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Under the cat­e­gory of things-that-don’t-agree-with-me-aesthetically-but-are-nonetheless-awesome, we have here an incred­i­ble, spine-tingling, heart-lifting video put together by Faith Church of Budapest Hungary: on Easter Sunday this year, 1300 young folks gath­ered in Heroes Square in down­town Budapest and very pub­licly put on a chore­o­graphed wor­ship dance to a Hungarian praise song.

The music doesn’t all appeal to me, nei­ther does the dance moves they chose for the video. But the very fact of their being there sends chills up and down my spine. You see, I’ve been there. I spent some time in Eastern Europe six years ago, and stood in this very square in front of the Millenium Memorial. It’s an old, pati­naed monument–this wasn’t erected at the turn of the mil­le­nium, but in honor of the thou­sandth year of Hungarian his­tory in 1898. And it sits in the mid­dle of a bleak square with an acre of paving stones around it in the heart of Budapest–a city still very much under the shadow of its years of Communism and repres­sion, when Christians were not allowed to prac­tice openly.

This church that started small in those dark days has grown to encom­pass a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of the com­mu­nity, now hold­ing mul­ti­ple ser­vices of tens of thou­sands apiece on Sunday morn­ing. I’m not whole­heart­edly com­fort­able with the trend of megachurches in US main­line evan­gel­i­cal cir­cles, but the Lord appears to be doing a mighty work here. For even just six years ago I couldn’t have imag­ined so many of Budapest’s youth (and older folks, too) stand­ing joy­ful in one of the bleak­est spots in down­town Budapest and danc­ing and singing the good news. For the song they were singing was par­tic­u­larly mean­ing­ful to me, hav­ing seen the dam­age sta­tism and tyranny has done to their coun­try in the past century.

That day will be remem­bered as the great­est day in his­tory
The fate of the world changed in one glo­ri­ous moment
When Life tri­umphed on Resurrection Sunday

The hope of a peo­ple search­ing for life
The day will be brighter
The mes­sage of free­dom rings in the sky
Spreading the fire
The flag of a nation ready to fly
Taking them higher
The heart of a land that rises to fight
Full of desire
When noth­ing is as you want it to be
Look up to heaven
Freedom was paid for on Calvary
The chain is bro­ken
Making a way right to des­tiny
Borders are open
And Jesus has granted the vic­tory
That Sunday morning

Joy in this life time, utterly free
More than the world gives, beyond what you see
For nations its time to rise their hope is in Jesus Christ
If the giants come, just hold on, the advan­tage is now on your side
Jesus, will take the final fight

A light dawned that Sunday Morning
It broke through the bound­aries of time
Hearts start shin­ing, call­ing to all mankind
Lets cel­e­brate eter­nal life

When noth­ing is as you want it to be
Look up to heaven
Freedom was paid for on Calvary
The chain is bro­ken
Making a way right to des­tiny
Borders are open
And Jesus has granted the vic­tory
That Sunday morning

Joy in this life time, utterly free
More than the world gives, beyond what you see
For nations its time to rise their hope is in Jesus Christ
If the giants come, just hold on, the advan­tage is now on your side
Jesus, will take the final fight

Watch it. I can’t hear this with­out cry­ing. For a coun­try that’s been through so much, come through the fires and flames of sec­u­lar human­ism, it is time to rise, and their great­est hope is in Jesus Christ. Jesus will take the final fight!

Last Saturday night I was toss­ing around a cou­ple rhyming lines in my head before going to bed, and they just weren’t fit­ting cor­rectly. I got up Sunday morn­ing and headed to church, not really think­ing about what I had been work­ing on the night before. I was sit­ting in church, lis­ten­ing to the ser­mon, when sud­denly the lines just fell into place in my head. As I sat there, a sec­ond verse came to me, then a third. I real­ized it wasn’t going to stop, got up (we run a rather infor­mal ser­vice), stepped out to my car and found a note­book, and returned to my seat. Before I really real­ized it, I had a dozen or more verses in my note­book! I’m post­ing it here for oth­ers to read and enjoy…it’s not fully fin­ished, so com­ments and sug­ges­tions are wel­comed and appreciated!

