Miracles, mops and Morgan Freeman
For hours after seeing “Bruce Almighty,” I was still thinking about him. Or rather Him. God.
In the movie, God is played by Morgan Freeman. He presents himself to Bruce Nolan (Jim Carrey), who sees himself as a modern-day Job. He’s been passed over for his dream job as a TV anchor and gets fired after an outburst on-air. Bruce gets mugged in the station’s parking lot and then crashes his car.
“God, why do you hate me?” Bruce rages.
God doesn’t take it personally. He knows, as an especially good parent would, that Bruce’s anger really has nothing to do with him. He’s frustrated because he is sizing himself up with an impossible yardstick, the one that has been waved in front of him all his life as the Measure of Success. So God, with good-humored patience, gives Bruce a gift. He lets him be God for a week so he can see his place in the world with new eyes and see the person he is meant to be.
What Bruce eventually discovers, as God knew he would, is that real happiness is about recognizing the unique gifts you have to offer other people.
So, instead of feeling insignificant for doing quirky people stories rather than hard-news anchoring, Bruce becomes a master at the quirky stories. He revels in them. He finds that his brilliance is in making people laugh.
When I left the movie theater, Freeman’s God stayed with me. I have an on-again, off-again relationship with God, mostly because the invisible thing doesn’t work for me. Faith isn’t my strength. I get stuck on needing proof, all the while knowing that proof negates the need for faith (a twisty argument that eventually gives me a headache). Maybe I should think of God as a woman; it’s probably more politically correct. But whenever I’ve tried to wrap my mind around who or what God is, I have always pictured a fatherly type. I never pictured the crackling-lightning, smiting God who orders people around, but I never saw God as an old man in a chair, scribbling curt notes into our permanent files, either.
Morgan Freeman’s God, however, is God as I want to imagine him. He’s the parent many of us wanted, and the parent many of us would like to be. He speaks softly and not too much. He smiles with amusement and affection. He is patient enough to allow you the mistakes you need to make, and he never scolds. He knows everything about you — even all your dark, crabby thoughts about friends who are thinner and maybe less wrinkly than you — and He still makes you feel as if He did his best work in putting all your weird little pieces together.
Again, like a good parent, He seems to remember exactly what it is like to be us. So He is endlessly forgiving, yet gently lets you know you are capable of more. He doesn’t abide whiners. Get up. Work. Think. Try. Help somebody. Help yourself.
Instead of asking for miracles, God tells Bruce to be the miracle.
But here’s my favorite part of the movie: God appears to Bruce in the guise of a janitor. He’s wearing one of those jumpsuit uniforms. He has a mop and bucket. God asks Bruce to help him mop a vast empty floor, a big job for just one person. Bruce declines in the beginning, but later, after his epiphany, he picks up a mop, and he and God clean together, one narrow strip of floor at a time.
This is the God I want to believe in, a nurturing father, someone who might not answer my prayers for spectacular requests like winning the lottery or producing a viable Democratic candidate, but who will grab a mop and work alongside me when the job is too big for one person alone.
(Joan Ryan is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Send comments to her in care of this newspaper or send her e-mail at [email protected].)