Brooklyn:

You will never reach new horizons unless you have the courage to leave the shore.

Brooklyn is a very perceptive film about Ireland in the 1950s and especially about life in a small town at that time. It finds the right balance between the sublime and the small-minded, between what is majestic and what is mean about human nature in its journey towards realising its dream of true love. Much of the credit for finding this delicate balance must go to the novelist Colm Toibin and to his fellow novelist Nick Hornby who adapted the novel for the film.

Ireland of the 1950s
Brooklyn tells the story of Eilis Lacey, a young woman who lives with her widowed mother and a sister. to whom she is deeply attached. She works in a store where she is constantly made aware of her lowly status as a very junior member of staff. The woman who runs the shop is fittingly called “Nettles” as she has a capacity to belittle her staff while being as sweet as pie to her more monied customers. The small town atmosphere of 1950s Ireland is wonderfully portrayed as is its capacity to suffocate young people like Eilis. In these circumstances it is easy to see why she would want to emigrate if she is to escape all this and to enjoy all the possibilities America holds out for a young person like Eilis. Brooklyn is a gentle and true tale shaped by all the hardship that surrounds emegration.

When life story becomes love story
When Eilis does emigrate the dream soon fades as she feels desperately homesick and out of step in Brooklyn where life for her is at odds with much of what she has been used to. But a stream of people help Eilis along the way, especially other young women who had emigrated a few years before her and know what she’s going through. There is a very subtle but strong theme in the story about the importance of women looking out for each other, helping those below them on the ladder to get their footing. Then she meets Tony a young Italian who frequents dances run by the Irish community in Brooklyn because he likes the way Irish girls relate. Though he treats her with respect and affection we keep waiting for him to betray her trust, but he’s as decent as they come. In the light of this experience everything from now on looks different for her.

In the cherished memories life-story is love-story.
  Enda McDonagh

Seeing everything with new eyes
Just when Eilis is starting to feel like she belongs in Brooklyn, a family tragedy takes her back home to Ireland. And once she is there, surrounded by family, friends and familiar sights, all of which she now sees in a new light, she feels the pull of home again. She also feels the allure of a young man named Jim Farrell whom everyone thinks of as “a good catch”. This faces Eilis with a difficult decision and underlying it is the story of a young woman’s journey from innocence to experience and the hard but necessary choices she has to make if she is to be true to herself and those like Tony to whom she has committed herself.

What all our stories are about
For me the film Brooklyn is all about a dream innate to all of us. However, because of our busyness meeting endless expectations, this dream does not have much room to surface and so it remains dormant most of our lives. Nevertheless, since it is innate to us and never goes away, significant events in life can arouse and bring it to the surface. One such significant event occurs when Eilis falls in love with Tony and something sublime and beautiful about this relationship captivates her. This experience engages us because it takes place against the background of all the hardship she has been through and in this way it triggers off the dream that keeps playing itself out in our lives.

Life’s refining fire

How hardship and darkness can become the fire that refines our dream
The dream innate to us as human beings keeps emerging no matter how we neglect it. How it very often does this in times of great hardship was the experience of people like the Romantic poets and novelists of the 19th century. Amid all the hardship and the dire living conditions that the Industrial revolution brought to the lives of the majority of the people caught up in it, poets like Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley discovered again what makes life sublime. Now while it was in nature that these poets discovered the sublime or beautiful, novelists like, Jane Austen, George Elliot and Charles Dickens found it in humanity’s dream of happiness that has its source in our capacity to love and relate.

In the middle of the 20th century, after the period of austerity that followed the second world war, people reached out again towards this ideal of the Romantics and found expression for it in the youth culture that emerged at that time. It was to this world that Vatican 2 revealed the extraordinary vision, value system and style of relating that it retrieved from the first twelve centuries of Christianity. This resurrecting of the human dream and that which the three persons of the Trinity want to build on it came to be seen as a Christian Renaissance. In the following song we are told that it is in the dirt of the soil that flowers still grow and that “that man long ago with his low-down birth found his glory planted in the earth”. Like Jesus it is here that we must find what is sublime or glorious about human life and loving.

Flowers Still Grow There
You’re worried, my son, about people hating
And how this world is run, how this world is run.
You say it ain’t true, it’s dirt we’re made of
Often return to, often return.
Don’t search too long for this gold that you seek
It’s too deep to dig for and your arms too weak.
Don’t you worry, my son, about the dirt in the soil
Flowers still grow there, flowers still grow.
That man long ago with his low-down birth
Found his glory planted in the earth.
So don’t search too long for this gold that you seek;
Don’t you worry, my son, about people hating,
Love is still the lord, love is still lord.
(A song sung by John Foley on his CD Wood Hath Hope)

The theme of emigration is central to Brooklyn. When Eilis decides to make a new life for herself in America it involves leaving home her mother but most of all her sister whom she was particularly fond of. Added to the crisis this causes is the fact that she has no one in America to whom she might go for some time to give herself a chance to settle in. Her only link is with a priest who has found her a job and a place to stay. However, the normal forces of adolescence to leave the nest and the feelings that she would suffocate in the small town atmosphere where she lives urge her to undertake this fateful journey. On it she finds hidden resources to grow up and to develop her ability to love and relate in a way that she would probably not have learned if she had remained at home. It is as if she is thrown into the ocean and has to learn to swim without any previous experience of how to do this.

The biggest problem she must wrestle with is loneliness, for even though she meets a number of women who help her in various ways there is nobody who fills the gap in her life left when she parted with her sister and some school friends she was close to. There is a scene in the film where the intensity of this homesickness strikes with great poignancy. It occurs when she volunteers to help in the parish to serve Christmas dinner to a group of homeless men who came from Ireland but never made it in America. At the end of the meal one of them sings a lament in Irish and it was hard to listen to it without choking with emotion.

The ultimate impact of the film on me
After much reflection what for me emerges from the story told in Brooklyn is captured by Victor Hugo’s saying:

The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved – loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.

This love we are made for, and thus long for more than for anything else, has to be worked out in the midst of human limitation and waywardness, our own and other people’s. What often moves us most to undertake this, our life’s main work, is an experience of falling in love. To bring this work to fulfilment, however, we have to be willing to face life’s times of crises and darkness. We have to be prepared to enter the dark chasm that comes between us and attaining the Holy Grail of God’s love and dream for us. The crises and darkness Eilis faced when she emigrated are symbolised by the following extract from the Grail Legend:

Descending Into The Dark Chasm 
At the end of his quest for the Holy Grail, Parsifal saw in the distance, the castle where the object of his life-long quest lay. However, as he got nearer the castle he came on a deep chasm that had to be crossed if he was to reach the castle. This abyss was so deep that he could not see the bottom. Even though the beginning of the path into it was clear, the depths it led down into soon became obscure. Parsifal was not sure what awaited him in his descent so he was anxious to avoid its forbidding darkness. He grasped at the possibility that he might find a bridge but, after searching for a long time, he became convinced that there was no way to attain the Grail than this descent into what seemed a bottomless darkness.

Grace grows best in Winter
What the Holy Grail stands for, and what ultimately justifies entering the dark chasm is the belief that we are “loved to the end” and that fostering faith in this love is central to the work of the Father, of Jesus and of their Spirit in our world.

Now before the festival of the Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. Jn 13:1

“This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.” Jn 6:29

The way God works to shape our faith through life’s hardships is compared in the Bible to how gold is refined in the fire and to how the potter works with clay to make a pot.To get it right the potter will have to keep reworking the clay, repeatedly breaking it down until it is as good as he and she can make it.

The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: “Come, go down to the potter’s house, and there I will let you hear my words.”  So I went down to the potter’s house, and there he was working at his wheel. The vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter’s hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as seemed good to him. Then the word of the Lord came to me: Can I not do with you, O house of Israel, just as this potter has done? says the Lord. Just like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel. Per 18:1-6

C S Lewis urges us to be aware of and open to this secret Master of Ceremonies at work in our lives for:

There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will
William Shakespeare

As in the life of Eilis our education in love, in this very limited and sinful world, takes place in times of great hardship more than at any other. My parents, especially my mother had an extraordinary sense of this reality of a providence at work in life which she used refer to as “the will of God”. I hope I have inherited something of her belief that some years ago I tried to express in these words.

Providence
We glimpse God’s providence
in people’s concern,
for though limited and low-key
it makes the ideal believable.
We are shaped and sustained
as in a second womb
whose layers of concern
gently encompass us;
Pervading and permeating
everything and everyone
working out the minutia
of Your plan for our peace.

RED ARMY

I think of the film, Red Army in the context of the following story:

Having the sky for our limits
There was once a poultry farmer who was given a present of an eagle’s egg. He decided to experiment with it so he put it among some eggs a hen was hatching out. In due course it emerged with the other chicks and grew up with them. Even though it was never quite the same as they were, it adapted itself to their ways and always thought of itself and lived as one of them. Like them it spent its days with the other chickens limited to the confines of the barnyard.

One day when it was about a year old its eye was caught by the inspiring sight of an eagle in full flight. However, its gaze was soon brought back to earth by a cock telling it to stop star gazing and to get on with the job.

Now, there are two endings to the story. One has the young eagle putting its head back down as it had been told to do and continuing for the rest of its days within the very limited world of the barnyard. The other ending is that, inspired by the vision in the sky, the young eagle stretched its wings and took off. From then on it was no longer confined to the barnyard but had the sky for its limits.

The making of a legend
The film, Red Army, tells the story of a Russian Ice Hockey team that became a legend. The team was the product of a school for training a world-beating ice hockey team that Stalin ordered to be set up as part of the Cold War that was raging between the USSR and the USA at that time. The story is told in the context of an interview with Slava Fetisov who captained the Russian team that was arguably the best ever ice hockey team. He is at times lighthearted as he tells the story and at others sobered by what happened to himself and to the other members of the team.

The film gets its name from the fact that this school for training ice hockey players was part of Russia’s Red Army. At that time in Russia everybody had to do a period of military service and any promising young ice hockey players were drafted into the Red Army. Their special assignment was to be part of the propaganda war then being waged between Russia and the United States.

The price of glory
Becoming part of the Red Army meant that these ice hockey players were subjected to the full rigours of army discipline. They were allowed to see their families only once a month and had no life outside the complex in which they trained. The officer who trained them was an inhumane disciplinarian who made sure that all their waking hours were devoted to their training. He knew that if his team lost a match he was likely to lose his job.

During their early years in this training camp the players went along with this very demanding routine and enjoyed the use their talent was put to. Since they had been together since their teens and were driven by the idealism of becoming the best in the world at what they enjoyed most doing they were happy together. They also had the opportunity to know each others game so well that they played as one person a game that was beautiful to watch. The result was that over a long period they won everything in sight and their achievement was spectacular.

The making of a legend

A time comes when you may not hear the birds
Their achievement, however, had its price. As they matured they began to feel the strain of the constant training and their lack of freedom to have a life outside the sport they had been willing to devote all their waking hours to when they were younger. Other dreams began to stir within them of a life beyond what they had devoted their youth to. Living within the narrow confines of the barnyard was too restricting as they began to dream of something less demanding and more rewarding. These dreams are echoed in the following extract from Mary Lavin’s short story called Brother Boniface:

He recalled that his father, to prevent him idling had sent him to deliver messages from their shop to the monastery and though it was not very exciting it gave him a chance to dream. As he cycled home his sadness deepened for it seemed to him that whether you cobbled or whether you hammered, whether you weighed up rice on a scales or led a colt round and round in a ring, or whether you stood at evening in a field opening or closing your hand to let fall a shower of seeds, you had to keep your eyes upon what you were doing, and soon you forgot that there was a sky overhead and earth underfoot, and that flowers blew and even that birds sang’.

Freedom from and freedom for
As a result of their international success the members of the Red Army team became players that North American teams were willing to pay a lot for. At first it was unthinkable that they would be allowed even to consider leaving Russia to play abroad. But when Slava as the captain of the team complained to the authorities about the constraints the team lived under he was disciplined and threatened with spending some years in Siberia. However, when he appealed this decision he was mysteriously allowed to leave for Canada provided he returned half his earnings to support the training unit in which he had spent much of his life thus far.

In time, and especially with the coming of Perestroika, more and more Russian players opted to play in North America. However things did not work out well for many of them as ice hockey in Canada was a much more aggressive game than the one they had known in Russia; getting the man seemed at times to be more important than getting the ball. Also, players in the teams they joined felt these foreign players were getting the best paid jobs so that there were fewer available to them.

Yet the biggest obstacle they had to face was the cultural one for they had been brought up in a society in which the group was what mattered whereas they were now being asked to adjust to a society which centred on the individual. As a result, though they enjoyed their new-found prosperity, many of them felt that this did not compensate for the strong sense of security and of community they had enjoyed back home in Russia. Some of them found the isolation they experienced very hard to bear and were sad and depressed as a result.

