HOW TO FIND FAITH AT THE MOVIES: The Role of Reluctance

Previously, John invited readers to join the quest for Catholic Stands in his blog Where to Start the Quest. In his first post called HOW TO FIND FAITH AT THE MOVIES: The Fool’s Quest to Understand, he described the ordinary world of the person seeking to decide about faith and in Issuing the Call to Adventure, he invited us to heed the call to begin one’s faith journey by stating the issue of faith to be decided. Now in this third stage, he encourages us to examine how reluctance to decide plays a key role in our adventures.

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After stating an issue (in my case: “Whether, since I will someday die, I want to take only those courses of action that satisfy my love of life?), what usually confronts us next is not a quick answer which would actually be a form of knee-jerk reaction or rash judgment, but a strange sense of reluctance to face the issue that has finally arisen. In a way it is a form of new realization that the Sword of Damocles is hanging above your head.

So, the aim at this post is to unpack this stage of the Decision-Maker’s Path ™.  We will be dealing with how reluctance serves the useful purpose of unmasking our problems with concession, dissolution, waiting, possession of great things, and the \”Emperor\” and the \”Empress\” within us.

3.11. Concession: When will you be offering concessions?

Making concessions is difficult enough, but anticipating there will be some seems to be an even more difficult lump to swallow. Interestingly enough, when you arrive at a true issue that you can’t readily answer, the flip side of it sets up this lump.

The only way to get past the crisis of the issue itself is to go through it, not around it. And the first step through the crisis is recognizing that some concessions will have to be made.

Is there a best way to do this? Yes. As Jimmy Durante sings: “Make Someone Happy.”

But not everyone is so easily made happy. Consider how difficult it is for Eliza Doolittle to make Professor Henry Higgins happy in My Fair Lady.

The problem appears to be a struggle for control over where things are going and when.

We can see this even in the responses to this series of posts. People are reluctant to reveal their own issues, especially on matters of faith. That’s one of the reasons why I set up my own issue. We can use it as an example and hope that others will be encouraged to reveal theirs at some point so we can discuss them.

Meanwhile, when I consider my issue (“Whether, since I will someday die, I want to take only those courses of action that satisfy my love of life?”), two notions hit me immediately. They are covered up by the word “only” and the expression “love of life.”

Am I really ready to commit to taking only a certain courses of action? Sounds terribly restrictive. Especially in light of my desire to satisfy my love of life.

In matters of faith, must we submit to a Professor Higgins? Or to the Magisterium of the Church? Or how about to Mother Mary? In the story of the marriage at Cana, it may seem that even Jesus himself was making a concession to his mother. Or was he recognizing in her prompting that the time had come for him to open ministry, even if that later would lead him to dine with taxpayers and prostitutes?

3.12. Dissolution: What choice are you fearing losing most?

To arrive at the point of such a concession to the timing of one’s journey raises another underlying problem. Up until the raising of the issue, the control of one’s life may have been pretty tight and determined and yet fundamentally dissatisfying. Nowhere Man is a good song to reflect this feeling of alienation about a dissatisfying life.

During the 1960s American culture especially went through upheaval over such dissatisfaction. The effort to self-medicate one’s way out of such dissatisfaction took many paths. And more and more people chose to experience the split to get down to the bottom of it.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s original story of “Henry Jekyll, M.D., D.C.L., L.L.D., F.R.S., etc.” shows how medications and intellectual knowledge alone are insufficient. Experience is and was desired.

Moreover, there is a particular form of experience desired: domination of human nature itself. The Jack Palance version of the film is spot on about this.

But why this desire to dominate human nature? Do we want to reduce all answers to a limited few to figure how best to cope?

Is it because we view our human options like those found in the Magic 8-Ball that some suggest holds all the answers to our questions, in a kind of modern divination?

Or is it because we feel so deeply split already by what satisfies us and what does not?

While hunting for satisfaction and finding the standard 8 lacking (see Aquinas examine for sources of happiness: wealth, honor, fame or beauty, power, any good of the body, pleasure, any good of the soul or mind, and any created good), aren\’t we inevitably aware that there is something more we want? Our reluctance masks this realization as well. But it also exposes our desire for the truest, integrating version of all these.

What is the worst feeling of human dissatisfaction? What is the worst human fear? Is it making a mistake in choosing the wrong answer about the issue being confronted? Is it that one doesn’t want to appear being stupid or moronic? Being rejected along with our answer? Being shamed because of our answer?

