The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug Review

Anthony here. Poor Andrea already got an earful of this, but I'm not done ranting yet! :) Buckle up. This is gonna be rough. 

(SPOILERS FOLLOW)

Peter Jackson’s latest Hobbit movie mixes elements from Dungeons & Dragons and World of Warcraft to tell a story that plays out like a fourteen year old’s fan fiction.

Think the fan fiction label is too harsh? There is a love triangle between a warrior elf chick who does not exist in the book, Legolas the elf, and Kili the dwarf.

Fan fiction.

At one point they flirt. Kili: “Aren’t you going to search me? I could have anything down my trousers.”

Elf chick: “Or nothing.”

Teenage boys: “Hur hur hur hur!”

The movie is a bastardization of Tolkien’s world and characters, jarringly out of spirit with the source material. But even if you leave that consideration out, it’s just not a good movie. It’s like a theme park ride or a carnival show, moving you from set-piece to set-piece without time to breathe or time to care. The world never feels alive and the story never has that organic, inevitable quality that all good stories have. The pieces don’t quite fit together. You can see the seams. It feels constructed, artificial.

And I’m not talking about the experience of seeing it in 48 frames-per-second 3D, either. Actually, I thought the high frame rate was wonderful. It did not make the movie look more fake to me, but more real. And it was much easier on the eyes. I felt less like I was watching a movie and more like I was looking through a window into another world. Which would have been awesome had it been Middle Earth. But it was instead Middle Earth™, with your guide, Peter Jackson. His face is the first you see in the movie, which is rather sinister in hindsight, like he’s staking his claim to this world and we’re only allowed to enter it through him.

No, the seams I’m talking about are in the story itself. To create three movies out of one short book (several people have pointed out that this will be the first time in history that you can read the book in less time than it takes to watch the film) Jackson added a lot. He added a villain. He gave characters new backstories and motivations. He added the warrior elf chick. And he added fights. Lots of fights. And even more fights. The result is a convoluted movie that movies briskly from one set-piece to the next and yet feels long and slow.

Jackson’s many additions to the story end up, oxymoronically, subtracting from it. For instance, Jackson knows that Smaug has to attack Lake Town to ultimately be killed by Bard. But he has decided that Thorin, who never even saw the dragon in the book, has to have a showdown with him first. Of course, Thorin can’t kill Smaug and Smaug can’t kill Thorin. This means that any confrontation between them is superfluous and cannot add anything to the story. And it feels superfluous. Thorin comes up with a grand plan to defeat the dragon that goes like this: lure the dragon to some huge mechanical forges, discover with dismay that the forges are out (after 170 years. Dang. Who could have predicted that?). Declare plan ruined. Suddenly realize he can trick the dragon into lighting the forges. Use forges to smelt gold into a two hundred foot high mold of a dwarf that is conveniently ready and waiting. Hope that the gold will still be molten and collapse upon the dragon when the mold is taken away.

Wait, what now?

Even in a fantasy world like Middle Earth, when someone says, “Wait, I’ve got a plan!” you usually expect something better than “Let’s trick the dragon into standing in front of a two hundred foot tall statue of a dwarf made of molten gold!”

How to defeat a dragon, by Rube Goldberg

The problem is, there is no reason for that mold of a statue to be there. It’s not explained in the story. It is also not explained how the forges could smelt that much gold that quickly. Everything needed for this sequence just appears. This is what I mean when I say that the story feels artificial. In a well-told story these elements would seem to be there for reasons that exist within the world of the story, not simply for the author’s convenience. Tolkien was an expert at this. Jackson is not.

Worse, this superfluous confrontation between Thorin and Smaug ends with Smaug leaving to wreak vengeance upon Lake Town even though Thorin and the other dwarves are standing right there. Jackson portrays it as if Smaug is going to get vengeance on Thorin by attacking the town. But Thorin couldn’t care less about Lake Town. Smaug attacks it in the book because he believes they are co-conspirators with the dwarves, and he can’t get at the dwarves, who are hiding in the tunnels. It is just not believable that he would leave the dwarves standing there in front of him (and after they hurt him) and get his vengeance by the bizarrely roundabout way of attacking the town.

Another example of how convoluted the film gets with all of Jackson’s additions is when Gandalf get a telepathic message from Galadriel to go investigate a Ringwraith tomb, causing him to leave the dwarves as they get ready to enter Mirkwood. He ends up at Dol Guldor with Radagast, and sends Radagast back to tell Galadriel. Wait, he can’t just telepathically tell Galadriel himself?

