Some thoughts on anime and life:

Sometimes They Scare Us

Christmas is a season for decoration. There are loads of Christmas motifs out there—Santas and reindeer, gift-wrapped boxes, snowmen and stylized Christmas trees. And angels. You see lots of angels around this time of year. Most Nativity scenes will have one. They’re a familiar enough motif that even secular displays sometimes have them.

You can always recognize them from their white robes and wings. They tend to be singing, or sometimes blowing trumpets. Most Christmas angels have a soft, feminine appearance. They look warm and cheerful.

The accounts of the Nativity in the gospels according to Matthew and Luke do indeed record several angelic visitations. Interesting to note, though, that in each case those being visited were very afraid of their visitors. The angels kept having to tell them not to be afraid, even as they brought “good tidings of great joy.” We see other cases of terrifying angelic visitors in the Old Testament. Angels scare people.

It's not hard to see why. They are alien beings with great powers. Sometimes they are depicted as instruments of wrath and punishment. Angels are messengers (The word originally meant “messenger”) of a power vastly beyond anything we know. Angels as depicted in the Bible are a far cry from our Christmas ornament and greeting card images.

I’m reminded of the scary side of angels whenever I watch the anime series “Angel Beats.” It’s the story of a group of deceased teenagers who find themselves in an afterlife that takes the form of a large school. The teens are given to understand that if they attend class and are good students, they will eventually pass from the world of the school and on to the next stage of existence.

A student named Yuri refuses to do this. When she was a girl, Yuri saw her three younger siblings murdered before her eyes, while she was helpless to do anything about it. Ever since that time she has been angry with God for letting something so horrible happen. Yuri leads other students with troubled pasts in a rebellion. They produce weapons and other gear with which to disrupt the school’s activities. As long as they rebel, they will not pass on and will cling to life as they know it.

They are opposed in their rebellion by the school’s Student Council President, a girl they call Angel. Angel is a small, quiet, unprepossessing girl, but she possesses frightening powers. When the rebels try to cause disruption, she tells them to stop. When they attack her, she fights back. She’s quite capable of killing them, although usually they are killed by their own foolishness instead. This happens a lot--the show is a black comedy set in a world where the already deceased soon revive after being “killed.”

The protagonist of “Angel Beats,” a newcomer named Otonashi, quickly learns how dangerous Angel. When he demands that she prove that he is really in the afterlife and can’t die, she obliges by stabbing him through the chest and temporarily, painfully, “killing” him. After this run-in he understandably joins Yuri’s rebel gang and participates in some of their absurd operations. All along he wonders whether he is doing the right thing.

In the course of the series Otonashi hears the tragic histories of some of his fellow students. Eventually he recalls his own life. Though it was as brief and hard as any of the others, he recalls having found it fulfilling. It is then that Otonashi realizes the purpose of the afterlife school. It is supposed to be a place where youths who had a hard time in life can come to terms with their lives, find peace, and pass on. All Angel ever wanted to do as Council President was to try to help them do this. Instead the rebel students attacked her, she fought them back, and a war began. All the students are achieving through their rebellion is to inflict unnecessary pain on themselves, and to delay their own redemption.

Otonashi decides to join Angel in trying to help his friends stop fighting and find peace. Over time more and more of them do so. The hardest case, not surprisingly, is Yuri.

At the climax of the series Yuri finds a secret computer lab that in some mysterious way can control the afterlife school’s environment. She learns that she could potentially use this system to take over the little world of the school, to make it whatever she wants and become its god. She is clearly tempted. But she rejects the temptation by destroying the computers. She then sees a vision of her murdered siblings telling her that she has done enough, and can now stop fighting.

During this climactic scene we hear, on the soundtrack, the show’s closing theme, a pretty but sad number called “Brave Song.” In it the singer sings of how she fights to embrace her loneliness and keep others from seeing her tears. Then we hear a second verse that hasn’t been sung in any of the previous episode endings. In this verse the singer speaks of accepting those feelings. She decides to stop pretending any longer to be strong.

At that moment the viewer realizes that “Brave Song” has been about Yuri all along. With all of her anger and resentment, her refusal to accept that the world around her can’t be what she wants it to be, she has been her own worst enemy. As the second verse sings of resignation and acceptance, the music paradoxically grows uplifting and triumphant. In surrendering her desire to play God, Yuri has actually won her greatest victory—the victory over herself.

