With full awareness of all the basic white girl jokes that it automatically incurs, I'm still going to claim that Love, Actually is a wonderful movie. It's not just because I've seen a lot of bad chick flicks and the caliber of both the acting and the writing is on a completely different plane of existence from so much of the genre. And it's not even just because of how I swoon at every moment of the Liam Neeson storyline although that definitely helps. I love that it's a love story that represents of the reality of love as extending far beyond the bounds of romance. I also love that it portrays the ways that all of our different love stories overlap and bump into each other - that the way we love or fail to love sends out ripples in all directions.
Today is the feast of John the Evangelist and the friend of a friend who gave us a tour of the Basilica of John Lateran also gave me a mountain-load of things to reflect on in the space of a minute or two:
his traditional symbol is the eagle because eagles can stare into the sun without going blind
he was the only disciple not to be martyred because he was the only disciple who had already been to the Cross
he teaches us about the virtue of friendship and enduring with the loved one in their hour of need.
And all of them center on what was behind everything that John said and wrote and did: love.
His clear sight and profound mysticism his "staring into the sun" all hang on the consistent simplicity of the claim that God is love and that that is everything.
Learning to love and be loved is everything that we have to do on earth. But in this fallen world and with our fallen hearts, we can't learn those things without truly encountering the Cross. Our hearts have to be broken before they can be whole.
Friendship can sometimes feel like the forgotten form of love - relegated to the realm of "a nice bonus if you can get it but not that big of a deal in the end."
Perhaps that's part of why I tend to be so moved by community related scenes like the one in Christmas with the Kranks that somehow ALWAYS makes me cry. Perhaps that's also why I love shows like The Office and Parks and Rec in which friendship isn't just the pleasant sidebar to the main story of romance. (Please don't get me wrong, I love the romance love stories too! And the family ones! I think all the kinds of love stories are important.) The friendship is also a love story and it's of the utmost importance in the process of becoming who you are meant to be.
That's something that particularly struck me when another friend of a friend told us about Sophie Scholl as we stood shivering the in the courtyard of the University of Munich that she attended. Our guide emphasized the importance of the friendship that Sophie shared with her comrades and how their victory was not so much measured by their external success as by who they became. And of course who they became ended up sending out ripple effects of hope and inspiration that still change the world today.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that of all the grand and glorious places I was able to see in Europe, it is the fitting and epic climax to come home to a place where I have a community. I am more loved by my friends than my childhood self could have dreamed and I owe so much of the person I have become, the ways that I have grown to the people who stick around, not because of vows or family ties, but solely because they love me.
One thing that particularly delights me about Love, Actually is the Heathrow Airport footage at the beginning and the end and, more specifically, what plays over the footage. The opening quote sets up just what makes the film so beautiful:
Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion is starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don't see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often, it's not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it's always there - fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as i know, none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge - they were all messages of love. If you look for it, I've got a sneaky feeling you'll find that love actually is all around.
And the end provided me one of my favorite gratitude reflections. Sometimes I drive through Milwaukee or scroll through old pictures and listen to the Beach Boys sing: God only knows what I'd be without you and I become instinctually and profoundly aware of the enormous and invaluable gift of friendship.
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