Finding life at the abyss

Wednesday night's movie in the series the Love of God was Babel.

In a remote corner of the Moroccan desert, a shot rings out - and a fragile loose chain of events starts and steadily tightens linking an American tourist couple's desperate struggle, two Moroccan boys and their father, a Mexican nanny illegally crossing into Mexico with two American children, and a deaf Japanese teenage girl whose father is sought by the police. Disparate pieces spread across the globe exposing cultures in collision across huge distances in an ever shrinking world, all of them sharing desperation, a sense of dislocation and in their own deserts.

The title Babel alludes to the great tower built in Gen. 11:9, interestingly it is thought to share a root with the Hebrew verb balal, 'to confuse or confound'. In fact in English babble is to talk meaninglessly. I've come across many interpretations for the story, the most common being the reason was the pride of humans, which ultimately led to the Flood as a response. However a good friend and scholar from almost ten years ago proposed that this was in fact a response to humanity's refusal to go and populate the earth, i.e. a disobedient act of staying together instead of fulfilling their divinely ordered purpose.

Anyhow I found shape and interest in the patterns which the pieces of Babel made up. Then again I love to listen to music and the interplay between the different parts that make up the music rather than the whole. I suspect this must be connected in my thing about taking things apart to understand how they fit together. Anyhow Babel did not go the way of the notes provided for reflection either for me.

The clue was in a question asked of the Mexican nanny by one of the American children as they found themselves lost and abandoned in the desert. "Did we do something bad?" and the nanny's reply was "No. I did something stupid." This for me at least actually glued everything together. The Moroccan boys, the Mexican nanny and the Japanese teenager had an innocence or were just plain naive. They weren't bad as such but they acted stupidly and had to take the consequences. Through much of the film I felt the smell of death looming, impending and I was surprised by the ending in feeling a sense of life. That life is not as isolating as we think it is at times.

There was nudity and it was graphic, however that said it wasn't simply eroticism. Sometimes we strip ourselves whether physically, emotionally or even spiritually for the wrong reasons or motives looking for compassion. Perhaps there seems to be no hope and it is a jump into the abyss. Sometimes we are stripped whether physically, emotionally or even spiritually and it feels like we are in the abyss. But there is still hope that compassion and understanding might come. I frequently find myself having done something stupid and somehow it is still possible to find life.

He found them in a desert land, in an empty, howling wasteland. He surrounded them and watched over them; he guarded them as he would guard his own eyes. Like an eagle that rouses her chicks and hovers over her young, so he spread his wings to take them up and carried them safely on his pinions. The Lord alone guided them; (Deut 32:10-12a)