Click: Death, Our Companion in One Way or Another

Just a few notes today...

I caught the Adam Sandler movie, Click, on a local station over Thanksgiving. With the commercial breaks, the movie's carnality was only gratuitous, and not ultra-gratuitous. Gratuitous carnality I enjoy, but Sandler has yet to learn the value of understatement.

The main character is Michael (Sandler) who receives the gift of a universal remote that controls his universe from an intelligent agent named Morty (Christopher Walken). It turns out that Michael's favorite button is fast forward, which lets him skip over the boring or troublesome spots in life, switching to autopilot. But if you fast forward through life, you run headlong toward death (and the present becomes a death-in-life). Momento mori, remember death, was the cry of an earlier age, a desire to live every moment with attention. But this remembering of death was not morbid but a reminder of our contingency, our humanity, our condition.

Fr. Carrón hits this point when he says that "ugly or beautiful as it may be, reality exists, and the fact that it's ugly doesn't mean that it doesn't exist: it exists, and we endure it. But if it exists, if this reality exists, if this illness of mine exists, if this sadness now invading me now exists, if this exists, it means that I exist, and if I exist, there's Another who is making me, now." (Traces 9, 2008, p 4). Reality is given to us for our destiny, our happiness, and that includes every boring moment, embarassing incident, or frustrating situation. Something exceptional has happened to us in time, which is "so exceptional that it cannot fail to reawaken all the energy of reason to seek to understand it" (p 4). Remember death, yes, but remember life, remember reality, remember my condition now, remember the extraordinary event: Jesus who announced that He is God and who remains with me now. Remember death, that is, remember who conquers death now. Remember death, and in doing so remember the resurrection.