Hi, my name is Father Mike Schmitz and this Ascension Presents.
So OK, throwback to a couple old movies.
There right now there's this kind of a trend of the dystopian future kind of a movie,
you have The Hunger Games and you have the one with Tris and that Divergent series and all these other things,
but a number of years ago, there were two movies that had come out.
One is called The Book of Eli with Denzel Washington.
The other is called The Road with Viggo Mortensen,
based off of a relatively famous kind of alternative book by the same title.
I watched both movies in the same day once.
I had gotten back from being gone on the road, doing some some preaching things.
I came back to Duluth and I was just exhausted
and no students were here and so I'm like, "You know what?
I'm just going to lock the door. I'm gonna watch a couple movies."
And I sat here for whatever, five hours worth of post-apocalyptic dystopian future
where everything has gone haywire.
Both movies are almost the exact same movies, right?
Both about a protagonist male who has precious cargo trying to get to a certain place.
And it's about the journey.
So The Book of Eli, he's the guy and he's trying to get this book to a good place.
In The Road, it's the dad, Viggo Mortensen, trying to get his son to the coast, to the shore, right?
Interestingly at the end of The Book of Eli, the big reveal
is like, "Oh, my gosh, what? This is crazy! It all made sense! God was with this guy the entire way."
It's one of those images of, this is remarkable how God guided this man.
You can see God's hand upon everything
every step of the—literally every step of the way at the end of the movie.
At the end of The Road, I don't want to spoil it, but he gets to the coast and it's just more despair,
it's just more depression, it's just more awfulness.There's no hope.
And then he dies and then the kid goes on.
And I remember thinking like, "Oh my gosh. The worldview of these two movies
are kind of the worldviews that you and I get to choose from."
One is life has meaning, God is present at all times
The other one is life doesn't have meaning. There's a road, it doesn't go anywhere, and then you die.
Nihilism, right?
So, meaning and nihilism.
Meaning—everything means something and nothing means anything
seem to be kind of the two worldviews.
But something happened.
I went back and I read the book The Road. Now again, disclaimer.
This is a very mature, meaning there's some really hard things in both movies.
I'm not advocating this, I'm just saying this was the story.
Don't watch it with your family.
So *garbled*
So I read the book The Road and at the end, I realized this was completely different
than what they showed in the movie.
And it's almost a shot-for-shot retelling of the book,
but at the end, yes, Viggo Mortensen's character, the father, dies
but the very next thing that happens is the son walks out into the road
and he meets a group of human beings, a group of people
who are not victims like a lot of other people and they're not bullies
and not the cruel people that are the bad guys that dominate the whole area.
They're strong people but they have principle.
In fact, the phrase that they use throughout the course of this book is "they carry the fire."
They're the good guys, they carry the fire, they carry this hope. They carry meaning. They carry purpose.
What I thought—I mistakenly thought when I saw the movie
was that this is two movies: one of meaning and one of no meaning.
One of meaningfulness and one of nihilism.
What ultimately it is is the story The Book of Eli is about a prophet or a man of God
who gets to see the fruit of following the Lord.
In The Road, it's again the same kind of thing. A man of hope who doesn't get to see his hope come true.
He doesn't get to see what he fought for, what he lived for,
what he ultimately died for come to fruition, but it does. He just didn't get to see it.
Because in the whole book The Road, the story is all about this father knowing he's dying
and so he takes his son on the road not to get just get to the coast,
but to show him how to live in this dangerous world
and keep the fire burning in the midst of this dangerous world.
If you're a dad or a mom, that's your job, right?
You realize, you probably won't get to see the fruit of all the sacrifices you make
for your children, for your grandchildren
but your job is to show them how to live in this world in such a way
that they can keep carrying the fire, keep carrying hope, keep carrying the Lord.
You may not get to see the fruit of all that you do.
You might actually end up dying before you ever see your kids come back to the Church,
might end up dying before you ever see your kids become the saints they're made to be.
You might die before you see all the sacrifices you've made, bear fruit
but in that, this is so good because it doesn't mean anything.
This doesn't mean that it doesn't mean anything.
What it means is you just didn't get to see it.
Because we're all called to walk through this world
and whether we get to see the fruits of what we're living for and dying for
or that we never get to see the fruits,
what we are called to do is we're called to be faithful, we're called to carry the fire.
We're called to continue to walk with the Lord.
From all of us here at Ascension Presents, my name is Father Mike.
God bless.