In the opening scene from the 1993 movie, Shadowlands, we see C.S. Lewis (played by Anthony Hopkins) lecturing students at Cambridge University (UK).
A lapsed Christian and onetime atheist, Lewis returned to the faith at the age of 32 while teaching at Oxford. He went on to become the greatest Christian apologist of the 20th century.
At the start of the movie, Lewis is lecturing his students on Christian doctrine concerning death and eternal life. His tone is authoritative and confident, his words reassuring and redolent of orthodox, New Testament beliefs.
Later in the film he meets an American, Joy Davidman Gresham, whom he married in 1956. Four short years later, however, in 1960, she had died of cancer. Lewis’ experience of this loss eventually inspired the book, “A Grief Observed,” a classic in bereavement studies.
What followed Joy’s death, as documented in the movie, is a period of intense spiritual and emotional upheaval. We watch as Lewis begins to question his once sturdy faith. No longer the confident lecturer, his doubts overtake him. He finds himself struggling with the yawning disparity between theory and practice, between pure doctrine and the vagaries of human existence in the “shadowlands.”
This disparity is also the subject of a six-part BBC drama first aired in 2017 entitled, Broken. It is a dark, gritty morality tale featuring a Catholic parish priest, Father Michael Kerrigan, whom we watch performing his duties in a depressed, struggling inner-city neighborhood in the north of England.
It is rare that the subject of religion, perhaps especially Christianity, much less Catholicism, is treated on screen or in print with any degree of seriousness. Ignorance of genuine, lived Christianity among our social elites is, quite frankly, an ongoing embarrassment.
Usually Christianity is treated as a trifle, or misguided, or even possibly malevolent. Clergy are either harmless, naïve, and ineffectual or close-minded, reactionary, if not evil. What I typically read in magazines and periodicals I find laughable, depending on my mood, that is. TV shows and movies? Fuggetaboutit.
So it is a rare event when any popular medium treats the subject with the respect and dignity it deserves. In Broken, Christianity (in this case Catholicism) is presented from the inside, its ever-elusive, instantiated rhythms and cadences seen and felt in and through the lens of everyday life. This is not the story of a dilettante’s airy anthropological observations. It is no two-dimensional caricature that conveniently fits preconceived expectations.
Instead, Broken focuses on the unfashionable subject of sin, redemption, and salvation, not your typical box-office gold. And it doesn’t just touch on it, either. It delves deeply.
With a sterling cast, affecting performances, and an unusually intelligent script, the series takes the viewer into the bleak world of human guilt, shame, sin, and evil. It doesn’t sugarcoat it.
But it also showcases humanity’s noble and passionate struggle for morality, justice, and truth, as well as the deepest aspiration of the heart – to know authentic love and genuine peace. It is, in short, the human struggle to know the mystery of God amid the shadowlands of the broken world in which we all live.
This is no antiseptic take on the Christian life. It’s a story of failure and loss, of nagging doubts and punishing guilt. But it’s also a story of heroism and the triumph of the human spirit. It is life examined with pitiless honesty and without the sort of self-deceptions and delusions we might otherwise choose to comfort ourselves.
Broken is a story of the very real dangers and rewards of living a gospel-centered life, one that takes faith seriously. Here moral choices do not always produce simple, salutary results. Hardship, opposition, ostracization, and misunderstanding often result. Competing beliefs are named and explored, ones that force us to think and feel deeply, and which often elicit doubt, anger, despair, even hatred.
It is a morality play that offers no easy answers. Each character is forced to probe his or her heart to discern what is right and what is good. And even then, it’s not always clear. In the shadowlands, that is. And yet critical choices must be made. Sacrifices must be shouldered. And consequences born.
Throughout, the struggle to obtain forgiveness and mercy lurks in the background. It is the subtext. And it is the message offered by the suffering Christ.
On the eve of WWII, in 1937, as Nazism lay ascendant in his native Germany, Dietrich Bonhoeffer published his famous defense of gospel living, The Cost of Discipleship. In it he distinguishes two types of grace, the costly and the cheap.
Having seen Christianity secularized, having substituted obedience to Jesus for the requirements of the culture, he writes: “Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline. Communion without confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ.”
In describing cheap grace, he says, “Of course you have sinned, but now everything is forgiven, so you can stay as you are and enjoy the consolations of forgiveness.” Here there is no real discipleship.
“In contrast to cheap grace,” he argues, “costly grace confronts us as a gracious call to follow Jesus, it comes as a word of forgiveness to the broken spirit and the contrite heart. It is costly because it compels a man to submit to the yoke of Christ and follow him; it is grace because Jesus says: ‘My yoke is easy and my burden is light.’”
I’m reminded of the famous quote from H. Richard Niebuhr (Reinhold’s brother), parodying feckless Christianity: “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a Kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.”
True character, genuine virtue, in other words, is not a parlor game. It demands we take a stand, even when to do so is costly. (As we know, Bonhoeffer was murdered in a Nazi concentration camp for his principled and active opposition to Hitler).
In Broken, one sees this played out dramatically as the main characters struggle with what it means to be Christians, not in a cheap sentimental way, but in earnest, and at a cost.
The show is not absent a faith that moves out into real world social and political situations. In fact, it is these very issues that drive the story. This is, of course, consistent with the fact that Christianity is by nature involved in the wider human community.
Yet, as I’m always saying, talk about “peace and justice” in the modern church too often devolves into pat blandishments and easy bromides, conventional, toothless, and almost always at a safe distance. No cost involved. Easy Peasy.
Not so with those inhabiting the world referenced in Broken, where Christian character is forged at great personal sacrifice. Yet the grace it makes manifest is capable of warming even the coldest of hearts.
Broken can be purchased on the streaming services Vudu, Amazon’s Prime Video, and Britbox. Also, through Britbox or Prime Video, you can sign up for a free, one-week subscription, which you can cancel later.
[WARNING: Broken contains vulgar language and crude references. However, at least in my view, it’s not gratuitous, nor does it seek to be merely “transgressive” in order to satisfy some piquant need for the trendy, ironic, or hip. You’ve been duly warned!!!]