursed creation, we have done more with less and “subdued/cultivated” our food sources in the most efficient, globally-helpful ways possible. Only once we emerged from subsistence farming (read: “organic”) has the world enjoyed its unparalleled wealth, abundance and health on such a wide scale. Organic farming is marketed as a central tenet of a caring, responsible lifestyle. It’s all very romantic and noble. But organic farming was all the world had for thousands of years. There’s nothing romantic about starving to death and continually being held at the mercy of the land (that’s not very Gen. 1:25-28, if you ask me). What’s environmentally or culturally responsible with using more land, more resources and feeding fewer people just to have a USDA “Certified Organic” label on your carrots? But it’s a great self-esteem boost, isn’t it?

(Full disclosure: my dad works for one of those immoral and malevolent animal pharmaceutical companies that sell antibiotics and synthetic growth hormones to greedy ranchers. So there.)

If anyone from Resurgence happens to catch this post, which I doubt (thanks for your support, all seven of my subscribers!), I would love to get your feedback/comments. Here are the rest of the links to nutritionally- and scientifically-sound articles that you should find helpful/thought-provoking:

“Study: Organic food not more nutritional” by Jessica Daly, CNN

“High Yields: The Only Farming Answer” by Dennis Avery, Hudson Institute

“What if Bad Fat is Actually Good for You?” Men’s Health article

“Can A High-Fat Breakfast Be Good For You?” by Jonny Bowden, That’sFit.com

“Should We Avoid Saturated Fats? Studies Say No” by Jonny Bowden, That’sFit.com

Type Casting

Daniel Dae Kim still can’t get off the island:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sb-ejxJEgqE

The Globe’s Not-a Warmin’

I’ve always liked Bob Dylan:

. . . Dylan is an old-fashioned patriot who wears cowboy hats, loves Texas as much as Greenwich Village, and spoke warmly to Rolling Stone of George W. Bush, whom he’d met when the latter was governor of Texas, while also wishing President Obama well. . . .

During an interview with Jann Wenner in the 40th anniversary edition of Rolling Stone, Dylan replied to a question about the urgency of solving global warming with the mocking, “Where’s the global warming? It’s freezing here.”

When Wenner pressed him as to who would solve the world’s problems if not politicians, Dylan came out with words so Biblically harsh or nakedly Libertarian they are frankly astonishing to the modern ear. Forget politicians: “The world owes us nothing,” he told Wenner, “not one single thing.” And: “Human nature really hasn’t changed in 3,000 years. … It’s not meant to change. It cannot change. It’s not made to change.”

Full article about Dylan and how he is the antithesis of the leftist “ruling class” of which he still holds generational clout:

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/the-bridge-bob-dylan-the-ruling-class-and-the-country-class/

The Gollum Upstairs

Sorry for the silence. The second half of my summer got jammed full of more trips, activities and stuff than a lifetime worth of Summers of George could dream of.

July 14-18, Lindsey and I went with a group from our church on short-term mission trip to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. I helped plan/lead the trip with one of our pastors (I took on this responsibility shortly after I took over as the boys’ head basketball coach at Dayspring Christian, so I had lots of free time).

At any rate, I’ve decided that participating in a mission trip is easier than planning one. Over the next several days, I will be posting a multi-part series about the Pine Ridge trip. It was a very moving and memorable experience, and I want to share some of the thoughts and stories that shaped my journey.

Once we returned from Pine Ridge, it was time to pack up our apartment – our first home together – and move. Just down the road, actually. To a basement. Into the basement of an elderly lady’s house. For almost rent-free.

It’s a nice basement –about the same square footage as our two-bedroom apartment: Living room, dining room, bathroom, two bedrooms and a utility room. The only thing we share with the lady, Catherine, is her kitchen. She has a bad hip and can’t drive, so her two-car garage is ours to use, as well. And she has a huge backyard with maples and ashes and a place for a garden. It’s a great opportunity for me and Linds to save for a down payment. It’s not too shabby of a setup, either – that is, if you can tolerate living in a basement and fending off Catherine’s hell hound, a yippy, nippy little rat terrier: Jiminy Cricket. More on him in a minute.

