To the Wonder: Tough Love

Terrence Malick is pretty weird.

There's no way of getting around that, really. The director's a genius, I’m pretty sure. But geniuses can be a bit odd. Most moviemakers seem preoccupied with things like plot and tension and plausibility. Malick seems to work in a surreal, dreamlike landscape all of his own. Plot is there, of course—but his stories move like memory. Moments splash on the screen with extraordinary detail and power. But the explicit connections that join them fade in a transitory haze. If he was a novelist, Malicks books would be all  nouns and verbs—dumping modifiers and dependent clauses and, really, huge swaths of punctuation. His recent films make 2001: A Space Odyssey look like a Jason Statham flick.

When I saw The Tree of Life, it took me a good two days before I figured out I loved it. I saw Malick's latest film, To the Wonder, three weeks ago … and I'm still not sure.

But even if the movie left me a bit conflicted, the message is pretty awesome. You can see my review here to get the basics, but in this space I'd like to drill a bit deeper.

The plot of To the Wonder is pretty basic: Neil and Marina dig each other, but they struggle to preserve the spark over the long term. In a parallel story, Father Quintana wonders why he's lost his feel for God.

The two stories together become a rumination on love and faith, and how hard both can be at times.

In a way, love and faith are so linked as to be almost indistinguishable from one another—something Malick understands. Relationship—the bond we share with one another and with God, too—demands a bit of both. We trust that our partners will be faithful to us, that our friends will not betray our trust. We believe they love us, just as we love them. Love is what we give. Faith is what we keep—the trust we have, the hope we cling to.

But offering love and holding onto faith can be tricky. We’re finite beings grasping at infinite truth and depth. It’s easy to get discouraged.

And that’s what we see in To the Wonder. Marina complains about how distant Neil is, even as Father Quintana struggles with how to relate to an invisible God. Marina and Quintana struggle with their own human weakness and frailty. They grow discouraged and angry. Marina is gravely tempted. “My God, what a cruel war,” she says. “I find two women inside of me. One, full of love for you. The other pulls me down to the earth.” It can be so hard to patiently listen for God when the world all around us chatters so insistently.

The story ends on a tragically pragmatic note. And yet, there’s still a stubborn insistence that our love and faith is not in vain.

I love Quintana’s sermon on love:

Love is not only a feeling. It is a duty. You show love. Love is a command. And you say I can’t command my emotions. They come and go like clouds. To that, Christ says you shall love whether you like it or not. You fear your love has died? Perhaps it’s waiting to be transformed into something higher.

It seems as though Quintana waits. And in the midst of waiting, we see tantalizing hints of the “something higher” that is, perhaps, waiting on him.

In the midst of his own spiritual struggles, Quintana talks with a janitor at his church. The man holds his hand up to a stained glass window and says, "I can feel the warmth of the light, brother. That's spiritual. I'm feeling more than just natural light. Felling the spiritual light. Almost touching the light from the sky."

It's telling that, in the movie's most spiritual moments, the sun and sky are powerful forces on screen—sometimes overwhelming the characters there. Again and again, Malick draws distinction between the earth and sky, our earthbound desires and spiritual inclinations. Sometimes they reach their hands in the air to feel the warmth on their skin. And at least one character shies away from the sun: A prisoner tells Father Quintana that he can't help his bad behavior—then, squinting, admits he "can't stand the sun."

In the end, Malick seems to suggest that God is like the sun—frustratingly out of reach sometimes, obscured often in our worst moments by cloud and fog. And yet, we feel Him in our lives. His presence is all around us.

In the end, we see hands reached to the heavens, feeling for the sun, as Father Quintana's voice offers a prayer to God.

Thirsty

We thirst.

Flood our souls with your spirit and life

So completely

That our loves may truly be a reflection of yours.

Shine through us.

Show us how to see you.

We were made to seek you.

We were made for love, for faith. It’s tough sometimes. But Malick leaves little doubt of his hope that the struggle is worth it. 

Running on Faith: Terror

I thought about the runners in Boston this morning.

Long before I heard about exploding bombs or injuries or death, I thought about the people running today—the 27,000 people fast enough and disciplined enough to qualify for the United States’ most prestigious race.

