HE WAS IN GOD'S HANDS THE WHOLE TIME, WASN'T HE? The Remarriage of Nature and Grace in "The Tree of Life" - Jim Crosby
We’re delighted to publish this very personal reflection on Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, written by our friend Jim Crosby, who has known the writer-director for decades. Read Jim’s introduction to Malick’s work here; and we urge you to see A Hidden Life, Malick’s new film, released in the US on December 13th, 2019.
Is nature, and particularly human nature, in some sense fallen? If so, can we characterize the fall as from a prior state of grace? And again, does grace remain available and accessible in some form to redeem and restore our fallen nature?
These historic theological questions are at the heart of The Tree of Life, raised at its outset by the voice-over reflections of the mother in the story, Mrs. O'Brien (Jessica Chastain). She recalls being taught by nuns, as a schoolgirl, of the two paths through life between which one must choose, the way of nature and the way of grace.
On a day in the life of Jack (played by Sean Penn as an adult, Hunter McCracken as a boy), Mrs. O'Brien's oldest son and the film's central character, he casts back in memory from his perspective in middle-age. Specifically, he ponders the effects of the
life and death of R.L. (Laramie Eppler), his younger brother who died at nineteen, on his own adult life and on their parents.
Twenty minutes into the story a parallel story over fifteen minutes long begins. It must be the boldest portrayal to date, in a dramatic, fiction film, of the history of the universe. We are compelled to ask, what is the connection between this man's story, or his family's story, and the scientific narrative of the big bang, the birth of our solar system, and the origins and evolution of life on earth?
Even prior to Mrs. O'Brien's raising of our themes of nature and grace in the first few minutes of the movie, a title card puts the drama in biblical and cosmic context, quoting two verses from the Book of Job: "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?...When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?" (38:4,7) Indeed, in the middle of the film, as Jack struggles with the onset of puberty and the deterioration of his relationship with his father (played by Brad Pitt), an actual sermon pondering the key questions raised by the story of Job becomes integral to Jack's reflections on life and our experience of the film.
A second biblical passage important to the movie is the famous love chapter of St. Paul, I Corinthians 13. Mrs. O'Brien's summary of what the nuns taught about nature and grace is a paraphrase, as we shall see, of much of that chapter.
Another Pauline verse, Romans 7:15, figures large late in the film. Jack says "What I wanna do I can't do. I do what I hate." The full verse, in Paul's words, went, "I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate." (NRSV) So we will be discussing human nature once more, as a part of nature as a whole, meaning by "nature" all of reality not created by humans. In addition to being more explicitly theological (and especially biblical) in orientation than Terrence Malick's previous films, I will make the case that The Tree of Life demonstrates further perfection and fruitfulness in the director's use of voice-over. There is a theological connection here, as some of the greatest sophistication and subtlety in what is being accomplished with voice-over takes the form of prayer. There had been experimentation along these lines in the earlier films The Thin Red Line and The New World; here it comes to full flower.
MOMENTS
The Tree of Life meets Masked and Anonymous -- one fantasizes about where a collaboration between Terry Malick and Bob Dylan might take us. One particular shot sends me down this rabbit hole of the imagination. When Mr. O'Brien has just sentenced teenage Jack to more yard work, a dog trots by. Jack eyes the dog furtively, jealously -- and I am reminded of the simple question from Dylan's New Morning album: "If dogs run free, then why not we...?" On some level this question must be going through Jack's mind. It's a tossed-off shot in Malick's body of work and a tossed-off line in Dylan's, but it points to a shared subtlety of humor and wry perspective.
But on to the promised focus on prayer in the form of voice-over. Depiction of prayer in film is a daunting thing, surely not an easy one to make natural and convincing. Paul Newman, as Cool Hand Luke, shortly before he is murdered by the man in the silver shades, goes into an empty chapel and shouts, "Hey, old man! Are you up there?!" That works for me.
A tad dicier is a scene in Raul Julia's portrayal of the Salvadoran archbishop, Romero. Oscar Romero is at the roadside memorial of his martyred friend, Rutilio Grande. Anticipating his own assassination at the hands of government-backed death squads, he falls to his knees and says, "I can't." Then he voices aloud God's response: "You must." Acquiescing, he concludes, "I'm yours. Show me the way." It's a strong, effective scene. Might it have been better still had the "You must" been left silently implied? Arguably. We'll never know.
