Crash

It's the sense of touch. In any real city, you walk, you know?
You brush past people. People bump into you. In LA,
nobody touches you. We're always behind this metal and glass.

It's that sense of touch. I think we miss that touch so much that we crash into each other just so we feel something.
(Don Cheadle as Det. Graham, Crash 2005)

Without having watched the movie "Crash" (who happened to have won the academy award for best picture), I suggested to my fellow catechists to watch it in our class. I've heard raving reviews from my oh-so-critical friends --we can be a set of critiques, really and we all differ in opinions. This movie, conjured up the same opinion from them and from the US Conference of Catholic Bishops.

So we ventured to create permission slips and started the film viewing 2 Mondays ago. We're glad we got permission slips due to the language and some nude scenes but otherwise, it wasn't at all that horrifying. We finished watching it yesterday and we had started a pretty good discussion.

Most of the conversation so far evolved around clarifications and connections. Nearing the end however, we started diving into the meat of things.

How the battle of good and evil resides in all of us and that within us all are dichotomies. One always triumphs over the other, especially in split moment decision making. Sometimes these contradictions are not even evident to ourselves and only surfaces when least expected. This reminds me of one of the readings in 'Day Breaks: Daily Reflection for Lend and Easer Week.'

We live lives of tortured complexity. Inside each of us there is both a saint and a sinner and enough complexity to write our own book of abnormal psychology. Our hearts are a murky cauldron of grace and sin, angels and demons. Always, it seems, we are torn in a away that leaves us feeling unsure, guilty, and tense.

We all have our daily struggles ... within and outside of ourselves. The challenge is to try and get the good win it. The movie "Crash" shows us that as much as we try, evil do win some battles and the war of opposites rages on.

Human compassion, in any form, is one way to show that the good is winning over evil within and around us. "By touching the center of our solitude, we sense that we have been touched by loving hands. . . There is an ancient legend which holds that when an infant is created, God kisses its soul and sings to it." Even before human consciousness, we have been touched by God's love and as we blossom into humanity, we long for that touch from others --created in God's image --and later, to return to God's touch itself.

That touch. That longing for contact. That struggle within for good to win. Maybe Det. Graham is right. Maybe, just maybe we all want good to win and we "crash" into each other so that we feel the struggle.