Fears for our Country, Exasperation with People: Is there Hope?

 Over and over, as I listen to my church people (and non-church folks too), I hear many expressions of fears for the country, and exasperation over the way others think and feel. Our United Methodist Publishing House asked me to write a book on Religion and Politics. I said yes, and began thinking up titles, like We’ve All Lost Our Minds or Jesus Must Be So Embarrassed. Easy to find fault and cast blame – but the publisher wants a book that analyzes what’s gone awry and yet clings to hope, and dares to suggest how we might fix some things and be healers. I won’t attempt to summarize a 140 page book here, but let me mention a few things.

People are in a deep funk about their country. But there’s so much to love. We can be grateful for the free space we have to disagree, to vote, to get involved (or not). We have traffic and other laws. We have brilliant founding documents on liberty, the separation of powers, and freedom of religion. We have national parks. We have my hometown and beautiful children. We have heroes who remind us of what actually is possible during times of fear and funk.

David Chappell’s A Stone of Hope, a book that demonstrates clearly that evil was held in check and the country was changed by the church, and nobody else, in the 1950’s, quotes a poem from Seamus Heaney: “History says, don’t hope on this side of the grave. But then, once in a lifetime, the longed-for tidal wave of justice can rise up, and hope and history rhyme.”

Are we so cynical and jaded we can’t envision, anticipate, or even pray for some great tidal wave, something God can do? If we cling to and live into what God might just do, we’re liberated from our fears, and liberated to do something. I just finished a great book by my friend Vickie Barnett about “Bystanders,” that vast majority of Germans who knew what was going on but just shrugged and did nothing. They felt overwhelmed and powerless.

But were they? Barnett points to the French village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, population 3,000, which rescued 2,500 Jews, mostly children, from the Nazis. The silence of other towns was a thundering approval of Nazi atrocities. At Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, there’s a garden celebrating the few who had courage and did something, with the inscription “Whoever saves one life saves the universe.”

We’re not called to be bystanders, or to fume in the privacy of our dens. Do some little something. Have some courage. Talk to somebody; listen to somebody. Don’t let your politics be your idol – a bad habit easy to spot in the other guys. Our God is above and beyond party divisions, and we can calm down and get busy if our trust is vested in the true God.

There’s so much damage from politics as waged in recent history. What gifts does the Church bring to healing? We are people with hope, not naïve optimism, but a long-range belief in that arc that bends toward justice. Reconciliation is supposed to be our strong suit, not blaming or cringing. We are supposed to know how to love, how to engage respectfully, how to bring faith to life in the real world, with resilience, tenderness, toughness.

My premise, which can’t be dismissed as naïve, or we’re toast, is that we aren’t stuck in an endless spitting match that feels like that nightmarish trench warfare of World War I, immense carnage to gain a few feet of turf, only to lose it the next day, everyone losing. There was a break on Christmas Day when both sides lobbed gifts to their foes before meeting in No Man’s Land to sing carols together. Fear for the country is paralyzing, and invites the very disaster we fear. Do a little something today, and something else tomorrow. Find a friend. Make a friend. Pray. Where else is there to turn just now except to God, and to others who love their country?

Review of The Odyssey: Unheroic, Disenchanted... and Long Fight Scenes?

    We saw “The Odyssey” last night. Well, it began mid-afternoon and ended last night! I rarely review movies. Not my strong suit – although I’m of more value than Bill Murray on Saturday Night Live who’d launch into a review, then pause to say “Now, I’ve not actually seen this movie…” I saw it. Didn’t take a bathroom or snack break either. Let me tell you about it – theologically and culturally, I hope.

   I had tangled expectations going on, not just because of the hype, but because I’ve always treasured Homer (although I’d take The Iliad over The Odyssey any day!). I re-read The Odyssey over the past month to ready myself. That alone was a great gift of the movie coming out.

   I felt a bit like I do when viewing a movie or TV series about the Bible. I know I’ll be jarred and annoyed, with a bit of an elitist sneer that “the book is way better than the movie.” But this one has that Christopher Nolan brand, and I knew lots of people would ask me my assessment of it. And people I know well and whose opinions I respect had already shared glowing reviews with me.

