Thoughts from a drive-in movie

By Kay Collier McLaughlin

The Bourbon Drive-In sits just off the corner of Jackstown Road and Kentucky 68, its marquee in clear view of the busy main highway.  According to local newspapers and word of mouth, films run Friday, Saturday and Sunday of most warm-weather weeks – the upcoming feature posted sometime Sunday evening. The first show of the 2004 drive-in season, according to the marquee, would be The Passion of the Christ.

It was a simple sign, as such things go — the black letters a little crooked on the white signboard — probably among the least auspicious for this mega million dollar movie.

The signboard was a beacon at least one commuter saw daily throughout Holy Week – a sign that led one car-load of thoroughly churched Episcopalians to the small drive-in on Easter Sunday evening.  Halfway between Easter dinner venues and home bases,  it was the perfect solution to attempting to coordinate various calendars. There was also a little sense of quirkiness in choosing a rather shabby, rural 1950’s vintage drive-in as the setting for viewing this particular movie.

Attendance was not without pre-performance hype — from every possible news source.  Columns and conversations pro and con, re both movie and director.

The night was chilly, the car a small, intimate island in the darkness.  As the scenes moved from the garden to Golgotha,  words in that car were few; the quietness palpable. Each viewer was locked into their own experience of the last hours of the life of Jesus, their own experience of the flashbacks to moments of ministry heartbreakingly juxtaposed with the terrible  kind of violence against which most have been protected in sanitized, civilized American lives.

Online thoughts regarding last week’s documentary on the religious movies of Episcopalian Cecil B. DeMille punctuated my viewing.  Nick Knisely of the Diocese of Bethlehem wrote that as a 10^th grader he decided he needed to read the whole Bible.  It was while reading in Exodus, how God led the people of Israel with a pillar of fire by night and a pillar of cloud by day, that he could see an image of just what that looked like in his mind as he read the words, for he had seen such an image in the movie “The Ten Commandments.”  “The idea that God would actually intervene in human affairs so decisively made me absolutely stop what I was doing.  If God did that back then, then maybe God was doing that now, too.”  Knisely went on to say, “When I saw The Passion, I was struck by the same powerful visual images that Gibson includes in an almost tableau manner. Perhaps in the future someone else will decide that they need to take God seriously because of a picture planted in their mind’s eye…(I recognize) the power of art to evangelize the world…I hope we (our Episcopal Church) will keep trying to share our faith by whatever tools God has given us to use.”

Leaving the Bourbon Drive-In, one of us said, “I know I will remember this for the rest of my life.”

And so will I.

I’ll remember that small island in the darkness, and the story played out on that huge screen in undeniable starkness, while my soul was still filled with the power of the Resurrection experienced in the local pageantry of the Easter Vigil.

“I looked up, and I saw my Lord a weeping”....the voices of the soloists sang. “I looked up and I saw my Lord a dying…”

“I looked up, and I saw my Lord a rising”....they crescendoed.

“Alleluia He is coming! Alleluia He is here! ....the congregation joined fervently.

Alleluia He is coming!   Alleluia He is here!”

Across the congregations, the bells rang — small bells, large bells, the high pitched and the low — as bouquets of flowers filled the window ledges and lilies appeared on the altar, and the lights came up in reminder of the great darkness that He had cast out.

“Alleluia He is coming! Alleluia He is here!”

In his book The Easter Moment, Jack Spong writes: “Across the chasm of our isolation there comes the gift of love — love lifts us up and stands us on our feet.  It gives us the courage to live again, to risk loving again. That is resurrection.  It is love giving life, love breaking into our loneliness.  When we know the love, we are lifted into life, resurrected life, life that can never be totally destroyed again.”

And so this Easter moment — a collage of moments – joins with other Easter moments – redeeming and transforming and living in me — that I can continue to sing.

“Alleluia, He is here!”