And what's the deal with the Master of Lake Town and Bard? If the Master is going to arrest Bard, wouldn't he take guards and go do it at his house? Instead, it seems like he waits for Bard to leave the house and for the guards to arbitrarily start chasing him (shouting "There heis!" What, you couldn't find him a moment ago, when he was in his house?), hides, and trips him up as he goes by. What in the world? Jackson's desire to add yet another chase scene results only in inconsistency. 

Jackson knows the story beats he has to hit, but since he has added elements in between that don’t exist in the source material he can’t get to those beats in an organic fashion. So the story ends up like a first draft, when the author knows what the story has to show and where the characters have to be but can’t quite make it play out believably.

Jackson (and Walsh and Boyens) is just not a good writer. He should let Tolkien do the writing.

It doesn’t help that the character of Tolkien’s world is lost. The book is a light hearted adventure, filled with humor and quirkiness. It has darkness in it, to be sure, and concludes in a truly epic fashion, but it does this while still maintaining Tolkien’s fun tone. The movie, however, is ponderous and melodramatic. Take Beorn. In the book, Gandalf warns the dwarves that Beorn is not likely to react well to having thirteen dwarves and one hobbit sprung upon him suddenly. So he takes Bilbo on ahead, and tells Beorn of their adventure in the mountains. Every so often he mentions the dwarves, each time in language that implies there are more than he had said before. Meanwhile the dwarves are coming up in widely-spaced twos. Beorn sees what Gandalf is doing, but is too interested in the story to stop him, and ultimately he is gradually introduced to all thirteen dwarves and one hobbit. It’s a very fun sequence; it shows Gandalf’s cleverness, and it gives you an idea of how dangerous Beorn is without resorting to, say, having him chase the dwarves in bear form.

Which, of course, is exactly what happens in the movie. And then Beorn the man turns out to be an emo were-bear, someone who would fit better in a Twilight film.

The way the sequence was handled reminds me of the way Jackson botched the trolls in the first film, losing the fun of Gandalf imitating their voices to make them fight, and turning into a faster-paced sequence that ends in Gandalf splitting a rock through sheer magical force to let in the sunlight. I’m beginning to think that Jackson simply does not understand subtlety. He brute forces his way through the story, and when there isn’t any brute force in the source material, he adds some.

And now I have to bring myself to talk about the warrior elf chick. This is the first time Jackson has added a character who isn’t in the books. Whereas in Lord of the Rings he could take Arwen and transform her into a warrior elf chick, this time there’s no female character even mentioned by Tolkien, so he has to create a warrior elf chick from scratch. I can follow the thinking from this point: since we have a warrior elf chick, we need a romance. And who better with than Legolas! But Legolas isn’t married in Lord of the Rings, so we have to make it an unrequited love. Which means a love triangle. Who can the triangle be with? Since this love triangle isn’t canon, we need someone who will die eventually, which will be all kinds of cool tragic too. Thorin? No, he’s too obsessed to have time with romance. That leaves Fili or Kili.

So that's why they made Kili so un-dwarfish, without the beard or the thick dwarven proportions.

I'm just a hunk, a hunk of burning dwarf.

And what we end up with is a warrior elf chick reciting a spell of +10 Healing over Kili while he mumbles feverishly about how it couldn’t be the elf chick working on him because she, like, walks in starlight in another world and stuff.

You are my sun, my moon, my starlit sky!

And he wonders if she ever could have loved him, while he falteringly touches her hand. And she wonders if she already does love that hunky little midget. I can’t possibly describe how jarring and out of place all this is to Tolkien’s world. It’s fan fiction. Fan fiction with a half a billion dollar budget.

I sound bitter, I know. I am bitter. Which is not to say that I think there is nothing done well in the movie. Howard shore’s soundtrack is, as usual, wonderful. And Smaug is great. Benedict Cumberbatch’s voice is richly sinister, and the design of the dragon was pretty much perfect (I love his predatory jaw). I wish he could have had the clever conversation with Bilbo that he had in the book. Also, the world of Middle Earth is portrayed well. It’s less New Zealand than CGI this time, but it’s still nice. But, again, it feels less like a real world than a theme park. Oh, and the spiders were cool. Mirkwood wasn’t very impressive, though, because – shoot, I’m off another rant. This is already too long. I’ll shut up now.

