Foreign films are always of interest to me and I find them deeply provocative in the areas of social justice, relationship, culture and history.
Live and Become, a film by Radu Mihaileanu, which I viewed this week, rates very high in all these areas. While it deals with poverty, women in poverty, ones’ life story, the hiding and then the revealing of story, redemption, faith and culture, what I have been pondering today is how this particular film story reveals grace – grace that has little to do with religion and everything to do with being created in the image of the Almighty.
Schlomo, living in a refugee camp in the Sudan, was sent to Israel by his Christian mother with a Jewish woman whose son had just died. The mother instinct to do anything to save her son, and the guilt he lives with as a survivor is a strong cord in this film. Schlomo is not Jewish at all yet hides this fact for many years. He becomes a good student of the Torah and is mentored by the Falasha leader. To reveal his secret can cost him his life, his home, his community, the woman he falls in love with – yet in a desperate place he finally reveals the truth to the Falasha/Rabbi. The love of a Sephardic Jewish family who adopts him, the love of the Falasha leader – all signs of grace that somehow we think of as “Christian” behaviour, that are being revealed through characters that do not recognize Jesus as the revealer of Truth.
This is where my thoughts have been percolating today – why do we, or rather I, think grace, compassion, kindness, redemption, and sacrifices are “Christian” qualities? If we are all in the image of God our Creator, are they not qualities of the Almighty that are given to every single image bearer, no matter what faith they are? Just as this is so every single fanatical “religion” has the qualities that have no resemblance to who God is. Where does the line between religion and grace come in? Where does one become faith and the other fanaticism?
It brings me back to embracing the truth that all of us are made in God’s image. All of us are created equal, and all of us are on a journey to discovering Truth and the relationship with the Almighty that Truth draws us into. The search for this Truth often leaves me with more questions, or undefined pieces, yet each time I find a piece like this question of “grace”, I am drawn more deeply into my own sense of knowing the reality of the Almighty in my life.