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Films

It’s a Mad, Mad World – Film Review of Lars and the Real Girl

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Earlier this past summer, my wife and I watched Lars and the Real Girl starring Ryan Gosling. If you’re a fan of the HBO series Six Feet Under, you’ll really enjoy this one. The screenplay was written by Nancy Oliver who wrote some of the best Six Feet Under episodes. Not only is this movie fall-off-your-chair funny (which I did when Lars introduces his family to Bianca), but it’s also a sociopolitical commentary on how society deals with emotional and mental health. I won’t get into the plot too much, but the story is about a delusional breakdown of the main character, Lars (played by Gosling) who has been unable to deal effectively with past family tragedy (the loss of his mother, occasioned by his own birth, and the loss of his father when he was a young boy). Clinically, he would be labeled with something like social anxiety disorder. Lars has repressed his emotions to such a degree that even the touch of another person causes him pain (“the kind of pain when your feet get really cold then you come into a warm house and they burn…it feels just like that”, Lars tells us). He ends up ordering a ‘real doll’ from a website and begins a delusional relationship with her and the rest of the story deals with how his family and his community (his church, workplace, friends, his therapist, and a really real girl) support him and help him through his delusion.

Lately, I’ve also been reading Michel Foucault’s History of Madness and early on, Foucault talks at length about leprosy and how medieval Europe, especially the church, shunned and relegated all lepers to the outside of the city gates (a scapegoating role the mentally ill-the mad-would come to fulfill after leprosy disappeared from Europe).

This liturgy of exclusion would carry over into the eighteenth century as society became less and less hospitable to madness, controlling it by labeling it, corralling it, and ‘solving’ it with institutions and the systematic treatment of ‘unreason’.

What struck me in this movie, is how Lars’ family and community (yes, even his church!) came alongside him and didn’t expel him or scapegoat him. However, the most compelling aspect, in my opinion, is how the therapist works with Lars. We never get the sense that she’s treating a problem. In one scene, Lars’ brother wants an answer, he wants a solution to this problem as quickly as possible. The therapist tells him, in probably the most subversive scene of the film, that this delusion isn’t a problem, in fact, it can be a gift for Lars and for those around him, which in fact, it turns out to be.

Now, I realize that labeling this delusion ‘a gift’, especially for those who have lived through or live with mental health issues, is a tenuous description but one that is, at least here, quite apt. In fact this ‘gift’ has its own dignity-Lars is allowed to live in a community without being ‘powered’ over, without being confined and expelled from society. As St. Paul tells us, “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise”. In the end, Lars reminds us of those unsuspecting Christ-like figures like Dostoyevsky’s idiot who, in shaming the wise (or here, the healthy), actually become their salvation.

The church is often shamed by these fringe figures and it desperately needs to discover how to behave like Lars’ community, learning to live with and even within the delusions of life. If we can learn that, we can also learn how to accept the gift of difference that mental and emotional health issues bring with them into our communities and so bear witness to salvation, our own included.

The Spirituality of Narnia

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Book Cover
Book Cover

Many people love the Narnia stories. However, not all readers know the deep spirituality that underlies them. In some ways, the stories mirror Lewis’ own wrestling with his spiritual longings, and seek to help others on the same journey. He wants us to feel, as he himself came to feel, that what we long for at the deepest level of our being is to be part of a great story, indeed The Great Story, in which the stories of Narnia and the story of our world and the story of our lives find their true meaning.

“I love C.S. Lewis’ work, and I’ve read many, many books about his life and writings. This book stands out to me because I believe that Lewis himself would have truly enjoyed it. It does what Lewis himself tried to do: make the most important story understandable and accessible to “normal” people. And it does so with a winsome style that has so much in common with Lewis’ own.”
— Brian McLaren, author/activist (brianmclaren.net)

“There is a great deal written about C.S. Lewis but much of it, sadly, is hardly worth the effort. That is certainly not the case here. Original, perceptive, balanced and insightful. Essential reading for anyone concerned with Lewis and issues of faith.”
— Michael Coren, Author of The Man Who Created Narnia

Visit http://www.regentbookstore.com/ to purchase this book

The Meaning of Life: The Views of Monty Python, Douglas Adams, Samuel Beckett, the X-Box, and Jesus

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At the heart of the courses I teach at Wycliffe College is the question of how to communicate Christian faith to people who are exploring their spirituality but know very little about Christianity. Of course, there’s a limit to how much you can learn about this in the classroom, so from time to time, I send my students out onto the campus to talk to “normal” people. One question that’s been especially fruitful has been to ask people: “If you could ask God one question, what would it be?” At the University of Toronto, the number one question was: What’s it all about? Why am I here? Is there any point to life? In other words: What is the meaning of life?

I guess if you asked people in their 30s or 40s, this would likely not be the main question. By that time, people are caught up in jobs and mortgages and even thinking about finding a partner and settling down, and they’ve stopped thinking about the meaning of life. Which seems to me a pity because the question is always an important one. And it’s not that they solved it, or came up with a working solution to it—it’s just that life squeezed it out of their heads. 

But while you are a student is actually the perfect time to try and figure out what you believe about this—partly because of the stage of life you are at, but also because you’re in an environment that actually encourages you to think about these things—which is not true for most.

Let me tell you what I’m going to do and what I’d not going to do. My main interest, as you might guess, is in Jesus’ view of the meaning of life, so I’ll say most about that. I do this partly because I suspect for many people who are trying to figure this out, they don’t even put Christianity on their list of options. They tend to think of it as a religion, and a discredited one at that. Which is unfortunate—but then (I confess) I could be a little biased.

What I’m not going to do—and I’m not qualified to do—is a full comparison of what different religions and philosophies have said about the meaning of life. But there are lots of resources out there for doing that, and I hope you’ll pursue them. (One of the best is James Sire’s classic, The Universe Next Door.)

The five examples I’ve chosen to think about the meaning of Life are not philosophers in the strict sense. But I would say in another sense, everybody who has ever thought about ultimate questions of life and death is a philosopher. And strange as it may seem, Monty Python, Douglas Adams, Samuel Beckett, the X-Box, and Jesus have all done that. And—guess what?—studying their works can actually be more enjoyable than reading the professional philosophers—though that’s good to do too.

So let’s begin.

Most philosophies and religions actually answer (or at least try to answer) five fundamental questions:

Where are we?
What kind of universe is this? Friendly or impersonal? Meaningful or a sick joke?

Who are we?
Are we “higher” animals? Fallen angels? Soft machines? Gods in disguise?

What is the problem? 
A failure in evolution? Inadequate education? The violence of men? Religion?

What is the solution?
A drug to correct evolution? Universal education? Matriarchy? A secular state?

Where are we going?
Annihilation and extinction? Life after death? Reincarnation? Utopia on earth?

I’ll refer to these five from time to time as we go through.
 

1. Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life

In spite of the title, if you watch the movie hoping it will help, you’ll be disappointed.
What it does is help formulate the question, show why it’s difficult. I think the most helpful part in some ways is the Eric Idle song at the beginning. The words are a clue to the movie. 
The Meaning of Life by Eric Idle

Why are we here? What’s life all about?
Is God really real, or is there some doubt?
Well, tonight, we’re going to sort it all out,
For, tonight, it’s ‘The Meaning of Life’.
What’s the point of all this hoax?
Is it the chicken and the egg time? Are we just yolks?
Or, perhaps we’re just one of God’s little jokes.
Well, ça c’est ‘The Meaning of Life’.
Is life just a game where we make up the rules
While we’re searching for something to say,
Or are we just simply spiralling coils
Of self-replicating DN– nay, nay, nay, nay, nay, nay, nay.
What is life? What is our fate?
Is there a Heaven and Hell? Do we reincarnate?
Is mankind evolving, or is it too late?
Well, tonight, here’s ‘The Meaning of Life’.
For millions, this ‘life’ is a sad vale of tears,
Sitting ’round with rien nothing to say
While the scientists say we’re just simply spiralling coils
Of self-replicating DN– nay, nay, nay, nay, nay, nay, nay.
So, just why– why are we here,
And just what– what– what– what do we fear?
Well, ce soir, for a change, it will all be made clear,
For this is ‘The Meaning of Life’. C’est le sens de la vie.
This is ‘The Meaning of Life’.

Now, even though it’s light-hearted, actually underneath, Eric Idle is addressing the five questions.

• Where are we? The big divide when you think about this question is: was the world made by God or not? Because if there is a God, it makes a huge difference. Hence the song rightly asks: “Is God really real?”

• Who are we? There are two options in the song: on the one hand, are we “Simply spiralling coils Of self-replicating DNA?” Or, on the other hand, “Are we just one of God’s little jokes”? Is God a cosmic sadist who made us just to torture us? Neither is very encouraging: neither helps us feel we have dignity or importance. Maybe we don’t.

• What is the problem? Many people find this one is confusing because there are so many answers to choose from. The song points out that for many, “this life is a sad vale of tears.” So suffering is part of the problem. But it also asks: “Is life just a game where we make up the rules / While we’re searching for something to say?” Part of the problem is that we don’t know the rules for living a human life (we have to make them up), and we’re searching for something to say because we don’t know what is right and true and reliable. 

• What is the answer? The song doesn’t offer any answer because there is no clear question. Hence the irony of the whole song: “This is ‘The Meaning of Life’.”

• The song does make an attempt at the fifth question: Where are we going? Again, it gives us a scientific option and a religious option: “Is there a Heaven and Hell? Do we reincarnate? Is mankind evolving, or is it too late?” Can we affect our evolution so that we can just perpetuate the race indefinitely?

So Monty Python makes us aware of the problem, but really not much more. I suppose if we can laugh about the fact that we don’t know what life is all about, maybe we can feel better about not knowing . . . at least till the movie is over. 
 

2. Douglas Adams

For those who don’t know, Douglas Adams is the author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a trilogy in five parts, about the adventures of Arthur Dent, a hapless Englishman who has all sorts of adventures in space that he didn’t want.

Like Monty Python, The Hitchhiker’s Guide is light and funny, but at the same time raises some serious questions about Life, the Universe and Everything. In the end, Adams’ conclusion is the same as that of Monty Python: we can’t know. But he deals with it more directly. Maybe the most famous sequence is the one where people actually try to discover the meaning of life, with the help of a super-computer, Deep Thought, who informs them (after seven and a half million years consideration) that the meaning is “42.”

