An Anguished Hope
On a sunny hot Father’s Day, as the monastery’s representative in the local council of churches I attended the Baccalaureate for the Cambridge Central School’s graduating class. It was held in a handsome red brick church dating from the late 1700s and has been lovingly restored and maintained by its congregation just outside the village of Cambridge.
Upstate New York has no shortage of Colonial-era churches, calendar perfect and uniform in their creamy white, or atypical in Coila’s case, being brick, but surrounded by majestic oaks, maples and ash trees as old as the churches.
One such supplies the title and venue for a new film, First Reformed by Paul Schrader, starring Ethan Hawke as the Rev. Ernst Toler. In a web review Jacob Knight captures its complexity: Here he's a man hanging by his fingernails over a mournful chasm, counting his numerous failures (a lost son, a failed marriage) as cancer and booze begin to eat away at his insides.
The added dimension is that he’s a man of God. First Reformed, as in the Dutch who brought their religion up the Hudson. The pastor goes about his chores in the church and the Manse in cassock and collar, and in the village in a long black coat and collar that made me think of Ichabod Crane. The story unfolds as he writes his diary each evening; the filming is such that you need to look close to see if he’s using a feather quill. His rooms have a Shaker,
almost monastic feel. A volume of Thomas Merton sits on his desk. Anyone who has had even the briefest skirmish in the “interior warfare” can identify the atmosphere, the intensity, and loneliness. 
When Sunday comes his homily is earnest, like his name; it
takes only a few minutes to distribute Eucharist to the handful of worshipers.
I don’t intend to capture, much less to give away the plot,
but I can comment on some vivid images.
A woman in each congregation, especially Amanda Seyfried as
Mary, propels much of the thriller facet. The bleakness of an upstate New York
winter contrasts with the lushness of a mega-church, “Abundant Life
Ministries,” whose pastor (Cedric Kyles) has adopted First Reformed as one
would an elderly aunt. Its auditorium seats thousands, it has a cafeteria, the
pastor’s office is like a boardroom, his I.T. facility broadcasts his message
far and wide. And he is a sympathetic ear for Rev. Ernst. Significantly, they
do argue over the relevance of Merton: “He was tucked away in a monastery; you
need to be in the real world,” he warns. (ahem…) And when the two ministers meet with
their largest corporate donor, also a world-class polluter, the three of them
in a booth at a coffee shop, it could be a scene from the Book of Job.
The state of the environment has a major role, both as
subtext (the film was made with climate-change deniers and their cabinet and
congressional clout acutely in mind) and as efficient cause of the hopelessness
that stalks the characters.
As the stress intensifies, culminating in the 250th anniversary
of First Reformed, Toler leans more heavily on the bottle. At one point he
pours two inches of liquor into a tumbler, then screws off the top from a Pepto-Bismol
bottle (the subtle sound is unmistakable) and pours a dollop into the whiskey. The
camera pulls in to watch the clash of colors and competing densities form a
malevolent-looking, fetal-like curling blob, an icon of the cancer in his
bowels and the cancer we have inflicted on the earth with incessant compromises
of the very land, air, and water we live on—a reality that gnaws at his soul
more toxically than the cancer in his bowels.
First Reformed is a masterpiece of American cinema: an
almost timid thriller about a crisis of faith several layers deep, personal,
sexual, communal, political, and ultimately global. It is about finding hope in
times that seem hopeless, where the finding has become a true spiritual ordeal,
the askesis of both biblical and monastic tradition
In radiant distinction, Pope Francis: A Man of his Word left
me feeling infused with true hope.
I heard about Wim Wender’s documentary on NPR, including his
own words about what he was looking to accomplish, especially by the interview
with Pope Francis that is the core of the film.
I admit to being skeptical about the potential for maudlin
spiritual propaganda. Instead, I found myself totally disarmed by the power of
the film and, of course, by the power of the pope’s disarming depth of presence
and genuineness.
For the first interview, the pope is sitting in the garden,
but by the end of the film, during the answer to Wender’s final question the
camera brings you very close so that Francis is speaking to you, and his
parting words should be taken personally.
The passion this pope feels about the environment and how we
collectively abuse God’s gift and leave our children a much-diminished earth
and untold suffering for people, chiefly the poor, around the globe, bears a
certain kinship with First Reformed, but in this film it is writ large. Quite
literally, as when the whole facade of St. Peter’s Basilica, now that it has
been cleaned and returned to its white luster, was used to project a film about
the environment. Seeing it “second hand”
was impressive, but for anyone in the square it must have been mind-blowing,
150 feet high and 370 wide, filled with images of mountains of garbage on which
hundreds of families live, are baptized, marry, and die, picking over other
people’s trash to eke out sustenance.
The same is true of floating plastic and other litter choking whole
rivers or forming rafts the size of countries in our oceans. That’s only two of
the images burned into my mind.
Pope Francis’ first Encyclical, Laudate Si, whose name is
taken from the opening words of the hymn in praise of all creation composed by
Saint Francis of Assisi made it clear why the pope (no less than the Ecumenical
Patriarch Bartholomew) burns with such passion about the accountability of the
issue.
Mr. Wender punctuates the œuvre with film clips of the life
of Assisi’s poverello saint, either from an old black-and-white movie or
especially produced, but an effective way to link the pope’s namesake and the
deep roots of environmental passion.
The interview is also laced with films of the pope’s
exhausting travels. Beginning with prisons in Italy and in other countries, to
slums in his native South America, to hospitals in Africa where he embraces
individuals with compassion and tenderness, undeterred by any possibility of
contagion, mirroring Saint Francis’ encounter with lepers.
On the Greek island of Lesbos he was joined by Bartholomew,
Patriarch of Constantinople (the pope’s senior in the crusade to respect
creation) and the Archbishop of Athens to comfort the flood of refugees from
the bloody war in Syria. (Unfortunately they were not identified.)
But what I found most dramatic was the Pontiff’s speech
before the joint session of our Congress. He reminded our legislators to
examine the attraction of the billions of dollars our government makes by
selling arms which are then used to wreak death and suffering on so many in the
world’s crisis zones, affecting primarily the poor and marginalized.
I saw both these films in a little arts theater in a college
town about 45 minutes away, a beautiful drive to Williamstown in the northwest
corner of Massachusetts. The woman minding the concession stand, with elegant
pastries and many kinds of coffee, told me that a Roman Catholic priest in the area
had bought 50 tickets so his parish could see Pope Francis and discuss the
issues. I would like my brothers and sisters to see both films. I urge our
Companions to look for them, and to all our readers, don’t miss the chance.
After all, an Anguished Hope is still HOPE.
