The Gift of Life

[This post contains spoilers about the book and movie The Giver.]

Remember

Remember
when we were young
and the whole world of adventure
and possibility lay beyond.

Bright eyes stared
ahead with visions
of love and fame
and money.

Instead debt,
lonely days and failure,
tears and fights, and
many disappointments.

But also work,
and laughter and
creation of new life and
so much growth.

Remember
when we were young
and had no idea
how amazing a plan
not ours could be.

G. Powell (2014)


My husband and I went to see The Giver on Sunday. Lois Lowry's writing was a momentous part of my childhood. I probably read it the first time in middle school, and then again in my early twenties, and remember being so struck by the themes of identity, but the movie really drove home themes about love and humanity. For those who don't know, The Giver takes place in what appears to be a rather utopian society, where all kinds of evil and meanness has been eradicated. The people live in a community in which food is distributed so that nobody goes hungry, jobs are assigned so that everybody has important work, and the people don't even see color because that would highlight differences. The evil and inequality of the world led the creators of this utopian society to go to what they call "sameness" and to exterminate all memories of what the world was like before.

On the surface, this seems innocent enough. A bit controlling, but what do you do? Nobody is going hungry or being raped or murdered. There's no war. Who can ask for more? The story follows a young man named Jonas who is of the age to be assigned his job that he will have for the rest of his life. He is also on the cusp of manhood, and after having a slightly erotic dream about a friend, he is started on a new medication, which we later find out is to curb these sexual feelings. In fact, the people seem to experience no deep emotions at all, and talk plainly about all the more fleeting ones. No intimacy, no love, only duty and responsibility. Jonas doesn't know any different until he starts his new job, which is to be the "receiver of memory" for the community. Because the community did away with all historical knowledge and memory in order to keep out anything that could cause dangerous conflicts, the memories are kept by one elder who advises the others when a situation comes up that they aren't sure how to handle. Jonas is to be given these memories so that he can fulfill that role.

The Giver begins gifting memories to Jonas, and at first he's thrilled. Soon he begins to understand concepts like color and excitement and deep passion, like the feelings that were so quickly quashed after he admitted to his sexual dream. He experiences joy for the first time. But darker emotions and experience exist as well, and Jonas has to receive these to understand why his community had to "go to sameness." The beautiful parts are glorious, but the pain is awful and the community founders wanted to spare the people.

Meanwhile, Jonas' father has brought home one of the infants that he cares for in his role of nurturer of new citizens, because the boy is not growing as he should. His father feels some kindness toward this baby and thinks maybe being at home will help him. Jonas begins to get very attached to the boy. Along the way, however, he learns about "release to elsewhere" which is the end that criminals, elderly, and sickly people all meet. He discovers that these people are simply killed, and because he has experienced the joys and pains of life through the Giver, he understands what death is and what a horrific thing his community has been doing in the name of peace. The baby that his father has brought home will meet this same fate, he learns, and so decides that he must flee.

Now, we also learn that the memories are tightly contained within these people, but it turns out that if the keeper of memory crosses the boundary out of the community, all of those memories would be released back to where they belong. The book and movie diverge a bit in how this all happens, but the end result is that Jonas realizes that by taking away the "colorful" experiences of life and the potential for pain, the community has also lost the capacity for love, and the result of that is this darwinist, emotionless, empty society with no real depth or beauty.

This is where the poem above comes in. I was thinking about how my expectations of my life are so much different than I ever thought they would be. I have no idea how it happened that I ended up working as a chaplain, married to the amazing man I met, living where I am, meeting the people I meet, but I did. And it was not totally painless along the way. There were lots of fumbles and screw-ups and lots of sadness and misery as I tried to awkwardly figure out who I am called to be. But somehow out of the chaos of this journey has always come something new, something alive, something urging me forward, creating in me a more authentic relationship with God, and a more real way to relate to the pain of the world. The Giver raises the question of what it means to be truly human, what it means to suffer. We don't know why we suffer or what pain really means or where it comes from, but what we know for certain is that God meets us there and promises us new life.

In many ways, pain and suffering cultivate in us a deeper capacity to touch the world around us, and to understand a God who loved us so much that s/he could send Jesus for us. It is that love which weeps that makes us new, the same way that power comes in weakness and life comes through death. When we lose the capacity to love as Jonas' community had, we forget the value of human life--especially the weak or the old or the invalid--and truly lose our power to bring about a better future. Jonas sees the subtle costs of this forgotten magic and does the only thing he can: returns love with the hope that as a people we may, as the Giver said, "choose better." Sometimes love and pain are two sides to the coin, but in the same way that Jonas hoped, we hope for a new future where we may choose only love and thus God's promised future of no more tears and pain and war will become a reality. The path to that future may not always look like we expect, but we humans are rarely wise enough to choose our path well. Thank God for a Creator and Redeemer who sends the Spirit of love and newness into our lives every day.