When the worst is not being chosen, it would seem that the best we could hope for is the opposite: being chosen as a result of revealing our answer. Jesus chose his apostles. But their answers to being chosen did not play out right away. So again we learn from our reluctance.

3.13. Waiting: What are you waiting to hear?

Jesus did not choose his disciples all at once. There were time periods in between, and thus waiting times. In effect, we do have time to go on our journey of faith and many take an entire lifetime, running the bases.

The Catholic Stand is that each of us has been chosen, I believe, but that does not immediately render us whole. There is a waiting time. A time in which we each must play out some innings we had not fully anticipated before our seasons are over.

For example, take a listen to the plaintiff song Sara. How long does one wait for loved ones to change when they seem intent on not changing?

In the famous baseball movie Bull Durham, the two main characters, “Crash” Davis and Annie Savoy have to play through some seasons of baseball before they find each other and a new life together, far from the glamour of the Show playing with the major league.

While the movie is rated R (for profanity, intense sexuality, and nudity, and thus not for children or even for some adults), it does depict life in the end with its many distractions as comic and hopeful and not as tragic and nihilistic.

Moreover, by seeing sports, especially baseball, as a modern form of religion, with baseball fields as cathedrals, we understand where people are going and waiting to hear something. What are they waiting to hear?

What were people waiting to hear in the Temple when Jesus started his preaching? Was what Jesus preached what we still are waiting to hear or do we think of religion reluctantly and only as another game to be played with no larger meaning in the beauty of a home run?

For committed Catholics, Jesus hit a home run that was not just heard around the world, but one that changes the way we see the world spin around us.

3.14. Possession of Great Things: What great things are you wanting most?

Reluctance not only masks our difficulties with conceding, with personal dissolution, and with waiting. We seem to always want to hedge our bets, making choice not so much like the Magic 8-Ball, but more like a game show, like Let’s Make A Deal.

But consider the famous Monty Hall problem. Say you are called down to stage when you are nearly starving. You\’re given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a Heavenly-Lamb you may eat; behind the others, Devil-Goats that may like eating you. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what\’s behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a Devil-Goat. He then says to you, \”Do you want to pick door No. 2?\” Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?

Without looking at the answer, which door would you choose based on statistics when looking for a way to only take courses of action that satisfy your love of life?

My hope is that you see something entirely new in this brief exercise. Choice making involves someone else setting up the doors and the prizes behind them.

Doesn’t this view of life make God out to be like a Monty Hall? No wonder The Rolling Stones bemoan the fact that they “…Can’t Get No Satisfaction.”

The movie Body Heat (also Rated R for similar reasons) depicts the tale of a lawyer who thought he found a way to possess all that he desired: sex; money, and power. All he had to do was do everything that was necessary to get them. The ending of the movie alone is worth the price of admission.

Without revealing it, suffice it to say that another cause of our reluctance to confront an issue is the possibility that our dreams of possessing the greatest of things may come true but not end up being like we expect. Our integrity may actually be hijacked in the process and we be imprisoned by dreams that become our nightmares.

Following Aquinas in understanding that it is the potential good recognized in sex, money, and power that causes us to be attracted to them, personal experience of testing the limits can be a brutal teacher. While Body Heat is considered morally objectionable by some, in the end it is a cautionary tale that spares viewers the brutality of acting out the desires portrayed.

The New Testament tells an equally brutal tale, involving real people in the time of Jesus. Can you imagine the aftermath of young Salome’s emotional life after her night of sensual dancing for her father’s brother, of taking her mother’s advice, and of asking for the head of John the Baptist?

Talk about sex, violent power and greedy motives! Surely Jesus saw in this beheading what the authority the political powers of his day took for themselves for their own selfish reasons.

Being reluctant to make a decision is a form of not wanting to lose our heads over our issue as well, especially by deciding to ask for the answer that best responds to our issue.

3.15. THE EMPEROR: WHO IS AUTHORIZING THE DECISION?

In Peter Kreeft’s books, Making Choices and Three Philosophies of Life, we can find great analysis of moral issues and ways to deal with them on an intellectual and philosophical basis. But where does the authority come from for us to make a decision about an issue? From the likes of Herod or Caesar? This is yet another cause of our reluctance to decide but also why reluctance helps us understand how decision-making differs, especially in matters of faith from making choices or making judgments

When we were young, it may be that our parents gave us choices among options they considered safe and moral. When we were older, our teachers instructed us on how to make judgments about matters, based on evidence of facts and reasoning about them. When we are on our own, we often find ourselves wondering about whether we do have the authority to act on a given issue.

