Film, Fiction, Faith and Fact

Spirituality Column #134
June 2, 2009
Current in Carmel (IN) newspaper
Current in Westfield (IN) newspaper

Film, Fiction, Faith and Fact
By Bob Walters

Normally it doesn’t matter when a novelist gets as many facts wrong as Dan Brown does. I think Angels & Demons is a good example of that.

Yes, there is a Vatican, a Pope and a place called Rome. There are Christian icons, locations, histories and mysteries attendant to all three. Europe’s CERN laboratory is a real place; Harvard is a real college.

Brown’s novels though are fiction, as are his imaginative depictions of historic conspiracies and secret religious societies. In Angels & Demons, Brown’s 2000 novel concocts a thrilling tale with a thread of truth here and there, woven into a fictional fabric of highly entertaining action and historical rubbish.

Ron Howard’s 2009 film adaptation of the book starring Tom Hanks is a movie I planned to refuse to see, because I am still ticked at Brown for The Da Vinci Code. I don’t care so much that he writes fictional things about Christ or the Church or the Pope, because the Jesus Christ Who is my Lord and Savior is plenty big enough to withstand a novelist’s keystrokes.

So are the Catholic Church and the Bishop of Rome.

What did tick me off were Brown’s disingenuous and potentially hurtful “Hey, this is the true story” attitude in his Da Vinci media interviews, and his ridiculous “Fact” preambles to these two fictional stories.

Note an important distinction: Telling a wild yarn isn’t a lie; it’s a wild yarn. That Brown calls these books fact-based, well, that’s a lie.

That the faith of so many people may have been shaken, dampened, or muddled by The Da Vinci Code’s misrepresentation of history, tradition and facts, surely grieves the Holy Spirit. It matters that the facts were wrong.

On the up side, thousands (or maybe millions) of us went into specific Bible studies to refute Brown’s theological nonsense. We heightened our awareness of important religious history and better understand the veracity of the Bible. That’s better than OK … it glorifies God.

At the end of the far-less-dangerous Angels & Demons movie – which I wound up seeing and enjoying – there is a tender line of utter truth that does not appear in the book, and to me vindicates the story’s spurious “facts” and dark ecclesiastical innuendo.

The chief Cardinal says to Tom Hanks’ character: “It is surprising sometimes who God sends to help us.”

Amen to that.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) rarely goes to the movies, reads few novels, and as a general rule ignores network television.

Forty Years of Proof

Spirituality Column #93
August 19, 2008
Current in Carmel, Westfield (IN) newspapers

Forty Years of Proof
By Bob Walters

In July 1968, forty years ago, Pope John XXIII issued the Humanae Vitae (Human Life) encyclical letter outlining the Roman Catholic Church’s position against, and its predicted long-term negative social affects of, contraception (i.e., “The Pill”).

Two months later in September 1968, Paul R. Erhlich, a butterfly specialist, published one of the leading bestsellers of modern times, The Population Bomb, a book outlining – in the most draconian, fear-mongering language imaginable – that hundreds of millions of humans would die in the 1970s and 1980s because of overpopulation and food shortages.

The one was a document of long-held Church disciplines and wisdom, and the other a collection of 1960s socio-science platitudes.

Wanna’ guess which one proved to be almost pure, accurate prophecy, and which one was pure dupe?

Humanae Vitae, in 1968, predicted bad times ahead if the sex act, intercourse, was mentally and morally separated from pro-creation. The document foresaw, in varying degrees of specificity, an increase in all the following: divorce, marital infidelity, single parent homes, juvenile crime, crimes against women, abortion, disease (no one had yet heard of AIDS, and STD was an abbreviation for “standard”), crime rates, homosexuality, sex crimes and pornography, just to name a few.

If you’re keeping score, how’d the Pope do?

Humanae Vitae raised a furor in the Church and polarized much of the Christian world. Behind the rallying cry, “You can’t tell me what to do with my body,” the Pope’s letter was – I don’t think this is an overstatement – widely dismissed and frequently disobeyed by just about everyone, including the pew-sitting Church membership and more than a few of the clergy.

And while one major population issue in the world today is sustainability – people in many places aren’t having enough babies, opposite Ehrlich’s doom-saying – one could argue that the blast pattern from The Population Bomb was so widespread that it frightened people worldwide away from large families. Even China adopted a one-baby policy.

