Angelina and the Amish

I think I might have watched too many movies.

Last night, after a wonderful weekend hosting our Belgian friends Sergio and Roselie, we were home alone and ready for some mindless entertainment. So we dialed up the Angelina Jolie movie Salt. I’d seen a review somewhere that gave it three and a half stars. After watching the movie I’ve decided that must have been on a ten-star scale.

Is it good if you laugh out loud at a movie that you are supposed to take seriously? At one point in the film Angelina escapes by rolling off a highway overpass onto a passing truck many feet below. In real life, if someone did that, they would break a few ribs and bounce off the truck onto the pavement where they’d be run over by a car. Angelina not only survived her fall without injury, she then jumped onto another semi and then leapt onto a smaller truck. She almost overshot the smaller truck, but was able to hang on by her fingertips. Man, does she have strong fingers!

That last stunt made me think of the last stunt I ever tried. This was about five or six years ago on the ropes course of the Young Life camp at TimberWolf Lake. At the end of the ropes course you jump out and try to grab a trapeze in mid-air and then are safely lowered to the ground. I jumped out, grabbed the trapeze and couldn’t hold it. It makes no difference if you hold on or not, they lower you to the ground either way, but after my attempt I was unable to lift my right arm over my head for the next month. That was nothing compared to the left arm. It took three months to lift that arm, plus a couple of visits to an orthopedic surgeon, an MRI and six weeks of physical therapy. That injury was fresh in my mind because on Saturday my son Jesse and I took Sergio and Roselie up to TimberWolf Lake and we walked under the ropes course. I stood on the ground gaping up at how high that trapeze is and wondered what in the world I had been thinking. What was I doing over a hundred feet high in the air on wires and platforms to start with? Sometimes my own stupidity overwhelms me.

By the way, we also engaged in one of my favorite sports on Saturday. We went Amish hunting. Sergio and Roselie were curious about Amish people, so we drove around North Central Michigan and found some farms and an Amish bakery where they were able to talk with a young Amish woman. I envy Amish people. They don't jump off platforms and grab trapezes or watch inane movies.

But let’s get back to the ridiculous movie and stupid me who watched it. It wasn’t even the ludicrous action sequences I found so objectionable. It was the plot. I guessed it. All of it. I knew from the beginning her “friend” in the CIA was going to turn out to be the bad guy. Don’t ask me how I knew, I just did. I’ve seen too many movies (The Fugitive comes to mind) where the wrongly-accused hero’s friend turns out to be the real villain. I knew Angelina was a highly-trained killing machine with a troubled and somewhat forgotten past (The Bourne Identity? The Manchurian Candidate?). I knew she would have to keep indiscriminately killing innocent people to prove her innocence in the end. I saw all of it coming. It was Die Hard, Rambo, The Terminator and all the others rolled into one.

For some reason this morning I’m stuck on the contrast between that movie and the Amish people we saw on Saturday. Sergio and Roselie were interested in the Amish because of movies like Witness and other media portrayals. What they found was much different than what they imagined. They found reality. None of it was glamorous or particularly exciting – just people living off the land, living lives made complicated by their quest for simplicity. Reality, where middle-aged men get hurt trying to act like kids on ropes courses and where Amish people work from sunrise to sunset six days a week and barely get by, presents challenges far more complex than anything the people who created Salt ever imagined. No one’s going to make a movie about the glasses-wearing Amish girl at Yoder’s Bakery in Stanwood, Michigan. Hopefully the world will ignore her. But in a sense – a sense suggested by CS Lewis in his sermon for the ages called The Weight of Glory – she has a beauty that outshines Angelina’s. Lewis said, “Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.” Keep that in mind today.