Choices

When my brother was a teenager, he was a big fan of “A Clockwork Orange.” He was the type of person who would always read the book and not just watch the movie, and he said that the book was nothing like the movie, but he liked the movie too. He wanted to buy a bowler hat, and he may have even bought one, but he was 6’2” so that look wasn’t really suited to him. He also worked out all the time, and the actor who played the lead in the movie, Malcolm McDowell, was 5’8” and wiry. He had a little bulk on him, but not like my brother.

I don’t really understand what he liked about the film or the novel. I know that some people think the movie is just terrific, and I do think Malcolm McDowell did a great job in it, but aside from the bowler hats, I don’t really get the appeal. I’m not into violence at all – I don’t care if it’s just a movie, violence really makes me sick. My brother was a tough guy on the outside and he got into his share of fights, but he wasn’t really into violence either, so I don’t understand what he liked so much to make him want to buy a bowler hat.

Anthony Burgess who wrote the novel described it as “a jeu d’esprit knocked off for money in three weeks.” He also said that the American publishers, by not including the last chapter, and Stanley Kubrik who directed the film version, changed the story from what it was meant to be and focused instead on the graphic violence of the main character and not his transformation. I can’t really say one way or another – I’ve never read the book in any version and only saw the movie once and even then I kept having to check out and leave the room because it was too much to take. But in reading about what Anthony Burgess says, it seems that it was a story about the importance of people’s ability to choose – whether we can and should be able to choose good or evil. The title refers to that, and usually writers choose titles that have to do with their themes. There has been so much speculation on that title, but Anthony Burgess says it is based on slang he overheard and is basically the idea of a person who has had the ability to choose taken away – to paraphrase what he says in his British slang, they’re still fleshy and sweet and juicy, but they are running like a wind-up toy.

I am ten years younger than my brother, and so I was very young when the movie came out and my brother started carrying that book around. I asked him what it was about, and he never really explained it. I think he thought I was too young to understand and maybe I was. But the idea of people having the right to choose, and needing that right in order to be people, is a basic idea that we all can understand on some level no matter how young and inexperienced we are. It’s an important thing to be thinking about at any age, and one of those messages that God wants us to be thinking about, but of course in my house growing up we didn’t talk about God at all. My brother died in 2003, and the year before he died he said to me that the one thing that he wished he had known about was faith in God. He said that with everything else that he had suffered, and he’d suffered a lot in his life, being kept away from God and faith was the worst. I didn’t understand what he meant at the time, but it made me start thinking that there must be something that I had been missing too. Two years after that I was born again, and then I finally understood.

When I started to think about “A Clockwork Orange” and my brother, I started to think that maybe he liked it so much because he didn’t know God. There was a darkness in my own life before I was born again, not as dark as my brother’s darkness, but a darkness still the same. I didn’t like violence then, but I could accept it, and now I reject it completely. Even saying certain things and some words bother me now that wouldn’t have bothered me before. I cringe at the sound of some things, and stay far away from anything that is not full of light. Ephesians 5:8 says, “For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light (for the fruit of the light consists in all goodness, righteousness and truth) and find out what pleases the Lord. Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them. It is shameful even to mention what the disobedient do in secret. But everything exposed by the light becomes visible – and everything that is illuminated becomes a light. This is why it is said, ‘Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.’”

In the last few years of his life, my brother started to go to church. Some friends of his started taking him, and he found great peace and joy there. He also spent time in the country, in the mountains, fly fishing in rivers, something that I know is a place where he would have been able to meet with God. God is always visible to us in nature, and His presence can be felt and understood there sometimes much more easily than anywhere else. He also loves fishermen, and it is no accident that my brother was going fishing at that time of his life. He had been a rock musician for as long as I could remember, and some of the music he played in his various bands was really hard, bordering on punk. But before he died he started recording music that was so sweet and lovely, cover songs and instrumentals and songs that he wrote that are so beautiful that they lift your spirit with their light. I had always felt that the other music he played and the bowler hat and “A Clockwork Orange” were things he was putting on like someone else’s clothes. They didn’t fit him at all and they always seemed like underneath it all they made him feel uncomfortable. These songs he recorded at the end of his life suited who he really was. They fit him in a way that nothing else ever had.

