And Away We Go...

I left my apartment this morning, looked up before I crossed the street and stopped suddenly. I'm pretty sure I said out loud, "What the hell?" as a meteorite, colloquially known as a shooting star, flew right over my head. It wasn't very big and it seemed very low. I wondered for a moment if it was going to hit my building. As I watched it and its little tail moving at a rapid speed through the sky, I realized I could hear it making a soft "fizzling" noise. I wouldn't have heard it if I hadn't been the only idiot up at that hour or if there had been any noise whatsoever on the street from vehicles, but there wasn't a soul around and honest to goodness, it was a fizzling, flying meteorite. I walked in stunned wonder all the way to work. What an incredible world we live in.

At work, I led a meeting for 150 people which went rather well, I thought. The only funny moment was when the boss came in and considered interrupting my talk so that he could borrow my keys to show a person attending the meeting a room in the hall. The person whom this act would benefit urged him not to interrupt me, and when I found about this later on, I was extremely grateful to that person for telling the boss to switch mental courses and leave me alone. Sometimes I'm convinced the boss has a little OCD.

In the afternoon, I *finally* went to see "The Invention of Lying". I have been wanting to see it all month but my plans to do so kept being thwarted by a pesky thing called work. I love Ricky Gervais and Tina Fey, so my desire to see it was insatiable. I had been warned off of it by a rather right-leaning priest-acquaintance who called it anti-religious, but I still wanted to see it. I have to say it's one of the best movies I have seen in a long time. It's funny in the base and self-deprecating humour style of Gervais. (I have the sense of humour which found the third line of the movie laugh-out loud, snortingly funny when a woman exclaimed with glee: "I just took the biggest poop of my life!")

The plot, however, was really philosophical and thought-provoking. In the film, no one has ever lied; everyone is brutally honest with each other. The main character, Mark, is more than down on his luck until he realizes he is, unlike everyone else, capable of lying. Of course, since there is no lying in this world, everyone believes everything Mark says. It changes his lot in life. Mark's mother is dying and he tries to comfort her as she fears entering a state of complete nothingness. Mark tells her there is a Man in the Sky and after death, she will live in a mansion and be with everyone she loves who has died and she will be very happy with the Man in the Sky. In Mosean fashion, Mark is forced to share his "knowledge" with the world and becomes a celebrity; everyone wants their philosophical questions answered about the Man in the Sky. Using two pizza boxes as his "tablets", Mark discusses heaven and hell, evil, suffering and the meaning of life with his captive audience who, of course, do not realize he hasn't actually heard all of this from the Man in the Sky. Mark unwittingly invents God and religion. There are several great religious spoofs in the film of Mark turning physically into a Jesus look-a-like while being in a period of depression, and a scene in which he is deemed worthy of pictorial representation on stained glass windows in "A Quiet Place Where You Can Think About The Man in the Sky", holding his two pizza boxes.

Karl Marx called religion the opiate of the people. This film explores that notion as Mark creates a lie whose sole purpose is to comfort his mother and make her happy before she dies. His lies comfort the whole world.

I can understand why my priest-friend was offended by the film. Yet, if you have never explored your faith critically, if you have never asked yourself if everything you believed turned out to be false whether you would consider everything a waste, if you have never paused to wonder what if ... you could easily lose your way. If it didn't happen with this film, it would happen in another challenge to your faith. It's a very profound film that forces the audience to ask some very deep questions with potentially devastating consequences, if you believe the world Mark has created is all a lie.

On that note, having pondered cosmic wonders and philosophical questions today, I shall sign off and be grateful to the Man in the Sky for quite a wondrous day.