Peters blog for March

The film called Her tells the story of Theodore whose work consists in composing letters that articulate emotions people are only vaguely conscious of and are incapable of expressing. He fosters communication among people who are unable to converse at much depth though they have all the technology to do so. Or maybe, it is because the facility for instant communication cannot carry the weight of much more than the superficial.

Loneliness and the loss of intimacy
As the film begins, it is over a year since Theodore’s marriage has broken down and he is in the final stages of legalising his divorce. He is lonely and depressed even though he has a well paid job that he enjoys, a beautiful apartment and lives in the perpetually soothing atmosphere of a Los Angeles in which everyone seems serene in their non-stop communications with people other than those they are currently around. His friends try to rescue him from his depression by organising dates with women whom they think might ignite the fire that has gone out in his life. These moments of intensity are, however, not what Theodore is in need of at this time.

 

Enter Samantha
What he does unknowingly need emerges in a most unexpected way when he instals a new operating system in his computer. As he is setting it up, it asks him a few intimate questions about his personal life, such as, “How did you relate with your mother when you were a child?” He hardly has time to answer these questions before the system has worked out where he is in his life and where he needs to move next. A woman who calls herself Samantha begins to communicate with him in a voice full of empathy and concern.

As Theodore’s job requires that he be at home with how people feel and how they might give expression to their emotions, he welcomes Samantha’s interest in his life and her ability to listen and respond to his various thoughts, emotions and moods. She has the capacity to take him where he is and through her appreciation and concern to give him the energy to move out of the numbed state he has been living in of late. Theodore and Samantha can communicate whenever they wish with the help of an earpiece and a very smart messaging service that accompanies their conversations with helpful visuals.

Where Samantha wants to take him
Under the influence of Samantha, who plays the role of personal assistant and therapist, lover and friend, Theodore’s mood changes from sadness and depression to the one of joy and enthusiasm he felt when he first married. She has the facility to introduce him to a level of relating he is ready for, to make a transition from a level of relating that relies too heavily on the sexual and emotional elements of a relationship to one where people share in a quieter and deeper way. It is more like the way friends rather than lovers relate as it is not possessive and can make room for the other having a variety of friends who far from diminishing the basic friendship can enrich it. So when Samantha reveals that she has many other people besides Theodore that she is intimate with, he is initially shocked but gradually he has the resources to accept this as part of the kind of relationship that he is ripe for. Samantha has taught him how to relate in a more mature way with the result that when, close to the end of the film, she tells him she must leave the relationship he realises he must now learn how to apply the rules of this new way of loving and relating she has introduced him to.

Lead kindly light

Lead, kindly Light, amid th’encircling gloom, lead Thou me on!
The night is dark, and I am far from home; lead Thou me on!
Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see
The distant scene; one step enough for me.

 I was not ever thus, nor prayed that Thou shouldst lead me on;
loved to choose and see my path; but now lead Thou me on!
I loved the garish day, and, spite of fears,
Pride ruled my will. Remember not past years!

So long Thy power hath blest me, sure it still will lead me on.
O’er moor and fen, o’er crag and torrent, till the night is gone,
And with the morn those angel faces smile, which I
Have loved long since, and lost awhile!

Meantime, along the narrow rugged path, Thyself hast trod,
Lead, Savior, lead me home in childlike faith, home to my God.
To rest forever after earthly strife
In the calm light of everlasting life.
John Henry Newman

Finding fulfilment in friendship
The film portrays for us a major shift in the way we relate if we are to answer the call of passionate love to find fulfilment in friendship. When we fall in love we are urged to move out of our adolescent tendency to be self-centred and to centre our whole person, body and soul, heart and mind on the person with whom we fall in love. As the second last of a family of ten I never cease to be amazed at how falling in love transformed my brothers and sisters from touchy adolescents into adults whom it was a joy to be with. Surely passionate love is life’s great catalyst in its power to transform us.

The lesser gods are decorous
And with a meek petition wait;
But love comes, fixing his own hour,
And hammers at the gate.

The most impermanent of loves
When C S Lewis comes to deal with passionate love in his book Four Loves he speaks of it as the most fragile or impermanent of loves. People fall out of love just as easily as they fall in love when, for example, differences emerge and they are invited to change in order to live together in harmony. This invitation often comes when there are rows, differences or difficulties and they are confronted with the physical and emotional distance between them these cause. If their experience of these differences is allowed to persist and become habitual, it causes a crisis as they question their compatibility. Like all crises their sense of dissatisfaction with each other can become an invitation as well as an obvious frustration. The hidden invitation their unpleasant situation offers is that they explore the deeper levels at which they might love and relate.

