After writing about violence the last few posts, something a bit more cheery seems to be in order for today. "Finding Neverland" is a dramatization of the friendship between playwright J.M. Barrie and the Llewelyn Davies family, who provided the inspiration for "Peter Pan". It is a real life story of the power of the human mind.
My favorite part of the movie takes place on opening night. Barrie has had twenty-five seats, scattered throughout the theater, held aside for a group of special guests, who turn out to be children from a local orphanage. He knows that "Peter Pan" depends on the kind of imagination that adults are conditioned to see as silliness, but that children find magical. As the children watch the play with eyes full of wonder and delight, the adults are happily swept along to Neverland with them.
This is what Jesus had in mind when he urged us to "accept the kingdom of God like a child." He was not telling us to embrace a childish, immature faith, but a childlike one full of wonder and delight at the beauty and adventure of life.
"Look out your window. It doesn’t matter which one. They all will do. What do you see? Trees, hills, grass, concrete, metal bars, trash, crap, and all the other debris of modern life? No, you see something wonderful, something magical and wondrous ... What you see is a gift. A gift more precious than anything, ANYTHING that has or ever will be imagined by human intelligence."