HIGH SPIRITS: Lenten Gibson
Aitken, Jonathan
T WOULD PROBABLY BE VAIN OF ME to suppose that Mel Gibson read my article in these illustrious pages last month. Since I was writing about the spiritual need to re-emphasize the importance of Lent...
...My assignment was to give the two opening Lenten talks at the Cathedral Church of the Advent in Birmingham, Alabama...
...I have stayed tuned to that Lenten wavelength during my recent travels across the United States...
...Why on earth I was invited to join their company is a mystery, possibly explicable by the notion that one speaker each year would be included to represent publicans and sinners...
...The power of Gibson's movie to unlock deeply private feelings of the spirit and to put them into open discussion at the lunch and dinner table was a phenomenon that repeated itself at every stop in my travels...
...to make a convincing case for suggesting (as the astronomical box office figures suggest) that Gibson's movie is having some remarkable consequences in this season of Lent Jonathan Aitken, a former British MP and cabinet minister, is the author of seven books, including Nixon: A Life...
...But there is a paradox here...
...I flew into the Bible Belt on February 25, Ash Wednesday this year and the date deliberately chosen by Gibson for the general release of The Passion...
...One measure of its success is the size of its congregation (2,000 plus on Sundays...
...Three days later I was giving an outreach talk in Jupiter Island, Florida, a winter residential community for old money families...
...For it is they who have become the movie's greatest enthusiasts, making huge block bookings for their Protestantcongregations and using it as a prime tool for their evangelistic programs...
...For at the next Youth Evening at his church, the attendance soared from 200 to over 300...
...I discovered a good example of this when I made contact with the First Baptist Church of South Florida...
...My soundings tell me that this movie will all but eradicate anti-Catholicism among Evangelical Protestants...
...The media have been quick to label The Passion a "Catholic movie" because of the prominence given to the role of Mary the mother of Jesus by the Catholic Mel Gibson...
...It's the first time it's ever come home to me that He died on the cross for me, for you, for everyone in this room...
...When I referred to the The Passion it was noticeable that a stillness fell over the auditorium...
...Let me begin with the spiritual deepening, partly because this was the theme of my first sermon in Birmingham, where I preached on Psalm 130 with its opening verse: Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord, Hear my voice Let your ears be attentive To my cry for mercy At the lunch for some 250 Adventists following my talk in which I had followed Augustine's example of equating the psalmist's crying with praying, someone came up to me and said he understood exactly what I had meant because he had just seen The Passion and he had now grasped that Jesus' cries from the cross were all a continuous extension of his apparently unanswered (until three days later) Gethsemane prayer...
...Every year it marks the ancient 40-day season of penitence with 40 sermons delivered by some of the most eminent bishops, theologians, and preachers in the firmament of Anglicanism...
...Be that as it may, I was fascinated by the reaction to Gibson's movie in Alabama and in other states I visited...
...For what emerged as a common experienceacross this broad spectrum of Christian communities is that the Mel Gibson factor has been a huge catalyst for teaching and deepening the spiritual lives of individuals this Lent...
...Two days later I was dining in Naples, Florida, with a prominent Catholic layman in the Detroit archdiocese...
...This is a hugely successful and serious mother church of the Episcopalian denomination...
...But Jim Evans' rejoicing at the results of his questionnaire seems well founded...
...No one is claiming that this is a representative sample or that as Florida's Southern Baptists go so goes the nation...
...Its administrator, Jim Evans, had block-booked 640 seats at the Regal Hollywood 20 Movie Theater in Naples on the opening night of The Passion, offering the tickets mainly to young people who were not regular churchgoers...
...Was this a purely localized Bible Belt reaction I wondered...
...These Southern Baptist meeting methods may seem a little simplistic to those who like to seek religious paths to grace with cautious and intellectual footsteps...
...In Birmingham, where the dean of the cathedral had recommended to his flock that if they wanted a Lenten discipline "then go see The Passion on every one of the next 40 days," the movie was the prime subject of conversation at every meal time...
...3. Learn more about Jesus Christ...
...4. Commit your life to Jesus Christ...
...I bet it was also the first time that the dining room of the Jupiter Club had ever been home to the expression of such sentiments...
...Another is the number of hits (250,000 per month) on its web-site, which records all its sternly orthodox teachings and preachings...
...The Advent is a conservative Cathedral that takes Lent extremely seriously...
...The only condition for getting a ticket (which were in as short supply as gold dust for the first two weeks of screening) was that the recipients fill in a card with the following questions: As a result of seeing The Passion would you like to: 1. Come to one of our Youth Evenings at our church...
...We all killed Jesus," she said...
...Not so...
...Since I was writing about the spiritual need to re-emphasize the importance of Lent among America's Christians, it would appear that the great director of The Passion of the Christ and the humble High Spirits correspondent of The American Spectator were on the same page in at least one respect...
...After seeing The Passion I will never again take the sacraments without thinking of Our Lord's sacrifice in a new and deeper way," he said with a visible emotion that surprised me only because I happen to know that his lifelong commitment to the Catholic Church could hardly be stronger...
...Yet I could fill the rest of this article with enough anecdotes from the communities I visited in Alabama, Florida, Virginia, Georgia, and Washington D.C...
...2. Become a church member...
...Also as a direct response to the viewing of the movie, 28 young people signed up for church membership, 10 filled in the card saying they wanted to know more about Jesus Christ, and 18 said they wanted to commit their lives to Christ immediately...
...Afterwards at a dinner in the Jupiter Club, an heiress of legendary wealth castigated the New York Times for its blame-game columns about whether the Jews or the Romans had killed Jesus...
Vol. 37 • April 2004 • No. 3
