A Serious Epilogue

Learning the true meaning of grace and resolving to erase self-justification from my life brings great peace to my soul.

...but...a few things still linger.
The lingering things are ultimately meaningless.
Just because we find the true nature of God doesn't mean that we stop being human.
Hence I found myself still questioning some aspects of my life, even though I felt like I was on the right road in the grand scheme of things.

Specifically, I wondered what I was to do about those John Wayne movies I loved.
I love classic westerns because of their stories of good vs. evil.
They are violent movies, but violence in fiction is not the destructive act that it is in real life. It is instead a dramatic movement for the action good takes over evil.

Of course, the argument of the impossibility of evil in alcohol applies to most movies: a movie itself can't be evil since it has no will power or ego of its own.
The evil is within me.
So the question is, can I watch these movies appropriately, or will they only serve to lead me back to the dark side again?

It's a real danger.
I kind of idolize the strong heroes that John Wayne plays.
I take this so far as to buying cowboy hats that I can wear when I go walking in the woods. I got one that resembles Robert Redford's hat in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, but I wanted a more summery hat, and John Wayne's hat from Hondo was perfect.
I can't find it anywhere though.

A detour for a minute:
The day after completing the journey I have written about on this blog, I went to see the Coen Brothers' A Serious Man.
It's eerie how certain elements of this movie reflected what I was going through.
Thank God I did not experience the Job-like experience that the main character Larry Gopnik has in that movie. But he responded to these incidents much like how I did: wondering what God is trying to tell me in the midst of all of this chaos.
Larry's journeys is baffling. He learns nothing about the meaning of life purpose of the bad luck he has experienced.
The only sense of meaning he learns during the story is that helping others "couldn't hurt".

This mirrors the realization that I experienced the day before: there is nothing we can really do to fix ourselves or the world. The only thing we can do that insures we are right with God is to help others as He has helped us...even when they don't deserve it.

What a coincidence!
Here's another one:
Halfway through the movie when Larry talks to his lawyer, way over in the upper right corner of the screen hangs the Hondo hat on a rack on the wall!

No kidding.
The hat I've been looking for was randomly put into a non-western about a character learning exactly what I learned the day before?

But what did it mean?
On the ride home I told my Dad (who saw the movie with me) about the Hondo hat coincidence.
Discussing this led to me discussing the message of A Serious Man; in particular the issue of helping others when they don't deserve it.
Larry does this at the very end of the movie, of which I said, "It's good in principle, but I wouldn't want everyone to help people that way as a rule," (I'm being vague to avoid spoilers), "...but it's just a story."

Bingo!
That was it.
I then asked my Dad, "Did I just answer my own question about the westerns?"
"They are only stories," he replied.
If I approach the John Wayne movies as just purely stories instead of Right-Winged rituals, it's OK.

I would have never discussed this if that hat wasn't in the movie.

It really makes you wonder if God really does tweak things here and there for us to stumble upon His answer to our prayers.