Reflection on Brokeback Mountain and Grace

Originally posted, August 6, 2008

This reflection was prepared for a master's level theology class, Theological Anthropology concerning the pervasive presence of grace and its experience by people in all circumstances, however dimly or clearly they or others may perceive that gracious presence. The works cited page has been removed. If you are interested in using any part of the paper, please contact me & I will provide more information.

“Oh Lord, how I know,/ Oh Lord, how I see, that only can the maker make a happy man of me” runs the final verse of the song that ends the movie Brokeback Mountain . This paper will examine one character’s quest for happiness, and the kindness and the blood it takes to unlock that potential within him.

The principals are Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar, young cowboys in Wyoming of 1963. They herd sheep together one summer on fictional Brokeback Mountain, away from their separate worlds, where Jack plans to rodeo and Ennis to marry. What begins as sexual desire evolves into an experience of kindness, happiness, and genuine, if unvoiced, loving devotion. As often happens when men go up to the mountain, they are transformed by the grace of this boundary event. One man, Jack, finds hope, only to be frustrated in his dreams, and finally to lose his life, while the other (eventually) opens to the possibility of authentic relationship. It is Ennis’s long refusal to allow himself to risk living in this world that becomes a time of incubation, a preparation for the “actual grace” that heralds and enables his “concrete experience of the impulse to self-transcendence” (R. Haight 128).

Ennis and Jack have had lives where self-giving kindness has been a scarce commodity. Ennis, orphaned, and Jack, berated and ignored by his father, seem unsure how to relate to one another in any meaningful way. They play a sly game of flirtation and denial until they manage a night of sexual passion after a drunken evening in camp. The night is followed by Ennis’s silent departure and his discovery of an eviscerated sheep, casualty of his staying in camp and harbinger of future expiation at the hands of wild nature, human nature out of touch with its better self. After perfunctory denials about being queer, the men begin showing a care for, and enjoyment of, one another that lasts until time to return to society.

Not having explored or owned the mountain top experience, the two are tied up by confusion and guilt when they must leave. Jack bloodies Ennis in a confused good-bye-become-fight and both mop the blood up with their shirts, blood that will eventually become salvific along with Jack’s own blood. They part with few words and Ennis faces the abyss of his fear, guilt, and loss in a powerful scene of pain. This segues into his wedding to Alma, as they are heard praying, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” But Alma, despite her name, is not the soulmate that Ennis craves, the one that can touch his heart and speak to his lifetime of emptiness.

Ennis was sad when he went up the mountain, sad when he came down, and knew happiness only on Brokeback. Afterwards, all he could do was to stand what he could not fix. Jack had dreams less coherent when he went up the mountain, but clearer when he came down; his hope was placed in building a life with Ennis. The transformation was immediate in Jack, but takes a lifetime – Jack’s lifetime – to come to fruition in Ennis.

In a series of meetings in the Wyoming mountains over the years, the men try to keep alive the hope and the love they felt in 1963. At their first return, lying beneath the stars, Jack asks Ennis if there is “anything interesting up there in the heavens.” He replies that he is sending up a prayer of thanks. This earnest thanksgiving is contrasted to the feast back in the world. Jack, at the head of his own Thanksgiving table, transcends his fear of losing his wealthy wife and family by calling out his overbearing father-in-law. Ennis, for his part, at dinner with his now ex-wife and her husband, is laid open by her honest, pent-up grief and anger. It is one of those moments of being confronted by insufficiency, radical guilt, and pain where Haight says the call of grace is operative (128), but Ennis lacks the faith in himself to own her accusations and to take a step toward salvation, personal wholeness.

During their times away, Jack proposes a life together, ranching with Ennis. He is open to the possibility of happiness and to building a lifelong relationship in spite of the danger. The risk is clearly recalled by Ennis, whose father made him look at a man dragged to death for living out his love with another man. The fear this inspired in Ennis looms so large that he will not accept the chance to live his dream. It is Ennis’s dream to ranch, a dream denied him by Alma, yet he consistently refuses Jack. He worries that people on the street “know,” but cannot move himself to accept a promise of happiness, to forgive himself, and he finds no forgiveness in the world.

Their relationship comes again to one of those border moments when Jack pours his heart out in longing and frustration and Ennis responds from his emptiness, able only to ask for understanding. “I’m nothin’,” he says, “I’m nowhere. You did this to me!” Jack’s cry “I wish I could quit you!” is one last plea ignored as Ennis returns to his sad life to wait for the next time. But there is no next time.

Learning from returned mail that Jack is deceased, Ennis calls Jack’s wife and hears a false tale of accidental death, while the real story is shown of his bloody beating and dragging death. Jack was killed for daring to be himself in the world of men. With the pain, Ennis also hears a word of comfort, that Jack wanted his ashes scattered on Brokeback, the one place, his wife says, Jack claimed he was happy. Ennis is shown as beginning to be set free by Jack’s blood. He takes his first positive, public action at owning who he is by going to Jack’s parents and offering to spread his ashes. The mother has been identified as a Christian Pentecostal believer, and is seen under a cross in the Twist home. She offers for Ennis to look at Jack’s room, preserved as he left it. There he discovers Jack’s shirt, bloodied 20 years ago wiping up Ennis’ blood in their fight, and beneath it, Ennis’s own bloody shirt from that day.

