Dear Church Family and Friends,
Recently, I watched a delightful Italian movie called “The Tiger and the Snow.” It is a romantic comedy staring Roberto Benigni, who won the Oscar for best actor in 1999 for his is role in the movie “Life is Beautiful.” In “The Tiger and the Snow,” Benigni plays the part of a poet desperately trying to save the life of the woman he loves. At one point, he pleads his case to a doctor saying, “If she dies, they can close this whole show of a world. They can cart it off, unscrew the stars, roll up the sky and put it on a truck, they can turn off this sunlight I love so much.”
One of the highlights of the film occurs when Benigni teaches a poetry class in a large lecture hall packed with students. In an animated fashion, he lectures about the necessary difficulty of finding the right word when writing a poem. He expounds that this task can at times require that one literally change one’s physical position. He then sprawls himself on the floor to demonstrate how one may even need to “chuck” oneself on the ground. Looking upward, he exclaims, “It’s lying down that you see the sky. Why didn’t I do that before?!” He explains the point of such antics when he states, “Poets don’t look, they see.”
In a similar way, the spiritual life is often a matter of seeing, not looking. With careful attention, we look for the divine that lives and breathes all around us. As we celebrate this Easter season, let us therefore see with new eyes the beauty of life as the sleepy head of spring awakes and arises with a fresh enthusiasm for the world.
Your brother in Christ,
Pastor Brooks
