The Journey of Love

My no. 2 princess warned it was a long show, but she said I would like it. She was right. From the word 'go', Interstellar had me. Perhaps because it's corny to the core with its "human-ness". It's bound to tug at every parent's heart. Who can watch a child's anger at a father walking out of her life without feeling the prick of tears behind the eyes? Who can not relate to the awful sense of hopelessness talking at an empty screen to someone 'out there' and getting no answer, year after year for umpteen years... who wouldn't just give up and move on?


Yes, it was a sci-fi adventure, with all the mandatory action scenes and incomprehensible gobblegeek language of time relativity, quantum physics, worm holes, black holes, gravity etc. Frankly I have seen more and better seat-gripping action in other movies. As for the premise, a dying earth buried in dust-storms, visions of apocalypse, time warps, the search for brand new frontiers - all are true and tried formulae which movieland has been tossing around for ages. So really as a sci-fi 'epic', I rate Interstellar just so-so. Heck, it didn't even have a super-macho handsome super-hero for me to gawk at.

But it was the interplay of  human and family relationships in the midst of all that which sustained my interest and carried the show for me. A father stuck in space who tries so hard to re-connect with a daughter whom he left behind on earth aeons ago, attempting to reach out across an eternity of time . A daughter growing up with unresolved abandonment issues. A son who loses faith when he no longer gets any response. And that heart-rending line of all lines  "Love is the one thing that transcends time and space."

As I watched Cooper, the dad, desperately clawing around in the one-way mirror of the time-warp - seeing his child right in her own room - so near and yet so far - trying to attract her attention for she cannot perceive him, it immediately brought to my mind a picture of God, the heavenly Father, attempting to communicate with us, His creation on earth. We are so near, yet so far from Him who loves us so much.

Daddy didn't whip out the latest I-phone from his space-suit to wats-app his kid across galaxy band-width. Instead he used old-fashioned Morse code which his smart-aleck daughter immediately recognized as a communication from her MIA dad. How did she know it wasn't a  ghost or her imagination run wild? She didn't need any 'proof', nor did she need to 'test' the validity or existence of her invisible dad in a science lab. She didn't even need to ask any questions. She 'just knew' it was Daddy, though she couldn't glimpse even a shadow of him. The only clue was books dropping down from their shelves in Morse-code order. Quite a miracle - books don't simply walk off shelves in a deliberate pattern. Nor do sand particles stand up like a wall. Yet Murph was so certain it had to be her Daddy.

If only we could approach God that way too. If only we realize God is always reaching out to us. He's given us an intelligent, perfectly-ordered and wonderfully beautiful world to not just admire or reduce to atoms and molecules but to appreciate His hand behind it all. It's funny how we can enthuse about the beauty of Mona Lisa although we have never seen her creator Leonardo Da Vinci. We are quite prepared to accept him as a real human in history although we may not have lived in his time or his space. Because...well, duh, because there are records.

Yet humans can be so superficial; just because no one has ever 'recorded' God on a petrie-dish under a microscope, we conclude so blithely He doesn't or can't exist. But there is a record - in fact there are 66 books  on record on the subject, complete with eye-witness testimony and historical confirmation of a certain Man who claimed to be God who walked on earth 2000 years ago. Just read the Bible. Ahh, we are so quick to say, that's different. Definitely God is different. For one, He doesn't bend to our rules; He makes the rules.

In the movie, the father used something familiar to his daughter - Morse code-  to let her know it was him, speaking to her all the way from outer space. God used an even more effective way  - He con-descended down from His place in high heaven to become one like us, so we could relate to Him as Jesus Christ. "For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form" (Colossians 2:9) as "the express representation of His being" (Hebrews 1:3), "image of the invisible God" (Colossians 1:15).

Jesus walking the earth, doing all sorts of miracles. Jesus dead on the cross. Jesus resurrected alive, seen by various witnesses. Jesus ascending into the clouds. What a crazy story. "Smart-alecks" would reduce, rationalize and explain away every incident; refusing to even consider how a very dead man can walk out of a tomb alive after 3 days, when worms should have been gorging on his entrails. Because... well, it's impossible; legally, logically, scientifically, humanly, 'earthily' impossible.  Yet we readily accept there are in fact time and space dimensions which mankind isn't even close to understanding or exploring. Like the brother with no faith, we give up on God because He doesn't 'answer' according to how we expect Him to answer, writing Him off as "impossible" to believe in.

I especially loved how a very old Murph says to her very young long-lost-in-space father, when they finally get reunited on earth , " Nobody believed me, but I knew you'd come back". When Daddy asks, "How?", Murph simply answers "Because my dad promised me". A promise her heart hung onto even when logically in her smart head, there was really nothing to hang onto. In that she proved stronger than her brother who started out well, dutifully recording messages hoping the father would somehow hear and respond, but finally quitting after years of silence. What made her continue to believe?  I think it's something to do with this thing called 'love' that makes one 'just know'.... Murph had no reason to  hope that her father would come back; she herself was already dying in earth-time. But she still believed, because she knew the one who loved her and whom she loved. 

That's how Christians are. We cling onto the promises of a God who walked out from the hallowed halls of heaven on a journey across space and time to save us, His beloved . It culminated on a cross upon a hill where Jesus paid with His own life to redeem ours from the clutches of another dimension called hell. But it doesn't stop there, for us who believe, the journey hasn't really ended, because He promised to come back for us.... one day.

That's the day this world, as we know it, will end as all of humankind face our ultimate Judge. I like how the father put it, "Mankind was born on Earth. It was never meant to die here....our greatest accomplishments cannot be behind us, because our destiny lies above us". That's literally true for those who believe, for we know where we are going. Sustained by the power of a promise made and simple trust in a God who is alive forever more, we get to embark on a journey back to the Lover and Beloved of our souls. That is the blessing of belief.

"Do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God ; believe also in me. My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am" - John 14:1-3