BP40
Edee (pronounced eedee) insists she doesn’t want to be around people . . .
If you’ve read many posts in this blog, you have repeatedly encountered the Designer Therapy for Life theme that there are three ways you can relate to people: you can move against them, away from them, or toward them. To move against others is to drive people away with outright anger. To move away from others is to escape into a lonely existence divorced from relationships. To move toward is to choose to be in relationship with others and, hopefully, with God.
In the movie, Land, Edee has chosen to move away from people—maybe even against them—after the tragic deaths of her husband and young son. In her grief—which she attempts to suppress–she is even willing to treat her own life carelessly. Clearly, she has a death wish. In a sense, she is moving against her own self to escape her dreaded suffering.
To die feels like a better option to Edee than to be slowly suffocated by pain.
Most of us could understand that her grief might be so engulfing that she cannot allow herself to feel it. Many of us might even be able to empathize with her fleeting desire to kill herself after losing the two most important people in her life. This poor woman’s world has been shattered by the unexpected double loss of husband and son.
Edee doesn’t want to be around others because she’s convinced that she will burden them with her dark agony. She also seems to hate the presence of others because she believes that no one will be able to enter into her grief. No one will be able to comfort her in her unique loss. Even if she is around others, she will still be alone because only she knows the bottomless depth of her searing grief.
Wanting to avoid people, Edee packs up and moves into an abandoned cabin in the Alberta wilderness. She acts like a dog that, knowing it is sick beyond recovery, limps off to find a place to die alone. She relies on no one, except herself. But Edee turns out to be bad company for Edee because she has no capacity to comfort herself.
Some critics hate the drudgery and the small amount of dialogue in this movie while others love the power of the expressive nonverbal acting and the backdrop of the Canadian Rockies. Personally, I thought the movie was decent. The acting was good. Miguel’s compassion for Edee was exemplary. The cinematography was great.
Even Edee’s choice to run away from the world and her hypersensitivity to anyone who attempts to get close to her I am able to accept if I combine her immense grief with what I would diagnose as features of a premorbid personality disorder. (Okay, okay, I’ll take off the psychologist’s hat.)
Back to Land . . .
One thing in the movie captured my attention above everything else . . .
The total emptiness of it. The hollowness. The deadness.
Better said, it created within me a sensation of living in a meaningless universe.
The question I was led to ask at the end of the movie was, Is this all there is?
If Edee’s goal was to shut people out, to distance from the true self God created her to be, and to become one with impersonal Mother Nature, she succeeded. The trade-off is that she was condemned to endure a soundless, lonely, stark existence. If the goal of the writers and the director was to leave the viewer with the feeling that life is ultimately nothingness, they succeeded, in my experience of Land.
If that was not their contrived intent but simply an expression of their philosophy about the universe that flowed naturally into the movie script, I am left feeling very sad.
The movie moved me to sadness and grief because of Edee’s human losses–her husband and son, obviously, but also the rest of humanity she shut out of her life including her sister, Emma. However, the emptiness and hollowness I felt during and after the movie was present for another reason. What was that reason?
A personal God was nowhere to be found in this movie—not even in the vehicle of His name being taken in vain. He simply does not exist for Edee, even to be hated by her. Either the long and deep darkness in her life has climaxed in the eradication of God or the long absence of God in her life has naturally led her into deep darkness.
What am I getting at here?
Why am I even taking time in a blog to talk about this movie?
Odd as it may sound, my ultimate observation about this movie is that it laid naked the amazing contrast between traveling through life with Jesus and traveling through it without Him. I believe Land unintentionally offers unmistakable apologetical evidence for why Jesus is so compelling for those who know Him: after we enter into a relationship with Him, we soon see that our previous life without him was hollow, alone, empty and dark and that our new life—although often difficult and painful—is always permeated by hope.
Even Edee’s unbearable grief would have been assuaged had she known Jesus. She would eventually have remembered the comforting words, “We do not grieve as those who have no hope,” or the amazing promise, “Behold, I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed” (2 Corinthians 15).
Edee most likely would have also been familiar with the saying that goes something like, Christians never say goodbye—only, ‘see you later’. Of course, the Holy Spirit would have been in her heart to personally comfort her unspeakable sadness with His presence as the Great Comforter and the Master Counselor.
