Showing posts with label Death. Show all posts

Charlie Fineman (played superbly by Adam Sandler) has been ambushed by the brokenness of the world. An orphan, the aunt who raised him died just prior to his marriage. Then, after a decade of marriage and three lovely daughters (nine, seven, and five), Charlie’s family perished in one of the airplanes that were flown into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Overcome by the crushing burden of his grief, Charlie has withdrawn into a world where he does not need to remember, haunted by the pain. Serendipitously one day Alan Johnson (played by Don Cheadle) runs into him—they had been roommates in dental school—and a renewed friendship is launched.

Reign Over Me is remarkable for several reasons. It faces the horror of death with a rare honesty. It accurately depicts the brokenness that results when someone is overwhelmed by that horror, unable to find healing in his grief. Without sentimentality—everyone in this film has been touched by brokenness—Reign Over Me shows how we flourish as individuals only in community, in friendships that share all of life for blessing and for curse. And it reveals the true costliness of community and friendship. Opening our homes and lives in warm hospitality always extracts a toll en route to shalom.

For Christians Reign Over Me raises important questions. Are we willing to follow Christ in paying the necessary cost to achieve real community in a broken world? Are we willing to walk with someone for the long haul, rather than walking away if healing hasn’t occurred in six months? Do we see and treat people like Charlie, deeply disturbed people, as creatures of wonder who are made in God’s image? Are we the sort of people that those who are hiding deep secrets of regret and hurt are drawn to us because they can sense we are safe?

Alexandra Fuller grew up in Africa, in Rhodesia until that nation’s savage civil war forced most white families to flee the land that was renamed Zimbabwe. Years later she returns to travel from Zambia, where her hardscrabble parents still live, across Zimbabwe into Mozambique with K, a soldier who had fought in the bush in Rhodesia’s army. He is half-mad from his memories, by the atrocities perpetrated by both sides, and by the unspeakable loss inflicted not only on his soul but on the blood-soaked land and its displaced, poverty-stricken tribal peoples.

Fuller’s book, Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier (Penguin, 2004) is a memoir of a shared humanity and great poignancy, of tragedy and loyalty, of God’s presence in lives haunted by demons.

“And this,” said K as he stepped into the roofless house, “is where we’ll live one day. I’ll finish building it soon. I have to get the farm going a bit more first, though. But what do you think?”

I wondered who “we” was, but I didn’t ask. Instead I said, “It’s lovely.”

“Look,” said K, “it’s all set up for books. Shelves here, and here. Maybe you could put ornaments on this shelf. This is the kitchen. See? A view of the mountain out the window.” He turned to me and I can describe the look on his face only as transported. “I don’t think,” he said, “that God is going to have me make this journey alone. He will send me a woman when the time is right.”

A blue-headed lizard scampered up the wall where the larder shelves would be one day and one of the dogs darted after it, barely catching the end of its tail, which sloughed off and wiggled hysterically on the cement-dusted floor.

“She’ll have to be a very special woman,” said K, softly and looking at me.

“Yes,” I said.

And then, maybe it was a trick of the rain-softened light, but I saw K’s face fold with such exquisite torment that my heart turned over for him.

He said, “There’s been so much destruction. But I’ve learned so much now. I’ve really learned about love.” K’s lips grew fleshy. “I would nurture a woman. She would be the head of the family now. I wouldn’t have to dominate her. I would put everyone else first. I would come last in the family. This is the order: first God, then my wife, then my children, the dogs, the servants… I would be last. I just want to share this”—he gestured to the house, the garden, the slow-churning river—“with someone.”

I looked away from the house and saw that three fishermen had paddled their canoes around the bend in the river. The evening had brought a kind of careless, extravagant beauty to the world. The sky was rinsed various shades of blue and pink and was scattered with ripped, high clouds. The sun, catching, itself in the trees on the far bank, bled red and gold across the water. Peace Mountain and the distant escarpment were softened in a dying light. From the village opposite K’s farm, blue clouds of smoke from cooking fires tugged into the evening sky. It was the time of day when the confusion of color, the churn of cooler air supplanting the heat of the day, the miracle of the journeying river—everything about being alive—seemed more improbable and fleeting and precious than usual. [pp. 62-63]

Russell Moore makes an interesting observation in Touchstone (September 2008; p. 16-18). He notes that though in the past churches used to have graveyards associated with them, they seldom do anymore. The old arrangement required believers to be reminded of their mortality as they gathered for worship. Today, he notes, churches tend to be surrounded by asphalt. Rather than being reminded of their mortality, 21^st century worshippers gather in a setting that is designed to suggest youth, vitality, and in mega-churches, the bustling activity common to a shopping mall.

I’ve never been part of a church that had a graveyard. On a visit to London, however, I attended St Helen’s Bishopsgate, a vibrant, evangelical Anglican church in the heart of the financial district. There was no graveyard, but the dead were all around us. In the walls of the sanctuary (the building dates back to the 13^th century) were crypts, each marked with the name of the Christian buried therein. We worshipped in the presence of the dead. I remember thinking I had seldom experienced a better demonstration of the unity of the Church than that morning.

There are lots of reasons—complex sociological, economic, political, even theological reasons—that churches today do not have graveyards associated with them, as Moore recognizes. Still Moore asks, is it possible we’ve lost something in the process? He suggests we might have lost the sense that all will perish apart from the gospel. “Maybe a cemetery,” Moore says, “would serve as a icon that all our Babels will collapse.” Perhaps the perverse seduction of pride and the tendency to allow the important to be pushed aside by the merely urgent would be lessened with a weekly reminder that we too will soon die. “Find an old graveyard,” Moore suggests, “and walk through it. Walk about and see the headstones weathered and ground down by the elements. Contemplate the fact that beneath your feet are men and women who once had youthful skin and quick steps and hectic calendars.” Perhaps walking past a graveyard would remind us that worship, though properly joyous, is also a serious matter touching on the deepest mysteries of life—and death. “Maybe,” Moore says, “we’d be able to speak more honestly to a people scared to death of death if we offered them and ourselves a visible sign that we, too, know what death is, and that we hate it, too.”

I find these reflections interesting. Interesting for what they tell us about how our world has changed. Interesting for what the changes reveal about life, and about us. And interesting for reminding us that nothing in life is so small as to be without meaning in the world God created.

Moore concludes that, “the graveyard is not just a sign that we haven’t forgotten our dead. It’s a sign that we're just waiting for them—and for ourselves—to hear one last invitation hymn. And when those quiet little mounds begin bursting, with headstones flying about, and a clap of thunder resounds across the sky, then at last it can truly be said, ‘Man, this church is alive.’”

To be Christian means to live in the hope of the resurrection. We don’t have graveyards around our churches anymore to remind us of that. So be it. So, let’s find other reminders and hold on to them for dear life.

(Dr. Moore is Dean of the School of Theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Image courtesy of stock.xchng)