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| Martin Scorsese in My Voyage to Italy |
For me, the word community implies the Christian ideal: communion. All of us together, sisters and brothers in the body of Christ. A reign of unshakeable fidelity, humanity, and solidarity.
Not to sound pompous, but I hereby rededicate this blog to fortifying my personal search for that spirit of solidarity.
For the awful truth is, although the idea of compassion and human solidarity moves me deeply whenever I am put into a position of having no other choice but to confront it, I soon enough set it aside again in favor of other, less challenging claims on my allegiance.
At bottom, this problem — which of course I am far from alone in — is one of dishonesty. Or, rather, it amounts to an aversion to looking at the human predicament through the eyes of absolute honesty. When I squirm aside and look the other way, as I typically do, I simply don't see the suffering, heartbreak, and pain in the world.
When I watched Mr. Scorsese's self-presented documentary on DVD, or for that matter when I viewed his earlier A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies, I was struck by the man's gentleness onscreen, the wideness of his mercy. This, from the director that has given us such violent films as Taxi Driver and Raging Bull.
Most of the Italian and American films Scorsese extols as influences on his own work are dark and gritty. Typically, they have been called subversive. When Rossellini made The Miracle, a segment of his L'Amore (1948) in which a mad woman gives birth to a child she believes is the Christ child, Catholic officials denounced it as a blasphemous parody. But, as Scorsese shows, it communicates "something very elemental about the nature of sin."
"It's a part of who we are," Scorsese goes on to say, "and it can never be eliminated. For him [Rossellini], Christianity is meaningless if it can't accept sin and allow for redemption. He tried to show us that this woman's sin, like her madness, is nothing in comparison to her humanity."
Rossellini, by filming this story about the redemption of a despised outcast and the miraculous nature of the life she gives birth to, showed us all the need for compassion and solidarity — and Catholic Church officials didn't get it.
What was it that they didn't get? Albert Nolan, a provincial for the South African Province of the Dominicans, wrote in his book Jesus before Christianity, "The one salutary effect of this moment in our history, its one redeeming feature, is that it can force us to be honest."
He was writing from a time, 1976, when the nuclear standoff between the superpowers made the destruction of the world a real possibility. But it was also a time, like now, when the world's rich were getting richer and the poor were getting poorer, there was widespread disease and starvation, and the sustainability of the planet's natural resources was in doubt.
In short, there was much suffering ... and it might well get worse.
The "subversive" films that Martin Scorsese makes and the ones by other filmmakers that he loves the best also "force us to be honest" — about suffering, about inhumanity, about despair, and most of all about the dangers of hiding our heads in the sand and not acknowledging all of the aspects of the human condition, both beautiful and ugly. For these are aspects we all share, in our common humanity, and our refusal to look at some of them is a dishonesty we cannot really afford.
In Jesus's day, Nolan points out, a great many Jews in Israel were treated by their fellow Jews as lepers, as demon-possessed or worse, simply because they were poor and "obviously" existed outside God's favor. These unfortunates were seen as positive dangers to an Israel already living under the yoke of Roman occupation: signs that God was angry with the Jews, and that Roman enslavement was their just desserts. The poor whom Jesus so conspicuously befriended were, in a word, scapegoats.
Thus was Jesus's primary message, Nolan says, one of solidarity. God is never a God of exclusion and social bifurcation, of shunning and despisal of the poor and the different. That above all was what Jesus taught us, says Nolan, by his words and by his deeds.
That's why I think it wrong to censor (or self-censor!) our solidarity with our brothers and sisters through scapegoating their supposed sins, or simply by remaining stony-faced to their manifold sufferings.
It's why I think it wrong for us to get so wrapped up in our debates about who gets to determine the laws our society lives by — for instance, ought gay marriage to be legal? — that we lose compassion for those dying of AIDS. Laws are only the "soul of society." What of the "soul of community," love?
And it's why I want to dedicate this blog henceforth to countering my own long-ingrained habit of resisting full honesty about what it's really like for all of us to be ... alike. So, herein, I'll be trying to learn to see the world through eyes more like Martin Scorsese's or Albert Nolan's than the ones I have right now.
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