Lord, show me Your way,
When I walk in the gray
Not in dark­ness, or in light
But the mists of my own sight.

Lord, how can I know
How to walk, and then to grow
In the fog, when I cry out
In the midst of fear and doubt.

Lord, I can­not stand,
Unless You’re with me in this land.
Lest then from Your path I stray
And be found out of Your way.

Lord, here in my storm,
Is lit­tle light and less of form.
Let me hear the blessed sound,
In track­less waste, of solid ground.

Lord, faith give to me,
That I may walk this stormy sea.
Let me trust now that Thy arm
Shall pro­tect me from all harm.

Lord, I can­not steer,
My own course, through storms of fear.
Without Your light I soon should fail;
My soul be swamped, unless you bail.

Lord, when I shall guide
My own steps, from this side.
Then I can­not help but sink
‘Neath the waves and o’er the brink.

Lord, I can­not see
What Your will would have of me.
Let me cry, lest I should fall
Thy Word be my all in all.

Lord, please clear mine eyes
Balance all, and let me prize
In my heart Thy Word aright
That I may safe come through this fight.

Lord, now help me fight
Long as I stand within Your light.
Yet when clouds shall cover me
Let not my thoughts stray far from Thee.

Solid truth shall set me free
Bring safe to har­bor, near to Thee
Let not me trust my dark­ened sight
Be thou, my Lord, my per­fect light.

This event got me to think­ing about the nature of cre­ativ­ity. I would hes­i­tate to use the word “inspired”, because that implies a lot of other things. But this was one of the stranger expe­ri­ences I’ve had with creativity…usually, I spend some time over a poem, con­struct­ing each verse and rhyme–rarely does any­thing of length come to me fully– (or mostly-) formed. Yet all our cre­ativ­ity stems from God, sub­cre­ation­ally, so should we be sur­prised when He takes dif­fer­ent paths with it?

Note: I don’t have a tune for this, and so if anyone’d like to tackle it, shoot me a mes­sage! I did notice while I was writ­ing this post that it fits fairly well with the tra­di­tional Celtic tune arranged by the Scottish band Runrig for “One Thing” on their The Stamping Grou

After the excel­lent CHEC 2010 Family Conference in Denver, I had a sin­gle day to see as much of Colorado as I could with my father and mother, baby sis­ter Katie, and younger brother Matthew. The high­light of our trip was an excur­sion up Mount Evans along Colorado Highway 5–the Highway to the Stars. The high­est paved road in the world, Highway 5 runs from below Echo Lake around 7,000 feet to a park­ing lot slightly below the sum­mit at 14,130 feet. For this flat­lander, 14,000 feet was a new experience–with atmos­pheric pres­sure down to only ~65% of sea level, the high bar­ren alpine mead­ows and ridge­lines were a far cry from the wooded moun­tains of my beloved Blue Ridge, remind­ing me of the “Scottish Soldier” folk song:

Because these green hills are not Highland hills
Or the island hills, they’re not my land’s hills
And fair as these green for­eign hills may be
They’re not the hills of home.

That said, it was an incred­i­ble, breath­tak­ing experience…but don’t let me tell you, you can see for yourself!

Highway to the Stars An album from our expe­di­tion up Mount Evans in Colorado, along the breath­tak­ing Highway to the Stars, the high­est paved road in the world. Mount Evans, CO 28 pho­tos

Another one from the files–here’s my review of WALL-E, pub­lished in the August 2008 Carolina Journal.

Disney/Pixar’s lat­est ani­mated odyssey opens to a much bleaker world than the one out­side the the­ater doors. A shell of aban­doned satel­lites rings a wasted Earth mounded in trash and stud­ded with spent nuclear reac­tors and empty cities. The sky has taken on a cop­per hue from the con­tin­ual dust­storms, and even the ultra­mod­ern tran­sit sys­tems and star­ports are empty and wind­blown. When the Earth’s pol­lu­tion accu­mu­lated to an unliv­able level, the humans boarded cruise-ships-to-the-stars and left an army of Waste Allocation Load Lifter-Earth Class robots to deal with the ruined planet.

