Every year, after the Christmas tree is lit, the fire built,
and the Christmas story read, my family watches the timeless classic, It’s a Wonderful Life. For as long as I
can remember, that’s been the tradition. Back in the day, I somewhat resisted
it, but my dear mother persisted, and so to this day we carry it on, and the
movie has become, if not my very favorite, then definitely one of my favorite movies of all time. As with
many things, my love preceded understanding, but with each year I am better
able to articulate the reasons I have come to appreciate the movie like I have.
It’s a classic and though (sadly) many in my generation haven’t seen the movie,
most still know what it is. And if not by name, then “every time a bell rings
an angel gets its wings,” usually jogs the memory. There are precious few other movies so old
that still have as much precedent in culture. Just what is it then about this movie? Is it the
nostalgia that it brings to families like mine who have been doing it year
after year? Maybe, but surely there’s something more. What is it about any
story that makes people keep coming back to it again and again?
I want to argue that, perhaps among other things, at the heart of any
good story are echoes of truth. Growing up, my dad was intentional to start and
end the day together as a family. In the morning, we would gather in the
kitchen, Dad would read the Proverb corresponding to the day, and then would
read out of a book on character—each page had a different character trait with
a definition, examples of how to carry it out within a home environment, and
rewards of this character trait. At the end of the day, we would gather in the
living room and Dad would read aloud to us. We learned about a lot of character
traits over the years; we read a lot of stories over the years. I’m thankful
for the intentionality in both the morning routine and the evening one, but if
I’m honest, I don’t remember the character traits. I might be able to roughly
recite a couple of the definitions, but that’s about it. I do
remember—vividly—The Pevensies’ first time in Narnia, and I remember Billy’s
hard work raising money to buy two hound dogs. I remember Anne Shirley
traipsing through Lover’s Lane and past the Lake of Shining Waters; I
remember Ralph Moody moving to Colorado, and I remember when his father died… I
remember countless stories and I feel, even now, the impact it’s had on me.
Stories serve to take things like character traits and show them to us in a way we can relate to and understand. The Remains of the Day is a book about a
butler in the 1940’s, and looks at how the old traditions of England change as
the world changes. It’s been years since I read it and I don’t remember much of
it well, but one thing in the book struck me and has stuck with me and is
perhaps the best “explanation” I’ve found for what stories do. “What is a great
butler?” the story asks, and the main character, who narrates the story and is
a butler himself, seeks to come up with an answer. He tries and tries to talk
his way through it and explain it, but clarifies very little. He then turns to
a story, a story his father used to tell:
“The story was an
apparently true one concerning a certain butler who had travelled with his
employer to India and served there for many years maintaining amongst the
native staff the same high standards he had commanded in England. One
afternoon, evidently, this butler had entered the dining room to make sure all
was well for dinner, when he noticed a tiger languishing beneath the dining
table. The butler had left the dining room quietly, taking care to close the
doors behind him, and proceeded calmly to the drawing room where his employer
was taking tea with a number of visitors. There he attracted his employer’s
attention with a polite cough, then whispered in the latter’s ear: ‘I’m very
sorry, sir, but there appears to be a tiger in the dining room. Perhaps you
will permit the twelve-bores to be used?’ And according to legend, a few
minutes later, the employer and his guests heard three gunshots. When the
butler reappeared in the drawing room some time afterwards to refresh the
teapots, the employer had inquired if all was well. ‘Perfectly fine, thank you,
sir,’ had come the reply. ‘Dinner will be served at the usual time and I am
pleased to say there will be no discernible traces left of the recent
occurrence by that time.”
This story says more than the previous five pages of the
book about what a dignified butler is. Of course one can go on about knowing
what to do in the event of a crisis, of reporting it to the right person but
handling it on your own, of doing so with calmness and without drama. But none
of that really gets the point across like the story does. The closest this
butler, or his father, ever came to adequately describing the role of a butler
was through the means of a story. The narrator further says, “It is of little
importance whether or not this story is true; the significant thing is, of course,
what it reveals concerning my father’s ideals.” He gets at the critical idea
that there are two different types of truths. For the sake of clarity, I will
categorize them as immediate truth and abstract truth. In the case of the
butler’s story, whether the events of the story actually happened would be the
immediate truth of the thing—the accuracy of the factual events. But
there’s truth in the world that has less to do with the facts and more with
abstract principles--Truth, with a capital T. The factual accuracy of the
butler’s story is not the principal focus; rather the concern is with the
deeper truths about the nature of a butler. And this, I think, is the beauty of
stories. Fiction presents to us Truth, through non-factual means. Flannery
O’Connor says, “When fiction is made according to its nature, it should
reinforce our sense of the supernatural by grounding it in a concrete,
observable reality.” A novelist’s aim, she says, is to “show the supernatural
taking place…on the literal level of natural events.” Stories, in many ways,
are an incarnation of the things which we cannot see or feel or touch, but are
nevertheless very real and true. Stories present these things to us in a way we
can relate to and identify with.
The plot-line of a story serves as the container of truths;
it’s the means by which stories are conveyed, but there must be more to a story
than mere plot, or at least more to a good
story than that, or we would not keep coming back, as my family does to It’s a Wonderful Life year after year. C.S.
Lewis describes it with the metaphor of a bird caught in a net. “To be stories
at all they must be series of events; but it must be understood that this
series—the plot, as we call it—is
only really a net whereby to catch something else.” Real life, Lewis says, has
the same type of sequence of events, but even so, we still feel that there is
something more. “In life and art both, as it seems to me, we are always trying
to catch in our net of successive moments something that is not successive.”
