Images, Parables, Paradoxes, Religion, and "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"

“Although Bohr was not religious, he once pointed out that paradoxes were a fixture of religious parables and koans because seemingly contradictory statements were needed to breach the gulf between the human and the spiritual realms. “The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer,” he said. God, Human, Animal, Machine, by Meghan O’Gieblyn

This reflects pretty well what I mean when I talk about theater (or the arts) and spirituality or even religion. Theater historically has always had it roots in religion, noi matter what culture you begin with, and no matter how secularized it has become over the millennia, there still seems to be a single chord of the transcendent sounding somewhere in the background.

It seems to me that, as human beings, we need images, we need parables, we need paradoxes in order to remind us about an aspect of reality that transcends the everyday, or even is the foundation for the everyday. As a culture, we may have embraced the “immanent frame” (cf A Secular Age by Charles Taylor) in our daily life, but I think all of us in the back of our mind are aware of a transcendent lurking somewhere. And we can sense it powerfully, even indirectly, through the arts.

I just recently watched a mini-documentary on YouTube about the making of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and for some reason I found myself thinking about the high transcendent stakes of that film. It seemed almost Greek in its scale, and at the same time, an odd retelling of the story of Jesus. I found myself imagining a film of, say, the Book of Mark with a young Jack Nicholson as Jesus and Nurse Ratchet as the Romans, and how that might affect our idea of Jesus' affect on his culture.