Cautionary Tales and the Good News of Easter

A few years back, I watched two Netflix series that showed the lives of good men gone wrong....leading double lives mostly and caught in the darker and darker shadows of vices and choices leading to greater evils than good for the world.  The premise is as old as the biblical Exodus tale, or of Noah and the flood, but in these cases not nearly so hopeful for their lack of any reference to God or the spiritual life.

"Ozark" and "Rake" are what I will call ‘cautionary tales’ about men caught in vices that prove difficult to escape, drawing them into wider and wider circles of evil in their own self-made hell, and drawing the world in with them.  Both deliver drama and satire at their best - Rake more satire than drama and Ozark more drama than satire - making them addictive for their quality performances, complex characterization and dark and disturbing humor.

In Ozark, it begins, with a basically good family man.  The series opens, however, with his double life and vice exposed, as besotted with porn he watches the computer monitor in front of him while simultaneously and matter of fact like assisting a couple sitting across his desk with their financial matters.

He’s an accountant in business with a partner and friend.  His partner is caught up in laundering money for mafia related business people, and he doesn’t know anything about this.  He finds out when the mafia come to do business, and unhappy with the results of his buddy accountant’s skimming off the top, they murder his partner in front of him.

Caught now as the mafia's target for being a witness to this murder he is forced into a choice of either taking on his partner's former role of helping the mafia or handing his life over to them for slaughter.  He chooses the former and tailspins out of control drawing his whole family (wife, daughter and son) with him into deeper and deeper evils... until they are so familiar with evil they are blind to other possible choices to get themselves out.   They choose evil in other words...at first slowly and tentatively and then with greater confidence and familiarity. Woefully mired in a blend of atheistic and agnostic views of life, they are left with no foreseeable alternatives of choice.  There is no God to turn to, and no imagination or glimmer of faith to make room for a Higher Power to deliver.  

Rake is a similar cautionary tale of an effective and charming lawyer taking on cases for the sickest and most depraved of clients and going to bat for them in court.  Sadly, being unable to convince himself of his own goodness and lovableness, he numbs himself with drugs and sex while simultaneously trying to extricate himself from the hell he builds for himself and those around him. Like Sisyphus, he is forever looped in a sad comedy of rolling the boulder up the hill only to see it come rolling back down. 

It's not surprising that in the case of both characters, neither is delivered from their miserable existences.  The writers of these satires clearly know what makes for addictive viewing!  We watch waiting in hope for some miracle to extricate them, perhaps partly in a guilt-like, Pharisaical gratitude that we aren't like them at all, and perhaps partly in fascination that "there but for the grace of God go I"!  Yes, we are as human as they are, and as capable of falling into the mixed trajectory of evil and good as anyone.  And while it may be dark humor to watch as fiction, it is hugely sobering to see it happening in real life, whether in small ways in ourselves or in similar exaggerated ways in public life as these characters reveal.  To simply be amused, entertained or to give in to the agnosticism and atheism found there and fail to reflect on these as contemporary cautionary tales is to risk falling deeper into the mire ourselves.  

A life without access or openness to the Creator, to the Divine Source, Redeemer and Sanctifier of life; a life without wisdom knowing through prayer and study and a relationship with Jesus Christ in the Gospels, will inevitably straddle, mix and become mired in the two worlds of evil and good.  To ad-mire is to easily become more 'mired'.  There is only one way through, a 'third way' we might say, and we find it surprisingly as close to us as our own breath.  It is to find our own profoundly human depths as we fix ourselves onto and plunge ourselves into the person of Jesus Christ.

Hardly a popular way today; largely a hidden one.  Watch a third movie, "The Hidden Life" by director Terrence Mallick on the life of Franz and Franzisca Jaggerstatter , and see this way precisely chosen and exquisitely formed on the person of Christ. See what unfolds!  A life of dazzling simplicity and freedom; of treasured grace and goodness.  It ends with a quote by T. S. Elliot about how many hidden lives are making our lives better for their selfless commitment to and faith in the person of Christ.  When faced with the ultimate choice for truth and justice like the character in Ozark (whose name I can't remember) or Franz and Franzisca (whose names I won't forget)...which way will we choose?

