ESCAPING GROUNDHOG HELL

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One thing we all pretty much safely take for granted is that time will continue in an orderly fashion. We don't ever pause to consider what it would feel like if we woke up this morning and instead of it being a new day, it was yesterday, all over again, and we were the only person who noticed. But this is precisely the concept at the center of the movie Groundhog day, starring Bill Murray as Phil Connors.

At the beginning of the movie we meet Phil, a weatherman from the big city, sent with a news truck to cover the Groundhog Day festivities in a small town in rural Pennsylvania, the very real Punxsutawney. Immediately it is clear that we are not to like Phil Connors. He is not just a jerk, but also a generally unaware, privileged jerk who believes that he is the center of the universe. Everything he says is sarcastic, meaning he never actually says anything he means, and acts like he is always having a good laugh at the expense of others. His job as a weatherman is symbolic of this conceit. In the first newscast we see him doing, he is shown blowing the clouds around the map, literally appearing to be in control of the weather.

It is also obvious that the people around Phil do not like him, but that he is either too cool to care, or perhaps even worse, too detached to feel the disdain others feel for him. But he does have a vague sense that, as he puts it, "the jealousy of others" is holding him back from the career advancement he believes he deserves. He knows he deserves big things, and yet here he is, in his mind, being sent off to this podunk town to cover their hokey festival.

And so he goes about his job with just the kind of detached and lifeless energy you might expect from a guy like this. From the moment he wakes up on Groundhog Day in Punxsutawney, every interaction he has with the people he runs across on his way to the festival, and his coverage of the big event itself, is all carried out in a technically proficient manner, yet not one interaction or thing he says has any real energy or love in it. There is simply no vulnerability. Through his sarcasm and feigned disdain he is able to keep himself safely detached from the world. But this lack of joie de vivre is obvious, and we the viewer realize that this is truly why the big career advancement isn't happening for Phil Connors. It's not because of how he treats other people. Ultimately it's because he has no love for life at all. He has become so narcissistic, so protected and detached from the world, that he has lost track of any of the real things of value that actually make our lives worth living.

Wouldn't you know it, despite his firm and confident prediction that the nearby snowstorm would definitely, 100%, without a doubt miss them in Punxsutawney - thus allowing his news crew, and more importantly, himself, to get out of that little town as fast as he could; as soon as his dull and lifeless coverage of the big groundhog moment is over, the snowstorm hits with full force. Which means another evening of hell in Punxsutawney for Phil Connors. But, this being a movie and not real life, after Phil went to bed that night, something strange happened. Instead of waking up on February 3rd, the day after Groundhog Day, he woke up again on February 2nd.

It doesn't take long for Phil to realize it either. To begin with, his alarm pops on at 6 AM with the same Sonny and Cher song he awoke to the day before, including the identical witty banter of the radio DJs. After just a few minutes of being awake and interacting with other people unaware of it once again being Groundhog Day, it becomes impossible to deny that something very strange is going on. Either he is experiencing the most intense deja vu of all time, or else the space-time continuum has failed to function for him as it normally does for the rest of us.

After a few days of this same experience, waking up at 6 AM in the same bed, with the same Sonny and Cher song on the same day over and over again, Phil gets over the weirdness of his situation and decides to embrace it. Or, in his words, "I am not going to play by their rules anymore!" And why should he? At this point he is completely free of any kind of consequences from his actions. As he quickly learns, he can eat as much as he wants, say anything to anyone, drive as fast as he chooses, drink as much as he would like, because come 6 AM, he is going to wake back up in that bed, hear the words to "I got you Babe" and start over fresh on February 2nd once again with absolutely no consequences from his previous day's actions. So he goes crazy just indulging his every whim and desire. He seduces women with lies stolen from things they would tell him in days past, he figures out how to rob a bank, he stuffs his face with the richest foods he can find, he gets drunk and acts stupid.

But after endlessly exhausting his every desire, he paradoxically finds an ever-growing hole of dissatisfaction growing within himself. At this point he turns his energy towards winning the love of his co-worker, Rita, who also came to town to help with the coverage and is played beautifully by Andy MacDowell. Like everyone else, Rita despises Phil but each day he works to know her better and to become the man she says she wants to fall in love with, by memorizing her likes and dislikes. He spends literally years of February 2nd days in this pursuit - mastering the French language and French poetry to impress her, choreographing their day to lead her to believe he is who she is looking for. But of course, he can never quite get it right, and after spending another day swaying her opinion and winning her over, he always ends up screwing it up somehow, and it inevitably ends with a slap of his face at the end of the night, and then bam, back to that alarm clock and "I got you babe," knowing the object of his affection once again hates him and that he will never escape February 2nd Hell.

And at this point, hell is the only place that Phil Connors can rightfully understand himself to be. He has now spent more than a decade of February 2nds in Punxsutawney and, having failed at finding any redeeming quality to his existential conundrum, he dives fully into the meaninglessness of his existence and begins to try and end this experience the only way he has yet to try, by dying. Over and over again he dies. And although this is a comedy, this quickly moves from funny ways to die, to very dark and serious deaths. It is clear that Phil Connors has been completely brought to his knees and no longer believes he is the center of the universe.

As author Michael Foley put it in his article on the theological implications of movie: Phil Connor's "poignant awareness of his emptiness recalls the chilling line from St. Augustine's Confessions: 'I went far from you, my God, and I became to myself a wasteland.' Liberation from the divine law initially sounds thrilling, but such freedom proves to be not only hollow, but self-squandering annihilation. As Phil [Connors] says [at this point in the movie], 'I've killed myself so many times, I don't even exist anymore.'"

