In the 1979 movie, Being There, Peter Sellers plays Chance the Gardener. Chance has spent his life living and working in the estate of a wealthy old man. Located in the center of power of the free world, Washington D.C. Chance’s only education is what he has seen on TV. On the old man’s passing, he stakes no claim against the estate. And as a result, he is forced to move out. Dressed in the bespoke finery of his kindly and late benefactor he is soon wandering aimlessly in the streets of DC for the first time. Through a series of fortuitous incidents, mostly involving the gross misinterpretation of his gardening cliches for world-wise, political wisdom, Chance is befriended by Benjamin Rand. Rand, a business mogul and all round power broker, is a trusted confidante of the US President. Chance is soon in the court of the President and shortly thereafter being considered a potential successor to him.
Life is a State of Mind
Until this point, this biting satire plays out in its natural element. Then we get to that famous last scene (Spoiler Alert!!). Rand passes away and Chance is at his funeral service. The President is delivering Rand’s eulogy and we see Chance walking off towards a lake. Umbrella in hand, Chance steps on its surface and walks across it. Midway over the lake, he tarries to poke his umbrella into the water. He then continues walking nonchalantly. We hear the President intone the closing line of Rand’s eulogy – “life is a state of mind”. The movie ends there. It leaves the viewer and generations of critics to ponder the meaning of that climatic turn to the supernatural. Let alone, its somewhat oblique reference to the Gospel scene of Christ walking on water (Matthew 14:25).
The Allegory of the Cave
For my part, I remained perplexed about that last scene until I read Plato’s Allegory of the Cave1. In the allegory, on being freed from his shackles in the cave, the prisoner comes to realize the true nature of reality and the falsity of the shadows, he had presumed as reality, while imprisoned. With Chance, this realization doesn’t quite materialize. Like the prisoner, Chance’s knowledge came from Television images and from gardening within the confines of the estate. However, in his post-estate life, Chance remains deluded about the true nature of the world. Even as he makes his way through it. So much so, that with his state of mind, he transcends even its physical laws. For example, he is shown walking on water in that climatic scene. To poke the enlightened viewer, in a post-modernist deconstruction and inversion of the allegory, while standing on the surface of the lake, he jabs the water with his umbrella. It’s as if to remind the viewer that it is she or he who is shackled by its physical laws.
Focus
The allegory in its intended form has fascinated Christian thought for centuries. We recognize in St. Peter the newly-freed prisoner and his journey out of the cave towards truth and light. In Matthew 14:29, St. Peter gets a taste of this literal freeing from the physical laws of nature when he walks on water towards the Lord. St. Peter flounders only when he loses faith. This happens in the precise moment that his focus changes to the stormy reality of his world. In this post-Truth era, the post-modern, secular relativist would have us believe in the fiction that we can walk on water powered by our subjective state of mind. That may play well in a box office matinee, but is unlikely to keep anyone afloat even on still water. For those of us who have been freed, and have come to know the objective reality of the truth, our only recourse in fair or stormy weather is absolute faith in and focus on the Lord of light. Amen.
1 Plato’s Cave – Animated version (~8.5 minutes; narrated by Orson Welles)
[Readings: Nm 12:1-13; Ps 51:3-4, 5-6ab, 6cd-7, 12-13; Mt 14:22-36]
