Radical Civility

I won’t rehearse every film clip we watched or the discussions they evoked. I will say that I was consistently impressed by the thoughtfulness of the responses, their authenticity, and the implicit trust that seemed to exist among everyone present. Attendance never fell below a dozen and most weeks numbered a bit more: one week it ran to nearly twenty. And I was touched beyond measure by the appreciation the group showed me. At my previous church, it seemed as if everything I did (however much a few appreciated it) evoked a kind of querulous scorn from many. There’s no point in getting into such stuff, except to acknowledge the sense of acceptance I felt at North Church compared to the wariness with which many regarded me at my previous church. To invoke the conservative evangelical jargon of my former faith tradition, the students in the Faith and Film course were a real blessing.

They hung in there even with very difficult material, perhaps the most difficult being a clip we watched from The Woodsman, a film that observes a young man’s attempt to create a semblance of normal life after serving time for that most heinous of crimes, pedophilia. The central character, Walter, commands our empathy if not sympathy because he plainly hopes not to repeat his crime. Yet plainly he also does not accept — or at least cannot acknowedge to himself — that his actions have actually harmed any child, and I chose clips that emphasized how much the matter was still in doubt. In one scene, Walter trails an eleven-year old girl to a park and makes what is, at one level, just gentle, interested conversation about her fascination with bird-watching. But at another level the interest is pitched a bit too high; the girl at first enjoys discussing her hobby but soon grows uncomfortable. She has to go home, she says. Her father doesn’t like her to stay away from home so long. “You should mind your father,” he agrees, too earnestly. And once alone his body tightens with self-loathing. He has come to close to the edge. Has, indeed, sought the edge.

I showed one other scene, a brief encounter between Walter and the cop who regularly checks up on him. The cop asks if Walter has ever heard the story of the Woodsman — you know, that Woodsman who cuts open the wolf with his axe and lets the girl inside his belly escape alive. What’s that story, he asks? “Little Red Riding Hood,” Walter supplies. Little Red Riding Hood, the cop agrees, then describes in harrowing detail some of the cases he’s seen in which dreadful things happened to small children. There ain’t no Woodsman, he says finally. The point of the scene is that, to him, Walter is unredeemable. It’s just a matter of time before he again becomes a predator.

The question I asked to start the discussion was stark: What if Walter wanted to attend North Church? It proved a most difficult exchange because everyone kept it so grounded in the real world — no trite platitudes here. Some believed that Walter should be welcomed and supported because if God did not regard him as beyond redemption we ourselves could not. Others noted the very high recidivism rate among sexual offenders and asked pointedly about the risk to children in and around the church. How could you square the imperative to support Walter with the imperative to protect the most vulnerable among us? Some thought frankly it could not be done.

The exchange was intriguing enough to me that afterward I went to the pastor, Eric Williams, and asked for his sense of how such a situation would be handled. He would have to be the real authority in explaining what course the church would take, but as I understood him, Walter would have to self-disclose and careful arrangements would be made so that members of the congregation would support him in his personal struggle but that he must also adhere to strict rules about contact — or rather the lack of it — with minors; and that a breach of the rules would require him to leave the church: a definite case where being “as wise as serpents” must ultimately trump being “as harmless as doves.” (Matthew 10:16)

The best recommendation I can make for the course was its impact on me. For the first month or so I came, I taught, I left. Then I began to feel a willingness to linger for worship, and by the end I had signed up for membership class. So the class certainly did at least one participant a world of good.

Part 1 - Part 2

Last summer the Christian Education committee at North Congregational United Church of Christ approached me about teaching a Sunday school class. In some respects it was an odd thing to do: I didn’t attend North Church (as the parishioners generally call it).

Indeed, I didn’t attend any church, not since an encounter with church politics at my previous spiritual home left me feeling hurt, bewildered, and, to be perfectly frank, more than a little exploited. But that’s a tale for another time, if indeed I can ever find a judicious way to tell it.

