Fathers For Good

Fireproof - The Catholic Version

If you have not seen the movie Fireproof, make every effort to do so. My parish rented the DVD and played it one evening for about 20 couples who showed up for the free screening. A low-budget film produced by two evangelical brothers and their Georgia congregation, Fireproof sends a powerful message about the sanctity of marriage and the need to invite God into this bond between man and woman.

The plot hinges on the troubled marriage of Caleb (Kirk Cameron, the only professional actor in the film) and Catherine, a young couple who are wedded more to their own ambitions and interests than to one another. Caleb is a man of strength, a firefighter captain in a small town who does heroic deeds and is respected by everyone except his wife. The source of her rejection of him is his internet porn addiction.

Catherine works as a publicist in a local hospital who takes off her wedding ring one day and becomes increasingly open to the advances of a tall, handsome doctor.

With the guidance of his father, Caleb embarks on a program called "The Love Dare," designed to save failing marriages through prayer and following a day to day routine to win back the spouse and "fireproof" a marriage. As the movie says, "fireproof" doesn't mean the flames won't touch you, just that you'll withstand them.

To learn more about the plot, you can visit the movie's website.

Here I want to make a few comments from a Catholic perspective. After all, the movie has a strong evangelical Christian message that pretty much begins and ends with the need to accept Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior. Of course, we do need to accept Jesus into our lives in that way. Yet while focusing on this theme, the movie avoids or passes over some very basic issues that are key to the Catholic view of marriage.

My first reaction after watching the movie was: where are the children? Caleb and Catherine are childless after 7 years of marriage, yet there is no suggestion that this could be a source of grief or frustration in their relationship. This is a key issue, especially in our time when so many couples go to great lengths and expense to conceive, and many childless couples are heartbroken. Yet the movie makes not one allusion to children or the desire for them.

The other issue is more basic to a Catholic mind. Have they been trying to conceive, or have they been contracepting to avoid children? Of course, Protestants generally do not view contraception as sinful, but it is totally unrealistic for anyone to think that contraception has no effect on a couple's relationship. As Christian moviemakers, they should have let us know whether Caleb and Catherine are open to new life or not. But, again, not a hint.

Of course, the movie has great strengths. It provides a subtle yet powerful study of temptation and sin, and the weakness of the flesh when the will is deformed. There are wonderful heart-rending and heart-lifting scenes, and talk about love that you'll rarely hear in church, let alone on a movie screen. Love is sacrifice; love is giving even when the other person rejects; love is not emotions; love comes from God.

Guys will love the scene when Catherine, finally won back and repentent over her scornful ways, appears in red-dress beauty at the fire house garage, and tells Caleb, as the wind billows her hair - If I never told you that you are a good man, I do now. It was lump in the throat, hold back the tears time for me -- every guy wants to hear from the woman in his life that he's a good man!

The final scene is sweet but falls short. Caleb and Catherine renew their marriage vows before a preacher as a lifelong "covenant" and not simply as a civil contract. Their friends and family gathered around the idyllic lakeside scene applaud and join in their happiness as they start anew, but something was missing.

How fulfilling the movie would have been if after the ceremony a friend had hugged Catherine and said, "I'm so happy for you and Caleb, and the news about your pregnancy!"

But that would be Fireproof - The Catholic Version.

Mercy Sunday

One of the most telling passages in the New Testament comes in the Acts of the Apostles, Chapter 17. Paul, the newly Christian itinerant preacher, visits Athens, the center of intellect and culture. Looking about at all the stone idols and gods, he becomes agitated and starts talking in synagogues and public squares about Jesus and the Resurrection.

The Athenians become agitated as well by his words and bring him to the Areopagus, the place where great ideas were debated, for as it says in Acts "Athenians as well as the foreigners residing there used their time for nothing else but telling or hearing something new."

Paul rises to the occasion before the assembly, hoping to win hearts and minds with warm words. "You Athenians ..." he begins and then proceeds to flatter them by calling them "very religious" by evidence of their many gods. He then refers to an empty altar dedicated to "the unknown god," and concludes with dramatic flair, "What you unknowingly worship, I proclaim to you." He tells them about Jesus.

We can picture brave Paul straining to make a connection with those who thought of themselves as the great intellectuals of the age, citing the words of a Greek philosopher, pulling out what he thought to be an ingenius logical argument. After all, he begins with what the Athenians were familiar with (the "unknown god") and relates their uncertain worship to the God whom he will reveal to them -- Jesus. Surely, the men of Athens will be moved by such rhetorical art!

But they are not. They are interested in "new things" but evidently not in the new life that might force them to rethink their assumptions.

"When they heard about resurrection of the dead, some began to scoff, but others said, 'We should like to hear you on this matter some other time.' And so Paul left them" (17:32-33).

