Autumn in Cheltenham

Outside the Library

Photographs by Bridget Harvey

Cinderella, a film directed by Kenneth Branagh and reviewed by Carol O’Connor

Carol O’Connor went to see the new movie ‘Cinderella’, directed by Kenneth Branagh. She enjoyed the film, but left the cinema asking the question, “So, what do I find missing that should matter in this film?”

 

TELLING A STORY ANEW

In Kenneth Branagh’s  ‘Cinderella’, as in many fairy tales, the heroine is unwittingly caught up in a world which dictates a destiny. The viewer has lived the story many times, but she only once.  Cinderella must struggle against mighty odds to be true to herself.  She is driven near despair, until a moment of magic happens. Something in the universe cracks open, and justice comes to the unjust. Perfect happiness and fulfilment is on the horizon for the heroine.

The story unfolds by virtue of Cinderella’s nature.  Also, in this version, by her actions. For Branagh’s Cinderella is shown to be a highly relatable 2015 Western modern young woman, contextualised in the extravagant Hollywood arena of fairy tale.  She is intrinsically good. Not a feminist, not complex, though she battles feelings of despair, indecision, and anger.  Nevertheless, she is no victim of her abusive treatment.  She has choices.   Cinderella first meets the ‘apprentice’ Prince not at the ball but earlier when, despairing because of her stepmother’s treatment, she decides to ride her horse fast into the forest. It’s there they fall in love.  And later, by virtue of Cinderella’s giving a begging old woman a cup of milk, the crone is transformed into her fairy godmother.

The settings are sumptuous, akin to a lavish English drama; good taste is assured in depictions of English castles and manor houses. Extravagance and abundance in life are permissible in the film’s terms, so long as they retain a natural purity. The artifice of the sisters contrasts with the artless simplicity of Cinderella; their twin style dresses, like lolly wrappers, portray them as gauche clowns compared with Cinderella’s modest taste. Even in rags and cinder-smudged face, she has unpretentious beauty. 

The film works because it plays on our inner yearning for completion, for beauty, for connectedness, for love.  It places this yearning in a context we all operate in - the world of material things.   

The stepmother yearns for more money, a title for herself and social privilege for her children. She enjoys gambling with her friends. But the film accentuates the viewer’s yearning to have more goodness, more courage, more kindness, despite all the odds. We loathe the stepmother, for she possesses that which we loathe in ourselves: greed, jealousy, insecurity, hardness of heart.  We are sanctioned to loathe her because of her actions.  And those things that she craves, which we crave too, we can push away as irrelevant to the possession of goodness itself.  We sublimate these baser cravings in favour of moral virtue. 

The film shows that if we act from goodness, so then we gain the material benefits, social privileges and romantic attachments that we desire but deny. By subverting the craving for material wealth and the world’s prestige and tarnishing it as evil, the film ultimately condones it as our final reward.  If we hold out long enough, we are eventually given those things we wanted, but forfeited. And in this process, moral virtue itself becomes betokened as a commodity, ultimately measurable and quantifiable in worldly terms.

Subversion works in other ways in the film as well. It plays on our expectations. Though it echoes the opening of the Brothers Grimm version of the tale, the usual structure of is upended, and in so doing we live through the story in a new psychological way.  The film opens with its own narrative sequence of Cinderella’s idyllic childhood - life before her stepmother.  It seemed a period impervious to change, a paradise invulnerable to suffering and loss, until the mother dies.  Death and impermanence are real enough here.

We are shown the paradise we long for, only to have it snatched away.  This emotional trick tantalises our longing for the happy ending. Paradise is regained, of course, by the end of the film. This way, we are given the same old stuff, but with a kind of catharsis, a clearing out of the desire, only to have it re-packaged and served back to us in new wrapping paper by the end of the film.  The status quo is once more endorsed.  We are back to where we began.  But unlike T. S. Eliot’s return to where we started and ‘know the place for the first time’, here we really see it just as an extension of what it was. We are given more - but of exactly the same.

LEFT WANTING SOMETHING MORE

It is ironic that a depiction of life that offers ‘everything’ can leave the viewer only pining for more: we leave the cinema seeing only the less in our own lives.

Is this ultimately sad experience to do with fairy tales themselves? My understanding is that the original fairy tales never purported to depict the whole of life.  They are one dimensional, moral teaching tales, often with gruesome elements. We have distorted their meaning by adapting them to a 112 minute film depicting a vision of how the world works.   

