ruminating on "Doubt": part one

I recently saw this movie for the first time, and then immediately forced Marc to watch it and saw it a second time. It has refused to leave me alone since, as many disturbingly-good movies tend to do. In it, Meryl Streep places a cynical-but-righteous nun who runs a school in 1950's New York. She suspects Philip Seymour Hoffman's character, Father Flynn, of molesting the one black student in the school. As the title suggests, the movie deals with themes of doubt, faith, and integrity and the audience tries to decide who to believe and which character to align with. 

So what to do? Well, blog about it of course! I'm going to do a three-part series focusing on the quotes from the movie that stuck with me the most. 

Sister Aloysius: What have you seen?

Sister James: It is unsettling to look at people with suspicion. I feel less close to God.

Sister Aloysius: When you take a step to address a wrongdoing, you are taking a step away from God, but in His service. What have you seen?

Do you agree with Sister Aloysius? I think her statement conveys something that many Christian missionaries and those devoting their lives to social justice or humanitarianism feel, if not say. Some of the darkest moments in people's faith often occur when they are in exactly the place God wants them to be, doing exactly the work God wants them to be doing. In a private letter to one of her spiritual confidants, Mother Theresa wrote from Calcutta in 1979 that "Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear."

People, as a general rule, like to feel comfortable. And one of the most uncomfortable things you can do to a person is force them to face a contradiction. In fact, there's a psychological term for that feeling: cognitive dissonance. People like Mother Theresa have been existing in state of cognitive dissonance for years. It is a contradiction that there are 12.4 million orphans starving in India while a kid in America throws away his cheeseburger because it has mustard on it instead of ketchup. It is a contradiction that a man can mutilate a black or Jewish boy in an alleyway and then go home and lovingly tuck his children into bed. For most of us, these sorts of realizations hit us in moments of clarity or the introduction of an unsettling statistic. We experience a bit of discomfort over them, but soon enough there is a show on TV or a spreadsheet that needs to get done or a friend who calls and dispels the cloud for us and we are able to forget about uncomfortable paradoxes and go on with our everyday lives. 

But when you "take a step to address a wrongdoing," when you refuse to forget and instead make an effort to correct the problem, you will soon find yourself immersed in the darkest parts of the human heart. Like Alex in A Clockwork Orange with his eyes pried open, you will not be able to look away. This is the enticing offer of Jesus when he asks us to clothe the naked and take care of widows and orphans in their distress; this is the requirement that made the rich man turn away in shame. 

While fighting injustice and refusing the be inoculated to the reality of the world around us does draw many away from God, I don't believe that it needs to. Jesus promises in Matthew 28 to be with us until the end of the age not because he is sending us out into uncharted waters, but because he is inviting us to join him where he already abides. When faced with evil, our spirits inside of us cry out, "This isn't right! There is something horribly wrong with the world!" What we don't always realize is that Jesus is crying out right along with us. There is something horribly wrong with the world, and will be until the work Jesus did on the cross is brought to completion at its end. What else is the peace of God for if not to combat the universal cognitive dissonance of existing in a world where good and evil are constantly at war? 

"If I go up to the heavens, you are there;

If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there."

- Psalm 139:8