You can almost hear the soft, derisive laughter, the suppressed guffaws, the knowing winks among men of great thought who were not going to sit and listen to child's tales about a dead man rising. Scoff!

They feign politeness, asking him to return "some other time," a phrase similar to our "I'll get back to you," or "I'll call you."

How telling is the scene: a courageous witness to the hope of all mankind (that this life is not the end) is met with the apathetic intellectual sloth of Athenians who only wanted to listen to what amused or flattered them. They dismissed Paul as a zealot or miscreant, but deep down they must have known that if what he said was true, they would have to change their lives, and make room for a new reality that was more than just talk.

How do we respond to news of the Resurrection? When the Paschal candle was lit at the Easter Vigil, did we simply watch, or did we let the fire of Christ's new life burn into our hearts, and enter our souls?

Are we living new lives now? Or has another Easter passed with us saying, by attitude and deed, "We will hear about this some other time"?

Be of good cheer. After the searing joy of the eight days of Easter, we have Divine Mercy Sunday. It is time to confess that we are not worthy of the death and Resurrection of our Lord. It is time to say how weak is our faith and how failing are our efforts.

The time is now, not "some other time," to hear the Good News and to rely solely on the mercy of Jesus.

Your Body Will Rise

Like a good who-done-it detective story, in Christianity there is always a body involved. Just consider the central tenets of our faith:

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Incarnation

Nativity

Crucifixion

Resurrection

Ascension

Assumption

 

On each of these great Christian feasts, a body is central to the plot, being conceived, born, killed, raised or glorified. That is why the Catholic Church has always been opposed to the generalized spiritism of each age, unwilling to wish away or dismiss the flesh as a mere appendage of the superior spirit.

 

The Catholic mind has always kept body and soul together, going so far as to claim that where one or the other is lacking, there is no human person.

There are souls in heaven, hell and purgatory, but human persons – body and soul -- are found only on earth. In fact, death is defined as the separation of the soul from the body, and we are told by saints as great as Thomas Aquinas that even a soul in heaven is incomplete, longing to be reunited with its body on the last day.

Which brings us to the topic of this Holy Week: the Resurrection of the Body.

 

A campus chaplain once explained to a group of students that Easter was the most perplexing of Christian feasts, though we're told it's the central celebration of our faith. After all, he said, we all can relate to the birth of a baby at Christmas and the suffering that comes with death on Good Friday.

But a body rising from the dead -- who has ever seen or experienced that? Where do we go to find an example?

 

With the Resurrection, we enter the realm of true faith – "the assurance of things hoped for and the promise of things not seen" (Hebrews 11:1).

Indeed, at the center of our Catholic faith is an event that even those who saw the risen Christ did not at first dare to believe. Mary Magdalene came to the tomb to wrap the body of the Crucified One, and when she found the tomb empty and Jesus standing nearby, she did not see that it was He. Only when He utters her name are her eyes opened to the living Christ.

“Why do you seek the living among the dead?” the angel said to the woman at the empty tomb.

Thomas doubted when he heard that Jesus was alive. Jesus appeared to show him his wounded hands and side, and Thomas said what we all should say in awe as Jesus comes to us at Mass in the consecration, “My Lord and my God.”

Jesus did not rebuke him for doubting, but said, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.”

That’s you and me.

We have not touched his sacred hands or side, nor have we seen Him walk through the door into our midst – yet we believe. That’s our Easter faith, based not on a vague, pervasive “spirit of life within us,” as the New Agers might have it, but based on a body. A body that was dead and laid in the tomb and was seen after three days to be alive again.

Yet there is a persistent claim in some Christian circles, dating back to the time of St. Paul, that Jesus did not really rise bodily. He rose “in the hearts of his disciples” and “his spirit lives on in his believers.” The Catholic faith is totally opposed to this notion, this heresy.

Yet St. Paul writes,  “If Christ is not risen, then your faith is in vain” (1 Cor. 15:14).

We are all about the bodily resurrection. We profess explicitly that the soul of Jesus was reunited with the same body that hung on the cross and lay in the tomb. In rising from the dead, his body is glorified, but it is the same body that was born of Virgin Mary.

Catholics often are accused of despising the body by denying its pleasures, and it’s true that the body and its sensual appetites must be placed under the control of the rational soul. But, in the end, it is the Catholic Church that is the great defender of the flesh, declaring that the body is not only an earthly good but a heavenly presence. It has a dignity that will last for an eternity.

As surely as we will die, we will rise again on the last day, when Jesus will judge the living and the dead. We will rise not as souls alone, but as human persons, body and soul, and we will live forever in our own skin – in heaven, we hope, with God’s grace.

This is our Easter faith. We are Catholic: matter does matter, and bodies do rise.

(Check this blog after Easter for a further reflection.)