The computer they build is called by the strange name of “earth.” If you wonder why the world is here, there’s your answer. Unfortunately, after a further ten million years, earth was destroyed by a construction crew of Vogons, who are building a hyperspace bypass, just five minutes before earth came up with the question. Later on, we discover that the Vogons were hired by philosophers and psychologists who were afraid that if the question to which the answer was 42 was really discovered, they would all be out of a job. 

So like Monty Python, Adams makes fun of our desire to know what life is all about. But along the way he also knocks some of the most common answers people give: some people think religion holds the meaning life, others think its technology that is the key; and old-fashioned romantics will always believe love is the answer. Adams debunks all of them.

• Religion is not the answer for the simple reason that there is no god. There is a man who rules the universe, but he’s senile, lives in a leaky hut, and has a cat he calls “the Lord”; there’s a prophet Zarquon, whose followers always believed he would return at the end of time and give meaning to life. To the amazement of the skeptics, Zarquon does indeed return at the end of time, but he is a doddery old man who has no idea what is going on, so this really doesn’t help.

• Technology isn’t the answer: by the time of The Hitchhikers’ Guide there have been lots of technological advances, but many of the things that go wrong in the galaxy do so because of technology: even though it’s so advanced, it still goes wrong and creates as many problems as it solves

• Love is not the answer: In The Hitchhiker’s Guide, love can be wonderful, of course, but it comes rarely and briefly. In fact, Arthur doesn’t find true love until the fourth book of the “trilogy”, when he falls in love with a woman with the unlikely name of Fenchurch (the name of a train station in London, England). Before long, however, he is separated from her (through a random technological accident, naturally) and never finds her again.
(The movie softens this: at the end, Arthur decides the real question is, “Is she the one?”—a truly romantic and Hollywood-ish kind of ultimate question—and he decides that Trisha McMillan is indeed the one. But it’s a lot less interesting than the book, and an answer I suspect Adams would disapprove of.)

As you might expect, the trilogy has no happy ending: Arthur dies. For some readers, this undoubtedly confirms the suspicions they already had about the nature of the universe: it’s a nasty, cruel place where comfort doesn’t last and there are no ultimate answers. Like Monty Python, in spite of the wonderful humour, the big story underlying The Hitchhiker’s Guide is actually a deeply pessimistic, even nihilistic, one.
 

3. Samuel Beckett

Some people might be offended to see the name of Samuel Beckett in the same line-up with these other names. He has been said by many people to have been the greatest playwright of the twentieth century, and perhaps that’s right. He is most famous for the play Waiting for Godot, which is still performed quite often.

But to me his philosophy of the meaning of life is summed up most succinctly and poignantly in a very short play called Breath. It only lasts 30 seconds, and it has no visible actors or spoken lines. As the curtain goes up, the stage is in semi-darkness, and a large pile of garbage dominates the centre of the stage. The cry of a new-born baby is heard. Then there is the sound of a long breath being drawn in, and, as that is heard, the lights slowly go up on the garbage. Just as slowly, the breath is then exhaled, and the lights slowly go down, we hear another cry of a newborn. Curtain. End of play. Thunderous applause.
So what is all that about? Would you applaud if you saw that on the stage? It seems to me it would be more appropriate to weep. If you could answer the questions from the play, the answers would be something like this:

• Where are we? The world is garbage
• Who are we? We are born, we live, we die, our lives have no meaning
• What is the problem? We don’t know who we are or why we are here
• What is the solution? There is no solution: life is an unending cycle of futility
• Where are we doing? To death, to darkness and to silence.

Now that is a very clear-cut world-view. If it has a name, the name is nihilism, from the Latin word nihil, meaning nothing. You can see why. The New York Times’ obituary for Beckett in 1989 quote a conversation he had with a friend on a beautiful spring day. They were walking across a park in London, England, and the friend said, “Isn’t this just the sort of day that makes you glad to be alive.” To which Beckett responded, “I’m not sure I would go as far as that.”

It’s difficult to live consistently as a nihilist, particularly when there is beauty in the world—and if there’s one thing you want in a philosophy of life, it’s the ability to live with it. Maybe this is why Douglas Adams, who’s also a nihilist, is so funny (if funny nihilist isn’t an oxymoron). Maybe it is the only way of coping with such an overwhelming reality.

I suspect there are many people who give up on the meaning of life because it seems so elusive and the options seem so challenging. And of course because there’s so much to enjoy in life, as long as it lasts and even if we don’t know what it’s all about. There is an X-Box commercial which sums up this point-of-view quite brilliantly. It was banned in the UK as too offensive. (Actually if you Google X-box commercial, you’ll find a number of them.) I think it’s very clever, though not exactly subtle.

4. The X-Box

The video opens with a woman in the last stages of labour. As she gives birth, the baby (a boy) leaves her body at high speed, breaks through the window in the delivery room, and shoots off into the sky. The camera follows the baby’s arc, and, as he flies so he ages—from small boy to adolescent to young man to middle aged man, and then (as he begins to approaches earth again) an old man. Finally, he crashes into an open grave, just waiting for his arrival. Then the caption appears: “Life is short. Play more. X-Box.”

Like Beckett, the commercial says life is short: you’re born, you live, you travel fast through space and time, and then you die. Like Monty Python and Douglas Adams, it makes it funny. But the conclusion is quite different from Beckett’s: he says life is meaningless, so how can you enjoy even the beauty of nature? The commercial says, life is meaningless, so play more. That’s hedonism.

Is hedonism more logical than nihilism? Obviously one is more fun, but I’m not sure there’s logic in it. Bear in mind too that those who made the commercial don’t really care whether you have more fun in your short life. They may not even be nihilists themselves. The only thing we can be sure of in their philosophy of life can be summarized in the words: “Please buy our product and make us rich”—which is related, I suppose, but not exactly the same.

So where do we go from here?

Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre says this:

I can only answer the question “What am I to do?” if I can answer the prior question, “Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?” (After Virtue 216)

If we want to know the point of life, we have to know the story of life. Monty Python and Adams say: We can’t know the story, and all our efforts to find it out are ridiculous. Samuel Beckett says: The story is that there is no story. (Although to me there is an irony in the fact that in order to convince us of this, what does he do? He tells a story.) And the X-Box commercial says: The story is that life is short and meaningless, therefore we should have a good time.

This is hardly a survey of all the options! It’s just to whet your appetite. If it inspires you to begin searching for the meaning of life in more serious place, I’ll be happy.

Jesus

I want to end by looking at Jesus, and by asking: What is the story that Jesus teaches? The basic answer is that Jesus buys in to the story of the Bible, and adds some very significant pieces to it.

The Bible consists of 66 books, written by different authors over a period of centuries Yet there is an overarching story that unites the books, in spite of their diversity. The story goes something like this:

In Act 1, God creates an incredibly beautiful world. It’s intricate and diverse and colourful. It’s full of vitality and it’s full of love. It’s a great place to be. And at the heart of it are human beings, male and female, made to reflect like a mirror image the character of the Artist who made them, with love and creativity. They live in a dance of perfect harmony with the Creator and with one another, and with their environment.

In Act 2, however, things go horribly wrong. Human beings try to play God. They behave as though they’re the centre of the universe. They treat the world as though they were the landlord, whereas of course they’re only the tenants. They step out of the dance and get out of step with one another and with the environment—and, most importantly, they get out of step with God. Instead of love being the thing that binds the world together, now the loudest voices now are those of self-centredness and anger.

At this point, a lot of artists would simply give up on their work of art and start over. Bill Mason was a film-maker with the National Film Board of Canada. In his last film, Waterwalker, we see him painting a picture of a Cascade Falls up on Lake Superior. When the painting is finished, Bill stands back to admire his handiwork. To his artist’s eye, however, the painting is less than perfect, and, to the horror of everyone watching the movie, he takes it off the easel, crumples it up and throws it into the campfire. Many artists are like that, easily dissatisfied with their work.

God, however, is a different kind of Artist, and, fortunately for us, more patient than Bill Mason! God decides, instead of trashing this world, to restore his work of art to its original glory and—what’s even better—God invites human beings to co-operate with him and become his apprentices in the project.

God starts with one couple, Abraham and Sarah, and tells them “Through your descendants I’m going to create a great nation and their job will be to bring my healing to the whole world.” The story of this nation—the Jews—is told in the book often called The Old Testament. This is Act 3.

In Act 4, God’s restoration project reaches a crucial stage. God writes a part for himself in the drama of human life, and he’s called by the name Jesus. (I said Jesus adds something unique to the Bible’s story.) It’s as if Shakespeare should write himself into the script of Hamlet to be one of the characters in his own creation. That way we can see what God is like in a way we can relate to, and we can learn what God’s dreams are for us and for the world.

And there is Act 6: the Bible doesn’t tell us a whole lot, but it does give tantalizing glimpses of the end of the story, when Jesus will return, the earth will be restored to its original beauty and then some, and God will set everything to rights. Tolkien made up a new word to describe this. (This was his philosophy too.) Since it was the opposite of a catastrophe–not so much turning the world upside down as turning it right way up–he called it a “eucatastrophe”—a good catastrophe. This is the final act—although, as C.S.Lewis says at the end of the Narnia series, this is “only the beginning of the real story . . . the beginning of Chapter One of the Great Story which no-one on earth has read.” But we’re jumping ahead.

What is the meaning of life? According to Christian spirituality, each of us is called to play our part in this story.

I deliberately missed out Act 5, and the reason is a simple one: Act 5 has not been written. It is being written, in our time, by every choice we make, every action we make, every word we speak. How come?

One writer, Tom Wright, explains it like this: suppose a previously unknown play of Shakespeare’s was discovered, but with one act missing. What could you do? He suggests that what you could do is get together the world’s most experienced Shakespearian actors, get them Shakespeare’s text until it is second nature to them—and then set them loose to act out the play—and when they came to Act 5 they would improvise! If they are going to do that well, they would have to be true to Acts 1 through 4, and it would have to connect with the start of Act 6.

