Tough Ain’t Enough

The Rev. Jeffrey A. Geary

Third Sunday in Lent

Psalm 95

February 27, 2005

This past Monday, through all the snow of our latest snowstorm, I went to the movies. I went to see a movie I had already seen, but this time I went with six of our senior high school students and one of their parents.

I don’t see movies very often. At least not in the theater. I rarely seem to find the time, or to have Noelle in town, with time, when I have the time. But the biggest reason I don’t go to the theater very often is that if I have a night free I’d rather be curled up with a book, or sharing a deep conversation over a glass of wine, or just finding a good reason to laugh.

I have some good friends who make seeing movies their way of spending time together. Ever since they started trying to have a child, they made sure they saw each film each year that stood a chance of winning “Best Film” at the Academy Awards – which sometimes meant a flurry of movie rentals and theater trips in January. Not a bad way to beat the winter doldrums. And since the birth of their daughter, this commitment to movies has ensured that they have regular nights out, alone, with each other.

I’m grateful for their commitment to movies, not only for the good it does their marriage, but because almost every year I watch the academy awards with them and talk about the year’s best movies. The New York Times this morning called the Academy Awards televisions oldest reality program, because we all have the chance to see Hollywood stars doing things we all do: sit, clap, laugh, walk, trip, cry.

The movie that brought me back to the theater a second time was Million Dollar Baby, directed by Clint Eastwood. Million Dollar Baby is the portrayal of young Maggie Fitzgerald (played by Hilary Swank) as a 32 year old young woman from Louisiana who dreams of boxing. She later tells us that she comes from nothing, and has nothing, except this dream of boxing. She doesn’t dream of championships – just about being part of something. In the opening moments of the film Maggie chooses Frankie Dunn to be her trainer (played by Clint Eastwood). Frankie tells her straight, “I don’t train girls.” Maggie respond by saying, “Well maybe you oughta. People see me fight tell me I’m pretty tough.” Frankie responds, “Girlie, tough ain’t enough.”

Tough ain’t enough. It’s not a bad summary of the film.

What Frankie means during that first encounter is that boxing take training, practice, dedication, total commitment. It takes heart. You have to love it, live it, need it.

But if this were all that Frankie meant, Million Dollar Baby would simply be a nice sports film about a young girl overcoming great odds through perseverance and dedication. (Actually, that was the film I thought I was going to see.) But as one of the kids said to me after seeing the film last week, “It really isn’t about boxing, is it?”

Like so many of the films Clint Eastwood has directed himself, this film is about guilt and forgiveness. We learn that the character he plays, gym-owner Frankie Dunn, is estranged from his daughter for a reason we are never told about. Though he has tried to bury these feelings, his guilt eats at him. As his priest tells him later in the film, “Frankie, I’ve seen you a mess almost everyday for 23 years. The only person who comes to church that much is the kind who can’t forgive himself for something.” The priest, at least this time, isn’t wrong. But what the priest doesn’t know is that Frankie has been searching for a way to reconcile with his daughter Katie, writing her letters every week, but she won’t have him. And his letters keep coming back to him.

Frankie carries a further guilt because he feels responsible for the loss of a friends eye. Scrap Iron Dupris (played by Morgan Freeman) works as custodian of Frankie’s gym, but he used to be a great boxer with a chance at a World Championship. Frankie met Scrap years ago because Frankie was “the best cut man in the business.” A cut man’s job is to stop his boxers bleeding by cleaning wounds and applying coagulant so that the boxer can keep fighting. But at the crucial time, Frankie sent Scrap into the ring one too many times, and the eye was lost, because the wound was too deep.

The film shows us a series of emotionally, spiritually, and sometimes physically wounded folks, trying to keep fighting, both in the ring and in life. And being tough, just ain’t enough.

After her first boxing match, Maggie asks Frankie how she had done.

“OK,” Frankie tells her. “But she kept hitting me,” Maggie says. Frankie asks her “What is the first rule of boxing?”

“Always protect yourself” she replies.

And the second rule? “Always protect yourself.”