How to make love last
According to the Great Commandment or the one that governs all the ways we love and relate, we are invited to get our whole person or our “whole heart, soul, mind and strength” involved in the way we do so. This implies that we love and relate at four levels: with our body and its senses, with our heart and its feelings, with our soul’s intuitive glimpses of the other’s goodness and beauty and with the convictions our mind has come to about what is true, good and beautiful about the one we love. Learning to love and relate at these four levels and to attain a healthy balance between them is a truly beautiful art form. It is seldom recognised as such though for Jesus it is where we find the fullness of life. (Lk 10:25-28)

The levels that come into play immediately when we fall in love are the first two as we readily become physically and emotionally involved. When we experience difficulties in our relationships, we are invited to accept each other’s weakness and waywardness so that we do not become fixated by these and taken down into feelings of dissatisfaction that can make the relationship too difficult to maintain. If, however, we learn to accept the other’s limitations just as we ask him or her to accept ours we become free to take our relationship onto a new level as we learn to appreciate the other’s gifts of loving and relating that attracted us when we first fell in love. There is a lot of hard work involved if we are to lay the foundations of relating with our whole soul and mind as well as with our whole body and heart but it is where the happiness we are made for is to be found. (Jn 15:9-11)

The road into friendship passionate love invites us to take
When Theodore sits with his friend Amy in the closing scene of the film they have both been chastened by the experience of separation and divorce. We wonder will they cling to each other to avoid the pain of their loss of intimacy and its consequent loneliness or will they follow the path Samantha groomed Theodore to take. This is the road into friendship that passionate love challenges them to take.

In conclusion I would like to reflect briefly on the nature of the friendship that Theodore is led into by Samantha. It is a kind of love and way of relating that C S Lewis in his book referred to above says is not well defined in people’s minds today; he would hold that in fact it is not seen as a love at all by most people. This contrasts with the notion antiquity had of it where it was seen as the “most fully human of all loves; the crown of life and the school of virtue”.

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 club-able 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)

The true nature of friendship
Where previous generations had seen Christianity in the context of the passionate love portrayed in the Song of Song, Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century saw it in terms of friendship. He based most of what he had to say about this friendship on the following words of Jesus, “I have called you friends for I have shared with you everything I have heard from the Father.” For Thomas friendship was the supreme way of loving and relating; he would even say that “love is friendship”. In working out his notion of friendship he was very taken by Aristotle’s ideas and boiled these down to the following three: Firstly, friendship was about what Thomas called ‘benevolence’ which for me is something like the affection that our parents gave us a taste for when we were children. It is a love that is personal or a one to one kind of love that accepts limitations, appreciates what is good and is concerned about all we yet might be. Secondly, Thomas believed that this benevolence had to be mutual or not a one way street in that both friends had to accept, appreciate and care for each other. Thirdly, he believed that friendship is maintained by conversation in which friends listen and respond to each other. Underlying this conversation between friends is the experience of acceptance, appreciation and concern that is implicit in all they do and say.

Underlying all that we share
Is a love that chooses
And calls by name.
A love sensitive and respectful
Accepting of each others weakness
And quietly affirming.
It is a brave one who initiates
Such friendship and braver still
Who maintains it.

Friends sit side by side gazing at a vision
When at the end of Her we see Theodore and Amy sitting together looking out at the sunset in a good old style happy ending to the film, we may feel it is too neat or trite. However, the body language says something more subtle as Theodore turns away from the embrace and the kiss that Amy felt would relieve their pain. In two very symbolic scenes in the film Theodore has already turned away from offers of a quick fix to his loss of intimacy and to his consequent loneliness. As the two sit side by side looking at the glorious sunset we find an echo of C S Lewis’s image of lovers sitting face to face but friends sitting side by side looking out at a common vision.

Lovers seek for privacy. Friends find this solitude about them, this barrier between them and the herd, whether they want it or not … Friends will still be doing something together, but something more inward, less widely shared, less easily defined; still hunters but of some immaterial quarry; still collaborating, but in some work the world does not, or not yet, take account of; still travelling companions, but on a different kind of journey, Hence we picture lovers face to face but friends side by side, their eyes look ahead. (Four Loves, C S Lewis)

The vision Theodore sees
We are not sure what Amy sees but we are more certain that what Theodore sees is the vision of himself that Samantha has given him. Whatever she was, whether muse or the inner voice of his dream of a love and a relationship that would engage his whole person or whether she was the feminine side of himself that seeks to emerge in the second half of his life, we are not sure. What we are sure of is that Samantha was a good friend in that she gave Theodore a vision of himself which he sees in the way she relates with him. He sees it in the balance between the way she accepts him where he is, appreciates what he has made of his life and is concerned that he would realise his dream. It is now up to him to appropriate this vision and to inspire it in those he befriends.

Friendship
I love you not only for what you are,
but for what I am when I am with you.
I love you not only for what you have made
of yourself, but for what you are making of me.
I love you because you have done more than
any creed could have done to make me good,
and more than any fate could have done to make me happy.
You have done it without a touch,
without a word, without a sign.
You have done it by being yourself. Perhaps it is
what being a friend means, after all.
Author unknown

If you are interested in the notion of friendship as the sum and climax of all the loves, there are six chapters on it in my book A World Alight With Splendour. There is a chapter on the history of friendship, one on its three elements, a chapter on each of these three elements and one on the bond or union friendship creates between people.