My new church is . . . complicated. It will be awhile before I am able to sort out just what it is that I'm called to do there. But . . . I am doing it, whatever it is, from my own home base, which means that last night I got to see Philomena (inCREDible movie) with friends, tonight I was able to go to a holiday event in my church community without its requiring an overnight away from home (and to hear one of the local pastors sing ~ she is also incredible), and tomorrow night, a SATURDAY night, I can go out to dinner with family and to Wicked with my daughter (third time for us). It's a remarkable thing to live at home and spend three nights in a row out with family and friends.
I don't, actually, read or view mysteries on a regular basis. Almost never, in fact.
The fact that I've just finished reading one, am almost through a second, and am even watching a third on television tells you that life is pressing in on me. Two many decisions hanging in the summer wind, too many moments in which I'm thinking, "Just blew that one," and too much clutter in my household. My response: Burrow in with something absorbing but entirely nondemanding. I don't even attempt to keep track of most of the characters beyond the main protagonists. Here's what I've been up to:
The Fallen Angel by Daniel Silva. Gabriel Allon, brilliant restoration artist, always up to his neck in religious Renaissance paintings and, by the way, also master Israeli spy and assassin, confidant of popes and secular government officials, happily married man whose psyche is marred by the murders (car bomb) of his first wife and son, is the hero of a series of Silva novels. Since his work in both the artistic and surveillance arenas so often takes him to the Vatican, other main characters often include devastatingly handsome priests with tortured pasts and lovers with whom they are entangled for life, and Italian women of astonishing beauty and professional acumen, often the former lovers of said priests. In this particular novel, the lady in question is married to the mastermind of a Vatican banking scandal (sound familiar?) unraveling at the hands of the priest hero with the assistance of his friend Allon. These novels are great fun ~ although, having heard Daniel Silva interviewed in NPR a couple of weeks ago, I decided to purchase his new one and discovered that I can only take so much Gabriel Allon at a time. Therefore, I'm now reading . . .
Faye Kellerman's Hangman. In Kellerman's series, Peter Decker is the Los Angeles homicide detective and Rina Lazarus is his beautiful Orthodox Jewish wife. I'd long since forgotten how the two of them got together ~ so I've just looked it up. There've been nineteen novels in the series, and the couple met in the first, when Decker was investigating a rape in a yeshiva community where Rina, a widowed mother, ran the mikvah. The Ritual Bath gives her an opportunity to explain her religious customs and the two of them a window of time in which to fall madly in love. Naturally, I enjoy the combination of religion, crime, and family as I do in the Silva novels. Here, the added bonus is that, having spent those six years teaching in an Orthodox school, the small details of Jewish life jump out at me and ring entirely true, and having a complicated family of origin of my own, the Decker-Lazarus combination of adults and children is intriguing.
Finally, my son Matt and I have become obsessed with the third season of The Killing, an AMC drama. The first two seasons focused on the murder of one teenaged girl in Seattle, reaching an entirely unsatisfactory conclusion. I swore that I would not get involved again ~ this year's combination of the gray and rain of Seattle with the lives of homeless teenagers being picked off one-by-one at the hands of a serial killer, and Detective Sarah Linden's unsuccessful, as of last Sunday, attempt to save the life of the man condemned to death as the result of a previous investigation of hers, was more than I wanted to stomach. However . . . my son was watching and I found myself drawn in the again, by the utter brokenness of both Sarah and her partner Stephen Holder, and by their intertwined search for redemption as they seek to carve a modicum of justice out of impossibly brutal situations. So far, with one episode left, Sarah is in some ways responsible for the execution of a man innocent of at least the particular crime for which he dies, and Holder for the death of a homeless girl ~ and it is apparent that the man finally in custody, to the relief of the police department and the entire city of Seattle, is not, in fact, the killer.
All stories of mayhem and murder, all absorbing, and The Killing beautifully filmed and acted. If you need a break from the intensity of your own life, immerse yourself in someone else's!
