Ricki and the Flash Shows Us What Courage Really Looks Like

There’s courage aplenty on the summer’s movie screens: Hey, there’s Ethan Hunt hopping on the side of a plane! Owen’s battling dinosaurs! Oooh, Scott Lang’s bravely shrinking for the sake of all humanity! Heroes are everywhere—risking their all for everything. And that’s great. Worthy, even.

But truth is, sometimes it’s easier to die for something than to live for it.

In Ricki and the Flash, the titular character (played by Meryl Streep) is an aging rocker, lost somewhere between a has-been
and never-was. She deserted her husband and kids to become a rock star. And even as she floundered, Ricki never looked back. She still plays music with her band, The Flash, in a small Tarzana, Calif., dive—checking groceries to pay the bills.

But when her daughter, Julie (Streep’s real-life daughter Mamie Gummer) tries to commit suicide, Ricki’s ex-husband, Pete (Kevin Kline) calls her home to Indianapolis. Once there, Ricki’s faced with a mountain of coulda-beens and shoulda-dones, confronting three children she hardly knows and who can barely stand the sight of her. “Guess you gotta give up a lot of special things to be a rock star,” Julie tells her.

Much of the movie is pretty discomforting—a litany of awkward dinners and embarrassing reunions, forced smiles and angry recriminations. And Ricki deserves everything she gets. She abandoned her family 20 years ago, and we can’t expect her kids to welcome her back as if nothing had happened. It’s not realistic. It’s not even fair. Not to her kids, anyway. Their mother made a really selfish, really bad decision that kinda crushed them. They have every right to be angry.

But here’s the thing: Ricki knows that. She didn’t come back for a joyous reunion. It’s not like she’s trying to kiss a 20-year-old boo-boo, making everything all better. She’s coming to help in the here and now—however her limited capital will allow her. She never really apologizes, but she accepts what she’s done. And she grieves.

When she confronts Julie’s ex—the catalyst to Julie’s attempted suicide—he lobs an emotional grenade. “Julie hates you,” he says.

“That may be,” Ricki says. “And I have to live with that every day of my life. But nowyou have to live with the pain you caused.”

Mistakes can be forgiven. Wounds heal. But the harm we do never just vanishes. We don’t get reset buttons.

We Christians talk a lot about forgiveness and redemption and all. It’s at the core of the faith, and one of the elements that makes it unique amongst all the world’s other great religions. But for those of us who have forgiven, and for those of us who’ve desperately needed forgiveness, the path to redemption and reconciliation isn’t always easy. Our religion doesn’t erase all the hurt, all the damage. Forgiveness isn’t just a matter of saying so. It’s a process—a long, hard slog for all involved, and with no pat promise of a happy ending. And there are times when Ricki wants to just … stop. To erase that chapter of her life completely. And she begins to wonder whether she’s worth loving at all. Take a look at this clip:

“It’s not their job to love you,” Ricki’s boyfriend Greg (Rick Springfield) says in the clip. “It’s your job to love them.”

It’s a great line. There are no exceptions to that, no conditions. “Hope bears all things, believe all things, hopes all things, endures all things,” Paul said. We love in the midst of pain, angst, discomfort. We love even when we want to run away.

It’s easy to tell someone we love that we’d die for them. It sounds very noble, very heroic, very Ethan Huntish. But as a friend of mine told me once, how many people get a chance to really make good on that promise? Not many. For most of us, the real trick is to live and love when we’re not loved back. Live and love in a painful situation. To face up to the consequences when we’ve done wrong. To walk on.

That’s what Ricki tells Julie at Julie’s brother’s wedding. “Walk on,” she says, when it looks like Julie—overwhelmed, we assume, by memories of her own ruined marriage—is ready to bolt. And the thing that’s great about that moment? Ricki’s in a situation that she’d like to bolt from, too. She’s sitting in the back of her own son’s wedding, shunned and even laughed at by some of the guests. She feels totally unwanted, totally out of place. And yet, she’s there. She’s walking on—pushing through the shame and judgement and heartbreak of so many bad decisions. In that moment, she’s living in a nightmare built especially by her, for her. And she endures it all for the sake of her son.

