I am a lover of stories. More than
that, I am a lover of storytelling. Not only stories themselves, but how they
are told, whether in novels or cinema or in our own everyday lives.
This week, the vicarage-dwellers
watched Encanto, Disney’s 60th feature-length animation. Set in Columbia
and inspired by the magical realism of much Latin American storytelling, Encanto
tells the story of the family Madrigal, three generations who live together in
a sentient house at the heart of a hidden village, presided over by their matriarch
Abuela, Grandmother. For two generations, each member of the family has been bestowed
a magical gift as a child. One has precognition; another, the ability to endow
food with healing power; another can control the weather, to an extent, though
her strong emotions can create unwanted downpours. One has enhanced hearing;
another can shape-shift their form; another can converse with animals. One has
super-human strength; another can summon flowers into being. And one, Mirabel
Madrigal, did not receive any magical gift. However, it is Mirabel who sees their
home cracking apart, the magic dying; and it is Mirabel who must save them all,
by helping them to confront those things that they have tried to suppress for
many years.
As Mirabel persists, the family
secrets are brought into the light. Her older sister, Luisa, the one with
superhuman strength, carries an enormous burden of anxiety, that her value is
only in her talent, and should it fail, who then would she be? And Mirabel and
Luisa’s older sister, Isabela, the one who makes everything pretty with flowers,
resents the burden of beauty and perceived perfection, secretly wishing to be
able to express all her emotions in a diversity of plant forms, resentful of
Mirabel who is free from the burden of expectation, unaware of Mirabel’s burden
of expectation to serve the village without a gift of her own. In the Madrigal’s
world, image, how we are perceived, is everything; uncertainty and ambiguity
are dangerous, to be pushed away. Abuela Alma is so frightened of losing the
miracle that has been given her family that she controls everything. She is
admired by the villagers and loved by her family, but over time she has become
a toxic presence, her actions, however well-intentioned, threatening the very
thing she is fighting to preserve: the future for her family, in their enchanted
home.
I must confess that I did not enjoy
this film. It was far too close to the bone. It told the story of many a local
church congregation, where love blinds us to controlling behaviour, where duty becomes
weaponised, and where we struggle with giftedness and identity.
This Sunday in our churches we hear
again the words that Paul wrote to a household in Corinth (1 Corinthians
12:12-31a). He speaks of bodies and of gifts. Our bodies are interconnected,
inter-dependent, and, in the case of a Christian community, express the body of
Christ in our neighbourhood. Each has a role to play, each is worthy of honour
and respect, if one suffers then all suffer. And Paul will continue, describing
how love holds this household together, building and where necessary repairing
a roof to shelter all, a house where the whole extended multigenerational family
can live together (1 Corinthians 12:31b-13:13).
It is easy to see the body in 1
Corinthians 12 as a metaphor, but it is more than that. We are bodily
creatures, bodies (and not just disembodied lives) entwined together, and that
is why there are limits to Covid isolating, and to relating to one another virtually,
through a screen. Both of those things are good gifts—indeed, life-saving—but
beyond a certain point they shape us in unhelpful ways. We are bodily
creatures, and Jesus is both our model and our life. Jesus, who experienced
hunger and thirst, the need to sleep, to rest; Jesus, whose body was wiped by his
mother in infancy and in death, whose body touched and was touched by others in
healing ways, whose body was tortured, whose body experienced dying and death
and whose body was raised from the dead in bodily form.
Our bodies carry our biography, from the
face of our mother or father that looks out at us when we look in the mirror
thanks to the genes they passed on, to the scars and burns and liver spots on
our hands, to the tension we feel when the present moment pulls us without
warning into the past. And our bodies need to know the healing power of love in
the past, where we can return through accompanied memory (for memory is a
shared construction) as well as in the present, through forgiveness and
reconciliation. Our bodies can also experience future-healing, faith giving
certainty to what we hope for, and the foretaste now of what will be one day.
By the end of Mirabel’s quest, her
gift is made manifest to her family, the gift of reconciliation. Family members
reconciled in their relationship with themselves—I can be weak as well as
strong; cacti are as wonderful as roses—and to one another where they had
become estranged. And the family are reconciled to the village, who come to
help, possessing no magical gifts but being many, and knowing what it is to
work together to bless others. One body, many parts. May we, as a local church,
discover afresh what it is to be embodied, to be touched as well as to touch,
to be healed and to heal, to discover Christ in our midst. Amen.
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