God is love

Every now and then I need to watch and listen to this clip with Gungor. Sometimes life feels dull and then this clip reminds me of all wonderful reasons to live there are:

Advent Tide in Sweden I : Tjuvarnas jul

In the Nordic countries Advent is still much celebrated . Although the reformation tried to rid Swedes of all Catholic habits, many of them remain, like celebrating Advent. It's not celebrated with much fasting, unfortunately for the public health. People tend to eat "Christmas Tables", ( i.e. the special Christmas dishes which resemble in much the food starving vikings longed for duríng the Advent lent-fat, lard, sugar, cream and salt are the main ingredients) for more than a month before Christmas, instead.

However, there are more to Advent in Sweden than eating an excess of calories in mediaeval food. One of the most popular is the Advent calendar on Swedish TV, a serial in 24 episodes guiding families to Christmas eve with some "Chritsmassy" story. Normally people love to hate, and find faults with it, but this year an unanimous praise is raised to the Advent calendar. Dorothea doesn't beg to differ. It is lovely in every respect.

The petty thief Kurre goes straight and gets hired as a Department Store Santa the weeks before Christmas

The story is set in early 20th C Sweden and the main characters are thieves in the "Klappsnappar-gang"(Christmas presents nickers). The petty thief Kurre is found by his daughter Charlie, a girl resembling Anne of Green Gables, Oliver Twist and the female Astrid Lindgren characters including Brenda helping Grandmother, Pippi Longstocking and Lotta on Troublemaker's Street. 

Charlie is straight forward and helps her father to live a straight life. She has already saved the small town from the gangster queen, the evil and tight fisted Madame Bofvén, and I bet she also will conquer the greedy department store owner, simply called "Direktörskan" (the Managing Directoress). A woman cut out from the same mold as Cruella Deville and Miranda Priestley from "The Devil Wears Prada".

The Policemen Jönsson and Jansson on either side of the Chief Inspector Lönnroth. Jönsson and Jansson are comical twin characters of Laurel and Hardy and makes life rather easy for the thieves in the small town

Apart from Charlie and the two horrible main villains in the story, there are several other strong female characters in the story; Madame Shadow-one of the thieves and Miss Gerda, the neighbour who has a cruch on Kurre, and Kurre has the same for her, at the same time Charlie has chosen her as her mother, since her first mother "is an angel".

The characters are Dickensian, the snow and cold is real and the story is heart warming. Most of my readers doesn't live in Sweden, and you probably don't know much Swedish, but you can get a hint of this Advent tradition and lovely story here.

Christian Science

Mark Noll has written a new book; Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind. . In an interview in Christianity Today he says:

Many of the problems that have taken place in the so-called conflict between religion and science come from hasty conclusions. Right back to the Middle Ages, we have a long series of purportedly new discoveries in nature. The response by church leaders has often been, ”This can’t be possible.” Only a little while later would Christian people say, ”Here’s how it is possible.”

Neither Martin Luther nor John Calvin was at all willing to believe that the earth might move around the sun. But two generations later, all Lutherans, Calvinists, and Catholics agreed that in fact the earth did move around the sun. It would have been ideal for people to respond to the ideas of Copernicus and Galileo by saying, ”Well, let’s take our time and evaluate this apparent contradiction with Scripture as carefully and as patiently as possible.” What took place instead was an unnecessarily dogmatic reaction.

I’m not qualified to speak in detail about current problems. As a historian, I am qualified to say that less denunciation and more effort at patient study is the best way forward.

It is hard to express how much I agree with him. I cannot understand  why Christians of all people in the world are so hasty in denunciations and so readily get scared of scientific theories and discoveries when we should be the most harmonious and confident people in the world. If we are the children of the creator, what can we possibly fear from science?

If you Want to Peep into Paradise-Watch this Film

Le vase de lilas

I rarely see a film that captures me like the one I watched yesterday; Séraphine, a French movie made in 2009. It tells a story in a rather straight forward traditional narrative way, of a very rare and un-traditional artist; Séraphine Louis, AKA, Séraphine de Senlis. This woman actually existed in Senlis, where she was born in 1864 and where she died in 1942.

Early orphaned she was first raised by a big sister and supported herself by doing laundry and all sorts of household chores for the middle class families in Senlis. That lead her to work and live with nuns in a monastery nearby the town. That monastery was one of the focal points of her life and here she started painting, as she claims, because of her meating her guardian angel who taught her to paint and told her what to paint.

The movie starts when she starts cleaning a house for the famous art critic, gallery owner and art collector Wilhelm Uhde. Uhde finds one of her paintings at one of Séraphine's employers and Uhde's landlady. He is immediately attracted to the beautiful painting of apples made in style which is both totally new and orginal and at the same time resembles Mediaeval art; especially rose windows in cathedrals.

She used a very powerful, lucid paint of which she never revealed the secret, taht gave the paintings translucent qualities and made them look like windows into paradise. Uhde was infatuated by her art and they became friends. The Movie depicts their friendship and their diffrent charcters in such a remarkably well tuned manner that I can't compare it to anything I've seen on the screen so far. There is no hint of sexuality only this deep understanding and respect. Séraphine advices the preoccupied Uhde to take his problems to the birds and the trees as she does, and she offers him her home brewed "energy-wine" when news of the Great War coming up, depresses him.


That war tears Europe apart, and by that Séraphine and Wilhelm Uhde. He has to leave France and he returns in 1927. Meanwhile Séraphine goes on cleaning and doing the laundry but she also develops her artist skills. For her art is more than just art. She paints heavenly revelations and she always sings sacred hymns which she learnt at the monastery, when she paints. She wouldn't say she became more and more a master of her art, she would claim that the inspiration from above gets clearer and stronger.

The film is remarkable in so many ways, it is a movie without the masculine viewpoint. Séraphine is not for sale, she is not attractive in the ordinary movie manner, she is human and depicted with dignity as being a genius in her own right, not as being an unusally clever working class woman. All the supporting roles are also so well played. This you very rarely find in Swedish or American movies.

The real Séraphine painting the Tree of Life

Apart from Séraphine, many other central characters are women, an unusual feature in movies when you come to think of it. Those women are the sister of Uhde's, Anne-Marie and Séraphines friend Minouche. The women in the movie doesn't fight over a man, they don't long for getting married and the three female parts that stand out the most are all women with a mission in life.This is so very unusual even in movies which are supposed to have female main characters that you get stunned. Normally all boils down to a man or several men as the centre of gravity in the story. This film never loses its focal point; Séraphine and her art.

A common phenomenon in contemporary popular culture is that religion equals evil. In this movie religion is shown with respect, without exaggerated reverence. The nuns are shown as normal and kind human beings, the beliefs of Séraphine are respected throughout the movie, Even her delusions in the end are described with utter respect. This is so very rare that I only can think of a handful of movies which don't mock Christians and their religion. To find a movie that depicts religion this way must be rather difficult, I can only think of The Mission from 1986 which comes near to this one.

Une devotion

Which finally leads us to the dignified portayal of a mentally ill person in the end of the movie. I have never seen anything that comes near to it. In short; I have very rarely watched a film so beautiful, so filled with positive energy, so deeply significant in every detail, so liberating both for the mind and the soul. The film has managed to transfer the essence and message of the real paintings by Séraphine de Senlis. Her paintings are windows enabling us to peep into Paradise beforehand and so is this magnificent movie.