It’s obvious though that, witnessing the sexual revolution, Ehrlich’s book didn’t scare anyone out of the bedroom.

And while by no means am I casting the first stone, it’s also pretty obvious that the Pope’s encyclical, despite its prophetic truth, sadly, scared almost nobody into obedience.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) read a terrific article by Mary Eberstadt of the Hoover Institution on all this in the Aug/Sept 2008 issue of First Things magazine. (article available free at firstthings.com)

Know the God You Pray To

Spirituality Column #67
February 19, 2008
Current in Carmel (IN) newspaper

Know the God You Pray To
By Bob Walters

Pope Benedict was recently asked how Christianity is different from other religions.

He responded that in every religion, human beings seek God. Christianity, he said, is a religion in which God also seeks man.

As a Christian, I like the idea that God is looking for me because I am looking for Him. How do I know God is looking for me? Because He sent Jesus Christ to establish an eternal relationship with me, you … all of us (John 3:16).

I accept that my human pursuit of Christ is imperfect, but know that in my faith I have the assurance that God is on the other end of that relationship perfectly trying to find me. The Bible tells me so. So does the Pope.

A friend recently lamented to me that he was indeed trying to find God in prayer, but couldn’t. He cited an author he read who had searched Ashrams in India for prayer, meditation, enlightenment, etc.

When I asked him the name of the God he was seeking, I tacitly (and to my chagrin) went a little overboard it seems in challenging his interpretation of God. “You Christians always sound like that,” he said. “You won’t tolerate the thought that someone else might be right.”

Still, I asked him to name the name of the God he was seeking. If prayer is talking to God, isn’t it a good start, I reasoned, to know with Whom one is trying to talk?

He couldn’t say, but trusted the lady Ashram author as the more appropriate broker of his hoped-for, deeper prayer life with God, the Divine, or whatever. He just couldn’t say What or Who the Divine was.

I wonder sometimes why people make it so hard. Truly and too often, I lament my own inability to convincingly share the following wonderful news:

God is already looking for us, the Holy Spirit is already in us, and Christ has already created a bridge for us to an eternal relationship with God.

If we want that, all we have to do is ask, and then be still. We will know that He is God (Psalm 46:10).

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) is pretty sure that prayers are best delivered when properly addressed and not when sent out "General Delivery."

Pope Views Not News

Spirituality Column #39
August 7, 2007
Current! In Carmel (IN) newspaper

Pope Views Not News
By Bob Walters

That the Roman Catholic Church sees itself to be “the one true church” is very old theological news.

The general eruption of media and talk radio indignation since the Pope seemingly reaffirmed the Catholic Church’s doctrine of exclusive salvation – “We are the only ones who are saved” – seems to be more a case of bad journalism than bad church public relations.

All grumbling to the contrary, the Pope said no such thing. The Vatican’s doctrinal theologians (the current Pope used to head that division) drafted a clarifying document stating that the church actually believes what it says it believes, and the Pope accepted that document as being also what he believes.

Somehow, this was international news.

Any “History of Christian Theology 101” class includes the facts that 1) the Catholic Church views itself as the one true church; 2) sees itself as mediator between congregants and Christ; and 3) that Catholic authority and practice emanate from its traditions as much or moreso than from the Bible.

Classic Protestant denominations – Episcopal, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Methodist, etc. – also provided a degree of Holy mediation and “liturgical” (institutionalized, pre-written) worship, but encouraged scripture reading to such a degree that America at its founding through about 100 years ago was a very Biblically literate culture.

Since then the Bible-totin’ Baptist, independent Christian and other Evangelical churches – a religious out-cropping of recent centuries – have taken to heart what it says in 1 Timothy 2:15 about Christ as the only mediator with God, and Biblically inferred that man needs a church (an “ecclesial community” in Vatican parlance … whatever), a Bible and a personal relationship with Christ, Amen.

Catholic or Protestant or Evangelical, what I know for sure is that Christ doesn’t change, God doesn’t change, and the Holy Spirit doesn’t change.

Maybe if we all tried to be more like them – Christ, God and the Holy Spirit – we’d find similarities among ourselves instead of differences. It would make God smile.

And hey, don’t yell at the Pope; appreciate a guy who understands his job.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) would point out that, unlike the Trinity, each of us must change … and it’s hard.