“We’ve all heard the warnings and we’ve ignored them. We push our luck. We roll the dice. We play with fire. It’s human nature. When we’re told not to touch something, we usually do, even if we know better. Maybe because deep down, we’re just asking for trouble.” – Dr. Meredith Grey.
From Grey’s Anatomy Season 8, Episode 18: The Lion Sleeps Tonight.
Posted in culture, entertainment, faith, philosophy, religion, TV
Tagged greys anatomy, meredith grey
Some time ago, a friend said to my wife that she “had done well.” In my vain way, I thought she was paying my wife a compliment for her choice. But our friend was complimenting my wife on how she had changed me. This beautiful potentiality of human relationships lies at the heart of the British drama comedy One Day.
The date is July 15, 1988: Emma and Dex meet and find themselves immediately attracted to each other. That one day just happens to be the last day of college, and the beginning of the rest of their lives. One Day checks in with them on the same day every year to explore their relationship as it ebbs and flows over the course of two decades – as they live, work and fall in and out of love. Meticulous costume design, hair styles and make-up effectively capture aging characters and evolving cultural styles.
After college, Emma moves to London to become an author, and while Dex eventually heads overseas to teach English (and pursue women), they stay in regular contact. One year, Emma takes a holiday to visit him and hang out. They set a whole bunch of rules to prevent them from ending up doing something they might regret. They break most of them anyway and end up skinny-dipping in a pool by the sea. And in this moment Dex finally tells Emma what she wants to hear in the only way British people can – he fancies her. But, ”The problem is” he says “I fancy pretty much everyone.”
And everything else it seems. As Dex works on a late night TV show, he also slides into alcohol and drug use, bringing shame to himself, disappointing his parents and their dreams for him. Selfishness and pleasure-seeking blind him to Emma’s love and he takes her friendship for granted. Departing broken-hearted and disgusted, she says “I love you Dex, I really do. I just don’t like you anymore.” Emma’s reaction is borne out of a desire for Dexter’s good, as true friends hurt to see friends hurting. And while it seems to take many years, Emma’s friendship transforms Dexter much more than he knows. As one character observes of Dexter “She makes you decent. And in return you made her so happy”.
Relationships in general and marriage in particular are not only good for our satisfaction, but also our personal improvement – learning to restrain one’s tongue, learning to give up bad habits, learning to watch romantic movies like One Day, learning to put others ahead of oneself. Changing one’s character and behaviour is a long process, and often comes by learning through one’s mistakes and realising what is in front of you, and perhaps a lot of unwitting (and witting!) prodding along the way.
The conclusion of One Day might leave you wondering whether such mistakes are necessary, but somehow those mistakes are part of what makes life what it is, for better or for worse. One Day rings true in acknowledging that life is difficult, people are stubborn and blind to how their short-sighted choices hurt self and others. And so we yearn all the more for Emma and Dexter as we ourselves yearn for stability and joy in our relationships; relationships which flourish long after that one day two people meet.
Posted in movies, philosophy, religion, reviews
Tagged anne hathaway, friendship, jim sturgess, meaning, one day meaning, relationships, time
What motivates a man to leave the comfort of home to father the fatherless, release captives and bring hope to the hopeless? Machine Gun Preacher is based on the life of Sam Childers (Gerard Butler) an ex-con whose self-destructive life is transformed to one of compassion. After being released from prison, Childers life continues where it left off, except that his wife (Michelle Monaghan) has converted to Christianity. When he nearly kills someone, Sam reluctantly begins attending church, where he too is born again.
While visiting Uganda on a house-building mission, Childers is awakened to the plight of children in Southern Sudan under the oppression of Kony’s Lord’s Liberation Army (LLA). Struck with compassion, Childers sets about liberating these desperate children: disabling LLA vehicles, eliminating opposition, and rescuing any children trapped in the convoy, taking them to the safety.
Some Christians and others watching the film may wonder if this use of violent force is appropriate for those professing faith in Christ. And it’s a great question: how do we deal with people like Kony who are responsible for such dreadful suffering, when the Bible is so big on loving one another. You know, blessed are the peacemakers. Shouldn’t Christians be pacifists? Isn’t vengeance up to God? As the nurse says: “This place does not need more guns.”
People like Sam Childers first acknowledge that our world is broken (if we had any doubts from the news headlines). Things aren’t the way they ought to be. People don’t respect each other the way they ought. People use other people as commodities to be owned, to be enslaved. In releasing these children, Sam is not seeking revenge or conducting a reckless military offensive. This is a man who sees injustice and acts out of compassion, seeking to defend those who cannot defend themselves. These are armed, brutal men who seek to be gods, seeking nothing but power for themselves from those least able to do anything about it.
Childers is uniquely gifted and perhaps God is redeeming this rough edge, because, maybe that’s what needs to be done sometimes. As much as we may not like it. But we ought to be most outraged by the fact that the world is this way in the first place. Indeed, we ourselves are complicit in the evil and suffering in our own lives and the lives of those around us.