The committee’s request actually had both logic and grace. It was logical because by its own admission, Christian education was a traditional weakpoint in the congregation’s life, and I am a professional educator who has taught several Sunday school classes. It showed grace because it offered me a way to ease back into a spritual community on terms with which I was comfortable. Most churches expect you to join or at least attend regularly before they’ll let you assume any teaching or similar responsibility. North Church didn’t have that philosophy, perhaps because it contains so many members with stories like mine — members deeply, even viciously wounded by churches they once called their spiritual homes.

Anyway, the committee asked if I’d like to participate and if so, in what capacity. I suggested doing a Sunday school series built around the theme of “faith and film.” At my previous church, I had used this approach in a relational evangelism course (more on that another time) and found it meaningful to others as well as myself. I looked over my schedule and said I could get started in January. For the next four months I didn’t so much as drive by the church.

January 8 arrived: time for the first class. I arrived a few minutes early and got the room set up. The director of Christian Education stopped by to see if all was well and to set out cookies and coffee. I’d been told to expect as few as six students, since (to repeat) Christian Ed was a tough sell at the church. To my surprise, twelve people showed up: not a bad turnout for a cold winter morning with a complete stranger as your teacher.

(Continued)

The Nobel Prize winner John Forbes Nash Jr. still teaches at Princeton, and walks to campus every day. That these commonplace statements nearly brought tears to my eyes suggests the power of “A Beautiful Mind,” the story of a man who is one of the greatest mathematicians, and a victim of schizophrenia. Nash’s discoveries in game theory have an impact on our lives every day. He also believed for a time that Russians were sending him coded messages on the front page of the New York Times.

– From Roger Ebert’s review of A Beautiful Mind

From two reviews of the film at HollywoodJesus.com:

This is not a movie about the return to health after the depth of mental illness. It is a story of a return to life in the midst of mental illness.

– Darrell Manson

“A Beautiful Mind” is well acted, well produced and tells an incredible story. But while I watched the credits role on “A Beautiful Mind” I wasn’t thinking about the inspiration or [Russell] Crowe’s acting ability. I was thinking about love. . . .

[Crowe's character, John] Nash marries one of his physics students while teaching at MIT. Alicia Larde (Jennifer Connelly) found Nash’s eccentricities charming and asks him out to dinner. In 1957 the two were married. It is only a few years later that Nash’s schizophrenia is diagnosed. He becomes paranoid and delusional and at times violent. The realization of the extent of his illness is sickening. Nash’s world comes crashing down around him.

Nash is given shock therapy and locked in an institution to heal his mind. With prescriptions to stop the hallucinations, Nash is sent back home to his wife. The drugs of the ’60s are so strong that Nash’s usually active mind was sluggish. The drugs also reduced his ability to be intimate with his wife, making an already strained relationship even more difficult. Alicia has to live with a husband who has displayed violent tendencies and a loose grip on reality.

I fully expected the couple to split up. If I was in Alicia’s situation I don’t know if I would have had the courage and commitment to stay with Nash — but I hope I would. In a time when marriage breakups are common, I think even the more conservative minded could understand why the Nash’s relationship could fail. A verse from the Bible came to mind when I thought about the love between the couple. “[Love] always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.” Corinthians 13: 7-8. The Nash’s love lasted over 40 years against some incredible odds.

– Annette Wierstra

Autobiography of John F. Nash, Jr. at NobelPrize.org

“What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” Walter and Vickie are in bed after making love. She wants to know Walter’s deep dark secret. So he asks her this question. It really doesn’t matter what she answers, Walter’s answer is worse. Walter has spent 12 years in jail for molesting little girls between the ages of 10 and 12.

The Woodsman really doesn’t so much sympathize with Walter as it does give us a view of his ongoing struggle. Neither Walter nor the viewer is aware of what led him to these deeds. He wants to be normal, but knows that his desires are not normal, nor are they easy to control. . . .

