Hollywood theology

Autumn in Virginia always reminds me of Rudy, one of my favourite films. It tells the true story of a working-class kid from a steel mill town who dreams of playing football for Notre Dame University. Not only is he physically small, but his high school grades are too poor to get into university, and his family couldn't afford to send him anyway.

But what Rudy lacks in natural advantages, he makes up for with shear grit, enrolling in a local college to improve his grades, while working odd jobs to support himself and sleeping in a janitor's closet. He finally gets into Notre Dame, does two years of grunt work and practice for the football team, and is finally allowed to play in the last game of his senior year.

The film's most memorable image is Rudy with a heavy bookbag trudging along leaf-covered pathways at Notre Dame. I think of it every time I'm kicking up leaves and carrying a bookbag at George Mason.

Great film, and also the unexpected source of some very sound spiritual advice.

At one of the darkest moments in the film when nothing seems to be working out, Rudy, a devout Catholic, goes to see his parish priest. He asks if he's prayed enough and if there's anything else he can do. The priest replies: "In all my years of studying theology, I've learned two things: There is a God...and I'm not Him."

Obvious? Maybe -- but I've come to think that anyone who really grasps that statement and lives its implications is well on their way toward the Bible's definition of wisdom.

I was reading Jim Packer's Knowing God last night, the chapter on "God's Wisdom and Ours." Packer offered an analogy which I found helpful as well as humbling. To the average bystander at York or any other major rail station, the trains may seem to operate without rhyme or reason. Why the platform switch for the Edinburgh service? Why the delay of the 7:45 from London? But if one is invited up into the station's signal-box, these mysteries become clear. All the trains appear together on a screen and the controllers direct them according to the needs of the whole network.

Packer suggests that many Christians confuse receiving wisdom from God with being invited into the signal-box of the universe. But God does not share with us all his plans, nor are we given to understand the why and wherefore of everything that happens in the world. Wisdom is to recognize that God alone understands fully and to bow before him in reverence and awe. Or, to put it simply -- let God be God.

Our task is not to understand the distant scene, but as Packer says, to "simply try to see and do the right thing in the actual situation that presents itself."

Easier said than done, I'm afraid, but these things I am pondering.