It was four years ago, at this time of year, that COVID social isolation began in earnest. Remember?
First we started staying home from Mass, then from school, then from everything else. The thing that brought me up short, though, was when it dawned on me we wouldn’t be back to normal in time for Easter. It seemed so terrible not to be present for my favorite day of the liturgical year, such a loss.
Then my father died suddenly, just before Easter, and I had to adjust my views on loss.
It was a strange thing. Instead of planning for my father’s visit, we were planning his funeral. All through the Easter Vigil, live-streamed on a laptop, I was aware that this wasn’t ideal. We should be inside the actual church, actually receiving Christ’s body and blood, and instead we were crammed into our living room watching a tenor singing out “Christ our light” into an empty building.
But I couldn’t stop smiling.
It was a strange thing. The seminarian started to read from Genesis, telling us how the world was empty and void, and then God spoke, and there was light. He told us how God made the water, and fish to swim in it, the land, and creatures to crawl on it, and sun, moon, and stars to rule the day and night, and man. And breath for man, the breath of God. It was a good story, and I wanted to hear more. I was spellbound through the entire Mass, as if it were all new. Out of the void, God made something firm, something real, something for us to stand on. And then he gave us life.
When I got the call that my father was dead, even as I cried, I kept finding little stepping stones of joy. It was like trying to make your way across a dark, formless swamp. No one would dispute that death and grief are dreadful and cold, but there was always something to stand on, something good.
I kept thinking: At least he died at home in his comfy chair, not hooked up to the beeping hospital machines he loathed. At least he was a praying man, and he had been to confession. At least the last thing I told him was that I love him. There was something for my feet to stand on amid the grief.
At least I believe in the resurrection of the body and life everlasting. It’s a good story, and I want to hear more. I kept thinking of it at his burial, where my siblings and I stood six feet apart, in an almost comically tragic scene straight out of a Russian novel, with fog and mud and solitary mourners by an open grave; and I smiled then too.
That was the year when one thing after another started to unravel in my life. I kept losing things, precious things, that I thought I utterly depended on; but I also kept finding firm ground under my feet. Not a lot of ground! But enough…. Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor.
Noah (2014) was a terrible movie. Help me figure out why we liked it anyway.
This is the second (yes, that’s all we’ve managed to watch so far) in this year’s Friday Night Mandatory Lent Film Party series. Last time, we watched The Passion of Joan of Arc, so I figured the kids would appreciate a “real movie” (i.e., in color, no subtitles, and, yanno, Russel Crowe). We had never seen this movie, and I’ve always been curious about why some people hate it so much, so we went for it.
Here’s the trailer, which is a fair representation, except it doesn’t include rock monsters:
The movie is apparently based not only on Genesis, but I guess on the book on Enoch, and also just . . . movie stuff. I’m sorry, I’m not going to research which parts are scholarly and which were just made up, because that’s not the part I’m interested in. I believe there really was a cataclysmic flood (many cultures have mentioned it) and that a holy man built an boat and saved his family and a bunch of animals. I also believe the story of Noah in Genesis is a myth, in the sense that it was written to convey something true about God and his relationship with man, and is not meant to be taken literally.
One thing I know, the story of Noah is not a children’s story (despite all the play sets and nursery decor people produce because of the animals and the rainbow). It’s actually incredibly violent and baffling. So I’m happy to report that this movie is also violent and baffling. Some of the baffling stuff is because the movie doesn’t really make internal sense, and part is because the writers don’t know what to do with a story about someone trying to make sense of the will of God while also having free will. But, I also don’t know what to do with that. I guess that’s ultimately why I liked it: Because it doesn’t make anything coherent out the story, but it does take the unavoidable problems seriously.
That being said, this movie was a mess.
[COPIOUS SPOILERS AHEAD]
In Genesis, God speaks very clearly to Noah, even telling him the most precise specs on how to build in the ark. In the movie, God refuses to speak except through ambiguous prophetic dreams, and this lack of clarity causes anguish to Noah and others. Supernatural things happen a lot, and it’s impossible to tell what they portend, except in hindsight. Noah thinks God wants him to save his family and the animals so the world can start fresh. Noah’s grandfather, Methuselah, gives them a seed from Eden, and when he plants it, springs well up out of the ground and instantly make a flourishing forest grow, and these are the trees the rock monsters cut down to build the ark. (Yes, I will get back to the rock monsters.)
Noah has three sons, and the daughter they adopted as a child, who eventually marries the oldest son, but is barren. He also has an enemy, the king Tubal-cain, who killed Noah’s father in the beginning of the movie. As the flood looms and Noah has built the ark and the animals are safely inside and in some kind of coma, Noah goes to find wives for his other two sons, but the people are so degenerate (I think they are eating each other? It was hard to say) that he decides he has the wrong idea about what God wants, and he intends to wipe out mankind entirely and give the earth over to the animals.