In the office of readings this morning, psalm 78  reminds us of how when we cry out to God, God delivers us from our "foes" - the vices, addictions, ingrained disordered habits we find ourselves imprisoned by.   If we don't know where to turn to get ourselves out of our addictions, vices, idols and evil, we will spiral on and draw others with us.  If we think we know how to do it ourselves, we are grossly misled and mistaken.  Only Christ can deliver us, free us and lead us to life-giving, deeply human ways of living.  

How often they defied him in the wilderness and caused him pain in the desert! 

Yet again they put God to the test and grieved the Holy One of Israel.  They did not remember his deeds nor the day he saved them from the foe...

The Office goes on with a reading "From the pastoral constitution on the Church in the modern world of the Second Vatican Council" saying:

Holy Scripture, with which the experience of the ages is in agreement, teaches the human family that human progress, though it is a great blessing for humanity, brings with it a great temptation.  When the scale of values is disturbed and evil becomes mixed with good, individuals and groups consider only their own interests, not those of others.  

The result is that the world is not yet a home of true brotherhood, while the increased power of humanity already threatens to destroy the human race itself.  If it is asked how this unhappy state of affairs can be set right, Christians state their belief that all human activity, in daily jeopardy through pride and inordinate self-love, is to find its purification and its perfection in the cross and resurrection of Christ.  

Humanity, redeemed by Christ and made a new creation in the Holy Spirit, can and must love the very things created by God.  For he receives them from God, and sees and reveres them as coming from the hand of God.  

As we give thanks for them to our Benefactor, and use and enjoy them in a spirit of poverty and freedom, we enter into true possession of the world, as one having nothing and possessing all things.  For all things are yours, and you are Christ's, and Christ is God's.  
The Word of God, (i.e. Jesus Christ) through whom all things were made, himself became man and lived in the world of men(humanity).  As a perfect man he has entered into the history of the world, taking it into himself and bringing it into unity as its head.  He reveals to us that God is love, and at the same time teaches us that the fundamental law of human perfection, and therefore of the transformation of the world, is the new commandment of love.  

Christ Jesus assures those who have faith in God's love that the way of love is open to all humanity, and that the effort to restore universal brotherhood is not in vain.  At the same time he warns us that this love is not to be sought after only in great things but also, and above all, in the ordinary circumstances of life.  

We can be oblivious and blunted to the Source of our deliverance from vices and human weakness, as the main characters in Ozark or Rake demonstrate, or we can turn our human weakness towards God for deliverance with cries from the heart and our whole being.  Our weakness truly is as St. Paul says our strength, for it leads us to cry out to be saved from our selves and paradoxically we are healed and made whole.

From another point of view, for any who've cried out and been delivered from troubling dis-orders and vices, we can easily forget God’s goodness while wandering in the wilderness; how he’s delivered us from the foe with grace, mercy and miracles as wondrous as those of the people of Israel in the desert! We are free in the wilderness (like the vast kind of wilderness we find ourselves in now) only when we stay focused on the God of love who leads us.  Everything else is distraction at best, complaining misery and free-falling into temptation at worst.

Cautionary tales aside, the good news is the Easter story we are slowly and surely living inside of.  Oh to make this a deliberate choice every day and act our part!...to know and be known inside of the love of God!  On this fourth Saturday of Lent, the opening part of a reflection from Daybreaks Daily Reflections for Lent and Easter by Ron Rolheiser says,

The stone that rolled away from the tomb of Jesus continues to roll away from every sort of grave.  Goodness cannot be held, captured or put to death.  It evades its pursuers, escapes capture, slips away, but forever rises all over the world.  Such is the meaning of the resurrection.

Take the dive into the hidden life with Christ and you will see resurrection life everywhere.  Especially in dark and mired times, as you are forced to choose, you too will rise out of the mud, whole and free, drawing your loved ones forth with you.