"How long have we been brothers?" Zilong (Andy Lau), the title character in the movie Three Kingdoms :Resurrection of the Dragon, asked his sworn brother Ping-An (Sammo Hung). "Thirty-two years and four months" was the reply. That was more than half of Zilong's lifetime. Albeit being one of the legendary 5 generals of the formidable Shu Kingdom in ancient China, Zilong was not mentioned in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. That aside, the film was true to its literary depiction of the Shu Kingdom as the protagonist.
The film began and ended with Zilong and Ping-An, chronicling their fateful first encounter to the battleground where one met his valiant end while the other assumed greatness by proxy. Their lives, though panned out differently, had one thing in common - both had come full circle and ended up where they started. They spent the better half of their lives fighting for a cause, only to find very little reason to do so at the end.
Such are tragedies made of.
I had some hard thinking to do too. After spending 6 years living for a cause, have I come full circle? All that I wanted was to have a family growing and maturing in the ways of God. Maybe I was too hopeful. Or maybe I had heaped too much expectations on myself and on them. Maybe I had played God too many a time. Maybe I need to release them all to Him and move on with life. Maybe.
Ecclesiates tell us that life is meaningless apart from God. Do I need to plunge the depths of futility to understand what that means? Or... maybe I can simply fear and love God, obey His commandments... and set out like a junior Augustine... do whatever I like?
Don't know. But the world certainly don't need another tragedy.
No comments:
Post a Comment