Or at any rate I’ll shut up soon. I’ll just end by saying that The Hobbit films feel to me not like Tolkien’s world, but as if all the horrible knock-off fantasy that Tolkien inspired, all the D&D and warrior elf chicks and brooding melodrama, were poured back into the original, making it a pastiche, a caricature of itself.

Orson Scott Card once wrote, “Peter Jackson filming Tolkien is like putting Saruman in charge of writing the history of Middle Earth. He thinks he’s being subtle and clever, but he never understands what’s really going on at all.”

And Tolkien’s son Christopher lamented, "They eviscerated the book by making it an action movie for young people aged 15 to 25 . . . [they have] reduced the aesthetic and philosophical impact of the creation to nothing.”

If I get so worked up about this, it is because I love Tolkien’s works so much. Not in an “oh cool, orcs fighting” way. And I don’t get caught up in the minutia, obsessively tracing elf genealogies through the Silmarillion. I’m not a Tolkien “trekkie.” I love Tolkien’s stories because they contain so much beauty, and so much truth. Tolkien’s philosophy of mythopoeia, of truth through epic storytelling, and his deep Catholic worldview imbue the stories with a power that I’ve never encountered as fully in any other story. It’s not Peter Jackson’s idea of power, of slicing orc heads off and declaiming clichés (“What if it’s a trap?” “It is undoubtedly a trap”) and making sure that the elf chick gets to fight too. No, it’s a subtle power, the power of a quiet rest stop along an arduous path, the power of a glimpse between the trees in the gathering dusk of the light of home. The beauty is the one Beauty and the truth is the one Truth, though but dimly mirrored.

“Blessed are the timid hearts that evil hate,

that quail in its shadow, and yet shut the gate;

that seek no parley, and in guarded room,

though small and bare, upon a clumsy loom

weave tissues gilded by the far-off day

hoped and believed in under Shadow's sway.”

{teatime} Favorite Saints

Anthony and Andrea here, this time responding to Clare's teatime link up regarding your favorite saint!

Hope you enjoy it!

The Final Victory

Anthony here. I recently saw the movie The Hunger Games. I thought it was well done. Well acted. Very intense in parts. And quite true to the book.

I read the Hunger Games trilogy a few years ago, and thought the books were interesting. A lot of the themes, especially in the first book, made savvy points about our own culture’s love of spectacle, especially as exemplified by “reality” TV. We tend to filter out morality, to suspend our judgment of right and wrong in the service of a show. This has led people like Miley Cyrus to decide (not incorrectly) that what people want is spectacle, and remake themselves in that image.

Suzanne Collins, the author of The Hunger Games, also links her imaginary world to ancient Rome. The name of her country, Panem, is the Latin word for bread, a reference to the phrase “panem et circenses,” or “bread and circuses” — give the people food and entertainment, and you can effectively control them. As Bill Watterson observed when he turned Karl Marx’s famous phrase on its head: television is the opiate of the masses. In many way we have already descended to the level of ancient Rome.

Are you not entertained?

So I think that Suzanne Collins creates a very compelling dystopian future in which disturbing trends in our society are carried forward to a logical, and chilling, conclusion. Unfortunately, what Collins can’t give is any solution. At the end of the trilogy (SPOILER ALERT) no true victory is won. Katniss, the heroine, is a shell of her former self, slowly recovering after having gone almost insane. But there is no true recovery. The best she can do is fall back on her survival instinct. She will go on living because, hey, it’s what she’s good at. But she is thoroughly disillusioned. The new society is not any better than the old. She might have set them back a bit, but they have the same urges as the overthrown Capitol, the same darkness inside, and she knows that sooner or later it will come out again.

It is very bleak.

And I can’t help but contrast it to my favorite writer, J.R.R. Tolkien. A lot of what is presented in The Hunger Games Tolkien would have agreed with. He sensed that evil seems to constantly overpower what is good. He wrote in a letter, “I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat.’” In another letter, he expounded on the theme: “If anguish were visible, almost the whole of this benighted planet would be enveloped in a dense dark vapor, shrouded from the amazed vision of the heavens! And the products of it all will be mainly evil . . . [E]vil labours with vast powers and perpetual success . . .”

Not exactly an optimist.

Vast powers and perpetual success. Observation would appear to bear this out. Evil seems more powerful than good. Good seems to be involved in a constant defensive struggle. A long defeat.

But I haven’t given you everything. In both those passages, Tolkien wrote more:

“Actually I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’ – though it contains (and in legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples of the final victory” (Letter 195).

