The Rubiks Cube of Avatar

Flip around the pieces in the Rubiks Cube of Avatar, and the story would be curiously the same, with some important differences.

In Avatar, the world of the Na'vi is indescribably beautiful. It is so beautiful the flora of the forest light up when you walk by.

The Na'vi is -- for lack of a better word -- a "primitive" race living in an unspoiled natural world. In this world, sublime mountains somehow float in mid air, as the Na'vi glide by them riding enormous bird-like creatures. They ride these birds by melding with them, joining their tails (the Na'vi have tails) to tentacles on the birds.

Na'vi and nature in communion as one.

The life-center of this world is ... a tree. An enormous tree that reaches to the heavens, filled with life of all sorts dwelling in its branches and within its twists and turns.

It is a Tree of Life; that is what it is.

A human being can only safely enter the Na'vi world (that is, without an oxygen mask) by means his or her avatar. An avatar is a human being that takes on the form of life of the Na'vi -- but still retains his own humanness. One person, two natures?

Suffice it to simply say that we human beings live in a condition in which the beauty of the Na'vi world is not directly accessible to us.

Even worse, in contrast to the wonderful greenness of the Na'vi world, there is nothing green any more in the "real" human world. This is a point the movie goes out of its way to underline.

Na'vi nature is essentially alive. And of course, achieving communion with this natural world is the equivalent of spiritual well-being and wholeness.

* * * * *

A recurring theme in our culture is that we human beings -- particularly of the post-industrial Western variety -- have irretrievably separated ourselves from the natural world and, in the process, have ruined that natural world as well.

Our world is hopelessly un-beautiful.

Only primitive peoples -- meaning usually pre-industrial, non-Western peoples -- can point the way back to uninterrupted communion with nature and innocence, and to the essential beauty such innocence promises.

Avatar retells this point with the best cinematographic technology that post-industrial minds are able to conjure up.

But somehow technology is the culprit. On the beautiful side of the ledger: the innocent and primitive Na'vi in organic communion with nature. On the ugly side of the ledger: enormous gunships and forces of technological destruction.

All of it depicted, again, with the best cinematographic technology post-industrial minds are able to conjure up.

Irony is at many levels of this story.

If Avatar were a Rubiks Cube, flip a few of its pieces and you'd get the Gospel Story. A savior from a beautiful world who comes into an un-beautiful one. A savior who takes on the form of life of this un-beautiful world in order to save it from its own penchant for destruction.

A Savior who says the culprit is not technology, but sin.

A Savior who pays the price of sin with His life, to assure recovery of a beautiful creation beyond description.

Logos2Go

John 1.11 He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.

Matthew 8.27 The men were amazed and asked, "What kind of man is this? Even the winds and the waves obey him!"

1 Corinthians 2.9 ... as it is written: "No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him..."

2 Corinthians 12.3-4 And I know that this man-whether in the body or apart from the body I do not know, but God knows - was caught up to paradise. He heard inexpressible things, things that man is not permitted to tell.