Crying in the church.
I really love the brief look at Jack breaking down in the church. I too have had a moment like this, and I believe it was the Holy Spirit filling my life once again.
Amazing movie.
I'm happy for you!
I really liked that too. I'm sure many people might think it's too much and corny but it all depends on where you're coming from. I have a low tolerance for corny, myself but that part I didn't find corny at all. It seems that many Irish have fallen away from their faith, so for me to have an Irish friend that is so fierce in his Catholic faith seems like a friggin miracle! I didn't catch Jack's last name so he could very well have been protestant..but he could have also been referring to the unfortunate sex abuse scandals that have tarnished the Church. :(
I like what he said about not going into churches because 'Where I'm from, the church has a lot to answer for' but people make a lot of excuses to fall away from their faith. I think I'm guilty of it too at times. How many believers have *not* had a crisis of faith at some point in their lives, really? When they make the decision to go back, they become so much more devoted, like a big lesson learned.
I felt a lot of emotion during the whole church scene for a few reasons. I imagined what it would be like to have done that looong pilgrimage and to have completed it...alive!... and just watching the movie, felt like those pilgrims had completed the journey and arrived at heaven's gate and everything became clear. ... and to Jack, it was like he somehow heard God saying to him "Welcome back, ... I've missed you!"
I like the scene as well, and not for any religious implication that god has found his way back into Jack's soul, but for the fact that perhaps Jack has at last found himself, connecting with three disparate souls with the connection of humanity that made him realize he's no better or worse than any of them, or anyone else, that we're all in this together and you better do the best you can - for yourself, for others - while you can. And yes, it was a long trip, and there he is sitting in this incredible church (the fact that some of the world's most beautiful buildings are churches goes to show you how rich the controlling factions of faith are, it's just maddening) and has this little powerful transformative moment that made him cry like a child. Maybe he finally got it, maybe he didn't and was aching to, who knows. Years ago, at Christmas midnight mass one time, I started thinking of those near me who died and started crying, uncontrollably. I think Jack had a moment similar to that, caught up in the grandeur of a place and all it means to so many people who seem so committed to something he can not be, nor needs to be. his character was rather self-involved, and maybe that moment showed him to feel small, yet as a necessary part of the whole human picture.
Beauty of scenes like that is they invite discussion, interpretation. There's no right or wrong answer at all, it's what you make of it that matters, what it means to you.
Thank you for sharing that reflection. It offered new perspective.
Yes, sometimes it is puzzling that the most beautiful buildings in the world are churches. I find it inspiring and strange at the same time because the people going for spiritual guidance shouldn't need such grandeur surrounding them to be close to God and it makes you wonder about the past.... all the 'indulgences'...that people were called to give money to the church in exchange for forgiveness for their sins. So a hell of a lot of sins helped build the many beautiful churches!
I think if these churches weren't so ornate they wouldn't have stood the test of time.
shareI don't know about the brief tears of Jack as an indication of a return to a specific religious idea. Maybe the start of it, maybe not, in Jack's case. In the context of the story, it struck me as more a feeling of something like the beauty of human culture (the church building itself, the statuary, the sense of ancient history, the ritual) striving to understand or approximate the meaning of it all, coupled with the feeling of being a small but significant part of something much larger than oneself. That's an awfully generic description of religious impulse that I resist as a final stopping place -- I happen to be formerly Catholic, now Protestant with Catholic liturgical and practice inclinations (I'm still crossing myself in the Presbyterian church, still saying the odd line in Latin, a couple of lines from the Athair Nua in Irish, etc.) -- but I'm not sure the character of James would've been open to much more than that, at that point in the story.
I do agree (at least I think you're hinting at this) that the deplorable behavior of people who belong to the Church -- in absolutely direct contradiction to biblical principles and the teachings of Christ himself -- is too often used for what people call a "crisis of faith" or for an exit from not only religious practice but the moral and ethical practice connected with it as well. One of the hardcore atheist's favorite harangues is a litany of all the bad things Christians have ever done (as if atheists also hadn't done their share -- or Buddhists, or Hindus, or Muslims, or agnostics). But that's a fundamentally irrational way of thinking. When people who claim to be Christian act in ways that are directly counter to Christlikeness, it is the selfish, evil choices of human beings that are at fault, even worse when done in the name of the Church or Christ, and not the fault of real Christianity (as opposed to the human, all-too-fallible nature of the church's organization and administration). To be blunt about it, it wouldn't be Jesus Christ who would cover up sexual abuse.
Yah, you're right about deplorable behavior of people who belong to the Church being used as reasons for people leaving their faith behind. Jack might have been referring to sex abuse scandals but he could very well have been talking about the tensions between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland-- but that war is not a religious one; rather a power struggle. 'Catholic' and 'Protestant' are just superficial labels on the longest war in history. You indicated that you come from an Irish background so I'm sure you know that but other people reading this may think it's actually about religion....because they haven't gotten the full scope of it. They keep hearing the parties in the struggle being referred to as 'Catholic' and 'Protestant'.
