A powerful story of forgiveness

Many of us take forgiveness for granted, accepting and offering it without much thought. But what if we faced a truly horrifying wound? Could we then forgive?

The Railway Man is based on the true story of Eric Lomax, a former British Army officer who was tortured as a prisoner of war at a Japanese labor camp during World War II. The film begins years later, on a train, where Eric meets and falls in love with Patti (Nicole Kidman), a former nurse.

'Railway enthusiast': Eric (played wonderfully by Colin Firth) is a “railway enthusiast.” He knows and loves about everything there is to know about railways. He and Patti marry, and before long he is on the floor screaming, experiencing flashbacks from his experience in the war. But he won’t talk to Patti about it.

She goes to Eric’s friend Finlay (Stellan Skarsgard), who was with him in the labor camp, and he tells her what happened.

Death Railroad: The film flashes back repeatedly to that time, when a young Eric (Jeremy Irvine) and Finlay (Sam Reid) are captured in Singapore and forced to work on the Burma railroad (later known as the Death Railroad).

Eric builds a radio receiver, and when it’s discovered, he takes responsibility for it to save his fellow officers from being punished. He endures terrible torture (thus the R rating), which continues to haunt him years later.

Revenge?: Then Finlay learns that one of Eric’s tormentors is still alive. Finlay tells Eric, who decides to travel to Thailand to confront the man. Will he seek revenge? The tension when he finds him is enormous.

The film takes a while to get going, but once we’re in the labor camp, we’re hooked, even though the torture scenes are difficult to watch.

Firth is outstanding. This could be another Oscar-nominated performance. Kidman’s skills are mostly wasted, as her character does little more than look concerned.

Lust for vengeance: The kind of decision Eric must make is one few of us will ever face. The film ends up confronting our own lust for vengeance as we identify with this character. Though difficult to watch, the film provides a good vehicle for discussing what forgiveness means and how hard it can be.

Forgiveness in strange places

Good fiction often takes us into worlds completely foreign to us and makes them familiar. It even creates characters we may on first sight think we have nothing in common with and makes them feel human, sympathetic.

 

Hanna Pylväinen’s debut novel is one such work. The subject of We Sinners is a family, two parents and nine children. The Rovaniemis belong to a conservative church—a Lutheran revival movement called Laestadianism—in modern-day Michigan. The church forbids dancing, drinking, TV and other common practices in our culture. But its central belief, repeated several times in the novel, is that believers are forgiven in Jesus’ blood when they repent.

Pylväinen tells the story from the point of view of the various members of the family. We witness the struggle of each person with other family members and with their faith. Some hold onto the faith; others reject it; some fall somewhere in between.

Pylväinen uses telling details to show these struggles. For example, Warren, the father, reflects on the family’s constant struggle with poverty: “It was daily things, it was money, it was when he stopped at a gas station and the kids all chanted, ‘Get a treat, get a treat,’ and when he came out with chips they grabbed for them like starving people.”

Tiina, the second oldest child, is the first in the family to leave the faith, yet “she felt no thrills of liberation.” Her becoming an unbeliever is like a conversion, yet she can’t quite fill the emptiness. After she cheats on her boyfriend, she feels “she was no good in both the church’s world and in the world she had chosen.” For her, “it wasn’t about the sinning at all, it was what you did about the sinning, and she had no means of forgiveness about her.”

In spite of how oppressive the church feels to many of the children, it’s difficult to leave it behind. When Julia, the fourth youngest, who has left, returns for a visit, she sleeps in a bed with her younger sister and experiences “the old childhood security of many people asleep in one place, the uncomplicated comfort of someone in her bed who was not her lover.”

Not everyone leaves. Brita, the oldest, marries a man in the church and has numerous children (four and counting). Nels, the oldest boy, goes to college and takes up drinking and going to parties in pursuit of Bernie, a girl outside the faith. But no matter how often he breaks the rules, forgiveness is available at church, and eventually he marries a girl in the church and settles down.

Pylväinen uses irony in this interplay of belief and unbelief. Nels’ roommate, Clayton, is his conscience as Nels breaks the rules. But later, Clayton takes up drinking and ends up with Bernie.

Uppu, the youngest, befriends a new student, Jonas Chan, a shy Asian-American, at her high school. Jonas goes to her church out of courtesy and discovers a faith different from the one his parents had left. “Unlike his family’s old church, no one said they loved Jesus, no one was overemotional, and God was less a personal friend than someone spoken of quietly, as if in fear of disturbing Him.” As Jonas becomes more and more interested in the church and then becomes a believer, Uppu can’t stand it and leaves.

The final chapter goes back to 1847, to Finland, where we encounter Laestadius, the founder of the church. What became in many ways a group that imprisons people in its conservative, sometimes harsh ways began as a revival that liberated people from some harsh cultural practices that were particularly oppressive to women.

In We Sinners, Pylväinen deftly explores this dance between between oppression and liberation, between belief and unbelief, and shows the gray areas. These are not polarities but gradations of human experience. We all move in and out of various communities and belief systems, searching for love and acceptance. Often we search for forgiveness. This novel shows that sometimes it’s found in strange places.