Learning from Cinematic Wisdom
A Review of
A Whole Life in Twelve Movies: A Cinematic Journey to a Deeper Spirituality
Kathleen Norris and Gareth Higgins
Paperback: Brazos Press, 2024
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Reviewed by Jennifer Burns Lewis
Some books take us on a journey to a fantastic or imaginative place. Others recount the life of a famous person. Still others paint pictures of reflection on universal themes like love, conflict, aging, beauty, or tragedy. Award-winning poet and author Kathleen Norris is best known for her spiritual autobiographies, The Cloister Walk, the story of Norris’s deep dive into Benedictine spirituality as a Presbyterian lay person, and Dakota, the beautiful memoir of life in a rural American community. In her most recent book, A Whole Life in Twelve Months: A Cinematic Journey to a Deeper Spirituality, Norris collaborates with Gareth Higgins, an Irish writer living in Asheville, North Carolina and the founder of the Wild Goose spirituality festival, to provide a lovely conversation for readers to overhear and engage in as a journey within, with movies as the centerpiece of the book. A Whole Life in Twelve Months is a lovely departure for these authors, and yet it is not a departure at all.
Written as a conversation between the two authors with citations of who wrote what to whom, this guide to movies that speak to the flow of human life offers an opportunity to be accompanied, as reader and viewer of film, among twelve films produced over the last ninety years. The chapters of the book share the scope and stretch of the human life: waiting to be born, childhood, community, the breaking and remaking of self, vocation (meaning in the ordinary); vocation (to step into your own shoes), relationships, overcoming success, generosity, transforming conflict, death and beyond, and waiting in silence. As James Martin writes in the foreword,
“Reading this beautiful book is like having an endless fascinating conversation with two friends about film, when those two friends are always wise, thoughtful and funny and have inspiring things to say about the movies they love. They invite the reader to consider films that have something to tell us about how best to live: how we can protect the innocence of children, how we can find a job that pays the bills and also nourish a vocation in the arts, how we can counter greed and violence with self-sacrificing love, and how we might choose to remember our loves once they have ended. Movies for every stage of life.”
Each chapter of A Whole Life in Twelve Movies includes questions for discussion or for personal reflection. They are incisive questions based on the theme of each movie, but broad enough that one could participate in a conversation based on the questions without having seen the movie on which the chapter is based. Whether the authors are discussing the 2016 movie “Paterson” and its theme of ordinary acts that compose an individual’s calling (a favorite them of Kathleen Norris) or the 1998 Japanese film “After Life”, Norris and Higgens invite us to consider how we make meaning in our own quotidian tasks and lives, and how we define what matters most to us. For an aging philosophy major, these are the great questions, and they add form and shape to our lives when we consider them and are introspective about our own mission, values and virtues.
I found myself wishing that I were more of a movie aficionado, more like Kathleen Norris and Gareth Higgens in exploring lesser-known and compelling films about the great questions. Both authors take unusual positions in defending the themes they have chosen for the films they’ve selected. What it’s like to be conscious of one’s own birth is how Higgens describes 2001: A Space Odyssey, a film notably produced in 1968, in the fascinating first chapter. Higgens makes the interesting case in the chapter on conflict that Wonder Woman 1984 invites a discussion of conflict transformed, and a curiosity about the definition of heroism and what makes a superhero. Norris chimes in with her preference for humans who perform heroic acts, citing the film “Of Gods and Men,” the true story of monks who stood up to guerillas in a time of civil unrest in Algeria, at the film “The Best of Enemies” a film about the denunciation of the Ku Klux Klan by one of its leaders.
My favorite chapter was the chapter about relationships, in which the authors discuss the 1937 film “Make Way for Tomorrow” alongside “Love is Strange, an American film produced in 2014. It’s a particularly beautifully written chapter with insights such as these from Gareth, “ …the experience of being reflected back by another who knows us well, whether they are spouse, partner, friend, or community, may be the greatest location for spiritual growth. We need living monuments to such relationships. We need to study them. We need to imagine what it would be like to join them. And someone always needs to go first.”
Why should one read A Whole Life in Twelve Movies? It would make a rich study for a faith formation group or small group due to the eclectic choice of films, and the amazing appendix filled with additional films for consideration, it would be a fine Lenten devotional for a group or an individual who wanted to take a deep dive into their own spiritual growth. For anyone who engages more readily with film, this book is a welcome addition to the volumes of books on faith and film, and this one is deeper than most. And no reader should skip over the epilogue which is a delightful invitation for the authors to complete the sentence “If it weren’t for cinema…” It presents a challenge to the reader to complete the sentence as well and to recall movies that have resonated, informed, and inspired us to live more boldly and with greater imagination.
Jennifer Burns Lewis
Jennifer Burns Lewis is a Presbyterian Church (USA) pastor and aging philosophy major who has served congregations, a college campus and a presbytery in North Carolina, New Jersey, Illinois and Indiana. She’s half of a clergy couple, a mother of two and a grandmother of four. She is the proud owner of a labradoodle puppy named Molly.
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