The Puritans weren’t dreaming about “a more perfect union”; they were too busy building a most-perfect religion, following their own blueprint for the Kingdom of God, one seemingly void, at least in part, of the Beatitudes from the Gospel of Matthew, chapter five. But again, that’s what made the Puritans so influential, because they were far too intentional to let God just be.
Safeguarding God against the ills of humanity was not simply the Puritans’ desire; they believed it was their divine responsibility. However, rather than keeping God safe, their efforts created a stifling environment, a space that opened up opportunities for new ideas to arise and spread among their own people. They couldn’t control people’s beliefs. And the same is true today. As hard as we try to demand that God be this or declare that God hates that, in the end, our actions often undermine our understandings about the sovereignty of God.
A dinner guest, while describing a recent trip to Israel, remarked that his visit had made him unusually aware of the fact that we live in a Christian country. It wasn’t the populace or the historical sites or the politics that brought it to his attention.
It was the weekly calendar.
For Jews, the Sabbath begins at sundown on Fridays and ends at sundown on Saturdays. So in Israel, the weekend is Friday-Saturday. Sunday is a normal work day. Our guest remarked that he felt very aware of its being Sunday, and disoriented by everyone doing “Monday things.” He said he’d simply never realized how culturally ingrained the Christian influence is.
We do live in a Christian nation. Protestant, to be specific. God may not show up in the Constitution, but God sure is everywhere else. Our work and school calendars make allowance for the major Christian holidays and holy days of Easter and Christmas. Federal systems like the postal service are closed on Sundays, the Christian Sabbath. What our guest was describing was the sensation of noticing the absence of something so familiar that its presence goes unnoticed. Eight years ago, when I was living in England, it took me ages to realize that the reason I was so jumpy in libraries was that there were no precautions to keep the books on the shelves or the shelves on the walls in the case of an earthquake. Not generally an issue in England, but certainly an issue here in California.
Matthew Paul Turner’s brief examination at the evolution of America’s relationship with God is necessarily limited. At 220 pages, he would need to cover about two years of New World history per page, which he doesn’t. The focus is extremely narrow, based first on Puritans and tracing a route from there to the Second Great Awakening, and then to the development of fundamentalism and evangelism.
What he does cover is done in a way that’s insightful, interesting, and liberally sprinkled with a wicked sense of humor. To be honest, I didn’t notice the massive gaps in his story until about halfway through.
There’s extensive discussion of the Second Great Awakening, but not the Third. No mention of groups like the Oneida Community or the Burned-Over District. The Quakers, Mennonites, and Shakers are mentioned once or twice and only in passing. No mention of the Amish. No discussions of Lutherans. Of course no discussion of Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, or anyone else whose religious observance didn’t spring off the Calvinist branch.
The strangest, to me, is there’s no discussion of the Mormons. As topics in America’s relationship with God go, it doesn’t get more American than the Mormons. Aside from the usual sensationalist aspects (polygamy!), they also play a major role in America’s move west.
It’s a fun read, but it’s fundamentally (hah) flawed. What Turner does discuss appears to me to be done well. What he leaves out is disappointing.
And God said: No longer shall your name be Ya’akov, “Heel,” But Yisrael, “Godwrestler,” for with Me and with humanity have you battled, and You have won!”
And thus, night after night, God, You come to me. Not with favors do You come, but to try my strength.
And when, by morning, I prevail against You once again, again I find myself alone: A poor and hapless traveler, limping on a twisted thigh.
“With God and with humanity have you battled, and You have won!” Is this Your blessing for me, Great Mystery?
Then heaven help me! For though against all I may prevail, Against one there is no victory. Against me!
Your blessings rest heavy, God. I cannot bear them. I limp, and I’m alone on every road, wherever I go.
Defeat me, just this once, that I might find some rest by morning, The rest that all the vanquished know.
Again it’s night. Again alone. And once again God comes seeking. Yisrael! Where are you?
Here, God, over here — somehow I moan. But why? Why, night after night, do You battle with me;
And, with the rising of the dawn, forsake me once again, And leave me limping, limping and alone?
And God said: No longer shall your name be Ya’akov, “Heel,” But Yisrael, “Godwrestler,” for with Me and with humanity have you battled, and You have won!”