Earlier in the summer, Lindsey came to know Catherine because she had volunteered to clean her bathrooms a couple times a month. Catherine and Lindsey hit it off well, and Lindsey enjoyed spending time with her when she went over to clean. The only thing that wasn’t enjoyable was Jiminy Cricket, or Jimmy, as Catherine usually calls him.

Catherine found so much promise in Lindsey, however, she thought it would be a great idea for us to live in her basement for practically nothing as long as we cooked, cleaned and took out the garbage. By the end of August, we were in – much to the consternation and constant disapproval of Jimmy.

Jimmy is a Katrina dog: he survived the hurricane and came to Colorado with other pets orphaned because of the storm. Somehow, Catherine found him. Orley, Catherine’s husband, had been dead a couple years by the time Jimmy arrived, so they took to each other right away. Catherine had someone to talk to again, and Jimmy also served as a home-security system. Jimmy adores Catherine, but he utterly despises every other creature on the planet that walks on two legs.

Especially those who live in his master’s basement. Every time we come up the stairs, every time we’re in the kitchen, every time we walk into the living room to talk to Catherine as she sits in her chair, the mongrel lashes out with a torrent of grating sound. He’s bitten my heels more than once and has nipped Lindsey’s on occasion. He is without a doubt the most loathsome, vile piece of flesh I have ever known.

It’s difficult to over state the hideousness of Jiminy Cricket. His legs, bony and knobby, support a fat, aging body of graying fur. The mass of his upper body is so disproportionate to his legs, that when he walks or runs, it appears that he moves sideways; it’s as if his legs are swaying his body from side to side, and he is incapable of walking in a straight line. His coat is course and very off-putting to touch; his ears resemble those of a jackrabbit; his nose is long and skinny. But his eyes – his bulging, black eyes – are the center of his disdainful repulsion. They are dark and putrid, thoroughly black and unmoving, like an orb that has no color or life. When you look into his eyes, your throat tenses with the sensation of disgust; every part of your being wants to shrink away from this foul, filthy animal. Jimmy’s ugliness is of the creepy sort. His tinny, high-pitched yelp pierces skin and shrivels ears, breeding contempt at every meeting.

So there he sits, on Catherine’s lap, raising all manner of hell as you try to have a conversation. There he charges, low and stooping, growling and foaming at the very scent of you. There he stands guard on the back of the sofa that looks across the front yard and driveway, always ready with a snarl and a shriek the moment you set foot on his master’s property. He is completely sold out to Catherine; anyone and everyone not of her is a threat to his peace and happiness.

But one day as we brought over a small load of boxes in mid August, Catherine was out, spending the day with her family. We were ready for whatever venom Jimmy would spit at us. Yet as the garage door slowly slid open and Jimmy appeared in the doorway into the kitchen (Catherine left it ajar so he could use the backyard), he let out not a single rumble, not one skin-curling bark. He even let us pick him up and take him back inside.

It was then we realized that his depraved nature only surfaced when Catherine was around to “protect.” This was a puzzling revelation, one in which I failed to fully understand until a few weeks later.

We had been in Catherine’s basement (or should I say Jimmy’s?) for more than two weeks, and still he treated us like he had never seen or smelled us before. He hated us. And I hated him. I would plot how I would silence him with the spray bottle when he would come barreling into the kitchen spewing hate and envy to greet me as I came home from work. I relished the chance to bombard him with a loud and terrible “Tssst!” if he ever brought his snarling anger too close for my comfort. I was put out by the very thought of him. He was enough to make me move out. He was my nemesis, and I was his thief, coming to steal his master away in the night.

Then just the other day, one morning after Lindsey and I left for work, Catherine fell. They took her to the hospital for x-rays, and as of this writing, she’s still there, recovering and receiving physical therapy.