In presenting this message, “Angel Beats” actually functions as a kind of Buddhist allegory. In Buddhism desire is the source of all evil and suffering. Spiritual growth comes from accepting all of life and abandoning desire. The circumstances of life, both good and bad, are all tools of karma—fate—God if you will—to teach maturity.

An interesting thing about “Angel Beats.” If one chooses to view the unseen God of the afterlife school as the Christian Deity, the Buddhist allegory starts looking rather like a Christian one instead. In Christian teaching God created human beings in his image, to know and serve him. But humans rebelled, creating the world of evil and suffering that we now know.

God chose to offer a way out of that situation two millennia ago by being born as a human being called Jehoshua—“The Lord Saves”—better known in the English-speaking world as Jesus. Jesus lived an exemplary life, died without deserving it as a sacrifice for our sins, and rose from the dead. Ever since that time he has invited others to trust in him and follow him, by living lives that revolve around service to others, rather than service to self.

For two millennia the world has, by and large, chosen to keep on rebelling. We accomplish nothing by continuing that rebellion, except to bring harm to ourselves. And so it is that that the human race continue to live in a world of suffering and evil, blaming God (if we believe in him) for it even as we as a race bring it on each other and on ourselves.

An interesting thing about Angel in “Angel Beats.” The students in the afterlife school eventually learn that she isn’t really an angel at all. “Angel” is actually a fellow student named Kanade. She is the one student who actually gets with the program and tries to follow the school’s rules. She hopes, as Student Council President, to get the others to do so as well, so that they can find peace and acceptance. But they keep attacking her. She fights back, using powers she has developed to protect herself. And so an endless, needless war begins.

At one point Kanade appears in association with a lotus blossom. This piece of Buddhist symbolism hints that she is a bodhisattva—a Buddhist saint who has attained spiritual awakening, but remains in the world of suffering to help others find the way to awakening as well. Kanade/Angel fights, bleeds, and suffers a lot from her fellow students. But she never stops trying, in her blundering way, to help them.

Here again the viewer of “Angel Beats” can find a Christian application. Just before Jesus left this world, he told his followers to “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all the things I have commanded you. And I am with you always, even to the completion of the age.” Many Christians call this passage the “Great Commission.” Teaching others about Jesus, trying to point the way to following him, is what our lives are supposed to be all about.

As with Kanade we find that the message isn’t always welcome. If offends people to hear about sin, and the danger of Hell, and the need to place their lives under God’s control. Talking about Jesus can bring ridicule and rejection. In some parts of the world it can get you killed.

And like Kanade, we aren’t always good communicators when we try to bring others our well-intentioned warnings and good news. Sometimes, like Kanade, we do or say something that cuts somebody to the heart, imagining that we’re doing the right thing.

Our biggest problem, though, is that we too can fall back at times into old rebellious habits. Like the rebels in “Angel Beats” we imagine that we have reason to be angry at God. One of the students in the series is a girl named Yui who spent most of her short life paralyzed. In the afterlife she is freed from her paralysis and runs around trying to do all the things she never had a chance to do in life. But she still can’t fulfill her greatest ambition—to fall in love and get married. This causes her to remain angry at God. “He took away all my happiness,” Yui says. “He’s such a mean God!”

The scene where the character says this hits very close to home. Marrying and having a family were my great ambitions in life as well. I did, eventually, find somebody to marry—and that’s when everything went wrong. The closest we came to having a child ended in miscarriage. The marriage turned abusive, and eventually I found myself abandoned (Which, sad to say, was probably the best thing that could have happened).

After all this I spent a long time trying to convince myself that I was better off alone. For several years I managed to be fairly content, or at least supposed I was. Then, awhile back, I met somebody very attractive, who had the qualities I was looking for. I began to think that maybe God was finally going to let me realize my heart’s desire. But we never hit it off.