Now, says Wright, that is where we are in relation to God’s story as Christians understand it. God has given us a framework for our lives in Acts 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6. All the clues for how to act out Act 5 are right there. And God says to us, Do you want a part in my story? I would love for you to be a part of it.

This blending of stories is illustrated very powerfully in the movie, The Neverending Story: 

The boy hero Bastian has been reading a book called The Neverending Story in the deserted attic of his school. As he reads, however, little by little he finds himself drawn into the story. When the hero, Atreyu, stops to eat, Bastian pulls out his lunch and eats too. When Atreyu meets a monster, Bastian screams, and then reads in the book, “Atreyu looked around to see where the scream had come from, but no-one was in sight.” At the end of the story, the Childlike Princess explains to Atreyu that her kingdom of Fantasia can only be saved by a human child from another world–and Bastian realises that she is talking about him. When he gives her a new name, he finds himself transported to the world of the book and Fantasia is saved.

As people begin to discover the Christian story, often they have the same experience. Little by little, they have the sense that this story is “about” them, that they have a part to play in it—indeed, that God is inviting them to play a part in it—and that they are being summoned from another world beyond the visible one.
Let’s go back to the question: what is the point of life?

Christians can answer it this way: “The point of life is to play your part in the Great Story God is writing about the world.”

How do you do that? By offering all that you are and all that you have to God, and saying: God, help me this day, wherever I may be, to live as your person in your world in your way. It’s as simple and as challenging as that.

Where does Jesus come into this? He once said this:

“Come to me, all you that are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am humble and gentle in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

In the middle of that saying, he says, “learn from me.” Jesus is many things, but one of them is that he is a teacher. He is gentle and humble teacher: not pushy, not sarcastic, not asking the impossible, not impatient with our failures.

Who does he teach? Those who are weary and carrying heavy burdens. Maybe weary from trying to figure out the meaning of life! Or weary of trying to live by a philosophy that is really not giving you life. One translation says, “those who are burned out on religion.” He offers to teach them too.

And what does he teach? He doesn’t teach the meaning of life as an academic subject: but he does teach what it means to live as God’s person in God’s world in God’s way. He teaches you who God created you to be: he teaches you how to become that person. He chips away at the things in your life and your character that prevent you becoming yourself, he nurtures those things which can help you play your part in God’s world.

So in that saying, he begins by saying, Come! And he really meant it. In my imagination, when had finished speaking that day, and people were looking at their watches and rounding up their children and thinking about supper, there were some who didn’t leave. They went against the crowd, and came up to Jesus, perhaps rather sheepishly, and said, You know what you were saying, about being your student and learning from you? I’d really like to do that. Could I hang out with you some?

And whoever that person was, and wherever they’d been and whatever they’d done, I imagine him smiling and saying, “Of course. You’re very welcome. Come and meet the others.”

And Jesus hasn’t changed. And his invitation to come and learn from him still stands. He just waits to see if we will say yes.

Have we got away from thinking about the meaning of life? Not really. That’s precisely what this is about. In Christian philosophy, you learn about the meaning of life by following Jesus. And that’s what I invite you to do.
Smith College MA
April 2007
 

Notes:

  1. He later wrote of this scene, “About the halfway mark between Marathon and Wawa you round a point and are confronted with one of the most beautiful sights to be found along the rugged north shore of Superior. Here Cascade Falls drops straight into Superior in twin plumes.” Bill Mason, Canoescapes (Toronto: Stoddart, 1995), 122.
  2. Genesis chapter 12 verses 1-3
  3. J.R.R.Tolkien “On Fairy Stories” in Tree and Leaf (London: Unwin Books, 1964), 60.
  4. C.S.Lewis, The Last Battle.
  5. He suggests that it is Act 5, the final act. I prefer the modification proposed by Richard Middleton and Brian Walsh in Truth is Stranger than it Used to Be, that the missing act should be act 5 of a six act play. (Shakespeare did not actually write any six -act plays, but, apart from that, their proposal is helpful.)
  6. N.T.Wright The New Testament and the People of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), 140-141.
  7. Michael Ende The Neverending Story (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1983).

“Stranger than Fiction” and the Meaning of Life: What Jesus says to Will Ferrell

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The image of God we carry around in our head is one of the most important things about us. Accurate and inaccurate images of God can lead to very different conclusions. For instance, many people have the image of God as very religious. But, from the teaching of Jesus at least, that is a pretty inadequate image. For one thing, the God Jesus believed in is the creator of all of life—not just the religious dimension of it.

One implication of this is that, if God wants to communicate with us, God does not have to wait till we take an interest in religion. God can begin to communicate with us through all sorts of things—through friends, through our school work, through circumstances—or even through a movie which raises spiritual questions. For me, Stranger than Fiction is just one of those movies.

Let me tell you what I want to do. I want to offer what English students will recognize as a kind of whimsical “reader response” to Stranger than Fiction. I’m not claiming that this is what the director or the script-writer “meant”: I’m simply saying, these are some of the resonances the movie had for me as a Christian. 

One reason I want to do this is that I find that many people have never heard an explanation of Christianity that they could understand. They’ve heard some that were horribly religious, or made outrageous assumptions, or used weird technical language, or just seemed too ludicrous to believe.

I’m hoping that explaining Christian faith with the help of the movie will help it make sense to you. If you are not a follower of Jesus, I don’t expect that it will make you a follower of Jesus by the end. But if you get to the point of saying, OK, I think I have a clearer sense of what Christianity is all about, I will be very happy, because then you can make an informed decision about it. And of course that clearer understanding may also be something that God is wanting to communicate to you right now!

First of all let me remind you of:

The story

[Beware: spoilers ahead!]

The story revolves around Harold Crick, played by Will Ferrell. Harold is an IRS audit agent and (among other things) a numbers nerd—he counts the number of times he brushes each tooth, the number of steps to his bus stop, and so on. We are introduced to Harold by a voice (a woman’s voice, English, upper class, and with that hint of sarcasm which is so typically English), which describes what’s happening. 

But then Harold begins to hear the voice too. First of all he’s alarmed, then irritated by the voice. Who the heck is this? How does she know so much about his life? And, of course, the $1,000 question: What is the connection between what he does and what she says? Is she just describing what he chooses to do? or is he simply carrying out what she describes? Whose life is this anyway?
Then he notices that his watch has stopped. He resets it, and the voice says, “Little did he know that this seemingly innocent act would result in his imminent death.” Now Harold is really scared. He goes to a psychiatrist (Linda Hunt) who decides that it’s simply a case of schizophrenia. But his problem is about a story, so he goes to see an expert in stories—Jules Hilbert, an English prof (played by Dustin Hoffman).
One thing Hilbert suggests is that Harold should find out whether his story is a comedy or a tragedy. That way he will know whether it has a happy ending or not. By this time he is falling in love with the owner of a bakery whom he’s auditing, Ana Pascal (played by Maggie Gyllenhall), so he tries to keep a note of whether the progress of their relationship indicates tragedy or comedy. For a time tragedy seems to be way ahead. 
But then it seems that, against the odds, Ana is falling for Harold, and Hilbert says this means it’s a comedy: this wouldn’t happen in a tragedy.

Then Harold hears the voice of his narrator on TV, and Hilbert recognizes her. It’s Karen Eiffel, a reclusive novelist. He says, “She only writes tragedies. She kills people.” In particular, she always kills off her main characters.

Harold discovers her phone number among the IRS records, and phones her. Then, in one of the most dramatic moments in the movie, just as she is typing, “The phone rang,” the phone rings. She is startled. Is it a coincidence? She types, “The phone rang again,” waits a second, and sure enough the phone rings again. With rising panic, she types, “The phone rang a third time”—and of course it does. And so the author and her main character come face to face.

He asks Karen if he’s already dead. The fact is that she has the ending in draft form, but it’s not yet typed. Her assistant Penny suggests she should let Harold read the manuscript. He tries, but (not surprisingly) finds he can’t do it, so he asks Hilbert to do it for him. Hilbert’s conclusion is not encouraging: “Harold, I’m sorry. You have to die. . . . It’s her masterpiece. . . . It’s absolutely no good unless you die in the end.” Harold replies (as I suppose any of us would): “I can’t die right now. This is really bad timing.”

But then Harold reads the book for himself, and here comes a turning point in the story: he changes his mind. He tells Karen: “I love your book and I think you should finish it.” And so he commits himself to acting out the end of the script . . . And that’s as much as I’m going to tell you.

To me, this movie illustrates a number of significant themes in Christian spirituality.
1. Sin

One of the biggest themes in the story is the tension between the author and the character. The Emma Thompson character is a kind of God-figure, with power of life and death. In the movie, as far as we can tell, Harold can’t change the course of the story: this seems to be confirmed when the wreckers begin to dismantle his apartment. He can ask the author to change it, but she has the last word.

In Christian spirituality, one way to think of God is as the Author of the human story. (It’s a bit more accessible than God as the King or God as the Lord, since we don’t have kings and lords in our world, but we do have authors!)

Our job as human beings is to play our part in the story. It’s not quite the same as Harold in relation to Karen Eiffel, because the way Christians understand this idea of God’s story is that we have been given freedom—not the illusion of freedom (as Harold has the illusion of freedom), but true freedom. So there’s a tension that comes from thinking of God like this: on the one hand, God is writing a story but on the other hand, we have the freedom to play our part, but also the freedom to say no. How can we follow a script and be free at the same time?

I would say the place to look is at Jesus. Because on the one hand, he can say, “I always do those things that please my father” (his favourite way of talking about God): so he’s obviously committed to living out God’s script. But nobody ever accused Jesus of being a mindless robot. When you read his biographies, he lives with passion and creativity and individuality. He’s somehow more alive than anyone around him. When he’s arguing with his enemies, he’s very light on his feet, and almost impossible to catch out. So it’s a funny paradox: it looks as though freely living in God’s story actually makes you more yourself, not less. (We’ll come back to that at the end.)

But, like Harold, we have some disagreements with the author. We may not like the way the story is going. Sometimes we don’t care for the part that’s been written for us. Sometimes the story requires us to be unselfish, or forgiving, or generous, and we don’t feel like it.