When the urgent takes over from the important

The tyranny of what is urgent
The film Red Army contrasts two cultural settings that have more in common than we think. They are both expressions of what Charles Taylor in his book, The Secular Age, calls Exclusive Humanism. The Russian cultural model was more obviously an expression of this in the way it excluded God and the dream innate to each person. It made an absolute priority of the communal and imposed this in a highly authoritarian way subjugating the individual to the needs of the community and above all to those of the state. The ‘American’ model highlighted the needs of the individual but subject to a very material and monetary view of life. Both societies made a priority of material and monetary values with the result that the cultivation of healthy relationships was forced into a secondary place. Stephan Covey in his book, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People describes this situation and its effects in the following way.

Feeling bad about feeling good
For many years now I have asked audiences the question: “If you were to do one thing you know would make a tremendous difference for good in your personal life, what would that one thing be?” I then ask them the same question with regards to their professional or work life. People come up with answers very easily. Deep inside they already know what they need to do.

Then I ask them to examine their answers and determine whether what they wrote down is urgent or important or both. “Urgent” comes from the outside, from environmental pressures and crises. “Important” comes from the inside, from their own deep value system.

Almost without exception the things people write down that would make a tremendous difference in their lives are important but not urgent. As we talk about it people come to realise that the reason they don’t do these things is that they’re not urgent. They’re not pressing. And, unfortunately, most people are addicted to the urgent. In fact, if they are not being driven by the urgent, they feel guilty. They feel as if something is wrong.

Look up!

Making room to dream and have the sky for your limit
Neither the Russian model nor the American one left much room for realising the dream innate to each person while the dream which the persons of the Trinity wish to build on this human foundation was nowhere in sight. The dream we are talking about here is the basic one our parents give us our first taste of. This is the dream of the happiness we find in the home our parents’ love creates and sustains for us. There is the danger that we easily gravitate towards the deficiencies we so easily notice in the love, home and happiness our parents provided for us but we must remember that human love is of its nature limited.

As adults our main quest must be how we maintain and develop our capacity to be loved and to love, for it is this which transforms the home or environment in which we live as well as the happiness we find there. In the following poem we are told how unhappy life can become until we find love and the home and happiness it opens up for us.

Love makes the home and its happiness

Till Love Came
Darkness came down, and then
I doubted all;
And there was no one in the lonely glen
To hear my call.

I doubted God, and I doubted
My secret soul;
The legions of Heaven were routed
And I had no goal.

I doubted Beauty and Love
And wandered forth
A child of despair, to rove
The faithless earth.

And then like an angel she came;
I ceased to rove;
In her heart was a pure white flame
And she was love.
Patrick Kavanagh

When we are children our parents want the sky for our limit. Though they want us to prosper materially they do not want our lives to be confined to what is ‘urgent’ nor do they want us to spend our lives meeting the expectations of others. They want us to realise the dream of home and happiness they through their love have initiated in us. The stories we hear as children also highlight this basic human quest for the happiness to be found in overcoming the obstacles we all encounter to the love and close relationships that deep down we recognise as ‘important’ or as what life is all about.

As adults we are asked to take responsibility for maintaining and developing what our parents gave us a gift of when we were children. Our failure to do this will mean that our dream becomes dormant and the consequent diminishment of what is meant to sustain us in life will lead to the loneliness and sadness so evident in the film, Red Army.

In Winter now I go to the eternal root

“The eternal root of true love I may know”
We need to heed the call voiced in the following poem to keep returning to the roots of our happiness by nourishing ourselves on the love and relationships we find there. The alternative is that we continue to live confined to the barnyard and fail to have the sky for our limits.

As the tree`s sap doth seek the root below
In winter, in my winter now I go
Where none but thee, the eternal root
Of true love, I may know.
John Donne

It is this human dream that Jesus wants to realise to the full when he invites us to find a happiness that is “complete” by “abiding in” or making our home in the love that he, his Father and their Spirit have for us. This love is exactly the same as the love which they have for each other.

I have loved you just as the Father has loved me; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete. Jn 15:9-11

I have loved you just as the Father Has loved me;
abide in my love

45 Years

The story of a long relationship told in a week
This film tells the story of a married couple who have been together for 45 years. Theirs is an intricate relationship that is portrayed with great sensitivity and delicacy. I was fascinated by the two main characters, Kate and her husband Geoff and how well they related in spite of being very different in such recognisable ways: she appears as warm and loyal but prone to doubts about her significance and importance for Geoff, while he appears to be very amiable and easy going. However, he avoids areas of conflict in their relationship at all costs.

The film focuses on the week that leads up to the celebration of the 45th anniversary of their marriage. At the beginning of this week Geoff receives a letter revealing that the body of a young woman called Katya he had known when he was young has been recovered from its frozen state in the Alps. Geoff and herself were on a hiking trip there when she fell into a snow-filled crevasse from which her body had never been recovered.

Enter another woman
After Kate becomes aware of Geoff moving around in their attic during the night she wonders what has he been looking for there. So while he is away in town she goes up to the attic and finds there a projector and some videos he had made of his time in the Alps with Katya. Kate is deeply affected by this, especially when she notices that Katya is pregnant. These images haunt her for the rest of the week that the film focuses on.

While Geoff gets lost in the memory of what happened to the woman whom he admits he would have married if she had lived, Kate is left to ponder the fact that she was his second choice and one that never quite met his expectations. As the week wears on she confronts him with her belief that she was never enough for him, that she had not his whole heart.

So much hangs on the answer we get
when we question another’s love;
we need to make doubly sure.
For as long as there is doubt
The conviction we thirst for
is only half satisfied.

A questioning of our significance we identify with
We can identify with Kate for hers is an issue that haunts our close relationships and often leads us to question who we are for those closest to us in life. Perhaps our feeling of insignificance that results from our importance for others being left unsaid is the source of a deep wound which certain circumstances, like the one Kate here experiences, easily aggravates afresh. This often pains us when much of the love we receive and give is left unnoticed, unnamed, unowned and thus unsaid. The centrality of this love to our lives is powerfully expressed in the Greek story about a woman called Care.

Care makes and sustains us
Care was crossing a river one day when she took some soft mud and shaped it into a human being. She wanted to give what she had made her own name but Earth also laid claim to this right. It was, after all, of earth or humus that the human being was formed. Care then asked Jupiter, who was passing by, to give her creation a spirit. This he gladly agreed to do but then he too wanted it called after him. They decided to ask Saturn to be arbiter and he gave the following decision which seemed a wise one. Jupiter had given it spirit, so he would receive that back when death came. Since it was of earth or humus that it was fashioned, it would be called a human being. However, since Care had formed this human being, it would be her role, as long as this being lived, to make and sustain it.

Where the life we dream of is to be found
Jesus elaborates on this truth that it is Care that ‘makes and sustains’ us when he says that the essence of life is to be found in getting our whole person involved in the way we receive and give love within the main relationships of life.

Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?” He answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbour as yourself.” And he said to him, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.” Lk 10:25-28

To move forward we must move back
There are a number of reasons why we fail to foster the love which more than anything else is life-giving. There is first of all the hard work involved in learning to believe in the love that is all around us if we could take the time to recognise it. Then there is the fear of arousing the demons in our past or of opening old wounds that reside there. We are afraid of delving into our story for we suspect that we will be confronted by its demons, even though these in fact form a small part of our story. Finally there is so much emphasis on career, success and prosperity in today’s dominant culture that we find it difficult to make the time, energy and resources available if we are to make the way we love and relate a priority in life.

Looking at each other as well as at One beyond us

An illusion that damages our relationships
Though it is not raised in the course of the film, our illusion that another human being can fulfil our desire for love and intimacy has got to be faced. The reality that we are made for a love which no one or no thing can satisfy is immortalised in Augustine’s words: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts will be restless till they rest in you.” To expect another human being to fully meet our need for love and intimacy is an unfair burden to lay on someone whose capacity to love and relate is essentially limited and sometimes misused.

Not leaving our love unsaid
At the end of the film when Geoff finally gets around to expressing his love for Kate, he says that marrying her was the best decision he ever made. We get little sense of how this affected her when in the final scene of the film we see her in the midst of all her and his friends standing alone and overcome with emotion. We are left wondering what this could mean: Is it that she realises she had not been attentive to the signs of his love and had focussed rather on its deficiencies? Could her sadness be that after doubting his love for so long that his words at the celebration were not sufficient to overcome this well established doubt or could it be that her sadness was due to her having misjudged Geoff so badly?

Seeing a vision each with our own eyes

We always remain a mystery to each other
Relationships are mysterious, we remain a mystery even to those we would say we know best. Kate especially, is an extremely reserved person and does not reveal much about what she thinks and even less about how she feels. This is despite the fact that she is a retired teacher and the more articulate of the two. The intricacy of their relationship is added to when we consider the mystery of how men and women relate in very distinctive ways. This adds such a richness but also a complexity to their relationship.

The dignity of difference

Sharing involves having a self to share
How they dealt with the complexity of their relationship is easy to sympathise with for we all have great difficulty revealing ourselves to each other, as in the absence of an ability to reflect and pray we do not know ourselves in much depth and we have great difficulty articulating what we do know. Yet my lasting impression of the film is of how wonderful Kate and Geoff were in the way they related with each other. There was a style or beauty about each of them as individuals that is heightened by the way they love and relate with each other.

Life in all its glory
The novelists of the 19^th century, like Jane Austin, George Elliot and Charles Dickens saw the sublime reality of two people falling in love and committing themselves to each other as an expression of the deepest dream of humanity. In this film we see an even deeper expression of it in the way two people have lived out this commitment in such a sublime way. It is a way of loving and relating in which they have found life in the place in which Jesus says above we are all asked to find it. He says to Kate and Geoff what he says to us all: “… do this, and you will live.” Lk 10:28 For this reason he would look at and love them as he did the rich young man in the Gospel story.

As he was setting out on a journey, a man ran up and knelt before him, and asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. You know the commandments: ‘You shall not murder; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; You shall not defraud; Honor your father and mother.’” He said to him, “Teacher, I have kept all these since my youth.” Jesus, looking at him and loved him. Mk 10:17-21

Having a self to share

Following the wrong god home we may miss our star
In the following poem we are asked to remain awake to this sublime reality “lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark”.

A Ritual to Read to Each Other
If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.
For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.
And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail,
but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park.
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.
And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.
For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give-yes or no, or maybe-
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
William Stafford

Manglehorn:

A Story About Intimacy
As what we long for and yet resist

The film Manglehorn takes its name from the man at the centre of the story it tells. He is elderly but still works as a locksmith in a small Texan town. He is a solitary person as his marriage has failed and he hardly ever sees his only child called Jacob, a successful business man in his twenties. We rarely see anybody in his store which is dark and its front window is so dirty that it lets in very little light. His main work seems to be answering calls from people who have locked themselves out of their cars.

A solitary man
He lives alone with Fanny his cat which is the focus of much of his affection. He seems to have a relationship with someone called Clare but I was not sure that she was part of an intimate relationship he had in the past or whether she was a creation of his imagination. He writes to her regularly only to have all his letters returned unopened. She seems to offer an outlet for his need for intimacy without this involving him in actual relationships that he would have to take responsibility for developing and maintaining.

Uncomplicated intimacy Fanny offers

Manglehorn is discontented with himself and the world he lives in, so much so that he says at one stage, ”I got nothing but frustration and disappointment from life”. There is a very revealing example of this disconnect between himself and his world when we see him out walking and he comes across a horrific pile up of cars. We are startled by his indifference as he continues eating his takeaway meal without once stopping or being involved in the tragedy he was witnessing,

Not a very uplifting figure to base a film on one would think. However, there is a lot of charm about the way Manglehorn relates with the people he meets during his working day and added to this is that he is played by Al Pacino. Even though Pacino is much less forceful than in other roles he plays he brings his own unique dynamism to the one he plays here.

One person who is seduced by this charm is Dawn who works at the bank where Manglehorn has an account. Even though she is much younger than he is she is charmed by him and especially when he asks her to join him for a meal. But this turns out to be a great disappointment for her as he insists on talking endlessly about his imaginary friend Clare and refuses to be drawn into the intimate relationship Dawn is looking for.

How we long for and yet resist intimacy

Manglehorn seems to me to be a film about our longing for intimacy as well as about our difficulty in doing what it takes to satisfy this longing. The film also portrays in stark terms the effects of our failure to answer this essential call of adult life. Manglenorn personifies our society which seeks instant intimacy but is not willing to face the pain involved in cultivating long-term relationships of some depth. As a result, he is afflicted by the modern malaise of depression that results from a loss of faith in ourselves, in others and in the world around us. It is in getting our whole person involved in cultivating these relationships as well as the love that creates and sustains them that Jesus says we will find life.

Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?” He answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” And he said to him, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.” Lk 10:25-28

Where we find life
We get an in-depth explanation of what Jesus is saying here from the writings of Erik Erikson, a German born American psychologist who wrote a lot about how we develop by answering four calls of adult life. These four are the call to identity, to intimacy, to become generative and finally there is the call of our later years to integrity or to the wisdom we learn from devoting ourselves to life’s key relationships.

Erikson believes that we cannot become intimate or share ourselves with another if we have not a self to share, a self that we accept and appreciate and thus find significant or important. If we do not accept our own limitations and appreciate how gifted we are as human beings and as people who ‘participate in the divine nature’, (2 Peter 1:4) we will have nothing that we will want to share with others. It is only safe to reveal ourselves to others when we are at home with ourselves, with our strengths as well as with our weaknesses.

