Anime Lectio: Anohana

                                                             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. The only device you need is the one you use for this blog.

3. Deep Breathing - Open yourself to God’s Presence

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. 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 people you

know and don't know are like signs of God’s presence. 

4. 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. 

There's not a lot of anime that focuses entirely on grief.  While there are a lot of anime out there that have moments of grieving in them, there's not a lot where every moment is about dealing with grief.  There are many ways to deal with grief, as well as many ways to express it, what leads up to the grieving moment(s), and other things about grief, which I tried to do in a class in the school I work in for a few years (the class met in our summer session).  I didn't talk about this anime, or any other anime, at all when doing this class, even when I was also doing an anime class at the same time as the grieving class (the only other anime that I know of that deals entirely with grieving, Journal with Witch, came out earlier this year), but I'm going to attempt to do that here now.     

5. Brief and written explanation of the anime

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

A boy in the middle of playing a video game is interrupted by a young girl who seems to be his younger sister.  The young girl is actually one of the boy's childhood friends who died when they were younger and appears only to him in order to have him help her figure out why she's appearing to him now, which she thinks is because he needs her to help her with something that will allow her to move on.  However, what she thinks she needs help with is something that she thinks she needs their other childhood friends for too.  The boy hasn't kept in touch with these friends since the girl died, which also created a lot of other changes based on how they all deal with her death, like the boy she appears to being a shut-in now.  After getting in touch with his old friends, explaining the situation to them, and trying to figure out what they need to do in order for the dead girl to move on, they figure out that what they needed to do was to have the boy cry (even though they all end up doing that due to what the dead girl ends up telling them before she moves on). 

6.  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.

For an anime to focus entirely on grieving, I think what it needs to do in order to do that is to find a way to make that engaging in a way that not only involves several characters in what you are watching, but also to make that relatable. People tend to focus on anime that aren't really relatable, or the parts that aren't very relatable that usually leads to criticism of the relatable parts, which is most likely why anime like this aren't very common. Anyway, grief is relatable no matter how it happens. Making it more engaging somehow helps with that, like relating to how a certain character grieves in their own way, how they grieve with others by helping each other with a certain problem, or what they are told to do in order to keep living (this series does all three of those things).

7. 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 understand grief, as well as how to make it more engaging in order for other people to understand it.