Reflections-Coincidence: Bible, Film, and Sandy Hook

A biblical text; the reminder of the classic Sophia Loren film, and the terrible tragedy of all of those children and adults being senselessly slaughtered in Sandy Hook (Newtown, CT) have stimulated these thoughts.

First, I was working on the biblical readings for the Fourth Sunday in Advent (Luke 1:39-56).  I had decided to preach on this text.  I was well on the way to developing a sermon with the title, "Put Mary back into Christmas."  Obviously a play on the popular song putting Christ back into Christmas.

The biblical story focuses on the meeting of two women, Mary, the mother of Jesus, and her cousin Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist. Mary, the teenager who is pregnant and from the "does anything good come out of Nazareth" hick town meets the older Elizabeth, the wife of a priest probably from a more upscale, well-to-do, sophisticated and educated background.  Luke's account focuses more on Mary than on Elizabeth.  But the story is built around the relationships of two women from dissimilar and similar circumstances.

Second, comes the Sophia Loren Italian film, "Two Women, English title." Loren won the 1960 Academy Award for Best Actress.  The story depicts a mother and teen age daughter's relationship during World War II.  The terror, rape, loss of home, and all of the atrocities of war bring ever more problems to these two women.  I do not think the film glorifies violence to women as a few have indicated.  It does depict how women are the victims of the powerful and ruthless but the focus is on the complexities of the relationships of two women who are related, certainly differently than Elizabeth and Mary.

Third, we have all been assaulted by the images--and suggestions of even more disturbing pictures--of violence perpetrated on the children and women teachers at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.  The special bond between teacher and child, in more than half the cases little girls (in no way do I wish to diminish the little boys and the many male police and first responders) presents vivid pictures.  The relationships of teacher, predominantly women, and student in the face of the powerful aggressor with a bundle of guns and ammunition calls to mind the relationships of "two women."  Then there are the mother's of those children caught up in the aftermath of the violence.  Again there were the fathers with the same looks of horror as their wives.

Each of these sets of images calls to mind the beauty and fragility of human relationships.  Of course explicitly in the biblical account God has played a role.  That role is on the one hand miraculous but not without its own complications given a teenager who was probably ostracized by her community after becoming pregnant.  Playing behind the film and the current events at Newtown are the inevitable questions of where God is and why do these things happen. In the coincidental meeting for me of these three stories many questions are raised beyond the where and why.  The presence and absence, whether of God or another human being, the relationships in these stories call us forth to not just seek some singular meaning but to discover the web of meanings that are intertwined in our own self's presence and absence.  This Advent Season punctuated by the tragedies of war and especially by the elementary classroom deaths reminds us of the need to never let the other in these stories go unattended.