Gravity: a review and brief reflections on earthbound existence

(Numerous spoiler alerts.)

"Life is impossible in space."

So begins the critically-acclaimed and blockbusting new film Gravity - the most humble, human and hopeful sci-fi film I've ever seen.

How can a sci-fi flick be humble? This was no "to infinity and beyond" celebration of hubristic human intergalactic imperialism. This was an extended study in our inability to survive a mere few hundred kilometres above the surface of the only habitable piece of rock in the known universe, a precarious existence in orbit (i.e. perpetually falling back to earth and missing, which is what orbit is) threatened not by aliens, not by an absent God, not by international tensions and conflicts, but simply and depressingly by the unforeseen consequences of our shortcuts and fundamentally by the inability to deal with our own junk.

Even amidst death and destruction, the Earth itself was the star of the show, the jewel in space, the pale blue dot on which all human hopes depended. The sheer beauty of the planet was the backdrop against which the crises and tragedies of the tiny cast played out. Indeed, the last line from the one human who felt somewhat at home in space was an appreciation of the beauty of the earth, praising the wonder of sunlight reflected on the Ganges.

When it all comes crashing back to earth, we are thrown again onto the ground, finding in the mud between our fingers the basis of our only hope. The sense of being "home" at the end was overwhelming. We are creatures of the dirt. It is no coincidence that the only survivor is named Stone.

The film was redolent with images of gestation and birth, symbolism that even became a little heavy handed at one point as Stone floated in the fetal position trailing a breathing tube. Numerous rapid dangerous movements through narrow spaces and a final desperate breaking into and out of water completed the natal symbolism. Stone, having found in space the ultimate womb in which to hide her maternal grief, the ultimate car ride to delay the full recognition of her loss, is reborn back into the world of pain and loss, the world of gravity, the word of dirt and mud. Her final embrace of the mud was a return to roots, an acceptance of her existence on a finite planet, a rediscovery of being fundamentally a pedestrian rather than celestial species.

We are humans from the humus, 'adam from 'adamah, and our destiny is tied intimately to the planet that is our only home, a home threatened by our inability to deal with our own junk.

A parable

Every day while walking up the 193 steps to my desk I pass the smallest nature reserve in the country, a tiny locked garden that thrives with all manner of wee, sleekit beasties.

Today as I walked past, a man, slightly inebriated, climbed over the fence, stumbled through a couple of low bushes, exclaimed loudly to his two friends who had remained behind "It's beautiful! No, I mean seriously, it's really beautiful!" and then proceeded to unzip his pants and relieve himself.

Whether the point of this parable is as an illustration of so many of our interactions with the created order, or is related to the fact that I kept on walking, thinking this was someone else's problem, I am not entirely sure.

Hold your breath

H/T Helen at The Seamonster, a great new blog about "ocean science, sports and discovery". This blog is an experiment in the communication of the perilous ecological condition of the oceans via getting people excited about their beauty and wonder. This video does it for me. Filmed entirely on breath (no underwater breathing apparatus for either subject or camerawoman) at the deepest blue hole in the world (Dean's Blue Hole, 202m), the "story" is fiction (in that no one has got to the bottom while "freediving"; the current record is 100m) but it is still an amazing little film.

Was Jesus a looker?

"An attractive Christ, or a Jesus who is a better-looking version of us, effectively endorses the existence so desperately sought after in the West, where looking good is an indispensable part of the 'good life'. Submitting Jesus to the values of our culture - that patently worships the new, the attractive, the young, the white, over the wizened, the ugly, the infirm, the non-white - is much safer than heeding his often blistering critique of power and our failure to love God and each other as we should."

- Justine Toh, "God must be beautiful - it runs in the family", SMH 25th April 2011.

Justine Toh has a good SMH article reflecting on portrayals of Jesus and our tendency to equate beauty with worth.

Myers on Augustine on desire and beauty

Ben Myers has written a wonderful short post which consists of an anecdote leading into a one paragraph explanation of the heart of Augustine's take on human desire.

Still enjoying U2: real joy

Here's where we gotta be / Love and community / Laughter is eternity / If joy is real

- Bono, "Get On Your Boots" from No line on the horizon

Love and community are the great marks of Christian discipleship. "By this, shall everyone know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another." (John 13.35)

This is hard. This is where we have got to be, but find ourselves continually slipping away from. Community takes time, commitment, forbearance, repeated attempts at communication, and forgiveness, forgiveness, forgiveness. For many people, such a message seems hopelessly idealistic. They have been hurt too many times, misunderstood, ignored, abused or rejected by the very community that is meant to be the place where we learn love. Are love and community even possible?

