The Good Lie

Last night we watched a movie called The Good Lie. It’s about the South Sudanese children orphaned by war and forced to walk hundreds of miles to safety in Kenya, where they lived (still live) in refugee camps until they were relocated. They are called the Lost Boys of Sudan. The movie shows the Africans adjusting to US culture: watching how others are eating their meals with plastic forks on the plane, wondering what to do with the plate of quivering jello on the kitchen counter, assuming the telephone ring is some kind of alarm, walking into someone’s house without waiting for them to open the door. At one point they try to communicate to their American hostess what is really bothering them (they were separated from their sister), but the woman keeps moving from room to room, showing them how to flick on the lights.

I have a friend here in Canada who is a lost girl of Sudan. When she was very young, she lost her family to war in South Sudan and was saved from death when a bullet knocked her into a shallow hole in the ground, out of sight of the gunmen. She also fled to Kenya and lived in refugee camps. Later, a visiting Canadian fell in love with her and married her, and now she lives here. She brought me cookies and helped me weed my garden. She says she had lots of practice at that in Africa before she came. She is tall and slender and beautiful and bends at the waist when she works the ground, and I can imagine her in a field with other women like a stately flock of cranes moving slowly through shallow water. But I cannot imagine what she has gone through. I can’t. I’m glad she is happy here now with her family.

In the movie The Good Lie, one of the Africans goes to school, and his teacher is having a discussion about the book they are reading, Huck Finn. In the book, Huck lies about Jim to save him from being punished as a runaway slave and sold down the river. The question is, of course, are there times we have to lie in order to save other people from harm? This question comes up in the movie as the South Sudanese lost boys (and girl) try to hold their little band together. I won’t say more in case you haven’t watched the movie.

The title is a figure of speech called an oxymoron. The word means “pointedly stupid” because it looks like a contradiction, the two words crossing each other out—like jumbo shrimp, civil war, good grief, devout atheist, recorded live, or unbiased opinion—but it points toward a paradox. I’m reading a book called The Promise of Paradox that explores the paradoxical nature of Christianity, a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Greeks. How do you explain: “If you save your life, you will lose it, but if you lose your life for my sake, you will save it,” or “I form light and create darkness; I make weal and create woe”?

Nothing puts a harsher spotlight on the paradox of Christianity than suffering: the suffering of Canaanites killed by genocidal Jews, the suffering of Jews killed by genocidal Nazis, the suffering of God killed by everyone, the suffering of children lost from Sudan, the suffering of people ravished by malaria, AIDS, famine, cancer. These aren’t things to be explained away. These aren’t issues we resolve with words. But somehow, we have this hope, this seeing of what is invisible, that this suffering is a good lie.