Where the Wild Things Are

Jesus Hates Zombies and Lincoln hates Werewolves, well that is a title for a graphic novel if I ever heard one. Our world looks for heroes in the strangest places. We now equate, Jesus with an American president, and I am surprised the author did not have the zombies and werewolf as the good guys.

If Jesus hates zombies, he hates vampires, but that fact might greatly upset a whole generation of girls who believe the greatest men of our day, are a 90 year old vampire, who looks nineteen and a teenage werewolf. Girls (and not just girls) swoon at the thought of knowing men like them. They have no repulsion toward the bloodletting that one of the characters indulges in, nor do they recoil at the idea of a wolf sleeping with a woman. Their hearts throb in anticipation as a vampire sneaks into the room of a girl their own age every night without anyone knowing. They long for a smelly werewolf to sit at their door to protect them.

Our world seems to be flying upside down, as Dallas Willard points out. And the sad thing is that the culture doesn’t even care, because there is not right side up. There is an emptiness, and a searching among us. Yet we are looking and searching in the dark. Hoping that some supernatural being will save us from our mundane existence and add excitement to our lives. Thing is that, that Supernatural Being died and rose again 2000 years ago to save us, yet we ignore him in favor of the "undead".

Funny, we are even willing to embrace someone else’s dream to gain our own hope of salvation. That is right, Stephanie Meyer had a dream about a vampire that led her to write the Twilight series, and through that dream came T-shirts, and discussion groups, and pilgrimages to the small town of Forks in Washington state.

At least in the pages of the Twilight books, there is the hope of redemption, the dream of an eternal future. One that is seriously misguided, but still it is there. I realized today that there is a part of the world that does not even have a false savior to give them hope. Part of the world is living in such utter darkness that they don’t even believe that there is a way out of the bleakness of human existence. They visit a place called Where the Wild Things Are, and discover there is no redeemer, there is no better tomorrow, there is only pain and sorrow.

If you are not familiar with this title, it is a very short children’s book, about a boy who visits an island inhabited by fantastic creatures called the “Wild Things”. That said the short children’s book has been transformed into a motion picture, in which a boy filled with anger and rage flees to the Wild Things, and discovers that they are just as angry and destructive as the place of pain that fills his own heart. He promises them that he will be their king and save them from sadness and pain with his invisible shield, but in the end, they discover that he is a fraud and all their hope for happiness is dashed when he fails to save them from themselves. The boy returns home to his own mother, his own family, with the simple words spoke to or by one of the unhappy Wild Things, “It’s hard to be a family.”

There is no redemption just the reality of the darkness, joylessness, hopelessness of life to endure until death. That, in the end, is the takeaway the movie leaves the audience with. I left the theater utterly depressed, thankful that the sun was out in all of its Arizona glory, and that the Son of God reigns in all of His.

I have always told my children that no matter what story, what movie, what book, or play, that I can find Jesus in it in some aspect or another. But today, I told them that I was wrong. Today, there was NO redeemer in Where the Wild Things Are. When the Son is absent, then too is His light and all that is left is darkness. The makers of the movie must have felt this as well, because the forest the Wild Things live in is without life, the world they exist in had a sun, but it is muted by clouds, and the lives they live are filled with bitterness, rage, betrayal and violence.

When a vampire is the hero of the young, and a movie for kids is filled with so much “realism” that they leave the theaters in quiet contemplation, we know we are flying upside down, about to take a nosedive into the earth.

The postmodern age looks to darkness for redemption and when it does not find it there, it discovers that the darkness is devoid of all hope.

The Light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it. He was in the world, and though the world was made through Him, the world did not recognize Him. He came to that which was His own, but His own did not receive Him.

Even within the walls and halls of our own churches, the younger generation is looking to darkness to redeem them. Will we be like the generation Jesus first came to, the one who crucified him, who were His own, but did not recognize Him because He came as light.

In Him was LIFE and that LIFE was the LIGHT of MEN!