Kenneth Branagh’s ‘Cinderella’ is skilful and original. There is a self-reflecting irony in the guise of the clumsy, pretentious artist who is painting the Prince’s portrait. As the artist struggles to hold the Prince still for a moment for his portrait session, so too does Branagh seem to be confessing his striving to re-tell the story. Cinderella herself declares that she loathes portraits of herself. Fresh representation of both characters is indeed a slippery business for the director.  The dialogue and imagery are witty and often humourous.  Before Cinderella enters the palace, we feel gratitude to the lizard who reassures her that just as she is only a girl not a Princess, he too is only a lizard not really a footman.  And later, Cinderella’s placing of the second glass slipper in the ashes of the household fire is a powerful metaphor for her experienced state of being. 

The film has depth. There are two deathbed scenes. Both demonstrate parental authority as ultimate arbiter of life.  The mother’s dying words are an entreaty to Cinderella to ‘believe’ and hold on to kindness and courage.  In the second deathbed scene the Prince is sanctioned by the dying King to marry for love, and not just for the good of the kingdom, his previously stated expectation. We are never given the reason for his change of heart, nor expected to ask because his words attune themselves so closely to our sentiments.  As the camera lifts upward showing the prince curled up beside his dead father on his large bed, it is a reconciling moment of pathos - Branagh’s hand is at work behind this shot.  As with the deathbed scene of Cinderella’s mother, it purports to give the film gravitas and the character moral substance. The film gains a kind of pseudo-religious elevation.  We learn that meaning in life ultimately derives from parental approval. Individuation only happens after their death, and even then it is in the taking on of their mantle.

For a moment, in both death bed scenes, we suspend judgement.  We do so easily, even though we know all the courage and kindness in the world guarantees no-one a destiny of immeasurable material and romantic fulfilment.  We know that one person’s love cannot completely fulfil another’s life. Or that Princes and Cinderellas live happily ever after. Life itself belies this.

In ‘Cinderella’ we are given a moral compass for the living of a good life. Cinderella’s final words of forgiveness to the stepmother are not said flippantly. Purity of heart is also shown to have a special affinity with nature.  And quite rightly, as in a children’s film, we don’t want to inflict on children a world gratuitously violent and cruel. At least not ‘our’ children; we can still live with the moral ambiguity of refugee children being detained in camps by our Government and who encounter a different reality . 

It’s not as if there aren’t metaphorical godmothers in our own lives, or charming ‘Princes’ who sweep us off our feet, or even glass slippers that are unique to the shape of only our foot.  It’s not as if courage, kindness and hope are qualities to be taken lightly, or that good actions don’t enlarge the hearts of all who come within its surrounds. Dorothy Day, early 20^th century social activist and Catholic convert used to like to echo Dostoevsky’s words, ‘The world will be saved by beauty.’ Aesthetic beauty more than enriches the world, and this film is full of it. 

CREATOR AND SUSTAINER OF EXISTENCE

So, what do I find missing that would overly matter in this film?

Some essential truth is completely absent.  Sumptuous, seductive, complete as this world is, at root it’s not enough.  For all things, taken only on their own terms, leave us eventually very hungry.

There must be a gesture toward the Other. Without this we rob our children of something very important to their development and growth. And our own embodied humanity.

In the film the fairy godmother becomes a representation of ancient mother magic. She is sparkly, passionate, a co-worker with Cinderella in the fulfilment of her destiny to go to the ball.  She is like a trickster God who is much needed but appears unexpectedly, performs providential magic with stated conditions, then disappears.  Her existence is neither overly questioned nor thanked. 

But imagine, if this spirit who can crack the universe open, tear apart the fabric of reality, were understood to be the breath of life itself? And what if this God wasn’t an unpredictable trickster, but shown to be the creator and sustainer of existence? What if this breaking open of the world to reveal fresh paths, doesn’t just happen once but over and over again - a God who takes a deeply personal interest in each and every person?  Who wills the best for us? As Rowan Williams has put it, a God who is ‘the “current” of divine activity that is here and now making us real.’  Not the benefactor of wealthy illusions or the commodifier of virtues, but a grace made known in relationship with one another every day.  By the food on our table.  By the air we breathe, the health of our bodies. And by our ability to give praise and thanks for it all.

The orientation of a life toward God does not mean a turning away from, but a seeing through the illusion.  The world grows rather than diminishes.  Without this sense of an invisible reality informing existence, life is like seeing the picture of a person but never encountering a living being.  Again to quote Rowan Williams, ‘this white heat at the centre’ is unconditional love which seeks to liberate thought, work with our endeavours, inspire imagination. This is a God who fulfils yearning and sets us free, in a way that a world that begins and ends only in itself never can. 

