I rented a movie this morning that got me thinking. It was not the greatest movie, but it had me really thinking about life and death throughout the whole thing. It is called A Little Bit of Heaven. The gist of the story is the woman in her 30s has a rare form of Stage IV colon cancer and she falls in love with her doctor. The beginning of the film centers on how the main character is work obsessed and engrossed in a culture of self. She lives a life devoted to hedonism and materialism like the rest of the secular world.
The first thing that struck me was the absolute loneliness of it all. To be terminally ill and be lost in hedonism and materialism. To not have anything more than this world. She has close friends, but even they cannot help her, beyond loving her in their way dysfunctional way, because they too live in a pagan world. It made me think about all of the people out there today who are sick and dying, but have nothing but the material world to cling to. It made me realize why it is so important to pray for the living and the dead.
This materialism is furthered by her experience of God. Sticking to the atheist understanding of a "Flying Spaghetti Monster" or "Sky Fairy", God is depicted as Whoopi Goldberg sitting in the clouds overlooking the earth. God appears to the main character as she would wish, as Whoopi Goldberg. This struck me as so typical of a person who is so wrapped up in themselves and the material world that they cannot imagine that God is not created in our own image. That God would be more glorious than Whoopi Goldberg and would not be sitting on a white sofa in the clouds. To make matters worse, God then becomes a Genie, and grants three wishes. All of her wishes are materialistic, desiring money and to fly. God makes the third wish finding love, enter the Doctor. There is depiction of God as he truly is, as one who loves us beyond measure. That all love is wrapped up in Him, in Christ.
There are some redeeming qualities to the film and characters. The Doctor and main character learn to love one another and the main character's family learns forgiveness. The movie shows how grief is different for each person. The death of the main character is a celebration of a life, and in their own way, the writers understand that this is not the end.
The depiction of God and Heaven fall flat. They are the typical misunderstanding by what we Christians mean my God. God is not some invisible entity that is a part of this world and floating in a cloud kingdom. God is the shear act of to be itself (St. Thomas Aquinas). Fr. Barron's Catholicism series gives a great explanation of what we mean by God in Episode 3. We do not believe that Heaven is what we want to make it, like the movie What Dreams May Come or that He is Zeus issuing judgments and striking down on people.
The main character and her doctor do discuss their understanding of God. As is the line of scientism, the doctor part of him says no God but the other part questions, while the main character believes in her created God. There is a scene where she gets into a biking accident at a Methodist church and smiles at the church, but she never actually goes inside. She does not engage the True God. The God-Man made flesh who is love itself. She never entertains anything beyond a Genie-like God who grants wishes and who sits in the clouds. Should she have encountered Christ, she would have learned who God really is and it would have changed the dynamic of her relationships drastically. There would have been hope beyond materialism.
I found the movie, beyond the hedonism and materialism, to be thought-provoking. My post-partum depression and anxiety has come with an obsession with death. I went through a phase when I feared losing my daughter, then my husband, and now I am confronting the inevitability of my own death. The fear at times is all consuming and if you can die a certain way, I have thought of it. A lot of women with post-partum struggle with this obsession. I too struggle with accepting the True God's will for my life. I fear what He will do with it and I struggle maintain my illusion of control.
Death is no longer front and center in our lives. We send the elderly to nursing homes, out of sight and out of mind. Most patients seem to die in hospitals rather at home. We live longer. I drive by a cemetery almost every day. It is on the way into town. It is not a Catholic cemetery, so it lacks depictions of Christ and Our Lady. It reminds me of where my grandparents are buried in Wyoming. It is my constant reminder of my mortality and a reminder that most of us ignore death. The post-partum has made me really think about death, sometimes in a very unhealthy way. I fear a materialistic view of the afterlife. I fear that I am wrong and the atheists are right. Why does this scare me so much? I cannot imagine that all of this suffering and pain is random. That we come here, live briefly, and die. Nothingness is all we have to look forward to. No, my mind and heart cannot accept that, and it is so against human nature. Nihilism is counter to human nature.
So, while this movie was not cinematic genius, it did get me thinking. I know the atheists cannot be right and I know that God is not created in my image. How boring would God be if He was a creation of mine?! How horrible for the world! As I confront the fear of death in my own life, it helped me to think about God, his love, and that this is not the end. Something to help me as I pray for the grace of trust.
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