Love Is A Verb

The Smurfs Movie is a Lot To Love

We meet no shortage of smurfholes in life who are eager to tell us like it is. But more valuable to us is often the person who tells us like it could be.

While you might find more scholarly dreamers in Ralph Waldo Emerson or John Lennon, there’s no cuter optimist than Papa Smurf.

Somewhere within an hour and 43 minutes, Papa Smurf reminded us that sometimes we have to trust the people we love more than our own instincts—even if those instincts have never been wrong.

Papa Smurf and I also share a love of blue moons, though he prefers the Bavarian variety to lead him home and I opt for the Belgian ale while winding down at home. As a single dad of hoards of little people, I’d think he’d want the ale too. But perhaps the Hanna-Barbera character doesn’t have any room for libations among all that love throughout his village of tiny mushrooms.

When he and five of his “three apples high” Smurfs get chased into the Big Apple by the evil wizard Gargamel (Hank Azaria), it’s love that leads them home. They get a lot of help from their friends Patrick (Neil Patrick Harris) and Grace (Jayma Mays) Winslow, who are expectant parents living in what movies always depict as the consummate New York lifestyle.

Peppered in are supporting roles from Tim Gunn and Sofia Vergara, who add a little fabulous into all the cute. Vergara plays a demanding boss to Harris’ marketing executive at a cosmetics firm in a storyline that’s all too predictable.

But that’s OK. I wasn’t expecting Citizen Smurf.

I just wanted to see the silver screen version of one of my Saturday morning favorites. My 7-year-old daughter and 4-year-old son were surprised to learn, upon asking to see the movie, that I saw the cartoon version when I was their age.

I’d fail if I dared draw comparisons or detailed differences between the Smurfs of my childhood and the latest Hollywood depiction. And, really, I don’t see the point. I never understand why critics analyze kids’ movies as though they’re writing a thesis on “Magnolia.”

I’m not sure how many stars the movie has received, but I know it got a lot of laughs at a recent showing at Destinita’s Bridgeville location. The audience seemed to most appreciate when Smurfette, whose voice actress was Katy Perry, said, “I kissed a Smurf and I liked it.”

A lot of laughs were also earned anytime Papa Smurf, Smurfette, Grouchy, Brainy, Clumsy and Gutsy replaced an explicative—or any other word—with some variation of Smurf. And I appreciate any noun that moonlights as a verb, adverb and adjective.

God is a verb : Occam's Razor

God is a verb

Those of us who believe in God tend to think of God as a noun. As you may recall from elementary school, a noun is a person, place or thing. God is probably not a person, unless you count Jesus Christ. Nor is God a place, except heaven is assumed to be some physical or ethereal space where God’s presence is overwhelming, sort of God’s home, you might say. Calling God a thing sounds sort of churlish since by definition there can be nothing grandeur or more magnificent than God. Given our poor definition, if we have to define God as a noun, saying God is a thing will have to do.

A sentence is made up of many parts of speech. God cannot be an adjective because adjectives modify nouns. Adverbs modify verbs or adjectives, and since God cannot be an adjective it cannot be an adverb. You can look through all the parts of a sentence and using God for anything other than a noun mostly doesn’t work. God can be part of a word and be something else. Goddamn, for instance, is an adjective and sometimes an adverb. There is only one other part of a sentence where God could work: God could be a verb.

For many of you, you are wondering what the heck I am talking about. A verb expresses action, state or a relationship between things. Dictionary.com defines a verb as:

Any member of a class of words that are formally distinguished in many languages, as in English by taking the past ending in -ed, that function as the main elements of predicates, that typically express action, state, or a relation between two things, and that (when inflected) may be inflected for tense, aspect, voice, mood, and to show agreement with their subject or object.

Yet if God is understood as the relationship between people, places and things, i.e. God is a verb, then clarity can emerge. This notion of God though will trouble most of us because we tend to see God as something external, all powerful, all good and unique, i.e. a noun. Saying God is a verb simply suggests it is what holds us in relationship to everything else. In this sense, we are literally part of the mind of God. In this sense, God becomes neither good nor bad, but simply is the relationship between all things, physical and spiritual. God in some sense is energy, or whatever forces exist, whether simple or complex, that hold us together in communion. This notion of God answers the riddle: If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, did it make a sound? If God is a verb then the answer is yes. The tree falling in the forest impacts in some measure all of creation because God as a verb posits as an article of faith that everything really is interconnected with everything else. So yes, it made a sound, even if we did not hear it personally.

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Love is a Verb, Stories of What Happens When Love Comes Alive

Love is a verb

Love Is a Verb

Love is a verb