To live in the world without this sense of something behind it all is to go on seeking for more and more of the same.  The cycle of greed, need, abuse  - the stepmother syndrome - inevitably kicks in. To recognise the presence of a loving generous God who wills the best for each of us, is not to deny or lessen the reality of evil or suffering in the world.  It’s to recognise that the stepmother lurks within us all. We need to reconcile her presence inside ourselves in order to let her power over us go. It is to recognise that God sits beside each suffering person, in compassionate listening as well as social action. This means owning the world in its wholeness, and brokenness. And to seek how to faithfully mature our children through it. 

Children will intuitively and innately understand the lifting of this veil of illusion.  Not to at least gesture to this reality is to rob ourselves and them of something profoundly Real. And this can be done in film.  (You can sense it as a backdrop in films by Studio Ghibli, like ‘Totoro’ and ‘Spirited Away’. In these films inner transformation takes place as much for the characters, as it does for the viewer.)

Why do we want to short-change our children about the nature of life itself? Why choose to mould their hearts when, upon reflection, the fabrication is so obvious? Is it because we want them to yearn for something in life that we were taught to yearn for, and were short-changed by, but still believe in for their sake anyway? It was really nice to have the dream while it lasted, even if it’s not real. Like Santa and the Easter Bunny.

Is this a conscious mirroring of the preoccupations of Western society today on Branagh’s part?  I don’t think so.  It would be a stark motive for directing a children’s film; too overt an indictment on we, the parents and grandparents, who are predominantly the people who take our children to see this film. And my 12-year-old daughter loved the film.

But coming out of the film we ask what are the terms upon which we choose to set our lives? We can still have all that Branagh offers his viewers, young and old, in ‘Cinderella’.  But that doesn’t mean more of the same. In recognition of the Other we find that we, particularly most viewers of this film, have a plenitude already.  It’s more we need, in terms of spiritual growth and understanding. 

Amanda Witt, volunteer and librarian

Amanda Witt works as a volunteer in the Library. Here is an article she wrote for Incite, the news magazine of the Australian Library and Information Association, and first published there this month.

 

 My name is Amanda. I am a qualified library technician and am currently studying towards my Bachelor via distance from Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga, NSW. I am unemployed and have been for five years, apart from a short six month contract in a school from 2012-13. 

 

I also have Aspergers Syndrome, which has been changed to ‘high functioning autism’ in the 2011 diagnostic manual update.

 

I decided to write this article to draw attention to the plight of many people on the ‘spectrum’. They will soon be graduating from school and maybe a tertiary course, and then looking for a job. But until employers and workplaces are willing to take a leap of faith and hire us, we will remain on the unemployment scrapheap.

 

These assumptions are why I continue to remain unemployed. I have a brief sentence at the end of my cover letter, stating that I have Aspergers and may require clarification in interviews. However it seems that this is the death knell, with many schools choosing not to interview me, based on incorrect assumptions over what I can and cannot do.

 

My resume is full of library work, both paid and voluntary, with some non-library voluntary work at places like the Cathedral in Melbourne. I also do a junk mail round for extra money, to keep myself occupied. Yet I have not had an interview since September 2012. Why? Because seeing ‘Aspergers’ seems to summon fear in some people, and after asking for feedback, I was told by one school that ‘the position involves lunchtime supervision and people like you don’t like noise.’   

 

I feel those who make the decision, judge me on students they may have, students who have meltdowns when the daily schedule is altered, who have to be alone each lunchtime, unable to cope with the playground noise. That is not me. Nor is it many of us with the condition, like the friends I have made through the recently established I Can Network, started at Monash University in 2013.

 

School staff may not realise that these students may have been diagnosed but their parents are not always taking them for regular times with the psychologist. I see mine every couple of months.

 

I was officially diagnosed just three years ago, and was eligible to register with a specialist job agency called Alpha Employment. The consultant would attend interviews with me, explain the issues to the team and sit up the back, clarifying small points that I may miss, such as body language cues which I do not read very well. Unfortunately Alpha lost Government funding at the end of 2012, and the expert consultants were retrenched.    

 

Yet, like most on the spectrum, I am good at things. I have an almost perfect memory of the Dewey Decimal System. Once I know the library’s physical layout, I will shelve the books quicker. I can also direct staff and students to ‘the third shelf from the left, on the top, blue cover’ once I know the location of a book or popular series. Yet when I mention this as a strength, it is somehow overlooked, weighed down by all the weaknesses I am perceived to have.

