Agnes

Our cable television service is through Massillon Cable.  They have pay-per-view, but also by going to Channel 1, there are free movies too.  I just realized that a few days ago.

The other night we watched an older one that was very controversial at the time.  It is one of those movies that a group of people could talk about for hours!  It raises as many questions as it answers, and probes deeply the mystery of faith and belief.

The movie is "Agnes of God."  It stars Anne Bancroft and Jane Fonda.  Bancroft plays the mother superior in a Montreal cloistered convent.  Jane Fonda is a court psychiatrist who is investigating the death of a baby within the convent, born to Agnes, a childlike nun who has layers and layers of hurt and injury buried deep.

Agnes says that she followed the instructions of an old nun who had shown her a secret passage in the convent just the day before her death and the nun told her to go to the barn where the passageway ended.  Agnes says that God came to her and sang a song to her for six nights.  When she sang the song, it sounded bawdry and certainly nothing that God would sing.  She admitted under hypnosis that she had strangled the baby, because she was convinced that it was a mistake.  Her mother had told her the same thing over and over again -- that she was a mistake.  And also that she was ugly and stupid.

So was it her mother's voice she heard?  Who sang the song to her?

At the end of the movie, the court decided that Agnes should be allowed to return to the convent and live out her days there.  She had a beautiful voice and she would climb to the top of the bell tower and sing.  She was singing in Latin at the end of the movie, as she had always done before. 

The one thing that I keep coming back to about the movie is that if God were to again bring a new life into the world through the help of a virgin nun, then why would she kill the child?  It makes no sense.  God wouldn't have a part in anything like that.

Probably the most troubling aspect of the movie is that the damage done to this young woman, damage that basically kept her a child in her own mind, was done by her own mother and excused away by some as the effects of alcoholism.  It goes way beyond a drinking problem.

It is still worth watching and if several people watch it, prepare for a very interesting conversation afterwards.

Well, I'm off to Joanne Fabrics tomorrow to look at some things, and to get some yarn. 

Have a good Tuesday.  Keep your umbrella handy.