Category Archives: Gentle

You Must Be Gentle, Part 4

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I saw “The Seventh Seal” on Blu-ray: the Knight, the Squire, Mia, Jof and their baby, Lisa and the Smith, Raval the Seminarian turned thief.  But my favorite character was the nameless girl.

She was the last of her village to survive, or not to flee, the plague.  The Squire saved her when Raval would have raped and possibly murdered her.  He decided against raping her himself.  “I’ve grown tired of that kind of love,” the Crusade-weary Squire said.  “It gets a little dry in the end.”  But he wanted her as his housekeeper.  “I saved your life,” he said when she hesitated.  “You owe me a great deal.”  The nameless girl considered a moment more, then turned and followed after him.  He had persuaded her to go a mile, and the second time I watched the movie I realized she would probably go two.

She would have given cold water to Raval, dying of the plague, if the Squire hadn’t physically restrained her.  As Death entered the Knight’s castle to claim their lives, the nameless girl looked to the brightening light streaming through a portal.  She greeted death silently and reverently, believing “Death will open a door, not close it, provide some passage to a brighter world,” according to film historian Peter Cowie in his commentary.  He also pointed out that it was the nameless girl along with the Knight’s faithful wife who were absent from Jof’s vision of the dance of Death.

The nameless girl is the woman Peter described as subject to her own husband so that even if some are disobedient to the word [or, not persuaded by the word], they will be won over without a word by the way you live…[1]  That Bergman put her in this film surrounded by so much unbelief and fear endears him to me even more.  He knew she exists.  He knew she must be there.  Yet he didn’t presume to know her well enough to put words in her mouth.  Except for her hopeful longing, “It is finished,”[2] we know her only by her deeds.

“Many years later,” Peter Cowie ended his commentary, “Bergman was asked at a press conference about his true feelings on death.  And he answered, ‘I was afraid of this enormous emptiness…My personal view is that when we die, we die, and we go from a state of something to a state of absolute nothingness.  And I don’t believe for a second that there is anything above or beyond or anything like that.  And this makes me enormously secure.’”

Among the special features on the DVD of Bergman’s “Wild Strawberries,” however, was another interview, “Ingmar Bergman on Life and Work.”  He was much older.  His wife Ingrid (Ingrid von Rosen, not the famous actress) had died.  Perhaps he remembered the same incident with the anesthesia differently, or perhaps it was a different incident.  He described it in Swedish through an interpreter as “an overdose of anesthesia.”  This time he was out for eight hours rather than six.

“The interesting thing was that for me those eight hours were no hours at all, not a minute, not a second.  I was completely gone.  I was completely switched off.  So that was eight hours that were completely gone from my life.  And that felt extraordinarily comforting when I thought that such is death.  First, you’re something, and then you’re no longer anything.  You’re nonexistent.  You just aren’t any more.  You’re like a candle that’s blown out.”

“That gave me an enormous feeling of security.  What complicated the feeling of security and total extinction is Ingrid’s death.  I have incredible difficulty in thinking, in imagining, that I won’t meet her again.  That’s an unbearable thought.  Therefore, two modes of thought have come into violent conflict with one another.  I’ve tried to write about it, but I can’t do it yet, and it may be a while.  What’s more, I often experience Ingrid’s presence…Not as a ghost.  But I know that in some way she’s quite close to me.”

 

[1] 1 Peter 3:1 (NET)

[2] John 19:30 (NKJV)

You Must Be Gentle, Part 3

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I watched an interview with Ingmar Bergman on the DVD version of “Persona” called “A Poem in Images.”  He spoke in English, not his native language, but I left the quote below verbatim because I liked the ideas expressed as they were.

“I was ill and they had to make some sort of operation.  And I got in my arm an injection…I had been unconscious six hours.  You know I had no feeling about time, of hour.  From existing, I have being in the situation of nonexisting.  And that makes me very happy….I am conscious about myself and everything and then suddenly, or slowly, my consciousness fades out, switches off.  And it is a not existing.  That is a marvelous feeling.  From existing I am not existing.  And at that moment nothing can happen to me.  I think it would be terrible if somebody came after this marvelous not existing and wake me up, and said, ‘You are a returned soul Mr. Bergman,’ or something like that, ‘and you have to go here or there; you are guilty for that, not guilty for that.’  I think it’s just crazy.”

