Shawshank Redemption

I just watched Shawshank Redemption and doing so was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had. Not a million reviews could do it justice, it’s ultimately ineffable blah blah blah. I will mention a few words on it. I believe the film is essentially an ode to hope. It is one of the most nourishing experiences I can recall, watching that film without having seen or known about it. It was like a shot in the arm for my humanism and I feel it and myself reinvigorated.

In Mark 1:2-3 of the Bible we have a misattribution where Mark says the passage he quotes is from Isaiah whereas that is simply not accurate. At the beginning (in the beginning!!) of the text such a thing happens! I find this nourishing as a human being that something often regarded as sacred through and through has error, something profane, within it. At the beginning as well is like dropping an unmistakable hint. Error and not doing complete, perfect justice to things (like with precise, accurate – perfect – knowledge) is something that gets to me. After seeing the film the channel was switched and up popped Justin Bieber advertising skin cream. With my considerable education my mind cannot fathom or conceive of something more profane. And that is life (if only we listened & learned from the French!!). Reality & it’s intrinsic profanity interrupts, it interrupts our sublime moments and always contextualises them, thus destroying any claims to purity. There are moments when the sublime is experienced (that is, felt as overawing, something perfect) but this is always downplaying something profane and imperfect. There are no perfect moments unto themselves, but for human beings (God’s imperfections) there is perfection and the sublime to be found. Only imperfection can find perfection in imperfection. Thus grace.

Rick Roderick, a quaint and endearing philosophy professor, stated a sentence which has stuck in my mind and which apparently resonates with the heart of much Eastern philosophy: “don’t sweat the small stuff”. Don’t sweat the small stuff. It is easy to preach, to talk, talk is cheap. It is even easy to preach hope, to advocate this powerful human virtue. But I think there needs to be a flip side, namely a reaction to the profane. Which is: not to despair over the imperfect or what is not sublime. I was rather crestfallen that with all the most perfect, that is the most insightful and most succinct, words I could craft to speak about Shawshank Redemption very suddenly were unrealisable as the setting and context unravelled before this player could utter all of his carefully constructed words and ideas. They were evicted, exiled. To try and mold the context back to something similar of what existed immediately after the end of the movie would of been foolish contrivance. The moment had passed, ‘immediately after’ was gone and all that flickered was transitoriness. I feel I lost too much heart through, and one must, as Nietzsche commands dance!, live with levity, lightness and not be weighed down by the world. Being hopeful without being able to dance is perhaps impossible. The profane must be negotiated and a shard of hope, an imagined elsewhere cannot be kept close as if it alone were enough.

The religions of Abraham perhaps overemphasised the sacred profane distinction. You cannot have hope, something sublime, sacred which is mystically connected to real phenomena of the world without having and/or acknowledging the profane and learning to live with it. No hate can be held in the heart, no despair cultivated over its imperfections. The profane must be lived with, only then may it become a conduit to the sublime and not a hindrance to it but even (as it is really necessarily) a facilitator of it. I have long felt the religions of Abraham went wayward in trying to programmatically map out the profane and the sacred. You can put reality or life in a neat box, a precise definition of both could be the impossibility of attempting to do so. I hold dear Yeshua and much wisdom of the Abrahamic traditions which acknowledge the connections between the profane and the sacred. Yet I shun some of their orthodoxies which deny this truth.

 

Hope to the humanist is what faith is to the believer.