Savoring the Scene

I am in the grips of a cold and thought about passing on writing an entry this week, but writing this blog is a respite from life as usual. It is redeemed time: time to write for the joy of writing.

Therefore, I find it appropOpinionsriate to write about a film that tells the story of time that is saved from the monotony of life as it is and turned into time as it should be. I write of Shawshank Redemption (1994, dir. Frank Darabont).

Shawshank Redemption tells Stephen King’s story of Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins), a banker in the 1940s incarcerated in Shawshank prison for murdering his wife and her lover. Andy protests his innocence and resists being diminished by prison life. Rather than conceding to a life of despair, he chooses hope and in doing so becomes a redemptive savior in the lives of other prisoners.

The hope with which he hopes is not simply a dream about the future. Andy hopes by working toward those things that make a brighter future possible. He writes persistently, once a week, to the authorities for six years, requesting more books for the prison library. He teaches a fellow young inmate to read and coaches him through his high school certificate exam so that he will have a better chance when he is released.

A scene that epitomizes Andy as the redeemer of time occurs in the first half of the firm when Andy takes a chance and offers a prison guard financial advice and then assistance in financial paper work in exchange for three bottles of beer each for his fellow prison work crew (12 to be exact). The story is told in retrospect by Red (Morgan Freeman), one of Andy’s fellow prisoners. I think of Red as a gospel writer.

Red recounts, “We sat and drank with the sun on our shoulders and felt like free men… We were the lords of all creation.”

Andy himself refrains from drinking and instead sits apart from his crew. When invited to join in by another prisoner, Andy explains that he has given up alcohol.

Red provides the following account, “As for Andy, he spent that break hunkered in theshade, a strange little smile on his face, watching us drink his beer … You could argue he’d done it to curry favor with the guards, or maybe make a few friends among us cons. Me, I think he did it just to feel normal again, if only for a short while.”

My son accuses me of seeing the Jesus story wherever I look, but I cannot help but see in this scene the Lord’s Supper being served in the form of beer. The sacraments, for me, are a foretaste of final redemption, an awakening to life as it should be, abundant life.

When these prisoners drink beer and experience life as freemen, they experience time that has been redeemed. They have stepped out of the darkness of their prison into the light and into their intended role in creation.

Advice to my younger readers: One can experience the redemption of time by savoring the flavor of a plump grape. Drinking beer is not a necessary ingredient to abundant life. The abuse of alcohol diminishes life.

This post originally appeared in Savoring the Scene in the Goshen Commons blog.