GroshLink

Just being home in Cenral PA this past weekend, I had the opportunity to swing by Elizabethtown, PA. The visit reminded me that I had failed to post my thoughts on Elizabethtown (a film set in Kentucky which I recently had the opportunity to see).

To get to the point, there was a strong endorsement of small town familial community and love as an antidote to the driven, success oriented consumer culture. Regarding small town America, I do not equate this with the Christian Gospel/counterculture. Yes, this can create a context for redemptive moments, where the noise of our success culture is drowned out, but it is not the be all and end all to answers regarding the search for affirmation, meaning, and community in our contemporary situation.

As for love, it needed a better image to wrap-up w/than bloody salmon swimming upstream for sex and life. To wrap, I thought that the movie lacked the strength to hold its alternative vision of family/community and love to guide one through the crisis points of one's life.

This is not to say that watching Elizabethtown has not provided opportunities for conversation, such as the one we're having right now. But it is to say that despite the starpower and message of family, small town, and love, I do not find Elizabethtown a prophetic word for the mass culture or a cult classic for the evangelical subculture. Love, family, and small town community must be in the larger context of living day by day in the Presence of God and one can be about this just as much in urban life far away from family. These are pieces of and tools through which God expresses Himself in our world. Yes, sometimes we need to go away on a Sabbatical to hear the still small voice, but He is the healing balm where-ever we are in place and personal journey. There is no magic in small town or love.

Other thoughts on Elizabethtown can be found here. If you've seen the film, I'd be interested in yours.