“If anguish were visible, almost the whole of this benighted planet would be enveloped in a dense dark vapor, shrouded from the amazed vision of the heavens! And the products of it all will be mainly evil - historically considered. But the historic version is, of course, not the only one. All things and deeds have a value in themselves, apart from their ‘causes’ and ‘effects.’ No man can estimate what is really happening sub specie aeternitatis. All we do know, and that to a large extent by direct experience, is that evil labours with vast powers and perpetual success—in vain: preparing always only the soil for unexpected good to sprout in” (Letter 64).

It is this glimpse of the final victory that Tolkien has, and Suzanne Collins seems to lack. There is a moment in The Lord of the Rings in which we find Frodo and Sam struggling through the benighted, dying lands of Mordor, trying to accomplish a task so utterly beyond them that they have no room for hope. They keep going because to oppose evil is the right thing to do, even when victory seems impossible. They hide under some brambles against a rock face, and Frodo, weary from his burden, goes to sleep while Sam keeps watch. Struggling to stay awake, Sam looks out from the hiding place and glimpses, just for a moment, hope:

Far above the Ephel Dúath in the West the night-sky was still dim and pale. There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.

That moment hits me hard every time I read it. I’m not sure there’s a more beautiful passage in all of fiction.

Ironically, what makes that passage possible is also what Tolkien’s critics have in mind when they speak of his story as being “simplistic” and “black and white.” They say that the characters are either all good or all evil, but this is manifestly untrue (Boromir, Denethor, Gollum . . .). So where does the accusation come from? From the fact that while the characters in Tolkien are not either all good or all evil, good and evil do exist (well, technically good exists – evil exists in the same manner that a hole does, as a lack or privation of some existing good. But that’s a topic for another post). Tolkien treats good and evil not as ideas that we create, but as objective, independent realities that we conform to. The characters in Tolkien’s story align themselves to these definite realities. So while a character might not be wholly good, he may still serve Good. And while a character might not be truly evil, he may still serve Evil. But this philosophy is alien to our modern world. The materialist worldview which characterizes modernity reduces everything to physical cause and effect, and thereby reduces good and evil to human ideas that do not correspond to any greater reality. In this worldview, to think too deeply about the human capacity for evil leads ultimately to nihilism. There is no solution, because there is no meaning at all.

Oh, the emptiness!

I don’t know Suzanne Collins’ background, but I suspect that she subscribes to this worldview. Most people do, to one extent or another, even if they don’t think about it directly, simply because it’s the dominant worldview of our time. Her story, especially in the final book, Mockingjay, conforms much more closely to the expectations of the critics of Tolkien: moral dilemmas without apparent answers, good characters doing evil things, et cetera. There doesn't seem to be a true, transcendent good that can be grasped and held onto, even in the midst of evil. Good is overpowered by darkness. That is why there is no transcendence or hope in the story. Ultimately, the best that the main character can do is simply survive. And even that’s not all it’s cracked up to be.

Tolkien, on the other hand, believed in a final victory. While good appears to be fighting a defensive battle, it continually subverts evil, turning it to good in surprising moments. Tolkien coined a word: eucatastrophe, which he defined as a sudden happy turn from darkness to light, from defeat to victory, from sorrow to joy. The happy ending. In a letter to his son, Tolkien wrote:

“I coined the word 'eucatastrophe': the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears (which I argued it is the highest function of fairy-stories to produce). And I was there led to the view that it produces its peculiar effect because it is a sudden glimpse of Truth, your whole nature chained in material cause and effect, the chain of death, feels a sudden relief as if a major limb out of joint had suddenly snapped back. It perceives – if the story has literary 'truth' on the second plane . . . -- that this is indeed how things really do work in the Great World for which our nature is made. And I concluded by saying that the Resurrection was the greatest 'eucatastrophe' possible in the greatest Fairy Story – and produces that essential emotion: Christian joy which produces tears because it is qualitatively so like sorrow, because it comes from those places where Joy and Sorrow are at one, reconciled, as selfishness and altruism are lost in Love" (Letter 89).

Eucatastrophe

Make no mistake: Tolkien understood evil. In The Lord of the Rings, even the victory over Sauron is just a respite. Sauron is defeated, but much good that existed before has been lost forever. Evil endures, and will rise in other places and other ways. But here’s the kicker: it will be defeated again. And again. And though it may seem that evil is constantly winning, still it will turn to good, again and again, until the final victory.

