Open your eyes - Notes from the Tilt-a-Whirl

I've been taking photos on my phone of magnolias again.

I received the DVD of Notes from the Tilt-a-Whirl, by N.D. Wilson in the mail late last week, and I have watched it over and over this weekend. It has inspired me through the unfortunately boring end to a crochet project, of weaving in all the yarn ends on a rug for my niece (though after watching this DVD I am not supposed to be “bored” with anything).

You really need to watch this. In the first chapter Wilson takes a swipe at Philosophers, which might raise the shackles of some, and I wondered at this beginning, but his gripe is that Philosophy departments are full of people wondering what it was that Plato said, instead of actually wondering what the world is. In the special features, he explains that he believes a lot of Christians are influenced by Plato’s view of the material world, and that he wrote the book Notes from the Tilt-a-Whirl because he had this pent up rage at how the world is viewed by a lot of Christians and how numb we all are to it’s “wonders” (even though he knows that sounds like a postcard). He noticed that the more educated people were, the more numb they were. So he attempts to break the apathetic shell off intelligent Christians, who’ve read Philosophy but who he saw as ignoring the nature of reality, the nature of God, in exchange for a heightened respect for secular thought, for Philosophers, whom he doesn’t believe merit the credence (because he has studied them).

So, that is by way of introduction, but you must watch on. I particularly love chapter four, called Talking Rocks. In it he talks about art and reality and says something to this effect (this is my loose transcription of some of the chapter, which loses a lot without his presentation of it):

God’s attention to detail, his attention to things that honestly don’t matter to us at all, should be really encouraging. You serve a God and you live in a world shaped by a God who cares down to the ants. If he didn’t care down to the ants I’d be more worried for myself ... We don’t have to see everything, we don’t have to have all the answers or have everything explained to us ... We can see his personality, we can see his caution, his care ... We can get to know him, and know that he’s the one there, he’s the one telling the story. You can find that you're in a Shakespearean play and you can trust Shakespeare. We just lose track of stuff, as soon as it leaves our little frame ... God is still tracking it, it's still going somewhere ...

He goes on to explain the magnificent probability and sheer unlikelihood of us being here as individuals, and asks are we going to be ungrateful?

Are you going to sit there and mope because you have homework, because you haven't got the car you want, because your life hasn’t gone the way you would have liked it to have gone because that person betrayed you, because you betrayed that person? Because you have red hair, because you have blonde hair, because you’re tall, because you’re short? What are you going to complain about?

...

When it does actually come time for the snowflake to melt ... for another mortal to die and exit the stage, we did have our time here ... We were the chosen, we were the shaped, we were the ones who got to participate in this song, in this art. And at that very end we should know that living really does make dying worth it.

Other chapters might be more profound, but I found this one so truly "inspiring". I also love the hiatuses (does that have a plural?) on the DVD. There is a winter, a spring and a summer hiatus, in which Wilson reads a story he wrote, accompanied by stunning visuals, to enhance what he's saying. He's a fabulous writer and these are beautiful, for example: "She [my grandmother] smiles and laughs when my children steal her walker, when Spring borrows a prop from Winter." Then there are other chapters about the nature of evil, about death and hope (when he walks through a graveyard and talks about the hope of the resurrection it makes me shiver), about the r-rated world we live in where nature itself is full of violence but also beauty (and how as people we tend to be all about "gritty" or all about "cutesy", but the world God made is neither), about the story we are all in ...

I like it a lot.