The idea that one might go to the theatre during Lent would have struck our Protestant forefathers as deeply disturbing, especially if the play seemed to have no obvious connection with the Christian faith. Last Monday I went to see Terence Rattigan’s play ‘Flare Path’ at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket. The reviews seem all to have been positive. The play was first produced in 1942 and is set in a hotel near an air force base. It concerns the relationships of three bomber pilots and their wives. It is as many of Rattigan’s plays are, beautifully crafted, funny, tense and sad, though seeming at the start to be rather dated with its understated emotions and clichéd air force bravado. As it progresses the feelings become less suppressed, tragedy threatens, a moral victory is won and all concludes with a happy ending – or so it might seem.
Rattigan came from an Irish Protestant background but his own and his father’s lives seem to have been of the kind which earns religious disapproval. And yet to me the play contains a religious theme suitable to Lent though I don’t think God is mentioned once (or at least not seriously). To explain I have to reveal further details of the plot but I would still encourage you to see it if you can – if only to dismiss such a religious reading.
The central characters are an actress married to the captain of a bomber crew, and her former lover, an Englishman coming to the end of an acting career in Hollywood. The actor turns up out of the blue, he needs her back, his contract wont be renewed, he’s beginning to feel old. The bomber captain comes back from a dangerous mission, he breaks down and confesses the fear which lurks behind his happy-go-lucky style; he’s terrified of flying, of his responsibility for his crew, he needs his wife desperately. The actress is torn between the two of them. She once loved the actor passionately, but is now beginning to fall in love with the pilot she married within a week of their meeting. She tells the actor she wont go away with him, so he threatens to reveal all to the pilot. In the mean time another of the bombers has failed to return from the mission. Its captain is a Polish Count married to a Lancastrian bar amid with a heart of gold. She has overheard the actor saying that the Count will leave her when the war is over, it’s only a wartime romance, he wont want to introduce her to his family or make her the mistress of his estate. It is her fear too; her husband can hardly speak English so he can’t tell her his real feelings. As hope that the Count will return fades she opens a letter from him to be read in the event of his death. It is in French and only the actor can translate it for her. The letter tells of the Count’s genuine love for her; his wife and child had been killed by the Nazis in Warsaw, he had not believed he could ever know love again but she had proved him wrong; after the war he will take her to Poland and show her how much he loves her, how much he owes to her. The scene is immensely touching, as the actor haltingly reads the words, searching for the right translation and she responds with little exclamations of love and delight.
The effect on the actor is profound; he undergoes a moral conversion and makes up his mind to leave without saying anything to break up the marriage between his former lover and the pilot. What is it that changes his mind? It is hard to tell exactly. The dignity and the suffering of the Countess, her love for the Count and the nobility of his love for her, the bravery of all the pilots he meets in this hotel, the fear of death and separation they live with on a daily basis, and the fact that they accept it all for the sake of the cause they believe themselves to be fighting for. In the face of all that, the actor is converted; his own suffering, his own difficulties become less significant and he contributes a sacrifice of his own.
Lent and Holy Week form that part of the year in which we spend most time thinking about the power and significance of the Cross. What does the death of Christ achieve, what difference does it make? The answers we give to this question are collectively known as theories of the atonement, theories which show how the death of Christ breaks down the gap between the human and the divine brought about by sin and ignorance, opening up the possibility of our becoming once more at one with God. One such theory was advanced by Peter Abelard, the famous lover of Eloise. It is known as the exemplarist or subjective theory. In brief it describes the mission of Christ as a demonstration or exemplar of the love of God towards us, which in turn excites repentance and reciprocal love in us. Of course God’s love for his people is a major theme of the Old Testament, but the incarnation, life and death of Jesus is seen as the ultimate, final, most complete example of that love. The difference made by Christ’s life and death lies in its subjective influence on the mind of sinners. Critics of this theory claim that it fails to take the power of sin seriously enough and that it leaves out any objective act of redemption, whether it be the defeat of evil, or the punishment of Jesus in our place, or some kind of payment of our debt to God, which we find in other theories of atonement. And yet Abelard states his theory with considerable force:
‘Everyone is made more righteous, that is more loving to God, after the passion of Christ than before, because people are incited to love…And so our redemption is that great love for us shown in the passion of Christ, which not only sets us free from the bondage of sin, but also gains for us the true liberty of the children of God, so that we should fulfil all things not so much through fear as through love.’
We do not know how Abelard developed this theory or how he explained the crucifixion as a demonstration of the love of God, nevertheless I was reminded of this theory as I watched Rattigan’s play and especially the scene with the letter which I described above. That scene is in some way an analogy to the exemplarist theory in that it shows someone being converted from the intention to perform a sinful act by a dramatic example of the unexpected power of love and self sacrifice. Sometimes the exemplarist theory can be made to sound (as in some hymns) like emotional blackmail, as if God were saying, ‘How can you treat me like this given all that I’ve done for you.’ But the example of love in the play doesn’t work like that. The actor is genuinely moved by the unfolding of a story of genuine and tragic love which he had underestimated and scorned before he knew its true depth.
Using this analogy we might argue that God allows his son to undertake a mission of teaching, healing, forgiveness and loving commitment to all those he encounters which by its moral and emotional power has its inevitable denouement, given the nature of the world, in suffering and death. This death is freely accepted by Jesus out of the knowledge that it is the love of God for the world which sent him on that mission which must be seen through to the end. The more we know of this story, the more we see how it works, the harder it is for us to read it while remaining in a state of anger, jealousy, pride or untruthfulness – all those states of mind which lead to sin. The story has converting power and the more deeply it is comprehended the more powerfully it may work on our everyday lives.
I doubt if Rattigan ever made this connection for himself, but perhaps because of his sensitivity to the workings of the human heart he was able to discover as it were anonymously the power of an analogy to the workings of one theory of the atonement. Strangely the play also contains a kind of resurrection in that the Polish Count returns having survived the landing of his plane at sea. The play ends with a scene of great jubilation which might be taken as a happy ending were it not for the fact that as an audience we know that the war still has five years to go, the Count will probably not be able to return to Poland, and the pilots themselves know that the next days and months will see more and more potentially fatal raids. The world continues to be in need of a narrative of redemptive love which will enable us to love redemptively in return.
With my love and prayers for Holy Week and Easter,
THANK YOU
My deepest gratitude to all of you who came to the party to celebrate my ten years at St John’s and my birthday, to all who provided such delicious refreshments, and contributed to the very generous gift I received and for the many greetings and good wishes I have received subsequently – it was the longest birthday I have ever celebrated!