Something outside of the sequence that gives the events meaning. Surely almost
anyone would agree that there is more to life than just one thing after the
next—anyone would at least want to
believe this, I would assume. Art, (particularly stories), Lewis says, “is an
image of the truth. Art, indeed, may be expected to do what life cannot do; but
so it has done. The bird has escaped us. But it was at least entangled in the
net for several chapters. We saw it close and enjoyed the plumage. How many
real lives have nets that can do as much?” This, then, is what stories give us.
They hand us the elusive element of real life, the thing of the non-successive,
that gives meaning to the successive. The “supernatural” as O’Connor calls it,
or the abstract truth—the thing that gives meaning to the story of the tiger
and the butler. Fiction should put fundamental truth in tangible imagery.
This is precisely what It’s
a Wonderful Life does so well. It puts the truth of Christianity in story
form, “on the literal level of natural events.”
One of the deepest, most fundamental Christian truths is the
paradox that life comes through death. The death of Jesus on the cross, but
also the death to oneself. Romans 6:6-7 says, “We know that our old self was
crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing,
so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. For one who has died has been
set free from sin.” Likewise, Luke 9:23-24 says, “If anyone would come after
me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever
would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will
save it.” The call of the Christian is to deny oneself and find identity in
something outside of himself, namely, Jesus. This is the grace of salvation. We
have to surrender, there’s got to be death, and we have to lose our identity in
order to be saved.
If we peel back the story of It’s a Wonderful Life, and distance ourselves from the
particular—in C.S. Lewis’ terms, to step back from the successive events and
seek to capture the non-successive element—it reveals a very Christian message.
George Bailey is a good man. He continually sacrifices his own desires for the
benefit of others. He gives up his dreams of college, traveling around the
world, and even his honeymoon, in order to help others out. He doesn’t yield to the miserly Mr. Potter, even
when it means much greater financial stability for him and his family, but instead
repeatedly upholds goodness, refusing to succumb to the morally corrupt values
of Potter. But in the end, this isn’t what saves him. When his uncle loses a
significant amount of money, and it looks as if the family bank is going to be
in serious legal trouble, and George will most likely be put in jail, all his
good works, all his self-sacrifice is not enough to get him out of this one. He
is brought to a place of despair. He goes for a walk, goes to a bar, and says a
prayer: "God, oh God, dear father in heaven, I'm not a praying man, but if you're up there and you can hear me, show me the way. I'm at the end of my rope. Show me the way." A plea for grace, because he has nothing else left to do. This is the
position the Christian must find himself in before he is saved. We have to come
to a place where we are on our knees, crying out because there is nothing else
we can do, and we finally realize it; it is a reality we feel deep down to our
core—that we are utterly helpless, we
can do nothing to save ourselves, it all must come from somewhere else. And so
we cry out in desperation.
This feeling of desperation leads him to the point of death.
His despair is so great he sees no way out but death. He asked God to show him
the way, and the answer is death. The most pivotal scene in the movie is when
George Bailey stands on a bridge overlooking a half frozen, swiftly moving river.
He contemplates jumping in. He has come to the point where he sees death as his
only option. And he is right. Just before he jumps, his guardian angel falls
into the water, knowing that George will jump in to save him, and thereby saves
George from killing himself. George then realizes that killing himself wouldn’t
help and says, “I suppose it’d have been better if I’d never been born at all.”
And then Clarence, the guardian angel, grants him his wish. George Bailey sees
what it would have been like if he would have never been born. He loses his
identity. The Christian call is to “die to self”—to lose our identity and find
it in something outside of ourselves, namely, Christ. George Bailey must lose
his identity—undergo a death of sorts—to realize the value of life. When he
regains his identity, he goes home and all his friends and family come together
and raise the needed money that was lost. They have also been earnestly praying
for him this whole time, as the opening of the movie shows. In the end, it is
something outside of George that
saves him, not his own efforts or good works.
The Christian story does not end in death, it continues to
the resurrection. Death brings life. “Whoever loses his life for my
sake will save it” (Luke 9:24). Interestingly, the end of the movie takes place
on Christmas Eve and ends with the singing of Auld Lang Syne. This song,
however, is traditionally a New Year’s song, not necessarily a Christmas one.
The new year is symbolic of a new beginning and fresh start. And so by singing
this song, the movie ends on a note of new beginnings, of new life. It’s
bidding farewell to the old and ushering in the new, thus echoing the Christian
theme of rebirth and new beginnings.
Deeply engrained in the heart of this story are the
fundamental truths of Christianity. Watching It’s A Wonderful Life gives a realistic view of grace and redemption;
we see it at work in the lives of people like us. Perhaps I should throw in a disclaimer and make it clear
that this movie is not meant to be a gospel tract or to proclaim the gospel
outright. If it were, we’d run into some serious theological issues. But the
underlying truth and the echoes of Christianity are there, nonetheless. Like the story of the butler
and the tiger best described the dignity of a butler, It’s a Wonderful Life allows us to see the theme of grace and redemption played
out in a story, capturing it in a way informative prose could not. In Flannery
O’Connor’s terms, this movie puts the supernatural on the “literal level of
natural events.” It has caught the elusive bird that C.S. Lewis describes so
that we can momentarily examine its plumage. It is a good story because at its core, it echoes The Good Story--the story all long to hear, whether they know it or not. And so for that reason, we keep coming back, year after year.