Belief, Belief, Perfection, Belief...

Anthony Sacramone, a Lutheran apparently, does a film review of Black Swan.

His perfection part:

Perfection is in the eye of the beholder, and so in order to achieve it one must always subordinate the self to some other authority, which, in this realm, is always, always fallible. It is a self-defeating exercise, because even if you think you’ve achieved it, give it a minute, and the criteria by which that perfection is judged will shift, and you’ll find yourself having to place catch-up. To be perfect is, by definition, to fail. And the ultimate failure is death.

His belief part:

The price of admission to perfection is faith alone, because the cost of that admission was paid 2,000 years ago. And faith is never a work. Only believe.

Thank you Walt Disney! Just believe, oh, wait! No one can see you believe, so you can't even check in and ask anyone if you are doing it right. Could this possibly be the source of more problems today in this wacky 'I'm OK, you're OK' world than trying to manage a 'perfect' performance? In the end, performing the black swan in this world means being able to perform it for the whole season, and even subsequent seasons- for however long a good ballet dancer's career may be.
So let's just take this questionable movie and use it to prove a point about salvation. Let's further remove from a person his evidence, the physical nature of his 'performance' as a Christian- the things he can see, hear, and compare to an ideal- and suggest he 'only believe.'

This has already been done, and we see the effect of it all around us. Society is secular, over-medicalized, and hearing the devil's lullaby- that there really isn't anything more to life than whatever it is he has before your eyes. If you don't do, you don't experience. If you don't experience, you don't perceive. If you don't perceive, it's rather hard to believe, especially after you find out about Santa Claus.

Yeah, laugh lightly and think this is just some Catholic take, but I know of Baptists who go and get baptized again, for precisely this reason- belief is hard for even the believers to judge. They come to feel they believe now, but they really didn't then, or they just got baptized because their friends did; any number of reasons that boil down to a feeling about the quality of belief at the first (second or third) one versus the latest one.