(NOTE: This is a passage from the closing paragraphs of chapter 4 from a book I am writing)
So what is the way forward? Is there a better way to approach issues of sexuality? “The answer my friend, is blowing in the wind” … solo agape. There is a great scene in the classic movie The Mission (1986) with Robert de Niro. DeNiro plays a Spanish slave trader and mercenary, Mendoza, consumed with guilt over the killing of his younger brother in a duel. The Jesuit Father Gabriel (played by Jeremy Irons) challenges him to a strenuous act of penance by climbing the forbidding water falls while tied to his armor and weapons.
Through much pain and effort,
Mendoza succeeds in making it to the top of the falls with his heavy load of
weapons and guilt.
So what is the way forward? Is there a better way to approach issues of sexuality? “The answer my friend, is blowing in the wind” … solo agape. There is a great scene in the classic movie The Mission (1986) with Robert de Niro. DeNiro plays a Spanish slave trader and mercenary, Mendoza, consumed with guilt over the killing of his younger brother in a duel. The Jesuit Father Gabriel (played by Jeremy Irons) challenges him to a strenuous act of penance by climbing the forbidding water falls while tied to his armor and weapons.
The Guarani Indians, the very people he formerly hunted and enslaved, decide to spare his life and cut him loose from the heavy pack his was dragging behind him (and symbolically from his prison of pride and guilt). Mendoza breaks down in weeping and laughter as he is set free from himself.
In a subsequent scene, Mendoza asks Father Gabriel how he can thank him for all of his help. Father Gabriel tells him "don't thank me, thank the Guarani" and gives him a copy of the New Testament. Mendoza is surrounded by nearly naked native women with beautiful bare breasts who are in the process of tattooing him as a sign of his induction into their tribe. The view wonders what will happen next. Will Mendoza take advantage of his new found popularity with the tribe and sleep with one (or several) of the native women? The next scene finds Mendoza slowly and thoughtfully reading from 1 Corinthians 13.
(Robert DeNiro reads 1 Corinthians 13)
If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 If I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3 And if I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I surrender my body [a]to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing. 4 Love is patient, love is kind and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant, 5 does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, 6 does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; 7 bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails …
1 Corinthians 13:1-8
In
the end, Mendoza does not take advantage of the innocence of the native women;
he gives his life in the attempt to defend them from the encroaching Portuguese
troops. His character has been transformed by mercy and divine love. Agape love
becomes his moral guide. Instead
of attempting to impose an abstract moral code of categorical imperatives on
people, the way forward is to teach, preach, demonstrate and impart the Love of
God. Those who internalize the divine agape love will, in the end, make the
right choices, because since God IS love, they have internalized God.
