[Oe List ...] grief and Christmas

[W. J.]

Dear colleagues,This Christmas season has been loaded with a mixture of joy to the world and global grief unlike anything I have previously experienced in my 80 years on earth.Sometimes it's easier to let our celebrative spirit and holiday cheer obscure our communal grief over the dire straits so much of humanity is experiencing this year and the next. And the reality that our health and that of our family members may be at risk.In this moment I was 'inspired' last night to screen two Fellini movies--La Strada and Nights of Cabiria-- for a very small group of invited colleagues, along with a meal and movie discussion. It was our last weekly Movie Night in this year.Some of you may remember that we used to show La Strada on Saturday night in RS-1, long before Requiem for a Heavyweight became our standard fare. I recall showing La Strada at a Lake Junaluska Methodist youth conference back in the early '60's with Mathews, Slicker, and Pierce on the teaching team. And maybe Fred Buss. My memory is slightly dimmed with the passage of time and my brain drain.But the movie still ends with that powerful scene in which Anthony Quinn (as Zampanò, not Mountain Rivera!) is lying drunk on the beach and finally just wailing and overwhelmed with grief over realizing how much he's lost by living in his illusion that other people don't matter to him.They do. And especially the young woman he lived and worked with and then abandoned when it was convenient.Hearing a woman singing that little bit of Nino Rota's theme music brings it all back to him.It's the last of several transformative events (or 'Christ-events' as we called them) in the movie.Let us not forget that celebrating Christmas is about rehearsing the story of a transformative event happening in our midst. THE transformative event, if you will, that brings forth a new, transformative era in human history.In the movie Gelsomina is a very strange, weird, childlike female clown, a Nobody Christ-figure. Without exactly knowing what she's doing, Gelsomina embodies a transformative spirit that speaks to the pervasive suffering of human beings around her.In this Christmas season, let us be the Nobodies whose transformative presence acknowledges our common grief and calls others to hope.MarshallYou can stream La Strada for free on Kanopy (with a library card). Or on TCM, the Criterion Channel, or HBO Max.




  

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