Easter;  Luke 24: 5 -12

Who is Mr. Banks?

The psychologist James Hillman claims that what the human soul really longs for is “healing fiction.” “Healing fiction“is the title of his book. We don’t like the word “fiction” in church much because we don’t want to create the impression that things we believe in are made up.  Let’s just say that, if Hillman is right, that what you and I really want are healing stories.  With today’s movie “Saving Banks,” we have a whole bunch of stories packed together. There is the story of Mary Poppins the musical, the story of Saving Mr Banks, the story of the life of Walt Disney, the story of the life P.L. Travers, the author of Mary Poppins.  Then this message is followed by a story in traditional dance of a woman in Japan going from agony to rebirth.  The most important story of course is the story of the Resurrection of Jesus the Christ which is most healing of stories, one that ties together past and present, heaven and earth, hell and hope.  It is the story that defines all happy endings.  In the light of what has just happened in Brussels we can say that we have just been reminded of hell in human life.  The wounds of the victims and the terrifying pathology of the perpetrators are confirmation of how much we need the healing story of Easter.  Healing and wounds come together and the fact that the wounds of the resurrected Jesus remain visible and tangible are even more powerful and healing for all of us.

Friends, who is Mr. Banks? Literally it is the preoccupied father of the children in Mary Poppins.  That is the Mr. Banks at the surface. The one who realizes he must be there more for his children and that he must lead a more joyful life.  But on a deeper level is he is Travers Goff, the failed Australian banker, the charming and imaginative alcoholic.  He is the man who makes the childhood of P.L. Travers magical and ultimately destroys it, leaving her permanently wounded.  “Mr. Banks is going to be okay,” we learn in the movie.  Walt Disney himself guarantees it. P.L. Travers is trying to save Mr. Banks, i.e. Mr. Goff, even though of course she cannot.  She can try to save his memory, his legacy, however. She can write an ending to the story that is good and right.  Of course until the end she believed Walt Disney was going to mess it up, the way Americans always did according to her. Although Travers behaved awfully and was a severe woman, she was not an awful person.  She adopted a child at 40, whom she raised faithfully. She knew the literary giants of her day.  She did research among the Hopi, Pueblo and Navajo people.  She didn’t like Hollywood at all however. Yet we get the sense that Disney’s own harsh childhood is at some level healed by this story and he desperately wants to keep his promise to his daughters of making it into a musical. In a deleted scene from the movie I found on the internet, Travers says something like this to Disney:”you must not make promises to children.  It’s like poison.”  The point she is making is that broken promises pile up in children’s lives.  Travers’ Mary Poppins story, so fictional yet so full of truth, helps us come to terms with the flaws of the people we love and our flaws as people others love.  It intimates that people can learn and change and be redeemed.  This we know to be true on a gut-level.  When we capture glimpses of the carnage in Brussels we think maybe this is an illusion, but when we witness the love and beauty and harmony expressed by the people of the city afterward we can be amazed by the human spirit.

Friends, we tell stories to save others, but we moreover we tell stories to save ourselves.  Travers did that and Disney was trying to do the same. For all of us there is someone in our lives we would have wanted to save, someone we loved dearly and even after they are no longer with us that wish continues.  So on another level we too have our Mr. Banks like Walt Disney did, someone we couldn’t hold on to or someone we could not reach because they wouldn’t listen or something was keeping them from listening.  But ultimately we too are Mr. Banks. Ultimately we know we don’t have it all together, as much as we pretend we do.  Ultimately we think are flaws will catch up with us.  We need saving.

This is the beauty of the resurrection story.  God wants to save us and will go to any length to do so.  What better story than this to get our attention?  The powerful God becomes weak and powerless and goes through pure hell to come out wounded but alive forever.  How can you beat that story?  Americans keep making movies about that story.  Let me be Mrs. Travers here for now and say that perhaps they shouldn’t, because the book and what we can read there between the lines is always going to be better than the movie.  But what we can say is that the story does save us, saves us from hopelessness and despair, from meaninglessness and pointlessness.  It has the story ending for all stories.  Jesus is no Mr. Banks. He can save Himself.  That makes Him unique. Or should I say that the story saves Him and rescues Him.  Jesus is the main character of the story for our sakes. Its happy endings makes our endings happy. Thanks be to God.