A Beautiful Mind
Tonight, after editing my sermons, I saw A Beautiful Mind. It was a very moving film, beautifully shot and well acted, loosely based on the life of John Nash, a schizophrenic mathematician who won the Nobel Prize. As Drew Trotter points out in his review in Critique,
A Beautiful Mind does not offer a thoroughly Christian perspective; John Nash triumphs by purely human effort. There is no mention of God, church, Scripture, clergy, sacrament or any other source of spiritual strength or healing known in Christian tradition. But what Mind does do is offer a realistic portrayal of one of the most difficult challenges facing humankind and the hope that that challenge can be faced and, if not conquered, at least neutralized. And the film does so with excellence and grace, reward enough for a viewing.
Most striking, perhaps, was the film’s emphasis on the importance of community and of love. As Nash says near the end, “The most important discovery of my life . . . is that only in the mysterious equation of love can any logic and reason be found.” After all, ultimate reality is not laws and facts and matter and chance but a God who is Triune, three persons bound together in an eternal covenant of self-giving love, who created us, not because He needed us but because He wanted us to share in His family life and experience His love forever. And we image Him best when we give ourselves to others, a lesson I’m still learning and perhaps indeed “the most important discovery of my life.”