The Element of Divine Surprise
“What if everything operates by love?’ I said to her, ‘I mean, what if this God presence . . is God moving through us and through everything we do? If so, why do we resist it? What if everything horrible that happens, from drive-by shootings to illness, is because we have broken this chain of love, and we don’t know how to put everything right again?”
“Surprised by Oxford” official movie poster
Clapham Senior Associate, Juliet Vedral wrote a review of the film Surprised by Oxford for Word and Way.
“Based on the award-winning memoir, Surprised by Oxford invites audiences into a world of romance, reason, and high calling. The true-life story of college-aged American Caro Drake is a wonder-filled exploration of life’s beauty and complexity, experienced in a manner not entirely dissimilar to C.S. Lewis’s famous awakening nearly a century ago in the hallowed halls of Oxford, England.”
You can watch the film’s trailer on the Surprised by Oxford website.
Parenting a toddler is a case study of humanity’s creaturely, fallen nature. Toddlers worship talismans (binkies, lovies, random household objects) that promise to provide safety and security and God help the parent who loses them before bedtime. Toddlers want what they can’t — and absolutely shouldn’t have — and there is no way to explain to them why, say, letting them walk defiantly into a swimming pool without floaties is not in their best interest.
Toddlers want autonomy but if they ruled the world, every day would be exactly the same as the last, without deviation. Every TV show, the same episode over and over again. Surprises? Changes to the routine? Not unless you are prepared to attempt comfort and console a weeping, screaming, often flailing, child.
Though I have learned to handle change better than my two-year-old, I’m still not great at experiencing losses, weathering disappointments, or watching carefully made plans fall apart. Surprises — good and bad — still have the power to send my inner child screaming.
C.S. Lewis’s book, Surprised by Joy, influenced the film and memoir's titles.
I’ve been reflecting on the element of surprise since screening Ryan Whitaker’s Surprised by Oxford, based on Carolyn Weber’s memoir of the same name. The film is gorgeous and it goes down easy (I screened it twice!) and immerses the viewer in the ancient and lofty world of Oxford. Part love story, part spiritual quest, Surprised by Oxford tells the story of Caro Drake, a brilliant and driven young woman studying Romantic literature. After enduring a complicated childhood and an estranged father, Caro has one goal in mind: to get her doctorate. But divine surprises are in store for her, as she is led on a journey to faith as well as love.
One of the first surprises that awaits Caro is the friends, professors, and mentors who are serious intellectuals and also devout Christians. “I certainly didn’t think that you could be intelligent and a person of faith at the same time, that they were necessarily antithetical,” Weber shared with me in a recent interview about the film.
So sure of the path she’s on, these relationships challenge Caro to think deeply about her purpose in life and whether God could have a place in it. Caro’s most challenging relationship is with Kent or TDH (Tall, Dark, and Handsome), a classmate who pursues Caro and asks her questions about God, faith, and purpose.
“Kent just articulated it so clearly, so kindly, he asked me a question, actually just asked me who God was to me, which no one had really asked me,” Weber shared when describing the way she first heard the gospel. “We don’t tend to ask people questions, which is what Jesus does all the time with people. That sort of invitation to just sit with that was really eye-opening. I felt like a hummingbird that hit the glass hard, because I’d been so busy in my life. I think that’s how so many of us are. We’re just distracted and there’s an opiate of busyness and we don’t sit with the large questions and people don’t invite us to.”
Continue reading Juliet’s article on the Word and Way website.