Norma Dent eases into her chair in the 750-seat auditorium of the luxurious Terrace Theater in North Carolina. The seventy-three-year-old is visiting Asheville to watch the premiere of Doc Savage: Man of Bronze starring Ron Ely. The screen is stunning: it curves around the audience a full 180 degrees in what was known in June of 1975 as Ultravision. “I saw the movie three times that day,” she says. Norma weeps at each screening when she hears Ely deliver the Doc Savage code. “He said it as if he meant every word of it. It was wonderful.”
Doc Savage novels were among my childhood favorites, but I’ll never appreciate the film version the way she did.
The code is ennobling, to be sure. “Let us strive every moment of our lives to make ourselves better and better to the best of our ability so that all may profit by it,” Ely intones without a trace of parody. “Let us think of the right and lend our assistance to all who may need it, with no regard for anything but justice. Let us do right to all and wrong no man.”
But Doc Savage is a terrible movie. The directors undermine that moving speech with canned applause—a wink and a nod that we’re above all that these days. This is sad to me. Through the 1930s and 40s millions of Doc Savage Magazine readers, and club members who read those words on their cards, took the code very seriously. The character gave pleasure to countless thousands, as novelist and Tomb of Dracula author Marv Wolfman puts it. Audiences and critics groan at a film that can’t decide if it is heroic or snide.
Norma Dent doesn’t care. She weeps for joy not for a movie, but for her husband dead these sixteen years: Lester Dent, creator of Doc Savage. “I thought my heart would burst with pride,” she says.
Doc Savage novels were among my childhood favorites, but I’ll never appreciate the film version the way she did. Her solace, like her love and her grief, was her own. I have my own ministry movies.
Last year I wrote about watching Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) the night my daughter Jess died. Those first few months, between long walks in the woods surrounding our house, my DVD player spun almost exclusively Bogie and Bacall, Abbott and Costello, and Bing Crosby pictures. They are still my ministers of comfort in times of great need.
My DVD player spun almost exclusively Bogie and Bacall, Abbott and Costello, and Bing Crosby pictures. They are still my ministers of comfort in times of great need.
Jess and I were great fans of all things Egypt, most particularly any mummy movie we could find. Even now, ten years after her death, I turn to documentaries on the ancient pharaohs and, of all things, Stargate (1994), to help ease bad days. Goosebumps and Power Rangers are in the same category of shows I shared with my little girl.
But it’s not all strolls down memory lane. I watch Dark Shadows (1966-1971) for the same reason, though Jess was not a fan. Its rich gothic tapestry woven by the plots helps me on days that my body is weak from long COVID. The characters and enclosed universe are reliable when my health is not. I also love Cruella (2021) precisely because I know Jess would have loved it, were she alive to watch it with me.
Films may minister to us in surprising ways. A heavy-handed faith-based dogmatic movie may not speak to you in the way you can relate to a quiet independent picture about a farmer struggling to make ends meet. Perhaps you spot a look in actor Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s eyes in The Possession (2012) that reminds you how much you care for your own children. “Just little moments of this family trying to find their footing,” Morgan says, “to tell the story of what this relationship is.” The screenplay doesn’t resonate with you; the plot may not be your thing; but that particular moment stands out. Because of it, you remember to be a better father, perhaps, or take care to listen to your child when otherwise you might be too busy.
Movies are not mentors. Few of us would pattern our lives, personalities, families, or beliefs on their fictions. Films are self-contained with a linear story: a tidy beginning, middle, and end. As a translator that spent twelve years writing primetime subtitles for South Korea’s largest television network, I will add that no script, no matter how skillfully crafted, is equal to the complexities of everyday life. Look to film for entertainment (I certainly do), but to shape our lives after the characters on the screen is to perpetuate an unhealthy fantasy.
I was arrested in 2006 for criminal impersonation. Part of my grift, and I worked at it for years, was to present to others not what they want to hear but what they think is true. A large part of this was taking them into my confidence: “Yes, all that you’ve wondered about is real; there are people just like in the movies; the fantasy is reality.” I trusted them with faux secrets, fanciful and fictional, that fed a perfectly natural need for the kind of manageable, self-contained world that they see on theater screens.
I was wrong to do so and I regret it deeply. The experience taught me a lesson that I believe is important for all film fans: movies are not mentors but they may minister. The former seems obvious when we say it out loud. The latter is more subtle, but I thank God that it’s true.
Ministry is not about lessons. To offer solace, a movie must simply be there, offering comfort and communion because we care about the story or enjoy the performances. For mourners, films may provide a safe space for us to acknowledge our lifelong loss and inconsolable grief.
Wait. Inconsolable? Oh yes.
Consolation is not found in healing or moving forward; it is found in love. We never stop loving our dead.
Jody Bottum with Dakota State University suggests that grieving well demands acknowledgement of “the always present absence of the beloved dead person whom we mourn.” To ignore our sorrow is to hinder our mental health, he writes: “Short of the immediate opening of the graves—short of resurrection now—there is no consolation.” This may seem hopeless, but is actually quite helpful. The realization that our life now includes loss helps us remember the love we feel. Grief is a validation of love.
