The subject and predicate of my first column of the year is inspiration.
Inspiration is what turns the key (or pushes the button) in the ignition that jumpstarts your day, your week, your month, your year. Inspiration is an enabler. The minute you hear the engine of your journey roar to life, whether with the powerful hum of a muscle car or the more craggy buzz of a trusty sedan, you know you’re on your way. But first you have to turn the key, or push the button. Inspiration makes you do that.
Inspiration came to me in the stories of two men who stared down seemingly insurmountable hurdles and triumphed.
I watched Father Stu on Netflix in the most trying days of my recuperation from a fractured ankle. Trying — because being a very sociable person, I was mostly homebound with a cast on my left leg, from mid-calf to my ankle. The everyday things we take for granted, like walking from Point A to Point B, had become a strategic endeavor. I had to rely on crutches, and later, a walking boot.
To be human is to flirt, even with self-pity. And I was almost succumbing to self-pity till I watched Father Stu.
Initially, the movie’s biggest pull, IMHO, was Mark Wahlberg, a Hollywood A-lister with acting chops as well. But I also know Wahlberg as a face of redemption, a poster boy for the buoyancy of faith in an ocean of depravity.
And despite it being largely about faith and religion, the biopic about Fr. Stuart “Father Stu” Long claimed the number one spot on Netflix’s list of most-watched movies just four days after it hit the streaming service last September. The movie was not preachy but it was a pulpit for light-bulb moments, played out, not preached, in a language we all understand. Sometimes, with controversial foul language typical of the neighborhoods and bars Stuart Long, a former boxer who would later become Father Stu, frequented. (This reportedly offended some of the religious.) Father Stu is like Rocky with a twist. And what a big twist of faith.
Stuart Long, who had no choice but to retire from the ring after a permanent jaw injury, underwent every obstacle in the book on his journey to priesthood. He could have even used it as an excuse to give up his desire to become a priest — he wasn’t born Catholic, he was an agnostic, he was in love with a wonderful girl, he had financial problems, he was run over by a car and hit by another as he lay dying on the road. He could have just hung up his gloves and lived on disability pay. But he told a Catholic publication in Montana in 2010 that on the day he was baptized (purportedly in order to marry his Catholic girlfriend), he knew he was going to become a priest.
And just as he was recuperating from broken bones after his accident, he found out he had a debilitating muscular disease. And guess what? He chose the priesthood still. He chose it over the woman he loved, he chose it despite the difficulties of becoming a priest in his condition.
In real life, on the day of his ordination, Stu got up with the help of his crutches. In an article, “Meet Father Stu – the true story, and real priest behind Mark Wahlberg’s new movie,” on pillarcatholic.com, he was quoted as saying, “I stand before you as a broken man. Barring a miracle, I’m going to die from this disease, but I carry it for the cross of Christ, and we can all carry our crosses.”
Father Stu is an inspiration to Wahlberg, who himself had a tough journey to redemption. According to The Pillar, Wahlberg heard about Father Stu while at a restaurant with a priest who had been friends with him. The actor decided he had to make a movie, and to pay for most of it himself. “I just found it to be so inspiring and so comforting, so I really couldn’t find a reason to not want to make the film,” Wahlberg told The Pillar.
Wahlberg added that the movie has inspired him to make a “real commitment…to do more substantial, meaningful, parts of God’s work.”
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Another inspiring movie I watched over the holidays is Blue Miracle, about an ordinary man, Omar Venegas, running a bankrupt orphanage (“Casa Hogar”) in Cabo, Mexico. Well, “ordinary” is relative because Omar’s purpose in life was anything but. He and his wife Becca struggle to make ends meet — not for themselves but for their family of boys rescued from the streets. The boys call him “Papa Omar.”
You wonder why there are people in the world like Omar, who would give his everything to turn the life around of underprivileged young boys, with no ulterior motive. Or you wonder why you can’t be more like him? More remarkable still is his having found a supportive wife in Becca, who cares for the kids and makes meals as sumptuous as she can for them, at least a dozen of them. Photos of the real-life Becca show she has the good looks of a movie star.
To save their cash-strapped orphanage, Omar and his kids partner with a washed-up boat captain named Wade (played by Dennis Quaid) for a chance to win a lucrative fishing competition. (Some creative license is used for the character of Captain Wade, who is mostly fictional.) The prize money from catching the biggest blue marlin would save the orphanage from being foreclosed.
The bunso in the orphanage is named “Tweety,”and Papa Omar has taught him that every time he feels sad, all he has to do is write a wish on a scrap of paper and nail it to the front door. And so far, all Tweety’s prayers were answered — there is a God, and there is the power of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The competition was rough and tough. Desperate, the captain (Quaid) plans to cheat. He tells Omar a fisherman has sold a big fish to him, and he will attach it underneath the boat and pretend he caught it in the ocean. He entices Omar by saying that although they would be cheating, the fish would save the orphanage from bankruptcy and allow him to help more boys. As he tells Omar his plan, unbeknownst to both of them, one of the wards in the orphanage and a member of the sailing crew vying for the prize, hears them.
Out in the ocean the next day, the captain tells Omar it was time to hook the fish strapped to the hull of the boat. He lets Omar do it and turns his back.
And when he returns expecting to see the giant marlin strung to a hook for the win, Omar tells him he let the fish go. He couldn’t claim credit for the big fish. In the eyes of the orphan who overheard the planned cheating, Omar stands like a god.
Anyway, what happens out there on the ocean? What is the “blue miracle”?
Suffice it to say Casa Hogar has now expanded to include more playgrounds and has even added a wing for underprivileged young girls.
Faith hooks you when you’re in the deep.
(You may e-mail me at joanneraeramirez@yahoo.com. Follow me on Instagram @joanneraeramirez.)