Life has to mean something

-

Watched 'About Schmidt', on a flight to Hong Kong yesterday, the 2002 Jack Nicholson film about a man who retires from his career as an Actuary. Soon his wife from a rather unfulfilling marriage dies, his daughter is getting married to a loser, he has nothing to do. He discovers his wife had an affair with his best friend that he never knew about, he visits his old firm and his old school, but they have moved on seamlessly without him. He tries to stop his daughter's wedding with no success. He travels across America in a Winnebago, visiting tacky places and making drab observations on them.
It is the story of a life lived without depth or significance. It is the story of a dawning realisation of the need for significance and meaning beyond survival and routine. At the end he says: 'We are all pretty small in the big scheme of things and I suppose the most you can hope for is to make some kind of difference. But what difference have I made? What in the world is better because of me? I am weak and a failure. There's just no getting around it. Relatively soon I will die. Once I am dead and those who knew me are dead it will be as though I never really existed. What difference will my life have made? None that I can think of. None at all.' It is the saddest confession, the saddest story I have heard in a long time. Yet there is something strangely heroic about it. It takes courage to realise it, stare it in the face and say it. Not everyone can do that. That is repentance – the clarity of mind that sees our own emptiness and unimportance on our own. We cannot live without significance, without life meaning something. Warren Schmidt is Everyman, Mr Smith. Many are like him. Few get to the realisation he makes of the superficiality, the emptiness of lives lived without a broader purpose, without being part of a bigger story, a story in which they amount to something 'in the big scheme of things', God's scheme of things. To realise that is the beginning of wisdom. To do something about it is even better.

Comments

  1. John-D Borra20 October 2010 at 00:29

    Wonderful post! Thanks for sharing this. I hope someday to move from the beginning of wisdom, to the wisdom of sharing new beginnings. God bless!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Trystan Owain Hughes20 October 2010 at 17:20

    Thanks for that post, Graham. I have a discussion guide on the clip that you quote:
    http://www.hopeandmeaning.com/#/about-schmidt-helping-video/4543195882

    ReplyDelete
  3. Chris22 October 2010 at 12:15

    Great post - who knew in-flight entertainment could bring about such meaning!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Wounded Realist - Guest Blog by Denis Adide

-
Image
In recent days we have become aware of the pervasive presence of racism in our own hearts, our church and society. I asked Denis Adide, one of the younger clergy in the Kensington Area to offer a Guest Blog piece reflecting on his experience.  Perhaps it was the collective awareness of our mortality brought about by the global pandemic. The world was made sensitive to the simplicity of life ’ s light and how easy it is to extinguish. The numbers of those lost to Covid-19 being read out in the daily briefings starkly reminding us all of just how vulnerable we each are.  Perhaps, in addition, the stripping away of all the normal distractions gave some of us - for the first time - a long sight of the mirror. We were forced to confront who we were - apart from the normal  ‘ what we do for a living ’  answer.  Perhaps, the recently developed culture/habit of long, YouTube and TikTok spirals with videos linked to videos meant that the sight of something  ‘ viral ’  was inevitable. 
Read more
-
Image
A Sermon in a service of Commemoration for Her Late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II for Richmond Borough Council, at St Mary's Twickenham We gather here today at the end of an extraordinary week. So many words have been said, so many pictures taken, so many comments posted, so many hours spent queuing and waiting for a glimpse of the coffin.  Our reading this evening from the epistle to the Hebrews gives us this advice; “Remember your leaders... Consider the outcome of their way of life and imitate their faith.” I want to take that advice this evening and offer a few brief reflections on the life of Her late Majesty Queen Elizabeth, to discern what we learned from her example as we seek to consider the “outcome of her way of life and imitate her faith.” The first thing we might usefully learn from her is her understanding of leadership as service. She held the highest office in the land and yet she understood that calling not primarily to privilege, to wealth, or power over others, but
Read more

The Stark Choice that COVID sets before us

-
Image
In the old days they would have seen this as a judgment. With a global death toll that has now passed 1 million, this plague would have been interpreted by our forebears as divine punishment or a sign of the end times. Not many people are seeing it that way these days, but maybe our elders had a point. The Greek word for judgment is Krisis – crisis. The great book of judgment in the Bible is called the Apocalypse – the book of Revelation. Judgment was not only seen as punishment, but more as a moment of crisis, a revelation of where we are heading, impressing the stakes of a crucial decision upon us. At the start of lockdown, in towns, villages and cities across the country, people of all faiths and none volunteered time and money, neighbours knocked on the door of elderly people to offer to do their shopping, family members arranged Zoom calls to keep up the spirits of isolated relatives. One of the churches in my patch began to think about how to respond to the needs that were quickl
Read more