Gravity is being hailed as a must-see movie. The IMAX experience is one of incredible beauty and thrilling danger. Most of us who see this movie will go for all of the tail-end-of-summer action adventure that it promises, but I was pleasantly surprised to find a spiritual and philosophical metaphor for the inextricable relationship between life and death.
Sandra Bullock plays Dr. Ryan Stone, an engineer making her first trip to outer space which becomes tragic when debris from a destroyed satellite hurtles towards her ship. Suddenly, what was a routine mission becomes an incredible fight to find a way to return to Earth. While the movie is receiving great reviews for the spectacular space ride some are under-whelmed by the plot. But I’m not sure the movie is intended to rest on the storyline per se. For me, Ryan’s journey into space is a metaphorical, dreamlike working out of her subconscious struggle between giving up life altogether and finding the strength to face her own despair. In the construct of outer space, the doctor becomes a vulnerable woman whose saving grace is an acute awareness of her own mortality.
Lisa Cole Smith
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We live in a culture where we do everything we can to avoid the reality of death. We are shocked and incensed when tragedy or difficulty enters our lives as if it were some sort of injustice, a betrayal of what life or God owes us. We prefer to go through life untouched by these things, numb to their reality. But Gravity points out that by doing so we choose to live asleep, floating around in a neither fully alive nor yet dead state. In this less-than reality we are unable to connect with one another or with ourselves. We live perpetually as we find Dr. Ryan Stone in the movie — cut off, isolated. Whether it’s in her space suit, a tiny pod or her car back on Earth, she has chosen the seemingly protected silence of shutting out the voices of pain and suffering.
Yet, as Christians, we know that often it is in pain and suffering that God is revealed. The early Christian Desert Fathers practiced a way of self-denial and strict asceticism, believing that a deep acquaintance with one’s mortality was a helpful necessity to confronting our deep and hidden selfishness and being given true freedom and life in Christ. A dying to self is integral to the Christian faith, and in a way, life’s journey can be seen as a series of little deaths, learning to kill and let go of false expectations, desires and needs on the way to maturity.
In outer space, Dr. Stone learns to expect to confront tragedy, difficulty and loss like clockwork as debris from the destroyed satellite circles the globe every 90 minutes threatening her life. In this barrage of pain and stress she finally gives up the pretense that she can hide from the grief of her daughter’s death. She is forced to choose to live or die, but the shell of half living is no longer an option.
In this, she is given a gift. Most of us are never in a situation where we are forced to choose and so we can travel our whole lives feeling as if we are running out of air — lonely, fearful and disconnected. Ryan Stone is an everywoman character traveling this path for us. In her story we find a call to “wake up,” to choose to embrace the threatening pull of reality on our lives, the gravity that grounds us in distinct time with a beginning and an end. We are reminded that life is not about arriving, about safety or security or certainty. To be protected from harm or pain is to die, to be walking and yet asleep. Only through embracing our mortality, embracing what constantly pulls us down toward the grave, are we aware of what we have in the ability to stand, to live, to move and to treat our moments as a gift.
Gravity suggests, as do the Desert Fathers, that we are only as ready to live as we are to die.
Lisa Cole Smith (lsmith@convergenceccf.net) is pastor of Convergence: A Creative Community of Faith, in Alexandria, Va.