The title of this post comes from tonight’s episode of FlashForward, which has begun to delve further into the religious questions that people would inevitably ask after a major crisis – even one that didn’t involve unexplained visions of the future. The Episcopal priest in the episode fits a familiar stereotype (think Ned Flanders’ attempt to find solace from his minister in the Simpsons episode “Hurricane Neddy”). In one sense, the scenario has a certain plausibility to it. After all, liberal Christianity has adapted to the fact that visions of the future are, apart from on TV, not part of our everyday or even occasional experience. We’ve largely shed the miraculous, and so it is not surprising that an attempt to depict a realistic liberal minister on a TV show featuring fantastic, seemingly supernatural events, would lead to the character of the minister being presented as having no answers for what is going on.
Of course, we have hints in the show that such a perspective may be correct – that the event, however bizarre, may have human involvement and scientific explanations.
We also get to hear an associate of terrorists quoting a Sufi parable.
Presumably it is for situations such as these that parables are most crucial. Even though we desire them, pat answers are not what we need in times of crisis. We need stories that challenge us to see beyond pat answers and trite responses to possibilities beyond the box of our current thinking. Certainly that is the effect they have on a main character in tonight’s episode.
In a fictional world in which the seemingly supernatural occurs, realistic liberal religious believers may regularly be stereotyped as having no answers. But even in that context, a minister who believed in miracles would have no better answer than the one that is always offered: “God did it”, followed by specious claims to know why God did “it”, and perhaps even how. But confidence that God is involved (a confidence, at any rate, which many religious believers, whether liberal or conservative, may well share) is not the same as knowledge about God’s involvement or what it means. When it comes to the latter, acknowledgment of our ignorance will probably lead us to greater understanding than denial of ignorance is likely to.
I hope that in the future, FlashForward will get beyond stereotypes and depict the complexities of human religious responses to crises, to the unknown, and to that which slowly becomes known and understood. In the mean time, we’re certainly being told an enthralling story.
One more thing: in this episode we catch a first glimpse of an
actor that LOST fans have been waiting to turn up.
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