Still Digging

I had the opportunity on Wednesday night to see The Great Escape on the big screen.  And, as has happened many times before, Steve McQueen and his baseball glove proved to be exactly the reminder I needed.

Because you can get out of the prison camp (in spite of the fact that the tunnel is thirty feet short of the trees), and you can steal a motorcycle, and you can get so close to freedom that you're arrested tangled in the barbed wire at the Swiss border, and you can be brought back to the camp only to learn that fifty of your friends - men with whom you have worked, and suffered, and drunk moonshine - have been murdered by the Gestapo, and you're facing a looong time in the cooler, but darn it...

You still have your baseball:

And the tunneling will start anew.

When Faith is Not the Answer

Or: We Keep Asking the Wrong Questions

Before I begin, let me be clear: I am not truly suggesting that faith is not the answer.  Faith is always the answer - or, more precisely, God is the answer.  But this is a case where precise theological truth and common usage are not only different, but often opposed.  Case in point: the film adaptation of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

A couple of years ago, I sat in a theater, trying to beat down my Inner Critic, who is nearly always convinced that she could have adapted this thing better herself.  I give her free rein after the movie, but I generally figure that the writer who actually did the work gets a chance to make his case first.  So when the Dawn Treader writers felt it necessary to add a mysterious and sinister green mist that swallows people up, I tried to play along.  The novel is episodic, and while it has a unifying quest, there's really no sense of urgency, and urgency is something you want on screen.  The intent was not wrong, so I accepted the mist as a placeholder, confident that Inner Critic could find something better later.

And then we got the scene where the cute little girl, whose father has been taken by the mist and who has stowed away on the Dawn Treader to look for him, confides her fears to Lucy.  And Lucy sympathizes, and then assures her that her father will be all right: she just has to "have faith."

At that moment, Inner Critic gave the movie an ultimatum: Her father had better be dead.  (Inner Critic speaks in italics so as not to disturb her fellow audience members.)

He wasn't, of course, and there was a sentimental, mist-defeating denoument.  But why was Inner Critic so keen to orphan a harmless movie character?

Because I desperately wanted, for once, to see a faith-themed movie that was truly brave.  To see a movie that had the courage to say no, faith does not "fix things."  Faith does not guarantee a happy ending.  We sometimes have this idea that if we just believe in God, all will be sunshine and roses, when in truth, we're more likely to wind up with a crown of thorns.

The sunshine-and-roses approach is, first of all, simply not true.  I am confident that I have no need to give examples.

Second, it is - or quickly becomes - selfish.  I know someone who is convinced that God's will for her is whatever will give her pleasure in that moment, and for whom "God will take care of me" means that He will rescue her from the consequences of bad decisions and poor planning.

Third, and most insidiously, this attitude can become self-idolatry.  "I am so special that obviously God wants me to be happy."  And if that one is easy to dismiss, try this one: "I am so special that obviously God wants me to succeed."

This last is, I think, the Catholic artist's great temptation, and there is just enough truth in it to make it really dangerous.  We see that the world sorely needs Christ's beauty - and it does.  We believe that talent is indicative of a calling - and it is.  So we abandon ourselves to Christ to be used as His instruments - and we should.  But unless we are very careful, we start to consider ourselves invincible: "GOD wants me to do something."  Yes, He does.  But maybe sometimes - not necessarily all the time, by any means, and we'll never know until we try, but sometimes - what He wants us to do is fail.

I recently read something that makes this point exceptionally well.  It's called Surfing With Mel, and it's… I'll let the subtitle explain:

A Story in Script Form by

Matthew Lickona

based upon

A Story in Epistolatory Form by

Joe Eszterhas

regarding

A Failed Film Project by

Mel Gibson

based upon

The Book of Maccabees by

God

(Please be aware: The language is what you would expect in a script about Mel Gibson and Joe Eszterhas.  If the preceding sentence didn't convey what you should expect, you may not be the target audience.)

There is no happy ending here.  There is the ugliness of sin, and a faith that brings no joy.  Faith here is not something that fixes problems, but something that cannot be escaped.

To return to theology, of course faith promises a happy ending.  In eternity.  But in a fallen world, let us not "have faith" because of what it will bring us.  Let us have faith because our faith is true.