It keeps coming back to me…

I watched My Dinner with Andre for the first time a couple months back, and it continues to rock me. Dense in the conversation is the story of a man’s journey to find and recover his soul in a world where Man is abolished from any importance. He called modern man a walking “zombie”, or a creature that is asleep but doesn’t want to know it.

His journey is essentially an attempt to reconnect with his Creator God, though I am not sure he understood that. I certainly didn’t recognize that when I went out and tried almost every kind of spirituality there is out there. I knocked on almost every door on the block that claimed to have the answer, which is the meaning of life and truth and existence. Some doors I entered; other doors I rang the doorbell, peered inside and ran away. I think the character of Andre describes doing much of the same thing. As a side note, I heard that the actor/writer of this film, Andre Gregory, who is actually playing himself in the film, returned to the Christian faith of his fathers some time after this film was made.

But what comes back to me again and again in this film is what Andre said about the nature of the modern world. It haunts me in fact when I look out at the world around me.

WALLY: [Quieter:] Well, why…why do you think that is? I mean, why is that? I mean, is it just because people are lazy today? Or they’re bored? I mean, are we just like bored, spoiled children who’ve just been lying in the bathtub all day just playing with their plastic duck and now they’re just thinking: “Well! what can I do?”

ANDRE: Okay! Yes! We’re bored! We’re all bored now! But has it ever occurred to you, Wally, that the process that creates this boredom that we see in the world now may very well be a self-perpetuating, unconscious form of brain-washing, created by a world totalitarian government based on money? And that all of this is much more dangerous than one thinks? And it’s not just a question of individual survival, Wally, but that somebody who’s bored is asleep, and somebody who’s asleep will not say “no”? See, I keep meeting these people, I mean, uh, just a few days ago I met this man whom I greatly admire, he’s a Swedish physicist, Gustav Björnstrand? And he told me that he no longer watches television, he doesn’t read newspapers and he doesn’t read magazines. He’s completely cut them out of his life, because he really does feel that we’re living in some kind of Orwellian nightmare now, and that everything that you hear now contributes to turning you into a robot!

And when I was at Findhorn, I met this extraordinary English tree expert, who had devoted his life to saving trees. He just got back from Washington, lobbying to save the redwoods? He’s eighty-four years old and he always travels with a back-pack ’cause he never knows where he’s gonna be tomorrow! And when I met him at Findhorn he said to me: “Where are you from?” And I said: “New York.” He said: “Ah, New York! Yes, that’s a very interesting place. Do you know a lot of New Yorkers who keep talking about the fact that they want to leave but never do?” And I said: “Oh, yes!” And he said: “Why do you think they don’t leave?” I gave him different banal theories. He said: “Oh, I don’t think it’s that way at all.” He said: “I think that New York is the new model for the new concentration camp, where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves, and the inmates are the guards, and they have this pride in this thing they’ve built, they’ve built their own prison. And so they exist in a state of schizophrenia, where they are both guards and prisoners. And as a result they no longer have, having been lobotomized, the capacity to leave the prison they’ve made, or to even see it as a prison. And then he went into his pocket and he took out a seed for a tree, and he said: “This is a pine tree.” He put it in my hand and he said: “Escape, before it’s too late.”

You see, actually, for two or three years now Chiquita and I have had this very unpleasant feeling that we really should get out. No, we really should feel like Jews in Germany in the late thirties? Get out of here! Of course, the problem is where to go, ’cause it seems quite obvious that the whole world is going in the same direction.
You see, I think it’s quite possible that the nineteen-sixties represented the last burst of the human being before he was extinguished. And that this is the beginning of the rest of the future now, and that from now on there’ll simply be all these robots walking around, feeling nothing, thinking nothing. And there’ll be nobody left almost to remind them that there once was a species called a human being, with feelings and thoughts. And that history and memory are right now being erased, and soon nobody will really remember that life existed on the planet! [Emphasis Mine]

There is a nihilism here that’s virtually inescapable with Jesus. Indeed, if this world is all one has with no afterlife, then life and existence might very well feel quite bleak.

As a Christian, however, I know that my citizenship is in the Kingdom of Heaven, not on this earth. With this knowledge, Jesus has given me the tools to detach from the outcomes of this world, to turn to Him and observe the world go to whatever end it has decided to go.