The second son, Ham, meets and greatly desires an innocent girl who’s been cast out by Tubal-cain’s people, but as the floods come, Noah rescues only Ham and leaves the girl to be trampled because he doesn’t want there to be any more children born.
BUT THEN, we find out that Noah’s wife has previously gone to Methuselah–
okay, let me pause and just belly laugh about Methuselah. I think this was the dumbest part of the whole movie. The dude lives in this cave on top of a mountain and it’s apparently like, a forty-minute stroll away from the ark? But they only go see him every few decades. Which is perhaps understandable, because’s he’s very clearly just Anthony Hopkins in a wig, and it’s incredibly awkward.
— anyway, he mystically arranges for Shem’s wife, Ila, to become fertile, and she immediately gets pregnant. Which is how the rest of the family discovers that Noah isn’t rescuing them in order to save mankind; he’s taking them all on a kind of elaborate death cruise, and he now believes that, when the baby is born, if it’s a girl, God will want him to kill her. This makes for some tension on board!
There is also the other complication that Ham is so mad at Noah for not letting him have a wife that he has rescued Tubal-cain, and secretly keeps him on board. Tubal-cain introduces him to the notion of eating animals, which is repugnant to Noah’s family. In fact, it is Tubal-cain who tells Ham (while gnawing on a live lizard) some of the few lines actually quoted from Genesis: That man is supposed to subdue the earth and have dominion over it.
Interestingly, Tubal-cain, like Noah, has also been struggling with God and is in anguish because God does not speak to him as he used to do. But Tubal-cain decides that the answer is to take charge, whereas Noah tries very hard to do what he thinks, according to his best guess, is what God wants. Just as the ark hits a newly-uncovered mountaintop, Ila has what turns out to be twin baby girls, and Noah finds he can’t kill them. He lowers his dagger and instead kisses the babies on the head, he tells God that he can’t do it.
The movie is extremely muddled, here. It does seem, right throughout the movie, that God wants some specific course of action, and does not want others. But he doesn’t ever let on what it might be; and Noah isn’t supposed to rebel against God, exactly, but he’s also not supposed to just do what he thinks best, exactly? The difference between him and Tubal-cain (other than that Noah is clean and has nice Russel Crowe eyes; and Tubal-cain is gross and murdery) is that Noah is trying, whereas Tubal-cain has decided he’s going to do what he wants. There are several points in the movie where doing your best according to your conscience seems to be admired; but also, Tubal-cain definitely seems predestined to be evil, so I don’t know. They land on a very squashy message about . . . I can’t even remember, something about how love is the answer.
But I salute them for recognizing what a profoundly hard question it is. What does God want? How do we follow his will? What if it’s something that seems like it’s the opposite of what people are supposed to want? They don’t answer these questions, but at least they ask them.
I forgot to tell you about the rock monsters (“Watchers”), which are fallen angels (?) who were cast down to earth because they helped Adam and Eve, and when they landed they got this gunky rock stuck to their angelic bodies (?). They see the magical forest that grows from the Eden seed and decide they will help Noah, so they build the ark and defend Noah’s family.
The rock monsters also apparently have a choice, and can be redeemed from their rebellion (?) against God, and at the end they go shooting up into the heavens like some kind of rocket-powered Transformers. Again, it wasn’t ever brought into focus, but there was a vague idea of salvation as something that’s always available to everybody, or something.
I don’t really have a problem with the rock monsters. They were silly, but I liked them, and they almost freaking made sense. Maybe there really were little weird doggy pangolin creatures trotting around, and maybe there were all kinds of healing salves and animal coma smokes and at-home pregnancy tests that we don’t have anymore. Maybe there really was a weird mishmash of technology and primitivism and a strawberry-loving Anthony Hopkins.
Again, they answered the question very poorly, but at least they asked a decent question, which was: What did the world look like, after Eden but not very long after, and not only before the Incarnation but before the flood? What does life look like when things are being revealed, but they’re not revealed yet? It’s a good question, and it took some guts to tackle it.
The movie was quite beautiful in many places. I loved the rather arty scene depicting creation, and then later the scene showing the potential for the restoration of creation. There is some mention of the waters below the earth meeting the waters above it to make the flood, and this is how the flood comes about: Huge geysers punch their way up out of the ground and combine with the punishing rainfall. Soo o o o there is some suggestion that from Eden comes both the downfall of the earth (in the form of the threatening waters) and its salvation (in the form of the ark). Which is not wrong! There’s something there! It’s just quite incoherent. But the film seems to sense there is meaning there, even if it’s not fully developed.
