La Dolce Vita
(1Kgs.19:4-8; Eph.4:30-5:2; Jn.6:41-51)
La Dolce Vita – ‘The sweet life.’ Have you ever seen that movie?
It was made in 1960 by Frederico Fellini. In the opening scenes, a statue of Jesus is carried by helicopter across Rome, first over some old Roman ruins, and then over a big new construction site.
At one point it’s carried above some beautiful bikini-clad women sunbaking on a rooftop, and they wonder where Jesus is going.
Then we see the helicopter lowering the statue onto St Peter’s Square. As the statue comes down, the camera zooms in for a close-up of Jesus with his arms extended, and He’s safely delivered to the Pope in the Vatican. [i]
Fellini made this film at a time when Italy was pulling itself out of the ruins of World War II. It’s the simple story of a man (played by Marcello Mastroianni) searching for a way out of the shallowness and spiritual desolation of his life.
For a while this film was banned because of its depiction of the seven deadly sins. But what Fellini was doing was offering a powerful commentary on the way the world was changing after WWII.
Instead of learning from the mistakes of the past and cherishing our Christian heritage, Fellini saw too many people turning towards the shallow self-indulgence of modern-day secularism.
When Martin Scorsese saw this film, he said it showed the world ‘moving from decadence to despair with nothing in between.’
The scene of Christ being lowered by helicopter onto St Peter’s Square was Fellini’s way of showing how the world is trying to lock Jesus away, confining him to within the walls of the Church.
He makes the point that if you remove Jesus from daily life, then spiritual decay will follow and hope will disappear.
So, what happens when hope does disappear? Let me tell you another story.
Before WWII, three famous Jewish psychiatrists lived in Vienna. They all spent years trying to understand human behaviour, to learn what makes people tick.
One was Sigmund Freud. He believed that the most basic drive in human beings is the desire for pleasure. He thought that everything we do in our lives is based on our need to feel good. In Fellini’s movie, that’s reflected in the image of the women sunbaking.
The second psychiatrist was Alfred Adler, who disagreed with Freud. He argued that what motivates people is the desire for power, the need to control things and to feel important.
The third man was Victor Frankl, who was younger than the other two. When the Nazis invaded Austria, Freud and Adler managed to escape. But Frankl was arrested and he spent four long years locked up in concentration camps, including Auschwitz and Belsen.
Victor Frankl
While he was there, Frankl noticed that those who survived weren’t the ones you’d expect. Very often those who were physically strong wasted away and died, while those who were much weaker managed to grow stronger and survived. Why?
Well, it wasn’t pleasure that kept them going. There was no pleasure in those horrid camps; it was all misery and murder. And it wasn’t power that kept them going, either, because the prisoners had no power. They were treated like animals.
What Frankl noticed was that the people who survived had hope. They never gave up their belief that life had meaning, despite everything that happened to them. They kept going.
In his film La Dolce Vita, Frederico Fellini had some serious comments to make about the shallow, self-indulgent secularism of our age. For it’s not the desire for pleasure that will sustain us, and it’s not the pursuit of power that will give us a better world.
What’s far more important is hope and meaning, and as Christians we know exactly where real hope and meaning are to be found.
As Jesus tells us in our Gospel today, He is the Bread of Life that came down from heaven. Only Jesus has the power to satisfy our deepest hunger, our hunger for spiritual meaning. Only Jesus offers us hope for eternal life.
In Isaiah (55:2-3), the prophet asks, ‘Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread? Why do you labour for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me,’ he says, ‘and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food.’
And what is this rich food that satisfies? It’s the Bread of Life. Jesus Christ.
Whoever eats this bread will live forever.
[i] See the opening scenes at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uo84caBoToQ