 

So if you see my application in the pile for a Victorian school or other library, then please re-consider and at least give me an interview. You may be pleasantly surprised, and I will be just as surprised if offered the job.  

 

Amanda Witt, currently volunteering at Community of the Holy Name Library, Cheltenham, Victoria. 

 

amandakwitt@yahoo.com

 

Slipping the Moorings: A Memoir Weaving Faith with Justice, Ethics and Community by Richard RandersonReview by Carol O'Connor

Review by Carol O'Connor

Many of us here at St Peter's, Eastern Hill, have had the privilege of hearing Bp Graeme Rutherford preach, or have been taught by him in the Trinity Course or at Trinity Theological College and will, I'm sure, continue to have echoing in our ears for years to come his well-worn words: It's not enough to just talk the talk, you must walk the talk.

Slipping the Moorings is an autobiography that would completely endorse Bp Graeme's dictum. Born in 1940 in Takapuna, a quiet town on Auckland's North Shore, Bp Richard studied Arts at the University of Otago and from there Theology at St John's College in Auckland, and was ordained Anglican priest in 1965. This was a time when 'church participation...moved from a habitual routine for many to a chosen activity for the committed.' It was a time of dwindling numbers in churches and a period of 'deep theological questioning' for Bp Richard. It was a painful time that finally led himself and his wife, Jackie, to sail to New York to learn more about theology in the context of contemporary life. From here, in the late 1960s, he began to find his true vocation.  He had begun to encounter new ways of being church, that reached out and spoke to people on the street, the poor and marginalised.

Along Bp Richard's path are many people who have inspired him and helped resource his social conscience. Amongst these, in the early years was Daniel Berrigan, Roman Catholic priest, who became known here in Australia for his protest against the Vietnam War and later in 1980, when he trespassed onto the General Electrics nuclear missile facility in Pennsylvania.

Issues such as racism, peace, poverty, and other ethical questions were all at the forefront of theological thinking at the Union Seminary in New York and helped expand Bp Richard’s conscious commitment to work in these areas. The theology he was learning contrasted radically with what he had experienced until then in New Zealand. It informed his whole understanding of Anglican Church and mission:

God was seen as active throughout the world, the spirit of love and reconciliation, suffering with the poor, the spur to right conduct in individuals, institutions and nations. Arising out of worship and teaching, the Church’s task is to be active in the workplace, society and politics, to work for universal justice and wellbeing. The primary direction is church to world, not world to church.

It was with new insight and understanding that Bp Richard and Jackie, with their growing family, moved to England in the early 1970s. Here he took on a curacy in the parish of Egglescliffe, near Newcastle, which involved two days a week with Teesdale Industrial Mission. Bp Richard’s description of life at Teesside ‘where smoke-stacks, concrete and steel were everywhere in evidence’ and his visits to shipyards and coalmines made me think of Fr Lawrie Styles, who spent his last years here at St Peter's and died in 2011. Although their paths seem to cross only briefly, Fr Lawrie spent many years in Industrial Mission in England. Upon graduating from Cambridge University in the 1950s Fr Lawrie joined the Industrial Mission in Tyldesley, a town between Manchester and Liverpool. He too became interested in the 'tragic gap that existed between clergy and industry...' and tells us in his book My God, What Now?  that in order to connect with those he was serving he found it important to visit the local pit and see for himself what it was like at the coal face. 

I asked at the time of my first visit to the pit whether I should wear my clerical collar so that those I met would know who I was. ‘No need’, came the reply, ‘t’message will go down ahead of thee before thee enters cage.’  The only people that seemed to be astonished were my brother clergy in the neighbouring parishes when they found me walking home from a pithead in their parish - black with coal dust. 

After a number of years’ experience in Industrial Mission and with his sense of vocation now clarified, Bp Richard went back to New Zealand in the mid-1970s. 

Slipping the Moorings is a memoir of a life founded on a belief that for any priest sermons and ministry must relate to contemporary times, or they become irrelevant. As Vicar of St Peter’s Church in Wellington and part of the ecumenical Inner City Mission, Bp Richard was never afraid to speak out on controversial issues. For example, at his initiative in 1989 a statement was issued, backed by 94 New Zealand clergy and laity, decrying a Government proposal to purchase four new naval frigates. A major debate opened up in the media following this statement  - not least the belief that the church should keep out of politics. But this is precisely where the church, Bp Richard believes, needs to be. For it’s here that many issues ‘determine for good or ill, the extent of poverty, or the wellbeing of families.’ So it has continued to be that he has put his energies into issues such as social justice, poverty, Treaty of Waitangi partnership, nuclear free New Zealand, anti-apartheid, gender equality, same-sex relationships, and public ethics and made public statements about them. He often attracts controversy, but always gets people to take issues seriously that otherwise could be swept under the carpet. Bp Richard holds the view that

…a silent church is a church that has become preoccupied with its own life and has lost sight of its mission to be a channel of compassion and a voice for justice.  Both church and society are poorer for that.  In speaking and acting I have always sought to be well informed on matters of faith as well as on topical issues.  I also seek to consult with others before forming a viewpoint.  Having done that I have taken a stand and prepared myself for whatever responses might come. 

