#419: Who Killed the Kennedys?

I shouted out, “Who Killed the Kennedys?” When after all, it was you and me.”—Rolling Stones, Sympathy for the Devil

Last week’s announcement of plans to auction Jacqueline Kennedy’s letters to Irish priest Father Joseph Leonard (expected to fetch upwards of $4 million, before the auction was cancelled and replaced by negotiations with the Kennedy family) reveals an outlook on Catholic faith that begs comment, first because the outlook is quite common, and second because it is quite wrong. 

The reportage in the Boston Globe included not only letters recently discovered in a drawer at All Hallows College in Dublin, but also letters already on file at the JFK library in Boston.  Among the letters are Mrs. Kennedy’s reflections on her personal beliefs, values, and concerns.  Especially newsworthy, of course, were Kennedy’s thoughts on the assassination of her husband, President John Kennedy.  Some of her thoughts are startlingly personal and poignant:

I am so bitter against God...I think God must have taken Jack to show the world how lost we would be without him…But that is a strange way of thinking to me – and God will have a bit of explaining to do to me if I ever see him.

This passage caught my attention as an example of the way many Catholics typically think when faced with a catastrophic event.  Naturally, they feel bitterness, and often that feeling targets God.  But more importantly, the question “Why did God do this to us?” is all too common.  Likewise, the question on many lips after 9/11 was: “Where was God?” Whether it is the massive evil of the Holocaust, the personal disaster of a random accident, or the traumatic public assassination of the President, people typically want to hold God accountable for what has happened. 

In this, Mrs. Kennedy was in good company, and her reaction, like the similar reactions of millions of others, is certainly understandable. 

But however natural, these reactions reveal a profound misunderstanding of Christian faith.  And what strikes me is that such a misunderstanding is not the result of some personal deficiency. Jacqueline Kennedy was a decidedly intelligent, well-informed person, as are many others who react just as she did.  Rather, it seems that people misunderstand their faith because they were taught to misunderstand it. 

I know I spent years misunderstanding.  I was taught that God is omniscient and omnipotent, that he knows everything and can do anything.  I was taught that all things come from God.  It was natural to assume that this meant that bad things also come from God.  So I, like many others, was prone to ask “Why did God do that?” in response to any disaster. 

I recall the scene in John Ford’s 1941 classic How Green Was My Valley, where an older couple stands at the base of the stairs, their heads bowed, mourning the loss of a son in a mining accident.  Suddenly a baby’s cry descends the stairs as the son’s widow gives birth.  The grandfather mournfully recites “The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.” Furious with grief, shaking her finger at him, the grandmother retorts: “Go tell that to that girl up there!”

That woman clearly did not buy the notion that God does evil and then cancels it out by doing some balancing good.  And she was right.  But it took years to for me to figure out why.

Perhaps the best source of clarity on this is Saint Thomas Aquinas, who offered a straightforward explanation of what he called “Divine Permission.”

Aquinas began by identifying our dilemma.  Yes, we believe God created everything.  Yes, we believe He is the author of all things.  But we also believe that God is all good, and perfectly loving.  So it seems God could do nothing evil.  Yet evil things clearly happen.  How is this possible, unless God makes them happen?  And how can God do evil if he is all good?

These questions probe our understanding of God’s will.  God clearly wills the good things that happen.  Does he also will the bad things?  If yes, how can he be all good?  If no, how can they happen at all?

The Canadian Jesuit Bernard Lonergan argued that Aquinas’ solution was like expanding a two lane highway to three lanes.  Yes, there are things which happen because God wills them to happen.  And yes, there are things which do not happen because God wills them not to happen.  But there’s also a third lane: things that happen because God wills to allow them to happen.  In short, some events happen, not because God wills them, but because he permits them.  This is the theory of divine permission.

This of course begs the question: why would God even permit evil?

The short answer is: freedom.  God wills to embrace us with his love, and have us love him in return.  But love must be freely given, and so humans can love God only if their lives are not predetermined--and only if they live in a world where events are not predetermined.

Love requires freedom, and freedom is possible only in a world where choice—and chance—are possible. Thus by inviting us to love, God must risk our refusal to love. If he refused to permit that refusal, if he prevented all evil, he would also prevent our freedom and therefore make it impossible for us to love.

This idea that God loves our freedom to love Him above all else is both gratifying and terrifying.  It is gratifying because it means God’s gracious love makes it possible for us to love him as well as each other.  It is terrifying because our freedom to love leaves us free to hate as well.  As Bishop Desmond Tutu said after 9/11, Christian faith includes the terrifying belief but God will allow us to choose hell rather than force us into heaven!

So the idea of divine permission creates a new horizon for our view of the events in our lives.  We can thank God for willing the good things that happen.  But we cannot blame God for the evil that happens.

