First Parish Sermon

My favorite movie of the summer, “The Others”, is one that I will refrain from reviewing in detail because I wouldn’t want to give away the ending in case any of you may chance to see it someday. I can say this, it is the best ghost movie I have ever seen, even better than the Sixth Sense, which was a pretty darn good ghostly flick. One commentator described this movie as The Sixth Sense meets the Turn of the Screw. This is a pretty fair description of the film in that there are a number of twists and turns to the plot that do not come together until the surprise ending.  This is another ghost movie in which children, a boy and a girl, play key roles in the story, along with their neurotic mother, played superbly by Nicole Kidman. 
It’s nice to be reminded that children can do a remarkable job of acting when given a chance to do so. As UU’s we affirm the dignity and worth of all children, whether they be good actors or bad actors. We are delighted to have them in our church school whether they are real or ghostly.

Perhaps one of the questions this movie tries to answer is, if there are such things as ghosts, who haunts whom—do ghosts haunt the living, or do the living haunt the dead? Unitarian Universalists tend to be highly skeptical when it comes to the question of whether ghosts are real and do we survive the ordeal of death in some form? I would suggest to you that, skeptical or not, we avoid what William James once referred to as “a premature closing of our accounts with reality.” There may be “more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.” If you would like to give your philosophy a little stretch, and maybe a scare, then by all means see, “The Others,” and get another view on what may be real or unreal.

I usually go to see one or two movies that were directed primarily towards children as their audience. One of them was Disney’s “Atlantis the Lost Empire.” Though it was not one of Disney’s best films, it was still okay, and I confess that I was relieved for a change not to have cartoon human or animal figures burst into song and try to turn a good yarn into an opera. I assume you are all familiar with the legend of Atlantis which derives from some references from the ancient Greek philosopher, Plato, who reported the story from the Greek ruler Solon, who visited Egypt circa 590 B.C.E., where he heard the tale from his Egyptian hosts. The story was passed down the generations for 200 years when Critas the Younger, a direct descendent of Solon, told it to Plato.

Plato described Atlantis as a vast island-continent west of the Mediterranean, ruled by Atlas the Titan, and surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean. Atlantis was governed in peace, was rich in commerce, advanced in knowledge, and held dominion over the surrounding islands and continents. According to the Platonic version of the legend the people of Atlantis became morally lax and complacent, and their rulers arrogant and corrupt. In punishment the gods destroyed Atlantis with earthquakes and floods, submerging the island beneath the sea in a single day and night. 

All of this presumably happened some 9 to 10 thousand years ago. Some Atlantean scholars have argued that the 9,000 year figure from Plato was a gloss from later copiers and that Plato actually meant 900 years, which would fit in nicely with the volcanic explosion and submerging of the island of Thera (Santorini) in Crete. Of course no one really knows since we do not know if we are dealing with myth or reality or an admixture of both.

What we have, in the words of one commentator, ‘is a wonderful romantic tale of a great lost civilization, a sort of super-Greek world of intellectual achievement, cultural sophistication, and enlightened governance, all powered by some mysterious source.” Earlier Hollywood versions had the Atlanteans harnessing solar power with a jumbo magnifying glass. In the Disney version the source of energy is a whirling living crystal that in times of crisis, instills “one of noble birth” with great wisdom and power. 

The story revolves around the dream of an explorer, Milo Thatch (Voice Over by Michael J. Fox), and his search for the lost city of Atlantis. Well, he and his cohorts do indeed find it, submerged and preserved in a vast dome beneath the sea. Remarkably, the inhabitants, who have lived there for thousands of years, know French and English and can converse with their visitors from the world above. As might be expected the visitors bring both creation and destruction to the inhabitants of Atlantis who must contend with the struggle between good and evil yet again. 

The legend of Atlantis, whether from Plato or Disney, is yet one more example, in the words of an internet critic, of the human penchant to weave myths and stories of “idyllic times and places, to give us hope, perhaps, of a better tomorrow….Not content with merely romanticizing the past we know existed, we create a past that never did exist”, like the Garden of Eden, where the first parents of the human race lived in innocence and bliss until they ate of the forbidden fruit of the knowledge of good and evil and were cast out by their divine Creator. 

The Atlantis legend is perhaps a better and more complete myth because it offers a collective tale of the loss of goodness and innocence, rather than just the mishap of a couple of ignorant human beings who were duped by a wily serpent. The fall from grace is social and systemic, not just individual and personal. The Atlantis legend could just as easily fit the Decline and Fall of the American Empire no less than the Greek City States or the Roman Empire. 

Each of us bears a portion of responsibility for what we are and have become as a nation and a culture. What will save us or destroy us is surely within us and between us, and we could lose it all in a single day or night, figuratively speaking, if we lose our moral direction and sense of national purpose. This is heavy stuff for a simple Disney movie, but it’s all there for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear.

The movie on Pearl Harbor is a continuation of the Atlantis myth in terms of the recollection of an actual historical event in American history—the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor and our entrance into World War II. This year marks the 60th anniversary of that event. The film attempted to do for that historical happening what “Titantic” sought to do a few years ago—to take a tragic event, weave a moving love story around it, make it into a blockbuster cinematic extravaganza that costs millions to make, but makes millions more when it is finished. 

