by
William Sternman
I didn’t realize
until I started writing this homily that my favorite movie is also the most
spiritual movie I’ve ever seen. That came as quite a surprise to me, because
neither I nor anyone else had ever considered this slick product of a big
Hollywood studio either spiritual or religious. But it changed my thinking
about religion—and my life--forever.
The movie begins
with this description of its hero, Larry Darrell:
“He is not famous.
It may be that when his life at last comes to an end he will leave no more
trace of his sojourn on this earth than a stone thrown into a river leaves on
the surface of the water. Yet it may be that the way of life he has chosen for
himself may have an ever-growing influence over his fellow men so that, long
after his death perhaps, it may be realized that there lived in this age a very
remarkable creature.”
Before he went off
to fight in World War I, Larry was a typical fun-loving American, but he comes
back filled with doubts about the meaning of life.
“I don’t think I
will ever find peace until I make up my mind about things. It’s so difficult to
put into words! The minute you try you feel embarrassed. You say to yourself,
‘Who am I to bother my head about this, that, and the other? Wouldn’t it be
better to follow the beaten path and let what’s coming to you come?’ Then I
think of a guy I knew. A minute before he was full of life and fun. Then he was
dead. It was the last day of the war. Almost the last moment. He could have saved
himself. But he didn’t. He saved me—and died. So he’s gone—and I’m here, alive.
Why? It’s all so meaningless. You can’t help but ask yourself what life’s all
about. Whether there’s any sense to it, or whether it’s just a—stupid blunder.”
An acquaintance
tells Larry that in India he met “a man I never thought to meet in this world.
A saint. People go from all parts of India to see him, to tell him their
troubles, ask his advice and listen to his teaching. And they go away
strengthened in soul and at peace. But it is not his teaching that is so
remarkable. It’s the man himself.”
Larry asks him why
he went to India.
“To escape my
pursuer. He followed me there. I’ve wallowed in the gutters of half the
seaports of Europe to put him off my track. He was waiting for me. I know that
however far I flee, one day he will come up with me and I shall feel the
terrible hand on my shoulder.”
“Wouldn’t it be
better,” Larry asks, “to face the issue and take your punishment?”
“Ah, but you don’t
know what the punishment is! It’s not prison or the hangman’s rope. I could
face that. It’s mercy, forgiveness, love. Didn’t anyone ever tell you that I’m
an unfrocked priest? It’s not the police I’m running away from. I’d kill anyone
who tried to arrest me. It’s God.”
Larry meets the
Indian holy man, who tells him that “the path to salvation is difficult to pass
over—as difficult as the sharp edge of a razor. But this much we know, and all
religions teach it: in every one of us there is a spark of the infinite
goodness that created us. When we leave this earth we are reunited with it as a
raindrop falling from heaven is at last reunited with the sea which gave it
birth.”
During a
mountaintop retreat, Larry has a vision.
“It was just at
that moment before night ends and day begins, when the whole world seems to
tremble in the balance…. All of a sudden I had a strange sensation. I felt as
if I had been released from my body—that I was suspended in mid-air. Then
everything that had been confused before became clear to me. I had a sense of
knowledge more than human. I felt I had broken away and was free…. I felt that
if it lasted another minute I’d die. And yet I was willing to die if I could
only hold onto it because for that one moment I had a feeling that—that— [God
and I were one].”
At the end of the
movie the narrator tries to explain Larry to his puzzled former fiancée.
“My dear, Larry has
found what we all want and very few of us ever get… I don’t think anyone can
fail to be better and nobler and kinder for knowing him. You see, my dear,
goodness is, after all, the greatest force in the world, and he’s got it….”
You can imagine
what an effect all this had on a thirteen-year-old boy whose conversations with
God always turned out to be soliloquies. I was convinced that Larry Darrell was
a real person and I wanted to sit at the feet of this worldly saint. I wanted
to become monk. Conversely, the movie The Razor’s Edge and the Somerset Maugham novel on which it was based,
gave me permission to think the unthinkable—that there was, after all, no God.
Until 1959, this
was the only American movie I ever saw that made me think about the meaning of
religion and spirituality. There were, of course, films like The Song of
Bernadette, in 1943, about a Catholic saint, and The Keys of the Kingdom,
1944, about a Catholic missionary who is a failure in everyone’s eyes but
God’s—but the religiosity of the protagonists was a foregone conclusion and
their spirituality was not discussed.
Still, they were
better than the movies of the Thirties in which priests played by Pat O’Brien
or Spencer Tracy were too good to be true. Or movies of the Forties like Going
My Way, Come to the Stable and The Bells of St. Mary’s, in which
priests were regular fellows like Bing Crosby, singing “Swinging on a Star,” or
lovable old codgers like Barry Fitzgerald, and nuns were saints in habits, like
Ingrid Bergman, or all-around good joes like Loretta Young and Celeste Holm.