Sorrow can be both unconsoling and inconsolable, according to moral theologian Darlene Fozard Weaver (University of Dayton). Millennia of experience and current research assure us that lament and mourning provide a means to honor our dead and the abiding love that continues without them.
“Grief includes depressed mood, yearning, loneliness,” observes psychiatrist Karl Goodkin (University of Nebraska Medical Center), “searching for the deceased, the sense of the deceased being present, and the sense of being in ongoing communication with that person.” A poem by Friedrich Rückert, who lost his two youngest children to scarlet fever, communicates each of these distinct states: desperation, longing, sorrow and a sense that his young ones still have an effect on his life.
This is my sole consolation:
I am inconsolable.Oh, you speak of consolation
yet offer no solace.
I am resigned: in my
pain there is none.
This is my sole consolation:
I am inconsolable.Oh, you speak of consolation
to ease my suffering.
Will it pass? No,
it will rise above.
This is my sole consolation:
I am inconsolable.Oh, bring this consolation
to light the night in me.
The dark will deepen
with each glimmer.
This is my sole consolation:
I am inconsolable.Yes, gently console me
with tales of solace.
Where they contradict,
I have the solution.
This is my sole consolation:
I am inconsolable.Help, return me to myself,
solace large and small.
I seek your pain, solace,
to put an end to you.
This is my sole consolation:
I am inconsolable.
Like Rückert, we may hear tales of spiritual consolation in an invisible world while facing the permanent nature of loss in our painful present, suggests R. Clifton Spargo with Marquette University. Where they contradict, Friedrich writes, I have the solution. Consolation is not found in healing or moving forward; it is found in love. We never stop loving our dead. Their absence in our lives is permanent. We grieve because we love.
Which returns me to the ministry of movies. When I miss my daughter, my parents, my friends now gone, please keep your preaching to yourself. It doesn’t help. I need a friend in my pain; a companion who knows when to laugh, remember, pray, remain silent, and weep. Movies do that. And so does someone else.
Jesus wept. I believe he still weeps with us in our darkest moments.
I have been surprised to read authors who attempt to cram their theology into the why of Jesus’ weeping. One writer dodges the endless exegesis on this simple sentence entirely by calling it enigmatic. A surprising number of grief books by spirituality writers (but not by grief experts or therapists, I must in fairness add) suggest that Jesus wept because Lazarus’s heartbroken sisters didn’t understand that their brother was now in heaven.
God is fully involved in human suffering. He feels it deeply… God mourns, if the Bible is to be believed.
This is damaging nonsense, of course. It follows the wrong-headed thinking that faith is a substitute for grief, rather than a resource in our perfectly normal, natural, healthy reaction to loss. We mourn. Of course we do. Those who love us mourn by our side, just as Jesus mourned when he saw Mary and Martha weeping. He wept with them. What could be more natural? We might consider taking the gospel writer at his word. Jesus was sad.
“God offers the supreme example of what to do with suffering,” observes prominent Old Testament scholar Terence Fretheim. “God enters into the suffering of all creatures and experiences their life. God sees the suffering from the inside; God does not look at it from the outside, as through a window. God is internally related to the suffering of the people. God enters fully into the hurtful situation and makes it his own.”
Philosopher and theologian Abraham Heschel refers to this as “divine pathos.” God is fully involved in human suffering. He feels it deeply; his messengers cannot turn away from the pain of this world. “The prophet’s ear perceives the silent sigh,” he writes.
God mourns, if the Bible is to be believed.
But God’s suffering is not limited to dusty books or prophets long dead. Through Jesus, our pain is his, and his ours. Lewis Smedes, professor emeritus of theology and ethics at Fuller Theological Seminary, experienced this aspect of divine suffering first hand. He and his wife lost a child within a day of the baby’s birth. The loss was so profound that years later he wrote an entire chapter in his memoir about the death. “Doris and I cried a lot,” Smedes says, “and we knew in our tears that God was with us, paying attention to us, shedding ten thousand tears for every one of ours.”
Jesus weeps.
I believe that God is beside us as we search for comfort where we can, as we discover meaning in the most unlikely places, films included. Our loved ones are still with us, sharing life’s many joys and sorrows. We pray with them before God, holding them in our love, and our bonds continue. When I imagine Jess flopped on the sofa beside me watching a movie, I am keeping our relationship alive in a healthy way—for no other reason than a particular scene makes me think of her and I know she would love it.
Ministry is a curious thing. It seems that the more we talk, the less we minister. Or more precisely, the less we talk, the more we commune with fellow sufferers. This life is hard enough. Words can help; indeed, we cannot live or communicate without them. They are vital to existence. Bless my many friends who have offered words of consolation at just the right moment. At the same time, words can hinder communication and may in fact do terrible harm.
Movies are the same. A mean-spirited movie might stay with us in a negative way when what we need most is hope. On the other hand, a picture that speaks to the human spirit can minister to millions with a message that defies despair. But what film to choose? Only you know which resonates with you. I have this idea that when a picture weeps and laughs and loves like you do, you’ve found your minister. I’ve found mine for the day; it’s in the blu-ray player now. Time for popcorn.
