Collateral Beauty - What is truth, you ask? No idle questions answered here!

When I saw the movie "Collateral Beauty" nearly 2 years ago it jumped right up into my list of favorites. A devastating story being told by someone hit hard by life and refusing platitudes and the conventional quick fix answers from friends, society, church and religions.

Throughout the movie I found instances where we are invited to enter into the drama of life - the drama of suffering, which, when you think about it, is what we do as we participate in the mass of the passion of Christ each Sunday at church. 

The post: "The Beautiful Truth of Collateral Beauty" from Jeff Hual at Mockingbird peels away all the cloudiness, distortions and relativism of the world as it says: 

... Collateral Beauty goes straight to the heart of the matter, diagnosing the human condition.  The movie begins with Will Smith portraying an advertising executive named Howard, a guru in his field, who is addressing his associates. Howard asks the question that is most likely at the heart of our burning questions today:

What is your why? Why did you even get out of the bed this morning? Why did you eat what you ate? Why did you wear what you wore? Why did you come here? We’re here to connect, so how are we supposed to do that?

Love, time, death. These three abstractions connect every single human being on earth, everything that we covet, everything that we fear not having, everything that we ultimately end up buying, is because, at the end of the day, we long for love, we wish we had more time, and we fear death. Love, time, death. Let’s begin there.

I don’t know if the writer of these words is a Christian, but I can think of no better description of the human condition. In the absence of Christ, humanity is forever trapped in an insoluble situation. We live always with the fear of death; we can’t do a single thing to gain more time; and real love can be ephemeral, elusive. So we go to church on Good Friday seeking an answer to our insoluble problem, one that rings true, and brings comfort into our situation. 

Jeff goes on in the review to explain the supernatural turn of the movie when Christ through Love, Time and Death, in the form of three actual people, enter into the drama of Howard's life. He goes on to challenge each of us to delve deeper in our faith by asking those most vital and hard pressing questions that only come to us when we are struck down by life and find out at that moment that the only way out is through God's love. And for me, I throw the challenge out, if we are not the one struck down, but rather the one nearby, we are commissioned by way of our baptism, to be present with them in that suffering so they can feel that they are not alone and perhaps feel the truth of the situation which is always, always, always that Christ is in it with them.

René Girard tribute from Gil Bailie

Link here to read my friend, Gil Bailie's tribute to René Girard in it's entirety. 

I have simply pulled out a couple rich comments from the tribute.

"Beginning with discoveries and insights gained from the careful reading of first literature and then anthropology, Girard turned to the scriptures, only to find there an anthropological perspicacity that completely distinguished this tradition, and in light of which the continuity between the Old and New Testaments came more clearly into focus. Girard saw the mounting chorus of anti-sacrificial admonitions issued by the prophets and the sympathy for the victim found in the psalms and wisdom literature as evidence of the Bible’s religious and moral movement toward the culminating, history-altering revelation of the Cross. Those who might regard Girard’s work as the reduction of the mystery of Christian redemption to a moral repudiation of an odious example of human sinfulness are mistaken. Not only has Girard shown how profoundly and unavoidably humans are implicated in the sacrificial paradigm, but his discovery of these things was accompanied by the deepening of his Catholic faith, sacramental participation, and personal piety – indicative of both his humility and of the gravity of the anthropological conclusions to which his researches led him."


"René understood that the unavoidably mimetic feature of our makeup makes us in some way spiritually permeable to each other and therefore in some way spiritually responsible for one another. Humble and self-effacing though he was, he conducted himself as a spiritual aristocrat. It is difficult to estimate, wrote Blessed John Henry Newman, “the moral power which a single individual, trained to practice what he teaches, may acquire in his own circle, in the course of years.” It was my privilege to be among those who not only to appreciated the importance of his intellectual contribution but who felt the subtle power of his spiritual integrity and the warmth and wisdom that emanated from it."

Entering Advent - Reflections, Meditations and Books

Sunday, December 1st is the First Sunday of Advent so I thought I would create a post with some reflections, meditations and books that focus on the theme of Advent.

Truly a great book on Advent is Advent of the Heart: Seasonal Sermons and Prison Writings by Alfred Delp, S.J., a German Jesuit priest who was imprisoned in Berlin in 1944, then tortured, imprisoned, and executed on February 2, 1945. Fr Delp's writtings and sermons always challenged us as he would say, "we are called to be 'shaken awake'; we are called to integrity and authenticity to confess and proclaim our faith; and we respond to God with reverent amen." Fr. Delp wrote:

Advent is precisely the liturgical season in which the interior religious tension of our time is most conspicuously revealed. ...
The season of Advent is, first of all, the time of man's original religious instinct. Never will we experience our primeval homesick yearning for God more actively and alertly than in this season of ... Advent wreaths. Advent is the time of the God-seeker. The original longing within every human heart is a great impulse toward the hidden and distant God, a longing to wander in that far-off forgotten homeland of the soul. That longing is what the Church expresses, both in her inner attitude and in the liturgy of the season. 

In a reflection written in 1935, several years before being arrested, Fr. Delp directly addressed the increasing hostility toward "the original religious meaning of Advent." 

Stay awake, so that you may be ready!

"Each one of us is confronted with new religious ideas in one form or another. It is not enough to be faithful within the privacy of your own heart or home. This is the moment for public, serious, and faithful profession of our faith."

Father Albert Haase's book, Living the Lord's Prayer - The Way of the Disciple, is not on Advent however you might say it helps us prepare the way for it. He wrote: 

Remember your suffering. It need not be in vain. It can become the womb of compassion.

