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 One Christian's View of "Cider House Rules"
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I doubt if the movie “Cider House Rules” will
be a big hit with the evangelical community. It’s treatment
of abortion may seem too pro-choice. However, a pro-life evangelical
like myself found so much thinking material in this gripping
story that I can’t help but write about the personal value
of seeing it.
It is essentially a story of two men. One, the obstetrician/abortionist/
orphanage house father ( Academy Award winner, Michael Caine) is a man
who has set himself free from society’s limits in an effort to curb
the pain of parent-less children in his 1940’s world. He lovingly
cares for orphans in one wing of his dilapidated institution while both
delivering and aborting babies in another. Drug-induced sleep is his only
peace as he attempts to take on more of the world’ rules in order to
soothe the painful effects of rules broken by others.
His understudy Homer, himself an orphan, wrestles with conflicts of his
own. He faithfully delivers babies but steadfastly refuses to do abortions,
once commenting that he might have been an abortion statistic himself.
A chance at love and adventure lead him to break away from the orphanage
to work at the apple cider mill owned by the recently-widowed mother of
his newfound love. There he encounters the horrors of incest, suicide,
and lost love, and ends up performing his first abortion on a young girl
made pregnant by her father. He finds that the simple rules he’s established
for his own life are as inadequate as the laughable “cider house rules” tacked
up on the migrant workers' boarding house wall.
“Cider House Rules” is a story of rules too simple for complex lives,
but it’s also a story about nightmarish lives lived without rules. You leave
the theater hoping for sensible rules to help you live in a broken world.
Jesus brings us just that. He brings sense to the nonsense of modern day
life. His book of rules is not as simple as we’d like it to be, not
simple because it requires that we “ask, seek, and find.” He
doesn’t grant us the position of Pharisee, one who is done seeking.
Rather he expects us to always search for the truth in the perfect words
he delivered to imperfect people.
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About the Author:
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Steve Graner is a Christian educator and familyman employed
by the Minot, ND Public School District. A licensed laypastor,
he is passionate about Christian writing and Christian drama.
Along with family and friends, Steve has performed numerous
self-written dramas and musicals for area church audiences. |
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