“Evil labours with vast powers and perpetual success—in vain: preparing always only the soil for unexpected good to sprout in.” Even if we suffer defeat now, even if we suffer it repeatedly, still we know that good will ultimately prevail. That may strike Tolkien’s nihilist critics as simplistic, but I, for one, am willing to live with it.

{teatime} What Are You Reading?

Via

Wow! Two posts in a day! Being sick makes one quite productive! :)

Here's a video response to Clare's teatime video posting at Come Further Up on the topic of "What are you reading?"

Until the next teatime!

Most Sincerely,

             Andrea Rose

Why God Exists: A Rational Proof

Hello! Yes, it has been quite a while! Working full time with overtime hours and being pregnant leaves me oh so tired at the end of the day with only enough energy to eat dinner and relax with the hubby by watching some "I Love Lucy" with his awesome projector!

My husband recently created a fun and approachable comic outlining the argument for God's existence, the cosmological argument.

He gave a talk based on this comic to 7th and 10th graders at a local church and I was highly impressed at the attentiveness and responses from some of the students. I've heard his talk about three times as I've been his practice audience, and some of this abstract metaphysical thinking is still quite heavy for me!

My husband has the makings of a great teacher. He's currently a librarian, but he would also do amazing at teaching history or philosophy! I hope someday he has the chance to pursue it! In any case, I know he'll get a lot of practice teaching our little potato in the oven and other future children!

He even has the hand gestures of a teacher! :) 

Let us know what you think!

http://sweetheartsseekingsanctity.blogspot.com/2014/05/why-god-exists-rational-proof.html

His passion and knowledge of the Faith astounds me frequently! How I love him!

Most Sincerely, 

                  Andrea Rose

                            

Two Months of Marriage!

Anthony here. Andrea and I have been married for two months today! 

And what a busy two months they have been. :) We moved into a new apartment in a new town, we both started new jobs, and, best of all, we found out that we are expecting!

Our baby is almost an inch big!

What's amazing is how natural marriage feels. It's the biggest change of my life, but it feels very normal, very cozy, very right. I feel like I've been married for a lot longer than two months. This is life, and everything before it was in some way unreal. Before, I was missing something. Now, I am complete. 

It makes me wonder at all those poor guys these days who live with their girlfriends before getting married. Marriage should be a watershed moment. People nowadays kind of shuffle into marriage, with one eye always on the rearview mirror. They've been living together and sharing finances, and they've found that they can tolerate each other on the whole; might as well make it official. But the marriage marks no great change in their lives. Maybe the wife has more security now, because it'll be harder for the guy to extricate himself. Maybe the husband stops wondering about other girls, or going out as much with the guys. But nothing fundamental changes. They wake up the next morning to the same life, essentially, that they had before.

How humdrum.

Whereas in the old way of doing things, marriage is a crescendo. It is the grand finale of a symphony, the great crest of a breaking wave, the apogee of a thundering rocket. It is the climax of one story . . . and the beginning of another. The old way of viewing marriage sees it as the making of a new, greater reality, two becoming one. It's the start of a brand new life, a new kind of being for both spouses, with a new mission — a vocation, a great calling! As Chesterton wrote to his wife, "Here ends my previous existence. Take it: it led me to you.”

But I think that part of the reason for such a dull experience of marriage in our mundane modern age is that the vocational aspect has been lost. There's a perception these days that marriage is for yourself. It should serve you. So you test-drive your wife before you commit to her, and even your commitment comes with provisos. Find yourself regretting your choice? You can return your wife and look for a newer model. Kids, too, exist for your benefit. You have them on your timetable. If one comes when you do not want one, a few hundred bucks and an afternoon at Planned Parenthood (and maybe a little time spent pressuring your wife) is all that's needed to push the reset button. And why shouldn't we say that two people of the same sex can enter into the same self-centered relationship agreement? There's no good reason why not. 

I greatly prefer the Catholic position that marriage is not for you, but for the family, which means you are living for your spouse (and, later, kids as well) more than for yourself. You are no longer an individual, pursuing individual wants and whims. You are a part of a greater whole: a new family. You are a servant with a specific role, bound to that role by love — real love! Not self-serving emotion! Too many marriages end as soon as love ceases to act upon a heart that passively receives it, as a man passively receives entertainment in a movie theater. As soon as love demands that the man become the agent, active, willful in his love — a far more adventurous role! — too many men turn away, looking for another non-interactive love that will sate them without thought or effort. 