And thus, night after night, God, You come to me. Not with favors do You come, but to try my strength.
And when, by morning, I prevail against You once again, again I find myself alone: A poor and hapless traveler, limping on a twisted thigh.
“With God and with humanity have you battled, and You have won!” Is this Your blessing for me, Great Mystery?
Then heaven help me! For though against all I may prevail, Against one there is no victory. Against me!
Your blessings rest heavy, God. I cannot bear them. I limp, and I’m alone on every road, wherever I go.
Defeat me, just this once, that I might find some rest by morning, The rest that all the vanquished know.
Again it’s night. Again alone. And once again God comes seeking. Yisrael! Where are you?
Here, God, over here — somehow I moan. But why? Why, night after night, do You battle with me;
And, with the rising of the dawn, forsake me once again, And leave me limping, limping and alone?
I’d like to admit something that may come as a surprise, given my postings for National Poetry Month last year and this year.
I don’t read poetry. Not really. Other than a brief foray into Edmund Spenser’s “Faerie Queene” this fall and an equally short glance at Shakespeare’s sonnets a little further back, I haven’t sat down to read a poem since junior year of college when I read Seamus Heaney’s translation of “Beowulf.”
The poetry I encounter most comes with music attached. And so, for the rest of National Poetry Month, I’m going to post favorite song lyrics. Some were written to be songs from the start, while others began as traditional poems and found themselves set to music later on.
I’d like to begin with one of the latter type, a poem/song that is now often found in Jewish services and prayerbooks.
Hanna Szenes was a freedom fighter and partisan during World War II. In 1944 she and some compatriots parachuted into Yugoslavia to help rescue Hungarian Jews from being deported to Auschwitz. She was arrested at the Hungarian border, imprisoned, tortured, and eventually executed by firing squad. Her diaries and other writings have been published and some have been widely used, including the poem I’m featuring today. In fact, this poem is used to close some versions of SCHINDLER’S LIST.
אלי, אלי
אלי, אלי, שלא יגמר לעולם
החול והים
רשרוש של המים
ברק השמים
תפילת האדם
Eli, Eli, Shelo yigamer l’olam:
Hachol v’hayam
Rishrush shel hamayim
B’rak hashamayim
T’filat ha’adam.
My God, My God, I pray that these things never end,
Thanks to my high school choir director, I have seen AMADEUS more than any other film in the Best Picture lineup. It’s possible I’ve seen AMADEUS more than any other film period, but I don’t care to spend the time considering all the options.
When I first saw it, I didn’t like it. But with every successive viewing, the film has grown in my estimation. I think now that perhaps my dislike came from the disjointed viewing that comes from watching a three-hour movie in forty-five minute chunks over the course of a week. It was hard to get involved in it, and all I could see was the immature obscenity of Mozart and the spiteful resentfulness of Salieri.
But this film grows on me in much the same way that Mozart’s music has grown on me. I used to be all about the great Baroque composers like Handel and Bach, and while I still love their music for its precision, organization, and florid embellishment, I find myself increasingly drawn to the soaring arcs of the Classical period.
On the back of the AMADEUS DVD case, there is a comment from a reviewer saying that AMADEUS is “as close to perfection as movies get.” I must say I have to agree, especially if one watches the director’s cut, as I have done. I’ve seen the theatrical release enough times to know which 20 minutes have been restored to the film, and they add. At one point in the film, Salieri remarks that Mozart’s music manuscripts are perfect – shift one note and it is diminished. This film is remarkably like that. The theatrical release is brilliant. Adding in scenes originally cut is risky, and could have caused the film to drag at moments, but instead it moves along with the smooth confidence of one of Mozart’s own compositions.
At heart, AMADEUS is about basic emotions of life – envy, arrogance, desperate seeking for parental approval, and the struggle to have faith in a just God. As I watched the film this time, I started to wonder about the choice of name. It’s based on a play by Peter Shaffer of the same name, which is in turn based on a play (Mozart i Salieri) from 1830 by Alexander Pushkin. The film could have been called “Mozart” or “Wolfgang” but they went with Mozart’s middle name, Amadeus.
