A link to the trailer for the the film Lion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoIy9Xq8tYs

Home, family, belonging
These are explored in the film Lion

In Calcutta Saroo’s a thousand miles from home.
He is lost, hopelessly lost, in a land of strangers who seem to care very little about the fate of a 5-year-old boy.
Eventually, trying to help, people ask him his mother’s name and he only knows “Mum.”
When he tells them where he thinks he’s from—Ganestalay—no one has ever heard of it.
He doesn’t even know what direction he came from or what train he took.
Home is more than a place. It’s people, and Saroo has lost all that home is.

But we are eventually shown that Saroo is welcomed and loved in a new home —Tasmania, by new adoptive parents, Sue and John Brierley… and together they are family.

What is home? What is family?

These are questions that torture Saroo as a young adult more than 20 years later.
We can see that he loves his adoptive parents, and he’s deeply grateful for everything they’ve given him.
But memories of his past—the mother and brother that he mistakenly, unwillingly left—pull at him continually.
Saroo dwells on the fear and horror he imagines they must’ve felt when he disappeared— and that they continue to experience.
He wonders where he belongs and whether that home—the home he left in India—might be his real home after all.
He longs for Guddu, his real brother, not the troubled Mantosh.
And as much as he loves his Australian adoptive parents, as grateful he feels toward them for all they’ve given him, he wonders whether his relationship with them is simply a substitute for the bond they longed for with the biological children they didn’t have.
Saroo one day blurts out. “I’m sorry you couldn’t have your own kids,”
“What are you saying?” his mother Sue asks, in disbelief.
“We weren’t blank pages, were we?” Saroo says. “You weren’t just adopting us, but our pasts as well. I feel like we’re killing you.”
“I could’ve had kids,” Sue shares. “We chose not to have kids. … We wanted the two of you. That’s what we wanted. We wanted the two of you in our lives.”

Saroo misunderstands the nature of adoption—the bond between parent and child, biological or adopted.
Saroo seems to think that his adoptive mother and father saw him as a bargain-basement substitute for a “real” son.

We find God in this movie in the universal longing to belong
In Paul’s letters to the churches in Rome and Ephesus he uses adoption language, he speaks of all of us being the children of God— adopted
Romans 8:14-17
For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, ‘Abba!* Father!’ it is that very Spirit bearing witness* with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ—.…

I believe the film reminds us that concept of home and family isn’t something solely based on blood.

Home and family are about care and memory and intentionality and, most of all, love.
And love is something that the Brierelys shower upon Saroo—even though he doesn’t fully comprehend their motive for doing so.
Love was also something Saroo had experienced with his mother, brother and sister, despite their struggle and severe poverty.

The film also teaches us how many children long for but never experience a home and family.
Saroo was but one lucky needle in a haystack made of as many as 20 million orphaned children in India, approximately 4% of its total population.
On average annually, less than 5,000 of those 20 million ever get adopted.
Heartbreaking.
Jim has an adopted daughter who was born in Cambodia
and I have an adopted daughter who was born in Guatemala
Our lives have been enriched through adoption.

We are also reminded that we all carry wounds… Saroo’s adopted brother Mantosh seems like the wounded one… with his self destructive behavior as a child and young adult
while Saroo is successful and a high achiever, but he is also deeply wounded.

In Lion, the smallest things are given great importance and value – the love of jalebi sweets, the sounds and smells of childhood, the devotion of a young boy to his older brother.
These are the forces that build relationship, bind communities and withstand time, change and trouble.
We are reminded that an unforgiving world is given depth and meaning by personal encounter and emotional connection.

The story is one of so much sadness. And, in the midst of it, so much that is lovely. Kind of like life itself. Amen

 

Lion

http://www.thinkingfaith.org/articles/lion
http://lutheran-church-regina.com/blogs/post/lion-2016-garth-davis-mini-movie-review