It’s just a few words about forgiveness, but they speak volumes, and they reminded me of my own feeble prayers.
The movie Philomena was not one I thought I wanted to see. I feared it would be too sentimental or too sad or too overwrought in a Hollywood way. I knew the outlines of the true story on which the film is based: A young Irish woman gets pregnant out of wedlock and gives birth to her child in a convent. She is allowed very little time with the baby, only an hour a day. And then the boy is taken from her without her even saying good-bye, adopted by an American couple.
Years later, married with grown children, Philomena seeks to find the son who was so brutally taken from her. She gets very little help from the convent.
What I hadn’t expected and what the wonderful actress Judi Dench shows with perfection, is that Philomena never loses her faith. She has suffered, she has doubted, yet she still believes. And she wants to do the right thing.
No spoiler alert necessary here; I won’t give the plot away. I just want to mention the crucial scene that struck me. Philomena confronts the now elderly nun who expedited whisking her child away from her, who self-righteously sees nothing wrong with what she did. Philomena says with great dignity, “I forgive you.” And the journalist with her, the companion on her odyssey, cynically remarks, “That was easy.” With steely-eyed gaze, Philomena turns to him and says, “No, that was hard.”
No, that was hard. Was there ever a truer line in an Oscar-nominated movie?
Forgiveness is hard. It only comes, as far as I can tell, with much prayer and God-given grace. But it happens when good people like Philomena know that the only way to move ahead is to let go of the past. To forgive.
Some have claimed the film is too critical of the church. Perhaps. But my own experience is that forgiving those who have wronged you, those in your faith community, in your own church, can be particularly difficult. We need to say, to ourselves, to God and sometimes to those who have wronged us, “I forgive you.” It’s not easy in any circumstance. But it’s brave, right and good.
Thank you, Judi, and you filmmakers for showing us that.
Photo credit: Philomenamovie.com
