My family has a tradition of watching a movie together on Thanksgiving Day. I'll admit, it's one of my favorite traditions. A free movie after stuffing myself with turkey? I'm not complaining. This year I chose to see Hugo over my other two options: The Muppets and Arthur Christmas. To be honest, I was expecting a Martin Scorcese version of I,Robot, but from the moment the lights dimmed, I knew I was in for a surprise.
I'll go ahead and recommend this movie to you. Instead of trying to lay out the incredibly complicated plot, let me give you the bare bones. Hugo is about the desire inside of each of us to "work." For the first part of the movie, Hugo (our orphaned protagonist) spends his time trying to fix an automaton (robot). Hugo does everything he can to fix the machine. To my surprise, only an hour into the movie he fixes the robot! Movie over, right? Wrong. Fixing the robot doesn't "fix" Hugo's need to "fix." In fact, it only makes him realize that there are much deeper issues.
Sounds familiar, right? Whether you spend your Friday nights at The Dunes or packing up for your next church trip, you've got to admit that you're searching for something. We really, really want to find some purpose in life. On the other hand, we really, really, really want those beliefs to complement the way we are actually living. So what do we do? We find a set of beliefs that explain what life is about, and we use those beliefs to make us feel good about how we spend our time.
Doesn't make sense? Ok, let's talk Mountain-Brookish. What if you like to party hard on Friday and Saturday nights? Don't you find yourself making up a god in your mind who's easy going, and just likes to kick back and have a good time? On the other hand, what if you are hard core youth group? Don't you make up a god who smiles at you for living the right kind of life? Oh, and he probably gets angry at those who narrowly avoid the police road blocks? Or maybe you like a tolerant god. He or She (just like you) figures there is no right or wrong. Maybe there's just no god and we're just floating along. In that case let's have a good time. But wait, what's a good time? Is it partying or another mission trip?
My point is that we all have our beliefs, or religion, that tell us how to live our lives. We judge everyone else and everything else that we know based on that religion. I think we relate more to Hugo than we'd like to admit. Over an over again -whether it's a new drug, new girlfriend, new service project, new Bible study- we "fix" ourselves. The problem is that EVERY SINGLE TIME we end up alone. In short, our religion has failed us. We don't work.
Where do we go from here? In one of the final scenes of the movie. Hugo, running from the orphan loathing, train station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen), trips and breaks the automaton. The inspector catches Hugo, and all seems lost. Unexpectedly, the man Hugo was trying to impress/fix/change shows up and claims, "The boy belongs to me!" It's one of the most heart wrenching movie scenes I've ever witnessed. Hugo didn't need to fix one more thing. He couldn't fix enough. Hugo needed to be unconditionally, undeservingly, accepted. I wonder, how different this is from us? We long to hear those unconditional words of belonging. Whether we admit it or not, we seek it everywhere. The problem is - our religions don't do that for us. We need (and I want to suggest that there is) something real, something concrete, something supernatural, that offers to redeem us unconditionally.
What I want to suggest is that you and I stop fixing robots (and creating new robots to be fixed) and start taking this situation we're in seriously. And maybe a good place for us to start is to admit that the reason we want to "work" is because we don't.
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