My contention is that the instances of prayer all through The Tree of Life, and particularly as Jack prays in his adolescence, are highly effective, and that their naturalness owes much to the evolution of Malick's use of voice-over. One could label the key section representative of a "split-level" technique. On the one hand, Jack prays onscreen, aloud, lips moving, "Help me not to sass my dad. Help me not to get dogs in fights. Help me be thankful for everything I've got. Help me not to tell lies." This is the superego talking, the way Jack has been taught to pray, the way he thinks he should. On the other hand, in a voice-over whisper, his real and deeper questions are interspersed -- "Where do you live? Are you watching me? I want to know what you are. I want to see what you see." Anglican theologian Kenneth Leech wrote a book entitled True Prayer. These thoughts of Jack O'Brien's, whispered to an unknown god, might well be seen as Terry Malick's picture of true prayer.
In his 2004 book, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt makes a compelling case that, between the 1592 writing of Richard III and the composition of Hamlet in 1600 or early 1601, the bard made significant strides in the dramatic portrayal of inner turmoil. Greenblatt attributes this in part to Shakespeare's mourning of the death of his son and anticipation of the eminent passing of his father. Also important in the playwright's struggle was Protestant curtailment of Catholic worship, including the suppression of what Shakespeare felt essential in the ritual of bereavement. The stiffness of Richard III's "What do I fear? Myself? There's none else by," (34) is left behind as the artist hones his art through Richard II, Julius Caesar, and Henry V. Greenblatt argues that by the time Shakespeare wrote Hamlet he had developed the skill to make the whole play hang on one planned act, and the sustained focus of the drama to be within one person, conveying that individual's angst as never before. Richard III's relatively simple self-doubt and self-loathing have become much more convoluted interior arguments in the tortured mind of Hamlet:
The spirit that I have seen
May be the devil, and the devil hath power
T'assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps,
Out of my weakness and my melancholy --
As he is very potent with such spirits --
Abuses me to damn me.
As Greenblatt puts it, "Hamlet makes clear that Shakespeare had been quietly, steadily developing a special technical skill...He had perfected the means to represent inwardness." (36)
Three centuries later, Henry James was in the vanguard of doing for novels what Shakespeare did for the stage. It was James's brother, the philosopher and psychologist William James, who coined the phrase "stream of consciousness." As applied to prose fiction, James Joyce and Virginia Wolfe are early 20th century novelists most associated with the phrase. Henry James, though, paved the way for them with his inward, psychological emphasis, a sustained focus on the point-of-view of his characters. Percy Lubbock, in The Craft of Fiction, wrote the following about James's treatment of Strether, the protagonist of The Ambassadors:
To bring his mind into view at the different moments, one
after another, when it is brushed by new experience -- to make a
little scene of it, without breaking into hidden depths where the
change of purpose is proceeding -- to multiply these glimpses
until the silent change is apparent, though no word has actually
been said of it: this is Henry James's way, and though the method
could scarcely be more devious and roundabout, always refusing
the short cut, yet by these very qualities and precautions it finally
produces the most direct impression, for the reader has seen.
It is not only as regards the phenomena of the natural world that Terry Malick seeks to facilitate our seeing. As did Henry James, he especially wants his audience to see the thoughts of his characters. Graham Greene said of James
...[I]t is in the final justice of his pity, the completeness of an
analysis which enabled him to pity the most shabby, the most
corrupt, of his human actors, that he ranks with the greatest
of creative writers. He is as solitary in the history of
the novel as Shakespeare in the history of poetry.
My goal here is not to compare apples, oranges, and peaches (or Shakespeare, James, and Malick) much less to embarrass my friend Terry, by claiming too much. I have neither the scope of background knowledge nor the desire to advance a groundbreaking thesis. Allow me merely to posit the thought that much of Terry's cinematic experimentation, especially his use of voice-over, is a manifestation of the same attempt at empathy that we find in the prior two writers. To the extent that we are aided in this "seeing," perhaps we can be said to be graced by a training in empathy thereby.
After the funeral of a boy of around his own age who drowned, young Jack finds that his own life goes on. His thoughts linger on the boy, though, and his questions tumble on one another: "Was he bad? Where were you? You let a boy die. You'll let anything happen." And, as he dances with the other kids in a cloud of DDT, "Why should I be good if you aren't?"
