Column on first Reformed

The Lovely One actually asked if I wished to see the movie First Reformed at the Frontenac. We went over the dress requirements for entering that piece of real estate, as it is more upscale than entering Godfrey from Alton. It is definitely not a movie for everyone, but it holds a deep well for reflection. It tips its hat to Dairy of a Country Priest and Bergmann’s winter Light, as Paul Shrader, the writer and director, is as much film historian and critic as he is writer and director.   He wrote Taxi Driver years ago, and adapted the Last Temptation of Christ, and this movie comes at some of the same themes: loneliness, social dislocation, and mental balance. He respects image as well as words: notice the movie is projected more as a square than as a wide screen rectangle,; look at two differing views of his small bed, or shots of the churchyard and of the site for an outdoor service, or the strange cocktail Toller makes, keep an eye for how he composes shots with light and shadow.

The lead role is a middle aged minister, Rev. Toller, played by Ethan Hawke

For me, no surprise, the spiritual elements stand out: the politics of money and church; the old church as more a museum than a functioning community, the intersection of the personal and the communal. He demonstrates the fading old variety of orthodox faith, and its new market-oriented upbeat expression at a nearby church, upon whose largesse he is dependent... Toller’s is a gloomy, Gethsemane spirituality. Rev. Toller admires Thomas Merton. (I may have spotted the 14^th century spiritual book, Cloud of Unknowing, in his books). He decides to make a journal as a spiritual exercise. Our Puritan spiritual ancestors spent much time in self-examination, and it seems Toller’s spiritual descent is in a realm of isolation, guilt, and darkness. “A life without despair is a life without hope.” He knows well the tensions of the spiritual life.  His home is so austere, so spare, that it looks as if it would be a parish manse version of a monk’s cell. In a later scene, I assume he is led into a mystical revelation worthy of the great saints, of creation resplendent, then an awful fall into the pollution and toxicity we pour into the creation. I say creation and not environment, as this is an example of Toller’s spiritual lens. Toward the abrupt end, we witness a bizarre scene where he movies toward extreme physical self-torture, a form of the flagellation of some monks, a terrible version of a hair shirt.

He is asked to counsel one of his few parishioners, a man being moved to eco-terrorism and utter despair about the fate of our warming planet. He asks Toller a haunting question, will God forgive us? I keep hearing the question as: can God forgive us? In a bracing conversation, Toller responds about living in the presence of facts in this way:  “Wisdom is holding two contradictory truths in our mind at the same time.” 

Schrader knows the faith of the fathers. Worship begins with the first question from the Heidelberg Catechism. He has Rev. Toller use an apt passage from Job at a funeral service. As the grounds shifts beneath him, Toller quotes Ephesians: "Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil's schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world."  It is an attempt to face a faith where, as Richard Niebuhr taught us, can be Christ against culture and Christ with the culture, at the same time.