Just saw the movie The Natural. Its about time I saw this wouldn't you say? I mean it took me until I was 34 for to finally accept I would never be a professional ballplayer.I was a softball player for the Woodstock Collection in Woodstock NY when in a dream I accepted my fate as a non professional ballplayer. I'm a baseball guy and a Yankee fan. How could I miss seeing this movie? Maybe, not to make a pun, maybe this film is too close to home.
There was a great line spoken by Glenn Close character,.. again no pun intended " we each have 2 lives the one we live with and the one we learn from". The latter is deeper than the bullet wound in Roy Hobbs shoulder. What are we learning from the life we live?
Our flawed hero as a young man was a great talent and he knew it too. Proud ,but not arrogant he made a deadly enemy. He loses not only his game but his youth. I say hero because he kept something of innocence from youth to adulthood. His love for baseball was really his innocence and revealed his love for life. He had a tenacity for integrity. He came back.
He returned to baseball where he had his youth and hope, fear and despair. His love led him back even more than his talent. That's why we write about the man. God is Love and it is beautiful to see this played out in life.
No this film doesn't have Gods name in it. In the version I saw on MLB network it did not have Gods name in vain either. Truly if it did I don't think I could see the films purity of heart.
What I saw is what we all need to see and that is to live our lives with the purity of heart of a child. It is beautiful to change by facing who you are and what you've done and go back to that place and find God is there .Your new childhood and your grown up new beginning all as one life lived and learned from.
In the culture of death which is our world and time it is so difficult to fathom and to navigate life as it was intended to be. Seek for real life and you will find it.
I lived life in my 20s too. My greatest love- talent was not baseball but acting. I had my plans and career set in my mind. I had great pleasure and some pride in it too. Then life intruded,
betrayal,discouragement, disappointment, and disappearance from almost everyone I knew before.
I call those years Lost In Brooklyn.
My wife Wendy was my close one {Glenn Close character }and the love of my life. It truly is a blessing to fall in love. Go for it. If you are married you can fall in love every day. Just have the courage to act on the purity of your passion no matter what the calendar tells you about how old you are. Or how badly you failed last time out.
At 52,oh so many years later, after my youth ,and days of theatre and being told I had talent and a great future... there I was with my daughter and my wife doing The Sermon On The Mount at a church whose name I do not remember. It was not the major leagues of theater it was South Bend Indiana. It was also the beginning I got to do all over again. I do this full-time and have for many years now. Its The Natural and as organic as life can be. It is not me making up for my past it is what I am about now.
This isn't about a movie anymore. Its not about taking up acting either. It is however not living by what the resume says you are .Its about believing in your calling more than your career. If words like "calling" scare you reconsider that a child would not fear those words. Go for the things that are free and that last forever. Seek and you will find a you ,you never knew ,and a God you somehow knew was always around and now has been invited in. By you.
Its Super....Its ..Natural.
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