“Immortality can be a burden
especially when you have lost the meaning for living, when there is nothing or
no one to live for. You may just become like a samurai without a master”.
The words of Master Yashida haunted
Logan on several occasions. The offer was very attractive: mortality and rest
after countless decades of fidgety existence. He had witnessed the barbarities
of war and human struggles in history, recently the Nagasaki atomic bombing,
where he saved Yashida’s life. He had lost his mutant friends. He had lost
Jean. He has now become “a samurai without a master”. What will hinder him from
accepting Yashida’s offer? Nothing. Just the curiosity of it!
What’s curious was the offer
itself. And it’s coming from Yashida himself on his deathbed. Why would a dying
man offer normal passing from life to death to an immortal mutant? Logan
thought, why do I smell something fishy in it?
What was fishy became a shocking
revelation in the end. Yashida himself (whose death was just a façade) was the
one interested in transferring “mechanically” Wolverine’s immortality to
himself. The motive? To protect and perpetuate the business empire he has built
over the years.
The transmission could have succeeded
had it not been interrupted courageously by Maroki, Yashida’s granddaughter. Finally,
Wolverine found the reason for living. To Jean’s offer (in a dream) of joining
her in the afterlife, Wolverine declined saying “I am a soldier”. He has ceased
to become “a samurai without a master”.
Did you wonder what people could
afford to do just to gain immortality? Wolverine
is a film that depicts it. We see here another comic description of the truth
of our being: man is created to endure forever. Confronted by the reality of death
and the fear of extinction, he clings to his desire for immortality.
But oftentimes, man’s desire to be
immortal does not correspond to his immortal constitution and to the eternal
life he is called. The immortality he seeks is still bound to time and space
while he is called to be eternal, to be in communion with the Author of time
and space Himself.
In his quest for immortality, man
clings to the things of this world. But God continues to remind him that true
immortality consists in denying oneself of worldly and passing things and
clinging to what is heavenly and enduring: a life in God.
Yashida spent his whole life in
obsessively devising ways to obtain Wolverine’s immortality. Every man and
woman does not have to invent extraordinary means to win eternal life. Christ
already has procured it for us and offered it freely and readily for our reach.
All we need to do is to turn to Christ.
“May
we seek Christ; may we find Christ; may we love Christ”. And in finding
Him, we shall obtain, not just immortality, but eternal bliss.
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