I was about five years old when I accepted what I thought was the gospel: believe in the Lord Jesus Christ or burn in hell for all eternity.  It seemed like a no brainer.  I was surprised that everyone in children’s church didn’t choose Jesus right there and then.  (I can’t say for certain that I was taught this until an evangelism course I took as an adult, but the first time I seriously questioned whether this ultimatum was the Gospel was during that course.)  I was saved, saved from hell, because I confessed that I was a sinner and believed in Jesus.  And it worked in the sense that I grew up among fundamentalist Christians and can’t recall ever having any fear that I would go to hell, not as a child, anyway.

Hell was never taught as something I should fear.  It was taught as motivation to invite my friends to Sunday school, friends who would go to hell if they didn’t confess that they were sinners and ask Jesus into their hearts.  I tried to invite my next door neighbor once.  In fact, I probably tried to save him myself right there and then.  But my Catholic friend knew as much (or more) about trusting Jesus as I did.  So I decided that my Sunday school teachers didn’t know much about my friends.

“So this feeling of not existence made me very happy,” Bergman continued, “because it was a feeling of relief, because this feeling of a god, this idea about a god, was very unhealthy.  It was a feeling of something that was perfect, extremely perfect, the most extreme perfect that exists.  In comparison to that I always must feel like a snake, like a dirty snake.  For a human being to feel like a dirty snake is not good.”

In Junior High I pretended to be ill one morning so I could stay home and finish reading “Phaedo” by Plato, the death of Socrates.  Socrates concluded, “if while in company with the body the soul cannot have pure knowledge, one of two things seems to follow—either knowledge is not to be attained at all, or, if at all, after death.”[1]  This has had a lifelong impact on me.  Perhaps the main reason I have believed that each of us will give an account of himself to God[2] (when I believed little else) is the hope that some clarity will come in his response to my account.  The primary torment of Sartre’s hell in his play “No Exit” is not knowing for certain why, or if, one is there.  Knowledge was the hardest thing to give up when I flirted with atheism.  To accept that knowledge is either unattainable, or that the verdict of a jury of my peers (or even a cadre of knowledge elites) is the highest form of truth and justice, is a camel I can’t swallow.

So though I have experienced anesthesia and even wondered if that was what death was like, it was never comforting to me.  Still, I could relate because I had been enamored with the fantasy of having never been bothered with existence in the first place.

As a child I prayed for two things: that my parents would get along and that I could hit a fast pitch baseball.  Sure, I probably prayed for other things, too, but these are the prayers I remember.  I certainly prayed them the most.  My parents never did get along any better.  They separated in my early twenties.  And I hit the ball once, until my neighbor friend shared a record with me, a recording of Stan Musial talking about hitting.

I was hit by a pitch at practice early in my first season.  It broke my finger and I had to sit the season out.  Stan Musial seemed to understand my fear.  I don’t even remember now what he said.  I only remember that I began to stand in without shying away, watch the ball all the way to the bat and make contact.  I’m sure coaches had yelled things like that at me many times before.  But I had stood at Sportsmen’s Park banging my wooden seat on its hinges when Stan the Man came up to bat.  Sometimes he struck out.  But the next time we stood and banged our seats again, and more often than not, often enough to satisfy us all, Stan the Man hit it out of the park.  When Stan Musial said it, I listened.  And I decided that he was a much better hitter than God.

In my late twenties I spent several years studying the Bible, history and philosophy.  I prayed for answers to the questions my studies posed, then I trusted that those answers would be forthcoming, and kept on studying.  By contrast I hated the Bible as a child.  When I was forced to read it I didn’t hear anything because I thought I already knew what it said from Sunday school classes.  I didn’t particularly like Sunday school classes either.  The few times I did pick it up on my own I found some things that didn’t sound like my Sunday school and I assumed I didn’t understand the Bible, or that my understanding couldn’t possibly be right because so many people before me had understood it like my Sunday school classes.  In my late twenties I probably still thought I already knew what the Bible said, but I was driven to read it, insatiably driven.  Answers came, sometimes amazingly.

