“A Wonderful Life”

It’s a wonderful thing when people operate in their gifts. They can do things that no one else can really do. The gifts come in a variety of sizes and shapes. The Professional Basketball Season (NBA) just ended. I’m amazed at the talent level (gift level) of these players …. their athleticism, skill set, endurance. I enjoy watching them…especially since I enjoyed playing basketball in my youth, despite being at least a foot too short to be very good. 

In another arena, I was recently reading about Frank Capra, probably not a name that many of us will quickly remember. He was an Italian immigrant who grew up in desperate straits in his early years; yet somehow he ended up as a movie director, with amazing and almost unique gifts. He won three academy awards as best director along with many other Oscars. Yet the film he may be best known for didn’t win anything and was considered a “dud”. Let me give you a hint…..” Mr. Potter…. George Bailey… Clarence…”. Give up? Yes it’s the movie, “It’s a Wonderful Life”, starring Jimmy Stewart that’s still on TV each Christmas season. You may also recognize the movies, “Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, You Can’t take It With You, It Happened One Night, Why We Fight, made during WWII and some others”. 

“It’s written that the art of Frank Capra is very, very simple: It’s the love of people. Add two simple ideals to this love of people: the freedom of each individual, and the equal importance of each individual, and you have the principle upon which he based all his films. Forgotten among the hue-and criers were the hard-working stiffs that came home too tired to shout or demonstrate in streets … and prayed they’d have enough left over to keep their kids in college, despite their knowing that some were pot-smoking, parasitic parent-haters. Mankind needed dramatizations of the truth that man is essentially good, a living atom of divinity; that compassion for others, friend or foe, is the noblest of all virtues. Films must be made to say these things, to counteract the violence and the meanness, to buy time to demobilize the hatreds.” 

Capra wrote in his early adulthood that he was a “Christmas Catholic”. In his later years, Capra returned to the Catholic Church and described himself as “a Catholic in spirit; one who firmly believes that the anti-moral, the intellectual bigots, and the Mafias of ill will may destroy religion, but they will never conquer the cross”.

Capra had a great gift and despite the fact that he had a rough life and probably won’t be canonized, he brought much of God’s love and truth to the silver screen and we are all beneficiaries of that gift.

So the moral of the BLOG is let each of us use the gifts that God has given to us. We may not be as gifted and brilliant as a Frank Capra, but we all have been given gifts from the Lord, and we’re called to use them for his greater glory. God can take our simple gifts and “empower them with his Holy Spirit”. Ordinary gifts used in the power and love of the Holy Spirit can change the world.  

We can all become “George Bailey” and change Bedford Falls or Warren into a suburb of Heaven. And that would be very good news.