Pointing a Gun at God

Last night I watched the movie Blood Diamond (2006). Solomon Zandy (Djimon Hounsou), a man separated from his family by the brutal civil war struggle of Sierra Leone, meets Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio), a white African-born diamond smuggler. One might argue that the film represents typical Hollywood sensationalism, an exploitation of human suffering as ethically inappropriate as selling a “conflict-diamond,” and the movie itself even admits this possibility. However, Blood Diamond managed to stir me significantly. The film, directed by Edward Zwick, cries out for an awareness of our complicity in bloodshed and slaughter, an indirect consequence of capitalism. Beyond this theme, however, Blood Diamond touches a universal question: having wronged our fellow human beings so deeply and so thoroughly, will God ever forgive us?

Perhaps, if God is anything like Solomon Zandy. The plot embeds the age-old story of the prodigal son within its arc through the character of Dia, Solomon’s son. Dia, when separated from his father, is taken into the rebel army and becomes a child soldier. Solomon searches for his son untiringly, endangering his own life, but when he finally finds him, Dia denies him angrily. Later, the boy trains a gun on his father. It is the only form of power he has left to fight the deep pain of abandonment and to demand the love he so desperately desires.

Why did you let this happen? his eyes ask, and I cry out the same question to God. Where have you been? We lash out in our pain and anger and then blame the consequences on the absence of the Divine, hoping, perhaps, that if we wound each other deeply enough it will draw God out of hiding. Wrath, at least, would be better than silence; discipline would remind us who we really are.

“You are Dia Zandy,” Solomon says to the boy behind the gun. “You have been made to do bad things, but you are not a bad boy…. You are my son…. I love you.”