Anime Lectio: The Dangers in My Heart Season 2

                                                           1. Why do Anime Lectio? 

Anime Lectio is a time for us to stop and take a breath. Between work, activities, family life, and social media, our minds are always moving. We rarely take time to contemplate and ask, why am I watching this anime? What’s the point of all this? And, how is this making me feel? 

2. Put away all distractions 

(phones, work, etc.)

We are so enslaved to things that stimulate our minds. Let this be a moment for us to free our minds, look inside of ourselves, and be at peace.

3. Deep Breathing

Take several deep breaths. Let your mind relax. If you’ve had any questions, desires, or struggles that you’ve been hiding or stuffing away, let them rise up to the surface. 

4. Open yourself to God’s Presence

Remember God places all our thoughts and desires inside of us, and He uses them to draw us closer to Himself. God gives us a community to help us understand who we are and what He is calling us to do. The faces of other people you know and don't know are like signs of God’s presence.  

5. Think About What’s on Your Mind in Relation to the Anime

Think about what’s been on your mind in relation to the anime.  The following is an example of such thoughts written by me. 

Where do you find your salvation?  This question was the title for the reflection that I wrote about Ash Wednesday being on Valentine's Day this year on the blog for the monastery where I live as a monk (https://monksinthecity.blogspot.com/).  I start this reflection by talking about one of the lyrics in the opening for the second season of the anime The Dangers in My Heart.  This lyric is "It's scary, but still in everything about you I find salvation," which is a lyric I think about a lot.  In addition to relating the lyric to other things, as seen in the reflection that I wrote for the blog for the monastery where I live as a monk, I'm also going to reflect more on it here, but before I do that, I will give a brief description of season two of the anime where the lyric comes from.

6. Brief and written explanation of the anime

Pay attention to how the brief and written explanation of the anime seen on this blog, or seeing the anime for yourself since that's better than any explanation, might “speak” to you or shed light on the things that have been on your minds.

Now that a friendship has been established between the main male character and the female main character in season one, as well as other friendships as a result of this main friendship that are also important in terms of supporting the main friendship, this main friendship now has time to progress into a relationship that is more than just a simple friendship. The male main character needed friends again, but he also needs to be with the main female character in a more intimate way, which they clearly both want and need to do, but don't always do that. There's a lot of back and forth between them about what they want not only for themselves, but also for each other, which also involves what their other friends want. However, the final episode of this second season is when the two main characters finally admit their feelings for each other in a way that makes this definite.

7.  Reflect on the anime

Has this brief and written explanation of the anime shed any light on what's been on your minds?  The following is an example of a reflection on the anime from me.

As I mentioned in a post on my Facebook page recently, I think the two major themes of this anime are acceptance and salvation.  In the lyric "It's scary, but still in everything about you I find salvation," what makes salvation scary is that it involves acceptance.  Acceptance of who you were.  Acceptance of who you are now.  And acceptance of who you will be.  This acceptance can be scary no matter how you do it since it always involves accepting others, as well as yourself and others also accepting that.  In this anime, it seems that the main characters, particularly the female one, have an easy time accepting others, but not themselves, which is essentially what the second season of this anime focuses on improving, which leads to the result of this improvement in the final episode of this season.

I also think the key to the result of this improvement is the realization that what you want and what you need shouldn't just be the same thing for yourself, but also the same thing for other people too.  For example, while the two main characters realize that they do need each other in order to be better versions of themselves, they also need to accept what each of them wants and realize what that actually is.  

This is also where the second part of the lyric comes in.  Even though it's scary due to what you have to accept, as seen in the first paragraph in this part of this reflection, you still find salvation in everything about where you find salvation.  In the case of this anime, the male main character finds his salvation in the female main character, which is what it looks like based on the images used in the opening song when this lyric comes up in it.  However, the female main character also finds her salvation in the male main character, which is seen in the final episode in the second season of this anime when he confesses to her earlier in the episode and she confesses to him later in the episode.  Not only should salvation be a two-way street depending on how it works, who's involved in it, etc., but it should also involve accepting everything about where you find salvation.  Not just some of the things some of the time, but all of the things all of the time.

While I do plan to write a chapter about this anime in an anime book that I am currently working on, inspired by the book Anime Impact and expanding on the themes of acceptance and salvation, which I would take further in a possible book idea I've thought about before devoted to just this anime, I do hope my initial ideas of the anime have come across clearly here.  I have learned in my life as a monk that when you think about something a lot, especially when you think about it during prayer, that it happens for a reason and praying about that helps, or make it part of your prayer if it comes up during prayer, which is what I like to do when ending these reflections by relating the prayer to what I reflect on.

8. Final Prayer

Please voice any prayer intentions for friends, family, or people around the world that relate to this anime.  The following is an example written by me.

Let us pray that we can accept everything about others, including ourselves, no matter how scary it is, which is also true for understanding our salvation.