Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Get Low

  "It's time for me to get low."

  With those words Robert Duvall's character, Felix Bush, begins his quest to plan his own funeral.  The only difference between this funeral and most other funerals is that Bush wants to attend his funeral.

  Get Low is an odd, endearing tale, one in which the viewer is constantly trying to discover the motive behind all this, and yet the story unfolds in such a sweet way that I never grew impatient with it, and like it more and more as the story wound together.

  Felix Bush is an odd, mountain man, the type about which countless stories and legends have been told, most of which aren't true, but are told to scare children and grown-ups alike.  He lives on the outskirts of town, and seems to be an enigma to anyone who crosses his path, until strangers from long ago return and begins to peel back all the layers of Bush's history.

  More than anything else, Get Low was a tale about forgiveness, and what our transgressions can do to us if we don't accept forgiveness.  They will grow and devour our lives, our wills, if we let them.  I imagine that we punish ourselves far more than most others punish us, and Felix Bush has something in his past that has been gnawing at him for forty years, and it has consumed him to the point that he cannot live without telling his tale.

  Do you allow yourself to be forgiven?  Do you accept grace and mercy?  Or do you choose to wall up your sins inside you, denying grace any entry and allowing those sins to consume and devour you?  Christ has nailed our sins to the cross--are you constantly trying to pull them back off the cross and prevent them from dying there?

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