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Okay, so maybe it's a little more, Boy Meets God; Boy Falls In Love; Boy Becomes Disillusioned and Withdrawn When Forced to Confront the Harshness of Living; Boy Decides God Isn't Real and/or Has Forsaken Him; Boy Comes to Terms With the Fact That You Have No Way of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

Through A Glass Darkly

Last night I started Ingmar Bergman's Silence of God trilogy with the film Through A Glass Darkly. I got it from Netflix (along with the next film, Winter Light) back in November or December. I kept putting off watching them because they are black and white, Swedish films with subtitles. Having familiarized myself with Bergman in the past by watching two of his more famous works, The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries, I knew I would need to be able to completely concentrate on watching the movie and reading the dialogue.

The Seventh Seal was intriguing, and very dark, and I kind of hated it, even though I didn't hate the experience of watching it. Wild Strawberries was much more enjoyable. For some reason, I like to watch people evaluate their lives and am always curious to see how artists depict what they, through the characters, find most valuable.

Art that struggles with the concept of God is also endlessly intriguing to me, which is why I added the Silence of God trilogy to my queue. Through A Glass Darkly was quite good. Short, at only ninety minutes, and encapsulated within a twenty-four hour period, there are just four characters, and the movie is basically all about them reacting to each other's reactions to Karin, a woman who is beginning an "incurable" descent into mental illness. The other three characters are her unimpeachable husband; somewhat absentee, novelist father; and sexually and artistically frustrated younger brother. After an intense day during which Karin finally decides to give into her darkness and has a vision of God as a spider that unsuccessfully attempts to penetrate her, she gets flown off to the hospital. But her father and brother stay behind and discuss finding something in the world to hold on to, and hoping that love is the true nature of God.

I suppose the spider, to me, represents all of the difficult questions associated with disillisionment about God, the feelings of helplessness when such terrible things are going on in the world, the self-hatred we feel when we allow our own inappropriate thoughts and feelings to overwhelm us. Had Karin allowed the spider to penetrate her, would she have fallen further into this fear and anger? Or would she have had to accept the duality of God (or as I see it, the duality of humanity, which we have assigned to God)? She was so blissful in her hallucination up to that point, wanting to leave reality behind, wanting to be allowed to see God. I like that the movie ends on a relatively positive note, a breakthrough between father and son, and the only idea of God that I really think should be adhered to--love. The world is full of grace, and as Studs Terkel would say, hope dies last. Unfortunately, we only get to see or access the smallest ideas of what God could be.

Anyway, I might try to watch Winter Light tonight. Depends how tired I feel after work today.