We knew Jimmy acted differently without Catherine around, and now we would see what he would do without his precious master around for days on end. He warmed to us to fairly well, actually: he sat at our feet during dinner as we fed him bits of food from our meals; he came when we called him to go to the bathroom outside. One afternoon over my lunch break, I sat in the backyard reading, and he ran up to me to sit for a minute, then ran off somewhere else and repeated this activity multiple times.

He even sat on my lap for a few minutes as I watched TV from Catherine’s chair. This, I thought, was unthinkable two weeks ago.

But it is painfully obvious that he misses Catherine. He seems lost and hopeless without her. He sits on the back of the sofa looking out the window, sure that at any moment she’ll be dropped off at the end of the driveway. Every time we open the garage door, he comes bursting into the daylight expecting to see his master coming up the drive.

We don’t know when Catherine will be back. So he waits, despondent and full of longing. And what is this feeling that’s coming over me? Could it be pity for the poor wretch?

Yes, pity. Last night as I did dishes in the kitchen, I heard a cry from the living room. I glanced up to see Jimmy facing Catherine’s empty chair. He let out a series of low, mournful howls – cries of desperation and loneliness. His scrawny head thrown back and his black, vapid eyes closed in sorrow as he wailed for his long, lost precious.

Yes, “precious.” I use the term knowingly. It was that afternoon in the back yard when I first realized that Jimmy is my Gollum and that Catherine is his “Precious.” Sitting in the backyard, watching him run up to me then scamper away again reminded me of Gollum’s interactions with his Hobbit masters, and it was then I knew that he wasn’t just a revolting, angry little dog.

Jimmy is Gollum and Catherine is the Ring. She poisons him with such a deep dependence that he rages whenever anyone threatens her attention. He can’t stand the thought of not having her. He is more than content to sit in the dark with her, to sit at her feet while she sleeps, like Gollum, deep in his cave below the Misty Mountains.

When she is gone, he is somewhat civil, and is even capable of befriending others and feigning sincerity – like Sam and Frodo experienced as Gollum guided them through Middle Earth. Jimmy is trapped within himself; he is Jimmy and he is Jiminy Cricket. Sméagol couldn’t overcome Gollum, and I’m afraid the Jiminy Cricket we’ve come to pet, feed and take care of the last few days will dissolve away into horrible Jimmy the minute Catherine returns.

And I, like Bilbo, Gandalf and Frodo, feel pity for the lowly thing. I nearly choked as I witnessed his cries of loneliness in the thick of his grief. It was a completely different perspective of the natural world for me, and I learned more about Creation’s deep and fatal connection with Mankind, as well as its intense need to be repaired.

Gollum got to hold his Precious one last instant before he melted away. I don’t know what fate Jimmy has with Catherine, but I’m sure she’ll be back soon. I wonder if he’ll remember how he fell asleep on my lap like I’ll remember how he wept.

In the morning as I let Jimmy outside and fill his dish, I’ll look on him with the same dubious antagonism like Sam did with Gollum. But I’ll also see him through eyes softened by pity and grace, like Frodo, who knew the sad history of Sméagol and believed the poor creature was capable of being redeemed.

The Eco-Jihad

The greenest kids on the block aren’t your Whole-Foods-buying, Prius-driving neighbors with the wind turbines in the backyard. No, the real champions of earth-friendliness are the faithful followers of Islam.

Or so says the Prince of Wales, the royal highness of eco-absurdism.

Speaking at the Sheldonian Theatre on June 9, in a lecture to mark the 25th anniversary of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, Price Charles urged mankind to save the natural world through the means of “sacred traditions.” In the Prince’s ecumenically-patchwork doctrine, our ruthless destruction of the environment stems from an ignorance of these sacred religious and spiritual traditions – most notably Islam.

The Fresh Prince of Fresh Air bemoaned the fact that Islam’s “treasuries of accumulated wisdom and spiritual knowledge” – these “priceless” gifts to the world – are being overshadowed by the “dominant drives towards Western materialism.” You know, the barbaric notion that “to be truly modern you have to ape the West.” If only we could only follow Islam’s “spiritual principles,” said Charles, then our environmental worries will be over!

