Someone asked me last week if the title of this talk was a misprint, because Groundhog Day isn’t today, February 8th. And you know, I had the feeling when I submitted the title to the Window that maybe it was a bad idea because dates are so exact for us, and NO ONE would care whether or not Wiarton Willie sees his shadow today. We had the bad news 6 days ago – he saw his shadow and we’ll have 6 more weeks of winter. Why revisit the subject? But at the back of my mind were some musings about the significance in our lives of all the recurring yearly events we observe, which are symbolized today by our Annual General Meeting, and I also had a recollection that a couple of months ago someone else, Dave Keller it might have been, had suggested that the movie Groundhog Day would make a good topic for a talk. I even watched that movie again in preparation for these reflections, and will talk a little more about it in a moment.
First, though, I want to suggest that our Annual General Meeting is an excellent example of the regular yearly events which have expectations and hopes attached to them, even if they’re not as clear as the hope that the groundhog won’t see his shadow and we therefore won’t have six more weeks of winter. We probably don’t get as excited and expectant about the Annual Meeting as we do about Christmas, to put it mildly, but I’d guess that we do have hopes for it – that the AGM will clear the way for smooth sailing in the coming year -- and that we’ll elect good new people to the Board -- and approve a great budget -- and do it all in about 20 minutes! Well, no, that’s unrealistic, but we do have hopes and expectations.
Another, less recognized annual event is the 200th anniversary of the death of Joseph Priestley, on February 6th, 1804. Priestley was a scientist first and foremost. He could be considered a forerunner of modern ecologists since he was the researcher who discovered that plants take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen into the air, in a process which we now call photosynthesis. He could also be regarded as the father of anaesthesia since he discovered nitrous oxide which is still used today as an anaesthetic. His biggest discovery, though, was of oxygen itself, and that’s how he’s most remembered by the world at large.
But as well as being a prominent scientist, Joseph Priestley was a political theorist, a social activist, and a religious dissenter. In his time only people who took communion in the Church of England were admitted to Oxford or Cambridge Universities; nor could anyone become a member of Parliament unless he was a communicant member of the Established Church. As a Non-Conformist (which was the name given to all non-Anglican Protestants in England) Priestley campaigned against these restrictions. He also spoke out against the slave trade, long before this became socially or even religiously the norm.
Priestley accepted the teachings of Jesus but not that he was one with God; his rational approach to scripture is widely accepted today. His quest was for truth. He was a Unitarian. Despite the importance of his scientific work, Priestley considered himself primarily a Unitarian minister. Following the destruction of his home and laboratory in England for his religious and political views, he was welcomed to America by Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin in 1794. He helped found North America’s oldest congregation, the First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia, in 1796. We celebrate Joseph Priestley’s life on the 200th anniversary of his death, and we can take hope from the fact that the efforts to which he dedicated his life bore fruit and still continue. The torch he lit is now ours to carry forward.
Now, back to Groundhog Day, the movie. It’s about someone who has to repeat one day in his life, over and over, until he can discover how to really live it. The central character is an arrogant weather forecaster, Phil, who travels to Punxsutawney the night before he has to do a broadcast about the annual ritual of the coming out of the groundhog from his burrow and whether he sees his shadow or not. He stays overnight, gets up early, does his story and is annoyed to discover that he’s trapped in Punxsutawney for a second night because of a snowstorm that comes in after the groundhog ceremony.
When he wakes up in his guest house room the next morning, lo and behold, it’s the morning of the day before all over again. Everything that happened to him the previous day -- the man trying to start a conversation at the top of the stairs; the old high school acquaintance recognizing him on the street, the ritual of Groundhog Day -- it all happens again. And, once again, because of bad weather, he’s forced to spend the night there. When he wakes up the next morning, it’s the same day as yesterday and the day before, with the same oncoming snowstorm keeping him stuck in town and the same events repeating themselves like a broken record.
And so it goes, day after day, as Phil, this rather miserable human being, finds himself trapped in Punxsutawney on Groundhog Day in what science fiction would refer to as a time loop. If he does nothing different, events will repeat themselves just as they happened on the original day. But he gradually discovers that if he changes his response to the day’s events, people will in turn respond differently to him, opening up all kinds of possibilities. Either way, with each repetition of Groundhog Day, he alone remembers what happened in previous editions of the same day.
At first Phil’s totally bewildered. After absorbing the initial shock, he becomes a bit giddy with his new-found freedom. Yes, there is a kind of freedom, even in his seemingly trapped situation. He can eat anything, drink anything, do anything to anybody, and tomorrow at 6 am the slate is wiped clean. Being the sleaze that he is, he immediately takes full advantage -- setting up beautiful women today for tomorrow's conquest, robbing banks and performing minor miracles. But nothing is getting him out of the time warp in which every day is February 2nd. He begins to treat life as a game of chance: he risks his life and he acts in ways which express his growing sense of hopelessness about the fact that time will inevitably repeat itself and he’ll wake up as if nothing had happened.
Almost by default, this half-empty character begins to search for a purpose in life, something to fill the emptiness. He starts by learning everything he can about his female producer, Rita, so he can pretend to be her ideal man and seduce her. When that fails, his despair deepens and he starts actively trying to kill himself. But he always wakes up alive, if not well, in the morning. At his very rock-bottom moment, he offers Rita the bleakest of all weather forecasts, predicting that it will "be cold and gray, and it's going to last you for the rest of your life."
In desperation, Phil reveals his predicament to Rita, and she listens and shows that she actually cares! Finding that someone actually likes him for who he is, he finally figures out a constructive response to the one day that he’s given over and over again. He stops rebelling against his situation -- and he even finds two big positives in it: he has all the time in the world, and he has the safety of knowing what will happen next! He begins to lead his life, simply by responding to it, constructively, rather than reacting.
