12/25/2020 Everyone seems to be sleeping late this Christmas morning—strange weather today: warm, windy, as if change were coming, as 2020 hurries to its indoor conclusion. I can imagine most people—here in eastern Massachusetts—stayed up late, watched old films, and cried in their beer. I was drinking tea. Christian faith has been replaced by nostalgic, secular, sentimentalism, and yes, I found myself prostrate in a world of tears before the altar of It’s A Wonderful Life, my daughter glancing at me occasionally, a little bored, a little unsettled, while she skyped with her west coast boyfriend—a child of two divorced women.
I think the saga which Jimmy Stewart portrays for us annually is underrated, perhaps because it belongs to a time of year—where Christianity hangs on among the secular. The film’s gloriously busy realism and its gloriously fateful idea are never at odds; we always feel both immersed and apart from all that happens—we are Uncle Billy when he loses the money, we are George Bailey when he is happy and sad and these simple things work better than any other film for reasons which precisely belong to great film making and great story telling. All the surrounding things which occur in the pivotal Uncle Billy scene, the phone call he has to take, the pet raven flapping on his shoulder, the bank inspector stopping by, George giving money to the floozy privately in his office, make us think, “ah that’s just how tragedy strikes the ordinary loser—cheery and distracting events accumulate ironically, even as others of menace stoke further fear.” It’s A Wonderful Life has many exact pieces, (many of them are literally stripped from George in the “reversal” reckoning part of the film) and each fits in tragi-comic precision in a manner which takes multiple viewings to appreciate, and so watching the film many times is both necessary and pleasurable—its popularity is not manufactured, but real.
I saw another black and white film on Christmas eve which I had never seen before—The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, which I found absolutely beautiful—more condensed than It’s A Wonderful Life, it takes less time to tell its story, but The Ghost and Mrs. Muir has a similar human sweep, and a moral power which blends accident and necessity together effortlessly. The sailor ghost quotes Keats, but there is nothing faux-aesthetic about the film, which belongs to a day when Keats was quoted and loved. The Ghost and Mrs. Muir haunts, artfully and poignantly, without making any special effort to do so.
Watching these old films on Christmas eve got me thinking about Christianity.
And what of Christianity? How does it keep up with the rush of a world full of science—and easy sinning?
A silly question, really. Of course Christianity can “keep up” with science and sinning—Christianity is a highly developed psychological “science,” and its chief subject is sinning.
The practice of assigning things to “bygone eras” is probably the most unscientific practice there is. Things may be getting worse—films are dumber, songs are not as melodic, poems are not as memorable—but things important yesterday are just as important today. Love and romance may be cruder, but they still matter.
Those who are not religious think, “I will sin if I wish; there is no proof of any punishment beyond the grave. I will try and be as nice to people as I can, and let my friends and family be my judge, and I, finally, will be my own judge—I will not obey things placed upon me from afar.”
The religious will respond, “You are, in fact, describing religion! God has granted us free will, so yes, you may sin as you wish. Yes, you should not believe what has no proof. If friends and family—who judge you—are not Christians, you cannot be a Christian—unless you, yourself, are a Christian, and this can only happen if you read the bible, which is mostly a record of friends and families who are Christians speaking to, and attempting to prove things to, those who are not Christians! Nothing is coming to you from ‘afar;’ that’s just your perception. And the fact that you even consider concepts such as ‘punishment’ and ‘sin’ and ‘judgment’ indicate you are far more religious than you think!”
And the religious person will go on, “There are Muslims and Jews and Christians who are less religious than you are. They sin, and afterwards, say, ‘I pray God will forgive me.’ Because they believe in God, they sin more than you do.”
And this retort by the religious may give the non-religious person pause, and they may even smile. And they may respond to the religious this way, “I suppose it all depends on sincerity, then. If you are religious, but not sincere in your heart, you are not religious. But how do we measure sincerity? All of us wish for happiness, and we will always seek out happiness in the best way we know how: where then, is insincerity? It can only be measured by some measuring stick outside of ourselves. But how can we truly judge ourselves if the judge is not ourselves? Sincerity cannot come from without. So all moral wisdom and teachings which come from without contain the ‘sincerity trap,’ and therefore, wisdom which comes from without is a lie.”
