The Little Mermaid

For Christmas my freshman year of college, my good friend and bio lab partner, Dio, got me a book entitled The Gospel According to Disney: Faith, Trust, and Pixie Dust. Oh Dio knows me too well. It combines three of my favorite things - The Bible, Theology, and Disney movies. I read through the book right after I got it, but last night as I was watching the Little Mermaid (in my opinion one of Disney's greatest triumphs - attested to by the fact I had the entire movie memorized at age four) I had this urge to pull out the book again.
Mark I. Pinsky made some outstanding points about the movie. He played with the concept of the basic plot of the movie being about inter-marriage (notice though that the movie is more about conversion then acceptance) but the sub-themes were just as meaningful. When Ariel makes the comment (right before she launches into 'Part of Your World') that she doesn't understand how a world that makes such wonderful things can be bad. When did we begin to confuse quality of worth with materialism? Is our world good because we have things or is it good because God said it was good the whole way back in Genesis? For the last couple of days I have had the opportunity to really notice some things around my house. Especially my curio cabinets. They are chalk full of things - and as nice as they are I don't think they are necessary. How often do we buy out of impulse to reflect our status instead of giving things away or using our money in a better way? Things in and of themselves are not bad, but they are supposed to remind us of God creating us to be people who create. And materialism should never block us from God or our neighbor. We should always be more driven to service and knowing God then obtaining wealth and things. Sometimes it just seems that even we, as Christians, get that backwards.
As much as I liked some of the items that Pinsky mentioned a lot more stuck out to me as I watched the movie. What does community look like? This seems to be the buzz question amongst my friends and I, especially after attending a college that claims to have community. Community is like the animals near the end of the movie - right before the first wedding scene where Eric almost marries Ursala the sea witch. Community is Scuttle telling all of his friends that they need to go help Ariel and every single one of them following him without any question, dropping what they were doing. They each brought their special gifts and talents (that God gave them in design) to the situation and together they achieved the greater good.
I was watching the local news the few days ago and there was all of this buzz because local churches were working together for the first time to construct a Habitat for Humanity house and it was being built faster then any house in the area has been done before. While the anchor was singing the praises of these churches all I could think was isn't this what the Church should be doing all of the time? Bringing individuals and small churches under the banner of the Church to achieve something greater then we could on our own. When did everything become about the local church's ministries and not the Kingdom vision of all of us working together? What could we achieve if we would reclaim this vision of the community of the Church?
As many times as I've watched this movie, I've never been touched by the scene where King Triton substitutes himself for his daughter, taking her place in the contract she signed to give her life to the Sea Witch. Wow. Triton loved his daughter so much that he sacrificed everything - his Kingdom, his family, his power - just to save his one daughter (out of twelve). What is love leading us to do? Love was what hung Christ on the cross. We say we want to live like Christ but love isn't compelling us to do anything any more. I would venture a guess that most of our motives come from greed and selfish gain, the antithesis of love. An image used several times in the movie - most notably when a transformed Ursala is dancing on the dresser top - is that evil is embodied in getting what you want for selfish gain. Oh how evil is running through America today, if this is true.
While I found Triton's selfless giving to be moving, it just made me detest Ariel at the end of the movie. Was she not incredibly selfish to leave her Father who just sacrificed his life for her in order to go marry a man she fell in love with for his body and has known for less then a week? She's not going to get to spend time with her family anymore. All I could think was how often do we leave our Heavenly Father for the wrong reasons? We have this tendency to forget about his ultimate gift for us every time something "better" comes along to distract us.
The same line of thought came up when all of the souls were freed from Ursala, whom they had sold themselves to. Did you ever notice how many souls there were? Its overwhelming. And for what? To be more bulk as a man or skinner as a female (as alluded to at the beginning of the movie) or something material or antithetical to love? How often do we sell our souls to different things? What have you sold your soul to recently?
Finally, I had this idea as Ariel gave her voice to the Ursala. How much is that like the spiritual discipline of silence? Only with the spiritual discipline we are giving our voice to God, to whom it belongs, so we can listen to what he is actually trying to say to us. We need to learn to be less dependent on talking, especially in prayer, because it only reflects our self-absorbed nature. Why not let God actually have silence and space in which he can talk to us instead of constantly filling up the silence?