An encounter with death (when an old streetperson dies during the day) has a deep effect on Phil. At first, he can't accept the man's death and, in at least one version of the day, he tries to be good to the old man, taking him out to eat (for a last meal) and trying, unsuccessfully, to keep him alive. But when he stops trying to force death to relent, he starts to be able to transfer his compassion for the old man onto living people. He begins to use his knowledge of how the day will unfold to help people. Knowing that a child will always fall from a tree at a certain time, he makes it a point to be there and catch the child -- every time. Knowing that a man will choke on his meal, he is always at a nearby table in the restaurant to save him.
Slowly, Phil goes through a transformation. Having suffered, he’s able to empathize with other people's suffering. Now, he sees the day as a form of freedom. He expresses it in a high-falutin’ TV speech he gives about the weather, at the umpteenth ceremony he’s covered of the coming out of the groundhog. Referring to the playwright Chekhov, who’s known for the bleakness and repetitiveness of his themes, Phil says:
When Chekhov saw the long winter, he saw a winter bleak and dark and bereft of hope. We know that winter is just another step in the cycle of life. But standing here among the people of Punxsutawney and basking in the of warmth of their hearths and hearts, I couldn't imagine a better fate than a long and lustrous winter.
In other words, having accepted the conditions of life, he’s no longer like all those people, including us perhaps, who fear life's challenges, and see the weather forecast, or the economic forecast, or the political forecast, whether it’s by a human forecaster or a groundhog, ---- see that as controlling their lives, our lives. Phil accepts "winter" as an opportunity. Finally, he and Rita fall in love and decide to settle down in Punxsutawney. And finally comes the great moment of release, when the radio comes on at 6 am as always, and it’s not February 2nd, it’s February 3rd! Like some other great fictional characters, Phil ends up living in the one place he couldn't wait to escape.
Groundhog Day shows us a character who’s perhaps rather like the worst in ourselves. He’s arrogant and sarcastic, absorbed in his own discomforts, cut off from other people. Like us, he finds himself in a situation he can’t control, seemingly a plaything of fate. But unlike us, he gets the bad luck -- or perhaps it’s a great gift -- of being stuck in the same day until he gets it right. Whereas most of us go semi-automatically through most of our days which are so similar to each other, he’s forced to stop and decide how to use each day to break through its sameness into something new. One reviewer of the movie observed that Phil's repetition of Groundhog Day is very much like the daily grind that most of us experience -- the same old job with the same people in the same situations with little variation. The reviewer noticed that in the movie theatre every time the radio came on to start another same-old February 2nd, groans could be heard from audience members. They hoped so much that Phil would somehow be able to escape from the grinding daily repetition.
In the end, he does break through -- to a more authentic self. Like many heroes, he can only escape his alienation by being exiled in a situation he would never have chosen. Think of Cast Away; think of The Wizard of Oz; think of It’s a Wonderful Life. When we get beyond denial and resentment over the conditions of life and death, and accept our situation, the movie tells us, then we can become authentic and compassionate. As Roger Ebert said in his 1993 review of the movie, it’s “a demonstration of the way time can sometimes give us a break. Just because we're born as SOBs doesn't mean we have to live that way.”
Some of you may have been reminded when you saw the movie or as you’ve heard me talk about it -- some of you, such as Craig Beam for example, almost certainly were reminded -- of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s writings about "the eternal recurrence of the same." Here’s what Nietzche said -- or rather the question that he asked:
How, if some day or night, a demon were to sneak after you into your loneliness and say to you:This life, as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and every sigh ... must return to you all in the same succession and sequence ... The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over and over and you with it, a mere grain of dust.
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?
Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him:... never did I hear anything more godlike!
If this thought were to gain possession of you, it would change you as you are, or perhaps crush you. The question in each and everything, "do you want this once more and innumerable times more?" would weigh upon your actions as the greatest stress. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation?
"How well-disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life" to say yes to repeating your life over and over again! Is your life, and your character, such that you could say such a yes? For myself, I’m not sure, but I find it a question well worth asking myself, perhaps on a regular basis -- perhaps every day! Phil, in the movie, does ultimately become so well-disposed to himself and to life to accept its repetition -- and paradoxically it's then that he escapes the trap of repetition and can receive the gift of newness and spontaneity. The poet Wallace Stevens puts it this way:
the going round
And round and round, the merely going round,
Until merely going round is a final good,
The way wine comes at a table in a wood.
And we enjoy like men, the way a leaf
Above the table spins its constant spin,
So that we look at it with pleasure, look
At it spinning its eccentric measure. Perhaps
The man-hero is not the exceptional monster,
But he that of repetition is most master.
Another poet, Rilke, thought that if we fail to grow as human beings, if we fail to have a perfect spring, it is because we avoid the difficulties of a "pure winter." A time of repetitious practice, in which we have nothing better to do than to do it all again and try to get it right, a "pure winter" enables us to store up growth and learning before we go springing into the unknown.
In the end, Nietzche’s lesson, and the lesson of Groundhog Day, and the lesson of the poets, and the lesson we can bring to our Annual General Meeting, is very simple, and it’s one expressed in a reading with which I sometimes open a service. I’ll use it this time to close my reflections for today:
Look to this day, for it is life!
In its brief course lie all the realities of your existence:
The bliss of growth,
The glory of action,
The splendour of beauty;
For yesterday is but a dream,
And tomorrow is only a vision,
But today, well lived, makes every yesterday a dream of happiness,
And every tomorrow a vision of hope.
Look well, therefore, to this day.