I believe so deeply in what Erikson is saying that I have written a book called, The Search For Something More. based on his four calls of adult life. In connection with the film I am particularly interested in how Manglehorn’s failure to answer these first two calls to identity and intimacy affected his life. There is no doubt that as George Bernard Shaw points out that there is a lot of shame in our life, things we have not accepted and that we are reluctant to share.

We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us, ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.

I think it is true to say that if we do not accept the limitations and sinfulness that are the source of our shame, we will not be able to move on to all we appreciate about ourselves and others. In this situation is is easy to understand why we erect a barrier between ourselves and others. It meets a need we have to hide from others all we are ashamed of. This is the limited and wayward self that we have never fully accepted and that will not allow us to appreciate how gifted we are by nature and by Grace.

The Wall
Some time between their first child and their last they allowed a wall to be erected between them. At the beginning it was little differences that were not sorted out and were stored away. These differences gave rise to feelings of frustration, doubt and resentment that they thought were too divisive to bring our into the open. He hid his fear of failure and she her sadness at losing him. Each sought refuge in other places and persons than in each other; he sought solace in his office while she channelled all her energy into her children.

So there the wall stood between them, so tall and thick that they could no longer touch each other across it. It was not the fruit of hostility or conflict so much as a failure to take the pains to work regularly at removing the obstacles to their communing.

Creeping separateness
In his book, A Severe Mercy, Sheldon Vanauken tells the story of his marriage and the effect that his long absences, while he was abroad working on a ship, had on it. He explains how he and his wife worked with these long periods of separation. However these periods of separation were not the real threat to their marriage. This was what they called ‘creeping separateness’ .

But why does love need to be guarded? Against what enemies? We looked about us and saw the world as having become a hostile and threatening place where standards of decency and courtesy were perishing and war loomed gigantic. A world where love did not endure. … But why? What was the failure behind the failure of love?

One day in early Spring we thought we saw the answer. The killer of love is creeping separateness. Involvedness is a gift of the gods, but then it is up to the lovers to cherish or to ruin. Taking love for granted, especially after marriage. Ceasing to do things together. Finding separate interests. We turning into I, what I want to do. This was the way of creeping separateness. And in the modern world, especially in the cities, everything favoured it. …. The failure of love might seem to be caused by hate or boredom or unfaithfulness with a lover; but these were results. First came the creeping separateness; the failure behind the failure.

Perhaps the greatest threat to the way we love and relate intimately with ourselves, with those close to us, with others and with the whole of creation is the cultural atmosphere in which we live today. A recent study sponsored by the European Union found that most of our divisions that have emerged at the personal and global level, such as the growth of fundamentalism, are due to the major divorce that has arisen between Religion and what the survey calls today’s dominant culture. This makes a priority of material and monetary values to the detriment of the love and the relationships that Jesus makes central. This cultural situation forces us to face the choice that W B Yeats explores in the following poem.

Faced with two ways: one broad one narrow

The Choice
The intellect of man is forced to choose
Perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark,
When all that story is finished, what’s the news?
In luck or out the toil has left its mark;
That old perplexity an empty purse,
Or the day’s vanity, the night’s remorse.
W B Yeats

Jesus speaks about this choice between “Perfection of the life, or of the work” and it is very clear which for him was a priority. As we saw above, life for him is to be found in getting our whole person involved in learning how to love and relate. This for him is the precious pearl to buy which we must sell everything else that is of lesser value.

The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant looking for fine pearls. When he found one of great value, he went away and sold everything he had and bought it.

In his parable of the sower Jesus reveals what is involved in making our own of this pearl. He says that if we are to make our own of the pearl of his love we must learn to listen and respond to it. For Jesus intimacy depends on the quality of this ongoing communication.

But the seed on good soil stands for those with a noble and good heart, who hear the word, retain it, and by persevering produce a crop. Lk 8:15

The fruit of this communication, that it takes a lifetime to harvest, Is an intimacy or union that Jesus describes as “complete” as it is a share in that which he has with his Father and with their Spirit.

The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, 23 I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. Jn 17:22-23

At the end of the film, Manglehorn realises his mistake and returns to see Dawn. He wants to enter into the relationship she has offered him but she says that he will have to pay a hefty price for this as he will have to learn to listen and respond to her love.

Song of the Sea

Ireland’s story

At the beginning of the film, Song of the Sea we are introduced to Conor, a lighthouse keeper, Bronagh his wife and their only child Ben. They are a very loving and happy family until Bronagh dies giving birth to their daughter Saoirse. Early on in the film we learn that the girl, who is unable to speak, may be one of the seal-like quasi-humans known to tradition as selkies. Things change for everyone when their very bossy Granny arrives and declares that the lighthouse is no place for Saoirse and her brother Ben to be reared. So she bundles them into her car and takes them to the town where she lives. This is portrayed as a dark and grimy place compared to the natural beauty of all that surrounds their home.

The journey home to Tir na nOg
In the emotional and physical absence of their parents, the children grow sullen and reserved. Ben sees Saoirse as a nuisance and is aggressive towards her because he associates the death of his mother with her. When Ben plans his escape with the intention of returning to his father, Saoirse is determined to come with him and so they begin their journey home.

It is a long journey the children are invited to undertake because underlying it is one that takes us into Irish mythology and its quest for Tir na nOg. As Ben and Saoirse begin their journey, they encounter three faeries who hope that Saoirse will sing the song of the sea for them so that hearing it they and all their fellow faeries may be transported to Tír na nÓg. When Ben and Saoirse take a bus into the country we experience the delights of nature after the grim world of the city. It is in this connection that the film quotes the words of W B Yeats’s poem, The Stolen Child.

Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

“Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild”
As well as being reunited with the beauty of nature the children are also reunited with their dog Cu who was not allowed to go with them when they went to live in town. Thereafter he becomes their unfailing companion for the rest of their journey representing all that is best in the animal world in the way he cares for the children and relates with them in such a sensitive and harmonious way. For example, he helps to carry Saoirse when without the seal coat she inherited from her mother she becomes increasingly ill.

When Saoirse falls into a sacred well, Ben follows her and meets the Great Seanachai who tells Ben his sister has been kidnapped by the owls of Macha the witch. He gives the boy one of his hairs which he says will lead him to the witch’s house. In his concern to find Saoirse Ben realises how unfair he has been to her all these years, especially when he remembers what his father said to him when Saoirse was born, “Ben, you must look after your sister”.

Life’s sufferings can turn our hearts to stone…
Ben then meets Macha, who is not the villain he imagined as she explains to him why she turns people into stone. She tells Ben that when her own son, the giant Mac Lir, suffered from a broken heart after his wife died she, in order to prevent his feelings from destroying him, took them away by turning him into stone or into the rock jutting up out of the sea near Ben’s home. Macha says she is determined to do the same for everyone, even herself if it will save them from the feelings their sufferings arouse.

… or take us to Tir na nOg
Ben manages to rescue Saoirse and they fly back home with the spirits of Mac Lir’s dogs. When they arrive home in the middle of a storm Conor attempts to take them back to the mainland to get Saoirse to a hospital. Meanwhile, Ben realising that his sister will not get well unless he retrieves her seal coat he dives into the sea and recovers the coat helped by the seals and his father. The reunited family are then washed up on Mac Lir’s island, where Saoirse, reunited with her coat, is restored to health and sings her song. Hearing it the faeries from across Ireland gather and together travel to Mac Lir’s island, and Mac Lir himself emerges with Macha and his dogs and they head off to Tír na nÓg.

Bronagh then appears and announces the sad news that she and Saoirse must depart as well. However, since Saoirse is part human, Bronagh is able to take her coat and leave her behind to live as a human. After a tearful goodbye the Faeries depart across the sea and Ben and his family happily return home to their island and when Granny arrives she decides that the children are probably best left with their father.

The interpretive key to all stories
Song of the Sea tells afresh the story of the inner journey we all go on if we are to realise our dream that Tir na nOg stands for. This is the deep dream innate to everything and it is of the joy that we get from the love and the relationships that are at the core of life. This inner journey we are all invited to undertake is the interpretive key to all our stories and songs.

Stories are medicine. … They have such power; they do not require that we do, be, act anything – we need only listen. The remedies for repair or reclamation of any lost psychic drive are contained in stories. C P Estes

The purpose of every story
The story told in Song of the Sea begins and ends with an idyllic portrayal of where we all get our first taste of our dream. This is depicted in the beautiful picture we are given in the opening scene of the film of the loving environment that Conor and Bronagh provide for their son Ben. Similarly, the film ends in the warm glow of a family happily heading home having been given the recipe for realising their dream. This came in the words of Bronagh inviting them to remember her love by telling stories and singing songs.

A three-tiered world
What happens on the journey towards the realisation of this dream is set in the context of Irish mythology with its three tiered world of human beings struggling with good and bad spirits to realise their dream. These spirits can help or hinder this human quest. The culture that dominates the environment in which we live today tends to see this world of good and bad spirits as unreal and irrelevant. Song of the Sea highlights this reality in the ways it suggests that we are slowly losing our ability to recognise the magic of the spirit world that always surrounds; we are losing touch with the fact that as human beings we are spirit as well as body. The purpose of stories like that told in Song of the Sea is to keep resurrecting the dream innate to all things. However this spiritual quest for our dream that is symbolised by Tir na nOg will not go away no matter how much it is neglected and repressed.

The outer voice
There is much in the film that represents the forces that make it difficult for people to see visions and to dream dreams. Acts 2:17 The first of these occurs when Bronagh dies and leaves Conor and his children having to deal with the loss of her love. Some years later the children are separated from their father when their Granny decides that they would be better off living with her in town. This is portrayed as dark and grimy compared to the beautiful place in which they had lived with their father. Then the children have to contend with Granny’s authoritarian and moralistic approach to life that boxes them in with her endless regulations. Ben too inherits this attitude in the way he keeps Saoirse and his dog on a leash and in his constant reminding of his sister that he is in charge and that she must do what she is told.

Saoirse can swim with the seals; listens to her inner voice

The inner voice
The whole film portrays the celtic dislike of having our dream restricted by authoritarianism and by the moralism it leads to. There is a spirit at work in us that dislikes being unduly restricted by the law; we have only to compare the German and the Irish attitude to jaywalking to realise this. This free spirit is represented in Song of the Sea by Saoirse and her mother as well as in a strange way by Cu their delightful dog who seems to live in a happy and healthy space. Saoirse like her mother belongs to a part human and part spirit world in that unlike other humans they can enter the sea and share the life of the seals. This is a life that is harmonious, free and a celebration of our being part human, part spirit and part divine. The ocean in mythology is a symbol of the divine world and Carl Jung would say that our outer, material world is like a small island in the vast ocean of the inner world of the spirit. We have come a long way from this view in our tendency to reject a large part of the spirit world and to make the material and the monetary side of life a priority.

Listening to the song of the sea
It is this song of the sea that Saoirse is in touch with and loves to listen to on the large sea shell she carries around with her; one that was originally given to Ben by his mother and that he passed on to Saoirse. It is this song of the sea that the three faeries she meets on her journey want to hear and be thereby transported to the land of their dreams that is symbolised by Tir na nOg. Unfortunately, she has not yet learned to play the song on her sea shell with the result that the faeries are turned into stone.

The dark feelings that deaden us
This being turned into stone by life’s sufferings is a major theme in Song of the Sea. How life’s sufferings can affect us adversely is expressed in the story of Mac Lir who like Conor was so consumed by dark feelings when his wife died that his tears created the sea. After watching what was happening to her son for some time his mother, Macha the owl witch, freed him from his feelings by turning him into a stone figure with a melancholic face. What she did out of compassion for her son is deeply significant as we tend to do the same to save ourselves and those we love from the effects that the dark feelings aroused by life’s sufferings cause. I think it is true to say that if we keep repressing our dark feelings rather than talking them out with ourselves and others we turn our hearts to stone and become emotionally unresponsive.

A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. Ezek 36:26

To name the demon is to slay it
In the light of this, it is interesting what Jesus did when he met two of his disciples on the road to Emmaus. They were running away from Jerusalem and the community they belonged to, driven by feelings such as fear, sadness and hopelessness. Jesus rather than ignoring these feelings asked them to bring them out into the open and to look at them as a small part of the bigger picture of his love for them. He knew the truth of the saying, To name the demon is to slay it.

That same hour they got up and returned to Jerusalem; and they found the eleven and their companions gathered together. They were saying, “The Lord has risen indeed, and he has appeared to Simon!” Then they told what had happened on the road, and how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread. Lk 24:33-35

Sufferings that enliven or deaden us
Much of the film is about how we handle the hardship that is part of every life as this can enliven and refine as well as deaden and turn our hearts to stone. The inner world that Ben’s many sufferings on his journey invited him into is seen in the way these refined his relationship with his sister. We see how he learns to answer his father’s plea that he should look after her in the way he gradually accepts, appreciates and shows his concern for her. At the end of the film he even risks his life to retrieve from the stormy ocean the seal coat that he knew would make Saoirse well again. This refinement of the way we love and relate is the way to Tir na nOg or to the land where our deepest dream is fulfilled. This is “life” Jesus has prepared for us and which he thus describes as a share in his own life with the Father and their Spirit. It is a life of intimacy and joy that the glory or deep attractiveness of love draws us into. It is the world we are given a glimpse of at the beginning and end of Song of the Sea.

