Archive for movies

Not even a cubit

Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you shall eat or what you shall drink, nor about your body, what you shall put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add one cubit to his span of life? 

And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin;  yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.  But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O men of little faith?

Therefore do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’  For the Gentiles seek all these things; and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all.  But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well. 

Matthew 6: 25-33

Today’s gospel reading stirred an echo in my memory. Mark Rylance is pretty much perfect here.

St. Jude, patron of lost causes

St. Jude Thaddeus Georges de La Tour 1650

St. Jude Thaddeus, Georges de La Tour, 1650

 

Today is the feast day of St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes, the Chicago police department and many hospitals. I first learned of St. Jude watching The Untouchables, a movie about Eliot Ness’ pursuit of Al Capone during Prohibition. In that movie, the team is enjoying supper after a successful raid when Ness sees Malone, a long-time beat cop, holding a saint’s medal on a chain.

“What is that?” he asks.

Malone responds with surprise, “What is that?”

“Yes, what is it?”

“God, I’m with the heathen.” Showing Ness the medal, Malone explains, “That is my call box key, and that is St. Jude.”

Stone, a young Italian on the team says, “Santo Jude. He’s the patron saint of the lost causes.”

“And policemen,” says Malone.

If you grew up in the Protestant tradition as I did (and are thus among Malone’s heathen), the origin stories of heavenly advocates can be startling. They certainly represent some of humanity’s most creative attempts to explain God’s work in the world, and to honor the holy people among us.

So why did St. Jude get saddled with the lost causes, and how did those causes come to be their own category among all the professions and diseases that are identified with other saints?

Wikipedia gives us an amusing explanation that I’ve found repeated on several other web sites. I have no idea how this tale came to be, or indeed if it is a traditional or modern fabrication. Still, it’s a great story, and with that caveat, I’ll share it:

St. Jude is known as the patron saint of lost causes amongst Roman Catholics. This is due to the tradition that, because his name was similar to the traitor Judas Iscariot, few, if any faithful Christians prayed for his intervention, out of the mistaken belief that they would be praying to Judas Iscariot. As a result, St. Jude was little used, and so became eager to assist any who asked him, to the point of intervening in the most dire of circumstances. The Church also wanted to encourage veneration of this “forgotten” disciple. Therefore, the Church maintained that St. Jude would intervene in any lost cause to prove his saintliness and zeal for Christ, and thus St. Jude became the patron of lost causes.

I laugh to think of St. Jude with nothing to do in heaven–no prayers coming in–eagerly taking on dire problems that no other saints would touch. Surely this is one of those instances of imagination run wild. Nevertheless, I do think that recognizing the place of lost causes in the life of the Church and asking for a bit of help is good and appropriate. We’ll always have the poor. And human nature. There’s a lot in this world that could bring a body to despair.

So, as I think about St. Jude, I’m reminded of another movie where a character named Jefferson Smith says lost causes are the only ones worth fighting for; his advocate, Clarissa Saunders, says they’re taken up by fools with faith in something bigger. On this feast day, that sounds about right to me.

 …the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. (1 Corinthians 1)

 

Praying for persecutors: Shaun of the Dead

 

In the opening scene of Shaun of the Dead, Shaun’s girlfriend Liz carefully and patiently explains to him that she would like to have a date with just the two of them, unaccompanied by his immature and boorish friend, Ed. Ed is Shaun’s best friend, and we sense from the beginning that honoring Liz’s request will be complicated.

Jesus’ commandment to “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” reminds me a bit of that scene. Here we are trying to build a good relationship with God, and he keeps insisting on bringing obnoxious, unpleasant people to the party. In fact, he insists that we find them and bring them along too. Why on earth would we want to stand in God’s glorious presence with them? Surely he’s kidding about asking for mercy and compassion on their behalf? It’s completely unreasonable. Not possible. You’d have to be a saint.

The stumbling block, I suspect, is that our enemies seem less than human, and we imagine that we must feel love for them before we pray for them. Praying for them seems like doing them a good turn, and that offends our sense of justice.

But of course, justice is not what this is all about, is it? We were once enemies ourselves.

Henri Nouwen wrote, “As disciples of the compassionate Lord who took upon himself the condition of a slave and suffered death for our sake, there are no boundaries to our prayers.” 1 What a startling thought. There is no one we cannot pray for. No one we should not pray for. As disciples we are free to lift up anyone into God’s presence: the serial killer, the dictator, the Republicans and Democrats, the people who injure our loved ones, the people who cheat us and shame us and hurt just because they can.

Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. Pray for those who are less than human to you. There are no boundaries to our prayers or to the mystery of divine compassion.

 

  1. “Anchored in God through Prayer.” Soujourners 7 (April 1978):20-21.

Sister Rose of Sundance

 

I’ve been thinking a lot about movies lately, and this morning a friend pointed me to an article about Sister Rose of the Daughters of St. Paul, a movie critic and blogger.  In the New York Times story,  “Acting as a Mediator at the Crossroads of Faith and Film,”  writer Samuel G. Freedman notes,

Sister Rose was serving not as a sentry protecting religious belief from cinematic product, but rather as a mediator helping to explain one to the other. As such, she embodies a departure both from the religious temptation to police popular culture, in the manner of the Roman Catholic Church’s now-defunct Legion of Decency, and the effort in fundamentalist circles to create a parallel universe of theologically safe movies, television and music.

“To paraphrase a Gospel passage, Christ came into the world to redeem the culture, not to condemn it,” Sister Rose, 61, said in an interview here. “It’s a negotiation. You don’t give everything a free pass. Something has to come out of your convictions and values. But what matters isn’t what the movie contains, but what it means.”

 

The world is such a messy place, and the road to Wisdom is a long one. Like Peter in Joppa, it can be so difficult to know what to eat, how to respond to what appears before us. (I always hear him asking God, “Is this a trick question?”)  How can we learn to truly prefer and choose what is good?  Sister Rose is one of the people engaging that question.  Another example of the “sorting” John Milton talks about in Aeropagitica when he says, “what wisdom can there be to choose, what continence to forbear without the knowledge of evil?”

Saints as sinners: a double feature

     

 

Most of the fiction that comes into my brain any more comes through the movies. Today I propose a double-feature: two movies worth seeing where the protagonist isn’t so good you can’t identify with him, and not so bad you wouldn’t want to.

Flawed saints are the flip side to the honorable thief and the prostitute with the heart of gold, but let’s be honest, pointing out feet of clay is not much of a trick.  These films succeed because they recognize the tangled complexity of goodness in a human being. Robert Duvall is beyond amazing in The Apostle (when he yells at God, you believe God is listening), and Jack Black will surprise you in Bernie–though East Texas is really the star of the film.

Hanging out on the Twitter stream: #anglicanfilms

If you think that Twitter is all about what your friends ate for breakfast, then either you’re not on Twitter or I’m afraid you have the wrong friends. The Episcopalians and Anglicans have been having a bit of fun lately trading jokes with #anglicanfilms. Here are some of my favorites: