|
Morning Reflection
May 30, 2025
Preface:
For the five years that we’ve distributed meditations, Scripture has been their singular starting point; but I’m aware that there are many issues, concerns, and points of interest specific to our time, that are never explicitly mentioned in Scripture and that, nonetheless, deserve theologically-informed comment. Periodically, then, in place of Meditations, we will offer Reflections that address these matters. Hopefully, they will both broaden and deepen the reach of faith and how it can appropriately be included in the general conversation of life.
Acquiring Character
I think there's a relationship between attention span and morality… if you shorten people's attention span a great deal, you are left with only the attraction of power and the power of power.
The function of documentaries, if they still have a function, is to be an antidote not so much to fiction filmmaking as to the news… To be able to reflect together and to juxtapose events and people in such a way that individual destinies and collective destinies make us think and reflect about our own roles in life - the best way to do that, I think, is to be subjective and to go in the direction of film essays.
Marcel Ophuls: from a 1978 interview on NPR, rebroadcast on May 26, 2025
Reflection
I don’t know whether Marcel Ophuls thought himself to be prophetic. No one had the slightest idea five decades ago that the age of Instagram and Tik Tok was looming. His most famous film, The Sorrow and the Pity, was four and a half hours long, which seemed demanding of the viewer when it was released in 1969. How much more challenging would it be today when just about everything needs to be condensed into sound bites of no more than a sentence or into ten second video clips in order to be retained.
Ophuls set himself the task, however, of conveying the experience of World War II in France – but not as it’s popularly remembered in segments given by newsreels telling of soldiers and armies. He wanted to portray the war as it was lived by villagers, who had to muddle through each day under occupation. He worked at the human level, asking common people simply how they got by. And from this perspective, four and a half hours was hardly enough to tell the story. Life is that way. It’s complicated in even the most mundane matters. And it’s full of compromise and error because it happens in real time.
When we forget this, when our attention span no longer affords room for the human, then we become immoral, fascinated only by power – and as Ophuls observed, adding emphasis, the “power of power.” And isn’t this the seduction that, across the globe, we’re increasingly falling into – where nothing else matters.
Years ago I realized, quite by accident, when I had become an Episcopalian. It wasn’t by decision. I had been a staff singer in an Episcopal church for several months, each Sunday working through the repetition of the liturgy. And while having coffee with a number of fellow staff singers, none of whom had grown up in the church, we together realized that we could recite large portions of the liturgy from memory. We were surprised by this. Paying attention over time, sometimes just by showing up, had its effect. And we felt changed, however subtly. And we recognized, as well, that the statements that we could recite without effort were words shared with others, with all the rest who showed up. In this way, by the habits of worship, we claimed the same destiny. And that built up in us an empathy and interest in one another that was an expression of morality – something greater than power. Somehow, we belonged, not to an institution per se but to a community established by paying attention, at length. The church isn’t so much defined by what it says it believes; it’s the continual, repeated act of believing together that gives us all character.
The following was one of the prayers I had remembered that day. It hasn’t been included in our liturgies for many years, but I can still recite it with ease:
“We do not presume to come to this thy table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy table. But thou art the same Lord whose property is always to have mercy. Grant us, therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood, that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us.”
| 
