Your friendly neighborhood...

In the M. Night Shyamalan movie Unbreakable from 2000, Samuel L. Jackson's character, in setting up the premise of the film, talks about how comic books serve as the modern day communicant of mythology. At first, I thought the screenwriter from Philadelphia was just being over dramatic. But as time has gone on, and as I've been asked questions about "what it's like" and "why am I doing this," I've actually found that certain comic book stories actually provide some of the better allegories to describe this time in my life.

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"You have really big cheeks." Such was the verdict of a friend's four year old child as I was visiting his house for dinner one night recently. That's the thing with kids... unvarnished truth. She was staring at my face for about five minutes and that's what she came up with. I almost did not give her the final "plane" ride she had been pestering me about before her parents put her and her sister to bed. But then I remembered humiliating my grandmother when I was a child by pointing out, for the whole supermarket to notice, just how large the woman five feet in front of us was... I lifted my friend's daughter up for a final twirl around the room.

After putting the kids to bed, my friend and his wife settled into one couch, I on the other, we flipped the channels to see if anything good was on TV. While eating dinner and hanging out with my friend's kids, I could not help but notice just how different my life is from my friend's right now... and how different it probably will be. That point started to really hit home when I found my life relating to the movie we settled on, "Spider-Man 2."

The Bible tels us that to whom much has been given, much will be expected. Uncle Ben Parker would put it a different way; "With great power comes great responsibility." That mantra haunts Peter Parker as he struggles with his new found identity as it affects both his friendships, his love life, as well as his relationship with the world as a whole. The desire to chuck it all and lead a normal life taps him on the shoulder incessantly... to the point where he does just that. Except he realizes that he can't... both because he cannot deny who he truly is and because, as he tells his friend Harry Osborn, "there are larger things going on than me and you."

For myself, I can't climb walls and I'll never have webs shoot out of my wrists. The only power I'll be granted at some point is being able to turn bread into flesh and wine into blood. Not much for dodging bullets, but at the end of the day there's hope that it'll be good enough to stop bullets in it's own way. But I do understand that desire to chuck it all and join "the rest" of humanity, but then I remember that my "dough like" cheeks would prevent me from getting my own comic series and that I should probably stick with this gig for the time being.

I know this might not be the analogy that everyone would make... maybe that's because I largely daydreamed about movies through Sunday School class while other future seminarians fantasized about presiding at Mass... I don't know. I do remind myself that while our friendly, neighborhood, Spider-Man goes at it alone in the Marvel comic book universe, my situation is probably more like the "League of Justice" from DC Comics; Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, and the Green Lantern all get to come back, commiserate, and "share fellowship" after a day of battling evil.

God, I can't believe I just used the phrase "share fellowship" in a sentence... I guess that means I need to watch more South Park. Anyway, next week's film review will be on 2006's "Superman Returns" - don't even get me started on that one.