The Children's Act

Challenging, harrowing, thoughtful, beautifully moving and subtle, just a few of my instant reflections on leaving  my showing of ‘The Children’s Act’  today.

It focuses on the challenges of a Judge in the Family Court, played by Emma Thompson., specifically the case of a 17 year old Jehovah Witness refusing a potentially life saving blood transfusion.  With a screenplay by Ian McEwan, based on his own novel, a writer renowned for thoughtful yet non dogmatic explorations on issues of faith  from his own atheist/humanist  standpoint, it’s a story stepped in the big questions, of life, love, meaning and God. 

As I reflect on it a few, fairly disparate, thoughts remain with me  ...

If your religion or faith, of any shade, is a means to hide from the reality of the world as it is, it’s pain or its opportunity.  If your dogma is so unflinching as to become as obstacle to obvious flourishing.  Then its certainly worth questioning and is most likely misplaced.  That’s true whether  your ‘faith’ has a ‘religious’ bent, or is in a humanism based on some sense of pure reason. 

If life is measured in the quality of its living, in poetry, song, and the travelling of the word with it’s ever extending horizons, what of those who can’t, or wont, read or sing or journey? 

If freedom is key, freedom to choose, what if the only choice is death?  If death represents some sort of ultimate finality is not our freedom somehow mocked?

If death, without faith, seems pointless and futile, yet the, oft repeated, loss of ‘an only son’ seems so profound, perhaps there’s a clue to the source of something more. 

To live life solely in the realm of reason, argument , duty, responsibility ... justice, even if perfectly and ably executed, is to fail to live life to the full.  

The final words, coming before a wordless cemetery, ‘will you still love me...?’ provides an ultimate challenge.  If life, fulfilled and meaningful, is to be an object of love, how might I live life with integrity, reason and purpose and still find love, be loved, love myself, just as I am?   If my circumstances seem to deny it, where might an unending, unconditional, life giving love be found?