These are all character protecting themselves from what hurts them the most. And it isn’t the gloved fists that keep hitting them. “A broken nose doesn’t hurt that much,” Scrap tells Frankie in the hospital waiting room while they wait for Maggie to have her nose reset. “Why are you telling me that?” Frankie asks. “Oh, I don’t know” says Scrap.

But the truth is that both of these men, and Maggie, know that there are many things that hurt more. Maggie’s family have rejected her. They laugh at her and her dream, and at what they consider the arrogance that lets her think she is anything more than “poor white trash.” Frankie’s daughter won’t speak to him, his priest doesn’t know how to help him, and so forgiveness eludes him. Scrap’s story alludes to but doesn’t explore the ways in which race, and violence, limit all of our lives.

Always protect yourself. It’s reasonable advice, in the ring, and in life. It feels like the “appropriate thing,” “the wise course,” something “experience teaches us.” It sounds like something you would tell your own daughter, “Always protect yourself.”

These characters have all been so hurt by life, so wounded, we can understand the ways they have closed themselves off from others. Because the truth is, every time these character let down their guard, the world hits them again square in the face. And as a result, all of the characters have become tough - protected from the hurt that comes with hope, and the risks that exist outside the ring in their broken relationships.

But tough ain’t enough. Tough works in the ring, in training, but not in life. As we learn early in the film, you need heart. And heart mean you can be hurt.

This is a film with a surprise ending that is so emotionally powerful that few people can talk when they first leave the theater. Since I don’t want to ruin the film for those of you who haven’t seen it, I won’t talk about all of the other issues raised by the film. Let me simply say that Frankie finds in Maggie the daughter he doesn’t have. Maggie finds in Frankie a father-figure who can love her. They learn to take chances with one another, for one another, and in the process, to begin to heal one another. This doesn’t erase their other hurts, in fact they probably hurt more. And it doesn’t mean that they find forgiveness. But through their love for each other they find that they can better deal with the parts of their lives that remain broken.

But this same love will open them each to greater hurt than they ever imagined.

During the season of Lent, we are all required to undertake a period of reflection and self-examination, to seek forgiveness and to extend forgiveness to others, to reconcile our relationships. Although King David could say in his Psalm, “Against you, O God, you alone, have I sinned,” Jesus tells us that if we are on our way to worship and have trouble with our brother, we should first go reconcile the relationship and then our worship will be pleasing to God.

But what happens when we cannot reconcile the relationship? What happens when we remain unforgiven, whether we have done something or not? I suppose I’ve spoken at length about this film because it was a reminder to me during the first week of Lent, about just how difficult forgiveness can be. How can we be forgiven when the wronged party withholds forgiveness? I have a friend whose father died before she could reconcile with him, and who carries the consequences of that with her everyday. Several divorced couples have told me that they struggle with forgiveness for past wrongs because their ex-spouse continues to hurt them, financially and emotionally.

Don Shriver, in his wonderful book An Ethic For Enemies, which we have in our church library, raises the question of forgiveness in politics, particularly naming guilts and wrongs between nations, and what happens when we cannot forgive.

Forgiveness is tough. But tough ain’t enough.

The challenge this leaves for me is this: how do we, the Christian community, become a community of forgiveness and grace that can help one another live with the unforgiven and unreconciled parts of our lives in ways that are life giving to ourselves and others? I know that the church has always placed a premium on reconciliation. We like to view ourselves as a community of the redeemed. Well, there’s a place for that. But very often we come together, bearing our wounds, and protecting our hurts. Can we offer them to one another without asking for someone to fix them? Can we look at them in our neighbor, and love them?

How do we love ourselves and open ourselves to the love of others so that we can go one more round in life.

I’d like to conclude with an image of forgiveness which some of us talked about during the Wednesday night Lenten soup-supper. The words come from Rowan Williams, the current archbishop of Canterbury.

. . . to live a “forgiven” life is not simply to live in a

happy consciousness of having been absolved. Forgiveness

is precisely the deep and abiding sense of what relation —

with God and with other human beings — can and should be; and

so [forgiveness] is itself an stimulus, an irritant, necessarily provoking protest

at [all] impoverished versions of [life].