Have It All

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You can’t have it all.  I know, I know.  People are all the time saying, “I want it all.”  But you can’t have it.  This is where my Buddhist side kicks in, I guess.  It’s the constant desire that makes people unhappy.  And you don’t have to take my word for it.  About having it all, I mean.  The Catholic Church backs me up on this.  There are seven sacraments.  If you follow the rules most strictly, no one can receive all seven.  Holy orders and marriage, at least for much of church history, have been mutually exclusive.  As Paul was rattling on about spiritual gifts in one of his letters, he makes the point that nobody gets them all.  And you don’t even get to choose.  

Humans are acquisitive.  It’s probably an evolved trait.  Think of squirrels hoarding more acorns than they can ever eat.  (By the way, squirrels are the real heroes when it comes to planting trees, and they don’t even mean to do it.  It just comes naturally.)   Life gives us what we need for as long as we have time on this earth.  If you’re reading this you’re living proof.  We fear for the future, however.  What if tomorrow something I need goes away?  I’ve lost jobs and I know the desperation that immediately sets in.  So we want to store up more than we need.  But those sacraments.  Those spiritual gifts.  They remind us of something important.  Something a carpenter from Galilee once said.  It’s essentially the same as therapists have told me: be in the moment.  You have what you need right now.  As a coda: tomorrow will take care of itself.

Those of us who can’t stand incompletion (don’t show me a series of books with one missing!  Please don’t.) suffer from this quite a lot.  Here’s where we need to nod to Siddhartha again and take a deep breath.  Center yourself.  When I was a seminarian discovering Roman Catholicism for the first time, really, and that mostly through the Episcopal Church, I wondered about the sacraments and why, if they were things we should strive for, we couldn’t have them all.  By seminary I was pretty sure I wanted the matrimony route.  As my wife can attest, however, I still crave a monastic existence from time to time.  Torn between two sacraments and I’m not even a Catholic.  I guess I’ve known all along that you can’t have it all.  Those who try for it, if they’re lucky, end up under the Bodhi tree.

Photo by Mattia Faloretti on Unsplash

Gather Round

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The church has been keeping secrets.  That’s the basic premise behind a fair raft of horror films.  Apart from giving those of us watching religion and horror quite a bit to talk about, it reinforces just how close the two are.  The Gathering is a film I missed when it came out, but one which has an interesting, if unlikely premise.  At times it reminded me of The Reaping, and at other times, the prequels to The Exorcist.  Cassie is a young American woman who loses her memory after being hit by a car near Glastonbury, England.  At about this time a deliberately buried church is being explored by an art history professor.  He asserts that it is the church Joseph of Arimathea built and represents, in its altarpiece, the earliest rendition of the crucifixion.  The clergy seem quite disturbed by this.

Meanwhile, Cassie recovers and is taken on as an au pair for the art historian and his wife (the one who hit her with the car).  The people of Ashby Wake stare at Cassie, as if they know her.  She has premonitions of several local people dying violent deaths.  The clergy learn that the altarpiece depicts those who came to watch Jesus’ crucifixion, not out of love or devotion, but simply for spectacle.  Since then they’ve been cursed and show up to watch various historic tragedies.  The clergy want the church, the earliest representation of the spectators, reburied.  The people of Ashby Wake include those of “the gathering,” indicating tragedy is about to unfold in that small town.  There is a twist ending I won’t reveal, but this is one of those horror films that rely on religion to make them work. 

Critics tend to dislike the film while viewers are divided on the question.  I actually enjoyed it, personally.  The concept of the watchers committed to bloodlust seemed different, particularly when put in the context of nascent Christianity.  It doesn’t handle religion as well as some horror does, but it’s a serious effort.  Why Joseph of Arimathea would want to have portrayed gawkers rather than those loyal to Jesus is one of the bigger questions left unanswered.  After the ending some of the unusual scenes earlier on make more sense.  But still no reason is given why an early church would have portrayed those not to be emulated.  As a horror film with no jump startles, but a slowly building dread, it fits the bill for some of us.  The “church keeping secrets” theme is one that should be explored further.

Sinful Thoughts

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The driving force behind Holy Horror is the fact that the Bible appears in lots of horror movies.  More than might be expected.  Although I’ve moved on to other projects, I still keep an eye out.  There may not be time or opportunity in my life to write a sequel, but you can’t unnotice the Bible in The Sinners.  The title drew me in, as did its free status on Amazon Prime.  It’s a Bible-based flick, for sure, but even the basic description gets religion wrong.  I generally like movies by female directors, and this one was a project of Courtney Paige whose name, for some reason, sounds strangely familiar.  In any case, one of the biggest blunders movies like this make is that the religion doesn’t hang together.  Of course, it doesn’t say what variety of Christianity it is, but it’s of the literalist stripe.

Seven alpha females at a Christian school in a Christian community form a clique in which they’re each characterized by one of the seven deadly sins.  They’re lead by the pastor’s daughter, of course.  One of the girls keeps a journal in which she confides that she confessed their activities to the pastor.  The betrayed girls decide to scare the offender but she escapes when they’re intimidating her.  She’s found dead but then the other sinners start being murdered.  The police aren’t really effective and the girls try to figure out who’s behind this.  I won’t say who but I will say that it doesn’t really make much sense.  Scenes jump around and characters appear with little or no introduction—it’s disorienting.  But that religion…

I know enough PKs (preacher’s kids) to know they often aren’t as innocent as dad thinks (and it’s generally dad).  I also know that forced conformity of religion builds resentment and resistance.  But there’s something wrong here.  The pastor drinks wine.  Even the truly religious girls drop f-bombs.  One even attends a Satanist meeting with no explanation.  The pastor’s wife is having an affair.  The school librarian has sex with her husband at the school between classes.  They can all quote scripture, and often do.  What religion is this?  I couldn’t really engage with the movie because there were too many distracting religious gaffs.  Hey, I don’t mind when movies show the problems with religions—they’re fair game for commentary, after all.  But if you’re going to do it, try to understand the mindset of the religion you’re criticizing.  There’s a lot to think about in this movie, and it really isn’t that bad.  But for those who know religion there’ll be some question of which it is that’s under fire.  If I ever get back to Holy Horror I’ll say more.