Mark D. Roberts
The film Calvary, which features Brendan Gleeson as a good priest staring down the end of a gun barrel, has been in theaters for a few weeks. The High Calling writes about the film and vocation:
There is a cost to vocational calling, not just to the called, but also, and perhaps more so, to their loved ones. This applies to vocational callings to serve in the structure of the institutional church as Christians have traditionally understood the notion, but it also applies to any vocation in which a person is serving others and serving God.
In a one-on-one interview with Gleeson and the film’s writer/director John Michael McDonagh, I asked about the moral dilemma of having to choose between one’s child and one’s calling.
McDonagh said that although the daughter appears fragile at first, she reveals herself to be “quite strong” by the film’s end. She has absorbed her father’s values and will carry them into a very different world from the one he has known, regardless of what happens to him.
There’s a scene in which father and daughter ask forgiveness of each other. Gleeson said it’s possible that in this scene, his character is asking forgiveness for what he is about to risk in his dealings with the would-be killer.
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