What if you had to live the same day over and over again, without consequences or change, for 30 years? Some would argue that that is what their life is already like, but it’s nowhere close to what Bill Murray’s character had to endure in the movie Groundhog Day. A classic movie all about second chances (and third, and fourth, and fifth…) Br. Tito and I discuss the stages he goes through and how he ends up a better person on the other side.
Longtime viewers might be having deja vu. Five years ago, I produced a video with the exact same title and exact same message. Sort of.
For new viewers, I hope this lesson is a helpful one for the season: don’t give up anything for lent; give up something for life.
If you had the power of God, what would you do? It’s a question that we rarely ask ourselves because, well, it’s not a very practical question. And yet, after watching the movie Bruce Almighty in which Jim Carey’s character is given this very opportunity, Fr. Patrick and I were forced to wonder.
Overall, the movie is more of a cautionary tale of acting without thinking, and there’s actually a few lessons to be learned. While we will never be God in Godself, we do have the ability to work with God to bring about the Kingdom, and our actions can have significant consequences.
Some stories are just too iconic to tell only once. So the Coen brothers thought when they wrote O Brother, Where Art Thou, an adaptation of the Greek epic The Odyssey. The classic story was too big to remain only in ancient Greece. It deserved a modern equivalent.
But simply transposing the story into a new setting wasn’t good enough. This is cheap adaptation. No, the Coen brothers understood that stories need to grow, adapt, evolve, an even change. They can begin with the source material, but unless something is added, it will not be a story that speaks to its time.
And so, that’s exactly what they did. Using the structure of The Odyssey and transposing it to the 1930s south, they began with something familiar in order to tell a new story.
Believe it or not, I am told quite often that I am wasting my life as a Franciscan priest. Seeing all that I have to give up, all that I’m missing, religious and non-religious alike find it troubling. In this video, I do my best to respond to this idea, telling the world what I knew even before I joined: this is the best life I could imagine.
Breaking In The Habit 