Contact

After writing this, I realized that it’s nearly an exact repeat of an entry I wrote 7 years ago, almost verbatim. Whatever, it’s still on my mind.

Contact is one of my favorite movies of all time, despite it featuring Matthew McConaughey as the least convincing Christian theologist of all time (I could buy him as a Rastafarian for sure. Not a Christian theologist). The primary reason is because I find many lessons in it that affirm my faith. Because of that, it’s amazing to me that the original novel was written by Carl Sagan, a staunch secular humanist (also a pot user. To connect back to McConaughey).

If you haven’t seen the movie and plan to, skip the following discussion of the plot. In the movie, Jodie Foster is a researcher for SETI, looking for signs of alien communication. Eventually she finds a signal, and hidden in that signal are designs for some sort of transporter contraption. Skipping a ton of details, the world ends up building it and Foster is the first person to travel in it. When she does, she gets transported through some wormhole and makes contact with an alien civilization, who speaks to her in the form of her deceased father. After she returns, she finds out that, although she was gone for 18 hours, to the external world, it appeared like she did not travel at all, and all the audio/video she recorded on her trip were empty. So she’s put before a Congressional committee and accused of fabricating the entire thing.

There are two key scenes in the movie that I love, that encourage my faith. One is her testimony before Congress. After some discussion, James Woods (playing some politician) asks her, what basis does the committee have for believing her, that what she says occurred actually did? There’s no solid evidence. All they have is her word. And she responds: he’s right. She can’t prove it. Despite that, she knows with every fiber of her being that it’s true.

It’s a remarkable monologue, and to me, it distills the essence of faith. To know something we can’t prove. Yes, I believe that faith, at least the Christian faith, is both reasonable and logically consistent. But to prove it is a fool’s errand; it’s not possible. Even what we think would phenomenally prove our faith probably wouldn’t. Like, my G3 has been reading Matthew, and near the end of the book, Jesus appears, resurrected, to many people. And it reports the amazing fact that many people worshiped him, “but some doubted.” Uh, hello, it’s just the risen Christ. That’s not proof enough? Details like that convince me that, if you imagine that something would incontrovertibly prove God, if it were to happen, people would still find a way to doubt. It’s simply not possible.

Proving God may even be beside the point. That would remove faith from faith. And for whatever reason, God has chosen to work through faith. In the end, we are like Foster in the movie. We cannot prove it, but we know it’s true. That’s kind of unsatisfying, but the truth.

Which gets to the second scene in the movie I really love, her interaction with the aliens. As she talks with them, she questions why they do things the way they do. That is, they cryptically hide plans in a radio signal for a machine where only a single person can transport themselves. And that person is left with the impossible task of convincing the rest of their world that these other extraterrestrial civilizations are real. Wouldn’t it be better, she asks, if they revealed themselves to Earth in an obvious way, such that their existence could not be questioned?

And the alien responds: they’ve been connecting with worlds for millenia, and, whether she understands it or not, they’ve found that this seemingly inefficient, indirect, ridiculous method is the best way. “Baby steps”, he says.
I seriously find so much spiritual insight in that, whether it was intended or (more likely) not. So much of the time, maybe even most of the time, people (or at least me) question why God does things the way He does. It just seems ridiculous, a really bad way of doing things. So much so that it even makes me want to doubt Him. It would make so much more sense, I think in those moments, if He did things a different way, made it more clear or obvious.

What I’ve come to believe is that in the end, I have to have faith that the way He’s chosen is the best way. I may not understand it, I may actually even disagree with it, like Jodie Foster disagrees with the aliens. But I have to trust that His wisdom is greater than my own, and that He knows the best way. In fact, it even makes sense to me that if His wisdom is greater than my own, it *shouldn’t* always make sense to me. So the lesson of this scene rings true.

It also jives with some stuff I’ve been reading. I’ve been working my way through the great philosophers, starting from the Pre-Socratics. I’m currently on Aquinas (who is incredibly boring). But the philosopher I’ve jived with most so far is Augustine. I could not believe how much I resonate with him. And he repeats this message several times in the writings I read: in the end, we have to trust that the way God chose to do things was the best way, whether we understand it or not.

I’m convinced. For that reason, I disagree with, for example, people who are totally against the institutional church. I share their frustrations. There are many many things that suck about the Church. But wanting to destroy it and start all over, or just avoid it altogether doesn’t seem right to me. For whatever reason, God chose to use the church, filled with stupid, weak, messed-up people, to represent Him and do His work. Even the person Jesus said he’d build his church on, Peter, was a screw-up. The Church sucks a lot. But God intended from the beginning to work through that terrible system. And though I think it might not make sense, it must have been the best way.

So yeah, I disagree with those who are simply opposed to the institutional church. We should definitely address its issues. But it makes no logical sense to me that we to ditch it altogether.

It’s kind of odd to me that I take such significant spiritual lessons from things that clearly aren’t meant to be so. Like, some movies that have had a profound impact on my spiritual life are Shawshank, Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, Pleasantville, and Contact. In the case of Pleasantville, it’s even superficially anti-Christian. What I think it is is that I find that each of them accurately identifies something that is true. And since I believe Christianity to be true, it makes sense that those aspects coalesce. Still, it’s a little weird.