When Jack is in anguish after the nightgown sequence in which his adolescent fantasies spur him to steal a neighbor's nightgown then guiltily throw it into a fast-flowing river, las he longs for the innocence he sees in his younger brothers, his poignant voice-over becomes, "What have I started? What have I done? How do I get back where they are?" Innocence lost is not to be recovered. Forgiveness and reconciliation thus become themes.
The questions raised theoretically in a sermon he hears on the Book of Job are made existentially immediate by Jack's experience, probing, and remorse. Jack visits the haunted, claustrophobic dream space of the attic of his boyhood home three times through the course of the story. First, Jack is a toddler, looking up the stairs. It establishes the dark room with the window at its end, and its place in his imagination. The second instance is when he is a teenager and his anger at his dad is mounting. Mr. O'Brien puts the boys to bed, the nightlight shines, and we see the attic again, light coming in the window at the far end. The final time occurs shortly after the big family fight, the dinner table scene that escalates from Mr. O'Brien's singling out the middle brother, R.L., for abuse, to the parents fighting in the kitchen. After Jack's vision of a clown in a dunking booth, he sees two people in the attic. Taking Jung's cue that all characters in dreams might fruitfully be interpreted as embodying different aspects of the dreamer, it seems safe to see both the young man who is too tall to stand beneath the sloped ceiling without stooping, and the little boy on the rocker, as Jack. The older boy gestures for the younger one to leave the room. Then the little boy is riding in circles on his tricycle as the tall fellow looks on. Jack wants to linger in childhood. He has grown past the point where he can. He is split, bent over and going in circles in no-man's land.
For Jack, sibling rivalry with R.L. and Oedipal jealousy of Mr. O'Brien are interwoven throughout. The moments of competition begin when Jack is a toddler and threatens to throw toys at R.L. They continue ten or twelve years on, when Jack dares R.L. to stick his finger in the lamp, goads him to wrestle in the yard, ruins his watercolor, and shoots his finger with the air gun. R.L.'s unspoken forgiveness frees Jack to first wordlessly play with and help the boy who'd been burned in the house fire, then to silently reconcile with Mr. O'Brien while working beside him in the garden.
Dad has lost his job. His sobered self-assessment defines one of the most poignant moments in the movie. Mrs. O'Brien walks down the sidewalk, radiant, smiling. Her husband's voice-over says, "Look at the glory around us, trees and birds. I lived in shame. I dishonored it all and didn't notice the glory. I'm a foolish man."
Repentance on the part of both the father and son comes at once, that of each facilitating that of the other. When Jack acknowledges in voice-over that his parents, nature and grace, will always contend within him, his father apologizes for being rough on him. His dad's confession draws out Jack's assertion that he is more like Mr. than Mrs. O'Brien.
Keep in mind that all this is memory, flashback on Jack's part, from a day in mid-life when he mourns R.L.'s death at the age of nineteen. The story can be seen as a Proustian meditation, a rumination on the nature of time, the interplay of chronos and kairos, duration and eternity.
Near the end, Jack at middle-age and adolescent Jack appear together in the same scene in the desert. In the sequence on the beach, Jack is middle-aged while R.L. is the age he was through most of the film, just on the verge of his own teen years. Mrs. O'Brien's kiss turns an old woman's hand young again. Observing Jack, we may find ourselves led to ponder the place and power of memory in our construction of our own lives, in our pursuit of our true selves, our growth into wholeness. At the end, the mask descending slowly through the water signals that the play is over and that we are leaving behind, as has Jack, our pretense.
The field of flowers facing into the light of the sun, the reflection of blue sky and white clouds in the glass skyscrapers of Jack's inner city, bespeak a healing of the rift between nature and grace.
THEME
If the opening twenty minutes of The Tree of Life are Augustine's Confessions, the following fifteen minutes are Terry's version of The City of God. He has started with the story of Jack O'Brien and his family. Jack is us, serving as our Everyman and organizing consciousness as we enter into his story. Suddenly, we next find ourselves thrown into cosmic history, and we are challenged to discern the connection. What links Jack's story, and, by extension, my own, we might ask, to the story of the universe?
It's the question of meaning -- the ultimate Socratic question -- the question of Job -- and it is only to be answered through story; through this and every other story humans have and will come up with.
