Learning Detachment, Pixar Style
by Lori Hadacek Chaplin in Reviews on Monday, February 15, 2010 6:00 AM
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If I’m lucky, I’ll see one or two movies a year that really speak to me on a spiritual level. I saw the movie Up
Weeks later, I’m still thinking about its particular message to me — and anyone else who has had to leave their home because of our nation’s economic crisis.
After seeing the movie, I wanted to know what others thought of it. Most critics praised the film. Steven D. Greydanus from DecentFilms.com and the National Catholic Register called Up’s prologue, “among the most arresting tributes to lifelong love that I have ever seen in any film, let alone a cartoon.” The “Tomatometer” at Rotten Tomatoes gave Up a whopping 98% fresh rating.
The plot of the movie is fairly complex for an animation, but in a nutshell it is about the adventure of a curmudgeonly, elderly widower and a boy scout (not your typical animation plot) that soar to South America in a house dangling from innumerable helium filled balloons. This parent-friendly animation covers the gamut of good values: it esteems lifelong marriage, respect for the elderly, heroism, selflessness — you name it.
But the message Up spoke to me was a more personal one — the virtue of detachment from material things. A difficult lesson that I have recently been forced to confront.
Last fall, we put our home on the market and moved to Nampa, Idaho; my husband, David, felt compelled to seek a new teaching position because of the dire financial situation of his previous college. I never dreamed I would have to leave my extended family — we all lived in a 30-mile radius.
I mourned leaving the home I loved; there I experienced some of the greatest joys and sorrows of my life. In this home, I recall spending quiet winter nights reading all of the Little House on the Prairie books to my then 6-year-old daughter, Ella. I first started writing for Faith & Family here nine years ago; I met and married David while living in this home; I gave birth to our daughter Gemma in this home. I brought our baby boy, Trystan, home from the hospital to this cherished abode. How could I Ieave a place that held so many memories for me?
In Up I saw myself as the curmudgeonly widower. He’d do anything to keep his home with him when developers and the judicial system try to take it from him. His home held the precious memories of his deceased wife. For him his house represented his true-love, his wife. He was never able to take her to her dream destination in South America, so he takes the home that embodies her memory with him.
Like the widower, I’m having trouble detaching myself from my home. I grapple with not having the comfort and support that my extended family gave me. My balloons are still attached to a piece of me that I left in my lovely home in Iowa. In moments of clarity I know, that like the widower, I need to let my possession go.
In his book, The Fulfillment of All Desire
Everything that exists is a gift from God. Yet oftentimes we look to the things and creatures created by God for a satisfaction and fulfillment that only God can provide. When the soul wraps itself around the things and the people of this world, looking for a satisfaction and fulfillment that only God can give, it produces a distortion in itself. Many spiritual writers call the process of unwinding this possessive, self-centered, clinging, and disordered seeking of things and persons — detachment.
Up reminds me that God has an adventure waiting for me — and you. I mustn’t let the things of this world keep me from soaring to the ultimate destination.
—Senior writer Lori Hadacek Chaplin is a wife and mother of three.
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