I don’t know how you would define sin if you had to. . . . One definition I find helpful it to think that sin is insisting on writing my own script.
2. Incarnation

In some ways, Harold is like Jesus, figuring out how to live in the story. But in other ways, Jesus is more like another character. Let me come at it this way: you may have heard Christians say things like: “Jesus came down from heaven”—which sounds remarkably like Superman coming to earth from the planet Krypton, which is a childish kind of image. C.S.Lewis suggested what I think is a more helpful and accurate image. He said:

Shakespeare could, in principle, make himself appear as Author within the play, and write a dialogue between Hamlet and himself. The “Shakespeare” within the play would of course be at once Shakespeare and one of Shakespeare’s creatures.

Jesus didn’t travel through space or time to be present in our world. He “moved” (and even that is a metaphor) from one mode of being to another. So the person we meet in Jesus is the Author who has written himself into the script of our story. 

What’s clever about Stranger than Fiction, of course, is that the author lives in the same world as her creation. Normally authors and their characters live in different worlds, which is why Lewis’ analogy can work. But by putting Karen Eiffel in the same world as Harold, the movie actually gives us a glimpse of what Jesus is like—not a neurotic chain smoker who imagines committing suicide, of course, but a human being who is approachable and who understands our problems. Because, of course, when Karen learns that Harold is a real person, she understands instinctively how difficult it must be for him to be part of her story. And when Harold learns that his author is in the same world as him, he can find her phone number and go and talk to her. 

So when Christians talk about prayer, they’re not thinking about talking to a distant, vague kind of God. They believe they’re talking to a God who has been a part of our world, who knows from personal experience what it’s like to be a human being, who has experienced hunger and suffering, joy and sadness, who has hung out with friends and who’s been let down by friends—and (ultimately) a God who has experienced death.

That’s the Christian doctrine called Incarnation.
3. Atonement

Talking of death, there’s another point at which Harold is both similar to Jesus and deeply different from Jesus: they both know they’re going to die, but they respond differently to knowing that.

In Harold’s case, one of the turning points in the movie is when the voice announces calmly, “Little did he know that this seemingly innocent act would result in his imminent death.” So . . . what do you do if you know you’re going to die? Jules Hilbert has an answer. He advises Harold that, if he knows he’s going to die, he should just live the life he’s always wanted, do whatever he wants to do: which he does. He stops wearing a tie, starts wearing a red sweater (very daring, for Harold); he stops counting tooth brush strokes; he learns to play the guitar, something he’s always wanted to do; he goes to funny movies; and he makes love to Ana. In the end, of course, Harold does something unselfish, but that’s not his first response to accepting that he’s going to die. It’s simply to have a good time.

For Jesus, the knowledge that he’s going to die doesn’t come via a voice from the sky. The realization seems to grow slowly on him: he experiences increasing opposition from powerful forces in his world, and sees intuitively how this is going to end. So about halfway through his biographies, he begins to warn his followers that this is going to happen. His response to knowing he’s going to die is different from Harold’s. Instead of just doing whatever he has always wanted to do, he continues to give his life for others every day—the sick, the lonely, the bereaved, the marginalized: so that what happens on the cross on the first Good Friday is just the logical climax of what he’s done every day.

Christians call this the Atonement: Christ’s ultimate giving of himself for humankind’s ultimate problem.

4. Revelation & Eschatology

Another theme of the movie is the question of tragedy and comedy. Will Harold’s story have a happy ending or a sad ending? You can ask the same question about this image of the Christian story. Is it a tragedy or a comedy? Certainly, when you look at some people’s lives, they seem like an unending tragedy.

But I learn two things from Harold: one is that, left to our own devices, it’s very difficult to decide which is true. First of all, he thinks his story must be a tragedy (Ana doesn’t love him), then he decides it’s a comedy (Ana does love him), then it goes back to being a tragedy (Eiffel only writes tragedies), and finally . . . Well, even if you haven’t seen the movie, the fact that it is a Hollywood movie means you can guess what kind of ending it will be.

But the second thing I learn from Harold is that your life does make sense once you read the whole story. When Harold reads the whole script, he realises that it all makes sense. He says, “I read it and I loved it and there’s only one way it can end.” He stops trying to escape his death: he sees how it fits into the story, and he agrees to act it out. It’s a tragedy, sure, but it’s a great tragedy. 

Christians believe that the Bible is God showing us at least the outline of the story he is writing. The story is about a good and beautiful world that has gone horribly wrong, and of a Creator who intervenes in the world to put things right. And (guess what?) when you get to the end of the story, in spite of all the awful things that happen between the beginning and the end, it’s actually a comedy—the divine comedy.

I remember once explaining the difference to my kids: that the arc of tragedy is upward—Macbeth succumbs to pride, and rises slowly and violently to power, but then he is brought down and things revert to normal. The arc of comedy, however, is the other way up. Things start OK, but then they begin to go wrong, and get more and more confused until you think they will never get resolved—but then in the end, everything is straightened out and everyone lives happily ever after. And my daughter Anna said, “You mean it’s like a happy face and a frowny face?” Which I guess it is.

God’s story, as Christians understand it, is ultimately a comedy. For anyone who chooses to co-operate with the Author, whatever happens along the way, the ending is always a happy one. And this is true even though death is always a part of the equation—Jesus demonstrated that. Death never has the last word: the last word in God’s story always goes to joy.

This idea that God has given us a glimpse of the whole story is what theologians call “revelation.” And the study of how the story is going to end is what they like to call “eschatology.”

5. Gospel

The last thing I have been thinking about is an idea that’s not in the movie, but it is in the Christian story, and it’s this: that the Author is trying to get our attention. In the movie, it’s the other way round: the character is trying to get the attention of the Author, who doesn’t know he exists. In God’s story, the way Christians understand it, the Author is trying to get the character’s attention, even though the character may not believe in the Author! God tries to get our attention through any number of means: through friends—Christians who don’t fit the caricature the media feed us; or it may be ideas about meaning and reality that keep coming back to us and nagging at us; or an answer to prayer that we prayed when we were desperate and we think in alarm, Maybe there is a God who’s interested in me. There are a thousand ways God can try to get our attention. Even, of course, movies that make us think about spiritual questions.

And why might God want to get our attention? In the movie, the reason Harold wants to track down Karen Eiffel is to get her attention before she kills him.

In the Christian story, the Creator’s story of the world, the Author wants us to pay attention because God loves us. God designed human beings so they work best in relationship to him. But if we keep trying to run our own lives, write our own pathetic little stories, naturally we will run into trouble. There is no story you could write for yourself, or a story your culture could write for you, which will be as good as the story the God who created you is writing for you.

Here is the last technical Christian term I’ll offer you: Gospel. Gospel means good news, and Gospel has always been at the heart of Christianity. So what is this Gospel, this good news? Here’s one way to say it: the good news is that by following Jesus, you can become the person God created you to be, and you can play your part in the great story, the Divine Comedy, God is writing about this world.

Like Harold, we can say Yes to the Author, and begin to live our lives in the light of the Great Story. And that is the greatest adventure that can ever befall a human being, because it is what we were made for.

Amherst College MA
April 2007

Christmas at the Movies: How the Grinch Stole Christmas

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Stories are amazing things. Some of them crop up in every culture in every century. Sometimes they turn up in different forms, but still with a recognizable family likeness. There seems to be something about certain stories that appeals very deeply to the human race.

I think this is probably one reason we love the Grinch. The heart of the story is really very simple. The Grinch, who is green and ugly and mean lives outside Whoville in a cave on top of Mount Crumpet. He hates Christmas for the simple reason that his heart is two sizes too small. So he hates the fact that the people of Whoville enjoy Christmas. He comes up with a very simple plan: he sneaks into the village on Christmas Eve and steals all their toys. Then he waits to hear their wailing . . . but it never comes. Instead he hears them singing for joy because they know that Christmas is not about presents, and the fact that their presents have gone doesn’t faze them for a second. The Grinch realizes the error of his ways, his heart grows three sizes bigger, he gives the gifts back, and joins in the fun.

I suppose the main theme in the book version of the story is the idea of the outsider, mean and ugly and scary, who has a change of heart, a conversion—something Tolkien called a “eucatastrophe.” If a catastrophe turns everything upside down, a eucatastrophe turns everything right side up, so that there can be a happy ending. There are lots of outsiders in our stories—giants, ghosts, witches, trolls, magicians, you name it. Some are changed (like the Grinch), some are not (like Macbeth). When they’re converted, it makes the story into a comedy; when they’re not, it makes a tragedy.

But the movie adds two things in particular to the book. It develops the character of Cindy Lou Who (who just has one line in the book). Really, she becomes the Grinch’s saviour: she is the one who believes he can change, goes up to the top of his hill through all the snow (“on a mission” as the narrator tells us), and invites him to come to the celebration in the village. And as so often in the stories, she’s an unlikely saviour: she’s only a little girl, after all, and (as the mayor points out) her nose hasn’t yet grown in (like the rest of the Who’s) . . . so what does she know? She’s in good company: saviours are usually the last people you’d expect: the miller’s youngest son (not the strong, good-looking oldest son); Frodo and Sam, little Hobbits from an obscure place called the Shire (which most people in Middle Earth have never heard of); Lucy, the youngest of the children in the Narnia stories.

The other thing that’s new in the movie is that the Grinch once lived in Whoville. In the book, we never hear how he got to live on the mountain. But in the movie it’s because he is ugly, and he’s made fun of by the other children, and he runs away. So at the end of the story, when he comes to Whoville, it’s not coming for the first time, it’s coming back to the place that was once his home and that he left. This idea of a journey also comes up in stories all over the world. From the Odyssey, where Odysseus goes out and has adventures and finally comes home again, to the Lord of the Rings.

So three themes: the nasty, mean outsider; the unlikely saviour; and the journey back home.

Why do we like stories like this? Tolkien said it’s because those stories are echoes of the Great Story, the story God is writing about our world and about the human race. They remind us of what God is like, or maybe they prepare us to hear the stories of what God is like. And because the story God is writing is so profoundly true, and so profoundly beautiful, these echoes of the Story touch us deeply, and so we tell and retell them in a thousand forms. And maybe God is trying to get our attention through those stories.