   The costumes, boats, scenery, and buildings were super well-done. I felt like we were back in the Bronze Age. The dialogue wasn’t very Bronze-Age-ish or Greek-ish, but no worries. There was some solid acting, but I’m no judge of such things.

   Four people we know sat on the row in front of us. Several times one would turn to me and say “You’ll get a sermon out of this, I’m sure!” Probably not. Despite being dazzled by cinematic technique, and digging a few moments, I was on the whole very disappointed. I’m a fan of Matt Damon (I mean, “Good Will Hunting”? “Bourne”? – great stuff). But his Odysseus was brooding, uncertain, pulsating with regrets, and nowhere near as wise, charming, brilliant, and compelling as Homer’s Odysseus.

   Not Damon’s fault! Nolan gave him a script. To Nolan (who seemed bent in the overall plot of the film to be saying Civilization is crumbling and we’d best do something before it collapses) I’d say Our civilization desperately needs heroes. You’re putting one on the big screen, but he looks decidedly unheroic.

   He looks unheroic because of another huge flaw in the film. One reviewer, Leah Schnelbach, rightly named “the Disenchanted World of The Odyssey.” In Homer, the gods are everywhere, active, and due considerable reverence as they push the plot. In Nolan, there are vague allusions to Poseidon being very angry and hurling some storms – feeding, I fear, into modern notions that God is not a good blessing but a problem. Athena appears on most pages of Homer, talking a lot, disguising herself as various characters, hugely impactful. In Nolan, a woman (I had to guess it was Athena) once in a while is sitting near Odysseus, more like she’s his therapist instead of the warrior goddess who wears armor and wields a spear.

   Damon as Odysseus hears others speak of the gods, and his replies reveal he is bent on defying them. I’m okay that this is inconsistent with Homer, but it’s so very modernistic, isn’t it? There’s a lot of chatter in the film about “the Law of Zeus,” the Greek tradition of hospitality as a must. I wish I’d known at the beginning to count how many times various characters appealed to “the Law of Zeus.” Zeus begins with a z, and for me the boring repetition of his name left me with a zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

   Zeus’s Law is utterly unsuccessful as a plot driver, and I’m sure Homer would say hospitality doesn’t come into play when city states are attacking one another or when someone’s stealing from your home. Homer’s Zeus wasn’t the author of a Miss Manners book of how to welcome strangers. Zeus was the king of the gods, a harsh enforcer of justice, and a philanderer.

   But my biggest complaint about the film is that it is flat out TOO LONG. It wasn’t the 3 hours; many of my favorite movies (“The Lord of the Rings”? “The Godfather”? “Dr. Zhivago”? “Ben Hur”? Even the biblical “Ten Commandments”?) are 3+ hours long. It’s a absurdly lengthy fight scenes. Yes, Homer’s Odyssey had violence. But Nolan fed into what must be the public’s taste for lengthy depictions of men stabbing, smashing, hurling, swinging, on and on, on and on, so boring. You could easily understand that in the plot there was a fight in just a minute or two. I wish I’d timed Nolan’s brawls.

   So what is it about our culture that digs extended and savage combat scenes? Homer was far more high-minded, reporting on fighting, but leaving us with a feel of nobility, personal tragedy, victory and sorrow. I should have seized on the beginning of any fight scene and gone to the bathroom or the snack bar. Boring, and troubling. I told my wife as we drove to dinner that I have a lone exception to my loathing of these monotonous scenes. In “The Lord of the Rings,” we have some extended battles. But there’s movement, real shifts in dynamics, and the unlikely hero pops up now and then (Eowen? Merry and Pippin?). And humor: in the thick of peril, Legolas and Gimli taunt one another as they count how many orcs they’ve dispatched. It’s funny, and defuses the violence.

   Okay, this review needn’t ramble on as long as Nolan’s film. I’m glad I saw it. Sort of.