Delight as a Spiritual Discipline

Everyone raised his hand to pick the fruit he best liked the look of, and then everyone paused for a second. This fruit was so beautiful that each felt "It can't be meant for me . . . surely we're not allowed to pluck it."

It's all right," said Peter. "I know what we're all thinking. But I'm sure, quite sure, we needn't. I've a feeling we've got to the country where everything is allowed."

"Here goes, then!" said Eustace. And they all began to eat.

What was the fruit like? Unfortunately no one can describe a taste. All I can say is that, compared with those fruits, the freshest grapefruit you've ever eaten was dull, and the juiciest orange was dry, and the most melting pear was hard and woody, and the sweetest wild strawberry was sour. And there were no seeds or stones, and no wasps." 

-C.S. Lewis The Last Battle

I turned thirty five the other day and my family bought me a pair of Enchroma glasses for my birthday. In case you haven't watched one of their videos online yet, Enchroma glasses correct a degree of red-green colorblindness for those who have the condition. I had watched the videos and was really excited when I opened the box. The idea that I would be suddenly gaining access to a world that everyone else experiences all the time was somewhere between exhilarating and terrifying. Now my color blindness is pretty mild. I don't have any trouble with stoplights and I am rarely wrong about any given color (purple is my undoing—I just can't see the red in it so I almost always think it is dark blue). But for my entire life, people have been going on about sunsets and autumn leaves in a way that has convinced me that there really must be something to them even though they generally leave me flat (I experience most sunsets as a fairly drab wash of bleached pastels). Now it was suddenly possible that I would be swept into new beauty—beauty which I could literally not imagine. At the same time, I was aware of the fact that the classes don't work for everyone ("individual results will vary") and the fear of disappointment was almost as keen as the hope for I-knew-not-what-exactly.

Without leaving you in suspense: they worked. At least they make a significant difference in the way I see the world around me. I can't say that with them I see the world as though I weren't colorblind since I don't know what the world looks like through your eyes. But when I wear these glasses purple becomes a whole thing. Also nobody ever told me that green has this much variety to it. I spent the first hours after I got the glasses just wandering around with a stupid grin on my face being distracted by the grass, the spring leaves, and the sky. There is one particular tree just across the street, which I am now particularly taken by. I think the underside of each leaf is a different shade of green from the topside (I hadn't realized it before) so when I look at that tree from all the way across the street, I can still make out each individual leaf, even thought they are all just green. My distance vision is perfectly fine, but I had never seen more than an indistinct blob-with-lines above the trunk before.

I think it must be like hearing harmony for the first time after a life of knowing only the melody. The world is simply more vibrant, more deep, more subtle, more complex, more real than I ever imagined it was.

This experience has left me thinking more and more about the overlapping concepts of delight, longing, and joy. Historically, Christianity has tended to be associated with the idea of asceticism and discipline. The ten commandments are generally thought of as negatives sorts of commands (don't do this, that, and the other), the whole concept of holiness in Christian teaching is popularly understood to be a list of things people are supposed to not do in order to avoid contaminating their moral purity, as well as a few things we are to do (but which are generally viewed as onerous). We are told that we should be able to find delight in this (the psalms seem to get really excited about obeying "the law") but that doesn't actually tend to jibe with our experience of life all that often. Christian-ing just doesn't come across as that much fun.

And while I know that I have just constructed a straw man, that the "fruit of the Spirit" are all actually beautiful and exciting ways of being, there is a genuine sense that "serious" Christians are those who really embrace a dour sense of suffering and sacrifice.

But. But. But.

That actually doesn't describe the people we read about in the bible. It actually doesn't describe the great saints, it actually doesn't describe the very life of Jesus. Those lives are rich and messy. Those lives are balls-to-the-wall vibrant. We find Jesus laughing and yelling and weeping and partying. In order to be considered for canonization, a saint's life has to show evidence of all of the fruits of the Spirit—joy no less than patience; after all Jesus' great prayer for us was that we would have lives lived to the full—abundant lives.