So the story of How the Grinch Stole Christmas actually resonates with that other story. Think of it this way:

1. Why do we like all these stories about outsiders? Because at some level we know we are the outsider. We all feel like outsiders in one situation or another. So we feel for the outsider, we identify with the outsider, whether the outsider is bad, or simply misunderstood, or a prince under an evil spell. We identify with all sorts. And maybe at some deep intuitive level, we have a memory of being expelled from the Garden of Eden (however you understand that story), and that we’ve been outsiders to God’s plan for us ever since. The outsider: that’s us.

2. Why are we drawn by these stories of unlikely saviours? Tolkien would say it’s because the saviour of the world is not who you would expect in a million years: born in Nazareth (a bit like Newfoundland might be to . . . some people) in a backwater of the Roman empire, a carpenter who never wrote a book, never went to university, and didn’t look like what anyone expected the Messiah to look like. Isaiah wrote, “There was nothing attractive about him, nothing to cause us to take a second look. He was looked down on and passed over.” And yet, says, St. Paul, God takes pleasure in using the weak and foolish and marginalized things that others don’t care about. A baby of dubious parentage born in a donkey’s manger, because there’s no room for him in the inn. An unlikely saviour indeed.

3. And then there’s this idea of the journey, where you leave home, have adventures both good and bad, and then finally come home again. In a sense that’s the story of the human condition: that the human race began as friends of God, servants and children of God, but then we chose to go our own way: as Jesus explained it, like a kid who runs away from home to have a good time, at least until the money runs out . . . and then grudgingly comes home.

The Grinch is about us: choosing to be outsiders to God’s joy and home and family, and an unlikely saviour who comes to invite us to the party, and a journey back home. There is a place in the teaching of Jesus where he sums up these three themes. It’s not a reading we usually associate with Christmas, but it is really. Listen to the story:

‘Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? When he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbours, saying to them, “Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.” Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous people who need no repentance. (The Gospel of Luke 15:3-7)

The story of Christmas is the story of the good shepherd (in those days not the romantic figure we have made him into, but another unlikely saviour) who comes to look for the sheep, the outsider to the rest of the flock, the one that’s strayed from the fold, and then bringing it back home, so that the great party can begin.

And that’s what Christmas is really about: the shepherd coming into our world to search for the lost sheep, and to bring it home on his shoulder. The only question is . . . when he comes looking for us, are we willing to be found?

St. John the Evangelist, Hamilton ON
December 2006

The Gospel according to “Crash”

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crashMovies are a place where the spiritual concerns of our culture often intersect with the Gospel. John van Sloten has become well-known in Calgary and around the world for “preaching from the culture.” Here he offers a sermon which analyses a popular current movie in the light of the Christian message.

The 2006 Academy Award winning film, Crash, is one of the most profound and powerful films I’ve ever experienced. Its insight into the human condition is piercing; a brutal commentary on our desperate need for God. Unearthing. Disturbing. It wakes you up.

If you’ve ever wondered why we need the Christian story of Easter–its Good Friday darkness and its Sunday morning hope–Crash will give you all the evidence you need. And not very politely–in fact it will sideswipe you. “Nobody leaves this movie unscathed,” says Hollywood director Paul Haggis. He’s right. Culpability is assured: so is grace.

The primary vehicle used in preaching the message of Crash is racism. But not simply racism: it includes all kinds of relational brokenness. A Caucasian gun store owner toward a Persian man; that same Persian man towards an Hispanic locksmith; a corrupt white cop toward a black woman, another black woman toward that same white cop; the rich toward poor, the poor toward the rich; and, last but certainly not least, we, the viewing audience, toward our very selves. In engaging the film, we realize that we’re no different from the story’s characters; we’re just as broken, just as guilty as they are.

The soldiers, having braided a crown from thorns, set it on his head, threw a purple robe over him, and approached him with, “Hail, King of the Jews!” Then they greeted him with slaps in the face. (John 19:2-3, “The Message”)

There’s a scene where two clean-cut young black men are walking along, talking about the unfairness of racism, the discrimination of stereotyping. As a viewer you find yourself walking alongside them, nodding in agreement with their assertions, sharing their incredulity at the injustice of it all. And then, in a shocking twist of plot, the two pull out their concealed weapons and ruthlessly car-jack a rich white couple. All of your broad minded, liberal sensitivities go out the window. Even our stereotypes of relationally broken reality are not as clearly defined as we’d like to think. Good and evil are inextricably intertwined. Crash unpacks us.

A rich white woman screams at her husband regarding her concerns that the tattooed Hispanic locksmith currently working in the next room is a gang member. With him, we’re sickened as we overhear her prejudicial rant; with her, we’re sickened as we overhear ourselves.

And then, in the most disturbing subplot of all, we meet a savior, the only redeemable character in the film; a good white cop named Tommy. We seethe with him at his partner’s blatant bigotry. We stand with him when he’s challenged on his racial idealism. We celebrate human potential with him when he saves a black man, caught in an explosive confrontation with police. And then we die with him when, later in the film, he ends up shooting a young black hitchhiker; all because of a meaningless prejudicial misunderstanding.

Then we cry out in despair with the Apostle Paul:

There’s nobody living right, not even one, nobody who knows the score, nobody alert for God. They’ve all taken the wrong turn; they’ve all wandered down blind alleys. No one’s living right; I can’t find a single one. . . . They never give God the time of day. (Romans 3:10-18, “The Message”)

Everywhere we turn we’re faced with questions. Are we really like this? This perverted? This twisted? Have all of us turned aside and become corrupt? Is there no one who does good, even one? Who’s going to save us from this mess?

The soldiers brought Jesus to Golgotha, meaning “Skull Hill.” They offered him a mild painkiller (wine mixed with myrrh), but he wouldn’t take it. And they nailed him to the cross . . . (Mark 15:22-24, “The Message”)

Putting God on a cross is the ultimate manifestation of human relational brokenness. Depravity is most proudly displayed via our ability to stereotype, prejudice, and reject God. We choose to see what we want to see, we limit the truth; both in the person of Jesus Christ and in ourselves. Somehow we manage to get to the place where we see ourselves as right and God as wrong; it’s the pinnacle of human pride. We become blind to who God really is. One could not conceive of a more tangible way not to “give God the time of day.”

And yet at the very moment that depravity reached its zenith, so too did the providential love of God. While we’re busy hammering in the last few nails, living out our denial based self righteousness, God tearfully looked down on us, at the mess we’d got ourselves into, at the suffering of his Son, and screamed out, “Enough!” And the whole time, Jesus peered straight into our eyes and prayed for us, “Father forgive them.”

The moment we were at our worst, God was at his best. He died, we found life. We sinned, he saved. Our darkness made his light seem even brighter.

And what’s really intriguing about it all is this fact; the whole time this story is playing out, we have no idea what’s going on. We’re being saved behind our backs. While we’re still messed up, and messing up, Jesus died for us.

We can see this same reality playing out in Crash. Throughout the movie, we’re given visual clues every time the camera looks down from above on the city, or on a particular scene, offering us a ‘God’s eye’ view of things. This perspective cues us to the fact that someone is seeing all of this. The storyline goes even further; opening our eyes and hearts to the fact that someone is also mysteriously acting through all of this.

In a powerful scene of redemption, the most despicable character in the film, a bigoted white cop, ends up being the officer on the scene for a terrible car accident. The black woman whose life is hanging in the balance is the same woman he’d physically assaulted the night before. Initially both are horrified at the situation–and then something else mysteriously takes over. A greater good rises up within that peace officer’s heart and he risks his life trying to free her from the burning wreck. She lets go of her anger and trusts him, having no choice but to let him save her. All the while the mystical musical of the movie’s soundtrack plays in the background. Arm in arm they run from the fiery scene, falling into a trembling, tearful embrace. Then the car explodes and the camera pulls up into the sky.

Redemption. Hope. God stepped in and saved them, despite themselves.

God did it for us. Out of sheer generosity he put us in right standing with himself. A pure gift. He got us out of the mess we’re in and restored us to where he always wanted us to be. And he did it by means of Jesus Christ. (Romans 3:24,26-28, “The Message”)

The whole back half of the Crash story is filled with this kind of serendipitous salvation scenes. Saving foisted upon undeserving souls. The whole back half of our life stories are filled with these kinds of serendipitous scenes. It’s what Easter is all about; God at work behind the scenes, resurrecting us in spite of ourselves–mysteriously, graciously, making all things new.

At the time this was written, John van Sloten was the founding pastor of New Hope Community Church (CRC) in Calgary AB. 

The Man Who Created Narnia

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C.S.Lewis is one of the most unlikely children’s authors you could ever meet. He was an academic all of his life, teaching first at Oxford and later at Cambridge. He was not married till he was over fifty, and had no children of his own, nor any nephews or nieces. His closest friends were other male academics. He traveled outside the British Isles only twice: when he fought in France during the First World War and when he went on holiday to Greece towards the end of his life. And he dressed like a typical absent-minded professor, “in baggy flannel trousers and tweed jackets” and a shapeless hat.

This is how he described himself:

I am tall, fat, rather bald, red-faced, double-chinned, black-haired, have a deep voice, and wear glasses for reading. 

He was born in 1898, and died on November 22, 1963 (the same day that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated).

So how come he became so famous, and especially how come he could write children’s stories like The Chronicles of Narnia?

There are three strands to understanding Lewis: the religious, the spiritual and the intellectual.
1. Religious

Lewis grew up as an Anglican in Belfast, in Northern Ireland. He said this about his childhood religion:

I was taught the usual things and made to say my prayers and in due time taken to church. I naturally accepted what I was told but I cannot remember feeling much interest in it.

There were two particular experiences of religion in his childhood that he recalled as an adult, and neither of them was good.

a) Problems with the church

The Lewis family went to the church where his grandfather was preacher. Lewis as a child hated his grandfather’s preaching, because it was frequently highly emotional and embarrassing. In terms of the content, it consisted mainly of denunciations of the Roman Catholic Church. He also observed that people seemed to go for political reasons, if only because, by attending the Anglican church, it showed they were not Roman Catholic! 
b) Boarding schools

Lewis attended several boarding schools. At one, he found that the religious instruction emphasized the reality of hell (he says “I feared for my soul” ) but it obviously didn’t tell him much of how to avoid it. At another he tried to learn to pray but found he became obsessively introspective about whether he was doing it “right.” He comments later, “Had I pursued the same road much further I think I should have gone mad.” He was eleven years old.

