As the lights came up on a recent screening of Bassam Tariq’s Your Mother, Your Mother, Your Mother, I found myself lingering with the scrolling credits alongside a sparse but equally affected group of strangers. It’s the sort of film that unsettles and unearths, forcing you to grapple with it’s pertinant questions regarding that felt intersection between faith and doubt. It’s a stunning exploration of forgiveness, hope and restoration that digs deep into the implications of its weathered spiritual core.
As one of its sobering and challenging reflections submts, it is difficult to forgive others, but perhaps most difficult to forgive ourselves. And while this film seeks to explore the nature of such an internal process, on a broader level it seeks to show how these two things actually relate to one another, especially when it comes to the ways in which our relationships to one another can tend to become a mirror which reflects back a sense of our own feeings of failure and weakness.
What follows this discussion within the film is then an equal concern for how it is that we make such judgments, both of ourselves and the world, especially where it comes to our conceptions of justice. As the events of the film unfold, the complex nature of our main characters past and present contnue to fight for his allegiance, seeking an answer to the brokenness and the darkness even as the struggle increasingly turns things back on his own sense of self condemnation.
The setting occupies this liminal space between our struggles with God and our equal need to seek after truth that exists beyond our own control of the world and circumstance. Each character in the film is navigating their own journey in this regard. Here it imagines what it is to traverse the path in silence, but also to leave room for the needed miracle to break through and transform the broader reality that holds them enslaved to its cycles of sin and vengeance. If miracles awaken us to the presence of God amidst the darkness, they also then bind us to the relationships in which faith can then be embodied as life rather than death. To find our way back to God in the darkness is to find our way back to one another. This is what resurrection hope looks like in the span of this film.
The theme of mercy also looms large as a key and persistant part of this process. There is a reoccurring motif of the silence being broken by a necessary word, with characters often speaking into the silence and hearing nothing in return, while similtaneously struggling to find the words needed to address that silence. This is true for the key relationships; son, daughter, sister, brother, father, mother, faith community. It’s also true for their relationship to God. To this end, prayer plays a significant role in a story where they consistently do not know what or how to pray, and often don’t have the words. Where this translates to the questioning then of the very faith that holds that hope in its grip, here we find a portrait of each person taking turns carrying the faith of the other through the crisis, each extending mercy and finding it in exchange.
All of this leading to a truly transcendent final 20 minutes that leaves the tears flowing and the reflections forming. Really compels one to think about what actual transformation looks like.
It was the next morning that I was reading from the book The Way of the Spirit: Recognizing and Responding to God’s Subtle Movements by Jeremy Sims. Here Sims walks through the notion of uncertainty, suggesting such a struggle is not the opposite of faith, but part of it. It is a call not to forgoe or resist doubt, but to learn what it is to be attentive to the questiions it is bringing to the surface. Another word for attentivness in the book is learning how to pray. Not just in words but in participation. Inattentivness is, according to Sims, the tragic erosion of our capacity for love. This is not an act of shaming, nor does it judge anything beyond naming the struggle itself. Rather, it is an invitation that begins with sight, not words, The act of having the veil lifted so we can see and name reality as it is. As Sim writes,
“We do not name to control. We name to receive, and sometimes to remember”
Which is precisely where we find the charatcers in Your Mother. Once they realize that words are simply language that seeks to put that which is being named into terms we can grasp, bringing glimpses of the mystery back into view, especially in those liminal spaces, they begin to remember. Here redemptive imaginging can begin to take shape, leaving room for God to form it into transformation. It “brings the struggle into the light,” and then asks us to step into that light.
Doubt, not as a “problem to be solved,” but as a facet of our learning to “see.” Here “the rule is mercy, not judgment.” The ability to “carry our passions” even where it risks our deepest fears and shame,. That is the space where desire can illuminate and reveal. That is where we can actually begin to walk through the door of repentance. As Sims put it, “learning that we are free to choose again.”
Which brings us to the films reigning image of resurrection. As Sim writes,
“Resurrection is God’s work, but freedom is communal. It is one thng to be made alive by Christ. It is another to have your grave clothes gently unwrapped by the hands of those who see what God has done and refuse to let you stumble around still bound.”
Which gets to that profound wrestling with hope that I fe;t Yout Mother represented, where the journey away from God is wrapped up in ones journey towards God who is, as the film posits, not confined to the temples we tend to leave behind, but present in the world itself. All of which is working to bind us to one another where we can be seen and where we can rediscover mercy and remember faith.
“A community that recognizes the Spirit’s work in one another bears witness, not just in doctrine, but in presence. It loosens chains by the way it names what it sees. It tells the truth about who a person is becoming, not just what they’ve been. It refuses to let people stay in shame or stagnation. It is not obsessed with perfection, but it is committed to transformation.”
This to me captures the journey of this family in the film. Finding their way back to each other even where it risks such vulnerability. This is the “community of hope that lends us assurance,” made up of all whom carry “the scars of their own journey.” Hope then, as Sims suggests, “cannot be mass produced. It has to be cultivated. Lived. Practiced together… what makes this hope holy is that it is held communally. This is one of the mysteries of the body of Christ. We borrow and lend faith. We carry one another in and out of belief.”
And I love how Sims puts this final word;
“Hope is not wishful thinking. It is not naive optimism or some last-ditch emotional crutch when everything else has failed. Hope, in the life of a community shaped by the Spirit, becomes something far more grounded and far more mysterious. It becomes formation.”
This is where Your Mother brings us as viewers, to such an altar in the world, one in which we find the freedom of this act of formation. Such freedom, Sim says, “is not just release from something- it is the assurance that we never walk alone through anything. It’s the settled knowing that whatever we are going through, we are accompanied by God,” a revelation that comes when we allow this to set ourselves within the lives of one another.
To learn to pray again.
To learn to see again
To learn to name again