This is the bottom for Phil Connors. Eventually he realizes that even death will not break this cycle he is in. And that is when the breakthrough comes - as it does unfortunately for so many of us - at the very bottom. Finally, Phil Connors begins to do things for the simple joy of them. That is the start. To find pleasure in life again. Pure pleasure. And for him it was found in music. We don't know exactly how long it took, but Phil becomes a master pianist. And through this love of music and the joy he finds in it, he starts to wake up a little bit and he begins to take a notice of everyone else that inhabits this little town around him - not just the object of his affection, Rita, but all the townspeople. He spends time with each of them, getting to know who they are, he listens deeply to their stories, and begins to care about them - about everyone really. Slowly, over what must be decades more of February 2nd days, we see Phil go from a man with a heart that is completely protected from the world, to someone who is literally living with a wide-open heart.

This is not just the projection of a minister's desires on this film. Bill Murray, the genius actor that he is, portrays this turn brilliantly. We see every aspect of his character slowly change and open up over time - not simply his actions, but his mannerisms, his pace, the way he begins to look right at people when he is talking to them instead of over their shoulders, the way he remembers what they have told him previously for their good instead of his, the way he builds his day to help others instead of feed his desires.

Of course, this turning outward, this opening of his heart to the world, ends up being what the universe, or god, or perhaps just the writer of the script, was waiting for, to liberate Phil Connors from his hellish experience of waking up over and over and over and over again on February 2nd at 6 AM to that Sonny and Cher song! And - spoiler alert - after living for others in a perfect manner one day, he ends up getting the girl and waking up on February 3rd!

There is a lot to talk about theologically within this film. But what is of particular interest to me is what this story is communicating about hell. I am particularly interested in this because I stand in a long line of ministers to whom the concept of Universalism is very important. Often times "Universalism" gets forgotten at the end of our faith tradition's name. Granted, "Unitarian Universalism" is a mouthful, so I understand why it is often just left at "Unitarian" or even just "UU". But our Universalist ancestors were indeed fighting the good fight even then against a very unhealthy notion of Hell as a physical place of eternal damnation and punishment that one could never return from. I agree, the idea that any one person could ever be that separated from whatever force sustains our beings makes neither rational nor theological sense to me, and I have never seen any evidence that changes that.

What I have seen much evidence for, what I am eminently and completely convinced of is that this world is real, that this life is real and that the suffering of people right now is very real. Of that I have no doubt. So the only thing I can say with absolute certainty about hell is that you can live it during this life right here on earth. I have seen it in the quietly desperate way so many of us go about parts of our lives. Walling off piece after piece of our heart as experiences of vulnerability injure us. I mean, it is easy to make a straw man of Phil Connors, who is a complete narcissist, but each of us does this in very real ways. Any time we start to feel ourselves sleep-walk through relationships with important people in our lives, anytime we feel ourselves withdraw at work, anytime we see ourselves avoiding situations or people, we have begun protecting ourselves from life rather than fully living it. Perhaps we all have to do this in some ways to survive. I know that our world will hurt us in so many ways if we let it, but the problem is it can be hard to keep this self-protection contained once we start. Before you know it, we've walled up our heart to the extent that we are safe in the knowledge that nothing matters enough to hurt us.

As Phil Connors learns, it is, thankfully, impossible to get to the end of this rope, to build such a barrier between ourselves and creation that we can't get back. Despite the feeling that he had killed himself so many times he didn't even exist anymore, there was a way back for Phil Connors. It was a road that began the second he allowed himself to feel something real again. Just one little emotion - in his case, the pure joy of music, made just because it sounds beautiful - was all he needed to start the tiny crack that would grow and eventually free his heart completely.

One of my amazing colleagues, the Rev. Joanne Fontaine Crawford, wrote on her blog this week, that "To love the hell out of the world means to love it extravagantly, wastefully, with an overpouring abandon and fervor that sometimes surprises even yourself. That love flows out of you, sometimes slow and steady, sometimes in a torrent, sometimes filled with joy, sometimes with fierceness, or anger, or a heartbreaking pain that makes you say, 'No, no, I can't take this anymore. I can't do anymore. It's too much ... too much.' ... The hell is all around, and we work, in great passionate swoops and in slow, plodding routines, to put that extravagant love into action and remove all the bits of (hell) from the world. Misery, ill health, disease, viciousness of greed in the face of want, voices that shout hate or whisper meanness, soul-eating addiction, humiliation, despair, injustice that curls up nastily, poisoning the spirit of giver and receiver ... we do not flee. Bone-chillingly afraid we may be, but we step forward. We are the only form love will take and the work is ours to do."

This is exactly what Phil Connors realizes by the end of the movie as well. And it is actually a very profound message. According to one person who tried to add up all the time it would take for everything in the movie to happen, Phil Connor lived thirty three years and two-hundred and fifty days of February 2nds before he truly got it, before he made the turn and started living for others, until he was actually able to fully live out of his open heart and escape his personal hell on earth. Now, thankfully, no one in this room has a heart as walled up and protected as Phil Connors did. But each of us has in some way protected our hearts from the world. But as Pema Chodron says in her excellent book Things Fall Apart: "To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man's-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh."

It is not safe, I concede that, but what if just the opposite is true than what our instincts tell us. What if the safest path is not walled-off protection, but ultimate vulnerability? What if the path out of hell on earth is loving this world with every piece of who we are?

May it be so, amen.