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In my perception, Bong Joon Ho, the Korean director of the film Parasite, has crazed a global nerve still vibrating from its four Oscars awarded by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Such films carry the wallop of myth, in former times, a spiritual force that corrected, educated, and inspired its listeners. Its title, Parasite, images the disgusting organism, secretive, invasive, even deadly, that lives in or on an organism of a different species. Often the host’s infestation remains undetected and mimics other diseases that complicate diagnoses and treatment.
The film Parasite presents the wealthy sophisticated Kim family and the scrounging Parks, both engaged in class warfare and seeking an elusive material security that pits them against each other. The parasitic infection is mounted through the cunning of Kee-Woo, the Parks’ teenage son and the story takes off from there. Beneath its surface, however, lurks an ominous tone that discomfits both families as well as the viewers. Something very dark lies ahead.
Although the film story runs two hours and twelve minutes, it plays into a much longer one in our psyches, one that unbeknownst to us, may have been running for decades—Thus, our parasite. Whatever our circumstances, material security has become the god of our consumer society, and greed, like the parasite, fuels this self centered pursuit.
How ferret out this disease that kills spirit? How do with less? How share with others without being condescending? When is enough, enough?
I continue learning …
“To what shall I compare the kingdom of God? It is like leaven that a woman took and hid in three measures of flour, until it was all leavened (Luke 13:20-21). Jesus likens this pedestrian image to the kingdom of God, an image unique in his teachings and often expressed in parables.
During the time of Jesus, Palestinian women always put aside moldy bread or leaven—a kind of poison—for the daily baking for their families. Only the smallest amount was used for their loaves that ballooned in the morning sun. But Jesus speaks of this woman hiding leaven in three measures of flour, enough flour to fill a warehouse with bread—an absurd exaggeration, until his listeners catch on. Jesus is referencing humankind’s relation with God, in all his disguises. Such parables inflamed the imaginations of his listeners: they would remember.
I, too, had a similar response to the parable, one that recasts my terminal illness in a different light.
Like the leaven hid in the flour, terminal disease hides out in my lungs, imperceptibly hardening their airways and compromising my breathing—a slow process, admittedly, but relentless in its damage. Yet, paradoxically, this disorder continues expanding my passion for communion with God, within this mysterious kingdom.
Just as the fire of the bake oven transforms the dough, the fire of diminishment transforms the psyche: critical processes to be endured. This is Kingdom living, both here and hereafter.
A small fire at night.
Heart Whisperings 