 And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent … But now I am coming to you, and I speak these things in the world so that they may have my joy made complete in themselves. … The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. Jn 17:3,13,22-23

Song of the Sea is a wonderful film in the way that it puts us in touch again with the inner world of our deepest dreams. It does this by reminding us that what we dream of is more than material and monitory well being; that the human spirit will never cease reaching out to all that is symbolised by Tir na nOg. In Christian terms this human aspiration is expressed in St Augustine’s well known words, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord and our hearts will not rest until the rest in you.” The very natural way that Song of the Sea expresses our deepest quest is so human and yet so wondrous that it makes me proud to be Irish.

Your diamonds are not in far distant mountains or in yonder seas, they are in your own backyard, if you but dig for them. Russell Conwell

Having the sky for your limit

TIMBUKTU
A story of Africa today

The film called Timbuktu takes its name from a province in Mali a country on the edge of the Sahara desert. It tells the story of a family who live in this semi desert area and how they are affected by a gradual take over of their country by the Boko Haram who are intent on wiping out the influence of western ways. The family consists of a young husband and wife and their daughter who is about 12 years old. They have adopted a young boy who is a little younger than their daughter but we do not see much of him as he spends his time herding the family’s cattle.

The human dream
They are portrayed as a very loving family who are well adjusted and live in a spirit of joy and harmony. They are idyllic in the way they live together for though the father idolises his daughter his wife lives contentedly with this. When their adopted son periodically returns from his work he too receives the father’s lavish affection. This is a beautiful portrait of the way we long for things to be. It a portrait of the splendour of the human dream of love, harmony and joy we get our first taste of from our parents.

This dream is the central theme of all our stories according to Joseph Campbell who spent his life studying the stories people tell. He believes that all our stories are about a journey which we go on to realize our dream. But we are also reminded in the film that ours is not a perfect world and that the beast of hatred and violence seeks to devour us. Our dream is easily consumed by this and is pushed underground, though it never dies. I thought of God’s words to Cain when he noticed the seeds of destructiveness taking root in him.

Is it not true that if you do what is right, you will be fine? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at the door. It desires to dominate you, but you must subdue it.” Cain said to his brother Abel, “Let’s go out to the field.” While they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him. Gen 4:7-8

A humbling experience
It was during my twenty years writing a number of books that I came to realise how much african society is based on the dream of love, relationships and the joy we can find there. This is a humbling realisation for me for I did not appreciate when I was in Africa for 12 years the highly developed capacity for love and relationship and for happiness that africans have. This was brought home to me when, a number of years after I left Zambia, I read The Lost World of the Kalahari by Laurens van der Post. We may tend to think of Africa as backward and primitive by modern standards but what emerges from his book is a portrait of a people who have a very well developed relationship with God, with each other and with their environment. This makes them admirable human beings and when we compare their culture with the one to which I belong to with its disregard for God, our fellow human beings and for mother Earth the comparison does not show mine in a favourable light.

Two cultures viewing for our allegiance

The Great Divorce between two ways we see our world
A book that helped me understand what has happened to us is Fritjof Capra’s The Turning Point. In it he describes the emergence, especially in the countries bordering the north Atlantic, of two cultures or of two ways of seeing reality and of valuing it. The first of these he calls the Systems vision and value system that prevailed in Europe until the beginning of the 17th century. It saw the world as a network of relationships between God, a world of good and bad spirits, between ourselves and between everything in the environment in which we live. I think this systems view of reality was the one out of which the Africans I knew in the 1970s lived.

The other vision and value system is one Capra calls the Mechanistic world view and and value system. According to Kenneth Clark in the series he did for television called Civilisation, this culture no longer asks, ‘Is it the will of God? or part of God’s plan to realise our dream. Instead it asks the question, ‘Does it work’? and “Does it pay’? In other words this second view of reality sees all in the material and monetary terms that Science and Economics defines as real. As a result, the spirit side of us that makes a priority of love and relationships is seen as unreal or as a private matter that should not be allowed to interfere with public life or that of our “getting and spending”.

The two ways

Where Jesus says we will find life in the fulfilment of our dream
The careers and prosperity we rightly wanted for our pupils in the school in Zambia I taught in came with their own built-in vision and value system. I remember coming out of a teachers’ staff meeting in the school I worked in while in Zambia. At the meeting I had spoken about the importance of Religious Education and English in the curriculum only to be reminded by a fellow teacher that we were educating our pupils so that they would find good careers. This attitude underrated, to say the least, the importance of Religious Education as well as English language and Literature that made a priority of human and Christian values. This is the vision and the values that Jesus advocates in the Great Commandment in that it invites us to get our whole person involved in the world of the love and relationships. This for Jesus is central to the realisation of our human dream and of the divine one he wants to build on this.

Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?” He answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbour as yourself.” And he said to him, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.” Lk 10:25-28

But now I am coming to you, and I speak these things in the world so that they may have my joy made complete in themselves… The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. Jn 17:13, 22-23

The two cultures in Chinua Achebe’s novels
How the conflict between these two cultures influence Africa today is wonderfully portrayed in Chinua Achebe’s novels, Things Fall Apart and No Longer At Ease. The first of these titles is taken from W B Yeats’ poem in which he speaks about what was happening in the Ireland of his time, when he witnessed how things fall apart when what is central to human life no longer retains its hold on us.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

The title of Achebe’s second novel is taken from T S Elliot’s poem, The Journey of the Magi. This is a reflection on what was on the minds of the three kings from the East as they return home after meeting Jesus. They are no longer at ease in the culture they are going back to after being exposed to the vision they had of the Saviour and the new value system and style of relating he exposed them to.

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.

The quiet revolution the Saviour invites
I have thought a lot about this quiet revolution or change of mind and heart the Saviour invites. It is called for if we are to adopt the vision and values he calls ‘the Good News’. This is encapsulated by Jesus in his commandment that we love others as he has loved us. Very important to this way of loving and relating is that we learn to notice, respect and defer to where people are and what they want. The following advice a bishop gave to his newly arrived missionaries is a wonderful expression of this sensitivity, respect and deference

Our first task on approaching another people, another culture, another religion, IS TO TAKE OFF OUR SHOES, for the place we are approaching is holy; else we may find ourselves treading on people’s dreams. More serious still, we may forget that God was there before our arrival.

This is a piece of wisdom I realised the truth of only in hindsight. I still find myself challenged by this call to take off my shoes when approaching another person, especially if that person comes from another culture with his or her distinctive style of loving and relating.

“You know book but we know life”
When I first went to Africa I, like so many others at that time, had little idea or feeling for the cultural values of the people I was sent to help. I had the idea that I was there to clear the bush of all plants and trees before building what I considered would provide people with a better way of life. This lack of appreciation of the richness of what was already there and of how people wanted our help to improve this was not on my agenda. The result was that because they had a different idea from ours of the value of work as a way to improve I tended to see the way they lived in a negative way. This lack of understanding and feeling for how africans saw life and what was important in it was epitomised in a joke that was doing the rounds at that time. It imaged the real expert on Africa as someone who writes a book about it while flying over the continent in a high speed jet and preferably at night.

There is a wonderful scene in one of Achebe’s books which highlights this clash of cultures. It takes place when a young man returns from abroad very proud of his academic degree. When he is invited to address a gathering of the Umoufia Progressive Union he outlines how he thinks his people might improve themselves. After the talk one of the village elders says to him “You know book but we know life”. It is only in hindsight that I appreciate the wisdom of this remark even though the longer I was in Africa the more I realised how little I understood about the culture in which I lived.

“The beast is at the door seeking to devour you but you must master him”

Yahweh asked Cain, ‘Why are you angry and downcast? If you are well disposed, ought you not to lift up your head? But if you are ill-disposed, is not sin at the door like a crouching beast hungering for you, which you must master’. Gn 4:7-8

What we do with our anger
Years of colonialism and misunderstanding have left a residue of anger in Africa so it is surprising and a great tribute to Africans that the Peace and Justice Commission in South Africa worked so well. It is also easy to understand but difficult to countenance the level of hatred and violence expressed by Boko Haram in the film, Timbuktu as they gradually take over the life of the people. They repress many of the ways we ‘work out our soul’s queer miracle” or the ways our spirit finds bodily expression in music, football, beer drinking and smoking. There is an anger in Africa that is healthy in that a great injustice has been done to people there. However, when this anger finds expression in the hatred and violence of the Boko Haram in this film it becomes destructive.

Indiscriminate hatred is the worst thing there is. It is a sickness of the soul…. We must not fan the hatred within us, because if we do, the world will not be able to pull itself one inch further out of the mire.
Etty Hillesum

Jesus spoke a lot about this destructiveness of hatred and violence because it so disruptive of the dream he has for us. This dream is of the joy we find in being loved and loving in all our relationships, even those with our enemies. This is what remained with me from the film and not the way that this dream was soon shattered by anger, hatred and violence.

Where the human dream of love, warm relationships and contentment is initiated

The idyllic life we experience at the beginning of the film in which people are sensitive to, respect and care for each other is powerfully portrayed for us in the parable of the Good Samaritan. Jesus knows that this dream he so wants us to realise in life will have to contend with the resentment, hatred and violence that so easily takes hold of us and dominates our relationships. It is interesting that the good Samaritan comes to the aid of a jew even though their peoples would have been enemies for generations.

Now an expert in religious law stood up to test Jesus, saying, “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the law? How do you understand it?” The expert answered, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and love your neighbour as yourself.” Jesus said to him, “You have answered correctly; do this, and you will live.”

But the expert, wanting to justify himself, said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him up, and went off, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road, but when he saw the injured man he passed by on the other side. So too a Levite, when he came up to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan who was traveling came to where the injured man was, and when he saw him, he felt compassion for him. He went up to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out two silver coins and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, ‘Take care of him, and whatever else you spend, I will repay you when I come back this way.’ Which of these three do you think became a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” The expert in religious law said, “The one who showed mercy to him.” So Jesus said to him, “Go and do the same.” Lk 10:25-37

Jesus and the ‘beloved disciple’
Where the dream is ultimately fulfilled 

The story of our
most important art form
and yet the most neglected

Life is had in love and relationships Luke 10:25-28
I saw two films in the past month that were both engaging and challenging. They were the French films Clouds of Sils Maria and The New Girlfriend. Both were about our inner world of love and relationships and were, like most French films on this theme, very engaging – I dread to think what Hollywood would make of the latter film. Both films were also challenging in that they confronted us with how we feel about an older woman becoming infatuated with a much younger one and how we react to a man wanting to live out his longing to be a woman. What came through from both films is how central to life our relationships are and how difficult it is to develop them so that they deepen and last. I think that few would deny that this art of being loved and loving as well as how it invites us to relate is by far the most important one but, as Erich Fromm says in in his book, The Art of Loving, it is also the one that is most neglected.

Rather than exploring the complex themes of these two films I would like to reflect on how the Bible deals with the world of love and relationships and how it suggests we navigate our way through these often stormy waters. To begin with I would like to explore this theme in my own experience and then how it is dealt with in the story of the Holy Grail and ultimately in the Bible story.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake waters lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
W B Yeats

Our underground stream of inner wisdom
Many years ago, during a course I attended on journaling, I came across an idea that has remained with me ever since. It is the idea that each of us has an underground stream of inner wisdom which it is important for us to awaken, explore and make our own of. This is no easy task for our wisdom lies deep underground or well below the surface of our consciousness and it is therefore difficult to access. It is a stream in the sense that runs from one end of life to the other and broadens and deepens as we learn what life wants to teach us. It is most importantly a stream of inner wisdom or a body of convictions we each have developed about what is true and worthwhile, a vision and values system that gives meaning and worth to everything in each person’s life. It is to this personal wisdom we each possess that the Bible story must talk to if it is to be meaningful and moving.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
I took the one less travelled by
And that has made all the difference.

Two ways of “Doing the will of God”
If we let the Bible or the Word of God speak to our personal synthesis or wisdom, it can become the main source of what is meaningful and worthwhile for us. The Bible first spoke to me when in 1953 when I did the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola. This profound experience led to my being won over by the winning ways of Jesus in the Gospel story and as a result, I wanted to find out all I could.about him and I diligently recorded all my findings in a book I kept for this purpose. Two sayings of Jesus in John’s Gospel guided me into what was to become central to my relationship with him. One of these spoke of his aim in coming among us: “I have come that you may have life and have it in abundance” and the second spoke of the nature of this life: “This is eternal life, to know you the one true God and Jesus Christ whom you have sent”. Jn 10:10, 17:3 As a result of being won over by Jesus I wanted to respond in a way that was approved of or even mandatory at that time. This was to let my life be governed by ‘doing the will of God’, and this was seen in the context of obedience to an outer authority. Our worth was defined in terms of how obedient we were to rules that governed every aspect of our lives.