The only prob­lem is the project failed. Only one robot still works on, and he is lonely. WALL-E, voiced by Ben Burtt, toils cheer­fully dur­ing the day, but spends his evenings won­der­ing what it would be like to have a friend. Pollution-ruined robots dot the land­scape, and WALL-E’s only com­pan­ion is a cockroach.

When an inquis­i­tive Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator, a gor­geous but sharp-tempered space probe named EVE, Elissa Knight, sud­denly drops into his envi­ron­ment, he is instantly smit­ten. He takes her to his “home” to show her the odd­i­ties he has col­lected in his work. When she finds a seedling in his hoard, though, she col­lects the plant and goes into hiber­na­tion. When her car­rier rocket returns to pick her up, WALL-E stows away as the space­ship leaves for the Crab Nebula.

When the robots and their pre­cious plant reach the Axiom, an immense star­ship shel­ter­ing the human race, they encounter another trou­bled world. Waited on hand-and-foot by a crew of obse­quious robot stew­ards, the humans have lived a life devoid of phys­i­cal exer­tion or per­sonal respon­si­bil­ity. They are unable even to act for their own good.

EVE’s plant, like the olive sprig the dove returned to Noah’s ark, indi­cates that Earth can sup­port life again and human­ity can return. The robots are not so ready to relin­quish their power, and a colos­sal strug­gle erupts over who will con­trol the plant. EVE and WALL-E must race against time to rouse the humans if they are ever to return to Earth.

WALL-E is a per­son­able lit­tle robot, and his cheer­ful labor and inno­cent curios­ity will endear him to view­ers. EVE is ini­tially cold, until she replays her mem­o­ries of Earth for the star­ship cap­tain and real­izes the lit­tle things WALL-E did for her. Her sub­se­quent devo­tion to WALL-E, who risks his life to recover the plant and com­plete her mis­sion, is touch­ing. It raises inter­est­ing ques­tions about robot romances but plays out well in the movie.

The under­ly­ing themes are more prob­lem­atic, though. Humans are depicted as finally hav­ing ruined the earth with nuclear reac­tors, oil tankers, satel­lites, and the excess of con­sumerism — sym­bol­ized by bill­boards on the moon. The film issues a strong indict­ment against mod­ern soci­ety, por­tray­ing the human race as a self­ish horde of con­sumers focused solely on leisure and enter­tain­ment. BNL, the global cor­po­ra­tion that built and oper­ates the Axiom, is actu­ally short for “Buy-N-Large.” Every human on board the star­ship lives in a motor­ized hov­er­chair, their every whim sup­plied by the robot stew­ards. Virtual golf and ten­nis are com­mon pas­times on the Axiom, but few of the grotesquely obese pas­sen­gers even know that there is a real swim­ming pool aboard.

These adverse impres­sions are mit­i­gated some­what by a plot that pushes the humans finally to develop some mus­cle and that shows the envi­ron­ment finally becom­ing hab­it­able again. Political jabs are less bal­anced, though. The brief­ing room of the White House is shown twice, with the BNL logo sub­sti­tuted for the Great Seal, as the for­mer CEO of BNL, Fred Willard, issues dis­as­trous advice in a heavy Texas accent, urg­ing his lis­ten­ers to “stay the course” in a not-so-subtle com­par­i­son to President Bush.

These envi­ron­men­tal and soci­etal premises have a decid­edly alarmist slant, but the actual plot­line bal­ances it to a large degree. The char­ac­ters are mas­ter­fully drawn, and Pixar’s ani­ma­tion is flaw­less as always. Taken alto­gether, “WALL-E” is a supremely enter­tain­ing film, with more seri­ous themes. It will be enjoyed by all ages, and well deserves a place next to “Finding Nemo,” “The Incredibles,” and “Cars” on the fam­ily DVD shelves.

Around Easter, in either late March or early April, the dog­woods around my home in North Carolina and my school in Virginia burst into bloom. Although they come in many dif­fer­ent col­ors, white, cream, pink, and near-orange, it is the deep pink/red ones which are my favorite, for they have a story behind them.