From the time Jack and Ennis began eyeing each other, Ennis could never confront himself in relation to others, to accept himself as loving or loveable, yet Jack awakened something in him. Both in passion and in shows of kindness during their Brokeback summer, Ennis was given the grace to be aware of what he lacked “in the world.” But he also lacked the power to seek meaningful connections, an I-thou relationship that might lead to a I-Thou relationship. In a transformative experience, grace does not always have its effect at once; it comes to fruition over time and in periods of staring at the abyss and at the mountain, wandering alone and groping for companionship. This Ennis did until his moment came for grace to find assent and come to him in power. At the Twists’, a place light, clean, but hardly a home, with its other-worldly, churchy feel, Ennis was one step removed from the mountain and one away from the world. Here was enshrined a relic, a testament to the reality of what happened on Brokeback. He took the blood offering and was changed.

As Ennis carries the shirts into the kitchen, the mother nods to him and wraps them for him. He leaves with them instead of ashes, but there is power in the blood, Ennis’s own blood that has been valued by Jack’s devotion. It is able to break the chains and let Ennis free himself.

When Ennis returns to the world, his daughter, Alma Junior, comes to him and asks him to come to her wedding. He had never really been able to relate to her, awkward even in talking to her as a child. In her teens, she had asked to live with him, offering him a chance for human relationship, loving companionship. Unable to accept the gift of another, he could only say that he “wasn’t set up for that.” And within himself, he wasn’t.

At first, Ennis demurs at attending the church wedding, and then there is one of those movements of character where you know something new has been done, for he pours wine and agrees to celebrate with her. When she leaves his sparse home, she forgets her sweater, which her father gently folds, sniffs, and puts away. It is the first time Ennis is calm and graceful with anyone except Jack. In the closet hang the shirts, his now enclosing Jack’s, which he touches tenderly, with a smile. This natural action rises to the order of supernatural transcendence as “the implicit act of faith and love” that accepts the divine self-offering in the ordinary and extraordinary pieces of one’s life (Haight 128). It opens Ennis Del Mar to receive the wedding feast offered by Alma as real food to satisfy his hunger; it lets him access the maker that can make of him a happy man.

The maker is at once other and intrinsic to Ennis, just as the possibility was both his and offered to him. The supernatural existential began to be apprehended in a moment of power, when Ennis freely decided and acted to own the mountain top experience and the experience of his own identity, even if they stayed in his closet. It was, after all, his closet and the door was open, at least to Ennis himself.

Christmas Reflections, 2008

 Original post, Thursday, December 25, 2008

Christmas 2008

Some years are stressful, some filled with change, novelty, and excitement, but this year has been relaxed and routine, a time of reconnecting and regularity. I was ready for that. My days were marked by lunches with friends, meetings with my Dominican Associate companions, the weekly Bible Study and Faith Sharing group at Westminster-Thurber retirement community, and time at the University. Jack Dog took me for regular walks around town and romps in the park to terrify the squirrels. These prosaic days were punctuated by several people-oriented excursions out of town and a trip to the hospital – I didn’t even know I had a gallbladder & now I don’t! Susan & I made some family reunion trips to the Pike County to share pictures and stories with the Lambert side of the family tree, and are glad we did.

In May I went to Georgia for a weekend men’s retreat, which was altogether unremarkable except for the camaraderie and some excellent drumming. A second retreat, a week in Iowa at the Trappist monastery I visited two years ago, drew me more deeply into the routine of daily prayer that both shut out the chatter of the world and sanctified that very chatter and passing of days and hours. I rose with the New Melleray monks for 3 a.m. Vigils – a beautiful and eerie prayer in the darkened, echoing stone chapel – but kept one eye closed so I could go back to bed until morning (unlike the monks who continue in prayer and reading). Praying the other 6 hours with them each day, I had a great sense of entering the river of prayer that has flowed for 1,600 years or more, sensing how it is a little different for each new voice that is added and then leaves, while the round of psalms rolls on around the world and through the years.

My other grand adventure was to drive with my nephews Nathan and Drew ‘cross country to move Nathan to Albuquerque – another trip to New Mexico so soon after last year! Nathan finished at Princeton and is doing post-doc work in alternative energy at Sandia Research Labs. The drive was a splendid time, talking about everything under the sun with these bright, sweet young men. Michelle and their not-quite-born-yet baby flew out with her mom . We worked getting their home cleaned and painted, ready for them and for Emmalene McKenzie, who in short order made her appearance, making everyone involved very happy. Not least of all her grandmother my sister!

This summer I began tutoring at Ohio Dominican – undergrad theology – and working in the writing lab, helping students organize and correct research papers. I like having the structure of “going to work” each week (as opposed to each day – been there, done that) and knowing I can be of some use to the kids, as well as enjoying their company. I’m sort of a cross between professor and parent (or grand-), a non-threatening adult who doesn’t grade or judge, but listens and maybe helps some, too. This is a great balance to the time I spend with the generation ahead of me at the Bible Study group. In both cases, I’m getting to use and share some of what I’ve been learning and meditating on in the master’s program and in my faith in general. I was going to graduate next year, but put it off till 2010 so I can work on my major paper with my advisor, who will be in Rome next Fall semester. This is shaping up to be a tremendously long program – 7 ½ years, one class at a time – but it’s keeping my mind active, giving me a sense of accomplishment, and generally making me happy, as well as redeeming some old failures & fears.

Speaking of school and old fears, over the summer I went to a reunion picnic with my high school class of ’65, Wheelersburg, Ohio, and the group after us. Was ambivalent at first, but some folks I’ve always liked were there, and I found some who overawed or kept me off balance 40 years ago have mellowed & aged, while I’ve developed some perspective myself. So, it was fun. I plan to do it again and recruit other alums to come, too. I got to spend time with friend and classmate Travis & wife Lou several times this year and am headed to Carson City to spend New Years with them. Reuniting seems to be a good activity for my 60’s.

I wish everyone a happy Christmas season, prosperity and health for 2009!