Peter’s blog for October

A portrait of greatness where it really resides

This film tells the spectacular story of Christina Noble and how after she had reared her own family she went to Vietnam and provided the joy of a loving environment for 700,000 abandoned children. What makes her story so spectacular is that it paints a portrait of a truly great person whose greatness lay in the way she loved and related with children who were left on life’s rubbish heap. This way she had of relating was very authentic because it was rooted in the way she saw people and their true worth in spite of how they appeared against the background of the dreadful circumstances in which they were forced to live. Another aspect of her greatness was that she could find and bring to light the greatness of those she worked for without a note of condescension. Was this because she had lived in circumstances similar to these children when she was young and learned not just to survive but to surmount them and fulfil her human dream against all the odds? Was it this that enabled her to fulfil the dream of these children she worked with by providing them with an environment in which they found the happiness central to all our dreams? Her great gift was that she could draw the latent goodness and beauty out of those she met. I am sure it was the very human and earthy realism with which she did all this that prompted Deirdre O’Kane, who played the role of Christina in the film, to comment, “She’s like Ireland’s smoking, swearing and singing answer to Mother Teresa”.

A background that highlights this greatness
What makes Christina Noble’s achievement all the more remarkable is that her own background was a very troubled one. Her mother died when she was ten and her father was an alcoholic and completely irresponsible in the way he abandoned his children so that the four of them ended up in orphanages. When Christina left the orphanage at fifteen she got a job in a factory but had to sleep in a wood as she had no other place to go. Shortly after that she was raped by four men and became pregnant. The institution she went to to have the child had her son adopted as she had unknowingly signed an agreement allowing them to do this. She then left Dublin and went to Birmingham to be with a good friend of hers and found work in a fish and chip shop. She married and had three children but her relationship with her husband became so abusive that she fled with the children to London where she reared them on her own.

The dream that changed a million lives
When she had reared her children she went to Vietnam inspired by a dream she had when she lived in Birmingham. At the time of the dream she often witnessed horrific scenes from the war in Vietnam on the television where she worked. She was struck by the sheer destructiveness of the war and by what it was doing to the ordinary people and especially to their children. Among the images that made a deep impression on her was one of a naked child screaming with pain as it ran along a road in an attempt to escape the bombings. As a result of all of this she decided in 1987 to visit Vietnam.

As she wandered around Ho Chi Minh city she became aware of the number of children who were abandoned and homeless. Even though she did not speak their language she noticed how readily they responded to her gestures of concern for them. Then with a great amount of paper work and patient waiting she obtained a three month work permit. What won over those who were adjudicating her case in the end was the verse of an Irish song she asked permission to sing for them. This humour, charm, ingenuity and determination was to characterise all her dealings with the Vietnamese government, with those she sought funding from and it also characterised her relationship with God. The film is unusual in the well earthed sense of the transcendent it openly displays.

Knowing God in wrestling with life

The long endurance that opened her eyes to the Father’s face.
Christina Noble embodies in a very earthy way the fulfilment of our human dream and the deeply religious one she built on this. In her frequent dialogues with God inserted into the film God seems to be the father she never encountered. Hers is a very honest encounter with God and the film acknowledges this several times when she visits a church or a Buddhist shrine to unburden herself to one she confided in and sought guidance from in a most authentic way. At the end of the film just before the credits begin we are given details of all that she has so far achieved. Along with the 700,000 she has helped in the 20 or so clinics she has set up for abandoned children we are told that she still talks to God. At a time when so many areas of life have been emptied of God it is a great tribute to the makers of the film that they have given so much room to this striking aspect of Christina Noble’s life. The following poem of Jones Very opens up many aspects of Christina’s faith that the film can only intimate.

The Created
There is naught for thee by haste to gain;
‘Tis not the swift with me that win the race;
Through long endurance of delaying pain.
Thine opened eye shall see thy Father’s face;
Nor here nor there, where now thy feet would turn,
Thou wilt find him who ever seeks for thee;
But let obedience quench desires that burn,
And where thou art, thy Father too will be.
Behold! as day by day the spirit grows,
Thou see’st by inward light things hid before;
Till what God is, thyself, his image shows;
And thou dost wear the robe that first thou wore,
When bright with radiance from his forming hand,
He saw thee Lord of all his creatures stand.

We are God’s plan for self-revelation

“Give them an impression of who I am”
It is, however, in Christina’s own person that we are given a deep impression of the God she converses with and believes in. She is like the person in the following story who is sent to give people an impression of what the great king is like. There is a wonderful truth in the saying that the Holy Spirit needs bodies to communicate what love is like.

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 poor 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 person whose wisdom he trusted who told him to go back to his farm and just 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. He gradually realised that this was what the great king had sent him to do. This was the way he was sent to give people an impression of what the Great King was like.

Made in the likeness of God

“Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his”
There are people in our own story or in the stories others tell us who enliven us by their acceptance, appreciation and concern. These people, such as our family and friends are significant in the sense that they put words on or define the love that makes and sustains us in life. They give us a very tangible impression of what the one who is love is like.

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

A woman with style
There is something about the style with which people love and relate that if we take the time to notice it is “lovely” or beautiful in the deepest sense. The beauty that we find in nature or in art, though more obvious, cannot compare with this work of art that people, in the style with which they love and relate, are. Christina is portrayed in the film as a woman with style and this was the way she related with everyone but especially with children who were for her real persons to be engaged in real human relationships.

Deirdre O’Kane who played the part of Christina in the film says of her, “She is the most incredible human being I have ever met. I want the film to serve her properly… playing her is the biggest thing I’ve done in my career – by a mile,”. With her unfailing humour, charm, enthusiasm, determination, ingenuity and generosity Christina is a woman of stunning beauty, a wonderful human being who flowered amid so much squalor. She is a powerful expression of the reality that it is amid life’s limitations and mistakes that our dreams for ourselves and others, somehow keep emerging. Amid all the negativity that comes at us there are people like our parents, lovers and friends who are living proof that “flowers still grow there” amid the mess that life often seems to be.

Flowers Still Grow
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;
It’s too deep to dig for and your arms too weak.
Don’t you worry, my son, about people hating,
Love is still the lord, love is still lord.
St Louis Jesuits CD – Wood Hath Hope

When I read a description of how the film came to be made I found another story that proved to me that flowers still grow there. It is the story of how Deirdre O”Kane and her husband Stephen Bradley brought this beautiful film to be. In order to buy the rights to Christina Noble’s two books, Bridge Across My Sorrows and Mama Tina they sold their home in Dublin and then over a six year period invested a huge amount of their time, energy and resources in coming to know Christina, writing the script and then undertaking the awesome task of directing the film as well as promoting it for a world-wide audience.

Go along and see their work of art; I am sure you will be as gripped as I was by its great beauty.