I wish the dialogue had been written to be less pedestrian, and I wish it had had a cast of nobodies. I found the all-star cast to be distracting and off-putting, which may be a me problem, but I just don’t really need to see Emma Watson screaming for two hours. Also, I didn’t recognize the actor playing Ham, but every time I saw him, I thought he was Reese from Malcolm In the Middle. Again, surely a me problem.
I deliberately didn’t read any reviews of this movie, but I’m going to do so now and see what smarter people had to say. If you’ve seen it, I’m so interested to know what you guys thought! I should note that Damien thought it was complete crap with no redeeming qualities, and it was mostly me and the kids who thought there was anything to talk about.
We did let the nine-year-old watch it, but it was pretty violent, had some fleeting sexy scenes, you hear the mother screaming quite a bit as she gives birth, and — well heck, it’s not a kids’s story, as I said. I was kind of relieved that the nine-year-old fell asleep after the first hour or so. Also definitely needs some discretion for credulous viewers who think movies based on the Bible are always accurate.
On the way to Mass, one of my kids asked me if it were true that people evolved from apes, because that’s what she heard in school, but she had read otherwise in the Bible.
Now, I know we have talked about this before. Many, many times. It’s just that she likes the story of Genesis very much, and she wants it to be literally true. The God she knows and recognizes is the one who is depicted literally in the pages of her picture Bible.
She isn’t ready to hear what I have told her in the past, and what I told her again this time: That I’m not really sure how modern humans came to look like they do. That it’s okay to believe that Genesis is literally true, but that I think some kind of evolution must be true; and also that I suspect scientists aren’t quite as sure about what happened as they profess to be.
What I am sure of, and what I tell my daughter she is very free to believe, is what it does say in the Bible: that God made human beings on purpose, out of love, and that He continues to love them and to want to be with them, and that he deliberately gave them an immortal soul. When and how that happened, and what it looked like, I don’t exactly know, and neither does anyone.
I told her that the story of Genesis isn’t bad science. It’s also not good science. It’s not science at all, and was never intended to be. I said that if she wrote a story about what kind of family she has, and someone told her it was bad science, she would be baffled, because it wasn’t science; it was a story. And that is what we generally mean by myth: Not something fake and made up to fool people, but just the opposite: something that attempts to tell something we think is true about what the world is like. And so the book of Genesis is a myth, in the sense that it was written to tell us all kinds of true things about how the world was made, and how humans were made, and by whom, and why, and what kind of relationship they have with God.
It tells us that the creation of the world was not violent, not ugly, not competitive, not chaotic, and not random. It was in some way orderly, it was deliberate, it was done with a plan, and it was beautiful. It was good. It was done in the context of relationships, from the very beginning. This is the myth of our creation. This is what I believe about how God made us.
My daughter is probably too young for such a subtle idea, but I’m not really sure what else to tell her. I knew she is very interested in Greek myths, so I said (probably confusing the issue more, but I was driving, and things pour out of your mouth as you drive) that Greek myths served the same purpose as Genesis: To try to explain what kind of world it was, as they understood it. They got some things wrong, but some things right.
Prometheus, for instance, I said. He was a titan who dwelt in a kind of paradise, but realized that mankind below was cold, bereft, needy and alone; and so he had pity on them and brought them the gift of fire.
And what a gift. It was more than just a flame, but signified all kinds of good things, light, heat, warmth, protection, intelligence, enlightenment, and even comfort. He cared for them, and so he came down from heaven and brought them good things.
It was here that I discovered the D’Aulaire illustration of Prometheus has been quietly living in my head all these years as a proto-image of Jesus. Of course he had.
But then, I said, of course they also got a lot wrong. In this myth, the other gods didn’t want man to have all these good things. So they punished Prometheus for what he had done.
And then it occurred to me: That part was a proto-Jesus story, too, albeit very darkly. In the myth, because of his kindness to mankind, Prometheus was nailed to a rock to have his liver eaten out by an eagle; but, because he was immortal, it regrew every day, and was devoured again the next day, and his agony continued. A wretched, ugly story, so perverse . . . but so familiar.
You see it, right? Fine tune this myth, and it becomes Jesus, who came down from heaven to save mankind, and for his troubles he was nailed to a tree and now he has become an immortal meal. The suffering part is over, but yes, his body becomes our food over and over again. The ancient story distorts the reality to come until the point of it all is lost, but it’s hard to deny the basic form is there. What does it mean?
Maybe the point isn’t lost after all. Maybe the point is that we tell these stories over and over again, but they don’t take on any kind of truth or beauty until Jesus arrives. That’s the point. If you want your story to mean something, put Jesus in the center of it. At least that is how it seems to me.
