Heart's Ease

A colleague of mine, decades younger than I and recent grad of Notre Dame University, said that she felt indescribably happy watching the Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland film, The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). It seemed nearly incredible to me that one so young should get a rush from a great old movie like this; it nearly destroyed my faith as a curmudgeon that "young people are hopeless."

For me, I still must trek deep into the Himalayas to Shangri-La with Ronald Colman, Jane Wyatt, H. B. Warner, Sam Jaffe, Thomas Mitchell, and Edward Everett Horton in Lost Horizon (1937).

Unlike Joseph Campbell's mythic treatment of an universal archetype of the hero's quest in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), a pablum based on C. G. Jung's analytical psychology with Gnostic, pagan overtones, I far prefer to steer away from Eternal Return bunk of Nietzsche and European "mythomania". The Great Tradition of the Faith, given and safeguarded by Mother Church, can make far more sense of this heart's yearning and desire than can psycho-philosophical hokum (Compare Dante and DeLubac to, say, Jung or Nietzsche).

The yearning is to be fully in the Divine Presence of the Most Holy Trinity. Our heart's desire is the Beatific Vision, kneeling before the One who is more me than I am myself (to paraphrase Gabriel Marcel via Gil Bailie). But until then, we have in our heart and mind a pattern given to our race by the Second Person of the Trinity, a blessed template and glimpse of glory: the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, and Ascension. All heroes and heroism have their origin here. Robin Hood, Aragorn, High Llama, et al.

Our mortal dream is to be rescued and to abide in the realm of a just, merciful, eternal King. Lost Horizon and The Adventures of Robin Hood help keep this dream cognizant. The Catholic Church offers a foretaste of Heaven providentially, eucharistically, magisterially. She invites all -- all who have strayed and become scattered, all who have never heard the good news, all who previously stood on their pride or indifference -- to come. Enter the gates of the good King and healer, come into his Blessed Realm.