Even the rocks will cry out

I heard a sermon a couple years ago that I still think about from time to time, as I did this morning when my notes from that morning popped up. In that sermon, the minister described a pseudo-baptism scene from the movie "Nacho Libre," starring Jack Black as a Mexican priest, named Ignatio, turned wrestler, named Nacho. Nacho wants his wrestling partner baptized before their match with “Satan's Cavemen” to better increase their chance for a win and so shoves his head in a bowl of water and declares a blessing. Disclaimer: I've never seen the movie, but this link goes to a clip of the scene.

The minister said this scene should tell us there is a better way for telling others about Christ than to push them into it. He gave the example of Philip in the story from Acts and went from there to cover much good and earnest theology about being a witness for Christ and about the movement of the Spirit.

But I couldn't stop thinking about the priest shoving the guy’s head into the bowl of water. Skipping past the false theology, past the adolescent sacrilege, what does it say about the hunger for a concrete splashing of grace, the reality of the place of baptism in the human narrative? It’s like finding a hieroglyphic or prehistoric drawing showing the offering of life for life.

Even the rocks will cry out.

Blank page; starting again

The DVD of the movie “Runaway Jury,” starring John Cusack, Dustin Hoffman, and Gene Hackman, contains an interview with Dustin Hoffman in its “Special Features” section. Hoffman speaks about the privilege of working with Hackman, particularly within the context of one scene in which their two characters have an intense angry encounter. After that scene was shot, he and Gene went out together for a drink, and while they talked they admitted to each other the same thing: whenever they finish a movie they are sure they will never again be able to accomplish another, nor even be asked; that what they've done was a fluke (my paraphrase). Listening to the interview, I was stunned but encouraged. Here were two movie giants who I imagined cruised from success to success without any personal fears or doubts. If the greats can feel this way, there’s hope for the rest of us.

I’m playing around with a new writing project. Not sure whether my idea will turn into anything but the blank pages are in front of me. In light of Hoffman and Hackman's admission, it's not so terrible to have self doubt when looking at a blank page or a pile of random thoughts that need shaping or to wonder if a finished piece is the last before I'll fizzle or am discovered as an imposter. It's just the way it is. In these creative enterprises there are no rules that you can follow, 1 to 10, and be assured of an outcome, and so it may always feel like beginning for the first time.

~~~

"Nostalgia for the Light": on looking for the past

There are a series of scenes in the documentary Nostalgia for the Light, directed by Patricio Guzmán, in which one or two or ten women, 60- or 70-ish, are bent over with eyes on the ground, slowly walking, occasionally stopping and reaching down to pick something out of the gravel, turn it over in their hand and either drop it or pocket it. Their posture reminds me of mine of when I’m on vacation by a lake or ocean, combing the shore for agates or seashells. But this isn’t a kind of geologic tourism. This is the Atacama desert in Chile and these women are looking for bones or bone fragments, fabric, or parts of appendages from their loved ones--husbands, sons, daughters, brothers--who were taken as prisoners by Pinochet and killed, their bodies destroyed and distributed who knows where in the desert or sea.

Sharing this same desert land is a world-class astronomy operation employing the most sophisticated telescopes science can offer. The astronomers here are studying light from stars long gone, watching for the universe’s original light.

The reason for this placement of the telescopes at this place is explained by the a view of earth from space in which there is only one patch that is brown and that patch is Chile’s Atacama desert, elevation 10,000 feet. The complete lack of humidity is what makes the sky so translucent, perfect for star gazing and study, and the ground a dessicant for preserving human remains. 

In unexpected ways, these stories twist around each other. A man who had been a prisoner of Pinochet and lived to tell about is interviewed in the film. He tells that while in prison he learned to make a small apparatus out of wood that helped him chart the stars. Watching the sky each night, he felt completely free. One of the astronomer explains that calcium in the bones found in the parched ground is really elemental calcium that originally came from stars. Two of the searching women join an astronomer in front of a telescope.

The shots of the landscape and night sky are stunning. 

I watched this film (available on Netflix) earlier this week and think it is an interesting film to reflect upon on this weekend we set aside for remembering. The women are looking down, the astronomers are looking up. Both groups are looking for the past and neither group will stop until they find it. Towards the end of the film, Guzmán says,“"I am convinced that memory has gravitational force.”

~~~

Duet in the dark

One of the memorable features about the Coen Brothers recent True Grit is the old gospel hymn that keeps threading its way through the film. "Leaning, leaning..." I just heard that same hymn threading itself through another film, The Night of the Hunter, a 1955 thriller directed by Charles Laughton and starring Robert Mitchum and Lillian Gish.

We learned of this film through the Arts & Faith Top 100 Films list, which we've been using to find titles for our Netflix queue. The list is curated by the people at Image and is revised each year.

Mitchum plays the bad guy, Harry Powell, who poses as a preacher. Ironically, his presence is always heralded by his quiet steady singing of "Leaning, leaning..." Gish plays the story's heroine, Rachel Cooper. In my favorite scene these two are in a night-time stand-off. Powell is in the yard of the house Cooper is guarding. In the house sleep the children Powell has been pursuing. Coming from the dark yard we hear "Leaning, leaning..." the film's clear marker for fear and danger. On the porch, we see Gish rocking in her chair, a shotgun on her lap. Finally she joins him in the singing and at first we are taken aback. They are now singing a duet, "Leaning, leaning..." He stalking, she rocking, but both singing the same song. Then it hits us that she is not letting this gospel be usurped. It will not stand as a marker for evil. She doesn't raise her voice or turn the song into a shouting match. Weary but determined she adds a defining clause in the beat between the two consecutive Leaning's. Leaning (on Jesus), leaning (on Jesus), safe and secure from all alarms; Leaning (on Jesus), leaning (on Jesus), leaning on the everlasting arms.

