Often, I turn to the words of others to help heal my hurting heart. Fiction, and especially films, can help provide me with insight & inspiration when the real world seems harsh, dark, menacing and unexplainable. Here’s a trio of movie speeches to provide some Sunday inspiration.
Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
In talking to a discouraged Frodo, Samwise Gamgee likens their participation in the epic struggle to destroy the Ring of Power to the heroic tales of old. He points out how it was often common people in those stories who persevere who become the heroes of the tales, inspired by the power of the storytelling of earlier legends.
It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come.
Secondhand Lions
A wonderfully fun romp of a movie (almost unknown) starring Haley Joel Osment as a young boy dropped off by his irresponsible mother to stay at his eccentric uncles’ farm for a summer. Michael Cain and Robert Duvall are delightful as the eccentric uncles. This scene speaks to the importance in holding fast our deepest beliefs under all circumstances — even if they might not be right.
Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most…You see, a man should believe in those things, because those are the things worth believing in.
The Great Dictator
Leave it to one of our greatest American comedians to speak so directly — and seriously — about some of our world’s most important issues. In The Great Dictator, (released in 1940 as an obvious response to the rise of Hitler’s Nazi Germany), Chaplin plays a dual role of the rising dictator of fictional Tomania, Hynkel, as well as a doppelgänger simply identified as “A Jewish Barber.” Leading up to the climax, the dictator’s underlings have mistaken the Jewish barber for Hynkel, so the Jewish barber uses the opportunity to deliver a passionate closing speech.
We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness, not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone, and the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone.
The shadow across my heart fades, the darkness fleeing the light of hope.
Look up — the sun is shining!
Buller's back porch 