The Power of Forgetting

The Power of Forgetting
JUDGES 2:1- 3: 4

Last night I went to the first performance in Los Angeles of the musical version of The Color Purple, a fabulous concoction of music, dance, and drama vividly bringing to life the tough reality of many women’s experience (and not just in the African American community) but ending with a note of encouragement and hope. Near the end, as in the novel, Celie prays to “dear God, dear stars, dear sky, dear peoples, dear everything, dear God.” The words reminded me of some comments by Ross Douthat in The New York Times (December 20, 2009), describing James Cameron’s also-recent blockbuster Avatar as “Cameron’s long apologia for pantheism—a faith that equates God with Nature, and calls humanity into religious communion with the natural world.” The article describes this faith as Hollywood’s religion of choice, embodied in many other movies because it is a faith that people in the United States (both Christian and non-Christian) love. It helps to bring God closer to human experience in a way that avoids God’s interfering with us in ways we might not like...