The cycle of life

Samsara
Directed by Lois Patiño
Certificate U, 113 minutes
Released 26 January

Broadly speaking, this film is in three parts. The first takes place in Laos, in east Asia, where the predominant religion is Buddhism. The second is the bit where we close our eyes. The third takes place in Zanzibar, in Africa, where the predominant religion is Islam. The director Lois Patiño is Spanish, which technically makes this a Spanish movie, but no Spanish is spoken and none of it takes place in Spain, so you wouldn’t know.

In rural Laos, a young man returns from his military service to spend time with an old woman, who is dying of old age. He also spends time talking with the local Buddhist monks. She knows her time is coming, and he reads to her from The Tibetan Book of the Dead. The pace of life is slow.

As the old woman finally passes away, we are asked to close our eyes. Part of the human experience is that, whatever we believe, no one really knows what dying is like. This film is likely to be as close to that experience as you’ll get in advance. We hear stuff. We see stuff too, because light (in blurred colours) comes through our closed eyelids, which act as a filter. I’m not sure I could rationally describe this remarkable audiovisual experience, but it certainly takes place at great depth within the human psyche.

When we reawaken, a young African girl living in a poor, coastal village is looking after a newly born goat. It is tethered, so its movement is restricted. She cares for it with great kindness. There is a massive contrast between this new world and the one in which the old woman died.

The remarkable achievement here is to bring to the screen the experience of reincarnation in a tangible way. If our Christian faith is to mean anything, it’s important to understand how the other major world religions work. This film brilliantly highlights a view found in Hinduism and Buddhism about what happens when we die that’s very different from the biblical one.

Jeremy Clarke is a film critic. jeremycprocessing.com

___

Abundant life in Nicaragua

Healing the World
Daniel Buttry and Dámaris Albuquerque
Read the Spirit
£19.54
ISBN: 978-1-64-180152-2

---

By any yardstick, Gustavo Parajón was a remarkable man. Although this biography sometimes verges on hagiography, it is impossible to overplay the enormous contribution he made to his country as a doctor, peacemaker and pastor.

Trained in the US, Parajón rejected a lucrative medical career to tend to the poor in his native Nicaragua. In 1967 he founded the country’s first community-based primary health care programme, Provadenic, which helped reduce the infant mortality rate from 25% to 1% within two decades.

Following the 1972 earthquake that claimed 10,000 lives in the capital Managua, he established the ecumenical relief organisation CEPAD, which later worked for peace during the 1980s Contra War. After Provadenic closed, AMOS Health and Hope kept its vision alive.

Following the 1979 revolution, Parajón’s willingness to work with the new government prompted a vicious campaign against him by some fellow Evangelicals in the USA. He could, however, be critical of the Sandinistas as well as of the dictatorship they overthrew. His refusal to ‘take sides’, a point the authors make strongly, led to his being appointed to a four-person National Reconciliation Commission when the war ended. Jimmy Carter later nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Parajón’s ministry was global. In the UK he was best known as a Greenbelt speaker. Twelve years after his death, however, his star is waning. This book’s value is not just the account it gives of his life, but its emphasis on the faith that inspired him. Foundational to his work was a conviction that all are created in God’s image and are to be equally valued. His example demonstrates what following the one who came to announce ‘abundant life’ for all, and to serve rather than be served, can actually achieve.

___

The prophet of Welwyn

Ebenezer Howard
Frances Knight
Oxford University Press
£40
ISBN: 978-0-19-879081-5

---

It is surprising that the creator of the world’s first garden cities is not better known today. Not only was Ebenezer Howard once famed throughout the world, but his ideas inspired the 20th century’s first environmental movement. Hopefully, Frances Knight’s thorough and concise account of his life will help promote fresh interest in Howard, a man of great vision, faith and action.

No previous biography of Howard has adequately explored his religious beliefs, despite his having seen them as central to his life and work.

A Congregationalist, Howard kept strong links with that tradition, while incorporating new religious beliefs such as Spiritualism and Theosophy alongside it. His influences included Congregational ministers.

Knight believes that Howard’s faith gave him a sense of being the prophet of the New Jerusalem, ‘literally interpreted as a command to build new communities’. A religious epiphany in 1888 convinced him that the ‘present industrial order’ stands condemned, ‘and that a new and brighter, because juster, order must ere take its place.’ He wanted his garden cities – Letchworth and Welwyn, in both of which he lived – to be based on altruism and cooperation. They should also be places of ‘theological and spiritual exploration’, where ‘everyone’s religious needs should be met.’

Howard lived a full and interesting life that encompassed spells in the USA, two marriages and mixing with the intellectuals and other significant people of his day; and he wrote a book which experts still consider the most influential and important in 20th-century city planning. With this excellent new study we now better understand the spiritual core of that life.

Both reviews by Andrew Bradstock, a former Church and Society Secretary for the URC