While in ages past, lines of authority proceeded down a hierarchy of levels, in modern democracies, many likely assume that that the individual always has the authority to decide for him or herself. But given the stakes in certain cases, another cause of reluctance is the question of one’s personal authority.

In matters of faith, the decision seems to rest squarely on the individual person. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, following on the Declaration on Human Dignity issued during Vatican II, states:

“The right to the exercise of freedom, especially in moral and religious matters, is an inalienable requirement of the dignity of the human person. This right must be recognized and protected by civil authority within the limits of the common good and public order… The right to the exercise of freedom, especially in religious and moral matters, is an inalienable requirement of the dignity of man. But the exercise of freedom does not entail the putative right to say or do anything.

As freeing as this may seem, in our reluctance we still understand we will be facing our Hamlet moment.

And as my cousin, Rob Leahy points out, Hamlet is clearly an angry young man at having to decide whether to kill his step-father for killing his father. So mad is he, says Rob, that he waited to kill him at a moment in a masquerading play when the usurper would be unable to confess his sin and would go straight to hell.

In modern psychology making one’s own decisions is considered part of the individuation process. In John Sanford’s book King Saul the Tragic Hero, the author presents his take on Saul’s individuation process as described in the Old Testament story. It serves as an excellent reminder of the background Jesus was facing when his disciples were called out for plucking corn that was supposed to be for the Temple only. Like David whom Saul had to contend with, Jesus acted on his own authority and defended his followers’ actions. The disciples of Jesus acting under his authority grew to feel less and less the burden of authority questions.

This act raised the profile of Jesus among the powerful of his day. When you unpack your reluctance to find your own authority, especially in matters of religious faith, the burden of leading or following may make your reluctance even more difficult to overcome.

Do you want to be your own Emperor or live subject to another’s rule?

Notice the example of how even Pope Benedict in stepping down has already committed his unconditional reverence and obedience to his successor.

Why is this so hard to do?

3.16. THE EMPRESS: WHOSE “WHY” QUESTIONS ARE YOU WANTING TO RESPOND TO?

I sense it has to do with not wanting to be treated like children any more. So our reluctance exposes this desire to be free of obedience as well.

And yet like Whitney Houston’s song Greatest Love of All, Jesus saw in children what we all need to remember, that though we may be damaged by our encounters with the world, we need not be destroyed by those encounters.

Moreover, as Ilsa tells Rick in Casablanca:

Ilsa: I can\’t fight it anymore. I ran away from you once. I can\’t do it again. Oh, I don\’t know what\’s right any longer. You have to think for both of us. For all of us.

Rick: All right, I will. Here\’s looking at you, kid.

Ilsa: [smiles] I wish I didn\’t love you so much.

Rick, like Lincoln, suffered melancholy over his lost love. (See Lincoln’s Melancholy.) But also like Lincoln, he was called on to make the decision for more than just himself.

There is a sense in which each of us is called on to take on the issue of faith and do the thinking ourselves to preserve the very thing that is at the heart of our dignity as human persons: the freedom to decide.

Rick did the right thing and found new friendship. Lincoln endured a battle with God and issued the Emancipation Proclamation.

Jesus could have made us follow him, but he didn’t. He simply asked others to let us come to him. Many have, many do, and many will. But not necessarily all. We may all want the ticket out of Casablanca (Hell on Earth) to America (Heaven on Earth), but each of us take courses of action, even though we do not run the bases the same way.

Getting to this point of overcoming reluctance by giving into it long enough to see its role in the process helps us be ready to move forward, but only after:

(1) anticipating I may have to make concessions concerning “only” and “love of life”;

(2) recognizing that it’s more than a choice about the present or a judgment about the past I am being called on to make, rather I am being called on to make a decision about my future;

(3) waiting for a time before making the decision;

(4) being careful not to have my dreams hijacked by false promises; and

(5) realizing that I am constituted with sufficient authority to make my own decisions though they are not only for myself, but for others as well.

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Next time we will address the wise ones the hero encounters; but for now, try to unpack the causes of your reluctance to deal with your issue.

Thanks in advance for your participation.

HOW TO FIND FAITH AT THE MOVIES
Using
The Decision-Maker’s Path ™
By John Darrouzet
(Ordered List of Themes, Questions,
Musical Warm-Ups, Movie Links, and Meditations)

 © 2013 John Darrouzet. All Rights Reserved.