I later learned some things that made me realize that it was surely for the best that we didn’t. I had escaped again falling into a life with somebody who wasn’t who I had imagined. I had also seen long-lost hopes revived, only to have to experience their destruction for a second time. I’ve been reminded daily ever since of what I’ve lost. It feels sometimes as if God, having denied me what I wanted so badly, wanted to rub my face in it. At times I have found myself thinking what Yui said about God’s meanness.

Then I remind myself that it isn’t true. Jesus never promised his followers that we would not be prone to all the troubles that life in this world has to offer. If anything, we sometimes invite other attacks upon ourselves as we try to follow him. “In this world you will have trouble,” he says. Then he continues “But take courage—I have overcome the world.”

When we follow Jesus we have the promise of God—not just some impersonal fate or karma—that he will work through everything that happens to us for our ultimate good. How, you might ask, could my ruined hopes of marriage and family work out for my best? If you find out, let me know! Maybe by keeping me from being too contented, God has made sure that I will not become complacent and cease following him, as so many do. Maybe through my marital failures I managed, in some way I can’t yet see, to be a witness of God’s love to others. Maybe God made me “take one for the team.”

I wish I could say that I was okay with it. To be honest, there are lonely days when I’m still not okay with it at all. Those are my rebellious days, and it is those that steal my joy. When I don’t focus on the things I don’t have, I’m free to be aware of the many blessings that God has given me.

There are two things I do know. First, in my times alone with God I have felt him tell me very clearly that what happened to me with my failed marriage and family was all for a reason. I didn’t do wrong myself. I was not just the victim of blind bad luck. God accomplished something through my pain, even if I don’t yet know what it is.

Second, Jesus promised his followers that anything they lost in his service would be made good, and more, when this age of suffering finally ends. I have this promise from God to those followers who could not have the children and families they wanted: “Rejoice, O barren, you who do not bear! Break forth and shout, you who are not in labor! For the desolate has many more children than she who has a husband…neither let the eunuch say, I am a dry tree. For so says the Lord to the eunuchs that choose the things that please him, I will give you in my house a place and a name better than sons and daughters, an everlasting name that will not be cut off.”

The word “angel” means “messenger.” Our circumstances in life are God’s messages to us. Sometimes, like the angels of the Christmas story, they scare us. But if we wait around long enough to hear them out, they will also bring us good tidings of great joy.

I think most religions and philosophies throughout history have been based on very similar concepts - what's the nature of life, how do we define and recognise right and wrong, etc.

Numerous cultures have produced variations on the concept of the afterlife as well, and this sounds as if it's along those lines. It's interesting that you chose to examine the similarities between Buddhism and Christianity rather than the differences, Daphne. So many people fixate on the differences almost as if they're looking to find conflict. Most religions are saying fundamentally similar things they're just doing it using a different set of symbols.

Jospeh Campbell - my go-to person for all things religious and philosophical - once compared different religions to different software formats. Different religions are using a different type of software to reach the same goal, basically. He also made a comment that had a profound impact on me when I first heard it in 1990. He said that religious conflict was based on people becoming obsessed with the denotation rather than the connotation of religion. People would rather fight about which particular animals you can or can't eat, or whose religion is the 'true' one, instead of looking at the actual teachings of each religion. He was referring to the divide between Islam and Christianity specifically, but it can be applied to other situations. If you examine the basic teachings of Christianity, Judaism and Islam - and as you've noted, even Buddhism - there are striking similarities in what they're actually saying about the nature of human existence.

I suppose my personal explanation for this is that human beings create religions according to our own deeper nature(s) so the similarities are a direct result of religion being an extension of the human condition; people suffer and enjoy life regardless of where they're from or which language they speak, etc. People around the world and throughout history have asked themselves very similar questions as they've grown older and experienced more of life, so these philosophical or religious belief structures are all built on the same underlying foundation - humanity itself.

As far as we know only humans create religions, although Dr. Jane Goodall has described chimpanzees as behaving with what she described as 'reverence' when they were in places of particularly striking natural beauty (in the case of 'her' chimps, this was a certain waterfall). So maybe we're not the only ones who experience awe, or ask questions of ourselves regarding the fundamental nature of our own existence. We know the great apes also possess 'theory of mind', so it's at least possible.

Anyway, thank you for writing this. I always enjoy reading what you write and seeing how you structure arguments. You have such an inspiring way of seeing things.