percy jackson is taking me a while to finish. maybe because i was busy recovering from the shock of running a 10K with absolutely no training, or maybe i was busy hosting my crazy family over the july 4th holidays, or maybe percy jackson isn't really capturing and holding my attention.
but at the expense of turning to morbid thoughts, i did pick out an interesting topic: our obsession with "paradise" after life on earth. obviously, percy jackson and the olympians has a lot of greek mythology woven through it. there quite a chunk devoted to hades and the underworld. riordan's depiction of the underworld is pretty fascinating. he describes the fields of asphodel as a football field times a million filled with "whispering masses of people just milling around in the shadows, waiting for a concert that will never start."
elysium, on the other hand, is a gated community with silver and gold flowers where one can "hear laughter and smell barbecue cooking." and in the middle of elysium? the isles of the blest, for those "who had chosen to be reborn three times and three times achieved elysium." these islands are apparently like resorts in the bahamas. and percy, our young hero, immediately decides that he wants to end up on the isles of the blest. yeah, tough decision... vast wasteland filled with millions of people v. a resort in the bahamas.
"heaven," "paradise," "nirvana" - call it what you want. it seems every religion has this concept of "what's next?" but for some (perhaps most?), there is one thing in common. it's all about me! you! humans! "paradise" is an eternity gorging on the food we like and doing the things we enjoy, all while being surrounded by the people we love
where's GOD in heavenparadisenirvana? as if it's not enough that we make this earth about us, we have to go and make heaven about us too.
reader! there's more to this life than doing good things here and there in hopes of getting rewarded with a giant cake that never runs out (which would probably be in my "paradise"). there's more to this journey than chugging along hoping to get to the "comfortable life." we have our god-given purposes to live out. we've been given a mission to find and complete. and we're not just doing it to end up on some bahamian resort.
tough decision....bahamian resort v. eternity spent in praising the only one who really deserves it
life lessons from percy jackson and the olympians
you are a wise sage. :)
ReplyDelete