Looking back, he said what he was experiencing was “the dry husks of Christianity,” and not the real thing. Not surprisingly, around the age of thirteen, Lewis “was desperately anxious to get rid of my religion” and was relieved to find he could escape. Thus in his mid-teens, he became an atheist. He remained so until he was around thirty.

By the time he got to his last boarding school, where chapel attendance was mandatory, he was no longer worried about either hell or prayer, and chapel meant “no more than two hours of blessed inactivity in which to dream his dreams secure from interruption.”
2. Spiritual

At the same time as he was disillusioned with church, Lewis was having experiences he called “joy.” “Joy” is crucial for understanding Lewis: he comments, “the central story of my life is about nothing else”–except this joy. 

What does he mean by it? He defines it many ways in different books:
“an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction”,
“the inconsolable secret,” 
“an unattainable ecstasy [which] has hovered just beyond the grasp of your consciousness,”
an “incommunicable and unappeasable want,” 
“a desire no natural happiness will satisfy,” and
“[t]he experience . . . of intense longing.” 

He realised later that these were actually the work of Holy Spirit, nudging him, trying to get his attention, making him unsatisfied, pointing him to something beyond this world where satisfaction would be found. They were, he decided later, “patches of Godlight in the dark wood of our life.”

He began to experience joy early in life. The first came when his brother Warnie created a miniature garden in the lid of a cookie tin. Reading Beatrix Potter’s Squirrel Nutkin brought a fresh experience of joy. Later, the feeling returned as he discovered Scandinavian myth. Then, as a teenager, discovering Arthur Rackham’s illustrations for Wagner’s Siegfried brought a new experience of joy. As a result, mythology became almost a substitute religion for him. He came to feel the kind of reverence towards the gods of Norse mythology that he later realised should be given only to God—but he had never felt that in church.

It seems sad that he saw no connection between his experience of church and his deepest spiritual experiences, but others would say the same. He himself comments that this disconnect does not reflect well on his childhood religion:

If the Northernness seemed then a bigger thing than my religion, that may partly have been because my attitude towards it contained elements which my religion ought to have contained and did not.
3. Intellectual

Lewis hated boarding school so much that in the end his father sent him to study with a private tutor. Kirkpatrick was strongly rationalistic (if you said it was nice day, he would ask you what you meant, and what grounds you had for saying it, and whether it was a thing a rational person should say ) and a strong atheist. In two and a half years, he taught Lewis to think. Lewis loved it, describing it as being like “red beef and strong beer.” Kirkpatrick commented to Lewis’ father, “His reasoning capacity is beyond his years.” Lewis had no problem getting into Oxford, except for the math exam, which he failed!

When he went to Oxford, it was with a brilliant mind but much confusion, both spiritually and imaginatively. This is how he described this time:

The two hemispheres of my mind were in sharpest contrast. On the one side a many-islanded sea of poetry and myth; on the other a glib and shallow “rationalism.” Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless.
New influences

What could bring these two halves of his personality together, and how does this relate to faith?

Firstly, he read the novels of George MacDonald, and sensed “the spirit of Christ.” He also enjoyed G.K. Chesterton, whom he described as “the most sensible man alive apart from his Christianity.” As these books began to work on him, he commented, “A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere.”

Then he began to meet Christians he respected and liked, such as Neville Coghill and Hugo Dyson. The most influential of these, however, was J.R.R.Tolkien, later to become famous as the author of The Lord of the Rings. As these influences on Lewis increased, he said later, “The great Angler played his fish and I never dreamed that the hook was in my tongue.”

The word conversion simply means turning. For some it is a quick thing, for others it is slow. For Lewis, it was slow, with three or four clear stages.

First of all, there was an experience on top of a bus going up Headington Hill in Oxford. He became aware of a growing spiritual pressure on him and realised that he was “shutting something out.” In a sense he didn’t do anything, but he did choose to stop resisting, and felt like “a man of snow at long last beginning to melt.” It was as though he was acknowledging that there was a spiritual reality beyond himself, whatever it might be, and with which he had to come to terms.

Then, in the spring of 1929, he found himself overwhelmed with the reality of God, and finally “admitted that God was God” and became “the most reluctant and dejected convert in all England.” On one level, he did not want to believe. There was no excitement, no ecstasy, no vision. It was more on the level of saying with a sigh, I guess two and two really do make four. He was still not a Christian—he was a theist—but this was a significant step in that direction.

What finally pushed him into becoming a Christian was a late-night conversation with his friends Tolkien and Dyson in Addison’s Walk behind Lewis’ College, and the talk centred around the subject of myth. Up to this point, Lewis felt that the stories of Jesus, the God who dies and rises again, was simply another form of a timeless myth, and not to be taken seriously. Tolkien argued that in Jesus myth actually breaks into history. The mythologies of the world are simply preparing the way for the reality, which is Jesus.

Now finally, the two halves of his life—imagination, which loved myth, and reason which demanded truth—came together in the strangest and most unlikely place: the Christian faith he had once rejected. As he wrote shortly afterwards to his friend Arthur:

The story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference, that it really happened . . . [I]t is God’s myth where the others are men’s myths. 

The final stage of his conversion took place a few days later as he rode with Warnie to Whipsnade Zoo. “When we set out,” he wrote, “I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did.” It was not dramatic, but then it did not have to be. The whole process took two years.
Imagination, reason and faith

From this point on, Lewis’ writing began to express his new faith. After this, he wrote at least one book per year till his death in 1963. The Narnia books began in 1950, and he published one each year till 1956.

Some talk about the Chronicles as if they are an allegory, because there are obvious similarities with stories of Jesus —particularly in the account of Aslan’s death and resurrection in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Lewis was very clear, however, that the books should not be regarded as allegory. He wrote to a correspondent:

You are mistaken when you think that everything in the books “represents” something in this world. Things do that in The Pilgrim’s Progress but I’m not writing in that way.

Certainly there are parallels between Jesus and Aslan. But there are also significant differences. For instance, Aslan dies for one person only, Edmund, whereas Christians believe Jesus died for the whole world. Or, again, Aslan takes different physical forms in different stories (a cat in The Horse and his Boy, an albatross and a lamb in The Magician’s Nephew), which Jesus never did.

So what kind of stories are these? Lewis’ own answer was that the Chronicles are a “supposal”:

I’m not exactly “representing” the real (Christian) story in symbols. I’m more saying “Suppose there were a world like Narnia and it needed rescuing and the Son of God (or the ‘Great Emperor oversea’) went to redeem it, as He came to redeem ours, what might it, in that world, all have been like?” 

So what is he doing? In his own early life, he had never really understood what Christianity was all about. He had heard the stories of Jesus—they were very familiar to him—but they had not grabbed him. He had been inoculated against their real meaning.

For him, it was almost as though he had had to go away from Christianity to find spiritual reality elsewhere, and then to discover that what he had discovered was merely a signpost pointing him back to Christianity. What he discovered when he came back was the same and yet at the same time different. This newly discovered Christianity brought meaning and stability, laughter and friendship, and satisfaction both intellectual and emotional.

The stories of Jesus had not changed: it was his understanding of them that had changed. How then to tell those old stories so that they would strike the reader with that same freshness that Lewis experienced? What he is doing in Narnia is trying to create a similar kind of experience for us: to send us on a journey to discover a world of myth ruled over by Aslan, an attractive Christ-figure but not a religious figure—and then to send us back to this world to discover where that story is pointing. The way Lewis explains this is to say:

Supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday school associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could.

The “watchful dragons” are those instincts that guard us against anything that sounds too religious. But Lewis knows that when we defend ourselves against the religious (though the religious can be damaging), we are also protecting ourselves against Christ who gives life Hence the need to steal past the dragons with stories that do not give off that churchy odour but convey the “real potency” he had found. And hence Narnia.
Getting round the watchful dragons

Let me give you just one example. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Edmund is a quite nasty character. It is not just that he has an uncontrollable greed for Turkish Delight. He is also nasty to Lucy. At first, he does not believe she has really been to Narnia. Then, when he goes himself and returns, he pretends he has not—to Lucy’s absolute dismay.

But this is not the beginning. Edmund’s nastiness goes back some years. Peter points out to him:

“You’ve always liked being beastly to anyone smaller than yourself; we’ve seen that at school before now.”

So Edmund is greedy and he is a bully. But that’s still not at the heart of what is wrong with Edmund. These are only the symptoms of a disease. Something is going on in Edmund which makes him a bully. What is it? There is one incident in his conversation with the White Witch which is very revealing. She says:

 I want a nice boy whom I could bring up as a Prince and who would be King of Narnia when I am gone. While he was Prince he would wear a gold crown and eat Turkish Delight all day long; and you are much the cleverest and handsomest young man I’ve ever met. 

What is going on with Edmund? At the heart of it is pride, and the Witch is shrewd enough to appeal to it. Not the innocent pride that takes pleasure in being who you are meant to be, but the pride that wants to be more important than anyone else, and tries to put everyone else down.

From this flows his desire to be more powerful than smaller kids and his desire to be more important than his siblings. And the result of his pride is that he constantly messes up his relationships with others. For example:

He kept on thinking that the others were taking no notice of him and trying to give him the cold shoulder. They weren’t, but he imagined it. 

If you think you’re the most important person, and people for some reason do not treat you that way, of course you are going to be upset.

But it gets worse: he is also out of step with Aslan. You may remember that although they have never heard of Aslan, when the Beaver tells them Aslan is coming:

At the name of Aslan each one of them felt something jump in its inside. Edmund felt a sensation of mysterious horror. Peter suddenly felt brave and adventurous. Susan felt as if some delicious smell or some delightful strain of music had just floated up to her. And Lucy got the feeling you have when you wake up in the morning and realize that it is the beginning of the holidays or the beginning of summer.

Why do they react these different ways? Lewis would say all people are either moving towards Aslan or they are moving away from Aslan, whether or not we know about Aslan. Every choice we make brings us closer or takes us further away.

Everything in Lewis’ fiction appears in a different form in his non-fiction. He comments on this idea of choice in Mere Christianity:

Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you . . . into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing into a creature that is in harmony with God, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God.

And in The Great Divorce:

There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, “Thy will be done.”