I think Charles Williams, the Anglican mystic poet-scholar can be of great help here. He (following an older tradition) describes two "ways" of Christianity: the way of negation, and the way of affirmation of images (I have written a bit more about them HERE). The first is the way of the ascetic. In the way of negation, the whole deal is to stop being distracted by all the things which are not God and which cause us to think of God in terms of what we see rather than as the transcendent unknowable. The way of negation tends to focus on knowing God directly; the mystical experience, meditation, and spiritual disciplines like fasting and accountability are hallmarks of the way of negation. The latter, the way of the affirmation of images, attempts to see God "though" the images of god's self in the good world that God has made, and it is worth nothing that the mystics have as much of a propensity to wind up here as as they do in the way of negation; think of St. Francis preaching to the animals, or St. Thomas Aquinas' appreciation for the table and attendant unwillingness to impose his weight on a donkey, these are marks of the way of affirmation. Williams is at pains to remind us that each can become disastrous without the other, that people following the one way need to be reminded not to judge those who follow the other—that, in fact, we need the wisdom and input of those following the other—and that each offers insights the other is likely blind to.

That is all well and good, and I am very much persuaded by Williams' account. But I think it can, and should, be taken a bit farther. I want to suggest that the temperament which is drawn to the way of negation also tends towards a dismissal of the physical as such. In the desire to be united to the Spirit of God there seems to be a strong temptation to deny the goodness of the body, a desire to become mere spirit. This is a dangerous thing. We are spirits but we are not mere spirits, we are body-spirits. We are (to borrow once more from C.S. Lewis) amphibious beings of both body and spirit. The impetus to deny the body can easily become a state of discontent, a state of explaining to God that we were not made as the right sort of being.

For all my love of C.S. Lewis, I believe that one critical mistake he made throughout his eschatology is an over acceptance of neo-Platonism. In neo-Platonic thinking, the only utterly "real" absolute is God (or "The Good") and everything else is an "emanation" from God, with all things becoming less real the further they have "emanated" from the center. This view has a lot to recommend it (you will see echoes of it in the writings of Augustine as well). It has given rise to the whole understanding of heaven as another land, better (more real) than the state of being we currently inhabit and to which we will one day go. The problem is that, at the end of the day, it is not a fundamentally Christian view. The promise Jesus made to us is not that there is a Kingdom of God which we will one day get to go to, it is that there is a Kingdom of God which is, even now, breaking into our own existence. As such, following the way of Jesus does not mean distancing oneself from the world, but growing into people who can first imagine, then partner with God in bringing a greater real-ness, a fuller goodness, to this world. That the old world is passing away and that a new world is being formed, does not mean that we will be transplanted. That new kingdom is being formed under our feet. It is breaking through now. It has been breaking through for two thousand years and will continue to break through until it is fully here and nothing of the old, drab, evil, sinful, broken world is left (I am going to refrain from commenting on the the question of whether there will be one final great push before the Kingdom of God fully comes or whether the entire process will sneak in gradually).

And this is why I believe that delight is a spiritual discipline, one which is far too much ignored and even despised by the western church. The innocent enjoyment of the good world God has made—we cannot forget that even the drab "old world" is shot through with resonant images of the vibrant Kingdom—is a training course in seeing the Kingdom God has made us partners in effecting. To feast, to love, to celebrate, to gaze at the sky in wonder, are all acts of spiritual insight. They are all disciplines. Good sex is as holy—and for many as necessary—as a rigorous fast and laughter is no less godly than lament. In the latter we are reminded that we live in a broken world; in the former, that the broken world is being healed.

It has been observed recently that we need a theology of lament, of loss, that too often our theology is entirely about propositions or about ethical duties—a theology for computers and enlightenment philosophes—too rarely is it about being. I agree with this critique, we do need a theology of lament and loss. We need a theology rooted in Ecclesiastes, Job and the Good Friday. That would give us one critical part of a theology of they way of affirmation. A theology of lament is critical to our capacity to honestly, richly, greet the very real world of which we are a part. But we also need a theology of delight. We need a theology of dancing till we collapse on a hot summer night; a theology of the third beer; of laughing under a string of lights because tomorrow has no hold on us tonight. We need a theology of thick time in thin spaces, a theology of the presence of divine joy in every street lamp and blade of grass. We need a theology of the tinny speaker and the spontaneous sing-along to an 80's anthem, a theology of bluegrass and crickets, a theology of lighting bugs. As much as we need a theology of lament, we need a theology of the eternal moment and the laughing earth, for human flourishing is thing of both laughter and tears.

Blue Ocean Reflections Part 2: Centered Set

This is the second post in a six part series. You can find Part 1, Solus Jesus is HERE.

The Blue Ocean Reflections series consists of my personal interaction and history with the six "distinctives" of the Blue Ocean Faith movement as laid out in the book of the same name (you can find my review of the book HERE). Throughout the series I intend to talk about my own history and journey of faith and to offer some thoughts on how what I have come to believe impacts my understanding of the world. As such this series is likely to have a heavy focus on theology, philosophy, and politics. But since my formal education has been as broad as I could make it, my reflections are apt to be fairly wide-ranging as well.

