"Desire on desire powers us on! When has the film world actually become so stiff? The movies urgently need more sex." So declares the title of an article I chanced upon while reading the news (and simultaneously practicing my German).
While it may be a bias of mine, viewing the Germans as a very sexual people, just browsing the Nostalgiemarkt, a stretch of make-shift collapsable stores along the river, and finding a prominently displayed large (apparently actual life-sized) replica of a German male's phallus on sale, watching WWII movies, think Schindler's List, that happened to have generous portions of Germans having sex, I might just be wrong. The whole world, every country, every nation, every people could be very well just as caught up with sex. Recently, I've been watching (or rather catching up with) films. Perhaps it was my bad choice of films to watch in one sitting: "The English Patient" (1996), "Coyote Ugly" (2000), "The Notebook" (2004), "The 40 Year Old Virgin" (2005), "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" (2008), "The Reader" (2008), but they all had quite a notable amount of rather sexual references and scenes. In fact, in some of them films, sex takes the centre stage, the CEO's chair, the lone spotlight on a raised platform: the entire story is weaved around it.
After Scotland and after attending summer school, I finally understood why the Romantics were so very taken by nature. It is indeed the most beautiful thing the Earth possesses, with its rise and falls of the land, the winding streams and the still collection of water bodies, the myriad of colours and textures, the incomprehensibly sweet smell of life... Though landscape paintings in that era were not even considered "proper" art, the market favouring genre paintings over those, that group of brave, stubborn, emotive and innovative young painters blatantly defied the conventions of the day to paint what they felt drawn to paint, what captured their hearts, their fancies, their imaginations - nature. To some of them, nature was sacredly special: it was God's creation, a title heavily pregnant with meaning, value and significance. They saw God in nature, His character, His laws, His works, all best exhibited and displayed in the natural world of flora and fauna. Their paintings, so very detailed and real (like the later Pre-Raphaelite paintings), could even be branded a worship of nature.
Whilst on tour in Edinburgh, we visited a number of churches, in one of which I distinctly remember seeing a Celtic cross. Though it is hard to pinpoint an actual date and location that Celtic Christianity was first developed because of its variety of practices and ideologies, a common trait of the various strands of this belief was its conceptions of the presence of God. In particular, the presence of God in nature. The Celts lived in nature, their way of life fantastically interwoven and in absolute harmony with it. They saw the whole of creation, the trees, the streams, the flowers, the sky, the wind, everything, every element that creates the very fibre of nature as the demonstration and display and indisputable proclamation of God (especially His omnipresence). It could be that precisely because of their close ties with nature, their oneness with it, that they placed a great amount of importance on it.
But here's the catch:
They did not worship nature.
They looked beyond the marvelous spectacle, the fantastic phenomemon, the amazing creation...
And saw God.
And it was Him that they worshipped. It was Him that they sought. It was Him that they placed high on a pedestal, dead centre in the limelight, the point about which their world revolved.
It is ever so easy to fall so madly and blindly in love with what we primarily see, touch, taste, hear, smell...
How easy it is to become so taken up by music, by the elements, by work, by necessities, by fun, by friends, by sex...
And how comparatively more challenging to look beyond what was gifted to us, what was granted us for our pleasure and stewardship and ingenuity, to see the Giver of the gifts.
Worshipping sex, worshipping nature, worshipping intelligence, worshipping art, worshipping relationships, worshipping money, worshipping talents...
Does not equate to worshipping the Creator.
That which was given to us, which we enjoy, which we use as aids to express and worship, should, no, must never become the worshipped.
"Seek him that maketh the seven stars and Orion, and turneth the shadow of death into morning, and maketh the day dark with night: that calleth for the waters of the sea, and poureth them out upon the face of the earth: The LORD is his name."
~ Amos 5:8
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