January 27, 2004
My mother spends a great deal of time watching Channel 61 on our cable system, the Catholic Global Television Network . She also spends a great deal of time trying to get me to watch it, and I spend a great deal of time making excuses about all the other things I have to do.
The other day, however, while I was over in her apartment, I caught an old segment of Mother Angelica facilitating a discussion of stem cell research. Now, my opinions these days are decidedly catholic and not at all Catholic. And so I have to admit that I didn't agree with most of what was said. However, I did get a kick out of Mother Angelica's quippy sense of humor. She reminded me of Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, who used to be on our old black and white tv in the early fifties. Like Mother Angelica, he knew how to play to an audience. They both used humor to make religious doctrine sound human and humane. It occurred to me, watching Mother Angelica perform, how much that approach appeals to the "childlike" in all of us. People of such uncritical faith seem to have remained innocent and childlike in ways that people like me turned way from for all kinds of personal and realistic reasons.
People like me look at Mother Angelica and see Granny Weatherwax. They are both the stuff of Croney female legacies and legends. And childlike fantasies. Their quirkinesses are appealing and disarming. Personally, I prefer Granny in terms of what lessons there are to learn about life. But if one is compelled to wear a black habit instead of a black pointy hat, she should take lessons from Mother Angelica.
Legacies and legends. I guess that's why I also like novelist Alice Hoffman, whose novel The Probable Future I just finished. It is a novel teeming with legacies and legends, and, like all of Hoffman's works, it opens up places in my poetic spirit that strict and traditional religion was never able to touch. Legacies and legends are powerful in their metaphor -- more powerful, for people like me, than any literal interpretations of life as we are supposed to know it.
And that's why I'm interested in seeing Mel Gibson's controversial movie, The Passion of the Christ.
I hadn't been paying much attention to the publicity about the movie, but when my phone rang at 11 p.m. Monday night and it was my mother excitedly telling me to put on Channel 61 (aarrggh), since I was up, I did. It was Mel Gibson being interviewed about the movie. What he said in that interview is pretty much what he's been saying in all interviews:
"Obviously, nobody wants to touch something filmed in two dead languages," Mel Gibson explained at a news conference …. . "They think I'm crazy, and maybe I am. But maybe I'm a genius.
"I want to show the film without subtitles," he added. "Hopefully, I'll be able to transcend language barriers with visual storytelling. If I fail, I'll put subtitles on it, though I don't want to."
"The idea came to me 10 years ago and has been rambling around in my empty head, very slowly taking shape ever since," Gibson said. "I think this is a pretty timeless and timely story to tell, involving an area where there's turbulence now just as there was turbulence then because history repeats itself."
"I want to show the humanity of Christ as well as the divine aspect," he continued. "It's a rendering that for me is very realistic and as close as possible to what I perceive the truth to be."
Gibson's last seven words, above, (hmm. Think of those Seven Last Words of Christ) are the point for me. "what I perceive the truth to be."
From where I sit, it's all headology -- our own or some sect's -- that propels us to what we choose to commend our spirit.
According to conservative columnist Brent Brizell*:
Gibson believes something different. For him, the time is right to reawaken a spiritually deadened culture to the inspiring story of Jesus as Lord -- not as some doubt-riddled horny carpenter, or some oh-so-hip gay swinger -- and to remind us all of the unbelievable suffering He endured to give an everlasting gift to the world.
Now, that's the legacy and legend to which Gibson chooses to commend his spirit. To him, it's literal. And, so it is to my mother, who wants to go to see the movie when it comes out. (I told her it's pretty graphic, but the fact is that her eyesight isn't very good these days anyway. And Gibson's flick has no understandable diaglog and that's OK since she doesn't hear that well either. Heh.)
And I want to see it for the metaphor. For the movie-making and risk-taking. For the legacies and the legends that have carried me from the days of the brilliantly amusing but stoically traditional Archbishop to my day today filled with the amusingly perceptive and outrageously ornery Granny Weatherwax. (I'm currently reading Terry Pratchett's Witches Abroad.) It is my spirit, now, who commends them.
*I lost the link to this and now I can't find it again.
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Old Comments (2)
Lindsay on 27 Jan 2004
I'd like to see it too. It's bound to be more interesting/inspiring than most of what Hollywood has to offer.
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Very informed and interesting comments! Greetings.
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