I watched the film Powder last night. 

Oh my God …

One reviewer tells the story:

Fantasy and drama combine in the story of a teenager known as Powder for his snow-white skin.  Powder is introduced into a tiny Texas community after spending his entire life in his grandparents’ basement.  He’s a wise genius, but an outcast, alienated by those who misunderstand and fear him.  When a schoolmaster and science teacher discover that Powder has a capacity for empathic insight and possesses the power to control electricity, the unusual boy becomes a tragic Christ-like figure – peaceful, prophetic and perhaps too good to survive in the real world.

Sweetness, goodness, supreme empathy.  Can such a one thrive, even survive, in our world of “Me first”?  Powder stands tall in the face of rejection.  He reaches out to those who are hurting.

A male classmate:  Why you look like that?  You look like some kind of vampire from outer space or something.  There’s not much fight in you, is there freak show?  You really think you could be like us?

The white skin, the soft eyes, the hat covering the baldness … all incomprehensible to these Texas teenagers – and adults.  Powder is other.

The science teacher:  It has become appallingly clear that our technology has surpassed our humanity. 

We’re stumbling around in a very dark age basically trying not to kill each other … I think you have a mind that we won’t evolve to for like thousands of years – you’re maybe the man of the future right here and now.

Perhaps there are many such future human beings walking the Earth today, “too good” for the smallness, the divisions, the “I’m right and you’re wrong.”  They are ambassadors of what can be, how a life can be lived.

Here’s what Powder has to say:

Inside most people there’s a feeling of being separate, separated from everything.  And they’re not.  They’re part of absolutely everyone, and everything.

What a concept … you and I are connected, and there’s a way that we can find each other’s divinity.  We can truly be together.

It’s possible to talk to someone without any lies, with no sarcasms, no deceptions, no exaggerations or any of the things that people use to confuse the truth.

There’s so much that is possible …

I want to go home.  Do you understand that?  I want to go home.

A real home, where we can cuddle, put our feet up on the couch, pass the bag of popcorn back and forth.

Powder meets a girl who sees beyond differences to the pearl being revealed.  She is a gift … and sees him that way too.

I don’t know what I think when I look at you.  But sometimes I think, I think you’re the most beautiful face I’ve ever seen.

Indeed

Beauty beyond the norm

Beyond the known

Shining