hava cuppa
It pays to read
Nick's blog occasionally. Greyfriar's has gone on the
web!! WOooooohoooo!!!!
random thoughts thought while avoiding German homework
Over the weekend we watched the movie
Dancing at Lughnasa. About five unmarried sisters and the son of one of them living together, scraping a living, in rural Ireland, 1930s. I kind of wanted to see at after Covenant did it as a play awhile back while I was a student. I didn't really remember too much about the play, except one of the characters smoked a lot, which didn't bother me in theory, but it really stank up Sanderson 215, wh. wasn't properly venthilated. And it seemed that part of it was just taking liberty with contract for "art's sake"...but that's long gone, and I don't really care about that anymore (nor did I really ever anyway). So anyway..another movie with Meryl Streep. We really enjoyed it. It's so sad. One thing I found interesting (and I remember thinking this about the play, when I remembered what the play was about) was the character of the brother of the sisters...the oldest of the siblings, Father Jack...a priest just come home home from decades as a missionary in Africa. Whatever ails him is never very clear. He's clearly tired, but I wasn't sure if he was sick, too. He misses Africa a lot. And it seems that the Africans have converted him, rather than he the Africans. He's adopted their religion, way of life, customs, language, community with the earth, gods, whatever. He never stops wearing his priest's garb, but saying Mass seems irrelevant to him, part of another world in which he doesn't belong anymore. He struggles to remember English words. During that time period, containing vestiges of imperialism flickering still, missions was done in as an entire (
gesamt) endeavor. It wasn't a matter of "saving souls" for the True religion. This true religion was seen in the eyes of many priests and missionaries as dinstinctly connected to Western culture, so that in order to be "saved" you had to give up your tribal ways and become "civilized". It's not a new story what a cultural travesty that wrought on non-Western cultures. I just found it fascinating to see it go the other way in the character of Father Jack. And it was so subtle in this film...