The Giver is one of my favorite novels. Critics are mixed on the
recent film adaptation, but I find it a good companion piece. I like how its
visual nature heightens aspects like the impact of memory and the role of
color. But most of all, I appreciate how it honors and develops the story’s
focus on the transforming power of love.
The film matures Jonas and his friends from 12
to 16, adding a layer of depth to their relationships and the narrative, which
stays pretty close to the novel. They live in a seemingly utopian community
that aspires to “Sameness.” Everyone lives amicably, content in their assigned
roles in a peaceable community governed by seemingly benevolent Elders.
That changes for Jonas when he is chosen as
the Receiver. He starts to experience the world’s collective memories — from
the beauty of snow to the horror of war and death — stored in the memory of the
Giver, who serves as an adviser of sorts to the Elders.
Jonas also discovers that everyone in the
community is medicated to control emotions in order to maintain an ordered
society. But the injections don’t just eliminate hate, anger and fear. They
also deaden love and joy.
The more memories Jonas receives and the more
he learns about his community, the more he struggles to find a way to restore
what they’ve lost. And love is central to that journey.
The Giver echoes a profound truth of our own journey: Love has the
power to wake us to and transform us toward the kind of life we were meant to
live.
God built into us the capacity and ability to
love, says C.S. Lewis in The Four Loves. The
love we feel for friends, family and beloveds are “natural images” or
“foretastes” of God — who is Love Himself. As such, they provide “proximities
of approach” or on-ramps that have the potential to become profound modes of
transformation, moving us toward the love of Love Himself: as Lewis says, “love
that seeks the good of the loved object for the object’s own sake.”
This is how we were created to love. This is
the kind of love that overcomes and transforms hate, anger and fear in
ourselves and others.
When we forget who we are, love wakes us up.
Experiencing it transforms us and opens our eyes to, as the Giver puts it, “a
life of shadows, of echoes of what once made us real.” We may not see
perfectly, says Lewis, but “to know that one is dreaming is to be no longer
perfectly asleep.”
The Weinstein Company |
The Giver explores this kind of awakening. Jonas receives his first
experience of love in a memory of a family at Christmas (a packed symbol of
love in itself). That starts to change him: “Something within him . . . had
grown,” as the novel puts it.
Then Jonas starts to experience love for those
around him. As his experience of and capacity for love grows, Jonas and the way
he sees the world transform (quite literally, in the latter case). By the end
of his journey, Jonas has the capacity for the best love of all: laying down
his life for others.
And Jonas’ capacity to love opens him to other
things. “With love,” the Giver says in the film, “comes faith, comes hope.”
And it is these three things — love above all
— that will lead us toward that day when “we’ll see it all . . . as clearly as
God sees us” (1 Cor. 13:12-13).
Love wakes us to our “life of shadows” and
reminds us of who we were created to be and the God who created us. In this
world, we may not love perfectly. It may be “only an echo,” to play on Jonas’
final words in the film, “but it will lead us all home.”
This is a repost of my September 1
column at MWR.