Spelling Trouble

Tonight I watched the movie, Bee Season. I had read the back cover prior to renting the movie. The cover said that the movie was the story of a man who pushed his daughter too hard to help her win the national spelling bee. Since I like smarty-pants stuff like that, I decided to rent it.

Too bad the back cover lied.

The movie was about a family of four that was faling apart because they all were looking for some "divine light." The dad was a Jew who believed that you could reach the "ear of God" by employing the techniques of Kabbalah. He believed his daughter had this mystical ability to reach God and have God speak to her. I suppose he was half right because God DOES speak to us through Scripture and because we DO have the ability to speak to God.

He was so obsessed with the idea that Jewish mystics could receive divine light that he pushed his wife into a mental institution and his son into a Hari Krishna group. His wife wanted so badly to see this divine light that she stole thousands of items in an effort create some masterpiece to please this mystical God.

The son just ran away to the Krishna place. And the daughter, well she spelled her way to God. The movie portrayed the girl doing what I would suppose to be the Jewish equivalent of speaking in tongues and being slain in the spirit when she reached this "divine light." Don't you know that when you find God you have all sorts of visions, speak in tongues and fall out on the floor having a seizure-like fit.

The sad thing is that while this is "just" a movie, people will still be influenced by this. Who knows how it will impact their view of God? It's a shame that their view of God will be sadly distorted because some mystical, cultish rubbish.

I will say that the movie did have a bit of truth to it though. I do believe everyone is born lacking something -- that something being a relationship with God. I also believe (and I think real life is evidence of this) that we seek to fill that emptiness with something. That something could be food, drugs, sex, control, a husband, a child, money, material possessions, some false religion; in short, idols.

I think the movie was also dead on in portraying false religions in such a positive light. Yeah, you read that right. Satan is a liar. If you've EVER told a lie, you know the best way to deceive someone is to make the lie resemble the truth as much as possible. The religions portrayed in this movie looked like they would be peaceful and loving and like they would draw you closer to God. They won't though.

Suddenly I am thinking of that children's song that goes like this:

(VS 1) Oh, be careful little ears, what you hear (repeat)
For the Father Up above,
Is looking down in love,
So be careful little ears
what you hear.

(VS 2) Oh, be careful little eyes, what you see, (repeat)
For the Father up above,
is looking down in love,
So be careful little eyes
What you hear.

Now if only I could get the movie companies to be a bit more truthful when they wrote the copy for the back cover.