As you will find if you ever have to cut down a dead dog­wood tree, the wood is a beau­ti­ful thing. It’s a clear, smooth pink hard­wood, with a fra­grant scent—a wood seem­ingly excel­lent for any of a num­ber of projects. But if you look closely at the trees, you see that there are very few branches larger than a half inch, and the trunk and major branches both are short and branch often, leav­ing few straight sec­tions suit­able for any­thing big­ger than minor wood­crafts. But the leg­end states that the dog­wood was not always this way. Supposedly, the dog­wood was once a tall, straight tree, easy to grow and easy to work. So easy, in fact, that the rough cross hacked out for Jesus’s exe­cu­tion was cut from a dog­wood. In pun­ish­ment (or com­mem­o­ra­tion, depend­ing on how you look at it), the Lord remade the dog­wood, mak­ing it a low, twist­ing, largely orna­men­tal tree, so that never again could it be used for a pur­pose so heinous.

Its flow­ers and blood-red berries are also said to carry a memo­r­ial. In the dead of win­ter, in the sea­son of our Savior’s birth, you will notice almost alone among the trees the dog­wood stands laden down with deep red berries that sus­tain birds and other beasts through the worst of the win­ter. And then when Easter comes, its del­i­cate flow­ers open at last, a storm of creamy petals, mostly in pure white and a red-tinged pink. Each flower tells the story, for at the edge of every smooth petals appears a wound or scar, mar­ring the per­fect beauty of the four petals with a sym­bol of Christ’s hands, feet, and side. A wash of red, like blood, stains each white petal. In the cen­ter of the flower* appears a crown of thorns. These spec­tac­u­lar flow­ers appear typ­i­cally shortly before Easter and stay for a short period, then fall in a rain of vel­vet petals, leav­ing the “crown” to bear fruit for the next winter.

Do we know what tree the cross was made from? No, we don’t. Is it even impor­tant? No, of course not. But like the sham­rock, every sym­bol we can find in cre­ation is worth remem­ber­ing that all cre­ation cries out to remind us of the truth? And like Lewis’s Ransom, with a God like ours, how can we be sure of coin­ci­dence? When we con­sider the love and pur­pose of God, how can we say the dog­wood was not orig­i­nally cre­ated like that to remind even one of us, when we walk among the red-tinged flow­ers at Easter, of the true story and mean­ing of the sea­son? In this way does the hum­ble dog­wood memo­ri­al­ize Christ’s death until this world shall pass away.

* tech­ni­cally, the dog­wood bears inflo­rations, flower clus­ters with bracts, but we’ll call them flow­ers for now.

Sunday, dri­ving down through the wilds of rural South Carolina, we crested a hill and real­ized that in advance of the front edge of a storm sys­tem, wide beams of light were break­ing through the light cloud cover, reach­ing down to touch each hill­top. I wish I had a picture–it was an incred­i­ble sight, but I was dri­ving, try­ing to make up the time after get­ting lost, and couldn’t get out my camera.

Such beams of sun­light are noth­ing more than that–bright light catch­ing the dust or wisps of cloud in the air and light­ing them up, much like a flashlight’s beam can be seen in a dusty room. Artists (par­tic­u­larly in com­puter graph­ics) call such beams of light “god-beams”, since peo­ple are fas­ci­nated with such ethe­real phenomena–they appear to reach from heaven to earth and look so real, yet are intan­gi­ble and hard to cap­ture on film. The incred­i­ble sight that after­noon put me in mind of a few things appro­pri­ate to the Sabbath we were trav­el­ing through–the incred­i­ble beauty of even a bro­ken world, and what Christ’s return may hold.

I’ve always been fas­ci­nated by hymns such as It Is Well With My Soul that speak to what our Savior and King’s tri­umphant return may look like (lyrics quoted below from Cyberhymnal):

And Lord, haste the day when my faith shall be sight,
The clouds be rolled back as a scroll;
The trump shall resound, and the Lord shall descend,
Even so, it is well with my soul.

Such incred­i­ble, spine-tingling sights such as a bril­liant patch of sun­beams break­ing through the clouds from an unimag­in­able bright­ness make me think about what that day may look like. The Lord gives little-to-few details, but what he does men­tion hint at a pretty spec­tac­u­lar event. From 1 Thessalonians 4, 16–18 (ESV):

For the Lord him­self will descend from heaven with a cry of com­mand, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trum­pet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord. Therefore encour­age one another with these words.