People have some weird reasons for leaving the Church and some of the ones I've heard just sound so ridiculous, I swear they're just making a mountain out of a molehill, and that the real reason is that they just don't want to fit it into their schedules or get out of bed on Sunday mornings!
My sister has left the church for what I believe to be very selfish reasons, one of which being she probably doesn't want to be preached to about 'honoring thy father and thy mother' because she has ousted them (and me) out of her life. She makes her auto-excommunication out to be that it's because women aren't allowed to be priests and because the Church doesn't accept homosexuality. She's not gay herself, so she's not actually affected by it. I don't know how many of her gay friends were ever Catholic or tried to get married in the Catholic church so I think her reasons are pretty weak and self-serving; rather just a thin veil placed over her psychological issues.
A gay friend of mine was brought up Catholic and, even though I find it hard to believe, he once told me he felt no bitterness towards the church for not recognizing his union with his lover. I think he's probably only one in several million gay people who would feel that way but too many people would have the Catholic church bend to the wants of today's society instead of accepting that the Church is staying true to its beliefs. It just brings me to the argument used *for* gay people: Be true to yourself. Don't lie about who you are just to make others happy.
I say whatever church is happy to marry gay people, then yay for them but whoever is not comfortable with it: that's their right and they shouldn't be bullied into it, just as gay people shouldn't be bullied for being who they are.
Totally agree with your first paragraph re the Troubles (and yes, I was actually quite involved with all of that, thankfully not in the middle of the fire, though). I just figured that Jack was referring to the sex-abuse scandals, although upon further review, with that clear Ulster accent (which I figure most people don't recognize as something distinguishable from the ROI accents), maybe he was referring to the Troubles, or to both.
You're absolutely right about religion being only a convenient marker for the conflict. Most people have no idea at all, and I mean none. Certainly not most Americans, who I assume are the main market for the movie. Some percentage are vaguely aware of some conflict in NI, and almost all of the ones who are aware of it have a second vague notion that it has something to do with Catholicism versus Protestantism, which of course could not be more off-target.
Re the rejection of religion in general: So much of human behavior -- I'd say almost all of it, actually -- can be explained and even predicted by social psychology and group behavior. Every generation has its group of cool atheists or cool agnostics who think of themselves as hardcore intellectuals with beliefs about religion that result from an unblinking application of rationality, but for the most part (with some exceptions, of course) their belief systems fall apart as quickly as the most ill-informed fundamentalist's, because they're based on all kinds of question-begging grounds that play well only in their own crowd, which is just fine with them (as it's fine with many fundamentalist religionists). "Eh, the Church has done so many terrible things." "Why didn't God stop the tsunami or that earthquake? How can he let sexual abuse go on rampantly in the Church?" And so on. They ask these questions as if they're conclusions rather than starting points, as if nobody had ever thought about the answers, as if advanced theology had never addressed them. Not to say that the answers are easy or always completely satisfying to a human mind struggling for a sense of justice in a fallen world. But most of these people aren't even making a sincere effort to grapple with them. They use the mere existence of the questions as a way of marking off their own territory for their group.
It's their right, of course, to do this. And I don't mean there aren't terrifically intelligent atheists and agnostics with very good and very hard questions and points. I'm talking about the Jacks of the world, who think that the terrible behavior of some Christians (or Muslims, or Jews, or whomever) indicates the falsehood of the whole idea. (Maybe Jack isn't squarely within this category, since he was at least somewhat open to an experience that went counter to his belief, rather than using his belief as an excuse not to gather any further information or experiences.) The arguments of an intellectually adept and honest atheist are invaluable, IMHO, to religion because they tend to refine theology by burning away whatever is actually indefensible.
(If we had time and opportunity here, I think I could prove that most intellectually honest atheists have to admit that hardcore atheism is not rationally defensible. Briefly, it involves a declaration of no God anywhere, or at least the absolute knowledge that no God ever had anything to do with this planet or with human beings, which is a pure-faith belief. Saying "I cannot find evidence of God" or "the lack of evidence of God, in my eyes, indicates that the idea of God is irrelevant to my life or to human beings in general" is agnosticism, not atheism. But anyway.)
Whoa, went far afield there. Sorry. You're on one of my favorite subjects.
Re your sister...well, I have to say, I am personally adamant about gay rights. I can't imagine what could be less anybody else's business (besides the individual person's, I mean), and I can't imagine how it could be moral or helpful to force a gay person to live as a straight or else suffer the scorn and condemnation of the Church and its people. (There's also that little bit about how Christ himself never said a word about it, to my knowledge.)
