SPE SALVE AT THE MOVIES

WARNING: If you have not seen the movie “Atonement” and plan on seeing it, you may want to skip this post.

So, as you might have guessed, I did see the movie. It left me feeling sad. Not boo-hoo sad, just dispirited sad. (I tend not to get too boo-hooy) None-the-less I had a hard time shaking it. Those of you who have seen it know that the main love interests are never granted their happy ending of “ever after.” With his dying thoughts the young soldier clings to the words, “come back to me,” and the idea of the house by the sea with the woman he loved. But as it was (this is your LAST chance to stop reading) they both died during the tragedies of war. Heavy hearted I walked away from the theater. That night I ruminated on the sadness and “utter destruction” of any redeeming shred of hope that might pervade. But in the end, the only hope came from a made-up story. Hardly satisfying. One had only to remember that it was a fiction of a fiction.

Surprisingly it was not until Monday that I was released from this spell. It was during a funeral of all things. I was preaching on hope and the Pope’s encyclical, “Spe Salve” when it dawned on me that the movie was exactly what this encyclical fights against. It perfectly exemplifies the horror of life without “the great hope that cannot be destroyed even by small-scale failures or by a breakdown in matters of historic importance.” These two particular characters never show a jot of a greater understanding of hope other than what they had in each other (and one of them aptly notes that he is not sure that the whole thing, held together with spit and promise, could stand based on one stunted, amorous night in the library.) In this, their only (shaky at best) hope for life is a total loss and “their passing away thought an affliction and their going forth from us utter destruction.” (Wisdom 3:1-6,9)

In an odd turn of events, the only ones that had any eternal hope are two of the worst of the antagonists! They are the only ones that presented even a jot of faith (in that they were married in a church and one of them seemed to give an expression that we might interpret as remorse) and thus are at least presented with the possibility of the Great Hope and chance of repentance.

In some book on hope somewhere upstairs in our library was written that even for the Christians that knew the smokestacks of the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, there was still hope. One’s body could even be destroyed, but not Christian hope as it promised that life continues. As the rite for Christian burial states, “Lord, for your faithful people, life is changed, not ended!” But without God and that solid hope we have a glimpse of the meaninglessness of death (and subsequently life) where hope becomes only about fulfilling personal desires. “Let me put this very simply: man needs God, otherwise he remains without hope.” (para 23)

Consider the story of St. Josephine Bakhita from paragraph 3, “The example of a saint of our time can to some degree help us understand what it means to have a real encounter with this God for the first time. I am thinking of the African Josephine Bakhita, canonized by Pope John Paul II. She was born around 1869—she herself did not know the precise date—in Darfur in Sudan. At the age of nine, she was kidnapped by slave-traders, beaten till she bled, and sold five times in the slave-markets of Sudan. Eventually she found herself working as a slave for the mother and the wife of a general, and there she was flogged every day till she bled; as a result of this she bore 144 scars throughout her life. Finally, in 1882, she was bought by an Italian merchant for the Italian consul Callisto Legnani, who returned to Italy as the Mahdists advanced. Here, after the terrifying “masters” who had owned her up to that point, Bakhita came to know a totally different kind of “master”—in Venetian dialect, which she was now learning, she used the name “paron” for the living God, the God of Jesus Christ. Up to that time she had known only masters who despised and maltreated her, or at best considered her a useful slave. Now, however, she heard that there is a “paron” above all masters, the Lord of all lords, and that this Lord is good, goodness in person. She came to know that this Lord even knew her, that he had created her—that he actually loved her. She too was loved, and by none other than the supreme “Paron”, before whom all other masters are themselves no more than lowly servants. She was known and loved and she was awaited. What is more, this master had himself accepted the destiny of being flogged and now he was waiting for her “at the Father's right hand”. Now she had “hope” —no longer simply the modest hope of finding masters who would be less cruel, but the great hope: “I am definitively loved and whatever happens to me—I am awaited by this Love. And so my life is good.” Through the knowledge of this hope she was “redeemed”, no longer a slave, but a free child of God. She understood what Paul meant when he reminded the Ephesians that previously they were without hope and without God in the world—without hope because without God. Hence, when she was about to be taken back to Sudan, Bakhita refused; she did not wish to be separated again from her “Paron”. On 9 January 1890, she was baptized and confirmed and received her first Holy Communion from the hands of the Patriarch of Venice. On 8 December 1896, in Verona, she took her vows in the Congregation of the Canossian Sisters and from that time onwards, besides her work in the sacristy and in the porter's lodge at the convent, she made several journeys round Italy in order to promote the missions: the liberation that she had received through her encounter with the God of Jesus Christ, she felt she had to extend, it had to be handed on to others, to the greatest possible number of people. The hope born in her which had “redeemed” her she could not keep to herself; this hope had to reach many, to reach everybody.”

Without God her story would have been a stark and dismal as the above movie. Who would want it? “I have seen that all perfection has an end, but your command is boundless.” Psalm 119.