It’s all very clear now. For the last decade, we right-wing Islamophobes have had it all wrong. We’ve thought that bin Laden and the like were waging their jihad in the name of Allah. But in reality, their global struggles have been about the restoration of a clean, un-Westernized eco Eden.

Ergo, if you’re of the Islamic tradition and you want to save “the environment” and still get a guaranteed spot with the 72 virgins, fly planes into buildings. Blow up the London Tube. Smuggle C4 on a plane via your underwear. Park a car bomb in Times Square. Stage a “massacre” on a flotilla in Israeli waters. Because the worst polluters and CO2-contributors to Allah’s delicate creation are those materialistic Westerners with their abnormal carbon footprints. Felling the Great Satan – surprise-surprise – has nothing to do with a world-wide caliphate after all. Just greener lives for those of us still alive.

This Islamic eco-platitude works just fine if you view the world through multicultural-colored windows. But reality has a way of smashing thinly-paned glass.

Not more than a week after Prince Charles’s hour-long tribute to Islam’s greener side, members of the Muslims Against the Crusades (MAC) group berated British soldiers during their unit’s homecoming parade in a neighborhood of Barking, Essex. Prince Charles was undoubtedly surprised that the MAC’s protest had nothing to do with the soldiers’ Westernized affluence and environmental unfriendliness.

“'This is a protest against parading in a Muslim area. We love death the way you love life,” shouted one MAC member. “Butchers return” and “Murderers” were also common refrains from the MAC contingent.

Muslims cut from this kind of cloth care nothing at all about the state of the “environment.” And about their “sacred traditions” – I wonder if Prince Charles includes female genital mutilation and honor killings among said traditions. Like the rest of the multicultural establishment, Prince Charles probably considers Islam’s “contributions” in areas like architecture and math as evidence of the faith’s noble, culturally-positive legacy.

But as scholar and author Rodney Stark points out, Muslims never “had” it. “The civilization we typically associate with Islam was in fact the civilization of the Christians and Jews they were ruling,” said Stark in a recent interview. “When those Christians and Jews finally disappeared, so too did that advanced ‘Muslim’ civilization.” Oh, well. At least NASA is here to make them feel good about their cultural and religious legacies.

One of the more dangerous revelations from this episode is that environmental doomsayers, like Sir Charles, will bark up any tree they think can help them “save” the “planet.” Climategate and Glaciergate brought the pure, wind-driven science of climate change urgency to a screeching halt, and now it’s time for religion – Islam – to save the day. Allah has gone green. It’s absurd simply writing that. How absurd must it feel to actually believe this nonsense?

I’m not normally a fan of Christopher Hitchens, but he made some pertinent observations about Charles’ speech. In an article in Slate, Hitchens assures us that the Prince’s remarks drew some “wolfish smiles among his Muslim audience.” Hitchens then went on to quote a document published by the Islamic Forum of Europe – “a group dedicated to the restoration of the Islamic Caliphate” and not the saving of the environment – stating that the “primary work” in establishing a global Islamic state “is in Europe, because it is this continent, despite all the furor about its achievements, which has a moral and spiritual vacuum.”

And the Prince of Wales is first among the vacuous.

All is Not Lost: My Lost Series Finale Review

Those last 15 minutes. Oh, those last 15 minutes. They will go down as the most controversial/gripping 15 minutes in television history.

What was shaping up to be a series finale to end all series’ finales, the last 15 minutes of Lost airtime took a Titanic-sized turn for the bizarro.

I’ve been with Lost since the beginning, and I’m torn in a bajillion different directions about the finale, “The End.” Tuesday morning (I wasn’t able to watch it Sunday night – yea for the interwebs) I tweeted that the whole thing was like the Chronicles of Narnia meets Titanic in a Unitarian church. And because I’m so torn about “The End,” what you are about to read is most likely going to be very random and incoherent. Consider this a “readability” alert.