However, I still see your point re your sister. Lots of gay people, or people who disagree with the Church in other ways, still belong to the Church and try to change it from within; lots of people in individual congregations believe whatever their conscience tells them to believe, within the broad constraints of a very few central tenets of the faith (I mean, for instance, that it would be off-point to think Ronald Reagan was the real Messiah, and Jesus Christ was just a man, if you're going to be a Catholic -- although I can point you to some Republicans in the States who believe something like that). And if the Church's stance on gays were really the only problem for her, of course there are other denominations and other specific local congregations within Christianity that would be fine with her belief.
Anyway...I think I'm saying more or less the same thing you are. The core issue of Christian belief has nothing to do with gayness one way or the other, and the stance of one particular denomination doesn't change that, so that the fundamental question of whether to stay in the Catholic Church or reject all of Christianity shouldn't rest on the Church's position on gayness, because there are other options. You can stay there and know others are in the same boat, and try to do what you can to bring the Church to your own belief about it. You can go to a different kind of church with the same central beliefs about Christianity but which also accepts gayness. You can practice Christianity privately, if you think no version of any church is acceptable. What _doesn't_ make sense is to use the stance of a specific brand of church (in this case, Catholic) on gayness to reject everything about Christianity. Even if you view gayness as fundamentally a matter of how a person is made, which I do, and even if the practice of every Christian church on the planet were to reject gayness (which certainly isn't true), that wouldn't obliterate all the other aspects of Christianity that have nothing to do with gayness one way or the other.
Same thing with women as priests. I believe very strongly this should be allowed, so I'm in a different denomination that allows it. Or, I could have stayed Catholic and simply tried to persuade people from within. It is not a valid reason to reject everything.
All of which is to say, based on what you're saying here (and your sister might have her own version of it, I guess), it does sound as if she may be using these wedge issues as a rationalization for her to do what she wanted to do anyhow. The mechanism of it is false dichotomy, like the only two options were to stay and thus act against personal conviction on gayness and women as priests, or to leave entirely and reject everything about Christianity. It's one of the central pillars of social psychology that people do this sort of thing all the time -- they decide to do something on a gut feeling, or for reasons maybe even unknown to themselves, or for reasons they can't admit to themselves or others, and then they construct a retroactive rationalization for what they did that gives the illusion that their actions had been based on these after-the-fact "reasons" to begin with. Humans in general walk around with an impression of their own rationality ("I had idea X and then idea Y, and therefore I took action Z") that very often is an illusion in this way.
Incidentally, I agree with your notion that a church, a nongovernmental entity, ought to be able to decide its own positions and stick to them if it wants or change them if it wants. An individual member can stay there and try to change them, or move to a different church whose doctrine on some of these peripheral points fits theirs more closely. I do not think society at large ought to be able to pressure any religious organization into certain positions, with rare exceptions (say, one that advocates violence or clearly criminal behavior).
Rock on!!! Very intelligently put!
Yup, when supposedly very smart people, or people who want to be viewed as smart!, present facts to argue that there's no God, it just gets ridiculous! Take, for example, the creation of the universe: a Big Bang? Really?! It's all just by chance?! Really? The complexities of the human body and how skin is able to heal itself?! Come on!
One of my favorite quotes is by David Letterman, when he had a scientist on his show, explaining the Big Bang theory. Very astutely, Letterman asked: "So...if there was nothing before the Big Bang....then, what...in the name of God....'banged' ????!!!!"
It was a thing of beauty, his question!!
Even though it's off topic and my opinion about it would cause another tangent, I would like to state my opinion on women priests in the Roman Catholic rite.
I am all for the advancement of women in the world, I would love to see a woman in the White House as someone other than First Lady (wow... wouldn't First Husband or First Man be a trip?!). We Canadians, though without a vote on the matter, still have a vested interest in who leads America, of course.
Women priests, though.... would be too weird for me! (I don't take certain changes well.) It's funny because my dad is all for it! Since the priest plays the role of Jesus in the mass, and it is pretty well accepted that Jesus was a man, it would be just too weird to see a woman up there, saying what Jesus said during the Last Supper! Women should be allowed to serve at Mass, girls should be allowed to be altar servers but women priests? Too weird!
I do believe that it would be nice (though still weird because I'm not good with change!) if Catholic priests were allowed to marry, especially seeing as now certain married Anglican priests are converting to Catholicism because they cannot abide by homosexual unions in the Anglican church and don't want to be forced to marry homosexuals.
Some men are very devout and have a hard time deciding between marriage and priesthood (yes they can be deacons, but maybe that's not the desire of some) Also, it is disappointing when you meet a charming, good-looking single man and then discover he's studying to be a priest! We can't help but think: "Damn! He's too good-looking to be celibate!"
...there you go... tangent!