“Exactly,” says the religious, undeterred by this insightful response, “this is why you must obey the letter of the law as set down in the bible—it is not a matter of sincerity; it is a matter of obedience. There is much written in the bible on how to behave and think—obedience is crucial, but it is not a simple matter; one must learn how to be obedient, one must learn how to teach others to be obedient—and this is what 99% of religion is. A very small part of religion (less than 1%) pertains to considering whether there is an afterlife or not, or even whether God exists, or not. The science of obedience is a lifetime pursuit, and involves wisdom and all sorts of things—obedience is the most complex thing there is, even as, on the surface, we think of it as a mere simple command: obey. And so sincerity has nothing to do with it, and this is why the word, the text, the law, the letter of the law, is the most important thing. Not even what Jesus is is as important as what Jesus says.”
“I see,” says the atheist or the agnostic, “so that means there are two steps—the first is to have faith in the word of the bible, and second, to have faith in what the word is telling you—and one cannot exist without the other.”
“But the first faith is contained in the second,” says the Christian—“you are seeing two faiths where there is only one. This is what the secular tend to do—make complex what is not complex.”
“But this is my problem,” says the agnostic, “Jesus preaches in the bible—he attempts to convert others, and I would be as one of them, being converted, and he will tell me to turn away from sin, and through Him I will get to heaven, but he does not know how much I love the one I am sinning with. I accept my sinning with the one I love with my own judgment, and therefore, I am sincere. If I accept the least part of moral teaching which comes from without, by something in a book, I cannot possibly be sincere—I am giving up my own judgment, and one cannot be sincere unless one is the judge of oneself. Secondly, if I am sinning, it is because I am hurting someone else, not God—who cannot be harmed by my sin if He is God—and therefore I am certainly not immune to that which approaches me from without, however this will be in the form of judgment from anyone who I am actually sinning against, and doing harm against, and this is real, and far more fruitful than anything written in a book, which does not know me, specifically.”
The Christian shakes his head, and says, “this situation you describe would work if there were no secrecy in the world. But there is. Thieves come in the night, and steal from us unawares, and if you are not able to judge of their wrong, who will? Judgment in this case must come from without—since within, we are deceived. An artificial judgment from without is a thousand times better than no judgment at all. There is no judgment which comes from us—this is why we need law, why we need judgment from without, and why we need religion. You ask for sincerity, and but isn’t it the sincere truth that you do not judge yourself correctly? You only judge things in your own self-interest—and how can this be a law for everyone? And if there is no law for everyone, there is no law. But there is law, whether you wish it, or not. The argument is already over. Jesus is necessary. And his word in the book is necessary. In the world you have described, everyone sins according to what they can get away with in self-judgement—just think of what such a world would be. A world such as that cannot be. It does not exist, and therefore there can be no prophecy which is in that world, or prophecy which predicts that world. It is a false world. There must be law, and there must be knowledge of the law, and therefore we need first, the law, and second, the wisdom which says, ‘Accept things as they are. The law is what is, the law is your guide and you shall not break it.’ And by the necessity of law, all we know of religion follows, and all we know of religion leads up to the necessity of law, too. You do not get to choose. You cannot escape the word. You may ignore the truth, but you cannot escape it.”
The agnostic now says with more passion, “Yes, all wisdom comes down to this: ‘Accept things as they are.’ If I am married—I shall not commit adultery. I must accept my vow of marriage. But if I hate my husband and love someone else, why should I ‘accept things as they are,’ and not love someone else? In fact, my love of someone else is ‘things as they are.’ So we have two competing things, two competing laws: obey the vow of marriage and obey love. And therefore the wisdom of ‘accept things as they are’ is not pure—if wisdom is divided, it is not wisdom, and therefore there is no wisdom, religious, or otherwise—only I, as my own judge, can make decisions; any wisdom which attempts to be moral—and this includes the wisdom of Jesus—is a removed set of general principles set down in a book.”
“You have hit the nail on the head,” says the Christian. “Obedience cannot be divided. The bible is not moral. The bible is not a set of moral principles. The bible is a guide to happiness, and part of its wisdom is that there can be no wisdom, or obedience, divided against itself; there can only be obedience to the one God as found in obedience to the one Son who is the Way and the Life. Happiness is the revealed God of the bible. Morality is only how happiness appears to sinners.”
Here is where the discussion ends. It doesn’t have to end here. Depending on who you are, it will end well—or not. Because there is free will, discussions like this will never end satisfactorily.
But is the impossibility of a good ending a reason not to begin?
The endings feel perfectly right for It’s A Wonderful Life and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.
And this is why we love old movies—and hate our lives.
But even if the ending does not please you, or cannot please you, begin, begin.
It is always good to begin.
Yes, you lost that money, Uncle Billy. But there is hope.