The second "Blue Ocean Distinctive" is their utilization of a centered set approach. Before I get into how taking a centered set approach to faith has affected my life and relationship to Jesus, let me get a big caveat out of the way: The theological take on set theory was first proposed by the missiologist Paul Hiebert of Fuller Seminary and was brought into the Vineyard movement by (I think) John Wimber. I do not know whether Schmelzer encountered it first through the Vineyard movement or from his own time at Fuller, but I first encountered it through a presentation he gave back when he was a Vineyeard USA pastor. Apparently the theological/missiological usage which has been made of centered set theory makes a total hash of the mathematical theories from which it derives its origin. I am totally fine with that as fidelity to the math is not at all necessary to the value of the framework as such, but I know it bugs some people so I want to acknowledge it.

OK, with that taken care of, let me open this piece by saying that centered set faith has been of incredible benefit me, spiritually and theologically (a distinction which will probably begin to make more sense in Part 3). Let me provide Schmelzer's outline of the idea, and then I will talk about the impact it has had on my thinking and end with a few of the modifications I have found helpful in thinking about the framework.

From Chapter 3 of Blue Ocean Faith:

...[P]icture two sorts of sets.

The first is represented by a circle. We'll call this a bounded-set. The issue with a bounded-set is with people being inside of the circle or outside of it.

The second, though, has no "inside" or "outside." Picture a large dot in the center of a page that has lots of smaller dots on the page as well. The issue here is motion. Are the smaller dots moving towards the center dot or away from it?

Schmelzer goes on to clarify that the "center dot" in this centered set framework represents Jesus while the other dots represent individuals whereas in this analysis, the circle of the bounded set represents something like "being a Christian", "Chirstian culture", or "Christian identification" (it can actually be a lot of different things to different people). Later in the chapter he offers a refinement of the framework which he says he got from a friend named Dan:

 But what, Dan suggested, if we all have more than one arrow? What if people are more complicated than that? What if we all have, say, a hundred arrows?

and he goes on to talk about encounters which move some arrows towards Jesus.

For me, this idea has been incredibly helpful in thinking about spiritual and metaphysical realities and has also proved to be amazingly freeing. My own experience of faith has been pretty exclusively Christian, I was born in South Carolina to parents who were Evangelical Christians. When I was five, at a vacation Bible school meeting, I asked Jesus to forgive me for my sins (being then convinced that this prayer would result in Jesus choosing let me into heaven rather than allowing me to go to hell when I died—it seemed like a pretty solid deal to five year old me) and to "come into my heart" (and to this day I am convinced that that five year old did have an encounter with the living Jesus). When I was seven my family moved to Ankara Turkey where they quickly integrated into the Protestant ex-pat community and helped to start the International Protestant Church of Ankara. I returned to the US for college where I matriculated from an accredited Christian University in South Carolina (read "not Bob Jones") with a double major in Bible and the Humanities. And I have been a regular church attender my entire life. As a result, I have spent much of my life with an un-questioned sense of who is "in" and who is "out".

My basic, unexamined framework was bounded set.

I suspect that this is the case for a great number of Evangelical Christians; bounded set is the unexamined framework with which they categorize people—it may even be the primary framework they use. I am confident that this is the case for many at the conservative Christian university I attended. Before people are black, white, male, female, American, or anything else, they either are or are not "really" Christians. I remember talking to peers and faculty about the best ways to put words around the category of people who were "in"—should we talk about "those destined for heaven", was "Christians" too broad or too narrow, did baptism make a difference, etc...—just because that was the category which mattered most.

For a conservative Christian working within that framework, getting people over the line into the "us" is the most important thing in the world, and it comes with a whole lot of stress. Notice that in the refined centered set model, if an interaction results in one of either person's many arrows swinging at all in the direction of the center, the good outcome has occurred. To borrow language from another theological framework, insofar as arrows are moving towards Jesus, the Kingdom of Heaven is coming on earth. But in a bounded set framework, there is this line, and most of us were never entirely confident about where that line was exactly—though we were darn certain it was there and we had competing rough ideas of where "there" was—and getting people across the line was everything.

You always felt that you might be this guy...

