Kiss of life

The hoarding with its enormous pair of bespectacled eyes towered over the landscape outside New York, advertising the services of a long-departed optician, Dr T. J. Eckleburg. Just eyes, no face or mouth. These eyes appear as frequently in the new film of The Great Gatsby as they are mentioned in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel on which the movie is based.

It’s the story of Jay Gatsby, born in poverty as James Gatz who has reinvented his life, acquiring enormous wealth through selling bootleg liquor during the Prohibition. The novel is Fitzgerald’s take on the American Dream, and also on the story of the American nation.

God doesn’t get much of a mention in Fitzgerald’s pages. But there are those eyes. ‘God sees everything,’ says one of the characters, looking at the hoarding. But perhaps in Fitzgerald’s view the God who once was central to American life has, like Eckleburg, departed.

There are, however, some spiritual themes in both book and film. Gatsby stands by the waterside outside his front door looking across Long Island Sound to a green beckoning light on the far shore, and reaches out to it. We learn that it’s a beacon at the end of the jetty at the house where Daisy lives. Daisy, the rich girl whom Gatsby loved and still loves, Daisy who married into money when he was away during World War 1.

But that green light is a symbol of all our unfulfilled longings the profoundest of which, Christians believe is the longing we all have, whether or not we acknowledge it, for God.

The Great Gatsby raises the issue of how authentic our lives are. Gatsby, it seems, had lost touch with reality. He was both denying the past, concealing his humble beginnings, and seeking to recreate the past, believing that he and Daisy could pick up their relationship where they had been five years before. ‘Can’t repeat the past?’ cries Gatsby. ‘Why of course you can!’ And the whole Gatsby opulence was based on criminal activity. Gatsby was not great.

The story to challenges us to look at ourselves, seeking to discern what illusions we are living. I may think I’m perfect, when my friends know I’m manifestly not. I may think I am a perpetual failure, when nothing could be further from the truth. I may think my lifestyle is fulfilling, while all the time I am burying that ache for the green light across the water.

And I believe the greatest illusion of all is to live as though God has departed, or as though God were never there in the first place. For I believe God sees and knows us as we truly are, and that we take our first step on the path to salvation when we see ourselves as God sees us.

The most spiritual language in both novel and movie comes when Gatsby kisses Daisy for the first time. ‘He knew that when he kissed this girl’ he would ‘forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath.’ He put his lips to hers and ‘she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.’ Gatsby is making his dream real, earthing it in one particular woman.

It reminds me of God, breathing life into the first man, incarnating God’s dream. And God has a dream for us. Unlike the warped dreams of Gatsby which would have compelled Daisy to conform, the dream of God sets us free to live with increasingly less illusion, with increasing authenticity. Only when we yield to the kiss of God is God’s dream incarnated in us.

When Gatsby first met Daisy he was able to gain access to a party at her posh house because, in army uniform, he was indistinguishable from the well-connected young men who buzzed around her. We know that in the eyes of God we are too flawed and imperfect to be seen at the party which God hosts.

And yet if we are friends of Christ we are as welcome as Christ is in his Father’s house. And the very warmth of the Father’s welcome inspires and empowers us to become like the Jesus who befriends us.

When Gatsby meets Daisy once again, the green light loses its significance to him. Who needs symbols when you have the reality? At present God comes to us through symbols – bread, wine, words, relationships, theology, story, music, poetry, creation. But we believe that beyond death there will be no need for symbols because in some unimaginable way we will discern the reality of God more completely.

And in the meantime, what do we have? The eyes of God, all-seeing, stern, but warm. But more than that, God’s face shines upon us. God smiles. God’s lips seek ours.

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 6th June 2013)