Slumdog Easter

I saw Slumdog Millionnaire a couple of weeks ago. It’s a great film, beautifully made and wonderfully acted. Its message also shares rather a lot with the Christian season of Easter, i think.

The story is about a young boy, Jamal, who has had a troublesome life. Eventually he gets onto the Indian version of ‘Who Wants to be a Millionnaire?’, and ends up winning the show’s top prize. Given his poor education, he is thought to have been cheating somehow, but the truth is that the answer to each question has come up at some point in his varied and challenging life as a poor orphan in the Indian slums. The film tells his story through the different questions asked to him in the gameshow, and how the appropriate nugget of information came to be known through various episodes.

The film’s vision of gaining immense triumph through a radical acceptance of one’s past is fascinating. Many people regard the past (and especially the bits of it that they don’t like) as something to be forgotten in search of a brighter future, or something to hide from for fear of reopening old wounds. I can’t help but feel that Slumdog is rather a call to affirm one’s past, for once we accept and validate the things that have happened in our life we achieve unity with ourselves, because – for good or ill – our past has made us who we are today, and who we will be in the future.

So why the Easter story? The sense of transforming our experience in the present through a radical acceptance of the past, and a hope for the future based on, rather than in spite of, the testing times of the past, seems critical to the witness of the early Church. Christ’s painful death was never denied, never covered up, and never apologised for, vicious and embarrassing though it was. But instead the early Christians knew that this pain and suffering had been transformed by the new life of resurrection. The past is not forgotten, but through radical acceptance of it the future is transformed.

Dealing with testing things in life is never easy. But i think that the Slumdog story and the Easter narrative give hope that out of even the most difficult things we experience can come hope, peace and joy. We don’t need have chosen our story, but we must affirm that our story is ours, and be hopeful that affirming and engaging with our story and the lessons that it has taught us gives hope when looking forward to those chapters in the story that have yet to be written.