It’s a big deal to run in the Boston Marathon—out of reach for a plodder like me. Those who were finishing up when the bomb went off were slower, by Boston’s lofty standards: For many of them, merely lining up at the start would’ve been the pinnacle of their running careers. To finish—well, after being on their feet for more than 26 miles, the elation (weary as they might’ve been) would’ve gone beyond description.

And then for some, it was all torn away.

I’ve written about my marathon training a time or two on this blog—drawing a few tenuous parallels between running and a life of faith. Both require discipline. Both can be incredibly hard and even painful. But both offer rewards, both tangible and transcendent.

But I didn’t think that a marathon would run headlong into that sort of unexplainable horror we sometimes suffer in life—the kind of cataclysm that can make some question the mercy of God.

“Where was God?” Goes the question. “Where was He in …” and then the blank is filled with pain. In Aurora? In Sandy Hook? In Boston?

If you’re Christian, it’s a hard question to answer. If God is who He says He is, then He was there—there in some capacity. But why, then, did He seem to do nothing? And there’s no answer, none at all, that can satisfy.

“And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him,” Paul writes in Romans 8:28. And yet he died at the hands of a Roman executioner.

“Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care,” Jesus says in Matthew 10:29. And yet the blood of Jesus fell to the ground as He was crucified.

But then, I think to the prayer that same Jesus taught us to pray: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, you kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

That line suggests, to me, that God’s will is not always done here on earth. Sometimes, people with evil in their hearts and weapons in their hands get in the way. We were given free will—to love and obey or go our own way. And sometimes, we use that will badly.

We don’t have to like all that happens in this world. We should hate it, in fact. That free will, so destructive at times, is the very thing that can spur us on to correct and curb such destruction. We can pursue evil. We can care for the wounded. We can be the hands and feet of God.

“If you are losing faith in human nature today, watch what happens in the aftermath of an attack on the Boston Marathon,” writes The New York Times’ Ezra Klein. “The flood of donations crashed the Red Cross’s Web site. The organization tweeted that its blood supplies are already full. People are lining up outside of Tufts Medical Center to try and help. Runners are already vowing to be at marathons in the coming weeks and months. This won’t be the last time the squeakers run Boston. This won’t be the last time we gather at the finish line to marvel how much more we can take than anyone ever thought possible.”

Distance running is, in some ways, an exercise in dealing with pain. It requires those who participate to push through fatigue and hurt and boredom. Yes, the tragedy in Boston makes those standard-issue running trials feel pretty lame. And yet, the principles are still in place: When it seems outlandish to imagine going on, we do.

And so it is with faith sometimes. Sometimes, God’s will is not done on earth. Sometimes, evil walks with us. Runs with us. It hurts us and threatens to break us—and at the most heartbreaking times. And yet we go on. We go on.

A few hours after I heard the news, I drove to the local Y. I laced up my shoes, the soles still crusted with dust and mud from the previous weekend’s long run. I filled up my water bottle, flipped on my iPod and listened to Philip Yancey’s book, Prayer.

And then I began to run. I’ve got a marathon to do in a month. And I plan to do it.

Matthew Warren and Space to Grieve

It's been an extended weekend of loss, it seems. We lost a great many people who impacted many of us—Roger Ebert (whom I wrote about here), Annette Funicello, Margaret Thatcher.

But the loss I most keenly felt this morning wasn't a celebrity or politician, but a 27-year-old pastor's son who succumbed, apparently, to depression in the worst way possible.

Matthew Warren, son of Pastor Rick Warren (author of The Purpose Driven Life and senior pastor for California's Saddleback Church), died early Friday after spending the previous evening with his mother, Kay, and father. It sounds like he had struggled with depression for most of his life.

Warren wrote a letter to the Saddleback staff, asking for prayers. In it, he wrote:

Kay and I often marveled at his courage to keep moving in spite of relentless pain. I'll never forget how, many years ago, after another approach had failed to give relief, Matthew said " Dad, I know I'm going to heaven. Why can't I just die and end this pain?" but he kept going for another decade.

In his letter, Warren writes that “no words can express” the anguish he and Kay feel. For those of us who’ve never lost a child, the loss is truly inconceivable.

The subject of suicide has always been a tricky thing in the Christian community. We’ve struggled with how to deal with the topic. Before I left my gig at The Gazette, I had the difficult honor of talking with parents still grieving over the suicides of their children. They talked to me of the heartbreak, the loss and, sometimes, the lack of support they received from their churches--where mental illness was treated as an unspeakable secret, suicide an irredeemable evil. And they talked of the pain. Years later, they talked of the pain that never goes away.

