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