– From Reviews by Darrel Manson. Manson is the pastor of Artesia Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Artesia, California. The complete review is here.

***

The reason we cannot accept pedophilia as we accept many other sexual practices is that it requires an innocent partner, whose life could be irreparably harmed. We do not have the right to do that. If there is no other way to achieve sexual satisfaction, that is our misfortune, but not an excuse. It is not the pedophile that is evil, but the pedophilia. That is true of all sins and crimes and those tempted to perform them: It is not that we are capable of transgression that condemns us, but that we are willing.

The Woodsman understands this at the very heart of its being, and that is why it succeeds as more than just the story of this character. It has relevance for members of the audience who would never in any way be even remotely capable of Walter’s crime. We are quick to forgive our own trespasses, slower to forgive those of others. The challenge of a moral life is to do nothing that needs forgiveness. In that sense, we’re all out on parole.

– from Roger Ebert’s review

Roger Ebert’s original review. (1984)

From Ebert’s review of Amadeus as one of the “Great Movies.” (2002):

Happy people are pleased by the happiness of others. The miserable are poisoned by envy. They vote with Gore Vidal and David Merrick, both credited with saying, “It is not enough that I succeed. Others must fail.” Milos Forman’s “Amadeus” is not about the genius of Mozart but about the envy of his rival Salieri, whose curse was to have the talent of a third-rate composer but the ear of a first-rate music lover, so that he knew how bad he was, and how good Mozart was.

From First Samuel 18:5-11:

David went out wherever Saul sent him, and behaved himself wisely: and Saul set him over the men of war, and it was good in the sight of all the people, and also in the sight of Saul’s servants. It happened as they came, when David returned from the slaughter of the Philistine, that the women came out of all the cities of Israel, singing and dancing, to meet king Saul, with tambourines, with joy, and with instruments of music. The women sang one to another as they played, and said, Saul has slain his thousands, David his ten thousands. Saul was very angry, and this saying displeased him; and he said, They have ascribed to David ten thousands, and to me they have ascribed but thousands: and what can he have more but the kingdom? Saul eyed David from that day and forward. It happened on the next day, that an evil spirit from God came mightily on Saul, and he prophesied in the midst of the house: and David played with his hand, as he did day by day. Saul had his spear in his hand; and Saul cast the spear; for he said, I will strike David even to the wall.

76	INT.   OLD SALIERI'S HOSPITAL ROOM - NIGHT - 1823	76

The old man is reliving the experience.  Vogler looks at him, horrified.

OLD SALIERI
Because You will not enter me, with all my need for you; because
You scorn my attempts at virtue; because You choose for Your in-
strument a boastful, lustful, smutty infantile boy and give me for
reward only the ability to recognize the Incarnation; because You
are unjust, unfair, unkind, I will block You!  I swear it!  I will hin-
der and harm Your creature on earth as far as I am able.  I will
ruin Your Incarnation.

CUT BACK TO:

76A	INT.   SALIERI'S APARTMENT - BEDROOM - NIGHT - 1780's	76A

CU, the fireplace.  In it lies the olive wood Christ on the cross, burning.

OLD SALIERI
(V.O.)
What use after all is Man, if not to teach God His lessons?

The cross flames up and disintegrates.  Salieri stares at it.

Cool Hand Luke (1967) was based on a 1965 novel written by Donn Pearce, a merchant seaman who had once spent time on a Florida chain gang. Set in the South in 1948.The title comes from the main character, Lloyd “Luke” Jackson, a decorated World War II hero imprisoned for destroying a string of parking meters in a small town. His prison nickname, “Cool Hand Luke,” is bestowed when he remarks after successfully bluffing in poker with “a handful of nothin’”: “Sometimes nothin’ can be a real cool hand.”

This religious imagery is much less evident in the novel, where the central religious element is Luke Jackson’s alienation from God. His father, we learn, was a preacher who nevertheless left his wife and family, and at two points in the novel he talks to God and daringly questions Him.

