Rev. Danny Fisher

The author celebrating his first birthday on this day in 1980.
…Which I can hardly believe. But, as Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche once said:

This existence of ours is as transient as autumn clouds.
To watch the birth and death of beings is like looking at the movements of a dance.
A lifetime is like a flash of lightning in the sky,
Rushing by, like a torrent down a steep mountain.

I hope that I’ve still got a lot of life left to live, but most of all I hope to wake up at least a little bit. For then, as Rinpoche also says:

When death finally comes you will welcome it like an old friend, being aware of how dreamlike and impermanent the pheneomenal world really is.

One of my favorite films, one that I think ranks among the great modern spiritual classics, is Martin Scorsese’s enormously controversial adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis’ The Last Temptation of Christ. Hulu.com has generously made the entire film available for free download. You can watch it here or below.

Speaking about the film, its “blasphemous” qualities, and the international outrage surrounding the project, I think critic Roger Ebert put it perfectly (and rather eloquently) when he wrote:

What makes The Last Temptation of Christ one of his great films is not that it is true about Jesus but that it is true about Scorsese. Like countless others, he has found aspects of the Christ story that speak to him. This is the Jesus of his two most autobiographical characters, Charlie in Mean Streets and J.R. in Who’s That Knocking at My Door? Both of those characters were played by Keitel. Interesting that he choose Keitel this time to play Judas. Perhaps Judas is Scorsese’s autobiographical character in The Last Temptation of Christ. Certainly not the Messiah, but the mortal man walking beside him, worrying about him, lecturing him, wanting him to be better, threatening him, confiding in him, prepared to betray him if he must. Christ is the film, and Judas is the director.

I think I’ll leave it at that; people have done so much talking about the film at this point, I think the less said the better. It speaks for itself. If you haven’t seen it, I’d encourage you to watch it.