Granted, my idealism about love and marriage has not exactly been tested. I am, after all, married to the most beautiful woman in the world. Every day I am reminded by the mere sight of her just how lucky I am. But what a wonderful way to start a marriage! How much nicer this is than if we had spent two years living together and got married because it was convenient! I look at my wife, and I am filled with wonder. Her beauty leaves me astonished, babbling incomprehensible fragments of stillborn poetry in a fruitless attempt to capture in words something that exceeds words: the beauty of a human soul, the perfect design of a child a God, the wonder of eyes that contain a whole world, the marvelous otherness of her female nature, and the lovely herness of herself — and the startling, astonishing, impossible knowledge that all this has been given to me, to have and to hold, to guard and protect, to serve . . . and to love. 

This is marriage. 

All this, and yet this new beginning feels so natural and so right and so comfortable that I could have been married all my life. The newness of it helps me to see and to be astonished; the rightness of it makes me feel as though it is not new, but simply the way the universe is and has been since first the stars spun into being from the mind of God. Comfortable as an old sock; breathtaking as the first sunrise. It's a paradox that Chesterton would have delighted in — and probably did, since no man took up the adventure of marriage with more enthusiasm.

Think I'm over-idealistic? I've certainly been accused of that! Ask me in ten years, and I'm sure that my views on marriage will have developed. Developed, but not changed, not in their fundamentals. I will be wiser, the first rush of youthful enthusiasm will have been replaced by the steady appreciation of experience. But I will still believe the same. You see, the the nice thing about ideals is that even if you try and fail to meet them, you're still better off than if you have no ideals at all. And the nice thing about Catholicism is that it tells me that those ideals have a reality that does not depend upon me. Marriage is what it is. If I fail, it will be my own failure, not a failure of the reality of marriage itself. It will be because I fail to see and respond to the true nature and wonder of marriage, not because marriage lacks that reality. Because the ideal is the reality, and it is only we poor humans who fall short, whose blindness loses sight so quickly of the remarkable nature of marriage, the incredible gift of the other, the sheer awesomeness of God's plan. And that gives me the courage — not to mention to the access to grace! — not to fail. I have only to conform myself to reality rather than setting myself against it, to open my eyes repeatedly to the wonder of our marriage, and above all to place myself trustingly in the hands of the Love from whom that reality pours, and my poor, earthly, reflective love will be lifted up and brought into Love Himself, and fulfill its purpose.

Meantime, I get to be married to the most beautiful girl in the world. 

No exaggeration.

Am I lucky, or what?

Planting!

I had intended to create a terranium with a lid, but I couldn't find any pretty glass containers with lids! So I settled on these neat cylinder jars from Walmart. I placed some colorful rocks on the bottom, followed by potting soil and then put in the plant! It was super easy and I love the look! 

Geranium

I believe the back plant is a species of Dracena...

I think I may make a few more to place around the apartment.

Memories

This walk was one of the strongest memories I have of the wedding. My emotions were surging, my eyes tearing, and my smile shaking. As I walked down that aisle, I walked up with my past and present and had the amazing experience of connecting them to my future at the end. As I walked, I saw the individual faces of those family and friends whom I have loved deeply and who have helped me grow in amazing ways. My father's arm reminded me of all our precious times together and the times when our family was growing up and all at home. Memories flooding in of my father practicing his karate downstairs or dancing to "Sixteen Tons" with us, my mother talking with us about the Faith or all the times I lied my head in her lap to vent or obtain advice, and of all the various adventures I had with my sisters.

And that amazing moment when I looked up and saw the man who had loved me so well and so completely throughout our courtship and engagement. I felt the sureness and trust of his continued and undying love. It is a love that we have deemed has "eternal immensitude". Anthony's kind eyes and beaming smile melted my heart at the end of that aisle and mine was melded with his in the Sacrament of Matrimony. God is so very good and I am so excited Anthony is now a part of my past, present and eternal future.

Nuptial Mass Consecration

"Out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament... There you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves on earth, and more than that: Death. By the divine paradox, that which ends life, and demands the surrender of all, and yet by the taste -or foretaste- of which alone can what you seek in your earthly relationships (love, faithfulness, joy) be maintained, or take on that complexion of reality, of eternal endurance, which every man's heart desires."

~ The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter to his son.

It is so beautiful to have someone with whom I can share a complete love of the one true Faith. 

Love

"Loves requests always to be amazed at the other one and at what he or she is.

