Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Bette and I asked some friends over to watch Close Encounters of the Third Kind with us. If you can separate Christmas movies, like A Christmas Carol and Miracle on 34th Street, from Advent stories, Close Encounters is my favorite Advent story.

What's not to like? In this story, it's Joseph who gets "pregnant." I put that in quotes because it is a vision, not a fetus, that is emplanted in Joseph, but the implications expand until they drive out everything else in his life. Including his wife and kids. And when you stop to think about it, what do we know about the other couples Joseph and Mary hung around with?

This vision has three parts. It is a representation of Devil's Tower, in Wyoming. It is a sense that this picture means something. It is a sense that the meaning is crucially important. That's it. And for that, Joseph gave up "normal life." That all sounds biblical to me. Except for Joseph being the one who got pregnant, and that's not as different from Matthew's account as it is from Luke's. Richard Dreyfuss plays Roy Neary, the Joseph character; he's wonderful.

The Wise Men get the message too--in earth coordinates. They are Wise Men, after all. But a lot of "potential wise men," like the pilots of the planes that see the alien ship as clearly as could be asked, think that telling what they saw is way too much trouble. And it might alert Herod.

Herod is the U. S. Army in this movie. They protect the Wise Men and help them get to the place of meeting. But then they use "security concerns" to control the guest list by getting rid of as many of the shepherds as they can. The chief Wise Man protests, "Major Walsh, this is not your party. These shepherds are here by invitation and you have no right to exclude them."

The shepherds are marvellously unreliable as witnesses. They are too old or too young or "unreliable looking." If you haven't noticed the delightful irony that in Luke, the shepherds were the only ones who were told the whole story because they were the only ones nobody would believe, then you have still before you one of the great jokes of the Bible.

I love all that. But there is a special place in my heart for this story because my daughter Dawne made this picture for me. This shows the special U. N. reception area that was set up to receive and understand a message from far beyond their understanding.

She made it by running that scene--I call it the "Little Town of Bethlehem" scene--over and over, putting the picture on pause and painting it in oil. Bless her! I had copies made and sent it out as a Christmas card once, years ago.

Here's a poem I sent out with it.

It is in the dark months; these months
That we are given the chance to notice
That the most glorious of all our almost denied hopes
Is really true.

The poem isn't everything I wanted it to be, but it does capture how completely preposterous the story of Advent is and how much less attracted to it we are than we might expect. That's what the line about "our almost denied hopes" is about.