God tells us always that we have the right to choose. He also tells us that when we choose the path of life we are blessed and when we choose the other we are cursed (Deuteronomy 30:15-19). But we always have the choice. The difficulty is that sometimes we don’t realize we have made a choice until it’s made and we find ourselves on a path we didn’t want to be on. Anthony Burgess writes in “A Clockwork Orange,” “Goodness is something chosen. When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man.” But what if we are just doing what it is that we know how to do and we haven’t been given any guidance otherwise? What if we were lacking in guidance from childhood and we get involved with people who don’t seem so bad at first? Even children who grow up in homes with people who believe in going to church can be left in the dark when it comes to knowing about love and compassion and kindness. We learn by example, and going to church is something that can be just a show of religion, but that has nothing to do with living our lives by faith. Jeremiah 10:23 says, “I know O Lord, that the way of man is not in himself, that it is not in man who walks to direct his steps.” Proverbs 14:12 says, “There is a way that seems right to a person, but eventually it ends in death.” God knows that we are easily led astray, and His grace can bring us back again always from wherever it is that we have ended up.

One of the songs my brother recorded was "Amazing Grace," another was "Silent Night." Another was Ennio Morricone’s "Touch the Sky," and another was one he wrote that I wrote about in another post, “Noodle Salad,” that came from a quote from the movie “As Good As It Gets,” a movie very different from “A Clockwork Orange.” My brother was so different in the last years of his life, and in a wonderful way he was much more comfortable. The Holy Spirit is known as The Comforter, because he brings comfort to us when we can receive it. My brother spent a lot of years with walls all around him, not letting in the comfort that he so much needed. It was not because he rejected God, it was because he didn’t know Him. It was very much the same for me. When our eyes are finally opened after so many years of walking around in darkness, when we finally see the light and understand that we have the choice to choose to walk in the way of life, when we finally understand that we have been walking around in darkness and that we made choices that were leading to death, God is always ready and waiting with His arms wide open, as wide open as they were on the Cross. That is why He took that road that day, all the way up to Calvary. He knew each one of us before we were ever born, and knew the paths we would walk before we ever walked them. He knew the end from the beginning, and so He kept on walking, knowing that some day we would understand.

For the past few days He has been giving me Isaiah 9, “Nevertheless, there will be no more gloom for those who were in distress. . .the people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in a land of deep darkness, a light has dawned . . . they rejoice before You as people rejoice at the harvest . . . You have shattered the yoke that burdens them, the bar across their shoulders, the rod of their oppressor . . . For to us a son is born, to us a son is given . . . and His name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” (verses 1-6) Amazing Grace and Silent Night rolled into one, with a little bit of Touch the Sky and Noodle Salad for a garnish.

We do have the right to choose, and God wants us to have that right, but He also wants us to know and understand what choices we are making. He’s not the father or mother or grandmother or whoever who says to us, “You made your bed, now lie in it,” without ever having really taught us and supported us in making the choices that would lead us on the road to life. Just saying things to people and telling them what to do is not teaching them. God was very clear with the children of Israel when He gave them the 10 Commandments and He will be very clear with us too, but first He needs to get our attention, and sometimes that takes a while. But He’s patient with us because He knows that we don’t understand sometimes, and that sometimes we have been so blinded by things and people we thought were harmless fun that we can’t see that they are really not fun at all. He knows that things happen that drive us further away from Him, terrible things that hurt us and make our world seem dark. And so He waits and watches like the father of the prodigal son, until we wake from the sleep of death we’ve been in and decide to come home.

Blessings,

Jannie Susan