Gifts of Grace

The other day I watched a DVD of the movie “Cast Away,” and like so many things that you see once and then see again, you are made aware of things you missed before.

This is a Christmas movie in so many ways, which is probably why it was released during the Christmas season of 2000. The doomed FedEx aircraft crashes on Christmas Eve and the Tom Hanks character washes up on a south Pacific atoll on Christmas Day. With a touch of irony, we note that one of the first “casualties” of the crash is the pocket watch his girl friend/fiancé gave him as a Christmas gift no longer works; from the point of impact into the ocean, time became irrelevant. But now there were other things to take the place of time, for along with the soggy salvation of the efficiency expert, Chuck Noland, there is the salvation of all these “gifts” – the FedEx packages – that come in with the tide.

Each of these gifts impractical though they may appear – ice skates, volleyball, party dress, videotapes, etc. – plays a vital role in Noland’s survival. But none more so than the one that is never opened, the one with the wings as of an angel that provides a balance to all the material things that this castaway makes use of until he is rescued some four years later. Why does he hang on to it? Why does it stay intact the whole time of his ordeal? It is the only link to the spiritual aspect of his life; God is never mentioned, to the best of my recollection, but the spiritual component of God is there from the very beginning of the film. There is a continuity of a sense of the eternal while everything else in Chuck Noland’s life is bound by the temporal, by the tick-tock of on-time deliveries. In the end, we witness how one man’s ingenuity and determinism contribute to his salvation, but in the end also, we observe how the gift of hope is held up in a simple unopened package with a west Texas address adorned with wings as of an angel.

I have told you already that I am fascinated about those places, events, opportunities where the spiritual and the material sort of brush up against each other. So, it happens here in this screenplay.

I believe that God gives each of us gifts to get us through the days of our lives. For me the film is a metaphor for the frustration and despair that hover around us like a shroud. But underneath the despair there are gifts that God sends us if we but look around. They may be practical gifts just to get us moving, and dressed and getting ourselves fed, but there is always a spiritual gift that helps us to look beyond our present circumstances into the world that is to come; that has yet to be revealed to us.

Life as he had known it with FedEx, with his girl, with his urban environment is as empty for Noland as that south Pacific atoll. But there was still one thing left to do; deliver the package; take the gift of hope – the unopened package – to its intended destination. And so he does. As the film ends, we get a kind of God’s eye view of the “born again to a living hope” person we know as Chuck Noland. He is standing at a west Texas crossroads looking back down one of the roads at a new opportunity that has been placed before him. And the irony this time is that as one gift got delivered, another one was offered in its place. A gift of grace for someone who was lost, but now is found; was blind, but now he sees.

… and the credits roll.