I had a chance to see “Precious” yesterday — a riveting, heartbreaking, inspiring film you’ll probably hear something about come Oscar season.
I won’t say much about it now. But I’ve been chewing on some of the themes for several hours now, and I did want to just touch on one of them.
“Precious” is about a 16-year-old girl (called Precious) saddled with a world most of us would find unimaginable. At an age when most girls’ lives stretch before them in a ribbon of promise, Precious’ life seems stillborn. She’s given birth to one baby — a child fathered by her own father — and is pregnant with another. She’s overweight, illiterate and (she thinks) wholely unlovable. Her mother abuses her in every possible way.
Hers is a life, it appears, without hope.
“Hope” is a deceptively glib word for most of us, I think. Hope is central to us as Americans, to us as Christians. It’s practically part of our DNA to hope — to imagine that, with hard work and faith and love, we can be anything, do anything, achieve anything. We are an optimistic people, at our core, firm in our belief that we’ve been set aside for great things. And, as such, we’ve gone great things.
But for many people around the world — for many people in the United States — the word “hope” represents an outlandish ideal. For people like Precious, poverty and abuse isn’t a horror as much as it’s a way of life. For some, reading a restaurant menu is as unreachable as the moon, and moving out of poverty is as laughable as setting up shop on Neptune.
Hope.
It’s not hard to give someone hope: Food. Education. Opportunity. Yet for a staggering number of people, those small gifts are hard to come by. Yesterday, the United Nations World Food Program announced that another 200 million people joined the ranks of the hungry over the last two years. That means that about 1 billion people are undernourished.
“One out of six people in humanity will wake up not sure that they can even fill a cup of food,” said Josette Sheeran, executive director for the program. “We have to make no mistake that hunger is on the march.”
Imagine, 1 billion people, living on a cup of food or less.
My daughter — about the same age as Precious — is working on a paper dealing with John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address. In her paper, she quoted Kennedy:
To those people in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required — not because the Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.
But Precious didn’t convict me as an American — that we should be sending more aid to nations untold. Rather, it convicted me as a Christian. The Christian Church, as fragmented as it is, could still be the most powerful force on earth, if it wished to be. To paraphrase Kennedy again, it is in our power to abolish human poverty. It is in our power to bestow hope.
Thousands of Christians give hope to people every day, every minute. But we could be doing still more. We’re called to live our lives in radical love. We’re called to give hope to people around the world and across the street. And yet so often, we — I — ignore the need and go about our lives.
Living our lives as Jesus would have us live them is hard. Yet that is what we’re called to do. Our lives are not our own, we’ve been told. We’ve been bought with a ransom, and that ransom gave us hope. It’s fair and fitting we should do our upmost to give hope to others, giving freely of our time, our talents, our money, our passion. It’s time to show the world what it truly means to be Christian. It’s time to show the world what hope’s all about.