One was in a book from the British Museum.  A friend gave it to me after a trip to London.  He didn’t know the question I was asking and he didn’t know the answer was in the book he purchased for me.  He simply thought I would like the book.  And he was wrong!  Apart from the question I was asking, I would have had no interest in this book at all.

Nietzsche: Friedrich Nietzsche was much smarter than I am.  He would have convinced me of atheism apart from the Lord’s answers to his questions, or the questions he fostered in me.  I will be forever grateful to Nietzsche for those questions.  The Lord’s answers changed the way I read and understand the Bible.

Yet after that amazing time I was still disgruntled.  Writing this has forced me to ask myself why.  The answer that comes to me is that I was not actually as open-minded as I like to remember the story.  I was trying to find a rational alternative to faith (i.e., that arrived at the same conclusions but required no faith).  My best effort was indistinguishable from faith.  In other words, I had failed.  So as the Lord and I did our postmortem on those years, I said the time was better than I had expected (recalling my parents and hitting a baseball), but that I was still inclined to wish for never having been born.

He was angry.  But I didn’t respond in what I consider a typical male response to anger, matching anger for anger, blow for blow.  To repeat what He said wouldn’t mean much.  It was completely in tune with the years we had spent analyzing statements and their negations.  The thrust of it was, “I don’t care what you want, I called you into existence to love you.”  My uncharacteristic response—one I have noticed in women responding to men’s anger, especially their jealousy—was, “He loves me.”

So while Bergman’s musings about anesthesia and death form a bond of recognition in me, and his taking comfort in nonexistence is endearing, I can’t follow Ingmar Bergman.  Clearly I am inferior to God.  But He has gone so out of his way to demonstrate his love and mercy to me that I can’t help but feel like a beloved child rather than a dirty snake.  For you did not receive the spirit of slavery leading again to fear, Paul wrote the Romans, but you received the Spirit of adoption, by whom we cry, “Abba, Father.”[3]

[3] Romans 8:15 (NET)

You Must Be Gentle, Part 2

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Neither Alexander or his evil stepfather appear during the whipping sequence in “Fanny and Alexander.”  The whipping was implied with a sound effect and a series of close-ups of the witnesses.   There was nothing titillating for a spankophile (though Justine’s pained expression was ambiguous and difficult for me to read).  There was no homoeroticism.  There was nothing to distract one from the bitter irony of a man who, in the guise of punishment for lying, bullied and tortured a boy into a false confession.

Alexander made a brave, if short-lived, stand against confessing something he didn’t believe.  One stroke of the cane later he caved like a little girl.  Frankly, I was embarrassed for Alexander.  The boy Jose in “For Greater Glory” was tortured to death rather than deny his support for the Cristeros, who rebelled against Mexico during Plutarco Elías Calles’ persecution of the Catholic Church.  To be fair, Jose may have been based on a real boy strengthened by the Spirit of God.

Alexander, though Bergman’s alter-ego in the movie, was a fictional character whose reactions were dictated by the writer/director’s rhetorical or dramatic needs.  The pyrrhic victory of Alexander’s evil stepfather stands as a brilliant illustration of Jesus’ warning to hypocrites, You cross land and sea to make one convert, and when you get one, you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves!1  The real Ingmar Bergman, as far as I know, rejected his real father’s Lutheran faith with as much vigor as Jose refused to forswear himself.

It got me thinking about growing up in the cult of boyhood.  The cult derides a boy who can’t take it, whether pain or derision.  It lauds a boy who runs at full speed, throws his body down, and slides through dirt and gravel, to be called “safe.”  Bruises and blood are marks of honor.  Tears are forbidden.  The only acceptable response to pain is swearing or responding in kind, returning blow for blow.  Boys are little soldiers in training.  Anyone attempting to use physical pain to force a boy to forswear himself should be prepared for the violence that may require.

I have no idea if Erik Bergman treated his son Ingmar as ruthlessly as the evil stepfather treated Alexander.  I only know that any attempt to produce faith and repentance in another through bullying and torture is a folly of the religious mind.  Faith and repentance come from the Holy Spirit.