Here's where we gotta be / Love and community / Laughter is eternity / If joy is real. And yet the Christian message is, in the end, a message of joy and of reality. It claims that being touch with reality is to be in touch with the deepest of joys, that existence is not ultimately tragic, that pain is not the final word.

Of course, being in touch with reality now also means mourning and weeping. Jesus said, "Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh." (Luke 6.21). Life in a broken world yearning for God's healing breath will remain a life of groaning. But such sadness is due to the depth of love that God leads us into. It is love that leaves a mark, that opens us to the wounds that hurt so much. But love is also the only path to laughter and joy. And the good news is that God promises to comfort those who mourn, to turn weeping into laughter. It is God's redeeming love which means that weeping may linger for the night, / but joy comes with the morning.

And this hope - that the story of the world will, in the end, be a comedy rather than a tragedy - this hope is what makes possible a commitment now to "love and community". If our love springs from desperation then sooner or later, faced with difficulty, it will wither and die, or at least retreat to a safe distance. Love must be sustained by hope and faith. But just like love, faith and hope cannot sustain themselves, or be merely wishful thinking in the face of desperate need. Only love can sustain faith and hope, not our love, but the fact that we are first loved. We do not yet know how loved we are. We do not know how beautiful we are. We do not know how beautiful we will be.
Image by CAC.

Hart on learning to see

Sometimes we don't see what's under our noses. Sometimes we see but do not perceive. Having one's eyes open and head pointed in the right direction is no guarantee of correct vision. Hart makes an excellent point about the labour of vision that is required in order to see straight in a world bent out of shape:

[A]ll of nature is a shattered mirror of divine beauty, still full of light, but riven by darkness. ... [T]o see the goodness indwelling all creation requires a labour of vision that only faith in Easter can sustain; but it is there, effulgent, unfading, innocent, but languishing in bondage to corruption, groaning in anticipation of a glory yet to be revealed, both a promise of the Kingdom yet to come and a portent of its beauty.

- David Bentley Hart, The Doors of the Sea:
Where Was God in the Tsunami? (Eerdmans: 2005), 102-3.

Learning to see creation rather than merely 'nature' does not mean closing our eyes to the pain all around (and within). Instead, it is to look thankfully not fearfully, seeing abundance rather than scarcity. It is to look caringly rather than instrumentally, seeing beauty before usefulness. It is to look hopefully, seeking glimpses of the glory yet to be revealed.

Around the web

Do you suffer from Bono fatigue? H/T Drew.

Review of the first Mac back in 1984. Amazing how many of the innovations are now standard across the board. H/T CraigS.

An intriguing stunt by the Washington Post: Pearls before breakfast. What would happen if "one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made" were to try busking in a busy Washington D.C. train station? The article is long, but well written. H/T Benjamin Ady.

Popular evangelical liturgy as recorded by Chrisendom.

How to get from NYC to London. Don't skip step #24. H/T Daniel Kirk.

Hart on doctrine as winsome apologetics

I presume that a credible defense of Christian rhetoric can be undertaken only from within Christian doctrine: because the church makes its appeal to the world first by pursuing its own dogmatics, by narrating and renarrating itself with ever greater fullness, hoping all the while that the intrinsic delightfulness (and of course, truthfulness) of this practice will draw others into its circle of discourse.

-David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Eerdmans: 2003), 30.

Today, I started reading this fascinating book (a lovely gift). It will be heavy going, but looks very stimulating. His basic question is "Is the beauty to whose persuasive power the Christian rhetoric of evangelism inevitably appeals, and upon which it depends, theologically defensible?" By taking 'beauty' as his theme, a whole way into theology (and evangelism, and philosophy) is opened up that is often overlooked, particularly by Protestants. One of his main points in the introduction is that beauty is not abstract, but is irreducibly associated with particular things in their contingency; the Christian gospel is not a set of timeless truths of universal reason, but is a historical story of such particularity that a modernist is embarrassed.

Anyway, I'd love to hear what people think of the first quote, which comes at the end of the introduction. Is there an intrinsic attractiveness to the good news as it is narrated? Do we believe the good news will strike hearers as good? Is this a repudiation of an apologetics of cultural translation (at least as a first strategy) in which we try to first connect with where people are at and answer the questions they are asking?