buy Pregabalin in uk I saw the movie Of Gods and Men two nights ago at the excellent little art-house movie theater in Kew Gardens. The movie was not perfect – poorly paced, occasionally indulgent, not quite as intelligent as it might have been – but it was very good, and it affected me. It depicted the monastic life beautifully – a life given to simple tasks, a life where no conversation is indulged unless it is significant, a life at rest from ambitions other than worshipping God in tiny things. But not only was it beautiful, it was accurate as well – I recognized a great deal from my years teaching in a school run by monks. My mother, who had been a nun, was impressed by how much it reminded her of her time in the convent as well.
buy Gabapentin australia When I left the theater, I could hear again – the movie had no score, and its silence had worked its way into me. I realized that I hadn’t truly heard anything in ages. I walked to my mother’s house along Lefferts Boulevard, hearing every engine from every car and every breath of wind. It made me want to go home to Wildcat Mountain, but it was enough for that night just to be there walking along that road.
It also stirred me another way, in a way I still cannot quite fathom. The movie represented something I know well from real life but really had not seen much of in movies – real Christianity. You may say that the monks in the movie (Frenchmen murdered in an Algerian Civil War) were merely a vestige of colonialism, inheritors of some injustice bound to be avenged, or simply dumb the way all people who do not avoid visible dangers are dumb, but I find it hard to care forever about injustice and stupidity. They are ours; we are born and reared and die in them, and there is no help for it. They will kill us in the end, either our own or someone else’s.
But the movie went out of its way not to spend much time on the monks’ death: the focus was on their life, and on the brief period of time when it was clear to them what is true of all lives: that choices are made against the backdrop of coming death. They did not know if it would come today or in twenty years, but for a brief period of their lives they truly felt it.
And I wanted something I felt they had: a love which was no longer held in reserve, but had already been given, and merely sought to live out its days in gratitude for the receiving. I wanted whatever goodness I had to be not merely my own.
Much more could be said about the film, but this is enough: when I talk about Christianity, I mean something very similar to what is represented in this movie. That is extraordinary enough, I think. Though it is monastic, the ideals it shows of work, worship, and beauty, and the absence of secular conceptions of ambition, are the same as would be found in a Christian family or Christian solitary life.
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