Or Isaiah 34:4, also from the ESV:

All the host of heaven shall rot away, and the skies roll up like a scroll. All their host shall fall, as leaves fall from the vine, like leaves falling from the fig tree.

Whenever I see sun­beams like that, I think of His return. It may be just be the poet in me, but I imag­ine a clear sky, bluest of blues, cloudless…when sud­denly like the sun break­ing through the clouds, the true light of heaven breaks through into our world, out-shining the sun, and the very fab­ric of our real­ity rolls away. I have no doubt it will most likely hap­pen dif­fer­ently, prob­a­bly in a way unimag­in­able to me on this side of the event. But the thought excites me nonetheless…to crib from C.S. Lewis, when Christ returns, why, then it shall be spring!

May we always live in the knowl­edge that Christ is coming–neither to for­get the Master is return­ing, nor to atro­phy our tal­ents idly wait­ing, for we are to be found working!

(I’m not delv­ing into the niceties of inter­pret­ing end-times prophe­cies here, as legit­i­mate as those dis­cus­sions may be. Suffice it to say that I believe that the Second Coming of Christ is indeed set forth as a phys­i­cal, actual, (if more-than-physical, as well) event that will occur, but has not yet. The details of the tim­ing may indeed be a legit­i­mate the­o­log­i­cal dis­cus­sion, but this is not the forum or time to go into that.)

After yesterday’s post about the Voyage of the Dawn Treader, where I men­tioned Prince Caspian’s dis­as­trous devi­a­tion from the orig­i­nal story, I real­ized I had never posted this arti­cle I wrote shortly after see­ing the film on the the­matic struc­ture and motifs of Prince Caspian. (I inten­tion­ally did not com­ment on the inter­po­lated romance between Caspian and Susan, which I con­sider to be extremely dis­tract­ing and dam­ag­ing to the film as a whole and pos­si­bly the franchise.)

We Are All Minotaurs

Last week I went open­ing night with three of my broth­ers to see the new Chronicles of Narnia film, Prince Caspian. The film does not fol­low the book really closely, but it did do some things very well, and it set me think­ing. Before I watched the film, I had always thought of Prince Caspian as a rather point­less  book. It wasn’t a grand alle­gory like The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe or The Last Battle, but it didn’t have a par­tic­u­lar theme of its own like Dawn Treader or The Silver Chair—or so I thought. Although they dis­carded mas­sive chunks of the book when mak­ing the film, the film­mak­ers retained every line of the dia­logue that dealt with the spir­i­tual side of the story, empha­siz­ing the the­matic and alle­gor­i­cal ele­ments that made it what it was. As the film closed I was amazed—they hadn’t added any­thing to the famil­iar lines from the book (in that par­tic­u­lar realm), but they had drawn out a theme which I hadn’t really seen as inte­gral to the story.

It really dawned on me when Lucy finally meets Aslan—when towards the end, she talks to him at last. Aslan asks her, “Little One, why didn’t you come to me?” She answers, “But…but—the oth­ers wouldn’t believe! They wouldn’t lis­ten to me!” “Yes, I know, but why didn’t you come?”She looks down, and with a catch in her voice admits, “I-I guess I was scared. But-but Aslan?!–if I had come when I saw you, would the oth­ers be dead?” “Lucy, how many times have I told you that you can­not know what would have been? But what will be—that is a dif­fer­ent mat­ter!” I real­ized that that was the true mean­ing, the real theme of the story—that some­times we have to take things on faith, and not waver—that Caspian had to trust the Professor, trust that the horn would bring help, trust that the chil­dren and then Aslan would truly help him. Peter, Susan, Edmund and not least Lucy had to place their faith implic­itly in Aslan, even when it looked like they had been pulled into Narnia only to die. They needed to fol­low him, even when it looked like he was lead­ing them over a precipice to their doom. When things looked dark­est, they had to take it on faith that Aslan would save them, that they were to be found fight­ing for the cause when he came. This theme was brought out pow­er­fully through­out the movie, result­ing in per­haps an even more the­matic film than book.

