V for Vendetta

I was asked to speak about this movie tonight for our Mosaic service. The topic is Internal Gyroscopes vs. External Slavery, or some such goodness. Basically, we are called to be motivated by internal things (god) vs external things (life). We naturally get caught up in the external. How do we move from being externally motivated to the internal?

My talk is as follows:

Tonight we are talking about moving from being moved/motivated by the external world around us, to being motivated by internal things. Acting vs. reacting.

In the movie V for Vendetta there is a particularly powerful scene where Evey (played by Natalie Portman) has been captured by the secret police. She is told that she will be sentenced to death by firing squad unless she gives up the name and location of V (the protagonist). Evey is justifiably terrified but says nothing. They take her away, shave off her hair, and proceed to torture her. Over and over again they ask her to give up that information, but she refuses. Sometime during her ordeal, Evey finds hope in a letter, written by a fellow inmate who is near her own death. Each time Evey returns from another session, she finds solace in the last words of another fellow sufferer, words that are full of love - love for life, love for others, love for the persecuted. Evey is asked, one final time, to give up the location of V. She replies with a strong no, gripping the letter of the dead inmate. Her captor tells her she will be taken out behind the chemical sheds and shot. When they come to take her away, they ask her one more time if she will cooperate. She says she would rather die. Her captor says, “You are free to go. You are no longer afraid.” And walks away, leaving the door to her cell wide open. Evey leaves her cell, leery of a trick, and realizes that her captivity was not what it had seemed. She searches herself for the typical reaction: anger, righteous anger, indignity, something. But all she finds is hope and love. Evey emerges into the world a changed woman, her hair and her fears gone, ready to move the world.

What’s the point? I found these same themes of changing our motivators reflected in Richard Foster’s book The Spiritual Disciplines. Foster talks about how it is impossible for humans to deal with our sin through the will alone. He says, “The will has the same deficiency as the law – it can deal only with externals. It is incapable of bringing about the necessary transformation of the inner spirit.” So, we can’t decide on our own that we are going to be motivated by inner things, and then do it; just as Evey was unable to overcome her fears by deciding she was done being afraid. The question is, “if we can’t move our focus from the external to the internal by ourselves, how do we do it?” What is our equivalent of the torture cell?

Foster says that inner righteousness, a transformed inner spirit, can come from God alone; so it would seem that we either get it or we don’t. He continues, “the moment we grasp this breathtaking insight [that only God can transform us], we are in danger of an error in the opposite direction. We are tempted to believe there is nothing we can do. If all human strivings end in moral bankruptcy (and having tried it, we know it is so), and if righteousness is a gracious gift from God (as the Bible clearly states), then is it not logical to conclude that we must wait for God to come and transform us? Strangely enough, the answer is no… God has given us the Disciplines of the spiritual life as a means of receiving his grace. The Disciplines allow us to place ourselves before God so that he can transform us.” The spiritual disciplines are our torture cells – plain and simple. They strip away the false, the shallow, the sinful so that we can connect, one-on-one with god. It might sound a bit harsh, but changing from one who reacts to one who acts is not something you can do overnight or in your sleep. We can’t follow Christ unless we take up our cross, that ancient instrument of torture and death, and follow.

We have two options: be condemned to a dead life of reaction outside of Christ, or submit ourselves to the painful/beautiful disciplines so that we can become people of action. It’s our only hope. The question is: how bad do you want it?