Wednesday, October 1, 2014

The road to Calvary


          
  A friend recommended that I go see the movie, Calvary. It covers seven days in the life of an Irish priest serving in an isolated parish on a windswept corner of County Sligo.  The film opens with the priest, Father James, hearing confessions.  A man enters the confessional and reveals to Father James that he was abused from the ages of 5-7 by a now-dead priest.  He intends to extract retribution by killing Father James seven days hence. “No point in killing a bad priest,” he says. I’m going to kill you because you’ve done nothing wrong.” The penitent wants the world to know the trauma visited upon him and, in his mind, what better way than to kill an innocent man?

            It’s easy to see the parallels between the movie title, Father James’ predicament and his journey of seven days. Father James’ “road to Calvary” takes a week to complete and is filled with the flotsam and jetsam of encounters with a variety of unruly, unappealing and often unlikable parishioners.  Father James deals with each of them with a mixture of patience, righteousness, humor and even, sometimes, anger. Needless to say, this parish priest is respected, but is not popular.

            Father James’ isolation in relation to his parishioners caused the recovering English teacher in me to focus on two moments in the film which paralleled scenes in Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar and Mark Twain’s novel Huckleberry Finn (hang in there).  With respect to the former parallel, there’s a scene in the film where the Pub owner, smarting from a losing encounter with the priest, says to one of his customers: “(Father James) needs to be taken down a bit.” His words reminded me of Cassius - who had his own issues with Julius Caesar - when he said to Brutus:

“Why, man he doth bestride the narrow world / Like a Colossus, and we petty men / Walk under his huge legs and peep about.”

Later in the film, having acquired a gun for the purpose of defending himself on the seventh day, Father James wrestles with his conscience - he had just chastised a parishioner for thinking there are exceptions to the fifth commandment - and pitches the pistol into the stormy waters of the Atlantic ocean, thus committing himself to the final confrontation with the man who intends to kill him. That scene echoed the words of Huck Finn - “All right then, I’ll go to hell” - when he commits himself to freeing his friend, Jim, the slave.  I won’t act as a spoiler for the rest of the film, should you decide to see it; but I do want to comment on the theological and ethical elements in Calvary which should, I think, resonate with what we try to do here at La Salle for the students entrusted to our care.

The word and the place of Calvary are synonymous with the Christian understanding that Christ’s death represents the sacrifice of an innocent man in order that the sins of the many can be forgiven.  I’ve always struggled with the cause and effect of this core element of our Christian faith. It seems so incredibly outsized as to be incomprehensible. And yet, having watched Calvary, the priest’s belief that he will be able to convince his potential murderer to abandon his malign goal makes sense to me (especially after he throws the gun into the sea). In short, innocence forms its own moral compass. The film reinforces this point when, in a debate with one of the other characters about the difference between recrimination and forgiveness, Father James blurts out this blockbuster:

“We have too much talk about sins … and not enough about virtues, I think forgiveness has been highly underrated.”

It is all too easy for organized religion to dwell on sin more than on virtue - we see this played out in the news headlines on a daily basis, it seems. Rarely, though, do we devote as much time to the Gospel virtue of forgiveness…hence Father James’ comment. This is particularly problematic during the stormy adolescent years of high school. Confrontation - not forgiveness - is often the dominant social paradigm among teenagers. At La Salle, we seek to tilt the scale towards forgiveness by surrounding our students with adults who are also on a journey towards becoming more forgiving.  We don’t always get it right, but we know that our goal to produce good students and good people necessitates that we keep trying - just as Father James kept trying to win over his recalcitrant parishioners to more fully embrace Gospel values.

I suppose I will always wrestle with the magnitude of Jesus’ sacrifice; but in watching Father James’ journey to Calvary, I have a better idea how to encourage our students to imitate Christ’s example, who, at the time of His Calvary, forgave his persecutors.

No comments:

Post a Comment