When I was sit­ting there putting all the pieces of the puz­zle together, I remem­bered a strange detail I had noted ear­lier in the film. There were Minotaurs fight­ing along­side Centaurs and Fauns in Caspian’s army! In the book, there were rem­nants of both good and bad Narnia in the for­est, and they had joined forces orig­i­nally, but the evil ele­ments were soon found to be unable to work along­side the good. True, that hap­pened in the movie, but the Minotaurs were not involved in the mutiny. I sud­denly real­ized that the film­mak­ers, in trans­form­ing the story for the sil­ver screen, had cre­ated a very inter­est­ing visual metaphor in the par­tic­i­pa­tion of the Minotaurs in Caspian’s army. One Minotaur had even been high­lighted, when in one bat­tle, a gate is dropped behind much of the army and a Minotaur throws him­self beneath it, brac­ing him­self to hold it up and allow his com­rades to escape. Even when gut-shot by one of Miraz’s archers, he stood there long enough for most of the army to escape. Something seemed strange here. Thinking back, what were the most vis­i­ble mem­bers of the Witch’s army in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe? The Minotaurs, of course! And yet here they were, fight­ing and dying for the right side this time. How could that be? They didn’t deserve it! It was then I real­ized that the themes of redemp­tion, repen­tance, and sal­va­tion were only strength­ened by this motif. The Minotaurs were unspeak­ably evil, in fact the very sym­bols of the dark army, but after the death of the Son they too were offered grace. Now, despite their her­itage, they had the priv­i­lege of fight­ing in the King’s army, and giv­ing their lives for Him. The alle­gory dawned on me—what are we but Minotaurs in the cos­mic sense? We are the “unspeak­ably evil” ones, the ones whose kin­dred were present and par­tic­i­pated in the death of the Creator’s Son. Yet we had been offered free grace, and we were the ones who should be awed to be asked to give our for­tunes or our lives in the King’s ser­vice. Truly we too have more to appre­ci­ate than any other. We are all Minotaurs. We ought not to for­get it, either.

That’s how book adap­ta­tions ought to be—the film­mak­ers using the strengths of the medium to enhance and rein­force the themes of the orig­i­nal work. Not to say that the film­mak­ers did every­thing right with Prince Caspian—far from it—but that the metaphor of the redeemed Minotaurs fight­ing in the King’s army left me with a poignant image of the theme, one which left me think­ing for days. That’s the way it ought to be.

With great excite­ment I watched this trailer for the first time–the sea of lilies, the star’s daugh­ter, the beach at the end of the world, the very appear­ance of the Dawn Treader, and the Dufflepuds…come majes­ti­cally to the sil­ver screen, and in 3D no less! It was on my sec­ond, and third, and fourth rewatch­ing with my fel­low C.S. Lewis friends, that we noticed a cou­ple of sig­nif­i­cant discrepancies…

• Where does Jadis (the White Witch) come in? The shot in the trailer seems to hint at some sort of vision, so I sup­pose it could be part of the Dark Island sequence, but some­how she looked more…corporeal…than that.
• Where’s Eustace and/as the dragon? Apparently he is in the movie, as an effects house has been con­tracted to pro­vide 200 shots of the dragon, but he’s not in the trailer almost at all (only one shot, in his bedroom).
• I was incred­i­bly excited to see the sea of lilies, and the beach at the end of the world. But where do Peter and Susan come in? They weren’t sup­posed to be there! (H/T: I noticed this one only after see­ing some­one men­tion it in a Youtube com­ment…) One other thing–is that Aslan’s moun­tain behind him in one of the final shots? I can’t wait for the Silver Chair!
• What’s the deal with Lucy and the snow? I pre­sume it’s meant to be another spell she exper­i­ments with, but I can’t remem­ber any­thing like that.

A friend of mine got to see some very advanced footage from VDT over two years ago, early in production–he stated that he was wor­ried about the final film, because it appeared that they have empha­sized the darker parts of the tale to the detri­ment of all else…

I will be very excited to see it, but I’m con­cerned about what the new direc­tor will do to the film, pos­si­bly devi­at­ing from the orig­i­nal in the dis­as­trous way Prince Caspian did (although PC at least stayed rel­a­tively con­sis­tent the­mat­i­cally.) December can­not come quick enough!