It was in 1964 when studying Theology that I began to read the Old Testament as the best commentary on the Gospels. I delved into this area of the Bible that I had never been exposed to before with the help of a wonderful book called, Theology of the Old Testament by Walther Eichrodt. With this and the enlightening notes of the Jerusalem Bible I discovered that the Word of God is not so much about doing the will of God as about coming to know his love and his plan or dream for us. I realised that it is through knowing and believing in his love that we have life in abundance. I also came to realise that each of the persons of the Trinity have a significant role in revealing this love; that the Father initiates its revelation, sending Jesus to put it in human or tangible terms and both sending the Holy Spirit to lead us into an intimate knowledge of their love and plan for us.

tells the story of how four people
found the Holy Grail in their love for each other

The Holy Grail
It was when I began to teach that I became aware that the Bible is a story best understood in the light of our own story and in that of a story like the following:

The Grail Legend
The Holy Grail is the chalice and platter used by Christ at the Last Supper. It was reputed to be kept in a certain castle where the king resided. As a result of his being unaware of its presence the king and his whole kingdom were afflicted by a debilitating illness that nobody could heal.

Meanwhile, in a remote part of the kingdom there lived a youth called Parsifal. On being trained as a knight he was given three rules to live by. He must not seduce or be seduced, and he must seek the Holy Grail. When he finds this, the object of life’s journey, he must ask the question, “Whom does the Grail serve?”

After many years journeying he arrived at the king’s castle and was invited to stay. However, he failed to recognise the Holy Grail and to ask the crucial question. Consequently, the king was not healed and the his kingdom continued to be desolate. So Parsifal sets out on his journey again but as a result of being seduced by many things he forgot all about the Holy Grail.

Eventually he met a hermit who absolved him and gave him instructions on how to get to the Grail castle. This time when he found it, he asked the vital question and received the following answer,

The Grail must serve the Grail King.

As a result of becoming aware, with Parsifal’s help, of the Holy Grail and the need to devote himself to serving the One it represents, the king was healed. He and his kingdom were cured and their desolation gave way to joy as they learned to acknowledge the presence of the Holy Grail.

This story is based on the belief that there is a basic desire or dream built into us. It is towards the realisation of this that we journey all our lives even though, like Parsifal, we are often seduced by more superficial dreams. The dream built into us at our making is of a love that will satisfy our fundamental craving but it is one that cannot be fulfilled at a human level. This is because the grail hunger can only be satisfied by the Grail King, who by his death and resurrection has opened up before us a love that knows no bounds. There is a danger that we burden other human beings with satisfying this most basic hunger when in fact they can only give us an impression of the One whose love can satisfy it.

The dream the Grail King has for us
What follows is a very personal account of how I see the Bible and its role in satisfying our basic hunger. As I see it the Bible tells the story of the Trinity’s desire to satisfy our deepest longing or grail hunger by their self-revelation as love. This is their love of us “to the utmost extent” that is symbolised by the cup and platter used by Jesus at the last supper. Jn 13:1 It is in knowing their love and in entering the relationships with them, with ourselves, with others and with all creation that we find the life Jesus so wants to share with each of us.

I have come that you may have life and have it to the full. Jn 10:10

This is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. Jn 17:3

Life as all about love and the dream it inspires
The word “know” Jesus uses here means an experience of being loved by the three persons of the Trinity in the exact same way that they love each other. Jn 15:9-10 This desire they have to share “everything”, in sharing the love they essentially are, is what Jesus calls friendship. Jn 15:15 The following views of friendship give us a sense of what it tastes like but also of the inadequacy of human friendship to satisfy our deepest longing.

Sharing our unique dream

Many people when they speak of their “friends” mean only their companions. But it is not Friendship in the sense I give to the word. By saying this I do not at all intend to disparage the merely clubbable relation. We do not disparage silver by distinguishing it from gold. … Very few modern people think Friendship even a love at all. … To the Ancients, Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves; the crown of life and the school of virtue. The modern world in comparison, ignores it. C S Lewis

Friendship is the nearest thing we know to what religion is. God is love and to make religion akin to friendship is simply to give it the highest expression conceivable to man. John Ruskin

  There is in friendship something of all relations, and something above them all. It is the golden thread that ties the heart of all the world. John Evelyn

T
 Sweet is the lore that nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things; –
We murder to dissect.

Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.
W Wordsworth

The Bible tells the story of our journey into friendship as the sum and climax of love
The story of this dream the Trinity have for us began with Abraham who is addressed by God as “Abraham, my friend”. Is 41:8 Moses too is seen as someone with whom God speaks “face to face as with a friend”. Ex 33:11 Initially the Trinity revealed themselves to the leaders of the people but in the new covenant, announced by the prophet Jeremiah, God speaks to each person, or “to the least no less than to the greatest” Jer 31:31-34

The friendship which the Trinity seek to initiate with each of us involves a mutual sharing. They invite us to do this by listening and responding to their self-revelation in the Word. Much of the Bible story is about the difficulty we find listening to the inner voice of this revelation because it has to compete with the insistence of so many external voices. These make it difficult for us to find space to answer the constant call of the Bible story to listen and respond to the Word of God.

“Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.”
Steve Jobs

When the centre no longer holds
Stephan Covey in his book, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People makes the following striking comment about how people so often opt for what is urgent or for meeting external expectations rather than opting for what is important.

Almost without exception the things people write down that would make a tremendous difference in their lives are important but not urgent. As we talk about it people come to realise that the reason they don’t do these things is that they’re not urgent. They’re not pressing. And, unfortunately, most people are addicted to the urgent. In fact, if they are not being driven by the urgent, they feel guilty. They feel as if something is wrong.

In a book called A Severe Mercy Sheldon Vanauken tells us of a much more subtle threat to the way we love and relate that takes the form of what he calls “creeping separateness”.

Separation

Don’t You Love Me Anymore 
(A song sung by Joe Cocker)
Oh oh I thought I’d see you smile
When I walked in the door
Thought those arms of yours would be open wide
The way they were before
Why do you look at me
Like I’m some stranger now
Why do you pull away
When you used to hold me so tight

Don’t you love me anymore
Have your learned to live your life without me
Don’t you love me, anymore
When did the fire go out
Where did the feeling go
Did it slip away when I wasn’t there.

Creeping separateness
But why does love need to be guarded? Against what enemies? We looked about us and saw the world as having become a hostile and threatening place where standards of decency and courtesy were perishing and war loomed gigantic. A world where love did not endure. … But why? What was the failure behind the failure of love? One day in early Spring we thought we saw the answer. The killer of love is creeping separateness. Involvedness is a gift of the gods, but then it is up to the lovers to cherish or to ruin. Taking love for granted, especially after marriage. Ceasing to do things together. Finding separate interests. We turning into I, what I want to do. This was the way of creeping separateness. And in the modern world, especially in the cities, everything favoured it. …. The failure of love might seem to be caused by hate or boredom or unfaithfulness with a lover; but these were results. First came the creeping separateness; the failure behind the failure.

Coming to know love in all its diversity
Belief in the Trinity’s self-revelation as love is at the heart of our calling as Christians, and something the Trinity constantly “work” towards. Mk 1:14-15 Jn 6:29. The Holy Spirit is seen as the one who leads us into “all the truth” or into the love of the Father that Jesus expresses in human terms.

When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come.He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you. Jn 16:13-15

How love unfolds
Early in my life I came across a book that invited me to focus my attention on seven very distinct ways Jesus’ love is revealed in the Gospel story. These were aspects of his love that I was familiar with especially when they were portrayed for me in some detail. After reading the Bible for many years I began to notice nine aspects of the Trinity’s love portrayed there. These are faces, portraits or facets of their love and of the dream this inspires that I have written eight books about. They are meant to join it Paul’s prayer for us:

I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Eph 3:18-19

We see how the foundation of this love is laid in the Exodus, in the role that the loves of acceptance, appreciation and concern play there. Ex 3:7-8, 6:6-7, 34:6-7, 34:29-30 In the prophets we see how this love becomes personal and passionate as well as permanent, profound and joyful. Jer 31:31-34, Isa 62:2-5, Hos 2

We share everything

All these loves are a preparation for the love of friendship as Jesus understands it. Thomas Aquinas would go so far as to say that “Love is friendship” since both express the greatest love the world has ever seen. Thus, the whole movement of the Bible story is towards this mutual sharing of “everything” initiated by the Trinity’s passion for self-disclosure. This friendship needs to be cultivated by the conversation the persons of the Trinity initiate and constantly work to maintain no matter how we fail to engage in it. This need of friendship for conversation is based on the principle that to improve our relationships we need to improve the communication going on within them. Our tentativeness about the conversation in which we reveal ourselves to others is well expressed in John Wood’s Poem For Everybody.

Poem for Everybody
I will present you with parts of myself,
slowly, if you are patient and tender,
I will open drawers
that mostly stay closed
and bring out places and things,
sounds and smells, loves and frustrations
hopes and sadnesses
bits and pieces of three decades of life
that have eaten their way into my memory,
carved themselves into my heart
Altogether they are me.

If you regard them lightly
deny that they are important,
or worse, judge them,
I will quietly, slowly
begin to wrap them up
in small pieces of velvet,
like worn silver and gold jewellery,
tuck them away
in a small wooden chest of drawers
and close the lid.
John Wood

The poem highlights how extraordinary is the unfailing passion of the Trinity to converse with each of us.

I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. Jn 10:14-15

I made your name known to them, and I will make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.” Jn 17:26

The life that I have is all that I have,
And the life that I have is yours.
The love that I have of the life that I have
Is yours and yours and yours.

A sleep I shall have
A rest I shall have,
Yet death will be but a pause,
For the peace of my years of the long green grass
Will be yours and yours and yours.
Leo Marks

The Tale of the Princess Kaguya

The film is based on a Japanese folktale called The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter in which a bamboo cutter named Sanuki discovers a miniature girl inside a bamboo shoot that lit up as he approached it. Believing her to be a divine presence, Sanuki and his wife decide to raise her as their own, calling her “Princess”. The girl grows rapidly and conspicuously, causing her parents to marvel and the other children of her village to nickname her “Takenoko” meaning Little Bamboo. She develops a special relationship with a young man Sutemaru that always remained her ideal.

When Sanuki comes upon a large amount of gold in the bamboo grove in the same way he found his daughter he takes this as proof of her divine royalty and begins planning to make her a proper princess. He moves the family to the capital city. The princess is forced to leave her friends behind and finds herself in a mansion, replete with servants and fine clothes. She is also supervised by a governess who seeks to tame her and make her a proper noblewoman. She struggles with the restraints of nobility, arguing that life should be full of laughter and the healthy struggle of making her way in the world like everyone else.

When the girl comes of age, she is granted the formal name of “Princess Kaguya” for the light and life that radiates from her. In order to insert her into the the best circles Sanuki holds a celebration in commemoration of his daughter’s naming. At the celebration, Kaguya overhears partygoers ridiculing her father’s attempts to turn a peasant girl into nobility through money. Kaguya flees the capital in despair and runs back to the mountains, seeking Sutemaru and her other friends, but discovers that they have all moved away. She wanders off into the snow where she faints with the cold but then awakens to find herself back at the party.

As Kaguya grows in beauty she attracts scores of would-be suitors. Some men of noble standing court her, comparing her to mythical treasures. Not wanting to marry any of them, Kaguya tells them she will only marry whoever can bring her the mythical treasure mentioned. Two suitors unsuccessfully attempt to persuade her with counterfeits. The third abandons his conquest out of cowardice, and the fourth attempts to woo her with flattering lies and a promise of life in the countryside. When one of the men is killed in his quest, Kaguya falls into depression. Eventually, the Emperor notices her and taken with her beauty, he makes advances towards her, revolting her. Kaguya then demonstrates the ability to disappear at will, surprising the Emperor. Understanding that he has been too forward, the Emperor takes his leave, determined to still make Kaguya his wife.

Kaguya reveals to her parents that she originally came from the Moon. When the Emperor made his advances, she silently begged the Moon to help her and learned the truth. Once a resident of the Moon, she broke its laws, hoping to be exiled to Earth, so that she could experience mortal life. Now having heard her prayer, the Moon will reclaim her during the next full moon. Kaguya confesses her attachment to Earth and her reluctance to leave.

Sanuki swears to protect Kaguya and begins assembling defensive forces. Kaguya returns to her hometown in the mountains once more. She finds Sutemaru and tells him she would have been happiest with him; Sutemaru vows to protect her, and they fly through the air together. When the Moon shines upon Kaguya, she begs Sutemaru to hold her tightly. Despite Sutemaru’s best efforts, Kaguya is torn from his grasp out of the sky. He awakens alone in a field and, convinced that it had been a dream, returns to his wife and child.

On the night of the full moon, a procession of celestial beings descends from the Moon, and Sanuki is unable to stop it. An attendant offers Kaguya a robe that will erase her memories of Earth. Kaguya begs the attendant to grant her a last moment with her parents.

Thee God I come from

The attendant assures her that upon returning to the Moon, she will be free of Earth’s impurities. Kaguya rebuffs her, saying that Earth is full of wonder and life. The attendant then drapes the robe around Kaguya, and she appears to forget about her life on Earth. The procession ascends to the Moon, leaving Sanuki and his wife distraught, as Kaguya looks back one last time with tears in her eyes.

