I enjoy various genres of movies and one such genre is the type that the movie Anne of Green Gables fits into. I am not interested here in trying to justify such a liking, but rather to meditate on one reason why I think perhaps I have an enjoyment of such movies.
Lewis suggests that the existence of longings or desires means there is something out there that will satisfy those desires. We were not made for sin, for the humanity in which we are bound. We were made for good, for beauty, for the perfection that existed before the fall. Pictures that give us little tastes of that perfection, be they movies, books, nature, or other forms, remind us that we are not of this place, that this world is not home. Gire calls those pictures “windows of the soul”. Lewis writes:
"We do not merely want to see beauty... We want something else which can hardly be put into words -- to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. That is why we have peopled air and earth and water with gods and goddesses and nymphs and elves." (CS Lewis, Till We Have Faces)
Why like such things? Because it is the heart’s longing for home.
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