The womb is a place where something is in the process of being birthed - a place where something is formed.  Fr Albert goes on to say, 

Compassion makes us aware of who we truly are as it bonds us to others in relationships.

Interestingly, the word religion is a derivation from the Latin word, re-ligare: meaning, "to bind back." As we are beings in and of and for relationships - and as we are always falling in and out of relationships, we, by nature, are religious beings forever in the process of patching ourselves back together. And so I was struck by how suffering works in all this and how compassion is the out-growth of suffering. 

Richard Rohr, when lecturing on suffering and pain says; If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it.  So at the point of suffering we have the breeding grounds of choice - either we are being transformed through our suffering or it is a source of transmitting the suffering on to others.  

During the Advent season we are ever reminded of Our Lord and how He came to awaken in us a self-donating transformation of suffering in the world.

Oscar Wilde once remarked on suffering:

Jesus understood the leprosy of the leper,The darkness of the blind,The fierce misery of those who live for pleasure,The strange poverty of the rich, And the thirst that can make people drink from muddy water. He penetrated the outward shell of things and understood that whatever happens to another happens to oneself, and whatever happens to oneself happens to another.

These words give us an image into our relatedness to one another. Embracing our sufferings as well as being with others during their sufferings is the beginning of the transformation of the world. It is the meaning of Advent. My friend and mentor, Gil Bailie, talked about entering into the biblical story this way: 

Advent Banner 
by Rebekah Holten

Jesus says, "take this cup," which is the cup of suffering. We don’t have to be melodramatic about it; there is suffering in our lives. The suffering that I should understand as redemptive is my suffering. The sufferings that I see other people undergoing I should not think that I am going to take it away, I won’t be able to, but I can be present with them in that suffering so they can feel that they are not alone in that suffering and perhaps feel the truth of the situation which is always, always, always that Christ is in it with them. They may not be able to experience that unless they know that I am in it with them. That act of being present with them may be their only entrée to the discovery that Christ is in it with them. Being in that suffering with others, and of course, that sometimes means helping to relieve the suffering, is our responsibility... (See link HERE to get the transcript of Gil's talk on Entering the Biblical Story.)

In Seek That Which Is Above: Meditations Through the Year the future Pope Benedict XVI wrote:

Advent is a time when a kindness that is otherwise almost entirely forgotten is mobilized; namely, the willingness to think of others and give them a token of kindness. Finally Advent is a time when old customs live again, for instance, in the singing of carols which takes place all over the country. In the melodies and the words of these carols, something of the simplicity, imagination and glad strength of the faith of our forefathers makes itself heard in our age, bringing consolation and encouraging us perhaps to have another go at that faith which could make people so glad in such hard times.

There is no better time to enter the biblical story then now during Advent. 

Tough Gospel Reading Challenges Us in the Direction of Love

The parable of the talents in Matthew 25:14-30 is often heard as the master being harsh on the servant who is full of fear and resentment. In our journey of faith all of us are challenged to get out of the myth of an autonomous self stuck in the world-view and instead enter into Christ, linking us to Him, those who have gone before and those whose lives we are intertwined, enabling us to recognize our talents as "what has happened to us, the heritage granted to us by faith." The reality is when we try to operate out of fear or resentment we not only suffer, but the fruits "can even be harmful...," and as my friend Gil Bailie alludes, it is a recipe for squandering the gift of being and our talents, and we become like withering branches that are collected and thrown on the fire and burned (John 15:7).

The following appeared in The Magnificat - it is an editorial from Traces Magazine, (Communion & Liberation International) 2011.

In the painful confusion presently surrounding us, only a few things are clear and certain. One of these is that we cannot live on the proceeds of the past any longer. For example, we cannot base our tranquility on political balances consolidated decades ago; they are collapsing in the most unforeseeable way... It is no longer possible to assume that wealth automatically produces wealth - as was the case in the past fifty years in Western countries - without re-investing it now, and at a risk. Even lifetime certainties like home or relationships can be swept away in a moment, or end up caged in by a threat of death that suffocates the future...

So, as you find yourself looking at those dramatic events... you realize that the challenge reaches you at a deeper, radical level. For your wealth, too, cannot be enough, even that wealth that once served to lay a foundation on solid ground - an encounter, a history behind you, an education - in a word: the Christian heritage, what many of us would define, quite rightly, as the crucial factor of life, that which has given form to our existence. We can't live on the proceeds even of that. A faith reduced to heritage, to an inherited treasure, doesn't automatically generate interest and dividends sufficient for living now, for surviving the onslaught of reality today. It's rather like the parable of the talents... in which the owner is angry with his servant who buries his talent in the ground to keep it safe, instead of making it produce a profit. 

The talents are... what has happened to us, the heritage granted to us by faith. If you don't risk it now, in time it is of no use. If there is not a presence that enables you to augment it and make it fruitful now, it is useless. It can even be harmful... 

"The Christian faith stands or falls with the truth of the testimony that Christ is risen from the dead", as Benedict XVI reminds us... If you take this away, we are dead, because faith is reduced to "a series of interesting ideas" or "a kind of religious worldview", but it is "dead". All that's left is "our own judgement in selecting from his heritage what strikes us as helpful", and we find ourselves "left to ourselves", alone, unable to face up to the certainties that collapse, in a moment.

This is why Christ rose. He removes the stone from the grave, and he digs up the earth where we would like to hide what we have received, where at times we would have the temptation to bury the heritage of faith. He does it so as to give it back to us now, to make it bear fruit now, and to take away our loneliness from the world, for ever.