To Thee go

Thee, God, I come from, to Thee I go
THEE, God, I come from, to thee go,
All day long I like fountain flow
From thy hand out, swayed about
Mote-like in thy mighty glow.

What I know of thee I bless,
As acknowledging thy stress
On my being and as seeing
Something of thy holiness.

Getting the balance right
The story told in The Tale of Princess Kaguya highlights the difficulty of striking a healthy balance between being true to two kinds of authority both of which must be listen to and obeyed. There is an outer authority that is experienced by many as being true to the expectations of others while our inner authority asks us to be true to our own inner voice or that built into each of us when we were made in the image of God. Gen 1:27 Finding this healthy balance between these two kinds of authority causes a crisis in Kaguya’s life that we can easily identify with.

She was given a sense of her dream by her parents whose love created a home and an environment in which she was happy. This experience continued to develop by means of the friends she made among the local children but especially with Sutemaru who became the love of her life. This remained the most influential relationship for the rest of her life and always imaged for her the fulfilment of her dream. In one of Mary Lavin’s stories called, Brother Boniface she gives the following reflection of an old monk who had learned to be true to himself, to his inner voice.

Keep in touch with your dream

The call to dream dreams and see visions Acts 2:17
Brother Boniface, as an old monk recalled how as a very young lad he had discovered the stars but that in the struggle to make a living he tended to lose sight of them. One had to move beyond making a living to dream, to be enraptured by simple things, for otherwise in keeping your mind on what you are doing you forget the sky above.

He recalled that his father, to prevent him from idling had sent him to deliver messages from their shop to the monastery and though it was not very exciting it gave him a chance to dream.

“As he cycled home his sadness deepened for it seemed to him that whether you cobbled or whether you hammered, whether you weighed up rice on a scales or led a colt round and round in a ring, or whether you stood at evening in a field opening or closing your hand to let fall a shower of seeds, you had to keep your eyes upon what you were doing, and soon you forgot that there was a sky overhead and earth underfoot, and that flowers blew and even that birds sang”.

The outer authority Kaguya lived with
Kaguya’s experience of an outer authority came from the expectations of her father who burdened her with the dream he had for her. His plan was to spend a large amount of the money he found in the bamboo grove on making his daughter part of the nobility and thereby gaining entrance to it for himself and his wife. To achieve this Kaguya was asked to sacrifice her own dream of happiness that she hoped to find in the love of Sutemaru. But the dream she had of finding her happiness in love and relationships would not go away no matter how she repressed or resisted it. The nature and importance of this human dream is pithily captured in Hilaire Belloc’s poem Dedicatory Ode

From quiet homes and first beginning,
Out to the undiscovered ends,
There’s nothing worth the wear of winning,
But laughter and the love of friends.

This is the dream Kaguya wants to return to but when she goes back to her old home she finds things have changed or moved on. For example, Sutemaru has married, her home is derelict and her former friends have moved elsewhere. So she can’t return to the ‘good old days’ but must keep adjusting to the love life offers her and to the change of mind and heart needed if she is to believe in this.

Inner and outer voices

A major issue in today’s world
We can resonate with Kaguya’s predicament as we face a referendum and must each listen to these two voices of an outer and inner authority. There is a lot about trying to find the right balance between these two in the Second Vatican Council. There it was a key issue of finding the right balance between meeting our need to “dream dreams and see visions” and at the same time to meet the needs church and state. In his book called, What Happened At Vatican Two the historian John O’Malley saw this as one of three key issues of Vatican 2. He speaks of the balance the Council sought between outer and inner authority as that between vertical and horizontal relationships or between the centre and the periphery. O’Malley says:

“Vatican 2 is innovative for the pervasive emphasis it placed on horizontal relationships … and in the way it sought modulation and balance with the vertical relationships”. The Council expressed its belief that “Deep within their consciences men and women discover a law that they have not laid upon themselves but which they must obey. Its voice ever calling them to love and to do what is good and to avoid what is evil, tells them inwardly at the right moment: do this, shun that. For they have in their hearts a law inscribed by God. Their dignity lies in observing this law, and by it they will be judged. … By conscience that law is made known in a wonderful way that is fulfilled in love for God and for one’s neighbour. Through loyalty to conscience Christians are joined in the search for truth and for the right solutions to so many moral problems that arise both in the lives of individuals and in social relationships.”

Missing our star we follow the wrong God home

The danger of ‘missing our star” and following the wrong god home
Ultimately, the inner authority each of us must be true to is based on our belief that the Holy Spirit is always leading us into all ‘the truth’ or into the love of the Father that Jesus reveals in human terms. Jn 16:13-15 We are called to this in a society which has lost a sense of an inner voice or that of a dream built into us. We are seen instead as a tabula rasa or a blank slate on which can be written what is considered to be for “the greatest happiness of the greatest number”. As we see today, this tends to become the greatest happiness of the few and this according to the poet William Stafford, becomes “a pattern others make for us” so that we miss our star and follow the wrong god home.

 A Ritual to Read to Each Other
If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.
For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.
And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail,
but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park.
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.
And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.
For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give-yes or no, or maybe-
should be clear:
the darkness around us is deep.
William Stafford

Jesus was well aware of the darkness around us and the need we have to stay awake and listen to the word of God in spite of the difficulty we find in making space to listen to to our inner voice and to the way God speaks to this. This is the problem Jesus addresses in many of his parables but especially in the parable of the sower. This parable was particularly poignant to the first Christians as they were mystified by our reluctance to listen to our inner voice and how God confirms what it is saying to us with the word of God.

When a great crowd gathered and people from town after town came to him, he said in a parable: “A sower went out to sow his seed; and as he sowed, some fell on the path and was trampled on, and the birds of the air ate it up. Some fell on the rock; and as it grew up, it withered for lack of moisture. Some fell among thorns, and the thorns grew with it and choked it. Some fell into good soil, and when it grew, it produced a hundredfold.” As he said this, he called out, “Let anyone with ears to hear listen!”….

 “Now the parable is this: The seed is the word of God. The ones on the path are those who have heard; then the devil comes and takes away the word from their hearts, so that they may not believe and be saved. The ones on the rock are those who, when they hear the word, receive it with joy. But these have no root; they believe only for a while and in a time of testing fall away. As for what fell among the thorns, these are the ones who hear; but as they go on their way, they are choked by the cares and riches and pleasures of life, and their fruit does not mature. But as for that in the good soil, these are the ones who, when they hear the word, hold it fast in an honest and good heart, and bear fruit with patient endurance. Lk 8:4-15

The story of our two selves

My blog for April centres on how we get in touch with our own story and “feast on it” as the poem below recommends. I have already used this poem in a previous blog about my brother as it captures how in his latter years he came home to that place where we are all called to, the place where our inner and outer selves befriend each other.

Love After Love
The time will come
When, with elation,
You will greet yourself arriving
At your own door, in your own mirror
And each will smile at the other’s welcome,

 And say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
To itself, to the stranger who has loved you

All your life, whom you ignored
For another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

The photographs, the desperate notes,
Peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
(Derek Walcott)

 Coming home to ourselves
The poem is about two aspects of ourselves, an outer and inner one that come home to one another, usually in the second half of life. In the first half we are preoccupied with the outer world of our career, of marriage and of rearing a family. In the second half of life when we have established ourselves and the pressure of making something of ourselves has eased there is a call to go on an inner journey on which we seek to realise our dream.

The opening to the top

The dream that will not go away
Ours is a dream of the intimacy and joy that love draws us into. According to Joseph Campbell in his book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, it is this dream, and the journey we undertake to realise it, that all our stories are about. It is an innate dream or one built into us as human beings when we were made in God’s image and then recreated in the image of the Trinity at our baptism. As a result we are able to “participate in the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4) and realise our dream in the extraordinary way that Jesus ambitions for us. (Jn 15:1-15, 17:13, 22-23)

Why we become a stranger to ourselves
Getting in touch with our inner world is difficult, especially in the first half of life. This is because it is hard work becoming aware of our experience of our dream and it is not a journey our educational system has prepared us to embark on. What also deters us going on an inner journey is the fear of meeting the ghosts of the past or of being exposed to the painful experiences that are part of everybody’s story. Even though these negative experiences may only be 10% or so of what has happened to us they can fixate us and become 90% of what we see and so deter us from entering the 90% of our story that is enriching.

What do you see:
the 5% that is black or the 95% that is white?

What belittles the inner or spiritual side of us
Perhaps the biggest obstacle to ‘feasting on your life’ is an attitude to our inner world that is in the air we breathe. This is generated by a culture that is dominated by Science, Economics and Consumerism and by its belief that only what is material and measurable is real. As a result our inner or spiritual world is seen to be too subjective and personal to yield a knowledge that has much value. This atmosphere in which we live makes our human dream and that which Jesus has in mind for us appear unreal and even childish. As a result, the inner world of the spirit is seen as a private matter that we deal with in a world apart from our normal one. The following poem tunes in to the conflict there is between these two sides of us that compete for space in our life.

 The Choice
The intellect of man is forced to choose
Perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark,
When all that story is finished, what’s the news?
In luck or out the toil has left its mark;
That old perplexity an empty purse,
Or the day’s vanity, the night’s remorse.
(W B Yeats)

Being faced with two ways

Living in two separate worlds
Consequently, we live in two worlds that have become separated: a very large outer one that centres on the material world of work and wealth and a small inner one that centres on the basic human quest to realise our dream. The object of this quest is to get our whole person involved in the way we love and relate. (Lk 10:25-28) Because our outer world of work and wealth has become so dominant our inner one of love and relationships has for many people today been pushed into a corner and become dormant or part of what we might term our underground stream of inner wisdom. We could think of this inner wisdom as the body of convictions we each accumulate during life that gives meaning and value to all else. It is a unique way we have learned to understand and evaluate the environment in which we live and that nobody besides ourselves can explore for us.

 We are that!
Once upon a time, in a not-so-faraway land, there was a kingdom of acorns, nestled at the foot of a grand old oak tree. Since the citizens of this kingdom were modern, fully Westernized acorns, they went about their business with purposeful energy; and since they were midlife, babyboomer acorns, they engaged in a lot of self-help courses. There were seminars called “Getting All You Can out of Your Shell.” There were woundedness and recovery groups for acorns who had been bruised in their original fall from the tree. There were spas for oiling and polishing those shells and various acornopathic therapies to enhance longevity and well-being.

One day in the midst of this kingdom there suddenly appeared a knotty little stranger, apparently dropped “out of the blue” by a passing bird. He was capless and dirty, making an immediate negative impression on his fellow acorns. And crouched beneath the oak tree, he stammered out a wild tale. Pointing upward at the tree, he said, “We…are…that!”

 Delusional thinking, obviously, the other acorns concluded, but one of them continued to engage him in conversation: “So tell us, how would we become that tree?” “Well,” said he, pointing downward, “it has something to do with going into the ground…and cracking open the shell.” “Insane,” they responded. “Totally morbid! Why, then we wouldn’t be acorns anymore!”

“We … are … that!”

Going down to our inner wisdom
Becoming aware of the richness of our personal experience and learning how to appropriate or to believe in the wisdom we each have accumulated is not as difficult as it may initially appear. It involves digging our well to draw on the wisdom that is in our our underground stream. To arouse this dormant wisdom we must learn to notice and name it so that we can then savour and gradually appropriate it. This may sound complex but in practice what is involved is simple if we are prepared first of all to tell our story, noticing its significant events and what they are saying to us as well as how we feel as we do this.

 As we learn to tell our story, to notice and name the significant people in it and how they love and relate in a number of very distinctive ways we are all familiar with, our inner wisdom emerges. When it does we are then in a position to savour and appropriate the love we have received and given which is the core of our inner wisdom. This can then become the context in which we understand and evaluate all else in our daily experience. A way of feasting on our life is provided on this website in a course called What do you want? Click here to access it.

 You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
To itself, to the stranger who has loved you
… Sit. Feast on your life.

Father Lawrence Hannan, S.M.

The story I feel I must tell this month is the very personal one of my brother Larry. He died recently at the age of 94 having spent 69 of those years in Fiji as a missionary priest of the Society of Mary. When he first arrived there as a newly ordained priest there was a lot of pent-up energy waiting to be released. He had found his years of the study of Philosophy and Theology, like many of us did at that time, a frustrating experience. This meant that for much of his early life as a priest he was a man of action with little time to cultivate the intellectual and reflective side of himself. He noticed the impoverishing effect of this on various renewal courses he was sent on but he was not able to make space in his life to do much about it even if he knew how. It was not till he was 53 that, during a year long course in Manila, that he realized what he had to do and developed the will to do it.

The last of life, for which the first was made
I was 12 years younger than Larry and I did not get to know him until he was in his sixties. An opportunity to know him better came in 1989 when, at Larry’s invitation, I spent 3 months in Fiji giving a variety of courses to lay groups. It was during a week at the end of my visit when we travelled around all the places Larry had worked that we had time to share where life had taken us. Before I left Fiji, he asked me to recommend some books he should read on his forthcoming sabbatical and I am reported to have said: “Don’t read other people’s books; read your own”. Even though this was his little brother’s recommendation he took it and produced a very honest, fascinating and beautifully written account of his life. It was in writing this that Larry’s two selves came together: the side that loved people and the other that learned to love in a new way by being loved.

