13: Marvel Movies & Kevin Smith
Gareth Higgins on SHANG-CHI AND THE LEGEND OF THE TEN RINGS
I’ve heard it said that when St Francis was asked on his deathbed what he regretted, his response was something along the lines of I wish I had taken better care of myself. This fella, who went from soldiering to feverish confrontation with the oppression of his neighbors, to public denunciation of his father’s mini-empire, to a life of voluntary poverty and service, may have been referring to his tired feet and sore back, or something deeper, but the point is the same: even the most heroic lives need to be punctuated with chosen moments of renewal. And there’s a reason only one letter separates “rest” from “reset”, and why as the tradition has it, even God needs to take one day off each week.
People are not machines. Machines can’t love you back, for one thing. But more importantly, machines don’t know that they need to rest. Humans, on the other hand, need to discern a life in which play and community, ordinariness and spectacle, activism and doing nothing are balanced. In The Guilty Bystander, Thomas Merton wrote that there is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence.
To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence.
The frenzy of the activist neutralizes [their] work. It destroys the fruitfulness of [their] … work, because it kills the roots of inner wisdom which makes the work frutiful.
I’ve loved this passage since I first encountered it a few years ago, and I hope it may finally be working its way into my heart. It was a delicious surprise that a Marvel superhero movie could help. It may not even be intentional, but one of the things Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings does really well is to center characters who know how to enjoy themselves while also saving the world.
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