We have all seen the man who is knee deep in theology, with ecclesiastical degrees and pedigrees up to his neck, but he has no love, no kindness, no spark of divinity inside him that he allows to become a flame. Why, because there is no Jesus at the center of his story. And we have all seen the man who doesn’t know the holy name of Jesus at all, and yet his whole life and all his works are animated and illumined by that presence just the same. We have all seen men whose lives make stories like this. What does it mean?
It means that Jesus hides. He hides in Genesis, He hides in myth, he hides in humanity, he hides everywhere, so that we can find him. At least that it how it seems to me.
The reporter, Ben Jacobs, made an audio recording of the assault, and eyewitnesses confirm that Gianforte assaulted Jacobs, broke his glasses, and began punching him when he was on the ground, after Jacobs repeatedly asked questions about the new report on the American Health Care Act.
Gianforte’s office claims that it was Jacobs who initiated the aggression. Eyewitnesses say this is not so. Here is the audio recording of the incident:
A little more about Gianforte. He’s the founder and CEO of the Gianforte Family Foundation, an organization which, among other things, bankrolled the donation of a T. rex and acrocanthosaurus exhibit to the Dinosaur and Fossil Museum in Glendive, MT in 2009. The Billings Gazette reported that the museum teaches that dinosaurs coexisted with humans.
The museum’s founder and director, Otis E. Kline, Jr., says of one of the exhibits in his museum:
“There’s two ways these fossils could get to Kansas, and one is the evolutionary way; the other is the biblical creation way,” Kline said.
“The evolutionary way says there was an inland sea that came from the Gulf of Mexico. But the biblical creation way says it was the flood of Noah’s day.”
The Gazette reports:
The funds [for the museum] were raised through a nonprofit Kline created, the Foundation Advancing Creation Truth.
Not, you notice, a foundation for advancing the truth about creation, but a foundation for advancing a certain story of creation, even though there is no evidence for that story and plenty of evidence against it (and even though serious Biblical scholars, including Josef Ratzinger and John Paul II, affirm that Genesis was never meant to be a scientific treatise!). Rather than looking hard at measurable evidence of how the world came into being, they’re creating a false, emotionally appealing dichotomy of faith vs. science, of us vs. them, rather than of true vs. untrue.
Why is this anecdote relevant? Because the GOP has steadily, aggressively working to earn a reputation as the party that not only doesn’t care what is true, but will bowl over anyone who tries to report what is true; because it’s not a matter of true vs. untrue, it’s a matter of us vs. them. Who do you want to win? Them?
Remember, Trump spent his campaign training his fans to bleat, “Fake news!” every time they heard something they didn’t like, even when it was manifestly not fake, just unfavorable to him.
Remember, it was the Trump administration that introduced the nakedly Orwellian phrase “alternative facts.” To paraphrase Groucho Marx: These are the facts. If you don’t like them, well . . . we have others.”
That Trump and his admirers and wannabes lie when convenient is a given — and that’s certainly not confined to the GOP. All politicians, left and right, lie left and right, and they mostly get away with it. This is nothing new.
But what we are seeing is something more: an open campaign to keep those lies afloat by damming up the sources of unfavorable information — threatening them, encouraging legislation against them, or just plain knocking them to the ground and punching them because you’re tired of their questions.
This is a phenomenon to watch very carefully, in big government and in your local government, too. If you’re an American, remind yourself frequently that our founders spilled their own blood to escape from monarchy — to extricate themselves and us from being ruled by someone who was above question and above reproach, whose word was truth.
It’s well and good not to blindly trust the media, and it’s excellent to read, watch, and listen critically, asking yourself frequently, “How credible is this story on the news?”
But if “Don’t trust the media!” is your clarion call, ask yourself whom you do trust, instead. Where are you getting your information from? From the guy who’s trying to shut the media down, sue them into oblivion, break their glasses? Why would you do that? Who behaves that way, if not the guilty?
As Trump supporters have said in a different context: If they haven’t done anything wrong, they have nothing to fear. If it’s true for Mexican immigrants when ICE is in town, surely it’s true for our president when the microphones come out. If he’s done nothing wrong, why is he so afraid of the press?
Don’t let yourself say things like, “Well, that reporter was being very aggressive; he got what he deserved.” That’s his job. Don’t let yourself repeat, “This is what they get for writing all those negative stories.” That’s their job. Don’t allow yourself to say, “I never trusted the media anyway, so it’s no great loss if they’re not allowed inside the White House.” That is their job. Make them do their job. Insist that they be allowed to do their job.
I would have been thrilled if the New York Times et al had done their job better when Obama was president, and had held his feet to the fire the way they’re doing to Trump now. Now they’re doing their job. Better late than never. Better now, before it’s too late, and we lose our hunger for the truth altogether.
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Image of First Amendment under scaffolding by tacomabibelot via Flickr: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
