Yes, it’s just an advert for John Lewis. Yes, it’s just an audacious example of product placement. Yes, it’s a particularly unreconstructed fantasy of middle-class domestic life. But it’s beautiful.
To see a human life glide past you in less than two minutes – from the baby being lifted out of the cot, right through to the grandmother walking through the park with her elderly husband and grandchildren. With so many significant moments in between, choreographed and edited so that it seems to be a single movement, a single breath. (I just think they lost their nerve at the end by not showing one final scene in the hospital ward.)
It makes you realise how astonishing and beautiful and fleeting life is. It makes you wonder what it all adds up to, what it means, when the very things that seem to give it meaning race past so quickly and soon become lost in the past.
And of course none of this would work without that soundtrack…
If you haven’t seen it, do take a look. Don’t miss the first three seconds in the struggle to adjust the screen:
I agree life is a beautiful miracle, just like Love, even if the advert does not show the estate, or the girl raped, or the drunk husband, or the wrong marriage. It does indeed show the miracle of life.
It’s a fantasy, the equivalent of a romantic comedy at the cinema; and like a good romantic comedy it can awaken something that makes you go back into the ordinariness and mess of daily like with less cynicism and more hope, even with your eyes wide open.
yes. One of the miracles of the passing of time and advancing years is the constant pull, a bit like a magnetic compass, always drawing one back to a font of hope and truth and Love. Always awakened and never room for cynicism. Mess is a wonderful fertilizer for wisdom.
Yes. Life is magic, magic (and tough).
Dear Jesus – thankyou, forgive + bless us all – now and always. And bless those, in particular right now, who find life particularly hard, and see no joy in it at the moment.
Dear Fr Stephen,
Love your blog. Keep up the good work.
God Bless, Edmond
I just read back over the blog and comments and Im sorry for sounding cynical. Nice to meet you Fr Stephen, I have been following your blog for a while now and Im hooked.
Life is astonishing and beautiful and fleeting and I think what it all adds up to is Love. Limitless Love.
Love makes life all worth while, finding the speck of Love both inside and outside of ones self. It dosent matter what hand we have been dealt. We all have the gift of limitless Love. Which can bless the whole universe.
What the advert does show however is Grace which I am stll working on!
Thank you for the blogs and the prayer Edmond x
I’m glad you are enjoying the blog mags
It is so nice to see those lovely moments contained in the video. Life is difficult, and those precious moments so brief that they can be missed if one is to busy with the “business” of life. Sometimes it takes a stepping back to remember that we are not in control of everything, and to appreciate this wonderful life that we have been given.