But yet in most manifestations of Christianity today, there is a thread of hope in even the midst of the greatest pain. I hope the Warrens find a hint of solace in the hope that Matthew is home now, waiting for a glorious reunification. Thoughts of heaven are surely little comfort in this moment, but a little comfort is better than none.

It amazes me that there are those who would try to strip away that small bit of comfort in this period of unimaginable grief. Some are Christians that believe suicide amounts to an unforgivable sin—overlooking God’s boundless love and mercy. Others are atheists, almost gleefully trying to destroy faith in this moment of grief and anguish. Writes Cathy Lynn Grossman for USA Today:

You can find, among hundreds of comments on USA TODAY's news story on Matthew's death, comments such as the Cincinnati poster who says, "Either there is no God, or God doesn't listen to Rick Warren, despite all the money Rick has made off of selling false hope to desperate people." In another comment, the same poster counsels Warren to "abandon primitive superstitions and accept the universe for what it is — a place that is utterly indifferent to us."

The Internet is a wonderful tool, but there are times when the unfettered communication it provides can be a bitter thing. In ages gone by, families grieving could’ve found space to mourn in their own way. They would’ve been given time to heal, time to make sense of it all. Now, it seems, there is no time—no time at all before an unfeeling cacophony fills every place of peace.

There are atheists who declare that the Internet is god—our collective minds wired together forming an all-seeing, all-knowing web of consciousness. There are those who even say it answers prayer.

But as amazing and transforming as the Internet has been, there are times when it reveals itself for what it truly is: A hive made of broken, sometimes petty people, all needing the only real Hope there is. 

If You Love Something, Keep It Free

North Carolina will not vote for an official state religion after all—despite an impassioned move toward that end by a handful of the state’s politicians. And that’s probably a good thing.

A little background: For the last few days, North Carolina has been enmeshed in a pretty remarkable political brouhaha regarding state-sanctioned prayer. The American Civil Liberties Union (on behalf of three plaintiffs) filed a lawsuit against a county board of commissioners for opening 97 percent of its meetings with Christian prayer.

Now, anyone who follows this stuff knows that these sorts of suits are fairly common: The ACLU often files lawsuits against governments, schools or other state-run institutions that (they say) push Christianity in public settings. Sometimes, these lawsuits are dismissed after the institution promises to never, ever pray in the name of Jesus again. Sometimes, they go to court—with mixed results. The First Amendment is a tricky thing.

But this is the first time that I remember a state saying, in essence, that governmental Christian prayer is so important that they’d be willing to write a law that would, essentially, supersede the First Amendment. It said, in part:

North Carolina General Assembly asserts that the Constitution of the United States of America does not prohibit states or their subsidiaries from making laws respecting an establishment of religion.

The proposal was nixed before it could come to a vote. And I think all of us, religious and secular alike, can be grateful.

Christian thinker Os Guinness has done a great deal of ruminating on the themes of faith and freedom. Last year, in his book “A FreePeople’s Suicide: Sustainable Freedom and the American Future,” he talked quite a bit of something he called the “golden triangle of freedom”—a dynamic absolutely critical to, he says, the success and future success of America.

In The Christian Post, he described the triangle like this: “Freedom requires virtue, virtue requires faith of some sort, and faith of any sort requires freedom. And like the recycling triangle, it goes round and round -- freedom requires virtue which requires faith which requires freedom which requires virtue, and so on.”

Guinness says that freedom is great and all—but it can’t be just sort of a willy-nilly, hedonistic freedom that some would like. Our personal freedoms have to be tempered by virtue—a moral code of some sort that helps us govern ourselves. And Guinness doesn’t believe that such virtue is possible without faith of some kind. Atheism just doesn’t have the ethical oomph to provide it.

But there’s another side to that: Faith needs freedom to flourish—not just freedom to worship Christ, but freedom to worship, or not worship, anything at all.

I heard Guinness speak several years ago, and I remember him stressing how brilliant the First Amendment—protecting the rights of all faiths—was to the character of the country. Europe (he pointed out) has always been filled with countries that sanctioned official state religions. But when religion is tied too closely to a government, it often grows corrupt and, as such, it often doesn’t look much like the work of God at all. Guinness said at the time that the First Amendment—and the freedom of religion it guarantees—is a prime reason why the United States is still so religious compared to much of Europe. Faith needs freedom to flourish, even if folks use that freedom to reject faith completely.

