Donnie Darko: Discovering a Tangent to Reality?

Have you ever seen the film Donnie Darko? It is a rather strange film about a teenager who is struggling with some kind of mental health issue who slowly discerns an alternate reality. It seems as if this other reality is breaking through into his own world. In an early scene, Donnie hears a voice that draws him out of his bedroom and outside. We cut to the morning when he is awakened in the middle of a golf course and when he returns home it appears that a jet engine has crashed into his bedroom.

This strange voice continues to plague Donnie. It comes from a bizarre looking rabbit that seems to appear in and around bizarre crimes that Donnie commits. While most of them are more like really bad pranks, Donnie still is not capable of realizing what he is doing. But he does know, that something is not right.

What fascinated me about this film was this thin line between being able to discover what is real and a kind of veil that separates us from a secondary universe. It is not clear in the film whether this is imaginary or not, though Donnie's guide along the way is a book written by a former teacher at his school who is now a recluse. The book seems to provide a template for him to try and make some sense out of what is happening to him.

The one thing that struck me about this film was this sense of feeling like there is sometimes a veil over what reality could be for us. It is the sort of thing that keeps us from knowing who we are and what potential we may have. I am struck by this image because so much of our own lives these days can feel like we are living in our own entertainment film about our life. We play the roles we think we need to succeed, heck, we even have our own soundtrack in our IPods to play as we perform various acts throughout the day. Our conversation may be peppered with cute cultural phrases to make us seem "hip" or "with it" (how do you like those out-of-date phrases) even though deep inside we may feel like no one really knows who we are.

I think at the heart of Donnie's dilemma is that he is surrounded by a family that is trying to make sense out of who he is now. His father tries to use humor to brush off the fact that he doesn't really understand Donnie either. His teachers seem to walk him right up to the precipice of discovery but then back away, as his science teacher says, "I could lose my job."

At the heart of Donnie Darko is this sense that sometimes we might see through the veil in front of us into a world of different possibilities. In Donnie's case, these seem to be headed towards destruction. You'll have to watch the movie to find out how it plays out.

I bring it up here though because in talking with many of you I sense that inner desire to try to see the world that is in front of you. The veil we are trying to see through is the one that the culture we live in places in front of us. It is a sheet of sorts that can be used to separate us from where we are and lie to us about what we could be if only we had the latest gadget, or sexiest girlfriend, or a better body. This veil causes us to look at external expressions of who we are and bury deep inside the people we were created to be.

By the way is not a community forming to lead you on a tangent. We are just walking alongside the Donnie's of the world to help them discover God's reality. Together we are able to discern how life is different and how very present God is in each of our lives. It's going to seem odd, because you might think the "leaders" you meet are going to tell you how to think about God, or how you should worship God, or why you should worship God. But the truth of the matter is that time and again, when I sit at Unos or at Panera, it is you who reveal to me how God is working in and around Nashua. Together we discern how our two paths became one. We discover how we are each being called through the veil into a new reality. Together we will be able to move into the real world that allows us to be who we were created to be. It is the world we are already living in now, if we could only see it.