Searching for our reformation
Our busy society is complex, and for many of us, so very comfortable. The fact that it is widely damaging and utterly unsustainable is something many of us refuse to face.
First Reformed is a film, written and directed by Paul Schrader, that features people taking a long and serious look at problems like pollution, global warming and species extinction. These are issues that most of us just don’t want to face.
The film considers abortion, hopelessness, suicide and murder. The central character, a Protestant minister whose life and faith are already unravelling when we meet him, is slowly and inexorably stripped and dismantled of layer after layer of what keeps us all functioning cheerfully and predictably in this disintegrating world. As the onion-skin layers fall away, he finds that those who have been negating his worries, making his journey more difficult, also directly benefit from big-business money and largess.
Unable to imagine any way of functioning without it, business is very keen to add a solar panel here, cut some plastic packaging there, even introduce a little expensive recycling, to ensure that the mainstream money continues to flow. These are the easy, outer layers of our onion. It gets harder when we look at the life we are leaving for future generations, what lies we collude with to maintain our comfort, and the pride we take in our mastery over what we can trample.
The film’s priest is finally saved by intimacy, love and connection. Stripped bare of pretence, artifice and even hope, ultimately that is all that any of us can have left.
These are not problems that we can think our way out of, and certainly not ones we can buy ourselves supremacy over. There is no statistical analysis that will make a solution clear, no scientific fact yet to be discovered, and no technological innovation waiting to be invented.
We have to care, and care deeply enough that love does indeed — in fact, and in practice — actually conquer all.
I hope that with films like this, and the love and dedication of all of us, including the gallant activists of Extinction Rebellion disrupting business-as-usual in London and elsewhere, and the experts meeting at the UN COP24 conference in Poland next week, things really are about to change.
The changes we need to see are fundamental, and I don’t for a moment think that Jersey will be able to sit quietly on the sidelines, massaging the egos and the tax affairs of the very few, while humanity’s love of the living world is reformed and redeemed.
This article first appeared in the Jersey Evening Post on 29 November 2018
