A Flick and a Book

By Brother Stavros


I received a present in the mail the same day I saw the new Irish film Calvary. Both made a serious impression.


     Calvary is a story about passion: faith, love, disbelief, unbelief, pain and loss and ultimately sacrifice. The prominent Irish writer-director John M. McDonagh discovered, from all the media attention the film attracted (it packed theaters in the British Isles), that his title—once commonly understood in the Christian West as the site of Christ’s crucifixion—now needs a footnote; maybe it’s a metaphor for today’s Ireland, where the economic bubble has burst and the Catholic Faith has ebbed like the tide. While Ireland may no longer be a land of staunch religion, it remains one of stunning beauty and of vibrant theatrical talent.

     The story unfolds in a village on the Donegal coast in the northwest of the island. It is a tale of struggle between and among its denizens for meaning and identity, dignity and hope, all with the undertow of a looming murder of the parish priest (played by Brendan Gleeson) who receives the news in his ear in the opening scene from a mock-penitent in the darkness of the confessional box: “I’m going to kill you, Father, because you’ve done nothing wrong.”

     Like the flummoxed apostles questioned at the Last Supper, “Who is it who will turn you in?” every viewer must wonder, as I did, as each character (suspect?) steps into the plot: barkeep, doctor, butcher, banker flush with new money, clueless curate, brittle bishop, a cynical police inspector, an angry black Caribbean auto mechanic, a serial killer serving time, and a doting American writer. And while not suspects, there are female persons of interest who deepen the texture of the narrative, appropriately two Irish beauties—the priest’s daughter (Fr. James is a widower with a late vocation) and a flaunting adulteress—plus a woman of deep grace, though only a tangent on the plot: a French tourist who is widowed by a car accident.

     Like the mixed bag of pilgrims in the Canterbury Tales, each character has a pain, a grudge, and an emptiness, whereas the assassin has the wound of repeated abuse at the hands of a priest throughout his boyhood, as is made poignantly clear by the voice on the other side of the grill in the opening scene. As Saint Paul observes, each of our lives has an effect on others. The priest we watch, in the intervening week before the threat is to be carried out, is the butt of scorn and abuse for rendering more than lip-service to faith in a God he himself must wrestle with, Jacob-like, and leave limping.

     And here is the connection to my recently arrived gift, Love Poems from God, Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West (Daniel Ladinsky, translator, Penguin Compass, 2002), which I began to read that night after the theatre, with my soul feeling a bit bruised and numbed. The twelve voices embrace the same mystery, addressed many times in Hebrew scriptures, as when Isaiah consoles Sion, faced with expulsion and dispersion, sulking in abandonment: “Can a woman forget her nursing baby, feel no pity for the child she has borne?” Or when Jesus cries out from the cross: “My God, my God why have you abandoned me?”

     By the time this review goes on line, Calvary will have ended its theatre circuit, so look for it in the cloud or wherever it’s legally downloadable.

     The killer in Calvary wants the priest to suffer precisely because of his innocence, in dreadful symmetry for his own suffering when he was an innocent boy. Where is God in this picture? The beautiful balance of the poems in Love Poems from God suggests not answers but, more importantly, the mystery of paradox, depth, and power of divine love.

     Rabia, a 7th-century poet from Basra in the marshland of what is now Southern Iraq and a contemporary of St. John of Damascus, was captured and kept in a brothel until she was 50 years old, but became the earliest of the great Sufi poets. This Muslim woman is described in the Arabic classics as follows:

Throughout her life, her Love of God, poverty and self-denia l did not waver. They were her constant companions. She did not possess much other than a broken jug, a rush mat, and a brick, which she used as a pillow. She spent all night in prayer and contemplation, chiding herself if she slept because it took her away from her active Love of God.

   

     This sounds like a passage from a Byzantine synaxarion, a comfortable fit in any Western hagiography.

     By mingling Eastern and Western poets, Ladinsky underscores how the mystics have much in common and point to the same truth of God’s overwhelming love no matter what our distractions, brokenness, or sense of unworthiness.

     I felt the night I opened the book that the priest in Calvary would have found deep comfort in its pages, because the instincts he demonstrates in dealing not just with his personal drama, but with the web of angst among his village flock, are reflected symphonically in the language of Rabia, Francis, Rumi, Aquinas, Hafiz, Kabir, Teresa of Avila, and four other poets, ending with Tukaram, the closest to our era, a weaver living in the first half of the 17th century in central India. These poems are buoyant, defiant, mischievous, overwhelmingly intimate, at times even erotic like the Song of Songs, and always full of light.  I am selecting only four to give you a taste, working backward from Tukaram:

FIRST HE LOOKED CONFUSED

I could not lie anymore so I started calling my dog “God.”

First he looked confused,

then he started smiling, then he even danced.

I kept at it: now he doesn’t even bite.

I am wondering if this might work on people?

And from Kabir, a weaver from Bengal in Northern India, 15th century:

WHAT KIND OF GOD?

What kind of God would He be if He did not hear

the bangles ring on an ant’s wrist

as they move the earth in their sweet dance?

And what kind of God would He be

if a leaf’s prayer was not as precious to creation as

the prayer His own son sang from the glorious

depth of his soul—for us.

And what kind of God would He be

if the vote of millions in this world could sway Him to

change the divine law of love

that speaks so clearly with compassion’s elegant tongue,

saying, eternally saying:

all are forgiven— moreover, dears, no one

has ever been guilty

From Francis of Assisi (1182-1226):

ANYONE WHO SUFFERED

I would not leave this earth

until God promised me

that my hands could always

touch the face of anyone

who suffered.

And last, from Rabia

I HOPE GOD THINKS LIKE THAT

There is a dog I sometimes take for a walk

and turn loose in a field,

when I can’t give her that freedom 

I feel in debt.

I hope God thinks like that and

is keeping track of all the bliss

He owes

me.

     With the darkness looming from ISIS and others bent on division and a corrupted perversion of Islam as gruesome as anything from the Spanish Inquisition, we sorely need to share a common hope, starting in the individual heart with courage to act in some way to make God proud. It is worth remembering that the Ireland so lushly filmed in Calvary was for decades the sight of horrible religious divisions, and that many of the mystics represented in Love Poems from God were nourished at the bosom of Islam from what we now know as Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, and Iraq.


     There are about 350 poems in the Ladinsky collection. I am only sorry he was not able to include some samples from Ephrem the Syrian, Gregory of Narek, and Symeon the New Theologian, for example, to let some of the riches of Eastern Christianity be appreciated in the hope with which he concludes his Preface that “a few of these poems will reach in deep enough to cure what separates us from each other, and from the beautiful. I hope you fall into the wine barrel [this book] and crawl out legally drunk, and get arrested for doing something that makes God proud of you, like being too happy.”