On one level this memoir is a critique on Christian leadership in the 21st century. True Christian leadership doesn’t just happen, but evolves over time and experience. By means of stories and reflections, critical engagement with the world’s and his own ideas, Bp Richard shows us what such leadership can look like. Projects that involve social justice issues take time and patience, as well as hands-on commitment. Christian leaders need not only a moral compass and instinctive bias to the poor and marginalised, but courage and ability to take risks - to speak out publicly when needed.  Though subtle in his thinking, Bp Richard is often much more interested in getting to the point and acting from this place, rather than 'navel gazing.' He is a straight shooter, but ‘prepared to win some, lose some’. A good Christian leader he tells us, like any leader, needs effective communication skills and an ability to work in a team. He or she needs to be grappling with contemporary issues and listening to people all the time. Most importantly Christian leaders need imagination and times of deep reflection and prayer, because at the heart of all this type of leadership is Christ and the Gospels.

In many ways this is the real strength of the book. The title is a 'plea that the church should slip its moorings’ from a place of comfortable complacency and become part of the challenge to work for a more just, environmentally and ethically aware world. And it’s a plea that is directed as much to bishops and clergy as to laity.

When he came to live in Canberra in 1994, as assistant bishop with responsibility for the church in the wider community, Bp Richard saw this as an opportunity to further this chosen role of hands-on Christian ministry. He gave addresses at conferences and chaired inquiries on the issue of poverty, became chair of the then named Canberra Church of England Girls’ Grammar School and affirmed the place of trade unions in the Patrick Stevedore waterfront dispute in 1998. In 1995 he was shocked to discover that the only Aboriginal Bishop, Arthur Malcolm, had no effective speaking or voting rights at General Synod. In all these areas and more he worked for justice and right relations.  After returning to Auckland in 2000 he has worked on the Royal Commission on Genetic Modification and later on the Advisory Committee on Assisted Reproductive Technology. Once more, as in Canberra, he was called upon publicly to defend his views on homosexuality. And, as in the subsequent debate concerning his views on faith where he was then ‘caricatured’ as being an agnostic and unbeliever, he felt the need to stress that his views are personal, like those of others:

As a bishop of the church I accept the policies and decisions of the Church and live by them…What one can expect is that a bishop will respect the convictions of every person, and ensure that all are included…I lament the immaturity in the church, or any institution if the leadership is prevented from speaking openly lest it cause offence…Clergy and church members need to be mature enough to live with diversity rather than to operate from a mindset that ‘it’s my way, or the high way’.

To read Slipping the Moorings is to hear the call to all of us here at St Peter’s to continue to recognise the richness of diversity of individuals within our own parish life. Bp Richard’s work reminds us that church community needs authentic responses from its parishioners, and needs a leadership that seeks to focus on the poor and marginalised. His mandate that the primary direction is church to world, not world to church, made me also realise the abundance of gifts we have to offer in this way. We have our obvious ministries to the public every day: the Institute for Spiritual Studies, the Breakfast Program for the Homeless and the Bookroom are such places.  But there are many other important areas where this interface happens. Against a current tide of church practice we keep the doors of St Peter’s Church open everyday for people to come in and sit and pray. Our Vicar and Assistant Priests’ ongoing links with Parliament, Brotherhood of St Lawrence, Anglicare, Fire Brigade and Ambulance keep us connected with broader city services. Our collection of food parcels for the refugees, the pastoral care team who regularly visit elderly and sick parishioners, as well as inner city hospitals, the Children’s Play Group, and the recent practices of Ashes to Go and Palms to Go - where clergy and parishioners stand at Parliament Station bringing these to the world - all these are signs of our engagement in the contemporary world on many levels. There is always more work to do. But by remembering that we are not a church that should stay closely moored to its own preoccupations and existence, navel gazing, but called every day to ‘venture out into the deep’ we ourselves as a community can help bring the reality of God’s love into the wider world. 

Review written by Carol O’Connor