For a lot of us this meant living with a constant sense of guilt since any interaction with a person who we suspected to be on the outside had a built in imperative to shift them over the line. The natural result has been the clustering of bounded-set folk into social conclaves wherein all or nearly all of their friends are safely inside the bubble which allows for more unforced, natural, friendships; at my school we called it "the bubble". But this compounds the guilt since we also believed that by not going out "into the world" we were letting people down and failing our duty to God. So we would rush outside "the bubble" and engage in some incredibly awkward conversations with people where it became eminently clear that we weren't so much interested in them as whole, complex, and fascinating individuals as we were intersted in convincing them to jump over the line with us (we called this "Evangelism"). People became projects, which always felt wrong but did assuage the guilt—temporarily.

This just isn't healthy, and there wasn't much of joy in it.

And there was another problem. In a bounded set world the critical thing, what really maters, is the boundary since that boundary is what determines (in most bounded set thinking) whether one spends eternity in heaven or in hell (I will have more to say about heaven and hell in another post). Those are incredibly high stakes, arguably the highest possible. The atheist magician Penn Jillette once explained that he sort of appreciates it when people try to convert him because it lets him know that they care about him enough to try to save him from the eternal fate they worry he is headed to; of course he disagrees but he definitely understands that their heart is in the right place.

The problem here is that the line is not Jesus. When we spend all of our attention on the line (and, lets face it, if bounded set is a good model and the stakes are as high as it would suggest then it is really hard to construct an argument for looking away from the line) we are, by that very fact, not looking towards Jesus. Jesus himself pointed out that it is impossible to serve "two masters" (he was talking about following either God or wealth when he made the statement but I think the principle applies more broadly), if the line becomes our master then Jesus is not.

Take a deep breath... centered set feels like this to me

When you think about it, centered set just doesn't have these problems. In a centered set framework the critical thing is to get your own arrows pointing towards Jesus. The focus is not on the line, it's on the center. And this means that any and all interactions have the potential to result in arrows moving towards the center. Centered set people get to walk into all of our conversations without first asking about what side of the line our friend might be on (there aren't really lines to pay attention to) and then we get to delight in anything good that comes out of the conversation, we get to celebrate the wisdom and insight our friends have to offer and we get to offer our own insights. The guilt and the stress pretty much vanish. And, speaking from my own experience, the freedom and joy this brings are heady and glorious. I no longer have to measure the "success" or "failure" of my conversations against a sort of "pass/fail" rubric having something to do with moving people across a vaguely defined cultural/ideological boundary. Successful conversations and interactions are conversations and interactions which result in goodness, in justice, in the world becoming that little bit more like it ought to be. I get to learn from everyone and I get to offer my own insights without feeling forced or awkward. It is really amazing.

Side note: I have included one of my favorite TED talks below in case you are interested in thinking a little more about what successful discussions and even arguments might look like. It is by Daniel H Cohen and he breaks down the unhealthy, distorting ways we think about arguments. I can't recommend it enough

For all of that, I do have a few refinements of my own for how I think about centered set theory (I want to thank my friend Aaron Brooks for helping me with this one and suggesting key elements). I'll call it a Gravitational Centered Set while admitting that we are drifting really far from the original model.


I like to expand the picture from a set, to a physical scenario. So instead of a point with a bunch of other points moving around it, try imagining a black hole with all sorts of stuff orbiting it. In this iteration, Jesus is the black hole (yes I realize that our cultural associations with "black hole" are less than positive—just work with me here) and we are the particles flying around Him. In this iteration, everything is gravitationally drawn towards the event horizon of the black hole (after all Jesus did say that when he was lifted up he would draw all people to himself) but we also have a bunch of our own energy which we can use to try and break free of the orbit. The goal is still to be unified with the center (the black hole) and every interaction has the potential to further that progress. But here, without extreme effort on our part, being drawn into the goodness, love, and joy of Jesus is practically a sure thing—God claims to be about the business of rescuing all creation after all—and our "job" is to let it happen and not to give up on the process even when things get hard.

