The year of many movies

You know me well enough by now, reader, to know that I am pretty fond of books and reading. Since I was four years old I have never wanted anything out of life except to read all the books in the world and to add a few more to their number. You will never hear me say a bad work about books. I like people too, naturally – but the thing I like best about them is the books they write. In my heart of hearts I have always felt that anything else a person might do in life is trivial by comparison to those two mighty feats of the human spirit, reading and writing. In my eyes, the science of space travel dwindles into insignificance compared to what Milton wrote about travelling through space. I am glad and grateful for technology, of course I am. I am not one of those backward unadventurous souls who would use last year's computer or quibble over the expense of a few billion dollars per annum on space programs. Technology, I salute you! All I'm saying is that if (God forbid) a thousand years from now NASA and America itself have vanished from human memory, whatever kind of human beings are left on earth will still be reading Milton and marvelling at his description of the sight of our planet as seen from space:

And fast by hanging in a golden Chain
This pendant world, in bigness as a Starr
Of smallest Magnitude close by the Moon.

So please, reader, do not reproach me when I tell you that in this year of our Lord 2014 I have nourished my spirit more on images than words. If the IMDB records are correct, I have seen one hundred and thirty films this year – more than Milton ever saw in his whole life! I watched a lot of movies I'd never seen before and I watched a lot of old favourites again too. Babette's Feast I saw this year for the seventh or eighth time. Annie Hall and Bicycle Thieves I saw for the fourth or fifth time. The big themes of my Year of Many Movies were (a) early films, especially romance and comedy, (b) Italian neorealism, (c) anything with James Cagney in it, and (d) Hitchcock.

Early in the year I had youthful aspirations to watch all of Hitchcock but I got sick of it after the first dozen or so. To be honest, it was Psycho and North by Northwest that ruined it for me. Those famous Hitchcocks get a little bit worse every time you see them (North by Northwest could be used as a textbook study in bad plotting), whereas his great films from the 1930s and 40s get better every time. My favourite is his first (1935) version of The 39 Steps, a perfect film that seamlessly combines suspense, comedy, and romance. By the start of the 1960s all the comedy had drained out of Hitchcock's spirit, which is a shame for everybody.

Anyway in the interests of sharing useless information over the internet, I have copied below the list of movies I saw this year with my ratings out of 10.

