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Making
things happen - with integrity. A weekly CyberMemo designed to keep you on task. Monday September 8, 2003 Volume V Number 41 |
FOCUS - Passion and Grace
Mel Gibson (the actor, director, producer) probably high-fived his wife Robyn back in 1990 when PEOPLE Magazine named him as one of the Fifty Most Beautiful People in the World, and then high-fived her again when they named him a second year in a row in 1991... and then once more, five years later in 1996 (when they named him again). It certainly helped to pave the road towards multi-million paychecks per movie (make that ten to twenty-five million a pop). Robyn, secure in her marriage, smiled back with every high five. But while Gibson knew instinctively the benefits of name recognition and general popularity, it was never enough for him.
On the contrary, he despised the notion, espoused by some, that he was a mere Hollywood hunk and a mediocre actor. So he set out to prove them all wrong. Gibson believed in both form and substance.
When he was a child, his dad took a settlement from the railroad for injuries on the job. He then announced to his large Catholic family that they were pulling up stakes in New York, and returning to his homeland Down Under. It was the summer between Mel’s sixth and seventh grades. That’s when he became an Aussie.
Young Mel stumbled into acting. The night before his first audition, he got into a nasty fight. Reading the script and still sore from the bout, it was perhaps the facial bruises and fire in his eyes won him that first part – and he never since left the stage or camera’s watchful eye. He completed his college degree at the University of New South Wales in Australia. He took his profession seriously, early on studying and performing Shakespeare with acting legend Judy Davis. When he arrived in Hollywood, he landed an obscure part in a forgettable television series called “The Sullivans.” That opened the door for a leading role in a “B” movie called “Mad Max.” To Hollywood’s surprise, it became a smash box office hit, with two sequels, and Mad Max made Mel Gibson a star.
Gibson’s fortunes increased. His work ethic and dedication and energy and drive earned him high marks in the industry. All the while, he remained devoted to Robyn and the children – they produced seven. When the critics panned his work as shallow, one dimensional Hollywood drivel, he took the leading role in a feature film version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. No one expected the film to win a wide audience, and his decision to take on the part surprised his action hero fans. Some wondered out loud if the star of Lethal Weapon fame had made a monumental mistake. But his performance proved to a doubting world that Mr. Gibson was an Actor – not simply a name and a face and a chiseled torso.
Gibson began to measure the value of a script by its depth of heart. He wanted meaning. He wanted inspiration. He wanted touch. He never shied away from brutal, real depictions of cruelty. Not the gratuitous sort of violence, but the incendiary kind – the kind that fires up the passions. Entertainment draws the audience in – but once they are there, sitting in a trance in the comfortable seats of a darkened room, he wanted to impart something that would engender goodness, courage, strength, character. Parenting does that. It sets your values.
To this day, Gibson relishes the accolades, but none more than the appellation Dad. The film, The Patriot, reveals Gibson right at home in the role of father. And in that role, he is a teacher… certainly not as the deliverer of stern lectures filled with platitudes and put-downs and dull repetitions (a caricature of fatherhood), but a teacher whose very life yields the greatest lessons. His passion as Benjamin Martin, a reluctant soldier in the Revolutionary War, is most poignant in his love for his children and his home and the children’s mother. Same with Once We Were Soldiers. Such convincing performances on screen can only be the reflection of his real heart for his own family.
Such passion can not be separated from a deep and authentic and abiding faith. Apparently, Mel Gibson possesses a generous portion. It comes from his Catholic roots. No doubt, it can be traced back to his own mother and father – who, like Abraham and Sarah who left their homeland for places unknown, left the familiarity of Peekskill (on the Hudson River, just across from the Palisades and down river from West Point), New York, and relocated in the wild and distant wide open spaces of Australia. It was an adventure that required unswerving faith – a belief that there is a God who protects and guides and gives the victory.
Mel Gibson is just finishing up his most ambitious project of all. More so than Braveheart or Lethal Weapon or Ransom or Conspiracy Theory. It’s a thorough, biblical, brutal look at the final week of Jesus’ life.
He calls it The Passion.
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Mel Gibson doesn’t need the money anymore. This new project can not be a commercial venture. It must be a passion. It must be a reflection of the most personal aspect of his faith.
It’s risky business, proposing a remake of the life of Jesus for the big screen - with a sizable budget ($25 million in funding supplied by the director himself). No one would suggest that Gibson is driven by a profit motive. Apparently, he simply thinks the story should be told – from all accounts, he is committed to tell it accurately just as the writers of the Four Gospels recorded it.
It’s a brutal story. Gibson is determined to recount it as it was – in the original language - Aramaic..