Also, I have been told that the closer you get to a black hole, the more things get weird. Looking back, the universe that made so much sense before starts to become distorted as light, time, and mass all start working differently, presumably we actually begin to see the goal itself more clearly. Also this process takes a long time (at least subjectively) but that is OK, God isn't short on time. I like this because I have found it to be true of my own relationship with Jesus. The closer I have gotten to him, the less the world which used to make sense, seems to actually cohere (I remember certain Pauline passages about the wisdom of God seeming like foolishness to people who aren't close to Jesus). It also means that getting everything "just right" isn't just implausible, it's a pretty foolish endeavor (though trying to improve our understanding to the best of our current ability is richly rewarding—it is always possible to have a better view even after you have given up on trying to claim you have the perfect view). Nothing outside the event horizon can see into the black hole. We aren't going to get some sort of perfect view of the center (I remember Paul saying something about seeing through a dim/distorted mirror for the time being) but the longer we look towards it and the closer we get, the better our understanding is likely to be. For me this has all had profoundly positive effects on my relationship with Jesus and on my interactions with my family, friends, neighbors, and even strangers. Strangers are a lot more compelling and fun when they aren't reduced to potential Evangelistic subjects.

So what do you think? I would love to get your thoughts in the comments section below.

For Part 3: Childlike Faith click HERE

Click HERE to get Blue Ocean Faith on Amazon

    

And I Really Do Mean That

  I divide the causes of human laughter into Joy, Fun, the Joke Proper, and Flippancy. You will see the first among friends and lovers reunited on the eve of a holiday. Among adults some pretext in the way of Jokes is usually provided, but the facility with which the smallest witticisms produce laughter at such a time shows that they are not the real cause. What that real cause is we do not know. Something like it is expressed in much of that detestable art which the humans call Music, and something like it occurs in Heaven—a meaningless acceleration in the rhythm of celestial experience, quite opaque to us. Laughter of this kind does us no good and should always be discouraged. Besides, the phenomenon is of itself disgusting and a direct insult to the realism, dignity, and austerity of Hell.

....
  But flippancy is the best of all. In the first place it is very economical. Only a clever human can make a real Joke about virtue, or indeed about anything else; any of them can be trained to talk as if virtue were funny. Among flippant people the Joke is always assumed to have been made. No one actually makes it; but every serious subject is discussed in a manner which implies that they have already found a ridiculous side to it. If prolonged, the habit of Flippancy builds up around a man the finest armor plating against the Enemy that I know, and it is quite free from the dangers inherent in the other sources of laughter. It is a thousand miles away from joy it deadens, instead of sharpening, the intellect; and it excites no affection between those who practice it.

 The  Senior Demon Screwtape, to his Nephew Wormwood

Transcribed by C.S. Lewis -  The Screwtape Letters

I was thinking about hipsters recently (I promise, I am going somewhere with this) thanks to an article my friend Steven Leyva posted. Specifically, I was been thinking about their use of "irony". The article (by Christy Wampole) deals with the idea terrifically and I do not propose to pirate and reword her observations. What did strike me though, is the similarity between "irony" as a hipster byword (which at the end of the day seems a little more sarcastic than ironic) and Lewis's treatment of flippancy in The Screwtape Letters. Both are ways of hiding and, probably more importantly, both criticism without substance. If Ms. Wampole is correct, the Ironic Hipster is mocking sincerity and the past in precisely the same way that the flippant man is mocking virtue. The Hipster does not tell us what it is that makes mainstream music, media, fashion and culture ridiculous; he simply treats them as though they are.

 Not that there isn't plenty to criticize in practically any culture- there certainly is. But criticism needs to be grounded, I am free to dislike the music and media image of Madonna only as long as I can say why I dislike them. To treat them as "obviously ridiculous" and mock them by becoming ridiculous myself while facetiously wearing or playing them is simple meanness. It is the difference between discernment and bullying. 

 
More serious though, is the relationship that the Ironic Hipster and the Flippant Man have to Joy. One aspect of Joy is that it is profoundly serious. A clever man may be able to make a Joke about virtue in general, it would be very hard indeed to make a good Joke about Joy (possibly something rooted in its use as a name but I'm not sure that even that would work out). But this difficulty does not arise from any intrinsic link between somberness or melancholy and Joy; indeed, Joy is often great fun, rather I am using "serious" to mean something closer to "weighty" or "significant". Joy really matters, and because it matters, it is out of reach for the flippant, insincere or ironic person. For the Flippant Man, sincerity is anathema - it explodes his facade of cleverness, an illusion built on the circular idea that the object of ridicule must be ridiculous because  it is being ridiculed and attended by the impression that the ridiculer is somehow above or better than that which he ridiculed. (If you don't think this is true, have you ever been ashamed of a song, book or movie only because someone else used it as a comparison to something they didn't like "whoa, that was worse than the country muisc"). I think it would be fun to go up to the next hipster I see wearing an Alf t-shirt and exclaim "You like Alf too? Awesome, so few people get how truly great that show was" I think they might be a little ashamed. 