P.S. My brother cor­rectly iden­ti­fied the music swirling into the final sequences as “Heart of Courage” by band “Two Steps from Hell”. Can’t say I like the name, but it sure sounds awesome…

My good friend Tristany recently rein­tro­duced me to an artist I’d heard of before but had never had time to check out prop­erly. Fernando Ortega is a clas­si­cally trained pianist, singer, and song­writer whose music draws on clas­si­cal, Latin American, coun­try, and Celtic influ­ences to cre­ate some of the most beau­ti­ful, rev­er­ent acoustic music for wor­ship and life I have ever heard. The first song of his I heard, and still my favorite (although he has an excel­lent col­lec­tion of old hymns done RIGHT) is the fol­low­ing, “Shame”:

Though I am weak, some­times weary
In times of trial I hide my face
In the bal­ance, judge me wholly
Please don’t judge me
By my shame

In dark hours of con­fronta­tion
When words may fall too soon to unsay
Don’t mis­take them for my true mean­ing
They are mea­sures
Of my shame

Refrain:
I have tried to live life humbly
Not a cow­ard, not in vain
When my meek­ness over­comes me
Remember me, not my shame
Not my shame

I am small and self-conscious
Every mir­ror reflects the grain
Judge my essence by my kin­ships
Remember me
Not my shame

I am weak, some­times weary
Sometimes small, I hide away
When my hours are all accounted
Please don’t bind me
To my shame

Refrain

Ortega’s arrange­ments of tra­di­tional hymns, par­tic­u­larly little-known Celtic hymns, are among the best I’ve ever heard. His music is typ­i­cally expres­sive, with­out being overly embellished–the hymns in par­tic­u­lar are well-suited to sing along with. I hope you will find his music, as I do, unusu­ally appro­pri­ate for a Sunday morn­ing, and well worth lis­ten­ing to through­out the week.

Originally pub­lished in the February 2010 issue of Carolina Journal. Enjoy!

Casting American actor Robert Downey Jr. (Iron Man, Tropic Thunder) as Sherlock Holmes was the first clue that Guy Ritchie was not fol­low­ing in the steps of Holmesian cin­e­matic tra­di­tion. Shot on loca­tion in Liverpool and London, Ritchie’s lav­ish cin­e­matic reimag­in­ing of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s clas­sic char­ac­ters will please many, but read­ers of the orig­i­nal books will find more at stake than Sherlock’s use of the King’s English.

The film opens with one of Holmes’ dar­ing escapades, infil­trat­ing an under­ground crypt and inter­rupt­ing an occult blood cer­e­mony. Tearing off the perpetrator’s hood, Holmes and Watson (Jude Law) reveal none other than Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong), a promi­nent mem­ber of Parliament. Inspector Lestrade (Eddie Marsan) turns up in due course to col­lar both the crim­i­nal and the credit for the capture.

Blackwood is duly hanged (and his death cer­ti­fied by none other than our own Dr. Watson.) Yet his tomb is mys­te­ri­ously bro­ken open, and the dead man seen walk­ing, appar­ently unharmed.

It is quickly revealed that the hanged Blackwood was a mem­ber of a mys­ti­cal order ded­i­cated to using their black arts to manip­u­late the course of his­tory. As mys­te­ri­ous killings crop up around London, Holmes and com­pany must sift through a myr­iad of clues to find Blackwood and expose his nefar­i­ous plot before it changes Britain for­ever. On the way, Holmes and Watson will spend a night in jail, ran­sack illicit lab­o­ra­to­ries, and sur­vive a rigged pow­der explo­sion before bring­ing the case to a suc­cess­ful con­clu­sion. It sounds clichéd, because it is.

