I’m a big Katharine Hepburn fan. We recently watched one of her classic films, The Rainmaker, costarring Burt Lancaster as a traveling huckster/salesman who promises residents of the parched prairie that he’ll make it rain–for a fee, of course. Based on a play written by Richard Nash, it has themes of pragmatism vs. pursuit of dreams, of faith vs. sight. Reviews I’ve found online treat it as a romantic comedy, or even a “hayseed farce,” but it’s much more.
Living by sight makes for a dried up existence. The most unattractive character in the movie is the totally pragmatic brother, who thinks he is doing his sister a favor to tell her she is plain and no man will ever want her. He is a critical parent if ever there was one, even to his father. It’s ironic that his name is Noah, because in the Bible Noah believed, against all odds and popular opinion, that rain would come because God had said it would, even when no one around him believed it.
Lancaster’s character, Starbuck, talked fast to convince himself as much as anyone else that he had a gift. The rain he brought was metaphorical as well as physical, faith and hope to answer the drought of spirit.
Faith and sight. When is a dream foolish, and when it is faith? What does living by faith look like?
The Biblical Noah lived by faith for a lot of years, acting on something very eccentric that God had told him to do. What would you have thought if your neighbor started building a huge boat, saying it was going to rain so much it would flood the earth? You’d think he’d lost his mind. But it happened.
Moses led the Israelites into the desert on the promise that God would lead and provide for all of them, the widow gave Elijah her last bit of food on the promise that he’d multiply it, Abraham believed in the promise of God that from his son would come God’s chosen people, Esther believed that her husband the king would not kill her if she went to see him uninvited — the Bible is crammed with people who did what must have looked pretty foolish and whom most observers would have called unrealistic, dreamers. But they are the examples for a life of faith.
So how can you tell if you’re acting on faith or if you’re being foolish? I don’t have all the answers to this question yet. I struggle sometimes to trust my own judgment. I don’t want to live in a fantasy land — well, from time to time maybe I do — but I don’t want to be faithless, either, and I can’t live in the arid land of the purely realistic. It’s an illusion that that’s the most responsible route.
“Faith is the substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things not seen.”
When and how do you live by faith? Faith in what?
