In het Uur van de de Wolf was afgelopen week de documentaire Low - You may need a murderer te zien. Daarin werpt Alan Sparhawk veel terechte vragen op en geeft in woord en zang ook een aantal waarheidsgetrouwe antwoorden. Over het gezin, God, geweld en deze wereld.
De alom gewaardeerde filmserie Dekalog van Krzysztof Kieslowski is van zaterdag tot donderdagnacht te zien op Arte. Richard Corliss (Time) over Decalogue:
In the last really rich decade for movies (sorry, 90s), the three great cinematic monuments — Berlin Alexanderplatz, The Singing Detective and this one — were all made for television. Kieslowski's series, which he wrote with Krzysztof Piesiewicz, is the TV-iest of the trio: ten little dramas, each about 55 mins. long, each finding a contemporary metaphor for one of the Commandments. Its characters, all of whom live in a drab Warsaw apartment block, must cope with infidelity, cupidity, murder, abortion, the loss of a child. You needn't adhere to any religious creed (I don't know that the filmmakers had one) to be moved and exalted by these stories, to have your faith in the power of movies reaffirmed or restored. Viewers who haven't 10 hours to devote to Decalogue may get the most pleasure from episodes 1, 5, 6 and 7. But that's like going to Mass just for Communion.
Professor Harris' scholarship is impeccable, but it's neither detached nor dessicated. As few secular academics do, she went to Lourdes as a volunteer aide to the sick and found herself caught up in a web of human solidarity, open-mindedness and "spiritual generosity" (as she puts it in a fine phrase).
That experience, coupled with the discovery that modern medicine had no diagnosis (let alone a cure) for a condition then plaguing her, led Ruth Harris to question the modern mythology of scientific progress, according to which phenomena like Lourdes are mindless and reactionary. Breaking with the chief unexamined assumption of secular modernity -- that humanity, tutored by the scientific method, will outgrow its "need" for religion -- Professor Harris found her scholar's interest piqued by aspects of the story of Lourdes that skeptics typically miss.
Elizabeth Ficocelli tells the story of the shrine of Lourdes through the prism of the three theological virtues. Her description of Bernadette -- whom the Church recognizes as a saint, "not because she saw visions, but because of her heroic virtue in responding to God's mysterious call" -- is a powerful reminder that sanctity is for everyone, and that the extraordinary enters the ordinary in order to call us to our true vocations. Genuine conversion, not spectacle, is what visions are for.
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