Yesterday I saw The Perks of Being A Wallflower. The movie is based on Stephen Chbosky's novel by the same name. Charlie (Logan Lerman) is beginning his freshman year carrying the weight of a tragic middle school experience and not expecting high school to be any better, the desire for friends, the hope for a first love, and a dark cloud of emotion over the deaths of a friend and aunt. Charlie falls into a friendship with a group of seniors who are all dealing with their own issues.
The cast is wonderful, filled with notable actresses/actors featuring Emma Watson, Ezra Miller, Logan Lerman, Dylan McDermott, Kate Walsh, Mae Whitman, Joan Cusack and Paul Rudd. Logan Lerman as Charlie makes anyone watching the movie surely remember the awkwardness of coming to age during the adolescent experience.
So here's the thing, the movie is 102 minutes long and based on the first 90 minutes of the movie I would have recommended the film for youth workers to see because we take our vocation seriously and we want to study culture and the adolescent experience (see trailer below).
However, it is the final approximately 12 minutes that totally rocked me and led me to write this post to encourage all youth workers that this is a must see film. I don't know if the film touched things deeply personal or if I was just watching this at the right (or wrong) time but the movie reminded me that hope can spring forth even in the midst of our tragic lives. The Perks of Being a Wallflower also reminded me why I haven't been able to walk away from the vocation of ministry, especially to youth and their families. I think our youth ministries are filled with the kinds of young people portrayed in this movie. The movie also demonstrates the importance of caring adults (Paul Rudd as English teacher) in the lives of young people.
I don't believe I've spoiled anything with this post. I just want you to see it. Maybe you won't be caught as off guard as I was but if you see it you will thank me.
The current edition of Nation's Health (June/July 2005) has an article by Bill Smith who is the Vice President of Public Policy with the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States. The article is entitled, Virginity Pledges linked to risk. I think this kind of data shows how ineffective the behavioral modification techniques that we use, in youth ministry and in the church, really are. Manipulating kids into making commitments and thinking that we have accomplished spiritual formation is absurd. The Holy Spirit alone generates authentic transformation and we can't manufacture that with shallow, safe, program-driven youth ministry tricks.
Go Lauren, you go girl...I really like Lauren and what she has to say.
I got this in an e-mail update from The Revealer. The Revealer is a publication of the New York University Department of Journalism and New York University's Center for Religion and Media.
Chastity is all the rage: NYT's Alex Williamsfalls all over chastity crusader Lauren F. Winner and her new book, Real Sex, in the paper's Fashion & Style section. "She wears retro cat's-eye glasses, has four tattoos, weaves references to the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu into casual conversation and sips Côtes du Rhône over lunch." Williams goes on to count the ways in which Winner (an interesting writer, despite the evidence of this profile) is rocking the evangelical world because she talks openly about the fact that sex feels good. As Ms. Winner, an Orthodox Jew before she became an evangelical might say, oy. Evangelicals have been openly discussing sex for the last couple of decades. But The Times sees evangelicals as trendy, and it needs a movement diva -- a "personality" -- around which to re-organize the world. Secularists who have sex outside of marriage? So last year. Sex-positive celibates? Hot. To hell with journalism that asks a smart cookie like Winner some tough questions. The Times has found a new radical chic -- evangelical conservatism.
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