This fact of our faith is both counter-intuitive and liberating.  It is counter-intuitive because we have been so used to thinking of God as the author of every single thing that happens.  It is counterintuitive because we naturally want to blame God for catastrophe, and feel as Ms. Kennedy did, bitter or angry toward God.  So to accept this belief in a good God who permits evil can be a tough challenge in the face of our own strong emotions. 

We may well get angry anyway, since God has permitted the evil even if he has not caused it.  We may ask “Why does God allow this?” And though the answer—“because our own freedom requires it”--is clear, that does not make it easy to accept.

But this fact is also liberating, because it frees us from the sort of torturous logic that so many Catholics employed to explain away evil events.  Just as Mrs. Kennedy tried to convince herself that God engineered her husband’s death for some good purpose, many Catholics construct fantastic rationalizations for the catastrophes that befall them.  Besides the fact that such rationalizations distort our image of God, they also have the effect of denying evil in the world.

It is one thing to believe, as Christians do, that God can use our suffering for good purposes.  It is another thing to believe that the cause of our suffering is good.  For if all suffering has a good cause, then there is no evil in the world.

It is easy to understand that, in moments of terrible shock, trauma, and grief, people are impelled to deny evil simply because they cannot tolerate the truth.  But in the long run, it does neither us nor our faith any good to pretend everything happens for the best in every situation.  There is evil in the world.  And that evil, at least in its human form, is the direct result of God’s decision to make humans free.  In fact that evil, and the suffering it causes, is the price for our freedom.

This poses a profound spiritual challenge: if God is the kind of loving father who prizes our freedom so much he will allow us to suffer its consequences, can we embrace the same attitude? 

This is no mere abstraction. We face this in our lives. How many parents will allow their children to fail and suffer in the name of their own freedom?  How many of us accept the consequences of our mistakes as the price of our freedom?  How many of us embrace an existence rooted in the freedom to love or not love?  How many of us would, at least on some occasions, prefer a life in a world where freedom was curtailed and we could escape its consequences?

In short, the Christian world view is of an existence that results from God’s special version of “tough love.”  God has created us for love, and so we must be free, and so our world must be a place of freedom, and so we must live with its consequences.

This is of course, the lesson of the story of the Garden of Eden.  We can imagine a human race that had never exercised its freedom for evil.  We can imagine a human race that always did the right thing.  We can imagine a human race that never has to suffer the consequences of wrongdoing.  But that is not the human race we all inherit.  Instead, we find ourselves part of the human family in which a long history of wrongdoing and bad choices have left us a world in which our freedom is sometimes to be feared even more than it is to be cherished.

The bottom line is: the Rolling Stones were right.  God did not “take” Jack Kennedy.  One of us (or some of us) did, as members of a human race that too often fails to love.  And the reason was not to teach some cosmic lesson that was in the mind of God.  The reason was some hateful motive by people who could not rise above their baser instincts and use their freedom for good instead of evil.

We must be tough to accept this kind of life.  And we must believe in a tough God whose love for us is a harsh and dreadful thing.

  © Bernard  F. Swain PhD 2014

#418: “Gravity”—a Weightless Classic

A brief respite from “churchy” concerns as I reflect on a great on-screen vision.

More and more lately I’ve been surprised by the reaction of family, friends, and acquaintances who have seen Alfonso Cuaron’s film “Gravity.”  Most liked it, but their admiration was mild, and mostly overshadowed by their stronger liking for other 2013 films: Twelve Years A Slave, Dallas Buyers Club, Philomena, Blue Jasmine, Wolf Of Wall Street, Nebraska, August: Osage County, etc.  By now I’ve seen all of them and I remain convinced that, 20 years from now, Gravity will outlive them all.  And after watching Gravity a second time, I think I know why.

Mine is probably the last generation of movie-going grownups. Today’s moviegoers are mostly teens too young to access the bars, clubs, and concerts that form the core social life for people in their twenties and thirties.  In our day, movie-going remained a major and frequent “date” option well into parenthood.  But even for my generation, reactions to films tended (and still tend) to be vague: “I loved it”……“It was great”…“the best movie I’ve seen this year.”

I had the good fortune to learn about movies from Guy Leger, a French Dominican priest who taught philosophy at the Institut Catholique in Paris but also had deep personal and professional connections to French cinema.  His father owned a movie house in Bordeaux, so he grew up with film in the early 20^th century.  After serving in the French military he took his best army friend home and introduced him to the movies.  That friend was André Bazin, who became the godfather of modern film criticism, founded the preeminent film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, and inspired the French New Wave (which gave us classics like François Truffaut’s 400 Blows, Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, Jacques Demy’s Umbrellas of Cherbourg, and Agnes Varda’s Vagabond) before his early death in 1958.