In the context (I hesitate to say "light") of this question, perhaps the striking sequence with one dinosaur deciding not to dispatch and consume the other can best be seen as a meditation on possible pre-human antecedents of compassion. Were there elements of empathy in the reptiles and mammals that preceded us? Or is the scene better understood as simply a poetic, artistic foreshadowing of the forgiveness and compassion Jack is going to remember learning from R.L.? Surely both interpretive options are valuable, and of Socratic and dialectical significance.
As the most theologically focused and explicit of Malick's films to this point in his career, how can the discussion of nature and grace in The Tree of Life be seen in the flow of two millennia of Christian theological history? Terry starts us even earlier, with Job, a book finalized several centuries before Jesus. There, God pulls rank with the question that opens the film: "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?"
In her anguish after R.L.'s death, Mrs. O'Brien turns that question on the Creator. At the outset of the extended "birth of the universe/story of life" sequence, she says, "Lord. Why? Where were you?"
The psalms of Israel had historically rejoiced that "The heavens declare the glory of God." (19:1, KJV)
Paul, often thought of as Christianity's first systematic theologian, wrote enigmatically of the relation of nature and grace.
For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing
of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to
futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who
subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free
from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of
the glory of the children of God. We know that the whole
creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and
not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first
fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption,
the redemption of our bodies. (Romans. 8:19-23, NRSV)
From the beginning, Christian theology has, on the one hand, placed more emphasis on the individual and individual salvation than did much of the Jewish tradition that preceded it, yet on the other hand, retained a strong sense that "we're all in this together." At times the "we" has included non-human species.
From Augustine in the fifth century (CE) through Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth, the formula "grace perfects nature" held sway, acknowledging a distinction between the two, prioritizing grace in importance, yet seeing nature as the good creation of a loving God. If Augustine was a Christian Platonist who saw nature in a more negative light than he might otherwise have done in part due to a sense of guilt over his early sex life, Thomas was tasked with balancing Plato's influence in Christian theology with a rediscovered Aristotle. Nature was raised to a more prominent place alongside grace after Thomas. If one appreciates Thomistic use of analogy, one sees that nature and grace are fused, like matter and spirit, not juxtaposed. Thomas' formulation was "Grace is nature's perfection, and therefore impairs nothing natural."
Perhaps the formulation of the relationship between nature and grace in the Christian tradition closest to its use in The Tree of Life is that of Thomas a Kempis in the early fifteenth century. In The Imitation of Christ, "On the Contrary Workings of Nature and Grace," we find the kind of contrasts voiced by Mrs. O'Brien and the nuns who taught her:
Nature is crafty, and seduces many, snaring and deceiving them, and always works for her own ends. But Grace moves in simplicity, avoiding every appearance of evil. Nature works for her own interest, and estimates what profit she may derive from others. Grace does not consider what may be useful or convenient to herself, but only what may be to the good of the many. Nature is greedy, and grasps more readily than she gives, loving to retain things for her personal use. But Grace is kind and generous, shuns private interest, is contented with little, and esteems it more blessed to give than to receive. Nature is curious to know secrets and to hear news; she loves to be seen in public, and to enjoy sensations. She desires recognition, and to do such things as win praise and admiration. But Grace does not care for news or novelties, because all these things spring from the age old corruption of man, for there is nothing new or lasting in this world.
When Mr. O'Brien repents of being oblivious to the glory around him near story's end, after losing his job, he recognizes all the ways he has lived the way of nature; his wife, in contrast, continues to be the embodiment of grace.
Yet surely the issue is more complicated than an either-or choice. Jack, as our Everyman (and, by extension, Terry Malick), appreciates aspects of his dad's perspective. The perfectionism of a Toscanini, vaunted by Mr. O'Brien, informs the production of this epic cinematic story. We are the beneficiaries of the energy of nature.
The dialectic, Jack's very wrestling with both his parents within him; is the arena of grace's perfection of nature: no nature, no grace.
Moreover, we remain cognizant that this focus on human nature lies embedded in the much larger context of Nature, the universe of which humans are only a part. As one can see especially in his earlier film, The New World, Terry Malick is attentive to the question of "the machine in the garden," the effect of human nature and human activity on the larger earth ecology and our fellow species.
