Waking Ned Divine - Breaking the Machine
Awaking Ned is a comic movie about people in a small village in Ireland coming together to defeat the machine so to speak.
How do they do it?
Ned Devine dies upon the shock of learning he won a lottery. The price money of close to seven million would be unclaimed. The village friends of Ned Divine concoct a scheme to have the innocent Michael O'Sullivan impersonate that he is Ned Divine when the 'suit' from the lottery company comes from the city to verify the claim and write the check.
If they would all covenant together to sign a document that they agree to this ruse, then each of them would get hundred and thirty pounds. They all agree to go with the ruse hoping to make a decent sum. But there is a grumpy old woman in the village, Lizzy Quinn, who is the last hold out. She say her last vote would cost a million dollars. If they don't agree to pay her that, she would expose the ruse and claim 10% reward for exposing them as fraudsters to the Lottery company.
If Lizzy exposed them, the rest of the villagers could be indicted for fraud if not arrested!
Lizzy reminded me of the book Fate of Empires. In the book Fate of Empires, Sir John Glubb analyzes how different civilizations follow a common pattern of rise to power, then decline and fall. Civilizations rise to power when people value courage, duty and honor dealings with others. One of the stages in the decline and fall is what he calls the Age of Affluence. In this stage the ethic of honor and duty is replaced by the ethic of wanting to make money and get ahead in life, often at the cost of civic virtue.
Lizzy reminded me of the kind of person Sir John Glubb had in mind when he describes those living by the value of commerce - money making!
What is the opposite of living by values of commerce?
The opposite of living for commerce is to live for the sake of covenant. To live for commerce is to live for making money. To live for covenant is to live for the sake of friendships and relationships in which our identity is enmeshed.
The person best exemplifying living by this covenant value instead of commerce is Maggie. She has a son, who secretly was fathered by the dead Ned Divine. Her son has a father figure in a her own childhood sweetheart Finn who is a deeply sentimental man. If she owned up to Ned Divine being the father of her son, her son would become a multi-millionaire over night, but he may lose his father figure in Finn. She decides her son would rather have a loving father in his life rather than become rich without a father. This kind of choice for covenant over commerce is what helps these seemingly naive villagers break the lottery machine so to speak.
The choice for covenant instead of commerce is deeply theological in the sense that we all are made in the image of a Triune covenant making God. So we long for connection and covenant over commerce. The impulse to value commerce over covenant or money over love is devilish.
Incidentally in the movie while Lizzy is attempting to call the lottery commission to expose the fraud other villagers and get paid ten percentage of the reward, she accidentally gets run over by the Priest of the village, reminiscent of a priest exorcising the village off the influence of evil. Of course, all done in jest!