Or do you have contempt for the wealth of his kindness, forbearance, and patience, and yet do not know (ἀγνοῶν, a form of ἀγνοέω) that God’s kindness leads you to repentance (μετάνοιαν, a form of μετάνοια)?2  And Paul counseled Timothy, the Lord’s slave must not engage in heated disputes but be kind toward all, an apt teacher, patient, correcting opponents with gentleness (πραΰτητι, a form of πραΰτης).  Perhaps God will grant them repentance (μετάνοιαν, a form of μετάνοια) and then knowledge (ἐπίγνωσιν, a form of ἐπίγνωσις) of the truth…3

As the ghost of Alexander’s “good” father said, “You must be gentle with people, Alexander.”  And gentleness is an aspect of the fruit of the Spirit: the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness (πραΰτης), and self-control.  Against such things there is no law [Table].4

1 Matthew 23:15 (NET)

2 Romans 2:4 (NET)

3 2 Timothy 2:24, 25 (NET) Table

4 Galatians 5:22, 23 (NET)

You Must Be Gentle, Part 1

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Alexander in Ingmar Bergman’s film “Fanny and Alexander” encouraged the ghost of his “good” father (who looks disconcertingly like Adolf Hitler) to stop haunting him, to go on to heaven and convince God to kill his stepfather.  The ghost of his “good” father counseled, “You must be gentle with people, Alexander.”

I’ve been enjoying a mini-Ingmar-Bergman-film-festival on DVD.  First, I watched “Persona,” Bergman’s reflections on his own guilt and hypocrisy raising children, told through a mute actress who had a child reluctantly to complete herself as a woman, and the nurse who cares for her.  Then I watched “Wild Strawberries,” a sober consideration (if not a lament) of a life spent solely for one’s work and personal achievement.  I think of these as Lutheran films, not because they are propaganda for the Lutheran Church, but because Bergman considered his films a dialogue with his childhood and that childhood was dominated by his Lutheran minister father Erik.

I looked forward to “Fanny and Alexander,” because it was the film where he dealt most intimately with the problem of his father.  I was disappointed when the first copy arrived broken in the mail.  Then with the second copy I was put off a bit by the plot.  It seemed to me like Bergman avoided the issue with his father rather than confronting it directly.  The problem was not that Erik Bergman was an evil stepfather who married Ingmar’s mother after his “good” father died.  The problem was that Erik was both the “good” father and the evil stepfather.  The sumptuous joy and luxury and the grey austerity are recollections of one home, not two.

I got over the plot in time and simply enjoyed the imagery.  Though Alexander was not really as close to his “good” father as he was compelled to be close to his evil stepfather, he was ultimately haunted by both.  And his desire to kill the evil stepfather is also God’s desire, if I may reunite the evil stepfather and the “good” father as one man born of the flesh and of the Spirit.  That’s why the “good” father’s advice touches me so, “You must be gentle with people, Alexander.”

Everyone born of the Spirit, born from above, is liable to the situation Paul described in Romans 7:15 (NET), For I don’t understand what I am doing.  For I do not do what I want – instead, I do what I hate.  My father could go from happily singing a hymn to screaming hysterically at us in no time at all.  I thought I could be a foster parent.  I thought I could help someone.  An autistic child defeated me in the most fundamental way a man can be defeated.  He shattered my self-image as a kind and loving man.  My wife lost confidence in me and, I think, in God to a certain extent.  I certainly lost confidence in God for at least the remainder of our marriage.  And my children witnessed it all.

I am thinking about forgiveness here as a way of being gentle with people.  But I’m trying to reach something beyond my ordinary conception of forgiveness.  When I have a bad encounter with the sinful flesh of someone born of God I shouldn’t think, “So that’s what you’re really like.”  This is false.  What the person born of God is really like is the new creation, washed, cleansed, buoyed-up, and carried along by the Spirit of God, not the sinful flesh I happened to experience.  So then, with the mind I myself serve the law of God, but with the flesh the law of sin,1 Paul concluded with gratitude to God.