You cannot love if you consider the one you love as a machine about which you know everything.

Love is still greater when you know that you do not deserve to be loved by the other one.  Then it becomes awesome! Then, you can both say. 'thank you'."

~ From our Wedding Sermon written by Canon Jayr of St. Stanislaus

Married for 11 days now!

Bliss!

Our previous record of seeing each other consecutive days was four days due to our long distance relationship. I love being married, I love my husband, and I love seeing my best friend every day!

More photos to come!

One Day!

"The things that we love tell us what we are." ~ St. Thomas Aquinas

So blessed that this man's goodness rubs off on me! 

Six Days!

“Love is not blind; that is the last thing that it is. Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind.” 

~ G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

***

Bed Set - Check! 

So happy to have found this pretty piece on Craigslist!

Big thanks to my Aunt for sending me the link, to my Mom for checking it out and my Dad and Uncle for moving it into our new apartment! 

Updates!

Life has been moving along at a light speed pace and I thought we'd update everyone on the changes that have been taking place!

I passed my National Physical Therapy Boards! Hurray! 

(Last exam ever, except for Judgement day!)

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Graduated with a Doctorate in Physical Therapy 

I was so blessed to have toiled through grad school with this wonderful group! 

My parents did so much to support me! They should both get honorary degrees!

An amazing woman and my dear friend: Wife,  mother, and graduate student = superwoman!!!

Study group flexing our muscles!

This wonderful man did so much to encourage me through difficult classes and internships!

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Celebrated both our birthdays, each a day apart! Mine on May 26th and his 29th!

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I was ecstatic to find a swimsuit I loved for the honeymoon!

(I know! It just looks like a summer dress!)

It's from meanttobemosdest.com

I was able to pick my own design!

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We found a one bedroom apartment about 15 minutes from each of our jobs!

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My Mom and bridesmaids threw me a beautiful shower!

All the bridesmaids except my sister who was in Argentina and Anthony's sister who is in Idaho. We missed them!

Four of us sisters with my Mom. My other sister was having fun exploring Argentina at the time :)

My very dear friend who is due with her third child at the end of July! 

Fancy toilet paper dresses!

My cousin even took flowers off a shelf in the restaurant to top off her look! 

My Mom bought me this corsage that is perfectly my style!

My Mom crocheted me a blanket!  

I can't wait to wear my real dress!

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We found a good deal on living room furniture at an estate sale and bedroom furniture on craigslist!

I can't wait to put up photos soon!

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And I am so excited about a comic that Anthony is working on that deals with the existence of God. It's quite spectacular and I can't wait to share it with the masses!

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It is 12 days until our wedding! There is still so much to do!

Please pray for us! 

Most sincerely, 

             

                          Andrea Rose

Philosophical Romance

I love Catholicism. It is the only worldview that is able to make sense of all aspects of human experience. It makes sense of science, explaining why there is order, why the universe is intelligible, why science works at all. And it makes sense of non-scientific, but deeply important, aspects of our experience, like beauty. What a poet tries to capture, Catholicism has. That awed catching of the breath during a symphony, the aching yearning that whispers to us from behind the sunset . . . Catholicism tells us why we feel this way. 

And Catholicism is incredibly rational. Nothing in it is arbitrary. No Catholic idea or teaching is "just because." The rational articulation of the faith given to us by Thomas Aquinas is stunning. It is a comprehensive, systematic framework for making sense of reality. It helps us see everything in light of what is real, what is true, and — because truth is beauty at its highest level — what is beautiful.

This Catholic framework illuminates Andrea's and my love in some amazing ways. Andrea likes it when I talk about this stuff. She calls it "philosophical romance." I'm just glad I found a girl who doesn't mind listening to my ramblings!

Philosophical romance is pretty cool, though. For instance, there's a popular song from one of the Twilight movies that has a refrain that goes something like, "I have loved you for a thousand years, and I'll love you for a thousand more." Well, one of the wonderful things about being Catholic is that I hear a song like that and think, "Only a thousand?"

They're selling themselves short!

See, I tell Andrea that I really will love her for a thousand years . . . and for a million years, and for a billion years, and then for a billion more after that, and a billion more, and . . . a billion more, and, well, a billion more. And a billion more. And a billion more. And a billion more. . . .

And you know what? It's true. It's not hyperbole. It is plain old, literal, honest-to-goodness truth.