	FILM	YEAR	RATING
	The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari	1920	10
	The Kid	1921	9
	Nosferatu	1922	10
	The Smiling Madame Beudet	1923	8
	The Navigator	1924	10
	Battleship Potemkin	1925	10
	The Lodger	1927	9
	Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans	1927	10
	The Public Enemy	1931	8
	Red-Headed Woman	1932	6
	Island of Lost Souls	1932	9
	42nd Street	1933	6
	Baby Face	1933	9
	Footlight Parade	1933	9
	The Testament of Dr Mabuse	1933	8
	It Happened One Night	1934	9
	The Man Who Knew Too Much	1934	7
	The 39 Steps	1935	10
	Modern Times	1936	9
	My Man Godfrey	1936	9
	The Lady Vanishes	1938	7
	Angels with Dirty Faces	1938	8
	Mr. & Mrs. Smith	1941	9
	Suspicion	1941	9
	Saboteur	1942	7
	Ossessione	1943	9
	Shadow of a Doubt	1943	9
	Lifeboat	1944	8
	Double Indemnity	1944	10
	Spellbound	1945	7
	Rome, Open City	1945	8
	Paisan	1946	10
	The Best Years of Our Lives	1946	8
	Black Narcissus	1947	7
	Bicycle Thieves	1948	10
	The Treasure of the Sierra Madre	1948	10
	Key Largo	1948	8
	Germany Year Zero	1948	9
	White Heat	1949	9
	Under Capricorn	1949	6
	Adam's Rib	1949	7
	Stage Fright	1950	10
	Strangers on a Train	1951	8
	High Noon	1952	9
	Stalag 17	1953	9
	Roman Holiday	1953	8
	Journey to Italy	1954	9
	Love Me or Leave Me	1955	10
	The Seven Year Itch	1955	10
	The Trouble with Harry	1955	7
	Rififi	1955	9
	The Wrong Man	1956	8
	12 Angry Men	1957	10
	Sweet Smell of Success	1957	10
	Touch of Evil	1958	9
	North by Northwest	1959	7
	Pillow Talk	1959	7
	The 400 Blows	1959	10
	Psycho	1960	9
	Elmer Gantry	1960	8
	Inherit the Wind	1960	8
	One, Two, Three	1961	9
	Judgment at Nuremberg	1961	10
	Lawrence of Arabia	1962	8
	The Great Escape	1963	8
	Dr. Strangelove	1964	10
	Frenzy	1972	8
	Scenes from a Marriage (TV series)	1973	10
	Annie Hall	1977	10
	Kramer vs. Kramer	1979	9
	Withnail & I	1987	8
	Babette's Feast	1987	10
	House of Cards (UK TV series)	1990	9
	The Castle	1997	10
	Opal Dream	2006	7
	Coraline	2009	9
	Fantastic Flying Books of Morris Lessmore	2011	10
	Looper	2012	5
	House of Cards (US TV series)	2013	8
	These Final Hours	2013	8
	The Lunchbox	2013	9
	12 Years a Slave	2013	10
	Ida	2013	10
	The Book Thief	2013	7
	The Broken Shore	2013	8
	The Babadook	2014	6
	What We Do in the Shadows	2014	8
	Calvary	2014	7
	The Infinite Man	2014	6
	The Grand Budapest Hotel	2014	10
	Transcendence	2014	5
	The Little Death	2014	8
	Guardians of the Galaxy	2014	7
	Magic in the Moonlight	2014	6
	The Newsroom (TV series, season 3)	2014	7
	Interstellar	2014	6

What's that you say? You want some highlights? OK then! The funniest movies I saw this year were The Navigator (1924) and The Seven Year Itch (1955); the scariest was Nosferatu (1922); the best love story was Sunrise (1927); the best thriller was The 39 Steps (1935); best gangster films were White Heat (1948) and Rififi (1955); best TV series was Scenes from a Marriage (1973); best war movie was Battleship Potemkin (1925); best film about religion was Elmer Gantry (1960); best courtroom drama was Judgment at Nuremberg (1961); most mind-bending was The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920); and the best new movies I saw were Ida (2013) and Grand Budapest Hotel (2014).

And in case you are starting to doubt my commitment to The Primacy of the Written Word, let me add one more highlight: The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr Morris Lessmore, a beautiful tribute to the power of books and reading. It's a short film available on YouTube. Watch it! Show it to children! Send the link to your librarian! And then go watch some more movies.

Stained glass for cows: Christmas reflections

1

In the beautiful Polish film Ida, Wanda tells her niece Anna about a woman she used to know: “She was an artistic type, always making things out of bits of cloth or glass. She once made a stained glass window and put it in the barn, to make the cows happy.” For some reason – I suppose it was the cows and the barn – this reminded me of the Christmas story. There is something a bit over the top about Christmas. All those prophecies, all those miracles and wonders, all those singing angels. There’s something extravagant, even superfluous, about the whole thing. It’s so superfluous that two of the evangelists took it for granted that they could tell the whole Gospel of Jesus without so much as mentioning the Christmas story. Do we need Christmas? Yes, I suppose so, in the same way that a barn needs a window.

