"The Ordinary Radicals" directed by Jamie Moffett

I watched a film last night and I’m struggling with how to write about it. I really wanted to like it, but I walked out feeling frustrated and confused and somewhat alienated.

It was called "The Ordinary Radicals" and it examines what the director calls a movement of “revolutionary Christianity. One with a quiet disposition that seeks to do small things with great love.”

Sounds intriguing right? I had read and enjoyed “The Irresistible Revolution” by Shane Claiborne, co-founder with Jamie Moffett of the “Simple Way” community in Philadelphia, and one of the main characters in the film.

I loved the “simple” approach to living out his faith and making a difference, that Claiborne describes, from making his own clothes and reducing his environmental footprint, to coming alongside a group of homeless people about to be evicted from an abandoned church they have turned into their home.

Claiborne lives his life in a radical way on the front lines, in community with a group of like-minded people.

So TOR is basically a documentary following Claiborne and the film’s director Moffett and some of their other friends (there are a lot of players and most aren’t properly introduced) as they tour around the U.S. with the new book “Jesus for President.”

The film’s Toronto premiere was at the Bloor Cinema, and the place was packed.

So the film follows the group as they travel across the U.S. – in a cooking-oil-fuelled bus -- on their tour. They visit churches, community groups, a music festival, promoting their message that living like Christ goes beyond political affiliation or your stance on abortion, but really means living for others, in love.

On their road trip they highlight people who are doing that, from an advocate and activist who lives in an old bus to be close to the homeless, to some guy who won two cars on The Price is Right but sold them to go to Uganda, to a soldier who left the army because God told him to.

Some of these people are really inspiring, but there are so many, and there’s so little depth to each story, that my friends and I found it hard to really connect.

Claiborne and Moffett have been living this way for a long time, and at parts I felt like they felt obligated to tell the story of everyone they had ever met who is making a difference. In short, there was way too much information and it was way to scattered. And it was too long.

It seemed like there was no real narrative that wove through the film – and as a result the many anecdotes felt disconnected and disparate.

I would have preferred if they had focused in greater depth on a few stories. The Amish group that offered real forgiveness to a murderer who devastated their community – sharing that they were ready, in advance, to offer forgiveness, intrigued me and I wanted to know more.

I was fascinated by their explanation that “forgiveness means being willing to give up your right to revenge.”

Another paradox of this film is this: Though the group seems focused on building bridges between Christians and non-church people, it seems as my friend Jared said, to alienate almost everyone. The Christian Right, especially, seems to be the big bad guy and there seems to be an assumption that everyone would agree with that.

I didn’t like that perspective and it seemed to run contrary to their message of building bridges and promoting love.

Weird.

I also can’t imagine a non-religious person connecting to the film, which also seems to go against their goal of breaking down barriers. I mean really, there’s so much Christian-ese in the film, I think anyone without that context would walk out going ‘what the…???’

But I will say this – my friends and I spent more than an hour discussing the film afterwards in a pub over beer. At times we were ranting, and we all found things we disagreed with.

But somehow we were all inspired by parts too. Not by the film in general, I would say, but by a few of those stories about real people making a difference in their world.

I was going to end the blog there, but I just remembered one other thing that annoyed me. The very last line of the movie is from this woman, who like many people in the film just seems to appear out of nowhere, says: “We are the change we have been waiting for!”

That’s an Obama campaign slogan, and I thought it really discredited their non-political message to that point.

Argh! So brutal.

The Farley fallout

Hey,
The Farley interview went great! If you want to read about, you can do so, by clicking here.
Peace...

"Otherwise" by Farley Mowat, 2008

I get to sit down with Farley Mowat on Monday for an interview. The writer and activist's new memoir “Otherwise” – described as the last book he will write -- is just hitting shelves, and he's on a book tour.

It will be the third time I’ve interviewed Farley, and I’m pretty excited. In one way or another, this giant of Canadian literature has played a pretty important role in my life.

When I was pretty young – maybe 12 or so – my uncle Dave gave me a couple of books by him, including “Lost in the Barrens” and “The Curse of the Viking Grave”, that my older cousin Scott had outgrown.

I devoured those books and started dreaming of a career in anthropology or trapping or canoe-guiding – anything that would allow me to explore the Barrens in Canada’s north and live out the kind of adventures I was reading about.

I moved on to "People of the Deer", "Never Cry Wolf", "The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be" – anything the public library had on hand.

A couple of years later my family moved to a small town in a remote part of Northwestern Ontario, and those stories suddenly took on new meaning as I met real-life people who hunted wolves and bears and trapped otters and beavers for their pelts.


But my most personal encounters with Farley Mowat occurred after I graduated from journalism school and moved to Port Hope, Ontario to work as a reporter at the Port Hope Evening Guide.

Though Farley and his wife spend the summers in Cape Breton, they spend the rest of the year in Port Hope. I lived in a cottage right on Lake Ontario, and he lived around the corner on King Street, and would walk his dogs on the path that ran right in front of my place.

I had the chance to interview him a couple of times. The first was when his name was included on a list the RCMP released of suspected Communist sympathizers that had been under surveillance during the Cold War.

He told me a hilarious story about visiting the Russian consulate in Ottawa with his father Angus, getting drunk on Vodka and standing on the roof of the building in their Scottish kilts, mooning the CSIS agents they knew were holed-up in the building across the road.

The second time was when one of his short stories was turned into a film called The Snow Walker. The film is about a brash bush pilot in northern Canada who has no regard for his surroundings. All he needs to survive, he thinks, is his plane and his own wits.

That outlook caves in pretty quickly when he crashes in the Barrens and is forced to rely on his young aboriginal passenger to survive.

After we had discussed – over cranberry juice and whisky -- the adaptation and how Farley felt about it, he said “now what about you? What’s new in your life?”

It’s not a question a reporter expects to hear very often, so I was taken aback. But after a moment I managed to tell him I was actually getting ready to go to Morocco in a couple of weeks, to spend a year doing volunteer work with a Christian organization – and I was pretty excited about it.

Farley’s eyes lit up and he moved to the edge of his seat.

“You need to listen to the lesson in The Snow Walker!” he told me. “You can’t be like the bush pilot who thought there was nothing to learn. You can’t go over there thinking you’re going to help and teach people, but you need to be the student and learn from them!”

It was powerful, insightful advice, and I never forgot it. I was often reminded, during my time there, of those words and how true they were.

So I’m excited to meet Farley again, and to thank him for his advice. I hope he remembers me. I think he will. At 87 years old he’s still sharp and insightful, and is probably still walking his dog along the waterfront trail in Port Hope and sipping cranberry and whisky in the afternoons.