Maybe I am particularly worried because I am generally a rather sincere and occasionally insecure person. I was taken aback a few weeks ago to discover that my high school students think of me as a hipster. On investigation it turned out to have a lot to do with the way I look. I have shoulder length brown hair which I generally keep tied back, I wear large sideburns and a goatee and my usual work attire involves a corduroy cabby hat, a selection of cartoon and comic-book ties, a tweed vest and a pocket watch. I do not really blend in. That said, while I am aware that hipsters often accoutre themselves similarly, we do it for entirely different reasons. I genuinely like Captain America, Bugs Bunny and Dr. Suess (got a 1-fish, 2-fish, red fish, blue fish tie for Christmas), I am a hopeless anglophile and bibliophile and happen to think that people in the 1920's looked really cool. It turns out the hipsters are mocking my style, or at least, the styles I have adopted!

I like sincerity as well. I write because I want to express something profound, I delight in books, music and movies which inspire me to sing, weep and cheer. I want to live an abundant risk-filled life, to drink deep and drain life to the dregs; I want to experience the laughter and sorrow the pain and the mind-shattering Joy. I want to see God and be undone.

Les Miserables is No Lord of the Rings, I Can Tell You That Right Now

   Alright, I just got back from finally seeing Les Miserables and I am happy to say that I was not disappointed. For those of you who don't know, I absolutely love both the musical (Ash and I have seen the stage version 4 times so far) and the book. In fact, for quite a while now, the stage production has been my go to example of how it actually is possible for a book to successfully cross media formats without being diminished.
  Cameron Macintosh and crew managed the same feat in the transition from stage to screen and that is no mean feat. The movie manages to be a bonified movie musical where the temptation for die-hard stage enthusiasts may have been looking for a filmed stage production and the full bore movie people will probably be upset that it is a musical at all (look for words like "melodramatic" as an indication that the review just doesn't actually like musicals).
  What I am generally looking for when a story crosses media formats is the preservation of the stories essential themes and characters. While I love what Peter Jackson did with the visual aspect of Middle Earth, I have to fail him on these points for what he did to Faramir, Treebeard, Saruman, Merry and Pippin and for his utter rejection of Tolkien's understanding of the relative power of good and evil, of the importance of age and wisdom and of the potential beauty of hierarchy. Wether Jackson approved of those things or not, he had no business changing Tolkien's story, his proper business would have been to tell his own story or that of someone else with whom his agreed.
  Les Miserables certainly does make some edits and changes so if you are hoping to see everything you love from the stage production you will be a disappointed there, the Thenardiers get more airtime but less song time (beggar at the feast is dramatically reduced and somewhat reinterpreted while dogs eat the dogs is cut down to a single line),  and while most of the numbers get an appearance, most of them are also shy a verse or so.

  What the movie does is capitalize on its own form. A movie allows for a far lazier imagination than does a stage production (which in turn allows for a lazier imagination than a book) by putting the story in its full setting.  On the stage we get a few props and some great costumes and the rest is up to us when it comes to setting. On stage there are no close ups and we can't really see things like tears so the crew has to find other ways of conveying personality and emotion. In a movie all of these are possible and Les Miserables uses them to the fullest extent. I have read some complaints about extended close-ups on characters as they sing, but I thought these were all incredibly moving (Fantine, ValJean, Javert and Marius all get them). I am not an expert in either stage or film so I will stop there but I was certainly pleased with the use of the new medium.
  The great thing though, is the preservation of Victor Hugo's essential themes and I am reasonably sure that not all of them are popular today. I have always loved the novel's ability to insist that life really is both horrendously tragic and wretched and also painfully beautiful and noble. Where so many stories and philosophies fail by trying to balance the good and evil in life or to choose one over the other and being dominant in our existence, Les Miserables refuses to admit to a watered down compromise and instead sets all the horrors of early 19th century Europe against true sacrifice, repentance, loyalty and nobility (there's a virtue we don't run into much anymore). I wept for both pity and joy while reading it and each of the times I have watched it.
  The victory of mercy over Justice without condemnation is also still present in the movie and comes across quite powerfully. Russel Crowe's Javert, while not a great a singer (I miss the baritone) was certainly well acted. As by brother put it, "this Javert is a lot more sympathetic but no less the villain". Redemption, Grace and the hope of Joy were all present as well.

  I certainly recommend it and hope you all go see it. Then leave me a comment and let me know how you liked it and what I forgot to mention.