“I wonder how many of us, if we were able to be transported to the new eden of Pandora would pay that price, and with that commitment.  How long before the lack of home comforts, technology, consumer identity would reality hit home and we’ be declaring, ‘don’t you tell me I have the earn the right to speak!’.  

Avatar is powerful not because it is demonic, but rather it reveals the human condition in it’s falleness and brokeness, and the need for a retraining of our desires to enter into a new way of life.  As Augustine would say, human beings have fallen not from God but into themselves, so overwhelmed by the plentitude of life, that we collapse life into ourselves. Overwhelmed with desire, we desire desire and consume.  The way out is the retraining of our desires, around their correct orientations with other.  It’s not that we don’t love the world too much, its that we don’t love it enough and rightly, and have to learn that with others.  

I left the movie, moved, and grateful, rather than depressed.  Thanking God that the worship of the Christian Church, gives me language, grammar and ascesis for entry into a new world.  I have a new body in Christ, and one who would have my imagination through worship opened to the dimensions of his Kingdom, that one day I will be resurrected into, and that I can experience now. 

Pandora is real, it’s here now for all who would enter it, in Jesus.“