After the roiling events of last week, it was hard to calm down. How could such cruelty be accelerating in a world that is already heavy with hurt? Like many people I know I wrestled with the witches' brew of helplessness and hopelessness.
As it happened a friend had recommended a movie which portrayed a marriage that was near collapse. I found it and lost myself in a different kind of story. Or so I thought.
Same Kind of Different as Me is about the great divide between a wife who has lost touch, literally, with her husband. He has become immersed in the lucrative world of buying and selling art, and the obsession leaves no room for his family. An affair is the tipping point.
But his wife offers him his freedom to choose.
In realizing that he wants to fall back in love he joins her at the homeless shelter where she volunteers. He would rather write a check and distance himself from the people he sees as being less than himself. But his wife knows better. Plus she had a dream about one of the more violent street people. God is asking her to follow him.
With an uncanny balance of gentleness and strength, the woman reaches out to the angry black man, whom we find has made a pact with himself never to trust a white woman. Yet she gives him time to change his mind.
Slowly we hear the reasons Denver has for his anger and isolation. Life has been brutal for him. When he talks with the husband about whether he can let down his guard, he describes the rich man's sport of catch and release.
"When a poor man goes fishing, it is because he is hungry. When a white man fishes, he throws it back." Denver wonders if the man is just befriending him for sport. Is his kindness real or just a hobby?
Denver tells the events of his fractured life, and the reasons that have left him with his frozen pain. Then a tear falls down his cheek. His anger makes sense, given all he has endured. And yet underneath it all is a great sadness.
In a way I can only call miraculous, coming to care about Denver brings the husband and wife back together more deeply than they were before. Following him to the scary places many people try to avoid, everyone finds healing. Even the one that dies.
