A few days ago, Becky and I somehow got into a conversation about what kind of movies we like to watch. She said she liked movies with a really good plot, and I said I liked movies with a lot of character development. As the conversation went on, I wondered at her depth of aesthetic appreciation, and she pondered my penchant for plot-less films in which “everybody dies in the end.”
One thing we were agreed on however: in films, and in life, we all look for a point. Sometimes we look at our own lives and ask “What is the point?” When it comes to our own lives, most of us would probably like a life that moved with the clarity and force of a tightly constructed movie plot. In reality though, the events of our lives usually hang together rather loosely: more like a collection of plots rather than any one single plot. I suppose that is why I like movies that emphasize the development of the characters. As in so much of life, the unified plot is not to be found in the chain of external events, but in the characters that experience them.
Homer’s Odyssey is like this. Odysseus, the main character, is caught up in a series of adventures as he tries to make his way home. Along the way, there are numerous opportunities for him to simply give up the quest for home and settle into a life completely different than the one he began with. One of the questions that the poem raises in my mind is the question of how we preserve our identity as human beings: along the journey of life, is there something stable in our life that we remain true to, or do we let go of our integrity and allow our identity disintegrate into so many parts? Throughout the Odyssey, Odysseus is continually tempted to sell his integrity in order to provide for his own physical survival, a struggle that all of us deal with.
This tension between survival and integrity is dealt with in a number of modern films as well. Forest Gump is, in many ways, a modern odyssey: like a leaf blown about by the wind, the main character moves in and out of the most disparate situations, the only continuous element in his life being his steadfast simplicity and goodwill. Another example can be found in the movie The Truman Show, where the main character unknowingly lives in a world that is completely fictional. The key insight in this film is that, although he eventually discovers that the world he has been living in is false, he equally discovers that the person he has become is not. These movies, while very different, both share a common theme: that the real meaning of life is not to be found in the continuity of life’s events, but in the continuity of the people who live through those events.
we have hope, because we know that the victory in this struggle does not depend upon our own power
As Christians, we too are participating in a story that is something of an odyssey. While from our human point of view we don’t have the privilege of seeing how the plot of our own story will unfold, we do have a hand in determining the kind of characters that we will become along the way. And while we too struggle with the age-old tug-of-war between survival and integrity, we have hope, because we know that the victory in this struggle does not depend upon our own power. To be sure, there are times when we win the battle for integrity and there are times when we lose, but deep down all of us know that the war will not be won in this way, for “in our hearts we have felt the sentence of death.” The meaning of our lives does indeed depend upon the continuity of who we are as people, but we are not our own creations. Rather, the continuity of our lives is found in the grace and redemption of Jesus Christ: For we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body (II Cor. 4:7-10).
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