But before we begin, a few things need to be understood:

1. Any serious viewer of the show knew that going into the finale (and even the last season) there would still be unanswered questions. Even the show’s creators admitted as much. So for all you what-about-the-polar-bears people, just drop it. TV shows aren’t created in a vacuum (especially this one); some things will go unexplained or completely abandoned altogether (more on this later).

2. Even if we knew that some things were going to be left “open for interpretation,” I think it might have also been naïve of us to think that the series would end with a nice ribbon tied around it. Wasn’t in the cards. That’s not how this show rolls (er, rolled). Unconventiality was the norm, so, in some ways, “The End” stayed true to the ethos of the show as a whole.

3. In TV critic Alan Sepinwall’s review of the finale, he said that your enjoyment/disdain of the finale probably depended on where you fit on the character-development or plot-mystery spectrum. Take a second to determine where you are on this spectrum before we move on.

There. OK, let’s get dirty. Thoughts, muses, questions and comments about the good, the bad, and the “what the…?” of “The End.”

To begin, we must go back to the end of season 5. Juliet falls down the hole of the yet-to-be-built Hatch and “detonates” Jughead – the nuclear bomb that somehow ended up on the Island back in the 1940s. As far as I know, the “conventional” wisdom has it that Juliet smashed the bomb with a rock and it exploded. Giant white flash. Fade to black. End of season 5.

Too bad the bomb never exploded.

Now, I don’t know if that’s a truly novel idea in the whole universe of Lost theories, but I’ve never really heard much talk about it, even amongst my other Lost friends. I don’t believe Jughead ever went off. Maybe it “neutralized” the energy so that the 1970s-Dharma folks could later build the Hatch, but I don’t know how a nuclear bomb “neutralizes” something without blowing that something to kingdom come.

Season 6 starts with the Island in-tact, and the time is “present day.” The Island time-skipping was already halted by Locke before “The Incident,” but somehow Jack, Kate, Sawyer and everyone else are in the 2000s again and not the 1970s. Whatever the bomb did (but I’m fairly certain it didn’t explode), sent them back to “present day” after Desmond blew up the Hatch (end of season 2).

As season 6 opened, we were all under the impression that Jughead’s detonation created a parallel universe (the “flash-sideways”). As Brian Regan might say, we were way off: they were all dead, in heaven! Everything that happened on the island really did happen, thus the bomb didn’t explode, because of it did, the ISLAND WOULDN’T BE THERE. This is one of my main puzzlers that season 6 didn’t do a very good job of clarifying, and maybe I’m making too big of a deal out of it.

But it’s a big deal because until the last 15 minutes of “The End,” all, if not most, of us were under the impression that Jughead’s explosion inexplicably created a different plane of reality, some “real” parallel universe.

Apparently not. Well, it was real, but it wasn’t real in the space-time continuum. All throughout season 6 we thought our lovable bunch of castaways/survivors were living two “real” lives. Nice con by the show’s creators, sure, but what did this purgatory consciousness have to do with resolving six seasons worth of plots and character arches? Why did season 5 come down to this defining moment of blowing up the Hatch when, in the big picture, nothing was ever really defined by it?

This is where the last 15 minutes of frustration and all of “what the…” sentiments come to a boil. The first two hours and 15 minutes of “Then End” were killer. Absolute killer stuff. From Jack’s duel with Not-Locke in the rain (with Jack holding the literal and figurative high ground), to Jack anointing a teary-eyed Hurley as protector of the Island, to Ben finding some peace and purpose in his life, to the many reunions – especially Sawyer’s and Juliet’s – to Miles finally coming to grips with his belief in duct tape, to Jack finally being the man he was never able to be (more on this later), to Locke forgiving Ben for killing him…I mean, how can you fit so many lump-in-the-throat moments in 2.25 hrs of TV? It was true art. It was meaningful from a fan’s perspective and also from a show-completion perspective.

