(Con)Descending into Lake Mungo
“Afterthoughts” is a new Fear of God blog series featuring co-hosts and guests further unpacking thoughts, themes, and ideas that keep them up at night from the conversations and content covered on the show. This entry is by co-host Nathan Rouse and is a follow-up to this week’s episode featuring Joel Anderson’s Lake Mungo. Enjoy, then, this latest entry in the new chapter of The Fear of God…
condescend: to willingly lower oneself to another’s level
Richard Rohr, mystic, Franciscan, Catholic, maybe-Hobbit, speaks often about “dying before you die”.
Such may also be the lesson from Lake Mungo, the little-seen Australian faux documentary horror film. In it, 16 year old Alice has drowned, and a film crew has documented the reflections of her mother, father, and brother, as well as a few community peers, of how her passing has affected them. The film is intimate and haunting, revealing a few supernatural twists along the way.
The most notable of these twists is also the most frightening scene in the film, when footage off of Alice’s cell phone is discovered from a school trip to Lake Mungo, a real world dry lake located in and around Mungo National Park in South Wales, Australia. In the footage, Alice is walking along the lake’s shore when out of the brush, accosting her, comes… an apparition? A spectre? A golem? Whatever is the essence of the being Alice encounters, it is wearing her face. At least, a waterlogged, misshapen version of her face. It is, in fact, a doppelgänger of Alice, its distended and saturated visage the exact same image her father will come to see on the stretcher carting her away after her death by drowning but a short season later.
In the actual Lake Mungo, Alice is visited by her own dying.
In her memoir, All The Young Men, Ruth Coker Burks describes becoming a ‘friend of death.’ Much to most of Ruth’s adult life had been spent befriending, caring for, and ultimately burying multitudes of gay men in Hot Springs, Arkansas, in the 1980’s, as AIDS and ostracism ravaged the LGBTQ community there and throughout the country.
Ruth had stared for so long into the deaths of the men she’d come to care for that the very nature and presence of death, however tragic its arrival, no longer held any sting and had become instead something like a peer, a familiar visitor come once more to usher forth those who had passed into that “far green country under a swift sunrise,” as Gandalf names it.
In a metaphorical Lake Mungo, Ruth condescends into the death encounter, partnering in the dying of others, over and over again. Where her friends would have encountered their deaths alone, she is there in Lake Mungo with them.
And so, too, must we who call ourselves ‘faithful’.
For what is the practice of faith, really, but those who’ve befriended death helping others do the same? Whether that be the death of a marriage, a mother, or even of a moment.
And yet, if I’m honest, I think we’d far rather play God than be Jesus - a statement we may nod and “Amen”, also revealing a deep theological problem in our churches and communities when we can somehow separate those two and not see a problem, for Jesus is God is Jesus and any competing view of the two must, if it is to be called Faithful, without fail default to Jesus. Thus “playing God” should only ever and always look like “being Jesus”. But in our “playing God”, we’d rather diagnose a problem than comfort our brother; we’d rather judge a behavior that leads to Lake Mungo than mourn with our sister.
But here’s the thing: if Christianity is ever going to be more than false promises and fraud prophets - and it must be if it is going to be worth anything - then it is Christlikeness, and it is this Christlikeness we put on when having faced the reality of our own death we aid others in facing the reality of theirs; sharing in it, bearing with it, loving through it.
If Lake Mungo is the place we find our dying, it is to Lake Mungo - this dried out hollow in the earth, this primordial place of death - we all must go, and willingly.
Once we’ve faced our own death, only then can we assist others in facing theirs. Only then can we do that which we must do: condescend.
