Wondering Presbyterian

  Warning: This article may contain spoilers for the movie  Soul . Which you should watch and then come back and read this. I’ll wait.              A couple of weeks ago, I watched the new Disney Pixar movie,  Soul . Soul  is the story of a band teacher whose life-long dream is to be a jazz musician. The band teacher, Joe, wants nothing more than to sit at the piano on a stage and lose himself in the soul-moving-dance that is music. In a beautiful scene towards the beginning, Joe auditions to play a gig at a local night club and as he plays the piano, everything else around him fades away. He goes into a sort of trance that lets you know his whole self is  in  this music. He gets the gig of his life and on his way home, he falls into a manhole and ends up in a coma. The next thing he knows, he’s on a highway to the light but he doesn’t want to go just yet. He finds a way off the path towards the Great Beyond and winds up in a colorful dream-like world called the Great Before (well, now

             I can recall only one birthday when my parents hired a magician. He was a member of my church and we used to dog sit for him, so really he was also a family friend. I don’t really remember much about the experience, but I remember there were flowers. And I remember thinking magic was real.              I don’t know when we lose that sense of real magic. Every summer when America’s Got Talent comes back on TV, I watch the magicians and try to google how they do their tricks. How could they possibly make that disappear? Could they really change that into that? And the ones whose tricks are wrapped up in a bow with mental gymnastics the likes of which I could never begin to understand (looking at you, Clairvoyants!), forget it. There are moments when I still believe magic is real and moments when I believe it’s just smoke and mirrors. And yet, I wonder sometimes if smoke and mirrors aren’t all bad.             Neil Gaiman talks about this a little bit in the introduction of h