My first exposure to Orthodox Judaism looked something like that pictured above. As a newly-minted lawyer in my mid-twenties, I went to work in the litigation department of a primarily Jewish law firm. My primary mentor, one of the most Orthodox men in the practice, tried to teach me something about his religion and culture as well as a little about trying cases. In the form of all good teachers, he started with literature, giving me Herman Wouk's Winds of War trilogy to read. He also invited me to his fifth child's bris, held in his family's beautiful suburban home. I had never before been to an event at which only men were actors and women gathered in another room, craning necks and turning heads to see and listen.
Later, I would have a good deal more interaction with the Orthodox, teaching in one of their schools for six years. I came to admire their fidelity to their faith and to their millennia of culture, even as I questioned the Zionism that motivated much of their lives. Certainly my own faith was much enhanced by my increasing familiarity with the rabbinic Judaism which followed closely upon the years following the life of Jesus and the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE.
The movie Fill the Void brought that world back in a flash, The story: an ultra-Orthdox family in Tel Aviv awaits the birth of the first grandchild and the likely engagement of the second daughter. The first daughter dies in childbirth and, as the initial year afterward passes and it becomes apparent that her husband may marry a young widow in Belgium and take the baby with him, the mother launches an effort to see him married to the younger daughter.
The world is one that many of us would find bewildering: the segregation of women and men; the emphasis on marriage as a woman's destiny; the insularity of the community in which the manifest power is brokered entirely by men, the latent by women. And yet it is also a community in which deep love and respect mark relationships between the genders and among women and among men, in which we see a rabbi who addresses concerns both highly theological and utterly practical, and in which connection with the God of the Universe is ever present and always acknowledged.
The big questions are, of course, the same in every community the world over: Love. Loss. Fidelity. Identity. Community. Disappointment. Hope. We often note that God is present in the particulars of everyday life, and this movie portrays that reality with beauty and sensitivity.
A couple of nights ago, The Lovely Daughter and I went to see The Way. Here's a brief promotional summary from the film's website:
"The Way" is a powerful and inspirational story about family, friends, and the challenges we face while navigating this ever-changing and complicated world. Martin Sheen plays Tom, an American doctor who comes to St. Jean Pied de Port, France to collect the remains of his adult son (played by Emilio Estevez [Martin Sheen's son and the movie's director]), killed in the Pyrenees in a storm while walking the Camino de Santiago, also known as The Way of Saint James. Rather than return home, Tom decides to embark on the historical pilgrimage to honor his son's desire to finish the journey. What Tom doesn't plan on is the profound impact the journey will have on him and his "California Bubble Life."
I've always felt an attraction to Long Walks - the Appalachian Trail, the Mountains-to-Sea Trail, and yes, the Camino ~ and maybe someday I'll even make one of them ~ and so I was initially drawn to the film for that reason. Also, I know Martin Sheen to be a devout Catholic (more on that here), so I thought that the religious dimension of the walk would be dealt with seriously. Insofar as the son's death ~ I didn't know about that, that it was the basis for the plot line, until a couple of hours before we left the house, and it gave me pause. "Oh, let's give it a try," I concluded.
As a mother who has carried and dispersed her son's ashes hither and yon, there were many scenes in the film that might have been taken from my own life. The ordinary day. The phone call. The police officer. The crematorium. The container of remains. The first time that my eyes welled up with tears came when the French police captain, telling Martin Sheen "Buen Camino" and sending him on his way, says "I too have lost a child." That current of understanding between parents; that need to say no more.
I thought that the movie was a bit slow and that the four main characters, and some of the supporting characters as well, were somewhat one dimensional. (Although, now that I think about it, there's something Canterbury Tales-esque about the entire scencario.) But the landscapes were breathtaking and the travelogue aspect seems to have captured what I have read of the inconveniences and discomforts of the Camino pilgrimage. And the scene of the mass in the Cathedral of St. James de Santiago - SPECTACULAR:
(The above is from youtube, not from the film. You should turn off the sound after the first few moments of music; it captures much more in the way of tourista commentary than the sacredness of the scene.)
