Bastian's Father: "Good morning, Bastian."
Bastian: "Morning, Dad. (pause) I had another dream, Dad."
Bastian's Father: (hesitates and then starts making breakfast: a whole egg in orange juice.) "I got a call from your math teacher, yesterday. She says that you were drawing horses in your math book."
Bastian's: "Unicorns. They were unicorns."
Bastian's Father: "What?"
Bastian: "Nothing."
Bastian's Father: "I understand. (pause) …but, we have to get on. It's no excuse for not getting the old job done, right?"
Bastian: "Yeah."
Bastian's Father: "It's time to stop day dreaming. It's time to face your problems."
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| Nancy Bates Photography |
As the film's adventure continues we see Atrayu, a mythical warrior, summoned and sent on a journey build in the mind of pure imagination. As they send him to accomplish his quest, they say: "Hurry Atrayu. The Nothing grows stronger everyday."
I see two parallels in this film, two worlds. There is the regular everyday mundane world of homework and grumpy dads. And there is the other world of the Fantastica where the majority of the adventure takes place. In this adventure The Nothing begins to overtake the world of Fantastica as piece by piece their amazing world turns to pure nothing. Everything simply disappears into pure nothingness: no treed, no dried up lake, no empty wasteland, just empty space. As the film continues we find out The Nothing represents people's eroding imagination - their in ability to conjure imagination in their real world.
So it goes with our lives void of God. The opposite of believing in a relational, biblical God is believing in nothing. Here's why?
The God of the Bible has done away with sin. This is something no other religion, other god, or other human power has ever been able to do. No matter how hard we try as human beings to attempt, chant, curse, sweat, fight, bully, challenge, or steal our way out of suffering and sin, we can never gain a foothold at conquering the evilness found in the human heart. Particularly our own.
Here's what the prophet Micah says about God:
Who is a God like you, pardoning iniquity
and passing over transgression
for the remnant of his inheritance?
He does not retain his anger forever,
because he delights in steadfast love.
He will again have compassion on us;
he will tread our iniquities underfoot.
You will cast all our sins
into the depths of the sea.
Micah 7:18-19
When we realize what God has done with our sin, it brings us into a story that guides all other stories. This other worldly reality - that appears to us as more of a mythical imaginary possibility (I mean who can ever really imagine a life free form the pain and suffering of sin?) - is meant to guide us through the mundanity of life. Being stuck in our sin without a plausible plan or way out is when the everydayishness of life overwhelms us and becomes the nightmare we can never escape. It's through God's story - full of imagination, wonder, and creativity - that we are able to understand His power that gives our life meaning.
C.S. Lewis once said: "The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens - at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. … By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle. I suspect that men have sometimes derived more spiritual sustenance from myths they did not believe than from the religion they professed. To be truly Christian we must both assent to the historical fact and also receive the myth (fact though it has become) with the same imagination embrace which we accord to all myth. The one is hardly more necessary than the other." C.S. Lewis, Myth Became Fact
AB.