Already, the project has stirred a firestorm of controversy. Some, including Catholic Scholars enlightened by the watershed confessions of Vatican II, feel that the story stokes the awful flames of Anti-Semitism. Certainly, the New Testament has been misused in history by villains and bigots and tyrants to justify the horrors of everything from ignominious discrimination to genocide. It is a blight on the pages of history. Others, on the other end of the spectrum, have simply re-written the account of Scripture to fit into a new brand of political correctness.
So the critics have charged Gibson with the crime of agitation. They seem to think that the story must be re-interpreted and toned down in order to be palatable to a modern audience.
But I wonder. Can the story of the Passion Week be told accurately without offense?
Just because some misinterpret historical documents to justify their own destructive ends mean that the documents are to blame? (Think of the atrocities committed in the name of the First Amendment.)
Just because Jesus was rejected by his own people, does that mean that a nation is still responsible? Are you and I as American citizens personally responsible for the offense of slavery?
If you understand the significance of Jesus’ life and death, you will humbly confess, that you and I are as responsible as anyone. He died for the sins of the world, I’m told. That includes me.
I’m suspending judgment of Gibson’s Passion until I see it.
But until then, I’ve got a whole lot of admiration for his brave heart. He’s taking a stand for his most cherished beliefs. At center stage is a crucified savior, one who suffered and died to open the door to new life, life that lasts forever.
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When my uncle reached the end of his life last week, his family asked me to say a few words at his graveside, on slopes of Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery out at the end of the peninsula on Point Loma.
Under the protection of a shelter with Roman columns, and in the ocean breeze coming over the knoll, with a sprawling view of the Bay and San Diego Skyline, and Coronado Bridge spanning the waterways, and yards filled with warships and aircraft carriers and submarines at the docks, and the long runways of the Naval Air Station, still operational, we stood on the burial grounds which have served American fighting men and women since the Civil War.
I paid tribute to my father’s only sibling, his older brother, who grew up with him on the tough streets of Depression era Chicago, and then went off to war shortly after the world shook in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor. He followed the first wave of GIs from England across the Channel into France with a brigade of two hundred and thirteen comrades. After a brutal, fierce encounter with a German company dug in a fortified compound, two hundred of my uncle’s fellow soldiers lay dead. My uncle was one of only thirteen survivors. Soon after, a wound in battle got him a ticket home, where he not only recovered, but he met and married my Aunt Pat. They were quite young, seventeen and eighteen, but he could not stay at home enjoying a comfortable new marriage while the war raged on. He returned to battle, and with his Band of Brothers, fought all the way to Eagle’s Nest in the Black Forest of Germany. When his fellow GIs found Hitler’s sorry remains, Uncle Chuck was barely an hour away.
Upon returning home, he completed an undergraduate degree and went on to Medical School. He practiced medicine for the remainder of his life; healing and helping. He would say it straight. His patients loved him for his directness, his candor, his sense of humor and his warmth.
And when he reached the end, he was a dad, a husband, a grandfather, an uncle. He received visitors, including me. When I saw him lying there, spent, struggling, he pulled me close and said, in a weary but strong clear voice, “I love you, Kenny.”
A short time later, he entered into hospice care. Nearly the last day, a harpist made an unscheduled but welcome stop in his room, just as my mother was visiting. From the corner next to his bed, she played a heavenly rendition of “Amazing Grace.” My uncle, an accomplished musician himself, played that old hymn often (we were told later) during his last days at the keyboard.
Amazing grace, how sweet the sound…
Amazing grace, indeed.
* * * * * * *
It’s Monday morning. You are a leader.
You may never be in a position to commit your most cherished convictions to celluloid and create a major motion picture. If you could, what would you say? Is there a message you believe the world should hear?
You don’t need Hollywood – go ahead – tell it.
The passing of my uncle marks the end of an era. The source we knew of the name Kemp is now gone. But oh, the Kemps. They are numerous. And multiplying still.
Uncle Chuck, so much an archetype of the Greatest Generation, was uncomfortable with his two Purple Hearts and Bronze Star. Even when his own son called him a Hero, for defending home and hearth, for willingly moving into harm’s way, for pursuing the enemy of the Free World until he was defeated, for surviving untold danger, he waved it off like so much hyperbole. “It was just luck,” he’d say.
We knew otherwise. But up to the last, he remembered one of his pals who wasn’t so lucky. We know him as Brinkman. He made my uncle laugh. They fought side by side. And then, too soon, he was gone. Killed in action. A photo remains of the two of them, standing by a B-17, somewhere in pre-D-Day England, grinning innocently, so very young, when their fate remained a complete unknown.
Chuck never forgot old Brink.
Now, at last, they, Dr. Chuck and Brink, along with Grandpa Charlie and Grandma Dorothy and Pops, are all together again.
Amazing grace.
Posted in Valley Center, California
© Copyright Kenneth E. Kemp 2003
Special Thanks to my good friend David Belcher, owner of Rhino Media Group and creator of WisdomGram
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