Interestingly, and unexpectedly, this film has stayed with me. I have been mulling it over, trying to ascertain what was so powerful for me. Not the storyline, not the characterizations, not even the remarkable spread of countryside.
Two small scenes.
One is the first of many in which Tom removes some of his son's ashes from the plastic bag in which they are contained to scatter them near the spot at which his son died. I have been thinking a great deal lately, for obvious reasons, about nursing my babies all those years ago, memories now blending with those of removing precious ashes from ordinary containers in order to make sacramental connections with land and water. Last week, I put some ashes in a locket so that I could wear them next to my skin as I was ordained to ministry.
I suppose that the scene has stayed with me because I did not know, until three years ago, what it would be, to feel the ashes of your child in your hand.
In the other, the main characters are relaxing at a hostel. The day is drenched in sunlight, and the only woman among them sits in a window, relaxing with her everpresent cigarette.
There is a part of me, even after all that has happened, that remains capable of sitting in a window frame in the sunlight, being and present.
The Lovely Daughter is ready to hop on a plane to Spain. I guess maybe I am, too.
**********
(Here's another review, if you prefer something less personal.)
It was with great anticipation that I went to see this movie last night. I'd only read one review, but Jim Martin, S.J. is one of my favorite writers on the intersection of religion and contemporary culture, and I trusted his recommendation. More than a recommendation; his reflection on the film as "like living inside a prayer" was an invitation to a vision of life.
Only a few minutes in and I was sitting in a state of horrified shock, wondering why he hadn't mentioned that a young adult son dies in the first few minutes. And that it's a death about which we learn as his mother learns about it ~ alone, opening a telegram, looking about for a few stunned moments before the animal sound of a sob breaks out of her body.
BTDT.
(And later (or earlier, actually, in chronology, although not in the film itself), there is another death, when another young boy drowns, despite the father's efforts to revive him and the wails of that boy's mother in the background.)
A few more minutes and I leaned over to my surviving son and asked whether this was too hard to watch. "No -- but it might be too boring," he responded.
He hated it, seeing in it an unsatisfactory imitation of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
I saw some other things. Yes, the coming-of-age aspect of the narrative: the three boys growing up in Waco in the 1950s; the gently passionate mother; the father, who alternates affection with harshness, driven by his genuine love for his boys and his music and by his desire to prepare his sons for lives that supersede the disappointment he has found in his.
I saw also the endless and often challenging symbolism: the wide branches of the tree overhead, the stairs and ladders and windows and doors, the mother's frequent baptisms of her legs and feet in water from hoses and sprinklers, the water - everywhere, the skyscrapers that ambiguously soar and yet constrain the adult life of one of the surviving sons. I'm sure that there is something more akin to a master's thesis than to a blog post in all of that.
But mostly, I heard the questions, some the mother's and some her grown son's. The questions which haunt bereaved parents and siblings and young friends (all of which I am), whether we are pacing through our own backyard woods or through our imagined vision of the exploding fire and water through which the universe came into being, trying to understand life and death as we experience them in our particular tragedies in relation to the God who laid the foundations of the universe:
Who are you?
Who are we to you?
Where were you?
You let a boy die.
You let anything happen.
Why should we be good, if you aren't?
I wonder if the film seems different to those who do not live these questions every day with the intensity of a mother whose son God let die.
I find that I have no idea at all whether I would recommend it.
I have no idea what happened to my original post, but I've reconstructed it as best I can:
Last night, for reasons not entirely clear to me, my nonreligious family agreed to accompany me to Of Gods and Men for its first screening here. From my point of view, Good Friday was an auspicious day on which to see the film for the first time
It's been thoroughly reviewed in many venues, including The New York Times, here, so I'll just offer a few personal observations.