Up to this point, Edmund is saying, MY will be done. I want to do what I want to do. And so, even though he has never heard of Aslan, his choices have been leading him away from Aslan. Hence when he first hears of Aslan, he doesn’t like it. He doesn’t want to know about Aslan because Aslan is the rightful king, not Edmund.

There is an old-fashioned word in Christian spirituality for what we are talking about: sin.
Sin is not eating too much Turkish Delight (whatever form that may take for you). According to Lewis, sin is saying to God, MY will be done in this world, not YOUR will be done in this world. Sin is choosing to be less than God designed you to be.

But this is not the end for Edmund. Aslan has not finished with him yet. After Aslan gives his life for Edmund and for Narnia, and comes back from death because of the Deeper Magic, Edmund has still to face Aslan, and something mysterious and wonderful happens:
As soon as they has breakfasted they all went out, and there they saw Aslan and Edmund walking together in the dewy grass . . . There is no need to tell you (and no-one ever heard) what Aslan was saying, but it was a conversation Edmund never forgot.

We can guess. Edmund’s choices were moving him away from Aslan. Now he turns, and what he didn’t know of course was what that Aslan was following him, so that, as soon as he turns round, Aslan is there.

But there is more: if a wrong relationship with Aslan leads to strained relationships with others, once things are straightened out with Aslan, the reverse happens:

Edmund shook hands with each of the others and said to each of them in turn, “I’m sorry,” and everyone said, “That’s all right.” 

Still there is more. If Edmund thought only about himself before, and what others thought, now something is different:

“You have a traitor there, Aslan,” said the Witch. Of course everyone present knew that she meant Edmund. But Edmund had got past thinking about himself after all he’d been through and after the talk he’d had that morning. He just went on looking at Aslan. It didn’t seem to matter what the Witch said.

The final piece in Edmund’s transformation comes after the battle:

 [Lucy] found [Ed] standing on his feet and not only healed of his wounds but looking better than she had seen him look—oh, for ages; in fact ever since his first term at that horrid school which he was where he had begun to go wrong. He had become his real old self again and could look you in the face. And there on the field of battle Aslan made him a knight.

The change Aslan makes does not make you weird or holier-than-thou and certainly not “religious”: it makes you yourself, free to become the person Aslan intended. And the word from Christian spirituality that fits best with the story of Edmund is the word “redemption.”
But how do you get back from Narnia to our world? 

If the Narnia stories succeed in getting round the watchful dragons, and touching us with Lewis’ vision of Christians spirituality, what happens next? He does not leave us without clues.

In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, for example, Lucy visits house of the magician Koriakin, reads through the book of spells, and comes across a story which takes up three pages and tells “about a cup and a sword and a tree and a green hill.” She says, “That is the loveliest story I’ve read or ever shall read in my whole life.” Yet as soon as the story is done, she can’t remember it, and she can’t turn the pages back. She asks Aslan, “Will you tell it to me, Aslan?” And he says, “Indeed, yes. I will tell it to you for years and years.”

I think Lewis intends us to imagine Lucy back in our world, knowing only that she had once read the most wonderful story, wondering how Aslan will keep his promise, and then discovering in the most unlikely place in our world people who treasure a story about a cup and a sword and a tree and a green hill. And as she learns more about the story, she realises that Aslan is keeping his promise.

And maybe she remembers too what Aslan once told her at the end of that same book: that he exists in our world too, but by another name, and we have to learn to get to know him by that name.

What Lewis hopes for is that our encounter with Aslan will drive us back to Christian spirituality, and specially to the biographies of Jesus with fresh eyes. I suspect Lewis would be glad if we found ourselves saying by the end of the Chronicles, “But I never knew Jesus was like that.” To which he might reply, “Exactly!”

McMaster University
January 2006

Notes:

  1. Humphrey Carpenter The Inklings (London: Allen and Unwin 1978), 38.
  2. Letters to Children, May 29, 1954. One writer notes, “Kenneth Tynan said Lewis combined the manner of Friar Tuck with the mind of St. Augustine.” Corbin Scott Carnell, Bright Shadow of Reality: Spiritual Longing in C.S.Lewis (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 1974), 32. Tolkien told Neville Coghill that he modelled the voice of Treebeard in The Lord of the Rings on that of C.S.Lewis. Humphrey Carpenter, J.R.R.Tolkien: A Biography (London: Allen and Unwin 1978), 198.
  3. Surprised by Joy 12
  4. Warren Hamilton Lewis, C.S.Lewis: A Biography (unpublished typescript in the Wade Collection, Wheaton), 232, in Jack, 217-218
  5. Surprised by Joy, 33.
  6. Ibid., 54.
  7. Ibid., 53
  8. Warren Hamilton Lewis, 232.
  9. Ibid., 20
  10. Surprised by Joy, 20
  11. “The Weight of Glory”, in Screwtape Proposes a Toast, 96
  12. The Problem of Pain, 134
  13. “The Weight of Glory,” in Screwtape Proposes a Toast, 99
  14. The Pilgrim’s Regress, Preface to the Third Edition, 12-13
  15. Letters to Malcolm, 93
  16. Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper, C.S.Lewis: a Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace 1974), 33
  17. Surprised by Joy, 111
  18. Spirits in Bondage xxiii
  19. Surprised by Joy, 138
  20. Ibid., 222.
  21. Ibid., 153-154
  22. Ibid., 169
  23. Ibid., 179. The same image of snow melting is of course the sign that Aslan has returned to Narnia.
  24. Ibid., 182
  25. Lewis’ poem, “What the Bird Said Early in the Year,” with its moving conclusion, “Quick, quick, quick, quick, the gates are drawn apart” is now engraved on a stone at the entrance to Addison’s Walk.
  26. An attempt to revive this argument has recently been made by Tom Harpur in The Pagan Christ (2005).
  27. The Letters of C.S.Lewis to Arthur Greaves, October 18th, 1931. Cf. “The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens—at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences.” C.S.Lewis, “Myth Became Fact” in God in the Dock, 166.
  28. Surprised by Joy, 189
  29. Letters to Children, May 29, 1954. The Pilgrim’s Progress is by John Bunyan (1628-1688). He might also have used his own book The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933) as an example.
  30. Ibid., June 8, 1960. A parallel kind of “supposal” happens in Out of the Silent Planet and Voyage to Venus, two parts of The Cosmic Trilogy (London: The Bodley Head, 1938; Pan Books 1990), where he applies Christian belief to the possibility of life on other planets.
  31. “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to be Said”, in Of This and Other Worlds, 72.
  32. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe 45
  33. Ibid. 39
  34. Ibid. 82
  35. Ibid. 65
  36. Mere Christianity, 87
  37. The Great Divorce, 66-67
  38. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, 126
  39. Ibid.
  40. Ibid., 128
  41. Ibid., 163
  42. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, 135, 138.

The Gospel According to Jim Carrey

by .

I do not think the God of Christianity is particularly religious. If Jesus is right, God created all of life, not just the narrowly religious bits. So if God is interested in us, God doesn’t have to wait till we get religious. God can communicate with us many ways—through friends, books, school, experiences . . . and even movies. Movies often touch us in deep ways—and whenever we are touched deeply, that may be a signal that God is trying to get through to us.

For example, in many of the movies of Jim Carrey, I am struck by how often issues of personhood crop up, question such as: Who am I? Am I good or bad? Who really knows me? Who am I meant to be? I was beginning to reflect on this on 2002, when what was then a new Carrey movie began to be advertised, Me, Myself and Irene, and I thought: “If that’s not identity, what is? Bingo!”

To me, questions of identity are basically spiritual questions, in the sense that they very quickly lead us to questions of God, and our purpose of life.

What I want to do then is to look at some of the themes that Jim Carrey tackles, and then show how they relate to Christian spirituality.

The problem:

In Man on Moon (1999), Carrey plays the comedian Andy Kaufman. The amazing thing about this movie is that nothing is what it seems. Every time you think you have got something figured out, the movie pulls the rug from beneath your feet. This is especially true for the figure of Andy: you are never quite sure who or what he is. Every time you think you know, he does something to surprise you. The confusion begins with the movie’s opening credits, where he appears first as a very shy person, then a very extroverted person, then tells us the movie will be full of interesting characters—like the ones he is playing at this very moment!

Later on, he goes to a university to speak to the students, and announces, “For the very first time, I’m going to reveal the real me” (which tells you he knows this is an issue). But he does not: instead, he reads F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby out loud, from beginning to end. What does this have to do with revealing the “real” Andy Kaufmann? Is he revealed—or disguised—by the reading of the book? We are left confused. We discover along the way that Kaufman has an alter ego called Tony Clifton, whose theme song is, “I gotta be me.” But who is the “me” he has to be? Does he really exist? This is still a question right up to the very last frame of the movie.

Another way we experience the problem of identity comes out in The Mask (1995) Carrey plays the introverted bank employee, Stanley Ipkiss, who finds an ancient mask. When he puts it on, he becomes a totally different person: animated, impetuous, and crazy. What’s going on? He goes to see a psychologist to try and understand himself, and we learn that the psychologist has written a book called, The Masks We Wear.

This suggests that we are meant to think of the mask that Stanley wears as a metaphor. We hide what is really inside and put on a mask for public consumption. For most people, of course, what the mask conveys is a socially acceptable, quiet, law-abiding person. The person inside might cause chaos if we let them out!

And, even worse, who would love the person we are inside? In 1969, Catholic author John Powell wrote a book called Why am I afraid to tell you who I am? He recounts that, when he told someone he was writing a book with this title, they immediately responded by saying, “Because if I tell you who I am, and you don’t like it, I don’t have anything else.” That is why we like to have masks, and are reluctant to drop them. We need to protect what is inside.

For Stanley, the opposite is true: putting on the mask gives him the opportunity to become wild, even manic, and he really doesn’t care who likes him or not. In his case, the quiet public persona actually seems to be the more truthful one. Stanley says he is a wild romantic, but that side of him only comes out when he puts on the mask. But that is when Tina (Carmen Diaz) sees the man who lives inside the mask, and accepts the “real” Stanley.

Jim Carrey is obviously aware of this tension between the public and the private persona, and our sensitivity about letting the inside be seen too often. He said, in an interview in Flare magazine in July 1998:

My movies have been ways for people to escape life. . . .The scary thing is that because you’re letting little glimpses of your true self come out, if it’s rejected, it’s actually you that’s being rejected and not the character you’ve created.