The film is set at the end of Watson’s time liv­ing with Holmes at 221B Baker Street. Holmes refuses to admit it, but he is afraid of miss­ing Watson and tries repeat­edly to draw him back into the chase and dis­tract him from his fiancé Mary Morrison (Kelly Reilly). Watson sees this as betrayal, and the repar­tee between the two dri­ves many scenes through the film. Deviating from the books, Holmes has a roman­tic inter­est of his own —Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams), object of Holmes’ pro­fes­sional admi­ra­tion from A Scandal in Bohemia. She makes a splashy entrance back into Holmes’ life, unafraid of using her fem­i­nine wiles to manip­u­late him for goals of her own.

The film is set in Victorian London, and the over­all feel is pre­dictably grimy, espe­cially in the under­world that Holmes fre­quents. Ritchie has gone for more of an action vibe in this film than pre­vi­ous Holmes iter­a­tions, with shaky hand­held cam­era work more rem­i­nis­cent of The Bourne Ultimatum than Amazing Grace or other period dra­mas. Holmes and Watson walk, run, and fight their way through a richly detailed world, but the flat light­ing in many com­puter enhanced scenes gives it a feel of unre­al­ity in con­flict with the gritty tone of the pro­duc­tion as a whole. Hans Zimmer con­tributes a tense, dis­cor­dant action score based on Hungarian dul­cimers and other unusual instru­ments — while its manic energy suits the film, it isn’t one I’ll be revisiting.

Surprisingly, given the gritty stag­ing, the film­mak­ers still showed some restraint. Holmes’ rela­tion­ship with Adler is some­what risqué, hint­ing at more than is said or shown directly, but still less than I expected after watch­ing the trailer. Drinking and smok­ing is quite preva­lent, but the cocaine use men­tioned in the books has been side­lined. The film is extremely vio­lent, how­ever, depict­ing in some­what gory detail numer­ous fist­fights, includ­ing a bare-knuckle box­ing match, and leav­ing lin­ger­ing images of grue­some killings — a man burned to death, another hanged, a third drowned. Several occult rit­u­als, includ­ing one recon­structed by Sherlock Holmes him­self, are depicted in hair-raising detail, although in clas­sic Conan Doyle fash­ion, most super­nat­ural events have very phys­i­cal expla­na­tions. Families would do well to exer­cise cau­tion before allow­ing chil­dren or younger teens to see this film.

The plot def­i­nitely delves into the realm of the strange and absurd. The occult cer­e­monies, mega­lo­ma­ni­a­cal vil­lains, and the macabre dis­cov­er­ies as Holmes closes in — while far­fetched and occa­sion­ally absurd — are all details true to the orig­i­nal books, as are the strained rela­tions between Holmes and Watson on a num­ber of occa­sions. Even such eccen­tric­i­ties as Holmes’s bare-knuckle prowess and his ency­clo­pe­dic knowl­edge of London soils are taken straight from the orig­i­nal. Though each is accu­rate, these details do not make up the full picture.

The roman­tic entan­gle­ment with Irene Adler, while a favorite the­ory of Sherlock Holmes fans, is not in the books and is indeed con­trary to Holmes’s stated char­ac­ter — the pre­cise, some­times cold logi­cian is gone, and in his place merely an eccentric.

The phys­i­cal action even devolves into slap­stick humor when Holmes is con­fronted with a pugna­cious giant of a hench­man seven feet tall. The clas­sic Victorian reserve demon­strated even in the midst of pre­cip­i­tous action by pre­vi­ous cin­e­matic Holmeses — such as Jeremy Brett — is absent, and both Holmes and Watson feel much more direct (“American,” per­haps?). The action in the film is so fre­netic that when Holmes finally does sit down and put his log­i­cal mind to work, it feels more like an aber­ra­tion than his true nature.

Ritchie has pro­duced a rol­lick­ing action film that just hap­pens to be set in Holmes’ London. It is a watch­able and even enjoy­able film for fans of Doyle’s char­ac­ters, but with the orig­i­nal Holmes con­cen­trated, enhanced, and caf­feinated for the American mar­ket, any trace of intel­lect or nuance is gone in favor of beau­ti­fully chore­o­graphed fight scenes and big-budget spectacle.

While large box office receipts and plen­ti­ful hooks for a Moriarty-centered sequel all but guar­an­tee a suc­ces­sor, this block­buster reboot of the series adds noth­ing worth­while to the canon.