The Messenger - December 2008 - Editorial December 08
By - 01 December 2008
Unto Us a Child is Born, Unto us a Son is Given: . People who love films are likely at almost any moment to tell you about a film that they have recently seen.
Maybe it just captured their imagination, opening up some familiar story with a new urgency or lit it up with hope. Well that is how I came to hear of the film, The Children of Men. I was losing interest after hearing it was a science fiction film, only to have my attention caught again when my friend said it was deliberately opened in the U.S. on Christmas Day 2006.
The film is set in the future, twenty years hence. By then the director imagines the chaos of our world will have reached breaking point with almost unbroken wars. A curse of human infertility has left humanity with less than a century to survive. The impending extinction is accompanied by the collapse of society. The people, desperate to survive, rise against the government, and the armies brutally try to suppress the revolt.
We are already familiar with the horrors depicted in the film: the concentration camps, the genocide, and the state repression seen only recently again in Zimbabwe. What I was not ready for was the central moment in the film when a child was born amid all that violence and hopelessness. A small group protects the mother and child. The climax in the film is reached as they attempt to smuggle them to safety through the warring factions. They are pinned down in the crossfire between two armies. And then the baby cries. When the soldiers and the armed insurgents hear the baby cry, the fighting stops. Their guide leads the mother and the baby to safety, walking past the astonished soldiers. In a world that was without hope, a child was born - and with the child, hope for the future.
The film opened on Christmas Day because the birth of a child is at the centre of Christmas. It was perceptive of the film director to grasp that so much of what preoccupies us today is sterile. A modern Christmas seems to be a search for a happiness that all too often proves elusive. We can perceive happiness to consist in acquiring or consuming; it can be competitive as in the film. The life-giving elements are less fashionable but await rediscovery: the instinct to travel any distance to be reunited and celebrate with family, to be reaffirmed in friendship, and to rediscover an old mystery - that there is more joy in giving than in receiving. The prophet got it right. Emmanuel, he said, God is with us. He not only accepted to die for us, he freely chose to live with us. It is our future.
John Looby, S.J.
Editor