PETER’S BLOG FOR AUGUST
The film chronicles 12 years of the life of a boy called Mason and how during each of these he faces the challenge of growing up. What we see happening to him during these vital years is a thought-provoking account of a person’s journey from the simplicity of childhood to the more self-reflective and complex nature of his life on the threshold of adulthood. Boyhood is, however, equally insightful about the changing nature of all our relationships each of which is explored with the same attention to detail about what happens as we grow up. It is an interesting fact that Richard Linklater the director of this film also made the three films, Before Sunrise, Before Sunset and Before Midnight which are about the growth of two young people over a period of 20 years.
A total immersion
While the changing face of society that occurs around the main characters form the background of the story, the primary focus is always on the people themselves and the consistent way their personal strengths and foibles are portrayed. While other directors may appear to be looking at their characters from the outside, the director of this film seems to be sharing in their hopes and dreams and allowing us to do the same. It is rare that a film invites us to share so intimately these early years of our own journey and the wealth of feeling we associate with them as the story the film tells unfolds.
Boyhood puts us in touch with the simple truth that our early years while in progress seem like an aeon, but to parents they flash past in a dreamlike instant. As adults our childhood years change from a plodding narrative into a swirling constellation of remembered and half-remembered moments, which drift in and out of reach. It is, therefore, with a sense of wonder that we grasp the obvious fact that what Linklater so perceptively describes could be easily applied to every one of us. Children and adults are not separate species as we all share the one dream that is innate to all.
The persistent dream
It is a dream that confronts us as it does Mason with a momentous choice between two cultures or ways of seeing life and what is important in it. The two are bidding for our allegiance and each proposes its own distinctive vision, value system and lifestyle. One culture makes a priority of material things, of what we have and what we do, of careers and meeting the expectations of a consumer culture. This is the dominant view of life today and since it has little time for the inner, spiritual world of our human dream, it leaves a vacuum at the heart of society. The alternative view of life and one Mason identifies with makes a priority of a dream that is innate to us as human beings, a dream of love and the network of relationships it leads us into as well as the happiness we hope to find in these.
The two ways that beckon us
Since the first of these two ways of viewing life and what is of value is firmly established, to choose the second one as Mason tends to do involves us in a constant struggle. There is a lot of pressure put on Mason to meet the expectations of his parents, his teachers and of his peers to be successful at his studies and at sport. As a young boy he conforms to these pressures but in his teens other concerns besides popularity and academic success begin to assert themselves. This leads to feelings of not being normal and of disappointing his mother to whom he remains deeply attached. Mason is by nature a dreamer and so he experiences the natural tendency of youth to become independent more than most; he tends to live more and more outside the perimeter fence. He feels the need to begin to take responsibility for his own life even though following his dream in this way will involve not meeting many of the expectations of his parents and peers.
Taking the road less travelled
There is a wonderful depiction of this dilemma that faces us all throughout life in a scene from the film, Dead Poets Society. The film takes place in a very prestigious New England school whose ideals centre on academic excellence and on preparing its pupils for successful careers in the leading professions. Mr Keating is a teacher in this school and as part of one of his classes he takes his pupils out into the quad. There he asks three of them to walk around in front of the rest of the class. They soon fall into line and march to the beat that the rest of the class set for them. After a short while Mr Keating asks them to reflect on what has happened and then gives his own reflection on it:
“What you have seen illustrates our need for conformity and the difficulty of maintaining our own beliefs in the face of others. Now we have all a great need of acceptance. But you must trust that your own beliefs are unique, your own, even though the others may think them odd or unpopular, even though the herd may go, “That’s bad”. Robert Frost said, “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood and I, I took the one less travelled by and that has made all the difference.”
Striking the right balance
The ongoing struggle in each of us to maintain a balance between these two influences is powerfully depicted by Stephen Covey in his book 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. In the following quotation from it he describes very insightfully our struggle to find a balance between what is ‘urgent’ and what is ‘important’.
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.