“Amadeus” means “God’s love,” a name especially appropriate for the film. Told from the point of view of perfectly competent but not genius composer Antonio Salieri, much of the film revolves around Salieri’s childhood plea and pledge to God for the gift of music. If God will give him the gift of composition so that His glory may be expressed through music, Salieri will dedicate himself to virtuous behavior of all kinds. Then Mozart, this filthy-minded, spoiled young man appears on the Viennese music scene, and Salieri’s faith in a just God is destroyed. How can such an extraordinary gift of music, a gift Salieri sees as a clear sign of God’s love, be given to this man?
I think many of us struggle with something similar, though it is rarely so destructive as it appears in AMADEUS. There is a skill or a quality we long to have, and we work ourselves to the bone trying to achieve our goal. Then someone shows up for whom it comes as easily as breathing, gaining accolades and praise for something that is natural while all our hard works leaves us in second place.
Not all Best Pictures are created equal. Sometimes one film will appear in which every participant, from director to stars to the people who hang tracing paper on windows to diffuse the light, hit some kind of collective sweet spot and create a work of art that defies description. AMADEUS is firmly in this category.
Out of Africa (Best Picture, 1985)
Mmmmm… Robert Redford before he became made of leather….
So, imagine it’s 1914 and you’re a well-bred white woman accompanied by African servants, trekking across a hostile wilderness full of potential threats from man and wildlife. What kind of MORONS don’t post guards at night?! Yeesh.
I liked OUT OF AFRICA more than I expected to, in spite of moments that smack of the self-martyring vapidity of BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY (he’s wild… untamed…. if I love him, I have to set him free… true, perhaps, but it always sounds stupid when said aloud.)
For all that Karen (Meryl Streep) is very much a privileged white woman in a British colony (or soon-to-be-colony), and displays the slightly patronizing kindness of her type towards the Kikuyu tribespeople living and working on her farm, she is remarkably sympathetic. We feel for her, taking on the challenges of this new world that might as well be on another planet from her native Denmark. She struggles with feelings for the man she married for convenience, and who routinely strays, which lead her to contract a bad case of syphilis – extremely dangerous in that time. Karen’s treatment requires her to return to Denmark and undertake a series of a medication that is apparently mostly arsenic. In other words, it’s the chemotherapy of her day.
I think the real star of this film is the cinematography. The images of Africa, both close ups and long shots, are remarkable, and the movements and foci of the camera views make the audience into a third, silent character sitting at the table with Karen and the other characters.
OUT OF AFRICA is much slower than AMADEUS, but that’s kind of the point. According to the Wikipedia article on the film, the director and producers of OUT OF AFRICA intentionally pulled that slowness from the autobiographical work on which the film is based.
This time around we’ve had love of God and love of man. Quite a good double bill, actually.
Next Up: Platoon (Best Picture, 1986) and The Last Emperor (Best Picture, 1987)
Interesting bit of trivia. Two supporting roles, one in each of these films, were played by actors who went on to create relatively high-profile characters in the science fiction television world. Alice Krige, who plays Sybil Gordon in CHARIOTS OF FIRE, created the role of the Borg Queen on STAR TREK: VOYAGER. ORDINARY PEOPLE has a small supporting role played by none other than Adam Baldwin, who was Jayne Cobb on FIREFLY. Anyways…
Ordinary People (Best Picture, 1980)
I’ve been dreading watching ORDINARY PEOPLE. The prospect of a tightly-wound emotional drama about a family dealing with the death of a child… well, it didn’t appeal. But I’m not sorry to have seen it.
Like many of the movies that have won the Academy Award for Best Picture, ORDINARY PEOPLE is not the kind of film that leaves you with warm fuzzy feelings of having spent a couple hours in pleasant entertainment. There’s something about it that grips, though, and it catches you up and draws you in. I suspect this is especially true of anyone in the audience who has dealt with the major thematic elements, either in themselves or in another person.