James Carpenter, in his significant 1988 theological review, Nature & Grace: Toward an Integral Perspective, depicted our ecological predicament as follows:
The lack of reconciliation between human beings and nature is today a source of suffering; it is itself one of the deepest roots of human pain, of a searing sorrow at the core of modern Western civilization. That pain cannot be removed by asserting that no reconciliation is possible and by locking ourselves into history, into "anthropocentricity." To turn our backs on the problem is simply to drive the anguish of being separated from our ground -- most literally, our ground -- into more and more hidden recesses of our spirit, only to find it erupting in social strife and warfare. The claim that modern Western people are rootless points to something more than their being without familial and social ties. Rootlessness has deeper dimensions than this. Among other things, rootlessness indicates that our affinity with nature, our very rootage in the soil, has been and is being increasingly lost sight of.
If The Tree of Life is the most explicitly theological of Malick's works to this point, it is also the most clearly psychological. There is evident Freudian subject matter in Jack's competition with his dad for the love of his mother. The developmental focus of Piaget and his successors is there, too, in the early examination of Jack's experience as a toddler.
Here too, though, we can trace our psychological way back through Thomas à Kempis to the apostle Paul. Book III, Chapter 55 of The Imitation of Christ relies heavily on Romans 7. Recall Jack's echoing of Romans 7:15 as he stands in the deserted shack: "What I wanna do, I can't do. I do what I hate." As a Kempis put it, "while I indeed possess the will to do good, I find myself powerless to follow it....I am borne down by the burden of my own corruption, and advance no nearer to perfection."
What seems to be implied in this film, putting Jack's story and struggle in the context of cosmic evolution, is that it makes no sense any longer, to the extent that it ever did, to think of human nature as somehow separate from or above all the rest of nature. Certainly we have more reason than ever to know that our exploitation of the earth is self-destructive. Are we learning the converse, that our wholeness is integrally connected to our efforts to heal, not just on the human plane, but on a planetary level?
Perhaps part of the Malickian project in The Tree of Life can be seen as an attempted step in the direction of overcoming the centuries-old faith vs. reason, religion vs. science divide.
In the summer of 2002, when cultural historian and "geologian" Thomas Berry was 87, I had the pleasure of interviewing him. Certainly part of his effort, especially in his 1999 book, The Great Work, was moving toward this needed reconciliation. I knew that he was a disciple of Jesuit paleontoligist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, taking from him the sense that humans, in evolutionary terms, can be seen as the universe coming to self-awareness. I also knew that he had been influenced by the renewal of Thomistic theology in the early 20th century. I wouldn't have been surprised, when I asked him who had the most profound intellectual influence on him, if he had answered either Teilhard or Thomas Aquinas. I shouldn't have been surprised that in fact he named Aristotle. He said Christian theology had emphasized redemption for centuries, and now needs to put greater focus on creation. Like Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Berry was trying to redress the balance between nature and grace, seeing them as conjoined and complimentary. Arguably that is what Terry Malick is about as he looks at individual psycho-spiritual healing and cosmic evolution side by side.
Contemporary psychologist Bill Plotkin, in his book Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World, gives us further helpful perspective to put into dialogue with The Tree of Life:
Self-consciousness gives us the capacity to wonder about our true place, and the possibility of not finding it. The hazard, then, of possessing the capacity to know that you know is the vulnerability of becoming truly lost in a way no other creature can -- unable to find your place and therefore unable to flower. If we can agree that conscious self-awareness is a liability, let's take a look at the flip side. What's so good about it? What's so great about being human? It might be this: The ability to know that we know gives us the ability to know ourselves, the ability to know that we exist and that we exist in an astonishing universe. It gives us the ability to fall in love with every thing and with eternity. If we are the only beings who know that we know, then we are the only ones who can admire the universe as a universe or consciously know our place in the universe. Without conscious self-awareness, there would be nothing or no one to appreciate the universe.
In effect, as Thomas Berry says, there would not be a universe. If the human is the only self-aware creature that exists, then we can say, as Thomas does, that the human allows the universe to exist. This is indeed a privilege. And it is why it's tempting to say that the ability to appreciate the universe as a universe might be the ultimate collective place of the human, the soul of humanity.
For Jack O'Brien to know himself as and where he now is, he needs to know where he comes from. Before retracing his personal history with his brother and his parents, he needs to situate himself in universal history. In order to answer "Where am I?" he needs, like Job, to experientially and existentially hear God's "Where were you...?" It means not only coming to grips with a renewed cosmology, informed by science, but recapitulating the philosophical, theological, and psychological forces at play in his life, claiming them and taking grown-up responsibility for what he has become and who he is becoming.