“Pearl Harbor” no where near measured up to the success of “Titanic”, but it was nonetheless a movie well worth seeing, and one that helped this viewer, at least, get inside the social and political psychology that the bombing of Pearl Harbor instilled in the American psyche on December 7, 1941. I was a mere boy of 4 years at the time and have no conscious memory of it. I can remember about a year or two later thinking to myself that I could not remember a time when we were not at war.

Back in 1941 the United States deluded itself into thinking we could maintain a policy of isolation and stay out of the European conflict. Like Atlantis of old we were protected by two oceans, the Atlantic and the Pacific, and we thought that no potential enemy would be able to bring the war directly to our shores. We were safe from attack, or so we thought. The Japanese had other ideas and virtually destroyed our naval fleet in a single day. Our confidence in our invincibility lay at the bottom of the bay in Pearl Harbor along with our ships and hundreds of our sailors. That day we lost our innocence and the belief that what happened elsewhere around the globe had no impact upon us. The movie reminded us how close the Japanese came to inflicting even greater damage upon us, but for some reason they held back sending in one last squadron of Zeros to finish the job. 

What the movie did for me was to put all of this in the context of a believable story about people like us and how their lives were turned upside down by this extraordinary act of war. The love story between Rafe (Ben Affleck) and Evelyn (Kate Beckinsale), and his best friend, Danny (Josh Harnett), was the kind of story played out in the lives of thousands of Americans during the course of that war. Lost lives and lost loves are the price that we pay when we are drawn into mortal conflict. 

Like Tom Brokaw’s best selling book, The Greatest Generation, this movie can help bring home to us the significance of Pearl Harbor and its aftermath in the shaping of our national consciousness. Though we hear critiques about our current foreign policy being isolationist in strategy the fact remains that we can never again be deluded into thinking we can go it alone and cut ourselves off from responsible engagement with others. It is fair to say that our religious vision of who we are is also deeply colored by this realization of our interdependence.  Our UUA Principles and Purposes refer to “the goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all,” and then conclude with, “respect for the interdependent web of existence of which we are a part.” There is certainly no room for any kind of isolationism here and we no longer need a Pearl Harbor to remind us of that fact.

Stanley Kubric, who directed the film “2001” from the late 60s, had been working on a film about artificial intelligence, but he never finished it. Kubric’s widow, Christiane asked Steven Speilberg if he would take her husband’s work and complete it, which he did. The result was the film, “A.I.”, meaning “artificial intelligence”, starring 13 year-old Haley Joel Osment. Osment plays the part of a human like robot, David, who has been specially programmed to give love as a child to a parent. His human mother, Monica, played by Frances O’Connor, has nearly lost her only son, Martin, who has been put in a state of deep coma and suspended animation until a medical solution can be found for his condition. 

David is given to Monica to ease her feelings of loss and to provide an object for her need to express motherly love. She eventually bonds with David and he starts calling her Mommy. Then lo and behold son Martin returns from his deep coma and comes home. He is clearly jealous of his robot brother. Some difficulties and a near fatal accident occur between them, and the decision is made to send David back to the factory to be disassembled. Monica does not have the heart to take him there and decides instead to abandon him in some woods where he meets up with other discarded and abandoned robots. 

The rest of the movie is about David’s quest to recover his lost mother love and to become, if he can, a real boy. Yes indeed, it’s Pinocchio all over again, in sci-fi garb. In his quest he is directed to find the source of dreams from the Blue Fairy who turns out to be a submerged amusement park figurine in New York City, which is now completely under water due to global warming and the melting of the glaciers. Thousands of years pass with David trapped in his under water grave with the Blue Fairy. Eventually he is found by highly evolved mechas, or robots, who have replaced biological humans in the evolutionary scheme. They are able to grant David his fondest wish, one day, and one day only, of mother-child love with a DNA fabricated clone of his mother, Monica. Then his dream is over and he must make his way in the world on his own. 

The irony here is that the highly evolved mechas are able to create a clone of David’s mother, Monica, to fulfill his need for love lost, just as he was created centuries before to meet the same need in her. This film raises many profound metaphysical and ethical questions, though it seems to take forever to get to its strange ending. On one level it is about how we treat children in our society. Do parents treat their biological children differently than they treat their adopted children if they happen to be in the same family? Sometimes they do, but I have known of many children who were treated pretty poorly by their biological parents, and many adopted children who were loved unconditionally by their adoptive parents. The fact of the matter is we all have the same basic needs for love, affirmation and approval whether we are adopted or natural, clones or mechas if such a day ever dawns. 

To what degree we are loved and affirmed is the luck of the draw. None of us can ever be completely fulfilled and some of us may feel like we have a hole in our bucket. Love is what shapes our dreams and gives meaning to our lives. We are responsible for how we treat one another and for how we express our need for love or the lack thereof. In this church we do our best to teach our children in word and action the meaning of our first principle—the inherent worth and dignity of every person. We have learned that we can’t do it alone, that we need one another to become whole and loving and free. Together we can find the source of our dreams and the love eternal that will not let us go.