But truly effective people in all walks of life focus on the important rather than on the merely urgent. Research shows that worldwide, the most successful executives focus on importance, and less effective executives focus on urgency. Sometimes the urgent is also important, but much of the time it is not.
Clearly, to focus on what is truly important is far more effective than a focus on what is merely urgent. It’s true in all walks of life – including the family. Of course, parents are going to have to deal with crises and with putting out fires that are both important and urgent. But when they proactively choose to spend more time on things that are truly important but not necessarily urgent, it reduces the crises and the fires.
The healthy mix of inner and outer authority
There is a delicate balance that must be maintained between these two influences on our lives or between an outer and an inner authority both of which we are invited to listen to. Mason had difficulty finding this balance because his father left home before he was six and when he returned periodically to visit Mason and his sister we realise that he is not a mature person and had not the wisdom to be a good father figure for his son.. When his mother married again, his step father turned out to be extremely autocratic and sought to control every aspect of Mason’s life. Her third partner was little better and was so intent on getting Mason to meet his standards that he had little sensitivity or sympathy for where Mason was. Compensating for these extremes of the exercise of authority by three men was his mother. She struggled to provide him with the understanding and concern as well as the challenge he needed to leave home and to take responsibility for his own life. She also had to prepare for the day she would be asked to show her love by letting him go and herself for the emptiness that would ensue.
In a wonderful poem by Cecil Day Lewis we find an echo of the inner and outer voices in ourselves and an insightful description of what was going on in Mason’s life.
Walking Away
It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day –
A sunny day with leaves just turning,
The touch-lines new-ruled – since I watched you play
Your first game of football, then, like a satellite
Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away
Behind a scatter of boys. I can see
You walking away from me towards the school
With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free
Into a wilderness, the gait of one
Who finds no path where the path should be.
That hesitant figure, eddying away
Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,
Has something I never quite grasp to convey
About nature’s give-and-take – the small, the scorching
Ordeals which fire one’s irresolute clay.
I have had worse partings, but none that so
Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly
Saying what God alone could perfectly show –
How selfhood begins with a walking away.
And love is proved in the letting go.
The poem is about something Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian notices about the film when he says,
But the point is that all parents are estranged, continually and suddenly waking up to how their children are growing, progressively assuming the separateness and privacy of adulthood. Part of this film’s triumph is how it depicts the enigma of what Mason is thinking and feeling.
Listening to the still small voice
The cultural atmosphere in which we live today leaves little room for us to listen to the inner voice that seeks to keep us in touch with what is important and not just urgent. This is the voice of the dream that is innate to each of us and that never ceases to influence us even though due to our neglect it tends to become less audible.
It is to this dream built into us at our making that God wants to speak. He does this initially through Moses with whom he speaks in a most intimate way or “face to face as a person speaks to a friend”. (Ex 33:11) Then God reveals to the prophet Jeremiah that he wishes to speak to each person in this intimate way or to make himself known to “the least no less than to the greatest”. (Jer 31:34). What God wants to reveal to us is his love and the intimate relationship he wants to share with us, a relationship that is symbolised by the celebration of life a marriage is.
And I will betroth you to me for ever; I will betroth you to me in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love, and in mercy. I will betroth you to me in faithfulness; and you shall know the Lord.(Hos 2:14, 19-20)
It is to the voice of this dream God has for us that Jesus invites us to listen in, for example, the parable of the sower. In this story he asks each of us to consider the puzzling reality that when he unfolds God’s dream for us in what he calls “the word of God” we are in various ways unwilling or reluctant to listen to him.
The seed is the word of God. The ones along the path are those who have heard; then the devil comes and takes away the word from their hearts, that they may not believe and be saved. And the ones on the rock are those who, when they hear the word, receive it with joy; but these have no root, they believe for a while and in time of temptation fall away. And as for what fell among the thorns, they are those 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. And as for that in the good soil, they are those who, hearing the word, hold it fast in an honest and good heart, and bring forth fruit with patience. (Lk 8:11-15)