We can see Jack as asking through the course of the story: Will I understand myself primarily as a man whose brother died too young; or as one whose mother embodied grace and whose dad extolled perfection; or as a fellow who sees the universe shot through with beauty? He is all three, of course, but the film raises the question of choice, and where Jack's intentional focus will rest. Each of us, as viewers and co-creators of the film we see, is invited to entertain our own versions of these questions.
TERRY'S ARC
Both the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil appear in chapter 2, verse 9 of the Book of Genesis. One could argue that, from that early beginning, life and ethics, and trees, have been inseparable for humans. There have been trees in Terry Malick's films from the beginning, certainly, most notably with the idyllic tree house in Badlands. In Days of Heaven, Abby married the farmer in a wooded grove. The jungle forest overlooked the battle in The Thin Red Line, and dying soldiers sought a glimpse of the sun shining through its leaves. Pocahontas, in The New World, loved and stood in trees, her keeper Mary telling her to put out new branches and reach toward the light. In The Tree of Life, the tree in the front yard defines the childhood innocence of the O'Brien boys. Mr. O'Brien teaches Jack the care of trees. In repentant mode, Jack's father associates glory with trees and birds. Through the course of The Tree of Life, Jack is going back and forth through time, contemplating his family tree, trying to climb toward the light of understanding.
Water, too, is revisited here, as something through which people come to new life, swimming upward toward the surface. Jack repeatedly returns in memory, not to the crowded pool where the boy died, but to the wild riverbanks where he once played with his brothers.
Fire is less prominent here than in the earlier films. There is the brief shot of the house fire that establishes the history of the boy whose hair won't grow back. There is also the sun at its birth, connecting fire not only with destruction but with life and light.
Money remains a theme largely through the desires and struggles of Mr. O'Brien. Much of his perspective and approach to life can readily be linked back to those of Kit, Bill, Sgt. Welsh, and John Smith in the earlier movies. Mr. O'Brien's longing to control his destiny through his patents is portrayed not only as elusive, but even illusory. At the end, for pursuing financial security as he has, to the neglect of "the glory" all around him, he dubs himself foolish.
We have seen how the use of voice-over has been further developed in this film, particularly in depicting prayer. Clearly, outstanding cinematography, especially of plants, animals, and all things natural, continues as a trademark here, as does sensitive and powerful use of emotionally evocative music.
What about the nature of love? Malick compared the relationship between Bill and Abby with that of Abby and the farmer in Days of Heaven. We could ask which relationship was more to be admired, how each related to our ideal of romantic love, and how romantic love is to be compared to love, pure and simple. Is there a distinction to be made? In The New World the two relationships of love to be compared were Pocahontas' involvements with John Smith and John Rolfe, respectively. There we saw in bolder relief a distinction between eros and another kind of love, arguably more mature and less selfish. One can see a similar structure and concern in the film that followed The Tree of Life, To the Wonder. Shifting from the relationship of one woman to two different men, there we find one man's love of two very different women. Eros and agape will be before us in stark contrast.
Before going there, though, what of love in The Tree of Life? Adolescent lust and attendant guilt are part of the psychological battle as Jack reviews his life. More significant, though, is the role of grace as first cousin of love, even as stand-in for love if it is correct to correlate Mrs. O'Brien's terms in praising grace to Paul's "hymn to love" in I Corinthians 13. There we find an intentional shift of focus to agape, an unselfish, even self-sacrificing form of love. Patience, kindness, humility, perseverance, and joy characterize this love.
Beginning with Private Witt as a Christ figure in The Thin Red Line, proceeding through Pocahontas and John Rolfe in The New World, and particularly in the person of Mrs. O'Brien and her amazing grace in The Tree of Life, we are moving increasingly with Terry Malick into the realm of the theological virtues. This is evident in the next three of his movies, collectively termed "the weightless trilogy," and most especially in his newest feature, A Hidden Life, the true story of WWII conscientious objector Franz Jägerstätter.
Jim Crosby serves as Lay Chaplain and teaches Theology to high school seniors at St. Stephen's Episcopal School, Austin, Texas. An Episcopal Third Order Franciscan, he started Nonviolent Austin, an affiliate of Campaign Nonviolence, a year ago.
Stay tuned to The Porch for Jim's reflections on The Tree of Life in preparation for the December 13th release of Malick's latest, A Hidden Life, the story of conscientious objector and martyr to the Nazis, Blessed Franz Jägerstätter.