Graham Greene: books and movies

I just finished reading Brighton Rock by Graham Greene (1904–1991), which I bought at a library sale before Christmas for fifty cents. It confirmed that I'm in awe of Greene and how he tells a story all the while showing broken people in whom a religious sensibility exists at once as a weight and a saving grace. The first book I read by Greene was The Honorary Consul, read years ago, and I was an immediate fan. A couple days ago I offered his name to a friend who was asking for book suggestions.

"I saw that movie, The End of the Affair," she said. "He wrote that, right?" The look on her face told me that she was not impressed. I reassured her that the movie was different than the book.

It's unfortunate that Greene's books may remain unopened by so many who would otherwise gobble up his pages because a movie, made in 1999, betrayed a book, written in 1951. Brighton Rock has now been made into a movie for the second time, the first being in 1947, and stars Helen Mirren and Pete Postlethwaite. I've not seen the original but hope that the new movie does the book justice. Perhaps if you're considering seeing the movie, read the book first just so you'll know if it was handled right or not.

I told my friend that my favorite Greene novel – and one of my all-time favorite novels ever – is The Heart of the Matter. Other Greene novels I commended to her were The Power and the Glory, The Honorary Consul, Our Man in Havana, and of course The End of the Affair and now Brighton Rock. She wrote the titles down, and I hope she reads one or more.

The Philosopher Kings

When I was in first grade, a boy in my class--whose name I remember but will withhold out of courtesy--threw up. He was sitting at his desk and out it came, all over the floor with a splash. The teacher managed the episode calmly and professionally, directing all of us, except the boy, to go out into the hallway, with half the class on either side, and sit single-file along the brick wall. The uniformed janitor then arrived and we all knew why. We next saw our teacher walk the sick boy down the hall toward the office, presumably to his waiting mother. 

It seemed a long while until the janitor emerged again. He walked through the middle of our group, pushing his industrial-sized metal bucket and mop. For some reason, his walk out of that room and down the hall, is one of my most vivid memories of grade school. I watched him and wondered if he had pictures of anyone in his wallet. I wondered if he was lonely. I wondered if when he left school at the end of the day whether anyone listened to what he had to say. I remember wondering those three things about him. That janitor, his walk and those questions, have continued to nudge themselves into my mind from time to time in all the years since.

This week I watched a documentary that caught my eye because it was about the inner lives of janitors. "The Philosopher Kings," released in 2009, films and interviews eight janitors who work in some of the most elite colleges and universities in America, including Stanford, Caltech, Princeton, Cornish College of the Arts, Cornell, University of Florida, Duke, and University of California Berkeley. It's a fascinating and moving documentary that reveals the challenges these eight have overcome in their lives, the dreams and goals they are pursuing, the sacrifices they make for others, what they learn from the institutions at which they work, and their significant inner wisdom.

The film is punctuated with a number of great quotes, including this one from Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"Do you think the porter and the cook have no anecdotes, no experiences, no wonders for you? The walls of their minds are scrawled all over with thoughts.

They shall one day bring a lantern and read the inscriptions."

Grace on the floor and in the theater

Yesterday morning I sat on my livingroom floor with scissors and tape, cutting up an essay that I've been working on for four months, and then trying to tape it back together in some semblance of sense and order. In between the cutting phase and taping phase, however, was the despair phase in which I was quite  confident I'd been deceiving myself all along about the viability of this would-be essay. The little snippets of white, representing chunks, paragraphs, sentences, and even single words, were like so much litter along the highway.

Anne Lamott says there are really only two prayers: "Help me, help me, help me" and "Thank you, thank you, thank you." Theologicially, I'm not sure I really agree with her, but practically speaking, she is on to something. My audible prayer on the floor was the first variety. Then like a game of solitaire, the moving of snippets began. Uncountable chunks of tape later, thirteen consecutive sections emerged. Order from chaos, and so was triggered the second variety of prayer. I don't want to give too many details about the essay's subject matter (after all I will want readers to buy the book someday :)), but it's a braided essay with strands related to a meal at a Chicago restaurant and to an icon exhibit at The Museum of Russian Art here  in Minneapolis, among other things. I'm now hopeful about the essay, although much work remains to be done on it and a little voice inside nags that those thirteen sections might not really make sense when I take them out again next week.

With my scissors and tape put away, and the taped together streamers of words in a pile on my desk awaiting another day's revisions, I decided, rather impulsively, to go a movie matinee, "Rachel Getting Married," a movie I knew little about other than it was starring Anne Hathaway and involved a wedding. Many times in life there are occasions of coincidence and I tend to regard them as moments of grace. Little--or not so little--nudges or benedictions. A good way into the movie there is a scene of the rehearsal dinner. Wedding party and friends squeezed into a single long table in a small private room. The camera (the entire movie is shot with a hand-held camera) circles the table and the room over and over in this very long scene, stopping to focus on faces and conversations and speeches. The room holds all kinds of people, relationship messes, past embarrassments, future hopes, terrible grief, joy. I was fascinated by the dynamics of all this, and then I saw it: along the perimeter of the room, on all four walls, hung a row of tightly placed icons. There was hardly a shot of a face without an icon or two or four in the background. Part of the theology of Orthodox icons is that they represent divine presence. My eyes welled up when I saw this encircling of the room, not just for the "coincidental" affirmation that my essay may actually be on the right track, but for this stunning visual depiction of humanity and the presence of God. And so was triggered more of that second variety of prayer.