At dinner afterward, I mentioned that monks in the Benedictine tradition make vows of stability, committing themselves to a lifetime in one place, unless asked by a superior to make a move. "Oh!" everyone exclaimed, wishing they had known that at the outset. They would have better understood what was at stake in the abbot's abrupt and unilateral decision that they should stay where they were, continuing to serve the impoverished Algerian community in which their monastery was located, and the anguish that accompanied their subsequent communal discernment as to what steps to take in the face of increasing danger.
"Isn't that why you make vows?" asked Gregarious Son. "So that in a time of crisis, the decision has been made?"
I was quite taken with the abbot as a model of the reconciling behavior to which we are called; my children, with what they saw as his fascination with other religions. He was fluent in Arabic, quoted the Qur'an to the radicals who burst into the monastery late on Christmas, and eagerly opened the package containing a copy of Chaim Potok's novel, The Chosen. The monks joined their neighbors for a family celebration at which a lengthy passage of the Qur'an was recited, and worked with and cared for them with an easy camaraderie. Perhaps reconciliation and fascination are two sides of the same coin: an attentiveness to the many ways in which God labors among us all.
I have been thinking, since somewhere in the middle of the film, about what the Incarnation means, and about our own task of embodying God's presence in the world. Many years ago, a then-young pastor asked me, "What does it mean that we are to pray without ceasing?" As if I should have known.
But now I think it means that, to the extent that we immerse ourselves in sustained and attentive prayer (as monks do at regular, scheduled times throughout the day and night), so we become in our ordinary lives, conscious or not, thoughtful or blundering, expressions of God's intention for goodness and love among us all.
I would like to be as beautiful and tall and slim as Julia Roberts. I would like to have that long hair of hers with its brilliant highlights. I would like to have the same flowing and varied wardrobe that she managed to jam into her duffle bag so that I, too, could wear a different outfit each day for a year and look elegant and exotic every moment.
I would like to be as beautiful as Elizabeth Gilbert. I would like to have had a successful career as a travel writer so that I would have years of experience in negotiating new environments. I would like to have someone hand me a $200,000 advance so that I could make use of the aforesaid experience by traveling the world for a year, and I would like said travels to result in a bestseller of epic proportions.
I would like to sit in a lotus position and meditate on my deck in Bali.
And I would like for everyone to believe that, as a consequence of all of the above, I am a deeply spiritual person, full of the wisdom gleaned from learning (preferably on Bali, but India will do) that "God is in me." Or something like that.
But . . . alas.
I am short and round, my clothes come from local and chain stores and are decidedly humdrum, I am stymied in much of my work, and I pray erratically and ineffectively in various locales in the middle of North America.
I am, in fact, on a Great Spiritual Journey, as are we all. But it takes place mostly in my home and neighborhood, and is not going so well. I look at my beautiful and gifted friends with whom I went to the movies and I think, I cannot even manage the most basic of conversations in the lobby of a theatre.
I was intolerably bored by the movie, which did not help my conversational efforts. I won't even say what I think of the book.
**********
A couple of weeks ago, my son and I went to see Winter's Bone. A magnificently filmed movie, limited entirely in its geography to the Ozarks and in its characters to a small interrelated group of folks largely doomed by poverty and drugs, it follows the story of a young woman's efforts to seek justice in the face of intractable kin loyalties and to hold together the little family for which she is entirely responsible in the aftermath of her father's disappearance.
Winter's Bone is the story Elizabeth Gilbert wishes, or perhaps believes, she has lived. A story of unflinching courage and willingness to tackle impossible odds. A journey of love and generosity reflected in determined sacrifice and tenacity.
I was mesmerized.
Never mind what I said about Elizabeth Gilbert and Julia Roberts. What I want are the guts and selflessness of Ree Dolly.
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