We humans will exist forever. I don't think of that as often as I should. We are all immortal. Whether we spend our immortal existence in a state of love, immersed in Love Himself, or in a kind of reductio ad me, shrunk into our selfishness forever, is up to us. C.S. Lewis wrote in The Weight of Glory, "It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations."

This means that, should Andrea and I reach heaven (as I have a holy hope we shall — though I am sure, in my case, only after a long detour in Purgatory!), we will love each other for eternity. Eternity is something we cannot even comprehend, time-bound as we are in this life. Oh, we intellectually understand the concept, but we don't really get it. We can't feel the full staggering weight of it. We will never end. We will experience more time than the universe has even been in existence for. And when that time has passed, we will experience that amount of time again, and then again, and again . . . In fact, we will exist for so long and experience so much time that the entire 15 billion years that the universe has existed will be something we look back on the way we look back now at a single moment many years ago. 

Another awesome truth is that my love for Andrea will never be less than it is now. It can only increase. Yes, I know that there will be hardships in marriage. Feelings ebb and flow. But love, genuine love, transcends momentary feelings. The difficulties are the crucible in which love is purified and set into the will. And then, after we have reached God, our love for each other will be truly perfected in our love for Him. So I can tell Andrea with complete truthfulness that I will never love her less than I do now.

Oh, and speaking of the universe, Andrea and I liked to sit out looking at the stars in the warm evenings last summer. I've always loved to stargaze. I love seeing the millions and billions of stars, feeling that awesome vastness of space. For example, the Andromeda galaxy, which we can see with our naked eyes, is 2.5 million light years away. That means that the light which we see when we look at it left those stars 2.5 million years ago. That's incredible! That light left that galaxy before human civilization existed. Our fastest spaceships go only 1/18,000th of the speed of light, so if we set out for Andromeda today we would reach it in 45 billion years. The universe itself has only been around for 15 billion. That gives us a sense of scale! We humans will never experience even a billionth, even a billion billionth, of the universe. Even if we should rise to Star Trek-style levels of technology, the universe will always dwarf us. We can never own the universe. It will always be too big for us to possess.

Incomprehensible vastness

And yet we can possess something far greater than the universe. We can possess its Creator. We are destined for a union with God so complete that there will be no boundaries between Him and us. The hand that sparked the Big Bang, that determined the bounds of the universe, that laid out the courses of the stars and planets, that set forth the laws of physics, and that sustains all of creation moment to moment, will be ours, and we will be completely His. We will be entirely immersed in His essence, His very Being. Love Himself will pour Himself into us continually, and we will give back to Him our own poor love, forever. 

This has great meaning when I think about marriage. It means that Andrea is loved by God with an infinite love, and she is destined to be united to Him. The universe will someday cease to exist, but Andrea will not. God loves her more than he loves the entire universe, which means that she is more valuable than the universe. She is a universe unto herself. All the laws of physics and the astonishing exactitude and perfection of the operation of the universe, all the breathtaking vastness and soul-searing beauty of it, cannot compare to the vastness of Andrea's soul, which is able to possess and be possessed by Being Himself, which is free to make choices and — wonder of wonders! — to love. And so, in marrying Andrea, I will be doing something greater and more momentous than possessing the universe itself. Something more valuable than the entire universe will be in my charge. That's an awe-inspiring thought.

To end on a light note, Andrea and I like to speculate on what things will be like when we get our glorified bodies at the end of the world. See, humans are not spirits like angels. Nor are we "ghosts in machines," spirits riding around in bodies. Our bodies are essential to us. We are, in a real and fundamental way, our bodies. The separation of soul from body at death is unnatural! We are not meant to exist that way. So we will eventually get our bodies back. And our bodies will be glorified and perfected. They will be able to travel as fast as thought, walk through other matter, and do many other things a superhero would be jealous of. But they will still be bodies. They will still be physical matter. Angels travel as fast as thought because, being pure spirits, they go from one place to another in the same way that we think of one thing and then another, without anything in between. (In fact, the "presence" of angels is this kind of thing; not a physical presence, but like turning a thought towards something.) Our glorified bodies will also be able to travel as fast as thought, but, since we will still be physical beings, we will travel through every point in space in between. What a rush!

What all this means is that I will still be able to dip Andrea. In fact, I will be able to dip her better than I ever could now! Couple this with the knowledge of our immortality, and Andrea has requested that I dip her from the Mariana Trench to the moon (assuming they are still around) on a certain day almost one billion years from now.

Wheeeee!

I told her, "It's a date."