Christ and the Chocolaterie
Hilary Brand
Week Three: Getting Wise -The Possibility
of Change
To start you thinking
Pause for thought
What answer would you give to the question, what is the film Chocolat all about? Take a few minutes to think about it before reading on.
One thing that has fascinated me as I have discussed this film is the variety of answers I have heard to the above question. It's about Lent versus chocolate. It's about self-denial versus self-indulgence. It's about traditional religion versus alternative therapies/beliefs. It's about tolerance and welcoming strangers. It's about what you do being more important than what you don't do. Yes, it is all these things and more, and they will all come up during this course. But I want to turn now to something you may not have thought of. Because I think that at its heart this film is about control.
The imaginary French town of Lasquenet is like most communities, especially religious ones — it works as an unspoken pact between those who control and those who assent to be controlled. It is ruled by habits (be it Lent, mistrust of the 'river rats' or the Widow Audel's protracted mourning) whose original reasons have been lost in the mists of time. The arrival of Vianne, the stranger who refuses to accept their norms, throws everything into confusion.
Read Matthew 12:1-21
So it was in first-century Palestine, only this time the uncomfortable stranger was Jesus, striding across the Judean countryside, ignoring petty restrictions, turning the tables, showing no fear for those who dominated or controlled.
Strange, then, that the Church that bears his name is so often known as the most traditional, hierarchical and authoritarian institution around. Strange but true — there is no shortage of evidence to bear this out.
Playwright Edward Bond, writing in the 1960s, claimed that 'God is a secular mechanism, a device of class rule'. Before you dismiss that as left-wing, 'angry young man' rhetoric, look at his logic in the following quote. Not only does it contain more than a grain of uncomfortable truth, it is also a view that is shared by perhaps the majority of our society.
For a long time this doctrine [original sin] helped to enforce acceptance of the existing social order. For reasons the church could not explain, everyone was born to eternal pain after death unless the church saved them. It carefully monopolised all the sacraments which were the only way to salvation. To be saved, a man had to accept the church's teaching on the way secular society should be organised; if that society ever needed restraining or reforming, the only ways of doing that that the church permitted were admonishment and excommunication. Leaders of church and state often came from the same families; and before a poor man was elevated to any rank in the church, he had to accept its teaching on secular society. Those who wouldn't, whether clerical or lay, were handed over to the state to be tortured or burned. This vividly demonstrated to everyone else the eternal hell in which all dissent would be punished. God is a secular mechanism, a device of class rule. (Plays One)
Is it possible for the Church to shake off this oppressive image?
Some say that the only way is to dismantle the old structures and create new ones. Well, maybe, but anyone who's been around the 'new church' scene for a while can attest that they are often as full of traditions and authoritarianism as the most hide-bound cathedral. The traditions are new ones, that's all. Authority may be held by a man in jeans and a beanie hat rather than a long frock, but it's just as controlling for all that.
Others would answer that the only way is to have no structures at all. 'I can be a Christian without going to church: Well, maybe, but the first thing Jesus did was to establish a group of followers and the last thing he did was ensure it would continue. And humans are social animals - even if every church were abolished tomorrow, the day afterwards someone would start a club for people who don't go to church anymore and the day after that someone would organise a committee and a set of rules!
Yet others, echoing John Lennon, Richard Dawkins and a whole clutch of post-modern philosophers, would say that the whole thing is impossible anyway. They would draw on Nietzsche's idea that any claim to possess absolute truth is an invalid assertion of power. Anyone who claims to have capital-T Truth must by definition be on a power trip. Anyone who believes they know God must, by definition, be mad, bad or an oppressor.
It's a tempting argument. Except that Jesus did and he wasn't.
But the world at large isn't looking at Jesus, it is looking at organised religion. It is looking at us (not listening to us) and evaluating Christianity on what it sees. And what It sees is not necessarily what we wish to show it - all of us 'read' far more of what is going on inside others than we consciously recognise.
I believe this issue of religious control and authority Is a huge one (and in the wake of 9/11 and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, even more so) - so much so that It may seriously decide the fate of organised Christianity in the Western world in this century. I also believe that the answer is there, staring us in the face, in the pages of the Gospels. The way for the Church to shake off its oppressive image is simple - look at the words and actions of its founder and let them sink into our lives. Simple - but radical, and far from easy!
To continue your thinking
The gift of hospitality
During the writing of this book, my eye fell on some old newspaper put on the bathroom floor as protection while the room was being decorated. Since our family lives in the real world rather than instant TV makeovers it had been there for some time. The paper was dated a few days after the dramatic events of 9/11 and it showed a cartoon of Bush and Blair trying to look Churchillian, but succeeding in looking rather more like monkeys. The speech box above their heads said, 'We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight somebody or other on the beaches, in the fields and on the hills of somewhere or other ... We shall never surrender.' Subsequent events have more than demonstrated the folly, and indeed the evil, of this approach.
When our tranquillite is threatened, our first thought is to try and reassert control. And in order to do that we need an enemy. We need something or someone to fight - whether or not the blame really lies there and whether or not fighting will solve the problem. And it must be external - the last thing we want to do if we are feeling insecure is to admit that some of the problem might possibly lie within.
The Comte de Reynaud knew this. He was no fool, says the film's narrator, and he knew that even if he achieved the drunken Serge's rehabilitation, that alone would not be enough for him to regain control of the town. 'Some greater problem needed to be identified and solved: And of course, conveniently, the river rats came sailing up the river and gave him the enemy without.
Read Matthew 23:1-12, 23-8
Since he was a twelve-year-old visiting the Temple, Jesus had observed the religious leaders of his day. He had seen them struggling to hold on to their Judaic authority in a society where the real power lay with a conquering army with quite different gods. And he saw, not just the absurd lengths to which this need for control led them, but what the essential problem was. They thought that if they could sort out the externals, then the internal would be solved too. Jesus knew that it had to be the other way around - they had to clean the inside first.
And Jesus had something even more radical to say - if you really wanted to change things then the solution lay not in trying to hold on to control, but in voluntarily giving it away. It lay, in being a servant.
Dangerous ideas and, or course, ones that made Jesus himself immediately become the enemy without.
Pause for thought
Who or what do you see as 'the enemy without' in your life? Is there any way in which the problem may lie within yourself? Is it even a problem to which it is possible to attach blame?