For Guy Leger, cinema was nearly a sacred art, and he demanded more probing reactions from his students than “I loved it.” And his starting point was a radical challenge to all of us.  Nearly every weekend he would repeat his creed: “If you have not been trained in cinema, you may completely miss the movie on the screen.”

At first, I was skeptical about this: how could moviegoers not see the movie in front of their eyes?  Yet over the years I have seen example after example.  Gravity is just the latest example--but it may be among the most powerful.  The more I talk to people about it, the more I think that most people went to Gravity but saw something else.

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a movie which so powerfully combines vision, craft, grace, and even poetry.

Ironically, the trailers that showed on TV and in theaters gave the impression of a fast-moving, action-packed special effects extravaganza--and I guess many people walked out believing that’s what they had seen.

But in fact Gravity is one of the slowest movies in memory.  The first shot lasts 13 minutes, the first two shots last 18 minutes, and the first scene lasts 40 minutes of real time--nearly half of the movie’s 88 minutes! 

When was the last time you saw a 40-minute scene in a movie?  And when was there ever a scene that long that did not become claustrophobic or stage-bound (with all due respect to Hitchcock’s Rope)? I bet most viewers did not even notice that it was all one scene. I don’t know which directors in movie history could pull this off, but I am quite sure no one else alive can.

The truth is that Cuaron has mastered a long-take, slow-cutting, choreographic style that absorbs even lightning-fast action into a smooth, fluid, almost serene rhythm—which is just the effect that he needs to make this movie what it really is: an intimate, simple morality tale.

You see, that first 40 minutes concludes with Sandra Bullock, finally safe inside the womb-like confines of a space station, stripping off the protective shell of her spacesuit, floating back, and finally (in weightless super-slow motion) curling into a fetal position—and Cuaron holds that evocative image for long seconds as the scene finally ends.

Up to this point, the Bullock character has immersed herself in her science to escape from a life too traumatic to endure: she has lost her only daughter.  Unable to bear the heavy pain of her of life on earth, she chooses the remote weightlessness of the heavens. 

The second half of the movie depicts her recovery.  Facing near certain death, she retreats to her high-tech womb, incubates a new will to live, and is reborn.

A major irony is that a movie called Gravity has only one shot where the characters are not weightless--the last shot!  Of course, it is the earth-ward pull of gravity that matches the outward thrust of the space stations and keeps them in orbit--and the threatening, violent action results when one satellite’s orbit fails.  But this tension of gravity and inertia is only visible, ironically, in the weightless floating of the characters. 

The film’s visible gravity is not physical at all, so much as it is mortal and moral.  There is the grave mortal threat of the chain-reaction accident that could kill all the characters.  And there is the gravely moral matter of whether Bullock believes her own life is still worth not only living for, but fighting for.  The movie’s climax comes at the moment that her will to live overrides her death wish (thanks to George Clooney’s dream-like Deus ex Machina) and she devises a plan to get her life back.

It cannot be mere coincidence (this is fiction, after all; nothing happens by chance) that Bullock’s journey takes her from an American station to a Russian station to a Chinese station.  Her new embrace of life has no national ring to it, her rebirth is a human triumph, not a patriotic one.  Nor is it coincidence that about half the time one cannot identify what part of the earth lies below the action.  The planet below is not a place of nations; it is the home of the human family.  And Bullock finally decides to rejoin that family.

The final scene brings us back to earth amid cosmic images of rebirth and evolution.  Bullock’s space capsule plunges into water, which then rushes in when the hatch opens. The moment is urgent: she must escape her fluid-filled womb or die.

Pushing herself out of the capsule into the water herself, she begins to sink: the suit that has kept her alive in space is lethal in water, it will drag her down. So she struggles to strip down, shedding her protective “skin” for a second time--just as a large frog swims by her up to the surface. 

Like a fellow amphibian who finally needs fresh air to breathe, she struggles to the surface--and floats, not quite weightless but buoyant.  She first swims and then crawls to the water’s edge, ready to emerge from water to land.  And in this, the movie’s last shot, she finally feels the pull of gravity that has been missing since the opening shot--the pull that has brought her back to earth and back to life. 

She nearly collapses under the new-felt, unfamiliar weight of her own body, her fists digging into the primal muck as if she were the planet’s first land-creature--as if her rebirth is the space-age rebirth of humanity. 

Finally, she makes it to her feet and begins walking, unsteady, over the land. We can see the change in her body language: Now she feels the whole weight of the world on her shoulders--and now she can bear it. She has decided that, after all, she prefers the heaviness on life on earth to weightlessness in the heavens. No longer gripped by grief, she gratefully welcomes gravity.

This is an instant classic whose astonishing special effects, stunning visual beauty and masterful camerawork are all eclipsed by its lyrical (and nearly mystical) affirmation of life and the courage it takes to live it.

  © Bernard  F. Swain PhD 2014