People will say, and perhaps rightly, that Ricki and the Flash is overly sentimental, maybe manipulative. But for me the movie works, and this moment works beautifully. It’s a reminder of what love will, and should, endure. It shows us what real redemption—in the midst of real pain—looks like. And it depicts the sort of courage we rarely see in the movies—a courage that we might just have to find ourselves.

Fire and Remember

Another June 23, another day of checking for fire updates.

Last year, it was the Waldo Canyon fire. Some friends had come down for the day and we were all planning to see a minor league Sky Sox game. Instead, they helped us pack when our house was put on a pre-evacuation notice. A couple of days later, as the fire rushed down a hillside and toward our house, we were forced out—unable to return for six days.

And we were the lucky ones. We had something to come back to.

The cabin, near South Fork

This year, the fires are burning a little farther from our front door, but I’m still following their progress with worry and concern. The West Fork Complex, a phalanx of four separate fires burning out of control in the southwestern part of the state, don’t threaten my immediate home, but they are near my heart and history.

Sometime before I was born, my grandparents bought a little cabin in the woods around South Fork. It’s a tiny place—scarcely 800 square feet, I’d imagine. Probably built in the 1910s, it’s essentially one big room with two lofts, a built-on bathroom and a covered porch to sleep on. A big deer head hangs in the main room, and it’s probably nearly as old as the cabin itself: Our family doesn’t have a lot of hunters.

I probably named that deer head decades ago, though I don’t remember what I would’ve named it. The very earliest memory I have—ever—is my dad holding me up to touch the deer’s coarse, stiff hair. The cabin’s been a part of my consciousness from the very beginning. I learned how to climb stairs there. I might’ve learned how to walk there, too.

Each crevice and cranny holds a memory. In the loft above the front door, there’s a knothole through which you can watch people come and go. Pull part of the staircase out, and you’ll find a toybox, loaded with army men and tiny cows. On the porch we keep a set of plastic poker chips: I’d build with them when I was little, pretend they were money when I was a wee bit older. Grampa taught me how to play blackjack with those chips later on, shuffling cards like a Vegas pro, cigarette in his mouth.  

My son, Colin, and Wendy on the cabin swing,
about 20 years ago

I’ve spent Thanksgivings and Christmases and countless summer weeks at the cabin, watching the chipmunks outside and catching spiders in the tub. My cousin and I would produce elaborate puppet shows from one of the lofts. We’d play baseball by the outdoor grill, using a walking stick for the bat and a pinecone for the ball. When I was 9, I built a miniature golf course in the woods, using old tin cans stuck in the ground as holes. Every time I’m up there, I still find a new hole, it seems—filled with needles perhaps, but ready to use if someone would just come by with a club and ball. 

The cabin’s been a part of our family longer than I have. My grandparents are gone now, but the cabin’s there still, a piece of them there in real estate: Their names still hang above the door, their character still lingering in every corner. After Grampa died, I dreamed of him sitting on the tattered cabin couch, assuring me that he was just fine.

The cabin is a precious place for me—perhaps the most special place in the world. And whenever I walk through the door, I become a little kid again.

Eleven years ago, we almost lost the cabin to another fire—a tiny 3,000-acre scorcher that came a quarter-mile from us. We were lucky. It looks like we might get lucky again. The West Fork Complex, though it’s devoured 70,000 acres down there and probably torn through some of our favorite hikes, looks as though it’ll go by us—maybe all of us in the South Fork area. We know we owe a great deal to the firefighters down there, and the direction of the wind. But it still feels, for now, like a bit of a miracle—as if we had painted lamb’s blood on the door jamb and watched the fearsome angel pass by.

Me on the same swing, about 2008. Colin's in the back and
my daughter, Emily, is to the right

But the fire’s still raging down there, and anything can happen. And even if our cabin is saved this time, I’m learning to hold these things, no matter how precious they might feel, a little more loosely. It would be incredibly hard to see this cabin full of memories go. But maybe the important thing is that the memories themselves remain. No fire can wipe those away.

Sometimes, I have a hard time remembering that God’s blessings to us were never meant to be eternal. They are transient, just as we are. They are to be embraced and treasured, but we can’t hold onto them forever. Even if they last 200 years, we don’t. We fade. We move on. Ashes to ashes, as they say.

But we’re told that, even if our mortal selves will falter and fail, the core of our being will not. Even as we crumble to dust, the essential part of us rises to the sky, to meet with the Maker of memory itself.