Atonement — Beyond the movie to something real

We watched Atonement last night, a movie version of Ewan McGregor’s book, starring Kiera Knightly. (Spoilers ahead.)

A 13-year-old girl feels rejected by the young man she has a crush on when he saves her from her rehearsed drowning and is angry with her instead of being her hero. So, she chooses to see things in a new light, where he is a sexual predator instead of the loving suitor of her older sister. This interpretation of reality leads her to provide the key witness against him in a rape trial. Ultimately, he dies in France and her sister dies in a war-related accident in London — the two never able to marry or share their love for each other.

The girl grows up to be a respected and successful novelist. Her final novel is a telling of the truth about what she had done. It exonerates the man, taking the blame for what she had done. But it goes further. In the book, she has her sister and her lover reunite, marry, and live a full life of love. What had been stolen is returned.

But is it really? No. It’s too late. There’s no real atonement. Nothing is made right. The dead are not raised. No novel can do that — at least, it can’t do it for the dead. The only one who has any feel of atonement is the girl, now an old and dying woman.

What the story highlights is our inability to atone for our sins.

There are things we simply can’t make right. Atonement is beyond us. We can’t raise the dead and give them the ability to live happily ever after.

Instead, we are left with regrets. And here, this girl throws herself into the thick of World War II as a selfless nurse, trying to win atonement through service. But that doesn’t work. The soldiers keep dying anyway. So, all she’s left with is writing and rewriting her regrets throughout her life, never achieving forgiveness or reconciliation.

None of us can atone for ourselves. There are moments of making things right. But there are so many regrets that we have no opportunity to do anything about.

Atonement has to come from outside of us. We just don’t have what it takes to generate it ourselves.

That is why, as a Christian, I surround myself with the image of the cross. For in his death, Jesus has in fact dealt with all the stuff of the past. And in his resurrection, he has paved the way for something better and more beautiful in the future. Not a future of fiction and what-ifs, but a future guaranteed by the presence of the Holy Spirit this very day, a living hope.