2

One of my children asked me why we give gifts to each other at Christmas. It is Jesus’ birthday, after all, so shouldn’t all the gifts go to him? We puzzled over this for a bit. We noticed that gifts are given not only on birthdays but also on weddings, anniversaries, the announcement of a pregnancy, and other occasions when the heart is big with joy. We might also give gifts when someone dies or gets sick or when a friend moves away. We use gifts on such occasions because there’s no other way of adequately expressing what the heart feels. We exchange gifts when an exchange of words would not be enough to say what we really mean. Gifts are a release valve for the human spirit. The special thing about Christmas isn’t just the use of gifts – that happens on all special days – but the profligate scale of gift-giving. On nearly every other occasion, the gifts are received by one individual. But the joy of Christmas is so high and so deep that we can only express what it means by giving gifts in every direction. Even if we could bring our gifts directly to the baby Jesus, our hearts would still require a release valve: the joy would be too much for us. On our way home from visiting the baby in the manger we would find ourselves shaking hands with strangers in the street, passing gifts to one another, emptying our purse into the hands of a beggar and telling him to be of good cheer. Why do we give gifts at Christmas? Not because the baby Jesus needs our gifts but because we do: we need to give something to someone: otherwise our hearts would burst.

3

I’ve been thinking about all this as I prepare my talk on the atonement for the Los Angeles Theology Conference next month. Atonement is an important idea. It’s about trying to figure out exactly how Jesus saves. Having some clarity about this can help you to talk intelligibly about how the Gospel story relates to the lives of real people here and now. Anselm’s account of the atonement is one of the most powerful pieces of apologetics in Christian history. Anselm translates the whole Gospel story into an idiom of feudal honour. To his contemporaries it must have seemed as fresh and as compelling as if someone today were to explain the significance of Jesus’ death using the language of smart phones and social media. The concept of atonement serves a purpose. But it only goes so far. Explaining the mechanism by which Jesus saves might provide an accessible point of entry into the Gospel story. It might tell you why a barn needs a window. It might even tell you why the window had to be located at that particular spot. But it can’t explain why the window is made of such strange and lovely stained glass. It can’t explain the superfluous.

4

In a fourth-century sermon on Paul’s language of “abounding grace” (Romans 5:12-21), John Chrysostom describes the need for salvation as one small piece of a bigger picture. The main thing about grace isn’t that it meets your needs but that it totally surpasses them. What Christ brings into the world is much more than anybody needs. It’s stained glass for cows.

“Paul did not say ‘grace’ but ‘abounding grace’. For from that grace we received not only as much as was required for removing that sin, but much more. For surely we were both freed from punishment and we rid ourselves of all evil; we were born again from above; and when ‘the old man’ was buried, we rose again. We were redeemed and sanctified; we were brought into adoption and justification. We became brothers and sisters of the Only Begotten, his joint heirs, and of one body with him. Indeed, we were counted as his flesh and were joined to him as a body to its head. Not only did we receive a medication that would heal the wound inflicted by sin, but also one that would bring us health, beauty, honour, glory, and dignities far surpassing our nature. Each one of these was enough to destroy death. But when all of them run together as one, not even a trace of death is left, nor can even a shadow of it remain to be seen. For Christ paid off much more than we owed – as much more as a limitless ocean compared to a small drop of water.” (Homilies on Romans, Vol. 1, p. 186)

5

What are you waiting for? Don’t just stand there! Go out and kiss somebody! Throw a party! Make a feast! Sing a Christmas carol! Let the wine flow freely! Give somebody something and receive a gift from someone too! Don’t be shy! Christ is born and the angels are singing. Christ is born and the world is renewed. Christ is born and the sunlight we were longing for has flooded over us, filling our barn (we don’t know why) with colours.

Deviant doodlings

Were I even to try to answer the question “Why do I love you?”, I would be denying its premise; I would be saying “I do not love you.” Why do I love you? Becauselessly.

No one speaks in the silence of the world. And that is God.

So Augustine allegedly said, “The church is a whore, but she’s my mother.” Big deal. Jesus said she’s his wife.

For people who cannot claim a white-hot moment of conversion, or even a “heart strangely warmed”; people who are unaware, day by day, of Jesus holding their hand and talking to them in prayer; people who, in worship, sing without closing their eyes and raising their hands – is it okay for them to take Jesus as their impersonal Lord and Saviour?

Have I ever had a religious experience? Not if you mean an experience of a particular kind, let alone of a particularly elevating kind. (The crack of a bat, perhaps.) Otherwise only in the gift, guilt, and grief of the ordinarie.

“What about you?” he asked them, “Who do you say I am?”