In Cable Guy (1996), the mask is very thin, and what is underneath is not pleasant. Indeed, the movie is hardly a comedy: some people find it very scary. Chip Douglas (Carrey) is an emotional black hole, frequently left by his mother to be raised by TV. As a result, he does not know how to relate to anyone, and he is desperate for friendship. In the movie, his latest victim is Steve (Matthew Broderick), whom he tries to force into being his friend. But Chip does not know how to be a friend: he manipulates, threatens, and bribes. C.S.Lewis once said:

Friends are not primarily absorbed in each other. It is when we are doing things together that friendship springs up—painting, sailing ships, praying, philosophizing, fighting shoulder to shoulder. Friends look in the same direction.

But for Chip, friendship is basically about him. He has almost nothing in common with Steve; they share few interests. He simply wants a friend to fill the emptiness inside, and (surprise) it doesn’t work. Steve does not want to be used in this way. He says, “We’re not friends. I don’t even know you.” 

On one level, what Chip wants is reasonable: we all need affection, acceptance, and friendship. One again, the songs in the movie give us an insight into what is really going on. Thus, at a karaoke party, Chip sings “Don’t you want somebody to love? I’d like somebody to love. It’s hard to find somebody to love.” That is the story of Chip’s life. So how do we find the love, acceptance, friendship we need? The movie raises the question, but gives us no answer, except that Chip’s way is not the way! Even at the end, he still has not learned, and the cycle begins over again.

The movie Me, Myself and Irene (2002) returns to the theme of the contrast between inside and outside. Charlie Baileygates (Carrey) is a cop on Rhode Island. But he is too nice for his own good, and, as a result, people walk all over him. He asks one man to move his car, which is illegally parked. The man throws Charlie his keys, and tells him to move it himself. Charlie obliges without a murmur. He is incapable of expressing his own opinion, or of showing anger. Rather, as one character says when the crisis comes, he “locks it all away.” Finally, the suppressed sides of his personality come out as a new, quite nasty character called Hank. Charlie apparently now has a split personality. (The makers of the movie got in trouble with the Schizophrenia Society for their cheap parody of schizophrenia.) The two characters—Hank and Charlie—begin to fight.

When he finally admits he’s got a problem, Charlie asks about Hank: “How did he get in?” and the answer is: “You created him by not dealing with your problems. You’ve been avoiding confrontation, but this guy inside, Hank, he doesn’t. The doctors feel you’ve created this character out of necessity. You never stick up for yourself.” Once again, we see different, conflicting parts of a personality: how can they co-exist? How can Charlie (or indeed any one of us) be a whole person?

There are also two sides to Jim Carrey in Liar, Liar (1997). This time, Carrey plays a lawyer (Fletcher Reede) who is a compulsive liar. The movie begins with children in class talking about their parents. Reede’s son Max says, “My father’s a liar.” The teacher corrects him: “You mean a lawyer.” Max replies, “No, I mean a liar.” And, of course, Max is right.

Fletcher lies in order to make life easier for himself. In other words, his lying is a mark of how self-centred he is: he twists the truth to suit his comfort and convenience. (Early on, he says he ran out of gas when he was late to pick up son.) Max, naturally enough, is fed up, and makes an unusual wish at his birthday party—that his father be forced to tell the truth. His wish, naturally, comes true.

Telling the truth, however, gets Fletcher into all sorts of new trouble, because now he can’t be so self-centred. By the end, he’s learned his lesson. He even quotes Jesus: “the truth shall set you free” and he concludes that “This truth stuff is pretty cool.”

Here then are some of the problems Jim raises around issues of personhood:

Who is the “real” me? (Man on the Moon)
How can I connect the inside and the outside? (Me, Myself and Irene)
How can I get people to like me? (Cable Guy)
Will people like me if they really know me? (The Mask)
How does the real me relate to the truth? (Liar, Liar)
Some hints of an answer:

I would argue that Jim Carrey’s movies offer at least four ways forward: all four resonate with Christian spirituality. Some of the movies we have already looked at offer clues to an answer; other answers are found in other Carrey movies.

1: Man on Moon (1999)

There is a point in the movie where Andy has been particularly obnoxious. He wrestles with women, and he wins. He insults people. He goes on David Letterman, and throws coffee and swears at his host. He is voted off Saturday Night Live. And finally he is expelled from the Eastern meditation group TM, because he is giving them a bad image.

He goes back to his apartment and lies on the bed brooding. His girlfriend Lynn (Courtney Love) arrives with Haagen-Dazs ice cream for him, and asks what the matter is. “I’m a bad person,” he confesses. “No, you’re not,” she argues. “You’re just a complicated person.” He replies, “You don’t know the real me.” Then she says gently, “There is no real you.” Immediately he asks her to move in with him. What is the connection? Why does her strange statement lead to his invitation? It sounds like a non sequitur. My guess is that he is deeply touched by the fact that Lynn loves him in spite of her insight that there is no “real me.” He does not want to lose this rare gift of a person who sees inside him, to the emptiness he knows is there, and loves him anyway. That is real love, the ability to love someone when every mask is removed.

One of the chief things that Jesus was known for when he was on earth was accepting people for who they were. It made no difference who a person was, how marginalized, how much of an outsider or a “sinner” they were. Jesus could know everything about you and still be your friend, even if nobody else wanted anything to do with you. Christians say he is still that way, that he knows the worst about them, and still goes on loving.
2. The Majestic (2002)

Here Carrey plays Peter Appleton, a movie script writer. The story is set in the 50’s, at the time of the McCarthy trials, when anyone suspected of Communist sympathies was being put on trial before the Committee on un-American Activities.

Near the start of the movie, Appleton has an accident and loses his memory. He wanders into a little nearby town where people think he is Luke, a boy from the town who was killed in Second World War. One man claims him as his son. The woman who was Luke’s fiancée decides it is probably him. Since Appleton can remember nothing, he wonders whether maybe is Luke. But not everybody believes it. So who is he really?

By the end, Appleton’s memory comes back, and he has to go and face his trial on charges of being a Communist sympathizer. His lawyer advises him to admit to the charges, stupid though they are, and to incriminate others. That is the easy way out, and he is inclined to take it. But before he leaves town, he visits the grave of Luke, and there is Adele, Luke’s fiancée, who has finally accepted that the real Luke is dead after all. Adele criticises Appleton for not taking a stand for truth and justice, as Luke would have done. Luke died for his country, after all, and here is Appleton not willing even to stand up for himself. Appleton is moved Adele’s angry challenge. In the end, he defies the committee and becomes a hero himself.

What’s happened? He has not only recovered the person he used to be. He is actually becoming someone different, a much finer person, with integrity and idealism he lacked at the beginning. And how has that happened? By modeling himself on someone admirable. 

Christians are followers of Jesus. They are aware of their weaknesses and failings. But in Jesus they see someone they want to be like—compassionate, passionate for truth and justice, with integrity that is willing to suffer for what is right. And their belief is that, as they open themselves to the Spirit of Jesus, little by little he shapes that same kind of character in them. We all need models—who better than Jesus, a human being as human beings were created to be?
3. The Truman Show (1998)

Truman is the star of an all-day soap opera. The only trouble is, he doesn’t know it. Gradually, as the movie unfolds, he gets clues that something is wrong in his world. Again, here is the theme of identity and personhood: Who is Truman? Who is the true Truman? (His name is significant.) Either he is the only real person (since all the others are actors) or he is the only unreal person (since everyone else lives in the “real world” and knows what is going on).

However, there is one person who enters his artificial world from the outside, because she cares about him and wants to tell him the truth about life: her name is Lauren. She takes him to the beach, hopefully outside the range of the omnipresent TV cameras, and tries to tell him that his whole world is artificial, and that he needs to escape. Unfortunately, before she can say much, another actor drives up, claiming to be her father and insisting on taking her “home.”

From that point on, Truman’s goal is to find a way out of his world, to stop playing a part, and to find Lauren and the “real world.” 

Again, Lauren is a bit like Jesus: Christians believe that Jesus too came from outside our space-time continuum into our artificial world, and said Hey, you want to be real in a real world? Follow me, and I’ll take you there.
4. Bruce Almighty (2003)

In this movie Carrey plays Bruce, a TV reporter whose life is falling apart. He complains to his girlfriend Grace (Jennifer Aniston) that it is all God’s fault. So God calls him on his cell phone and summons him to a meeting. God (Morgan Freeman) says basically, “You think it’s easy being God? You try.” And so, for a week, Bruce has all the powers of God. There are only two conditions: he can’t tell anyone that he is God, and he has to respect people’s freewill.

Half the fun of the movie of course comes from watching Bruce fool around with his supernatural powers, parting the red sea of his tomato soup, and so on. But there is a serious side to his experiments, which is, of course, his learning that he is not smart enough to be God, and too selfish to be God.

As you would expect, by the end he is learning his lesson and becoming a much nicer person. He is even willing to give up Grace if that is best for her, and he tries to think of Grace as God thinks of her. God says to Bruce, “You want her back?” and Bruce, says, after a moment’s hesitation, “No, I want her to be happy, whatever that means . . . To meet someone who sees her as I see her now . . . through your eyes.”

As a result, ironically enough, once he stops trying to play God, this unselfish love actually makes him more like God in character. Instead of being a poor imitation of God he becomes a decent human being with God-like qualities, in a harmonious relationship with God.

And I guess that is the ultimate parallel with Jesus in Jim Carrey’s movies: that Christians believe he put us in touch with God in a unique way, so that all the different parts of our personality can come together in that relationship, and we can become the person God made us to be. 
Conclusion

A friend of mine works in a university writing centre. She was recently advising a student who was writing an essay about the self, and it became obvious that for the student this was much more than an academic exercise. She said, I’m different people in different situations: I begin to wonder, is there a real me? Is there some way all these fragmented selves can be united? And my friend, who’s a Christian, said very gently, well, for me all the pieces come together in my relationship with Jesus, who made me and knows me through and through, and loves me no matter what.

And I guess that ultimately is the good news that Jesus has for Jim. And for all of us.

Brock University, 2004

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