Moonstruck is a romantic comedy, but it confronts some serious human issues, including what is commonly called the mid-life crisis.
The subject is embodied in the character of Cosmo Castorini, a successful plumbing contractor, a married man, who has been seeing “another woman.”
When his wife demands that he discontinue the affair, he agrees, but he also tells her this: “One day a man understands that his life is built on nothing, and that’s a bad, crazy day.”
In the movie, the fictional character comes to see that his life has value, but in the world outside the movies, that conversion may not be so easy for folks who are confused about what is most important in life, folks who don’t realize how much simple qualities such as generosity, faithfulness, and integrity contribute to the world.
What such folks may have lost sight of is the presumption that God loves us: not that we have to convince God to love us, but that God begins the day loving us ─ that the very fact that God shares his existence with us is an act of love.
It’s a critical idea, because it helps us to see our own value; and therefore it helps us to love ourselves.
Christians have often been misled to think that they’re not supposed to do that, that love of self necessarily means egotism and selfishness.
That misunderstanding has led to some extreme practices such as people starving themselves or whipping themselves in order to repent not only the failings they see in themselves, but those they perceive in the world at large.
But the Church teaches us that we are to love ourselves and that it is because we love ourselves that we protect our minds and our bodies and our very lives. It’s because we love ourselves that we don’t eat or drink to excess or in other ways that would harm us; that we don’t abuse drugs and alcohol; that we don’t take any unnecessarily risks with our health and safety.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church, when it speaks of suicide, says that it is gravely contrary to the just love of self, so that love of self is regarded as a just thing.
We can be grateful that not many people take their own lives, but many more people do commit spiritual suicide if they lose this sense of their own worth.
It’s important to remember as we approach the reflective season of Advent that repentance does not consist of wallowing in what we construe to be our failings but of celebrating the mercy of God that always allows us to begin again.
It’s important to remember that of all created things, we are the ones most like God (cf 1 John 3:1-3).
That’s why we hear Jesus say in Matthew’s gospel that every hair of our heads has been counted.
Unlike Cosmo Castorini, who had a devout and faithful wife and a devoted daughter but thought that his life was based on nothing, we should remember that the gospel is not a message of despair, but a message of hope.
We should remember that God made us to be saints, that he made us fit to live, as all the saints do, in his company forever.
Charles Paolino is a member of the RENEW staff and a permanent Deacon in the Diocese of Metuchen.