Yes, that was why I felt emptiness creep into my heart as I watched Land. Death was portrayed as so final. It had the last word. God was not there to announce that there is something beyond death. He was not a source of comfort or hope because He was not even a thought in Edee’s mind.
She appeared to be a committed materialist who believed that only things she could see and touch existed in the universe. She turned to the land, not to the Lord who created the land.
I love nature but turning to land as the place to seek solace (or escape) as Edee did after the death of her loved ones feels so inadequate. If I sought comfort only in nature apart from nature’s Creator, it would only intensify my grief. I could stare at the painting but never meet the Painter.
The whole point of Designer Therapy for Life is that we were created from the very beginning for relationship with God, others, and our own selves (Edee did not have any of these for several years because she cut them all off), and if we don’t have them, we will experience disturbances within us that will translate via Leakage into both physical and mental illnesses. Edee’s divorce of all relationships highly exacerbated her suffering instead of remedying it.
So, Edee had no faith in God. As was mentioned, she never speaks to a deity during the whole extent of the movie. There is no divine presence for her to be angry with, or to question, or with whom to weep. At least anger toward God during seasons of suffering might reflect the possibility of an emotional connection that later might turn to comfort.
Edee did not have such an intimate connection with a personal divinity. If she divorces herself from people, as she did choose to do, then there is no one left from whom to receive hope and comfort since she has already divorced God and her own self and will receive nothing from those two sources.
How many people in this world attempt to navigate their way through life divorced from God, others and even their own selves whether they are grieving or not? (A topic to be discussed in another post is that if we are not in relationship with God, we cannot be in relationship with our own hearts.)
Even in my saddest, loneliest, most angry moments in life, Jesus was always with me—at least after age seventeen. I may not have understood what He was doing, and I may have questioned where He was, but I knew He existed. I knew I was not alone in the universe.
What a gamechanger Jesus is. He is the gamechanger. I have discovered that it is much better to know Jesus in my pain than to know pain and not know Jesus.
Atheism and agnosticism offer little to no comfort in suffering. Pain has no meaning in those worldviews—ever.
I’m not a huge movie watcher, but I have viewed a fair number of flicks over the decades. The movies I remember most vividly are the ones that move me emotionally or, interestingly enough, those that leave me with a deadness inside when the credits roll—hollow, empty, emotionless, maybe numb. Land was of the second type. Even the Cabin soundtrack left me feeling like I was floating in airy nothingness going nowhere.
I have discovered that the hollow, empty movies are usually the ones where God is totally absent. What remains to fill the gap when God is left out? Gratuitous violence or sex or bleak philosophies of the universe or a lonely existence that is loud with an eerie quiet.
It’s like being at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in the month of May with 300,000 other spectators to watch the Indy 500 but not a single car is on the track. The Brickyard is completely silent, devoid of the main attraction.
Fortunately, Land seems to end with a ray of hope. Ultimately, Edee chooses to move toward people after faithful Miguel pursued her and coaxed her out of her total exile in the dungeon of her heart. After almost three years of being apart from her sister, Edee calls Emma, and we hear her sibling’s delight at the sound of her sister’s voice.
The excitement in Emma’s voice is the most thrilling sound in the whole movie. There is hope. There is connection.
How good that Edee chose relationship with other humans over death or a lifelong escape into nature—so beautiful but so devoid of intimacy. How good that she allowed Miguel into her heart which then propelled her to pursue her sister.
But what about God? Has Edee’s experience in the wilderness opened the door of her heart to consider the existence of a God who came for her, who pursues her wherever she goes—her loving Creator who wrote the owner’s manual about her?
In a very real sense, a viewer of Edee’s life might say that she has not asked the most important question in the universe, namely, Is there a God behind nature and can I know Him personally?
I want to be very careful at this point. I want to make it clear that I am not trying to hoist some rigid religious expectation on a nonbeliever as I self-righteously dissect the movie and shake my head at pathetic Edee. Not at all. Never. I am not criticizing her grief or the method she chose to deal with it. We all grieve in different ways. I am not even shaking my head at her unbelief.
Rather, I am speaking of the deep sadness I feel when I am reminded that many people do life without hardly a thought of God. It is natural for them—at least in their own minds–to live apart from Jesus. What is unnatural for them is to think that a personal divinity exists who loves them and wants to be involved in every detail of their lives—especially in their grief, loneliness, anger, and fear.
