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The New England Church PulpitNew England Congregational Church UCC |
Like Water and Chocolate |
Luke 3.21-22 |
On the first screen is the adolescent Helen Keller, poignantly captured in Arthur Penn's Miracle Worker. There is an unforgettable moment in the movie where Helen Keller, blind and deaf from birth, makes an astonishing, primal breakthrough. At a well in Tuscumbia, Alabama, with the patient and persistent Annie Sullivan teaching her to associate objects with words, Helen Keller has her celebrated epiphany. Helen utters the word "wa-wa"–water–and magically she is baptized into a world unknown to her before this. It is not insignificant that "water" should be her first word, for as Jean Giraudoux reminds us
'Water...is the one substance from which the earth can conceal nothing. It sucks out its innermost secrets and brings them to our very lips." (The Madwoman of Chaillot)
With this one word, she like Jesus, was baptized into a life that saved many from intellectual and spiritual blindness.
Now downsize that picture and put it in the upper lefthand corner of your screen.
On screen number two is playing a lesser known film entitled Beautiful Dreamers, where a type of baptism occurs in the swimming hole. In what some people call a scandalous movie about the friendship between the Canadian doctor Maurice Bucke and American poet Walt Whitman, the poet is invited by the doctor to help reform the way mentally ill patients are being treated at the asylum in London, Ontario. Whitman's warmth and enthusiasm for life is contagious among those he meets, including Dr. Bucke, who now goes on his rounds without his tie, a casualness of which his prim and proper wife Jessie does not approve. She thinks Whitman a bad influence on her husband precisely because of his zest for life by immersing himself completely into the uninhibited joys that life offers. Her prejudice against Whitman is confirmed when she discovers his free-thinking and unbridled sensuousness in his book Leaves of Grass.
At one point, Jessie is told by a male friend that she should give up intellectual pursuits, and stick to things domestic and emotional which are more suited for women. Enraged, she recalls the celebration of one's self in Whitman's book and her mind begins to open. One day while riding in her carriage back from the village to their home in the country, she hears voices singing a duet from an opera. It is her husband and Whitman singing full-throated in the woods. She finds them bathing in the river, stark naked, splashing in the joy of the day and the beautiy of nature. And in a moment of epiphany, Jessie unties her hair, takes off her clothes, and jumps into the water, shocking even her husband. She is free. The water is her Jordan River that awakens her to a life of happiness and affirmation. There is no eroticism in their collective nakedness, just the freedom for each of them to be themselves and revel in the beauty of nature and music and the company of friends.
Downsize and move this one to the upper right hand corner of your screen.
On the third screen, the current movie Chocolat is playing. The story takes place in a small French village in the late 1950s. Into this traditional village, where the Count serves like a modern mayor to keep order and tradition, a young woman and her daughter come to set up a chocolate shop. The woman is of dubious character, and raises a few eyebrows by the more circumspect of the town. It is the season of Lent, and the Count is dutifully observing the fast, as he strongly persuades the other villagers to do, though behind the scenes most of them are sneaking a bit of food. The chocolate shop unnerves the little town, as does its owner who is savvy in her understanding of human nature as she seeks to shatter walls that divide with a love that is deliciously unconditional. They've never seen the likes of such elegant candies, or known the engaging smile of one who wants to introduce them to life's more delectable side. She is not a church-goer, much to the consternation of the Count, for everyone of good standing in the village goes to church, and the Count sees to it that the observances of the faith are maintained even though one husband is beating his wife, and another woman has forbidden her mother to see her grandson since he was born.
The Count eventually forbids people to go to the chocolate shop, perceiving the chocolate to be Satan in the guise of tempting confections until, in his anger, the Count breaks into the chocolate shop the night before Easter to destroy the banal window display of chocolate statues and creamy morsels before it corrupts the pious who are gradually yielding to the chocolate's delight. Angrily he flails at the chocolate, breaking and pillaging, smashing and venting his frustrated jealousies, when, quite by accident and yet quite by divine order, a small bit of chocolate lands on the lip of his mouth that has not tasted food for days. It stuns him, it overwhelms him, sending him into a feeding frenzy of the smashed chocolate which renders him powerless to its magical spell. And when, on Easter morning, the village finds him sated and drunk on the chocolate, sound asleep in the front window of the shop as if inebriated on communion wine, the Count, as well as the town, has an epiphany, and paradoxically, Easter happens outside the church, in the chocolate shop.
Downsize and store this picture in the lower lefthand corner of your screen.
On the screen before you now is today's movie, and you are the actors. We come to this communion table at the beginning of a new year, seeking sight for blind eyes and insight for dark souls. The movies we've seen, however, remind us that this table is not an end in itself. It is more the archetype of every morsel of chocolate, every slice of bread, every glass of water or wine, every swimming pool and every river. In these God resides and provides opportunity for transformation. We know not what the new year will bring; nor do we know how the next thousand years will find the world. In this movie we go forward with confidence that life is good, that God is here, that the pathways are traversable, and the obstacles will ultimately be road signs. We embrace the future without anxiety. Bread and wine, chocolate and coffee, friends and neighbors invite us to discover the zest of living, confirming our calling to be fully ourselves as we following the pathway God calls us to follow.
–Gary L. McCann
| Copyright © 2001 by Gary L. McCann. All rights reserved. |