A Sound of Sheer Silence

All four of my grandparents have passed on.  My father's father died when Dad was in college, long before my mother (and, thus, I) came on the scene.  Dad's mother died when I was two, so I don't really remember her.  But Mom's parents I remember very clearly.  Grandpa died in October of 1991, and Grandma passed away in August of 2001. There are a handful of things that I remember from those funerals.  For Grandpa's, I remember the torrential rains in the 24 hours beforehand, flooding the streets and requiring the police in the small town where they lived to take us to the church in the "paddywagon."  For Grandma's, I remember that the pastor of the parish in which she had been a member for 50 years couldn't be bothered to come to the wake.  But what I remember maybe the most clearly was one of the hymns, sung at both of those services. It was "On Eagle's Wings," by Fr. Michael Joncas.  This song came to mind because President-elect J...

1. In 2004, M. Night Shyamalan released a movie called The Village .  Critical reception was not great, but I enjoyed it a great deal when I saw it in the theatre.  I have thought about this movie a number of times since then, and it I think it fundamentally a fable about a certain kind of attitude that we see commonly, especially in religious circles.  To explain this, I need to spoil the movie, and in particular the twist that is the key to the whole thing, so if you want to watch the movie stop reading now. At the beginning of the film, we are introduced to the 19th Century Pennsylvania village of Covington.  We are told two things--that "the towns," from which the elders of the village come, is full of wickedness, and that the forest is inhabited by monsters.  We get a scene early on where the monster stalks through the village at night while the villagers hide in their homes.  Eventually, Ivy (the blind daughter of the head of the village, pl...