But as “The End” got closer to the end, and some major plot questions were still unanswered, I started to get worried. When Jack’s dad blew the cover off the purgatory existence, a good chunk of the plot, characters and narratives from the last six years – including many introduced in season 6 alone – just kinda fizzled out. What exactly is the Island? Where does the light come from? What was Widmore’s angle? Why was Desmond so important? Why wasn’t Nadiya Sayid’s true love? What new lessons did the Oceanic survivors learn in purgatory that they hadn’t already learned in their time on the Island? Why was so much of season 6 focused on the Temple? They left so much material completely unanswered or “open for interpretation,” and then they have the audacity to end the show by telling us that they’re already dead and running around purgatory waiting to wake up and be with each other?

In some ways, the purgatory consciousness/remembering where they’ve come from makes sense: in the end, everyone goes to “heaven” (apparently God is a Unitarian) and everyone (well, not quite) is together. How many times in the last six years has Desmond said, “See you in another life, brother?” Even in “The End,” it was Jack who said those exact same words to Desmond. This wasn’t completely out of the blue.

The irony is that a sizable portion of Lost viewers (and also actual characters on the Island) thought that the Island was purgatory. Yet in the end, it’s this “other life” that ends up being purgatory. The show’s creators had a good thing going with that purgatory thread, and it makes sense that they wouldn’t abandon it – unlike other major plot devices. The power behind everyone ending up in “heaven,” in the church together, fading into the light, is that like any myth worth its ology, the story doesn’t end in death. We’re left knowing that the cast we’ve come to love over the last six years will spend TV-eternity together. Death isn’t the end; in many ways (especially when viewed in light of Christian cosmology) it is the beginning.

My question, from a purely story-line perspective, is why devote so much time in season 6 to this afterlife place when it had very little to do with the major narratives, questions and character developments from the “real life” on the Island. Yeah, it’s a nice sentiment that they all remembered their lives on the Island/learned their lessons (poor theology aside) then got to spend all of eternity together. But looking back on this season and the show as a whole, this purgatory thing didn’t add a ton to its resolution and Island-centric mythology.

The whole purgatory/let’s all go to heaven bit just seemed…cheesy. Unimaginative. My wife pointed out that it was like Titanic, that after everyone dies (as Jack’s dad explained), they all end up in heaven, be that a universalist church or the ballroom on a big ship. Ending one of the greatest TV series of all time like a James Cameron movie isn’t the way you want to go out, is it? Especially for a show that had proven itself to be very deep, literary and non-run-of-the-mill.

Also, not everyone from the Island was there – like Mr. Echo or, heck, why wasn’t Richard there? He had been on the Island longer than anyone. But Penny, who had never been to the Island, was there. It just felt poorly thought out. It was another incomplete narrative that wasn’t completely needed.

Thankfully, they nailed Jack’s final moments. His life-giving sacrifice to re-cork the Island was beautiful stuff. Here’s a guy who for six seasons has sucked at fixing things and being a leader, and now finally he is able to fix the biggest thing in his life: the Island. As he stumbled back through the bamboo, I couldn’t help but think of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe when the Pevensies found their way back to the wardrobe – the place where everything started.

Beginning and ending a show with the same character lying in the same place was true literary genius. Jack’s character went through several developments. He started out strong (though somewhat reluctant), then in the middle he wobbled in uncertainty and weakness. So, for him to act with such faith, clarity and purpose in the end was masterfully orchestrated. Talk about a dynamic character. Seeing him die in the bamboo grove after saving the Island and his friends provided complete closure to his narrative – arguably the crux of all of Lost. (It’s just too bad the confusion and irritation over the purgatory scenes interrupted/de-climaxed his noble march back to the place where everything began.) Based on what we learned from the purgatory scenes (one of this concept’s few pluses), one could even make the case that Jack didn’t start living until he crashed on the Island, and so for him to die in that same place is incredibly symbolic. It’s a great scene, perhaps the defining TV moment of my generation, although it was somewhat robbed of power and vigor by the ambiguity of the afterlife scenes.

So, where does all this leave us? In many ways, in the same place we started. Lots of “whys” and “whats” are still unanswered, many of the threads we had hoped would all come to one singular point at the end didn’t necessarily connect, and Jack lies dead on the same patch of earth his journey began – only as a changed man who found a balance between faith and action.

