Boy Meets God; Boy Falls In Love; God Isn't Real

Okay, so maybe it's a little more, Boy Meets God; Boy Falls In Love; Boy Becomes Disillusioned and Withdrawn When Forced to Confront the Harshness of Living; Boy Decides God Isn't Real and/or Has Forsaken Him; Boy Comes to Terms With the Fact That You Have No Way of Knowing, But That Life Requires Living.

Of what do I speak? I finally watched Ingmar Bergman's Winter Light last night, after it had been sitting on my coffee table for about six months. It's the second in the Trilogy I wrote about several months back.

Although it is much slower and heavier than Through A Glass Darkly, I actually liked it more. It's the story of a (Protestant) clergyman who, after experiencing war and death, ends up feeling cut off and abandoned by God, no longer sure if God even exists, and unable to be an effective shepherd and counselor to his congregation. The black and white film truly enhances this work, acting as a bleak backdrop of despair and lifelessness. There is plenty of classic Bergman dialogue; here is an amazing example:

Priest: If there is no God, would it really make any difference? Life would become understandable. What a relief. And thus death would be a snuffing out of life. The dissolution of body and soul. Cruelty, loneliness and fear--all these things would be straightforward and transparent. Suffering is incomprehensbile, so it needs no explanation. There is no creator. No sustainer of life. No design. God--why have you abandoned me?

He doesn't want to believe this. He wants what so many of the ultra-religious truly want--to feel special in God's eyes, to feel blessed, to feel pride and arrogance at "knowing" the answers.

Not to go off on a tangent here, but I definitely hit my spiritual crisis at around the age of 15 when a lot of things in my life sucked and several people in my family died. I couldn't understand what kind of God would allow or cause these events. The way I eventually reconciled this was to sort of decide that if there even is a God in the Judeo-Christian sense of the concept, it is the God of the Deists. The clockmaker who set the world in motion but does not interfere. Maybe there are reasons for life's difficulties, maybe not. Either way, at the very least the bad times allow us to appreciate the good times that much more. So people die--without death, what would be the point of life?

Anyway, I think this falls in line with the ideas espoused in the film. I'll wrap up with this brilliant monologue:

Parishioner: The passion of Christ, his suffering [referring to the beatings/indignities Christ suffered on the way to his execution, as depicted in the Mel Gibson film of the same name]. Wouldn't you say the focus on his suffering is all wrong?.....This emphasis on physical pain.....I feel he was tormented far worse on another level. Maybe I've got it all wrong. But just think of Gethsemane, Pastor. Christ's disciples fell asleep. They hadn't understood the meaning of the last supper or anything. And when the servants of the law appeared, they ran away, and Peter denied him. Christ had known his disciples for three years. They'd lived together day in and day out, but they never grasped what he meant. They abandoned him, down to the last man. He was left all alone. That must have been painful. To realize that no one understands. To be abandoned when you need someone to rely on. That must be excruciatingly painful. But the worst was yet to come. When Jesus was nailed to the cross, and hung there in torment, he cried out, "God, my God. Why has thou forsaken me?" He thought that his heavenly father had abandoned him. He believed everything he'd ever preached was a lie. In the moments before he died, Christ was seized by doubt. Surely that must have been his greatest hardship? God's silence.