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Letters to God

by Christian Huebner 

There’s a new movie out, tailor-made for those of Christian ilk. Letters to God is the story of a school age boy with brain cancer, Tyler, who prays by way of the U.S. Postal service and whose indefatigable spirit ministers to his family, classmates, and his mailman.

After seeing Letters, I found myself thinking of a scene from Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Over dinner, Lord Brideshead, the stuffy, pious, and somewhat spacy young aristocrat, asks Charles Ryder, the agnostic Oxford undergraduate and aspiring painter, what he thinks of the artistic merit of the Brideshead family chapel.  “Ryder, you’re an artist, what do you think of it aesthetically?”

“I think it’s beautiful,” protests Cordelia, Brideshead’s twelve-year-old sister.

“Is it good art?” Brideshead continues to pursue Charles’s opinion.

“Well I don’t ... quite know what you mean,” Charles hedges.

“Oh, Bridey, stop being so Jesuitical,” interrupts Sebastian, Brideshead’s younger brother and Charles’s friend.

“I thought it was an interesting point,” Brideshead says, but the conversation is over.

There’s something to be said for Sebastian’s position.  Asking too much about the aesthetics of religious art – that is, art that has a function beyond just being art, to serve a role in religious practice – sometimes is beside the point.  If a kitschy statue or banal contemporary hymn eases the path to prayer, then so be it; at that moment, the critic’s sigh is an unhelpful distraction.

But if the art is not religious art, but is merely Christian art – serving no formal religious purpose, but still in a Christian milieu – then Brideshead’s question is a worthwhile one.  What Chesterton said is true: anything worth doing is worth doing badly.

But anything worth doing is also worth doing well.

That’s true for art and especially for self-consciously Christian art. Pope John Paul II, in another Letter, his "Letter to Artists," noted that all people are called to be craftsmen of their own lives, to mould their existence into a masterpiece by their decision-making.  Some people also have a call to be artists in the specific sense, to “give aesthetic form to ideas conceived in the mind.”

John Paul, himself an actor and a poet, recognized a distinction between the two calls, the universal moral project of crafting one’s life, and the narrower project of crafting objects in the world, but he also the connection between them. “In producing a work,” he wrote, “artists express themselves to the point where their work becomes a unique disclosure of their own being, of what they are and how they are what they are.” Thus, “the history of art ... is not only a story of works produced but also a story of men and women.”

That idea, that art is bound up in the life of the individual creator and also the life of her or his community, is not unique to John Paul.  The critic Calvin Tomkins has noted that for the artists he reviews and interviews, art “has been, among other things, an approach to the problem of living.”

If that is true, it should be a sobering thought for any anyone claiming to make Christian art. It means that Christian art stands as a witness not only to the aesthetic skill of the maker, but to the vitality and beauty of the gospel. Produce something rich, like, say, the short stories of Flannery O’Connor (a woman who knew her call carried this burden) and your work speaks well of the Spirit that you claim gives you life, movement, and being.  Produce something thin and easy like, say, Letters to God, and you give a different impression altogether.

I shouldn’t be too hard on Letters. It was made as a so-called family film, something “safe” to take children to see.  And to that extent, it is successful: no character, not even the tattooed bartender serving shots to Tyler’s alcoholic mailman has any real edge of danger.  No risk of stray profanity in this bar or this movie.

Taken in the abstract, the messages of the film – persevere in faith through difficulty, stick close to your family – are also unobjectionable, even laudatory.  But the way these ideas “are given aesthetic form,” to borrow the pope’s words, is through a disappointing steady stream of easy clichés.  Cliché permeates this movie from the filler laugh lines (grandma looks up from blackened baking pan, and asks mom, Honey, was this supposed to be meatloaf?) to the hard-hitting moments of despair (frustrated mom is sick of hearing everyone quote the Bible to her, wonders if God really cares; fortunately, it’s pretty obvious what the answer will be).  From script to cinematography, Letters resembles the Christian rock music I listened to in middle school: unobjectionable, emotionally provocative, and second-rate.

Is that a bad thing?  Maybe, maybe not.  Stories matter, and this one is far better than some alternatives.  It’s just a little disheartening to see Christian art done badly.  Ideally, the lived experience of Christ would inspire something better.

The best moment in Letters is a notable exception.  Early in the movie, Tyler goes to visit the grandfather of his best friend.  Here again, most of the scene is ham-handed, but for a moment, the clouds part: the old man looks straight into the eyes of a boy ravaged by a disease he doesn’t deserve and tells the boy that he is one of God’s special chosen ones.  He has been given a mission of the highest honor, to bear his suffering and let his courage and faith draw others to the Lord.

There is something brutal and beautiful about this scene.  Something of the gospel slipped through the censors and transcended the skill of the artist.  It merits development.

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(The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Headline Bistro or the Knights of Columbus.)