Maybe that’s what “The End” is trying to tell us: Like those who struggled on the Island, it’s not about how many questions remain unanswered, but the amount of faith we apply along the way and the person we become.

Maybe we’re like Ben, who even at journey’s end and the happily ever-after is at arm’s reach, we still need a few moments outside the church to reflect and assess everything that’s happened.

As a series finale, “The End” does well, but falls short in some areas. If you’re disappointed in the finale and judge Lost likewise, I think you’ve missed the point. Yeah, maybe the creators didn’t have everything as perfectly planned out as we all thought. As for me, I would do it all over again, with the comfort of knowing that in the real world, all of the plot devices and character developments do matter and will eventually come together in one all-encompassing, resolving point.

Well, that’s all I got. My brain hurts. What do ya’ll think?

The Land Before We Knew They Indoctrinated Kids via Animated Movies

I watched The Land Before Time on VHS with the wifey last night. A few random thoughts:

1. That movie felt a lot longer when I was a kid. Maybe because my soul was so awash in anguish over the death of Littlefoot’s mother, and his ensuing depression, that my sorrow made the movie go by slower.

2. Animated movie story lines haven’t progressed very much since 1988. They still follow this basic pattern: “Hey, I know, we’ll take like five different kinds of [insert category here], have them go through [insert a cataclysmic, life-altering, dangerous event here], and in the process they’ll learn to get along and be tolerant of each other’s differences, and in the end everything turns out OK!” Yeah. Time for some innovation, Hollywood writers.

3. Petrie is gay. No other way to look at it. He “can’t” fly, but then he can. Come on – how can I not read that to mean that he’s coming out of the closet. And with that lisp of his, it’s just a dead giveaway.

4. Holy blatant evolution, Batman! And my parents let me, an impressionable 5-year-old, see this movie and allowed me to think that dinosaurs lived before mammals and human beings. Unconscionable. Maybe they were just too mesmerized by Pat Hingle’s deep, sultry narration to notice the overt evolutionary indoctrination. If there was ever some sneaky liberal agenda smuggled into a kids’ movie, this has gotta be the big one.

5. Littlefoot, Cera, Petrie, Ducky and Spike were really, really tiny dinosaurs. Right before Sharp Tooth smashed Littlefoot’s tree star, they were all sleeping in a dino footprint. Where’s the proper scaling? These were dinosaurs, not field mice.

6. Was that big, old spiky dinosaur that Littlefoot bumped into shortly after his mother died supposed to be a Yoda-like figure? Old, wrinkly dude with bushy eyebrows gives sage/Eastern-religiousy advice, then just wanders off, leaving the poor kid to fend for himself. Real original, George Lucas.

7. How many of those rubber hand puppets from Pizza Hutt did y’all have? We had dozens of them. Pretty sweet stuff.

8. I now know where Spielberg got the notion that he could pull off the ending in Jurassic Park, where the T-Rex “suddenly” appears and snatches the raptor out of the air – all without a single sound, tremor or anything. So, in TLBT, right before the gang dumped Sharp Tooth into the “pond”, Ducky goes into the cave to bait him out into the open. Ducky peeks behind a rock, sees Sharp Tooth, then cowers behind the rock when Sharp Tooth roars. When Ducky looks back up, Sharp Tooth is nowhere to be found. Ducky backs away from her hiding place, then – BOOM! – out of nowhere, there’s Sharp Tooth, right behind her! In other words, Spielberg barrowed a ridiculous, implausible scene from a 1988 kids’ movie to end one of the most ground-breaking films of the last 30 years. Way to think that one through.

All-in-all, watching the Land Before Time as a 25-year-old married, young professional really helped me figure out a lot of things in my life. Plus, it was more entertaining than watching LeBron James suck it up against the Celtics. (Always beware the MVP-award game.) And, most importantly, I was finally able to accept the death Littlefoot’s mother. I’ve been carrying that burden around for far too long. An enormous weight has been lifted from my soul.