Peter answered, “You are the Messiah.”

Jesus said, “Golly-gosh, Pete! Wow! Thanks so much for sharing.”

I recently clicked on a blog post titled “Singing Contemporary Worship Songs Eschatologically” because I thought the “E” must be a typo.

Congratulations to the quite brilliant David Congdon, whose book The Mission of Demythologizing: Rudolf Bultmann’s Dialectical Theology will be published in the spring of 2015. Reading the title off the cover, Matthew Frost tweeted, “So, is there a colon in the title, or does it just run straight through?” “Ha, colon!” David replied. So I’ve added the colon – and made it BIG. I mean, at over 700 pages, you’re going to need a huge colon to digest it, right?

What is said may be either profoundly true or painfully false depending on who says it. For example, Julian of Norwich’s celebrated intuition that “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well”: from T.S. Eliot (in “Little Gidding”) it’s a furnace-formed hope; from a spiritual dilettante it’s a cheap soporific.

Students demand texts that are “relevant”. Very well, give them what they want: texts they will dismiss as irrelevant: i.e., texts that will release them from the tyranny of the contemporary and fashionable. The relevance is in the recoil.

How do you prevent theology from becoming ideological? Martyrdom, perhaps, but, like the crucifixion itself, only as its witness is more an act of love than faith.

There once was a preacher named Joel,

who cried, “Savior, I do Thee extol,

for my health and my wealth,

and for me and myself.”

His theology floats in a bowl.

(Comment on Joel Osteen left at After Existentialism, Light)

There once was a man name of Crow,

had a dream he was free, but no mo’;

“Home, Sweet Home” was a jail

mass produced by the pale:

“Hey, this is America, bro’.”

Prisons are full of extremely dangerous people. If they’re doing their (inside) job right, none more so than the chaplain, the “Big X” in the breakout and relocation of the humanity of the incarcerated.

Why is the American prison system broken? Because it’s fixed.

The traditional arguments for the existence of God are not proofs but praise, immolations of the intellect, without spot or blemish, on the altar of faith. Or – to steal a phrase from Marilynne Robinson (commenting on Jonathan Edwards) – they are reason sanctifying the unknowable.

What is the difference between kindness and niceness? When children are quarrelling, we tell them to be nice to each other. Yes, because being nice is easy. It requires no effort, no empathy, no recognition of tension and difference (it comes from the Latin nescius, “ignorance”, and entered Middle English meaning “stupid”). Kindness, on the other hand, requires rigorous attention and moral imagination. It does not deny friction or fracture but acknowledges and embraces the other. The clue is in a common translation of gratia: not God’s loving-niceness but God’s loving-kindness.

“The church does not have a social ethic; the church is a social ethic” (Stanley Hauerwas). That’s what worries me: epigram – or indictment?

There is word-care, there is word abuse, and there is word-torture – as in the expression “enhanced interrogation techniques”.

I saw that photo of LeBron James wearing the “I Can’t Breathe” T-shirt, in solidarity with the family of Eric Garner, though – unhappy coincidence – it does double-duty as an endorsement of the CIA Torture Report.

“LGBT Christians Respond to Southern Baptists’ Call for Kindness, Understanding” (Religion Dispatches). Favourably, I trust. It would be quite unchristian to be mean and unsympathetic to Southern Baptists. After all, it’s not like they’re intrinsically disordered, just inordinately obstinate. LGBT Christians, let us love the sinner and hate the sin.

(To the tune of “Car 54, Where Are You?”)

There’s a crisis down in Rome,

There’s a lot of it about,

Baptists too – “What should we do?

Let them in or keep them out?”

Goddam gays won’t go away

(Good old days – auto-da-fés) –

Ross, Rick, and Al, where are you?

Reflecting on his life not long before he died, Karl Barth wrote to his friends that he had only one serious regret: “my failures in real gratitude.” My own list will be a helluva lot longer, but already I can add “my negligence in paying attention”.

The young find themselves fascinating; the old, frustrating.

“Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today” (Matthew 6:34). Only someone who knows that he will shortly die could say such a thing.