Love After Love
The time will come
When, with elation,
You will greet yourself arriving
At your own door, in your own mirror
And each will smile at the other’s welcome,

And say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
To itself, to the stranger who has loved you

All your life, whom you ignored
For another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

The photographs, the desperate notes,
Peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
Derek Walcott

 Sit. Feast on your life
Larry’s journal has remained for me over the years like the box of memories in the following story: As the book of Wisdom says, we neglect these memories at our peril

 Least falling into deep forgetfulness we get cut off from your kindness. Wis16:11

 The box of memories
An elderly married pair auctioned their house. As they sat for the last night in what had been their home, it seemed very bare. Just before they went to bed the husband took out a little tin box in which he had stored the memories of their life together, of the ways they had been blessed, the joys they had shared, and even their times of darkness that had turned out to be blessings in disguise.

As he took these memories out of the box and dwelt on each one in turn, he and his wife were no longer conscious of their stark surroundings. They re-lived the richness of their life together and they were grateful to God.

That night he died in his sleep. When he was laid out, she replaced the rosary between his joined hands with his box of memories, for she knew that it was with these that he prayed best. The evening of the funeral she opened her own store of memories. There she placed all the words of appreciation of her husband she had heard at the funeral. In the years that remained to her, she was sustained on her solitary journey, by the grace-filled memory of their life together.

The Larry I knew
I think that the sense of a person fully alive and happy will be my abiding memory of Larry. He had a zest or a lust for life that was seen in the huge energy with which he did everything; he always seemed to live out the principle that you should never walk when you can run. He was always full of new initiatives and plans and it was never advisable to stand in the way of these. Later in his life he made time to play and there was a child-like quality to this that was charming. The following shrewd comment of someone who knew Larry well highlights these “two Larries”.

I remember two Larries really. Of the earlier years I have the image of a rather severe man, a bit straight-laced, an administrator. Then he did a renewal in Manila and after that I remember him as a very caring man, as seminary rector in Suva and as formator in Tutu. I have always cherished the story of Larry as rector of PRS replacing the washing of the feet with a kava ceremony in which he, as rector, took the role of the servant mixing the brew and carrying it to the attendants. It shocked the seminarians but they admitted later, it was the first time they had understood the meaning of the Maundy Thursday ceremony! Larry must have held just about every post and parish in the country. The Lord will have received him right at the gate! Jan Snijders, S.M

With others and also alone

One who loved people and being with them
I think that we will always remember and admire Larry’s great love of people and of being with them. We the members of his family have memories of him home on holidays in Ireland. His great joy was to divide his time between visiting, reporting back to us what happened on his journeys and planning where he might go next. He could never get enough of his family, his friends and of the people of Fiji among whom he spent 69 years of his life. Some years ago we suggested that he come back to Ireland for his remaining years but he told us that his real home was with the people of Fiji.

 Even though he was a very forceful person abounding in energy he was also, especially after the year he spent in Manila, a very warm and affectionate person. In his later years he went out of his way to keep in touch with each member of his family and he would not leave you without expressing his love in a way that never ceased to surprise. He had an unusual capacity to love people and an even more unusual capacity to express it in a way that always sounded genuine. There is a beautiful testimony to this side of Larry written by Cardinal Soane Patita Paini Mafi a former student of the Pacific Regional Seminary when Larry was rector there:

This writing space can not cover fully if I was to do justice here and describe to you what I would consider a man who had saved me to re-possess my call to the priesthood during a time of great struggle and personal confusion in my early years at the seminary.  Larry was not only a Rector, but a mentor and companion in my own journey as a young seminarian at the time. It’s hard for me to forget the soft voice of your dear uncle which to me was so full of sincere love and tenderness of a true shepherd.  … I am so fortunate to have seen that last look of a true saint before I continue my pilgrimage to Rome.

 I have a memory of Larry that captures something very special about him. The memory is of visiting him in Fiji in 1989 when he was rector of the seminary. Every week we would go out for an afternoon together and a major feature of the day would be that after a swim he would get two of the largest ice-cream cones you have ever seen. It was a very challenging experience to get to the ice-cream before it dripped down the side of the cone onto the floor or even worse, onto your lap. My memory of Larry is of being amazed at how he could keep the car on the road and at the same time never allow a drop of that delicious ice-cream to go astray.

 What I treasure about this memory is the way it captures Larry’s love of life and his determination to enjoy every last drop of it. Larry in this way gives us an impression of what life in all its abundance is like; the life Christ ambitions for each of us.

Feeding the sweet tooth

Give them an impression of the Great King
A young peasant lad was summoned by a great king to come and see him. When he arrived at the palace, the king said to him, “My kingdom is so large that I cannot meet all my people and touch their lives as I would want to. My wish is that you would give them an impression of who I am.”

As symbols of the new role he was to play, the king gave the youth a sceptre, a robe and a crown. Now, since he did not know the king, the young lad was very confused about what he was being sent to do. He was too awe-struck to ask the king what he meant, so he went to consult a wise person who told him to go back to his little farm and just to be himself.

As time went on, more and more people came to visit him for they found in him a sympathetic ear and a compassionate heart. Gradually he realised that this was what the great king had sent him to do. This was the way he was to give people an impression of what the Great King was like.

The greatest thing we can do in life is to give those around us a glimpse of what love is like. Though the impression of love that Larry gave us is human and thus limited it makes God’s love that bit more tangible, colourful and credible.

 For Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men`s faces.
G M Hopkins

Going out in a blaze of glory

A Story For Our Time

The clash of two cultures
The initial emphasis of the film is on the extraordinary story of Stephen Hawking but gradually the emphasis shifts to include two other extraordinary people. These two are Stephen’s first wife Jane and Jonathan Hellyer Jones with whom she developed a profound friendship and later married in 1995 when Stephen had left her to marry someone else. Where the film is ostensibly about Stephen Hawking, I would agree with Tara Brady who, in her review of the film in The Ticket, says, “In The Theory of Everything Hawking’s condition is rather less important than how it affects his marriage. It is Jane who conveys the changing marital chemistry – care, dependence, resentment, and exasperation – in small, delicate motions. This is not a brief history of time; it is a brief history of love. And it is as complex and deceptively deep as any of the physics covered in Hawking’s books.” Even though she married someone who lived most of his life “in the mind alone” she never ceased to “think in a marrow-bone”. The film has a lot to say about this clash between two cultures that W B Yeats highlights in this poem.

A Prayer for Old Age
GOD guard me from those thoughts men think
In the mind alone;
He that sings a lasting song
Thinks in a marrow-bone;

From all that makes a wise old man
That can be praised of all;
O what am I that I should not seem
For the song’s sake a fool?

I pray – for word is out
And prayer comes round again –
That I may seem, though I die old,
A foolish, passionate man.
W.B. Yeats

 Opposites that attract
Jane met Stephen in Cambridge University in 1963 when she was an undergraduate studying Literature and he was doing his doctorate in Cosmology. Shortly after they met he developed Motor neurone disease and was given two years to live. In spite of Stephen’s efforts to end their relationship Jane insisted on marrying him and did so in 1965. For the next 25 years they battled with his gradual deteriorating condition in a way that was truly heroic.

 They had three children and the strain of looking after these as well as coping with the increasing demands of Stephen’s growing disability led to her parents insisting that she employ professional help. This complicated their relationship for Stephen resisted anything that interfered with his life at the university where he worked. The relationship was further complicated by Stephen’s growing attachment to one of these helpers called Elaine Mason. This eventually led to Stephen wanting a separation from Jane so that he could marry Elaine. When he did, his family felt they were cut off from Stephen because Elaine was so protective and possessive of him.

 When Jane was divorced from Stephen in 1995 she married Jonathan with whom she had a platonic relationship for many years. He was accepted as a friend of the family as Stephen had no difficulty with this relationship as long as it did not interfere with his own relationship with Jane. When Stephen’s marriage to Elaine Mason ended in 2006 he re-established a close relationship with his family.

Where the journey began as an impossible challenge

A history of how love develops
For me The Theory of Everything is a love story that centres on Jane’s immense capacity for love in the profound relationship she had with two utterly different men. Her relationship with Stephan over the 25 years she was married to him went through all the stages of such a long-term relationship: It began with the charming infatuation of these two very gifted young students and then to their commitment to marry. There followed the years of caring and being cared for when we become aware how affliction for many years refined their relationship but how it eventually consumed it. We witness how his growing dependence affects both of them, how it leads them to question their capacity to handle the resentment and frustration of having their lives more and more confined by his growing disability. In all of this a heroism emerges that manifests itself very differently in these two people who personify two such different worlds.

Two utterly different people
The relationship between Stephen and Jane was an intriguing one from the time they first met when students at Cambridge University. Their backgrounds were very different. Stephen’s parents were very intellectual and related in a very detached way. At meals both his parents read a book rather than talking to each other. Jane on the other hand came from a family who were always deeply involved in her life. Their spiritual stance was also very different: where she was a committed member of the Church of England all her life he had little time for Religion and eventually became one of England’s best known atheists. A deeper difference still was in their whole approach to life: her main quest was love and relationships while his was a single-minded devotion to his work as a scientist.

How adversity can refine or overwhelm a relationship
With such differences separating them you would wonder what kept them together. Adding to these forces driving them apart was the amount of hardship and adversity his gradual deterioration from Motor neurone disease imposed on their relationship. They married in the belief that he had only two years to live. When in fact his decline was much slower than expected they were both charmed with this though gradually the strain of facing an endless stream of curtailments of their freedom took its toll. As is to be expected he resisted, often obstinately, becoming confined in these ways, for example, he doggedly resisted being confined to a wheelchair in the late 60s. But even though he was for a time frustrated by these curtailments of his freedom he was not depressed by them for long as his determination and humour triumphed every time. It is to emphasize his indomitable human spirit that the film begins and ends with an image in gold of Stephen in his wheelchair but also as a little boy cheerfully skipping along in front of his parents.

The second man
Another remarkable person in the film is Jonathan whom Jane met in 1977. He was the organist and choir director in her local church and Jane met him when she joined the choir there. There was an immediate harmony between them. He wife had recently died from leukemia and Jane felt the need to find a let-up from an excessively demanding life. It was an extraordinary relationship in that there was a great sensitivity for each others commitments as well as needs, especially of their shared need of friendship. According to Jane, her husband was accepting of the situation, stating “he would not object so long as I continued to love him”. Jane and Jonathan were determined not to break up the family and their relationship remained platonic for a long period. Then in 1995 when Stephen divorced Jane she married Jonathan.

A rich tapestry of relationships
Jane’s relationship with two very different men, so that neither of them as a result suffered, is extraordinary. Jonathan was more a soul mate or a friend that she needed as a huge part of her was not engaged in Stephen’s world. Where Stephen personified an exclusive humanism and its preference for the disengaged reason that Science cultivates, Jonathan personified a more holistic humanism that centred on love and relationships.

Stephan had an immediate appeal for Jane when she first met him and was charmed by his childlike single-mindedness and simplicity as well as by his mischievous humour. He was admirable in the heroic way he wrestled with his disease and with the increasing way it confined or imprisoned him. We understand why he takes his frustration and his feelings of aggression out on her as we do her growing sense of resentment and frustration with the huge demands that his growing limitations as well as his growing dependence on her imposes. It is a dependence he resents and he expresses this in his defiance of her best efforts to get him to express himself after his tracheotomy. It was then that Elaine Mason stepped into his life with the professional skills and the charm to help him break through to a new way of expressing himself. As a result, he became infatuated by her at a time when he and Jane had become exhausted by their strained relationship. It was then that he decided he wanted a separation and eventually a divorce from Jane.

It’s the story that matters
When I see a film like The Theory Of Everything what matters most to me is the story it tells, especially if it moves me in some way. Other things about the film, such as who directed it and what films he or she has already produced, are peripheral. Now, what moved me about The Theory Of Everything was how it portrayed two ways of seeing life and what is important that vie for our allegiance today. The choice is imaged in the following story about a dream merchant.

The Dream Merchant 
Nick is employed by a multinational company as a dream merchant. He spends his day getting people to trade in their deep dream for more superficial ones. The reason why his company employ Nick to do this work is they realise that when people focus on their deep dream they are bad for business as they have little or no desire for what this multinational wants to sell them. If on the other hand people can be persuaded to focus on their superficial dreams they will be ready to spend their lives working to get the money they need to buy what Nick’s company wants to sell them. They will be open to an endless stream of desires which can be manipulated by the company at will.

Sometimes Nick is a little uneasy about the work he does, for he notices that when he buys people’s deep dream, something dies within them. What sooths his misgivings, however, is that most people are only too willing to do business with him. They obviously find their deep dream too difficult to maintain and are glad to be freed from its demands.

