Some of you
may remember a very old movie (older than I, in fact) called Mr. Blandings
Builds his Dream House, starring Cary Grant (1948). A more recent movie that is
rather like the first is The Money Pit, starring Tom Hanks (1986). In both
movies, a young couple has invested in a dream house for their future which
turns out to be a nightmare. I remember watching the Cary Grant movie a very
long time ago on an afternoon TV matinee. It was my first realization that Cary
Grant was actually funny. All that I knew of him beforehand was that he was the
one who said, “Judy, Judy, Judy”. Unable to find this online so far, I looked
up The Money Pit instead and watched that one this morning. Hanks is also quite
funny in this comedy of disasters as a young man trying to hold together a
house that is self-destructing all around him while at the same time
maintaining a marriage that is far more important to him than the money or the
house. “The foundation is the important thing,” the building contractor tells
Hanks toward the end of the story. “If you have a good foundation, everything
else can be repaired.”
It’s an
endearing sort of moral, and it may even be true. But the reason these two
movies came to mind in the first place is that upon awakening this morning,
after a rather sleepless night punctuated by pains and discomforts for which
there seems no end of modulation, it occurred to me that my body is like the cursed
house in these movies, falling apart bit by bit, beam by beam, from floor to
ceiling to plumbing to wiring. Every evening, I go to bed in the hope that the
night crew of time and rest will have mended some parts of the crumbling
structure by morning, only to find upon waking that new holes have appeared,
new pipes have cracked, that the floors are sagging and the timbers are
groaning and that the latter condition is now worse than the former. Oh, the
foundation is still solid—I’m still here, aren’t?—but all the parts above
ground are tipped and skewed and leaning in quite an alarming manner.
Now, I don’t
remember what ultimately happens with the house in the Grant movie. In the
Hanks film, the thing is in a seemingly hopeless state, such that even the
repairs are in need of repair. But when the foundation of the love itself is
threatened, the house no longer matters to either the man or the woman. Repairs
are finally effected, the structure made sound, but the foundation, the love
that is the very reason for the house, has been undermined. Of course, it all
turns out well in the end (this is, after all, a comedy). Love is restored and,
with it, the house, the dream, and the future.
Would that
life itself were a comedy. Or then again, perhaps it is. In 2 Corinthians, the
apostle Paul speaks of dwellings in this manner: For we know that if our earthly house, this tent, is destroyed, we have
a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For
in this we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed with our habitation which is
from heaven, if indeed, having been clothed, we shall not be found naked. For
we who are in this tent groan, being burdened, not because we want to be
unclothed, but further clothed, that mortality may be swallowed up by life.
Some of my
troubles may be reparable. I don’t know. If they are, they are only so for a
time—and God knows what period of time. Deterioration remains a constant process,
relentlessly undoing repair, relentlessly degrading that which has arisen from
the initial foundation. The great hope from the beginning is for a structure not
subject to dissolution, the eternal foundation sometimes known as love.
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