Death of a sister

Two days ago we buried Ginger. Good sweet Ginger, who had meant the world to those who knew her. Ginger, who left our lives – but not our hearts – too soon.

Since the first day we met her, my children and I, we never saw Ginger without her sister. The two of them were inseparable. They lived a contented, unassuming life in a little wooden cabin nestled among the sprawling unkempt gardens and the trees. Theirs was a life that seemed to know nothing of the anxieties that come from grand schemes and high ambitions. They had pieced their world together out of a thousand tiny kindnesses, small gestures, shared moments that would have looked like nothing at all to anyone who had not studied the intricate domestic choreography of those sisters.

There is a fellow in our neighbourhood who once had the effrontery to describe the sisters’ life as “dull” – which seemed to me as confused a notion as if he had reproached a German clock for dullness just because it always keeps the time. Certainly there was something staid, almost Victorian, about the manners and habits of those sisters. But the fact that a thing is small and precise, the fact that it follows a scrupulous routine, does not make it empty or contemptible. One can bluster about like the busiest person in the world and yet be fundamentally bored with life – that is the fate of so many of our contemporaries – or one can live richly and well with one’s sister in the confines of a small wood cabin, oblivious to all the world outside. Such was Ginger’s life: a small and uneventful life, perhaps, but a good life too.

And because the life of Ginger was free of all ambition and pretence, it was a hospitable life that always had room for friends and strangers and, most of all, for children. I would like to give you some picture of what Ginger came to mean to my children, but any account will fall far short of the thing itself. Little by little, in her own modest and matter-of-fact way, she welcomed my children into her gentle world. The sisters’ cabin, just a short walk from our own back door, soon became a regular destination. There I would find the children playing, eating, singing, or huddled in a circle chattering away with Ginger and her sister scarcely able to get a word in edgewise.

It sometimes happens that children trespass the boundaries of common courtesy; and there must have been occasions on which the sisters felt that their orderly world had come unhinged in the bustling presence of my three children – not to mention all the times when one of the children would show up, unannounced and unexpected, with a friend in tow. But I never saw anything in the demeanour of those sisters to suggest even a flicker of impatience. They were as indulgent with my children as if they had been their own. Ginger in particular became something of a confidant for my younger daughter. I recall times when, hurt or disappointed, my daughter went straight to Ginger’s place to tell her all about it even before she thought to tell her own parents. Not that Ginger ever spoke of such things to me. Whatever secrets my daughter might have shared with her were sealed up in the impeccable confidentiality of Ginger’s heart, just as they are sealed now forever in the colder confidentiality of the grave.

How suddenly Ginger’s illness came on, and how quickly her frail health went from bad to worse, are matters of which I will not speak here. We had driven her to the hospital – neither Ginger nor her sister drives a car, nor have they ever felt the need of one – and the look on the doctor’s face told us everything. At the very end, we nursed her in our own home. She died around midnight on the night of Thursday December 11th, after those who loved her had stroked her smooth brow and said their last goodbyes. 

Ginger was laid to rest near the the big maple tree. We read a psalm and said the prayers that are reserved for such occasions. We thanked God for the simple goodness of Ginger’s life, and prayed that, following her example, we might be good and true and simple in our own lives too. We looked forward to the final day when Ginger will rise with us and with all the ones we ever loved and lost. When there was nothing left to say we threw handfuls of earth into the grave. 

The other guinea pig, Ginger’s sister, peered out at the proceedings from my daughter’s protective embrace. Her whiskers twitched. Her soft fur, chestnut-brown, was wet with children’s tears.

When the solemnities had concluded we placed fresh flowers on the grave. We went into the back yard and raised the hinged roof on the wooden hutch and put Ginger’s sister back inside. She shot us a quizzical glance and went back to eating an old carrot. There was something sort of bereaved in the way she nibbled at it. For consolation we brought her lettuce, broccoli, cabbage, a sprig of parsley, an apple sliced in two. There is nothing like fresh veggie scraps for the wounded spirit.