This story highlights an issue central to The Theory of Everything and this is the choice we are faced with today between two cultures that compete for our allegiance. One of these cultural viewpoints is that adopted by Stephen the other by Jane and Jonathan. What Stephen is passionate about is Science or more specifically Cosmology and how he can grow in understanding of the material and measurable world. Jane and Jonathan on the other hand viewed the world from the point of view of love and relationships. These two ways of seeing life were accompanied by two ways of attaining it. Where Stephan approaches his world through disengaged reason, Jane and Jonathan approach theirs in a way that engages their whole person, their memory and imagination and how these in turn engage their heart and soul, mind and senses.

In his book called, The Turning Point, Fritjof Capra cites the opinion of the R D Laing, that nothing has changed our world more during the last four hundred years, than the obsession of scientists with measurement and the material. This obsession has dominated, diminished and distorted our inner world which as a result is seen as unreal, irrelevant and even as abnormal. This distorted vision of our inner world leads to a spiritual repression and a self-alienation that has devastated our capacity to enter the relationships which are necessary for a normal healthy life. He quotes the well-known Scottish psychiatrist R D Laing who says that as a result of Science’s stance towards our everyday experience:

Out go sight, sound, taste, touch and smell and along with them has since gone aesthetics and ethics, sensibility, values, quality, form; all feelings, motives, intentions, soul, consciousness, spirit. Experience as such is cast out of the realm of scientific discourse. (The Voice of Experience – R D Laing)

A revolutionary choice
The Theory of Everything then is about a momentous choice which faces each of us today, one that I have written about in a book called, The Quiet Revolution. The choice is between two cultures, each of which is bidding for our allegiance and each of which proposes its own distinctive vision, value system and lifestyle. One culture sees and values the world in terms of love and relationships, while the other, that has its origins in Science and Economics, sees and values everything in material and monetary terms. This latter vision and value system is the dominant one today and, since it has little time for the inner world of love and relationships, it leaves a spiritual vacuum at the heart of society. It leads, according to R D Laing, to a lot of confusion about what is real, relevant and “normal”

“… the condition of alienation, of being asleep, unconscious, ‘out of one’s mind,’ is the condition of the normal person. Such ‘normally’ alienated men and women are taken to be sane”, says Laing, “simply because they act more or less like anyone else, whereas other forms of alienation, which are out of step with the prevailing one are labelled psychotic by the ‘normal’ majority”. (The Voice of Experience – R D Laing)

In this cultural atmosphere we live in today it is difficult to give to our relationships with God, with our inner self, with others and with all creation, the time, energy and resources they deserve. To do so would involve a radical change of mind and heart and developing the art of prayer and reflection we need to do this. Because of our unwillingness to make space in our lives for this we live in circumstances that William Wordsworth lamented in the following lines:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

Where Jesus would have us find life
There is no doubt as to where Jesus would have us find life in all it abundance. For him life is all about getting our whole person, body, soul, heart and mind involved in the way we love and relate. He would agree with the view of Hillarie Belloc:

There’s nothing worth the wear of winning
But laughter and the love of friends.

I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly. John 10:10

Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus, “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?” He answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” And he said to him, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.” Luke 10:25-28

At the end of his life Jesus left us with his version of this commandment and it puts the emphasis, not so much on our love for God as on God’s love for us. This is the love that Jesus expresses in human terms in every Gospel story. It is an overwhelming love that takes the form of a friendship in which Jesus shares with us “everything” he, his Father and their Spirit have and are.

This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. John 15:12-15

A diversity of languages, races and cultures seeking unity

The film School of Babel tells the story of a group of immigrant children who have come to a school in Paris. As they are from all parts of the world French is a foreign language for them. They are, therefore, put into a class by themselves as they need to bring their competence in speaking French up to an acceptable level before they can join the normal classes in the school.

They vary in age from 12 to 15 but this is only a minor difference between them compared to all the other things that separate them. For example, they represent many of the essential racial groups, religions and languages of the world as well as coming from a wide variety of backgrounds. Some have been very neglected by their parents; one very young Chinese girl has not seen her parents for 8 years. As a result, a number of the pupils have become troubled and rebellious and find it hard to fit into the highly regulated French system of education, while others have retreated into themselves and are fearful of being open with anybody.

The Tower of Babel
I assume that the film’s name is an allusion to the story of the Tower of Babel told in the book of Genesis. There it illustrates one of the effects of our tendency to walk out of God’s presence or to exclude ourselves from God’s intimacy through what we do or fail to do. In the Bible story of the Fall people have already expressed their belief that sin separates us from God and from each other. Having forfeited the true source of their deepest significance and happiness in this way they burden the material world with making a name for themselves and with providing a happiness which it was not designed to provide. They say to themselves,

“Come, let us build ourselves a tower with its top reaching heaven. Let us make a name for ourselves and hold together, lest we be scattered all over the earth”. Gen 11:1-4

The effect of building the tower to attain happiness using only their own resources proved disastrous. Separated from the one for whom they were made, the God whose love held them together, they disintegrate and are scattered throughout the world. This is symbolised in the story by their language becoming confused “so that they no longer understood one another”. It is this divisive feature of language that Jacinta Ramayah, a Malaysian poet illustrates in her poem The Tower of Babel. However, she also believes there is a common language that is “a declaration of a love sincere”.

 Clicks, rolls, twists of tongues
sounds echo deep from the lungs,
strokes, lines, whorls, curly ends
are messages used by early man.

Guttural tones and stiletto barks
soft and hushed or loud remarks,
raised in anger, trembling in fear
or declaration of a love sincere.

Watch the play of various stances
of vivid hand and body gestures,
they complement the sweet voices
and tones of various languages.

The tower was built by man’s pride
God swooped down and cast it aside,
prose and poetry divided everywhere
a gift for people to learn and share.

The diversity of peoples

In School of Babel the pupils are away from the affection of their parents and initially feel that they live in a hostile environment where they are fearful and guarded. Drawing them out of themselves and drawing them together is the very formidable task that confronts their teacher for it is not hard to envisage that this group of pupils with all their problems would be practically unteachable especially as part of a large class of 20 to 30 teenagers.

We do not see much of the very gifted teacher who takes these pupils for a whole year as we only hear her voice in the background but as the story of how she interacts with her pupils unfolds our admiration grows. Her greatness is founded on the fact that she can hold the attention of a classroom where all that divides her pupils could so easily make her task impossible.

The Lesson

Her voice expresses a deep sensitivity for all that troubles her pupils as well as for their aspirations. So she is not just encouraging them to speak French but meeting the need every pupil has for understanding, acceptance and affirmation. She knows when to challenge those in her care not to be afraid to articulate their experience. She is a good example of someone who knows where to tap into people’s experience and how hard to push them. She is a great example of a skill needed to be a good teacher that the following story expresses very succinctly.

Knowing where to tap and how hard
Having suffered for some time from the noisiness of their heating system the workers in a factory demanded that something be done about it. So an expert in heating systems was brought along and he made his rounds of the pipes listening to them and tapping them with a steel rod. Within a short while all the noise stopped and the manager asked what was the charge. “Well”, the expert said, ‘for my time I need one hundred euro but for knowing where to tap the pipes and how hard to do so I need nine times that amount.

Through the medium of people’s experience
When I was a teacher and later accompanied people on their inner journey I gradually learned the importance of people’s personal experience and knowing how to encourage them to make use of it. There were always areas of this that were profitable for people to enter and other areas that were not. Knowing where to tap and how hard to tap was very important. This was something the teacher in School of Babel was an expert in as she knew that people are at ease speaking about their own experiences and that using this was the easiest way to learn a new language. She also sensed how wounded some of her pupils were by their past and that it was important for them to voice some of this but that there was much of it that they should not be pushed into expressing.

What underlies good teaching
There is a very moving scene at the end of the film in which the teacher and the pupils are saying farewell to each other. Watching them we realise what a bond has built up between the pupils and between them and the one who not only made them competent French speakers but taught them as well to relate in such a positive way. One Ukrainian girl who early in the film was very silent and guarded gradually turns into a beautifully communicative person. The way she and the other pupils were drawn out of the protective shell they had built around themselves reminded me of the following story that someone gave me a copy of when I began to teach Religious Education.

The Miracle of Love
Just after the second world war there was a young girl called Karen who was sent to a transit camp in Palestine. Like Karen most of the people there had been through the concentration camps in Germany in which they were very differently affected by that experience. All this challenged Karen`s desire to help those around her and so she began to teach young people in the transit camp to read and write.

One day she came across a boy of her own age, called Dov, living by himself. Nobody belonging to him had survived and he had been so badly affected by the experience that he refused to communicate with anyone. He just sat in his little tent all day staring at the wall. At least that is what the few people who had tried to help him saw and so they had stopped trying to reach him.

Not so Karen, she persisted in coming to see him every day in spite of his silence and apathy. She was very ingenious in her efforts to get some response from him until one day she got a flicker of one that she kept working on. Eventually he began to talk to her and to show her his drawings, the memories that imprisoned him in horror.

Through Karen he began to venture out of his tent and gradually to talk with others. Then one day Karen was killed in an accident outside the camp. People rallied around Dov for fear he would again shut himself off. They were amazed, however, to hear him say that he wanted to live in a way that would be worthy of Karen, in a way that she would be proud of.

Love’s magnetic field

The teacher in School of Babel and Karen give us a very tangible impression of how the author of the following passage from the Acts of the Apostles sees the Holy Spirit working in each person’s life.

All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability. Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language. Acts 2:4-8

Sharing the same space

What is happening in this passage is the reversal of what happened in the story of Babel; there is a re-establishment of our ability to communicate and be together. Even though we speak different languages we are enabled, under the influence of the Spirit, to understand one another using the language of love. It is this that the teacher in School of Babel illustrates so powerfully in the way she accepts, affirms and acknowledges the gifts of each of her pupils; she speaks a language they all understand and respond to.

“I will draw all peoples/things to myself”
This power of love to reintegrate what our sinfulness tends to separate is a major theme in the Gospel of John. For him what causes this drawing together of all things again is the power of Jesus “lifted up” on the cross and in the glory of the resurrection; it is the power of what John calls Jesus’ love of us to “the utmost extent”. Jn 13:1 It is as if the love of Jesus creates a magnetic field within which we are all drawn to each other by being so powerfully drawn to him.

And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people/things to myself. Jn 12:32

He did not say this on his own, but being high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus was about to die for the nation, and not for the nation only, but to gather into one the dispersed children of God. Jn 11:52

The Pharisees then said to one another, “You see, you can do nothing. Look, the world has gone after him!” Jn 12:19

A wonderful expression of this magnetic power of Jesus is found in Magdalen’s Song in Jesus Christ Superstar. In the song we can hear how Jesus gradually enraptures her.

I don’t know how to love him,
What to do, how to move him.
I’ve been changed, yes, really changed,
In these past few days.
When I see myself, I seem like someone else.
I don’t know how to take him,

I don’t see why he moves me.
He’s a man, he’s just a man,
And I’ve had so many men before,
In very many ways, he’s just one more.
Should I bring him down,
Should I scream and shout,
Should I speak of love, let my feelings out,
What’s it all about?

Don’t you think its rather funny,
I should be in this position.
I’m the one whose always been,
So calm, so cool, no lover’s fool,
Running every show,
He scares me so.
I never thought I’d come to believe,
What’s it all about.

Yet if he said he loved me,
I’d be lost, I’d be frightened.
I couldn’t cope, just couldn’t cope,
I’d turn my head, I’d back away,
I wouldn’t want to know.
He scares me so, I want him so, I love him so.

“Manners maketh man”
This is my concluding story for 2014 and it is on a theme that is common to many of the films I have been impressed by during the year. This has to do with the style with which the people in the stories I have focused on love and relate and it is an aspect of life that has always interested me. This became more apparent to me during this year when I realised afresh how central the style with which we love and relate is to Vatican 2. There it became an expression of a new way of seeing and valuing ourselves as Christians that was common in the first millennium.

As a result of all this I find myself as Christmas approaches revisiting the poem below by Hilaire Belloc and its belief “that the Grace of God is in Courtesy”. I love the way he finds this borne out in the wonderful reality we celebrate at this time of year and I am grateful for all the ways the people in the stories people tell in films reveal this Grace to me in their very distinctive style of kindness and Courtesy. May the Courtesy of Christ inspire your Christmas and your New Year.

Of Courtesy, it is much less
Than Courage of Heart or Holiness,
Yet in my Walks it seems to me
That the Grace of God is in Courtesy.

On Monks I did in Storrington fall,
They took me straight into their Hall;
I saw Three Pictures on a wall,
And Courtesy was in them all.

The first the Annunciation;
The second the Visitation;
The third the Consolation
Of God that was Our Lady’s Son.

The first was of St. Gabriel;
On Wings a-flame from Heaven he fell;
And as he went upon one knee
He shone with Heavenly Courtesy.

Our Lady out of Nazareth rode –
It was Her month of heavy load;
Yet was her face both great and kind,
For Courtesy was in Her Mind.

The third it was our Little Lord,
Whom all the Kings in arms adored;
He was so small you could not see
His large intent of Courtesy.

Our Lord, that was Our Lady’s Son,
Go bless you, People, one by one;
My Rhyme is written, my work is done.
Hilaire Belloc