ORDINARY PEOPLE is, at heart, a story about dealing with emotion. The main character, Conrad, begins the film a month after leaving a psychiatric hospital he’d lived in for four months as a result of slitting his wrists. Before that, and only seen in flashback, is the boating accident involving both Conrad and his elder brother, Bucky. Conrad survived. Bucky didn’t, and Conrad blames himself. The parents have different approaches, too. The father, played by Donald Sutherland, devolves into a spiral of worrying about everything. He is the more sympathetic of the parents, for he is genuinely concerned about Conrad, almost to the point of hovering and being too encouraging about every small victory. The mother (Beth), played by Mary Tyler Moore in a departure from her best-known TV roles, retreats into a brittle cheer, chattering about inane nothings and refusing to either deal with emotions or make any special effort to help Conrad readjust to normal life. The more sensitive natures of the men in her family are an embarrassment to Beth.
Dealing with strong emotion is a challenge for the best of us, especially when it’s a negative emotion. Grief, guilt, and anger can be overwhelming and frightening. They have a way of becoming larger than ourselves and devouring us from within. In a piece of rather angsty teenage poetry, I once described grief as a “ravening monster.” I can chuckle at the memory of that thankfully-destroyed poem now, but I still think the description is apt. These emotions, if strong enough, have the power to destroy anything they touch. One of the most honest moments in ORDINARY PEOPLE is towards the end of the film, when Conrad is leaving a school swim meet, and gets in a brief fistfight with a former friend. Another friend follows Conrad to his car, gets into it, and tells Conrad that he misses Bucky too. He asks why Conrad is so determined to go through this alone. These strong negative emotions make us feel isolated, but also make us perversely insist on further isolation. We push people away, even when they’re offering to help us bear the load.
There’s a song that was featured on GREY’S ANATOMY’s musical episode called “How to Save a Life.” A recurring line, in that episode sung by a character going through the grieving process and finally realizing the damage she’s done to her surviving relationships, is “Where did I go wrong? I lost a friend somewhere along in the bitterness…”
ORDINARY PEOPLE doesn’t show that part of the story for Conrad, but there’s a taste of it in the disintegration of the parents’ marriage as expressed by Calvin, the father. Beth finds him weeping in the dark dining room, late at night, and is stunned when he explains that he was crying because he doesn’t know if he loves her anymore. He doesn’t know if she’s capable of love.
Conrad does seem to get better, but those of us who’ve gone through therapy know that one cathartic session does not a stable person make. He’s got a fight ahead of him, and so does Calvin, now seemingly separated from Beth. I can’t help but wonder if Conrad is able to repair some of those friendships lost in the bitterness of guilt, grief, and isolation. Even if he does, it’s never quite the same. Scars will remain.
Chariots of Fire (Best Picture, 1981)
CHARIOTS OF FIRE is one of those movies that has become so famous, so popular and well known that it is one of the most mockable in the world. The challenge, therefore (as with the GODFATHER films), is to try to shut out the way the film’s images, music, and themes have entered the vernacular.
CHARIOTS is massively inspirational, showing how faith and determination and conviction can help a person achieve his or her goals. It perfectly captures the spirit of sportsmanship that is what the Olympics are supposed to be about: athletes, the cream of the world’s crop, trying their hardest to outdo each other and outdo themselves, and rejoicing in each others’ successes.
One of my favorite characters is the fictional Lord Lindsay, created to replace a member of that Olympic team who declined to be included in the film. Lindsay is based loosely on Lord Burghley, but more than that he provides a Peter Wimsey-like note of goodnatured (if entitled) sunlight in the story. Indeed, the contrast of personalities is fascinating. Lindsay is all golden hair and loose-limbed readiness for fun. Montague is in the background, quietly observing and admiring, star-struck. Eric Liddell has a slightly dreamy quality to him, an otherworldly element that highlights his religious fervor. And Harold Abrahams is all dark intensity, driven to be the best to prove to all, including himself, that he can be both led to water and allowed to drink.
What else is there to say about this film? It’s been studied and admired and parodied endlessly. Critics remark on that famous musical theme, exclaiming over how the composer opted for a contemporary sound in his use of synthesizers and pianos, rather than a sweeping, period-appropriate orchestral score. They compare the events of the film to the real historical record of this British running team, pointing out what the film used and what it didn’t. I have nothing new to add except that this is a beautiful film with a relatively simple story, and it leaves me feeling uplifted and hopeful.
Perhaps to be iconic is to be mockable. It’s just nice when the mocking is good-natured.
Next Up: Gandhi (Best Picture, 1982) and Terms of Endearment (Best Picture, 1983)