Contact

Last night as a family we watched the movie Contact, starring Jodie Foster and Matthew McConnaughy. I remembered not being particularly impressed by this film back in 1997 when we first saw it in theaters. When Glen suggested we watch it, I was sort of lukewarm about popping the videotape into the VCR. But by film's end, I understood why I had not appreciated the film as much one decade ago as I do today. I realized that in order to fully appreciate this film you have to have faith, an aspect of my life that was not completely lacking in 1997, but was underdeveloped.

The fact that faith is the key to appreciating this film is not just a little ironic, since the film's protagonist, played by Jodie Foster, does not believe in God, and the novel on which the movie is based was written by Carl Sagan, an agnostic. Yet, the movie is one of the best expositions of the principle of faith that I have ever seen.

If I've not stated this for the record elsewhere, I'll state here now that I feel a special affinity with atheists and agnostics. I am not an atheist or agnostic, though I have at certain points in my life entertained serious doubts about the existence of God, and even publicly expressed the sentiment that if God existed we should disbelieve in him. (The inverse of Voltaire's famous aphorism that if God did not exist we should have had to invent him!) For more than a decade of my life -- from roughly 1993 until 2005 -- even though I was active in a church, I was what I would now consider a functional atheist. For all intents and purposes I lived my life as if God did not exist.

I am no longer an atheist in any sense at all. I have been too profoundly touched by God, I have had too powerful an experience of God's presence to be able to do anything but feel awed and humbled and grateful to him, to feel anything but the deepest possible yearning for continued, growing communion with him, a hunger for the full realization of his kingdom here below on earth, and unmitigated, endless fellowship with him in the Eternal realms.

Yet I love and feel affinity with atheists and agnostics. In fact, in many ways I feel as though my faith is much closer to the disbelief of atheists than it is to the lazy, hypocritical, legalistic, intolerant religious culture in which today's America is saturated. American "belief" is too much like Nebuchadnezzar's golden statute. America's self-appointed spokespeople for God are too much like Nebuchadnezzar's priests, demanding obedience, and threatening lion's dens and fiery furnaces for those who don't bow down. To the extent that God is identified with American nationalism and American wars and the American dollar, that god I want no part of. That kind of theism is nothing but filth and idolatry. And when the predominant culture is idolatrous, atheism is the beginning of faith.

In the faith that I embrace, God speaks to us not in the storm and whirlwind, but in the still, small voice. The voice that is so quiet it can only be heard in the silence. God does not compel, God persuades. God loved us into being, and loves us into motion. In the Mormon theology that I embrace, God purposely created a universe for us to live in that appears to be godless. God deliberately sent us into this dimension with no recollection of him. We live in an apparently godless universe, with no overt memory of God, in order to be tested, to see if we will live lives of compassion, justice and mercy even when we are free to live lives of greed, injustice and hate. No compulsion, no force should be used to require faith. That's the way of Satan. That is the way, incidentally, of the culture we live in.

The "believer" who is intolerant and mean-spirited is like the son in Jesus' parable, who promised his father he would come and labor in the vineyard but then reneges. The "unbeliever" who is kind to the stranger and merciful to the widow and the orphan is like the son in Jesus' parable, who told his father he would not come work in the vineyard, but then showed up anyway. I'd much rather have the latter kind of faith than the former. So, apparently, would Jesus (Matthew 21: 28-32).

In the film Contact, Ellie Arroway (the main character, played by Jodie Foster) stopped believing in God after her father died of a heart attack, when a well-meaning priest told her that her father's death was God's will. At a crucial moment in the film, Ellie is interrogated by a congressional committee about her beliefs. She truthfully admits that she cannot believe in God, because she has no evidence of his existence, and is punished for this truthful admission. Another scientist, David Drumlin (played by Tom Skerritt), lies to the congressional committee, feigning belief in God, and is rewarded. I love these moments in the film, because they so beautifully illustrate some of the crucial issues related to belief and unbelief: the problems created by idolatrous definitions of God (that put God on the side of injustice) and the problems created by coercion of the human conscience (that reward hypocrisy and punish the search for truth).

Yet, though Ellie Arroway does not believe in God, she is the person in the film who demonstrates the greatest faith. At the beginning of the film, she tirelessly promotes a SETI ("Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence") project against disbelief and opposition in the government, and in the scientific and philanthropic communities. She has no "proof" that extraterrestrial life exists, or that, if it exists, it is capable of communicating with us. Yet, she reasons, if there are over 100 billion stars in the Milky Way alone, and even if only one in a million of those had life, and if only one in a million again of those with life had intelligent life, there would still be millions of worlds "out there" with intelligent life like ours, capable of communicating with us. So she presses forward despite the disbelief of her peers, in search of that life -- seeking "contact." At the end of the film, Ellie makes contact with alien life using a machine that -- to outside observers -- looks as if it did nothing, as if she was in the machine for only a few seconds. When Ellie tells about her experience with the aliens, the rest of the world disbelieves her, dismissing her testimony as nonsense and explaining it away as a fraud and a hoax. Ellie finds that the transcendent truth she has discovered about life and intelligence and our relationship to the universe is incapable of being conveyed to others. It can only be experienced, or accepted "on faith."

At the end of the film, Ellie is portrayed teaching astronomy to young children. When one child expresses skepticism about what she is teaching, she encourages that child not to believe in something just because someone tells him to. Instead, we should each strive to gain understanding for ourselves, always testing, always proving, always curious and seeking.

The novel by Carl Sagan, as I understand it, is actually a bit more theistic than the movie. Sagan steadfastly refused to deny the existence of God. But he also refused to believe in a God for which he had no evidence. All the same, the novel posits the existence of intelligences greater than ours capable of astonishing things (capable of building an interstellar communication and transportation system), and even the existence of an intelligence greater than these, that created the universe itself. The film doesn't go as far as the novel in its potential affirmation of a universal creator. But the film does inspire awe and humility, the importance of understanding our rightful place in a universe that is much, much larger than we are. This, like the refusal to believe in idols, and like the hunger to know, is another cornerstone of true faith.

Faith is far too often presented to us as requiring belief in unbelievable dogma. Worse, it is presented as requiring belief in a God of hate and intolerance and injustice. But faith is far more powerful and far more fundamental than any sort of "belief." Faith is rooted in the deep human yearning for "contact," for connection with others like ourselves, and with others greater than ourselves, and with ultimate meaning, the ultimate other. With God. Faith is not believing in the unbelievable, but rather, putting ourselves -- our bodies, our souls, our very selves -- on the line in that quest for contact.