Defeating Kony’s forces is in a way only dealing with the symptoms, and that is important. But solving the problem of evil in the world first begins with conquering the evil in us. In a sense, we’re all orphans but this is our own doing. Jesus leaves the comfort of his home to reach into our dark world to rescue us on our path to destruction (Ephesians 2:1-10), to give a father to the fatherless (Psalm 68:5) and to free the oppressed:
“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free…” (Luke 4:18)
No machine gun. Just a cross.
Trailer here:
The Civil Wars are one of my new favourite bands. The folk duo won Grammies this year for best Country Duo/Group Performance for their song Barton Hollow and Best Folk Album for their album Barton Hollow. The music is finely crafted, and for the most part minimalistic: the guitar work is precise and exposed, but the vocals are the true highlight of this extraordinary duo, with rich, smooth, perfectly blended harmonies, even during the indignant Barton Hollow (see below). On Poison & Wine, which shot them to fame when it was played on Grey’s Anatomy, band member John Paul White says:
“Poison & Wine” fits the paradigm of subject matter too true to be spoken, as opposed to sung. “That song probably does sum us up—The Civil Wars, the name of the band—as well as any song that we’ve written,” White says. It’s the one song on the album written with an outside collaborator, their friend Chris Lindsey. “We’re all married, and we were all talking about the good, the bad and the ugly, and just felt like: What would you say to someone if you were actually brutally honest—the things that you could never say because it would turn them away or let the cat out of the bag or reveal yourself to be weaker? What would you actually say if you had this invisible curtain around you and could just scream it in somebody’s face and they’d actually never hear it? We were all being very painfully honest, because we’re all very comfortable around each other and know that things like that never leave the room, except in a song. I’m pretty proud of that song, to be honest.”
The indignant Barton Hollow…
…and the longing of I’ve Got This Friend:
Read more about the duo here.
In The Next Three Days, Russell Crowe stars as John Brennan, a teacher whose wife, Lara, is convicted for the murder of her boss. Not convinced of her guilt, and having exhausted the legal options, Brennan begins developing a plan to break her out of prison. Writer-director Paul Haggis (Crash) twists a crime thriller into something akin to a heist film, relegating the wife’s guilt to secondary importance to explore the broader issue of control:
John Brennan: So, the life in times of Don Quixote, what is it about?
Female College Student: That someone’s belief in virtue is more important than virtue itself?
John Brennan: Yes… that’s in there. But what is it about? Could it be how rational thought destroys your soul? Could it be about the triumph of irrationality and the power that is in that? You know, we spend a lot of time trying to organize the world. We build clocks and calendars and we try to predict the weather. But what part of our life is truly under our control? What if we choose to exist purely in a reality of our own making? Does that render us insane? And if it does, isn’t that better than a life of despair?
Herein lies John’s conflict – does he chose the rationality of accepting the judge’s decision and despair or the irrationality of action for a life of happiness with his wife? If John is to rescue his wife he must live between these two worlds. Thus, he studies the prison, learns its routine, draws maps, develops a budget, analyses regularity of human activity, he builds “clocks and calendars”, as he searches for the key to smuggle his wife out of prison.
At the same time, the heist requires a great deal of what might otherwise be considered irrational behaviour for most ordinary citizens – he acquires illegal identification, weapons, creates a ‘bump’ key, suspending the ordinary regularities and moralities of his life. John is constantly presented with various choices, each of which would have massive consequences. For example, he considers robbing a bank for cash; he considers escaping town with his wife but without his son. He races off and nearly reverses over a young family: “You’re out of your mind! You don’t look!” the mother shouts. As John seeks to control one variable, another is sent off the scale.
As Lara declares her guilt to him in a bid to protect their son from being without both his parents, she drives a wedge between his resolve and his rational mind about what is right. Her guilt or innocence will either condemn or justify his actions in the viewer’s mind. Only with some measure of trust in her character does he proceed: I know who you are, and I promise you this will not be your life.
But isn’t Lara at least somewhat complicit in their predicament: she was angry, she was hasty, so that her fingerprints end up on a murder weapon – fire extinguishers don’t end up in the middle of a carpark for no reason. A moment of clarity might have saved her. Or, is Lara a victim of coincidence: the same day she has a fight with her boss a homeless person mugs the boss, and rain washes away the evidence which would corroborate her defence.
There is some small irony that filmmakers chose to tackle issues of control and coincidence when everything in every movie happens for a reason – because the filmmaker wanted it there. Christianity would say that God stands in a similar relation to the universe as a filmmaker stands to a movie: He creates, he upholds, establishes governments in their place, and guides history to achieve his purposes. Unique among the worldviews is that God is also working all things for the good of those who love him (Romans 8:28-29).
And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters.
All circumstances, including suffering, for the Christian are meaningful even if we don’t see it at the time. The challenge for us is to see and use our circumstances wisely. The death and resurrection of Jesus shows us what patience, forgiveness and love towards our enemies looks like – as irrational and backwards that may appear from the outside, but that is a reasonable response to Jesus (Romans 12:1-2). At the same time, a large part of loving our world is gaining a rational awareness and understanding of each others’ needs, and in so doing we might just save someone from a life of despair. We can’t control everything but we can control how we respond.
Posted in faith, film, movies, philosophy, religion, spirituality
Tagged choice, coincidence, control, russell crowe, sovereignty, the next three days