A British movie, Black
Narcissus, 1947, about English nuns setting up a convent in the Himalayas,
did depict its nuns as individuals with passions, including sexual, like the
rest of us.
If you’re wondering
why all the movies I’ve mentioned, except for The Razor’s Edge, are
about Catholics, it’s because during the Thirties and Forties Catholicism was
the religion of choice in Hollywood, despite the fact that the heads of most of
the Hollywood studios were Jews. Occasionally, you’d see a mild little movie
about a minister, but I never saw a rabbi in a picture until Woody Allen’s Annie
Hall, 1977.
The post-World War
II period saw a rash of Biblical and quasi-Biblical spectacles which glorified
Christianity…sort of. In Quo Vadis? (1951) a Roman centurion converts to
Christianity because he’s in love with a Christian. In The Robe (1953),
based on Lloyd C. Douglas’s novel, another Roman centurion, present at the
Crucifixion, is transformed by his possession of Christ’s robe. In its sequel, Demetrius
and the Gladiators (1954), Caligula tries to get the robe for himself.
Finally, in 1959, we have the incredibly boring Ben-Hur, winner of
eleven Academy Awards, in which a Jew sees the Christian light. These
spectacles were often entertaining, but their spirituality was pro-forma at
best. I’ve never been able to bring myself to see The Ten Commandments (1956),
The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), or King of Kings (1961),
featuring a Jesus with shaven armpits.
The only movie of
the period that I found inspiring was The Inn of the Sixth Happiness
(1961), in which Ingrid Bergman gives a luminous performance as an English
working girl determined to become a missionary in China.
The Brits came
through again in 1955 with a film adaptation of Graham Greene’s novel The
End of the Affair, in which a woman makes a bargain with God and then has
to live with the consequences. The movie discussed man’s relationship with God
and had a powerful effect on my religious thinking. So much so that I became a
fan of Greene’s novels about tortured Catholics.
Then, in 1959, came
Fred Zinnemann’s powerful The Nun’s Story, which tried to portray what
it was really like to be a nun, including the conflicts and contradictions.
When the Mother Superior of her convent orders the novice played by Audrey
Hepburn to deliberately fail a test that she knows she can pass with flying
colors, Sister Luke begs to be allowed to tell at least one person of her
sacrifice. Her superior answers disdainfully that that’s “humility with hooks,
a humility that takes something back for the sacrifice.” I’ve never forgotten
that phrase, “humility with hooks.”
In 1960, Inherit
the Wind reenacted the famous Scopes trial of the Twenties, in which the
legality of the Tennessee law that prohibited the teaching of evolution in the
public schools was attacked. The humanist Clarence Darrow is challenged by the
fundamentalist William Jennings Bryant (although they have different names in
the movie) to name one thing he considers holy.
“The individual
human mind. In a child’s ability to master the multiplication table, there is
more holiness than all your shouted hosannas and holy holies. An idea is more
important than a monument and the advancement of man’s knowledge more
miraculous than all the sticks turned to snakes and the parting of the waters.”
Although the movie
unfairly stacks the deck against the fundamentalist, this humanist declaration
still retains its power.
1960 also saw the
release of Elmer Gantry, based on Sinclair Lewis’s novel about a
salesman turned religious con man. Religious people were no longer
automatically considered good and clean.
In 1961, I was
haunted by another British import, Whistle Down the Wind, in which a
group of children believe a fleeing murderer is actually Christ.
My most spiritual
experience in the movies came while watching Martin Scorsese’s The Last
Temptation of Christ (1988). In the Crucifixion scene, the camera looks
down on the people at the base of the cross from Jesus’s viewpoint. Suddenly I
was up there on the cross, looking across a vast landscape to the horizon.
Instead of pain, I felt exhilaration and a wonderful feeling of detachment. It
was the most transcendent experience I’ve ever had.
Since I can’t
possibly top that, I’m going to end this homily on a more prosaic note, from Bull
Durham (1988):
“I believe in the
Church of Baseball. I've tried all the major religions, and most of the minor
ones. I've worshipped Buddha, Allah, Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, trees, mushrooms,
and Isadora Duncan. I know things. For instance, there are 108 beads in a
Catholic rosary and there are 108 stitches in a baseball. When I heard that, I
gave Jesus a chance. But it just didn't work out between us. The Lord laid too
much guilt on me. I prefer metaphysics to theology. You see, there's no guilt
in baseball, and it's never boring...which makes it like sex.”
Benediction:
From The Razor’s
Edge, adapted from Somerset Maugham’s novel by Lamar Trotti:
“We Indians believe
that there are three roads which lead to God: One is the path of faith and
worship; one is the path of good works performed for the love of God; and then
there is a third path which leads through knowledge to wisdom. You have chosen
the way of knowledge. But you will learn in the end, my son, that the three
paths are only one path.”
Drop quote:
“I never pray.
Kneeling bags my nylons.”
© 2000 William Sternman
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