Lessons From "The Road"

Lessons From "The Road"

A few years back a film came out called "The Road", it starred Vigo Mortensen of LORD OF THE RINGS fame. It was the story of a man and his son, traveling down a long and dangerous road in a post-apocalyptic era. The vision of the future was terrifying, though much of it was cliche in films these days: cannibalism, an earth destroyed by some ecological disaster, etc.

But underlying this story was a profoundly theological message. Everything is full of Christian symbolism, so much so that some churches were screening the film. The central issue was whether or not the father could maintain his own humanity in the midst of such terror, all the while trying to safeguard the boy's life and his innocence. The man crosses lines many times, and in the end seems to all but lose himself but the boy's goodness and light redeems the father, granting him the soul he would've lost unto himself.

The central message of the story is given when the duo encounters an old, nearly blind man played by Robert Duval. The man tells the father, "when I first heard that boy's voice, I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. His voice sounded like the voice of God." To which the father replies, "he is God, to me." Later on, the old man says something to the effect of, "that must be a terribly difficult burden, carrying the last god around with you."

Leaving aside the polytheistic undertones of the words themselves, the overall message is powerful, and to me reveals the fundamental insight of the Christian message. God exists in and through the vulnerable. We are in God's hands, yes, and God does for us all those things we can't do for ourselves: redemption, hope, forgiveness. But those gifts are given much like a child gives and is given. God saves us by falling into our arms, by suffering and dying for us. In that film we see both the manger and the cross, all in one. We hold in our hands the very presence of God. This is God's gift to us, for indeed it is GOD that we hold, the eternal incarnated in the human moment.

Our choice to help or not help, to love or not love, to believe or not believe even, is a choice to let God die and suffer anew, or to pick up the Cross with Simon the Cyrene. Every moment we birth God into the world or sacrifice him to our own satanic impulses. In this is the horror and the wonder of the human experience.

A final query: must we know God to help Him? I think unbelief hurts God, but that doesn't mean that the average atheist hurts God more than the average believer. Does the one who loves the child as a child receive the benefits of God's manifestation as the child?