The religious symbolism isn’t mentioned either in the shooting script, which was written by Donn Pearce and Frank Pierson. The Christ imagery seems to come mostly from the director, Stuart Rosenberg. It is especially strong in the following scene, which evokes the words of Christ in Matthew 5:38-41:

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles.”

(Continued)

Woody Allen’s “Crimes and Misdemeanors” is a thriller about the dark nights of the soul. It shockingly answers the question most of us have asked ourselves from time to time: Could I live with the knowledge that I had murdered someone? Could I still get through the day and be close to my family and warm to my friends, knowing that because of my own cruel selfishness, someone who had loved me was lying dead in the grave? This is one of the central questions of human existence, and society is based on the fact that most of us are not willing to see ourselves as murderers. But in the world of this film, conventional piety is overturned and we see into the soul of a human monster.

Actually, he seems like a pretty nice guy.

– From Roger Ebert’s original review of Crimes and Misdemeanors, 1989

I remember my father telling me, “The eyes of God are on us always.”

The man who remembers is Judah Rosenthal, a respected ophthalmologist and community leader. As Woody Allen’s “Crimes and Misdemeanors” opens, he is being honored at a banquet. He lives on three acres in Connecticut, drives a Jaguar, built a new wing on the hospital. During the course of the movie he will be responsible for the murder of a woman who loves him.

She dies not because of his passion but for his convenience. In this darkest and most cynical Allen comedy — yes, comedy — he not only gets away with murder but even finds it possible, after a few months, to view the experience in a positive light. If the eyes of God are on him always, what does that say about God?

– From Roger Ebert’s assessment of the film as one of the “Great Movies,” 2005

Jerry Orbach and Martin Landau in Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989)

In The Body: Being Light in Darkness (1992), Charles Colson talks about the difficulty of doing Christian evangelism in what he calls “a post-Christian culture”:

The prevailing world-view denies the existence of absolute truth. The existential, not the historical, conditions the American view of life. So when the Christian message, which is essentially historical and propositional, is proclaimed, modern listeners hear what they interpret as simply one person’s preference. . . . Thus, even sharing your personal testimony may not necessarily be convicting. (330)

To drive home this point, Colson described a recent dinner conversation with an acquaintance who happened also to be a prominent journalist. They had met because the acquaintance was “intrigued” by Colson’s born again Christian faith and wanted to learn more about it. But Colson found that the usual evangelical approaches did not work: the man believed in neither the Bible nor eternal life, so arguments that used these as points of departure failed to move him. And as for Colson’s personal testimony that a relationship with Christ had given him a sense of deep peace and fulfillment–well, the acquaintance was happy for Colson, but he had other friends who had found the same things in the New Age movement.

Colson, temporarily flummoxed, had a sudden thought. “Have you seen Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors?” he asked.

The acquaintance had indeed seen the film and they discussed it for several minutes.

Then, catching him off guard, I asked, “Are you Judah Benjamin?” [the film's central character, a well to do opthamologist who, to protect his comfortable life, commits a monstrous crime and then is wracked by guilt]

He laughed, but it was a nervous laugh.

“You may think this life is all there is,” I said, “but if so, then there is still an issue at hand–how do you live with yourself while you’re here? I know you have a conscience. So how do you deal with that when you know you do wrong?”

He picked at his food and told me that very issue gave him a lot of problems. Then somehow we moved into a discussion of Leo Tolstoy’s novel, War and Peace, in which Pierre, the central character, cries out, Why is it that I know what is right but do what is wrong? That in turn led us to C. S. Lewis’s concept of the natural law ingrained in all of us, and then to the central point of Romans 1: That we are all imbued with a conscience, run from it though we might, and that conscience itself points to questions which can only be answered outside ourselves. (331)

