Religious People

I went and saw Deepa Mehta’s Water last week, the last film in her elements trilogy. These films have made Mehta many enemies and many admirers. I fall firmly in the admirers camp. If I can someday do with words what she does with film, I will die happy. Water is a beautiful and shocking and heart-wrenching film set in India in 1938, not one for the faint of heart. But one of the things that struck me most about it was that everybody in it was a believer, a member of a religion. All Hindus. Except Gandhi, who gets portrayed as if he’d given up the pursuit of God for the pursuit of truth, which I take some issue with... But that aside, everybody is Hindu. And some of them are innocent, and some have blood on their hands. Some are cruel and hypocritical and others devout and earnest. Some are merciful and some are calculating. Some serve their faith and others use it for their own gratification. One of the most spiritual characters in the film is a young widow who used as a whore by high-ranking Brahmins—despite everything, she manages to keep hold of her faith, until love and despair undoes her.

Mehta is braver than I in her decision to have this enormous panoply of religious characters, some good, some bad. I noticed some time ago that everyone—well, almost everyone, in my Sudan novel believed in God. But some of them are awful people. And this gave me a long and unresolved pause, which I think stems from a heretofore unexplored concern that, as a Christian, I should not have Bad Christian Characters. That if I am to have Christians in my writing, I should only write about ‘good’ Christians--devout Christians, or at least ones with reasonably sound theology. But this seems to me now to be foolish. Mehta had the courage to hint that Hindus, devout or otherwise, are still just people. And so are Christians—just people, a motley crowd of people—some of us well-meaning, some of us loving and merciful people, and some of us downright wicked. And it would be nice if God turned up and knocked all of us wicked and hypocritical Christians off our horses like He did for Paul and demanded, What are you doing to my people? But God doesn't always do this. God seems to largely let us get on with it, for better or for worse.

And that, I suppose, is what I like to write about--how we get on with it, for better or for worse.