And really when you think about it, that philosophy mirrors the whole concept of God-given free will. God doesn’t force us to love Him. Jesus never twisted anyone’s arm to follow him. He simply asked if they’d like to. And that still seems like a pretty good strategy to me.

I know that Christians can grow kinda tired of secular assaults on faith and tradition. And hey, I like Nativity displays in the town square as much as the next person. But the solution, I don’t think, is to replace our spiritual liberty with a state religion—even if the religion is one I agree with. 

After-Easter Stitches

You know it’s going to be a rough day when, first thing in the morning, someone carves a chunk of skin out of your arm.

And when you pay someone to do it? Well, that’s even worse.

Yeah, that's the way my day began this morning. You can see the resulting handiwork in the picture. I'm hoping the eventual scar winds up looking cool and manly. Perhaps I can tell people that I received it swordfighting or something, when the truth will be far more prosaic.

A few weeks ago, my dermatologist informed me that a bothersome mole would have to go. I was a little surprised, given that the mole had been with me for much of my adult life and it had never expressed discontent with his situation. It was not particularly troublesome, nor (as moles go) even all that ugly. The only time it ever seemed at all peevish was shortly after my dermatologist performed a tiny biopsy on part of it. After that, it turned red, one can only assume from anger.

My dermatologist didn't like the look of the thing at all. And after the results of the biopsy came back, he said the mole would have to be forcibly evicted from my arm. It wasn't cancerous, he said: Not yet. But it was "atypical," and it was displaying a particularly fearsome form of atypical-ness. Which leads me to believe that my mole was the anatomical equivalent of a quiet, unassuming neighbor that one day, out of the blue, drags all of his living room furniture out on the front lawn and sets it on fire.  So with that in mind, I let the doctor excise a diamond-shaped section of skin about the size of a quarter. Then he stitched the thing up like a medieval purse and sent me on my way.

Technically, the little out-patient operation wasn't that big of a deal at all--less serious, maybe, than getting a tooth filled. (It was certainly less painful.) I know people deal with far worse things. But even so, it's left me feeling a little frail. I've been told not to lift anything over 10 pounds. Technically, I shouldn't run for two weeks (which'll put a serious crimp in my marathon training). And even though the mole wasn't yet cancerous, it's strange, and a little disturbing, to think of your own body working against you. It's like having a sleeper cell on your body, scheming away.

When we're reasonably healthy and happy, it's easy to forget that we're quite frail creatures. I felt my weakness after running this weekend. I sensed my own fragility while watching basketball yesterday—when Louisville’s Kevin Ware suffered a catastrophic injury doing something as routine as jumping.

But maybe that’s part of the poignancy and beauty of Easter, just now passed. Jesus was weak, just as we all are. He hurt, just like we do. He bled when beaten, struggled for breath on the cross and died—just as we all someday will. I have a hard time wrapping my mind around why He had to suffer so … but maybe part of it was to remind us all not only of His human frailty, but ours. He reminded us that, sometimes, circumstances can swamp us. Our human strength can only take us so far—and in times of crisis, that’s not necessarily very far at all.

“Frail,” by Jars of Clay, is one of my favorite songs, beautiful and true:

If I was not so weak
  If I was not so cold
If I was not so scared of being broken
Growing old
I would be … frail.

And yet God—indescribably great, unfathomably powerful—works through weakness. Almost every biblical hero you can think of came from ignominy or dealt with near-crippling flaws. And Easter is a continuation of that.

On Good Friday, we commemorated not just a death, but a humiliation: A man stretched out in the most vulnerable pose imaginable, exposed to the elements and abuse and ridicule. Crucifixion was designed, it would seem, to humiliate. To exploit human weakness. To take would-be heroes or martyrs and turn them into pitiable, prosaic lumps of flesh.

And on Easter, we celebrated. In that moment of ultimate weakness came eternal triumph. Crazy.

We are weak creatures, yes. But God can do remarkable things in our frailty. And even as I’m reminded a bit of my own weakness, I’m reminded that God sometimes does his best work through folks as weak and as whiny as I am.