Colson concluded the story by saying that he thought his friend would eventually become a Christian. “But I know one thing, without Woody Allen, Leo Tolstoy, and C. S. Lewis, I wouldn’t have found a common ground or language with which to discuss the spiritual realm. . . . [T]o evangelize today we must address the human condition at its point of felt need–conscience, guilt, dealing with others, finding a purpose for staying alive. Talking about the abundant life or life everlasting or Bible promises often just won’t do it.” (332)

In recent years a small library of books has appeared that deal with the ways in which cinema can be used as a way to illuminate issues of faith. Two lists of such books are at Amazon.com:

Faith, Film, and Church

Spirituality & Film

One of my favorite books in this genre is Finding Meaning at the Movies, by Sara Anson Vaux. “Movies,” she argues, “mirror our desires and dreams, but they also shape them, as we struggle to understand ourselves and our world. . . . [They] may offer the most compelling places today to raise questions of religion and value. They provide us with a fantasy arena where we can test situations and relationships that in ordinary life we may be too preoccupied or timid or frightened to think about; movies also provide us with safe boundaries. . . . But most critically, they stimulate us to imagine how we can translate our own beliefs and values from the protected shelter of our places of worship out into the worlds of chance and choice. Movies, when they encourage this kind of reflection, can be part of our ongoing worship life.” (pp. ix, 20)

Finding Faith at the Movies is a guide for groups and individuals who want to explore the interplay between cinema and spirituality. She selects a number of themes and then discusses specific films that illuminate them; for example, alienation as portrayed in Blade Runner (dir. Ridley Scott, 1982) and Contact (dir. Robert Zemeckis, 1997); integrity in Lone Star (dir. John Sayles, 1996) and Unforgiven (dir. Clint Eastwood, 1992); and purity of heart in Forrest Gump (dir. Robert Zemeckis, 1994) and Sling Blade (dir. Billy Bob Thorton, 1996).

The list of themes and films is, of course, suggestive rather than exhaustive. I can’t think of a good film that does not, willy nilly, illuminate an important spiritual theme. Even Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl’s admiring documentary of the 1934 Nazi rally at Nuremberg, can be viewed as an unintended but profound exploration of the ways in which evil can convincingly cloak itself as virtue.

I became interested in faith and film a few years ago while teaching a course in relational evangelism at a church I then attended. By “relational evangelism” I mean a strategy by which Christians can share these faith with others that is based on first creating and maintaining an authentic relationship with them. Poor evangelism tries to cajole, judge, and frighten people into accepting a single, rigid answer to questions of ultimate meaning. Competent evangelism challenges, but does not dictate. It summons people to take seriously the quest for meaning and to look carefully at the answers at which they’ve arrived.

How then to encourage others in the search for meaning? The best way is to create conditions in which questions of ultimate values will naturally arise.The possible strategies are limited only by the imagination, but one excellent method, I decided, is the film and spirituality group. As the name states, this is a group that meets together to view a film and then discuss its spiritual implications. I tried this experiment several times and found that it always produced interesting conversations and constructive results.

A few months ago I agreed to teach a Sunday school course on Faith and Film at a local church, and come January I have to make good on the commitment. Which means that now is the time when a flyer has to go into the church bulletin announcing the course. (This is particularly important since I don’t actually attend the church–or any church, for that matter–and so few of the members know me.)

An hour-long Sunday school class obviously affords nowhere near enough time to show an entire movies. So instead I’ve selected 5- to 10-minute film clips that illustrate the “faith and film” connection and, with any luck, offer a good point of departure for discussion. Here’s a list of the films:

Crimes and Misdemeanors (dir. Woody Allen, 1989)

Cool Hand Luke (dir. Stuart Rosenberg, 1967)

The Truman Show (dir. Peter Weir, 1998)

Grand Canyon (dir. Lawrence Kasdan, 1991)

Gandhi (dir. Richard Attenborough, 1982)

Crash (dir. Peter Haggis, 2004)

Amadeus (dir. Milos Forman, 1984)

The Woodsman (dir. Nicole Kassell, 2004)

A Beautiful Mind (dir. Ron Howard, 2001)