No, I do not wish to communicate that Jesus is a legalistic should that these godless individuals must pursue or I will judge them with holier-than-thou wrath. Not at all. Rather, I want to compassionately invite these people to consider the truth that Jesus is the missing relationship in their lives who will help them make sense of everything in the universe—even death. He certainly does not want to give them less. He always wants to give them more—more than they can ever imagine!
If Edee would believe in Jesus, He would reveal to her where she comes from, why she is here, where she is going, that she is loved unconditionally, and will comfort her in the agonizing experience of loss and death—senseless death. Death is always senseless according to God’s plan.
What would happen if you brought up the name of Jesus to someone like Edee whose natural inclination is to not even consider the existence of the divine? She might react with anger, defensiveness, and think you’re a flat earth radical who has nothing rational to speak into her life. She might assume that God is some totally foreign, judgmental personality who was created by a bunch of patriarchal men who lived in the first century AD.
Initially, she is probably not going to be receptive to God’s love for her. She most likely will reject Jesus out of hand when, in fact, He is the Key who will unlock the universe for her. It is tragic how such a hopeful, joyful message is shunned while the belief that she is utterly alone is embraced. I’ve often thought that it is a no-brainer to choose Jesus. But things get in the way . . .
What is the message I see and hear in Land?
There is no one beyond ourselves in this gloomy world. We are ultimately alone. The buck stops with meaningless death, and then the humans we love are gone forever. Look to the beauty and presence of nature for comfort because land feels kind of eternal. Even look to someone like Miguel to help you but realize that he, too, will disappoint you in the end when he admits that he was drunk and behind the wheel of the car in the accident that killed his wife and daughter.
Life is nothing but a tragedy.
What is my response to the message of Land?
Life is difficult. Sometimes, it is cruel. Often it makes no sense. Occasionally, we feel all alone. We might even feel like dying at times.
But be careful how you respond at those times. Work to not move away from or against God and others. As someone once said, when you are hurt or angry, don’t trust yourself. You will act out of your emotional mind instead of responding out of your rational mind. How often is our knee-jerk reaction the source of greater pain for us than the original suffering that elicited our reaction?
When unexpected and tragic suffering enters your life, run (or limp) to Jesus. You do not want to run away from Him or guillotine Him from your life. He is the most beautiful Being in the universe. He pursued you. In love, He died for you. He wants to adopt you into His family. He is the kindest Being, the most patient, the most just, the most merciful, the most forgiving. He is strong and He will never change.
How tragic for Edee to be a castaway in the middle of the land but be a million miles away from her Lord–Jesus, the center of the universe. The crux of it all. The key that opens every mysterious door of life. Even the door to your heart.
For those of you who know Jesus as your friend and seek Him daily, do not judge those who are walking through this world without Him. Have mercy on them because you were in their shoes at one time: apart from God, having no hope and without God in the world . . . far off. Alone.
Love like Jesus loves. Always be prepared to give a defense for the hope that is in you—and live it out every day in your words and actions so you will be a fragrance to those without God.
Be kind because everyone is fighting a great battle and be compassionate because you may be the only Bible they will ever read–until they seek Him with all their hearts and find Him. He will bring them hope and joy in every realm of their lives: spiritual, psychological, physical, and relational.
There are many Edees out there in the world we live in. If God directs your path across theirs, go into their land and knock on the door of their cabin. Everyone desperately needs to know they are not alone in the universe. Nothing else is worse than that feeling. God is bringing them to you so you can love them and speak God’s truth. Always love first.
Maybe one day God will save Edee through you before she barricades herself forever in her lonely cabin. She may never come out without your message of hope—not a message that is a regional, tribal truth, but the One on which the pillars of the universe are grounded.
Go therefore and make disciples of all nations ~ Matthew 28:19
And the Spirit said to Philip, Go over and join this chariot.’ So Philip ran to him and heard him reading Isaiah the prophet and asked, ‘Do you understand what you are reading?’ And he said, ‘How can I, unless someone guides me?’ And he invited Philip to come and sit with him ~ Acts 8:26-31
Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another. Do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly. Never be wise in your own sight. Repay no one evil for evil, but give thought to do what is honorable in the sight of all. If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all ~ Romans 15:15-18