Tears.

I just wanted to post some other piece of nonsense today; I didn't want to get sad with the saddest days on the church calendar staring us in the face. But that's all I have right now.

You don't need me to repeat the news about the burning of Notre Dame. It hit me harder than I would have expected. I still don't know why. It's part of my Catholic faith, loaded with relics, far older than any Christian structure in the New World or any American structure connected with Western Civilization. And it looked for a while like the church would be gutted, another loss in the war against civilization. But thank God, there was no loss of life as in the 9/11 attacks, no believed perpetrators to require police or military response.

Now I'm thinking that the French loved Jerry Lewis so much that they let a Jerry-like idiot work on the construction project.

I didn't break down and cry over it; not that I'm so full of toxic manhood, but maybe because there were so many unknowns when the news broke.

But later that night, I did think about my reaction, and I thought about times when I was pretty much brought to tears by movies. There is a connection, if you'll bear with me. (Spoilers ahead, but no new movies. I know nothing about Avengers: Endgame.)

I was on a date the first time I saw Field of Dreams, and I had an idea how the film would end because I'd read the book it was based on, Shoeless Joe. But the ending still punished me, and almost had me bawling in front of my date, which is not a situation a man wants to be in, no matter how much Gillette thinks it's okay. (The funny thing is, my dad was still alive at the time, and he and I almost never played catch when I was a kid.)

More recently I was horrified by my weepy reaction to Disney's Tangled, even though I think it is the best of the recent Princess movies. The self-sacrifice of the (toxic male!) character came as a tear-inducing shock.

I was not as surprised by the weepiness associated with A Dog's Purpose, except that the death of any character voiced by Josh Gad would normally be cause for me to throw a freaking parade. But even though the movie was horribly flawed, full of stupid characters, still: dogs. World War II veterans would sob at the end of Old Yeller, I've heard.

The most recent film that got my eyeballs liquefied was -- also surprising because I knew how it ended -- Paul, Apostle of Christ.

It's not a great movie -- rather uneven, with some stilted dialogue, and as is often the case with small-budget indies, some of the actors certainly seem of a quality one might describe as "the unemployed sibling of one of the backers." But its merits are strong. Despite the film's meager $5 million budget, the director manages to evoke the setting of pre-Christian Rome quite effectively. James Caviezel is excellent as Luke, and James Faulkner is outstanding as Paul. The old man is mesmerizing, which is no easy feat. He looks like a bum. But you can't take your eyes off him.

Paul is known to have been compelling, which made him such a powerful promoter of the faith, but no glad-hander. Here he is resigned to being imprisoned in lousy conditions and killed by the Romans, but still determined to bring the message of salvation to the small, persecuted group in Rome. Faulkner's Paul is never shown in a rage, but is easy to believe as the man who got into a fight with Barnabas over Mark's discipleship in Acts 15: 38-39, causing them to go their separate ways, Paul to Syria, Barnabas to Cyprus. A lot of Paul's history is told and some (especially his dramatic conversion) portrayed in flashbacks. One critic beaned the movie for providing Paul with dialogue straight from his Epistles, but what else would we want Paul to say? You can't present the man without giving him his own words.

There's a compelling story line here that is fictionalized -- I suspect you'd never fill a movie with any story in the Bible as is except  those of Jesus or Moses -- but it shows how Luke survived the persecutions to compile his Gospel and how Paul met his death. It fills in the historical gaps, and does it with no miracles, no supernatural escapes. There's nothing I didn't expect, and yet Paul's death made me want to sob.

But we know it's not a sad story. Paul didn't think of it that way. And maybe in the long run, all stories have happy endings. If sometimes the endings make me want to cry, well, it shows I've still got some heart.

As for Notre Dame, that same chapter of Acts I mentioned above quotes the Prophets saying:

After this I shall return
and rebuild the fallen hut of David;
from its ruins I shall rebuild it
and raise it up again,
so that the rest of humanity may seek out the Lord,
even all the Gentiles on whom my name is invoked.
Thus says the Lord who accomplishes these things,
known from of old.