There is a moment about an hour into Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin where two men pass on a country road without so much as a word of acknowledgment. The one man, Padraic (Colin Farrell), sneaks a glance at Colm (Brendan Gleeson), who’s already well beyond him, before leading his livestock in the opposite direction.
It’s hard to believe that these two used to be lifelong drinking buddies because the preceding events are rife with discord, providing a portrait antithetical to human flourishing. We watch their utter dissolution for much of the ensuing movie.
It can be a God-honoring thing, even a foretaste of heaven, to sit down with your best friend for a chat. Whether we live in a rural village, suburbia, or a sprawling city, the bottom line is still the same… God created us in his image to live at his speed so we might know others and know Him.
What’s worse is how suddenly they come to an impasse for near-inexplicable reasons. Colm, an avid violinist, has decided he no longer wants to spend his idle moments piddling around with Padraic at the pub. He’s deemed him a bore.
Colm confesses, “I just have this tremendous sense of time slipping away on me, Padraic, and I think I need to spend the time I have left in thinking, and composing, and just trying not to listen to any more of the dull things that you have to say for yourself.”
There’s a heightened absurdity to it as the befuddlement between them ultimately boils over into enmity. It’s important to note the Irish period piece is set against the backdrop of the national Civil War during the 1920s, which mirrors the feud building between Padraic and Colm.
It has all the hallmarks of a dark and broken world, and yet like the messy annals of the Old Testament, it somehow shows the urgent need for grace in a tumultuous landscape full of continual entropy. Sadly, there is little grace to be found in the film. Banshees takes this to the extreme through macabre displays of vengeance and the razing of personal property. All of this escalates thanks to a non-existent tiff blowing out of proportion as the two friends fall away. They’ve crossed a point of no return.
Life in the Fish Bowl
The milieu of Banshees calls to mind a documentary from a few years back called Godspeed: The Pace of Being Known. It follows another small community, this time in Pitlochry, Scotland, where an American pastor, Matt Canlis, looks to minister to the local parish in secular modernity. He learns quickly that so much of this work is predicated on relationships.
Pastor and author Eugene Peterson exhorts Matt that if he wants to become a pastor, he needs to go find a parish—a fish bowl where a person cannot escape being known—where you don’t fear being known. In small communities such as this, there’s no place to hide.
Likewise, a well-formed sermon means nothing compared to getting out into the parish and meeting people, knocking on doors and actually forming bonds with other human beings. Matt heeds Peterson’s advice and enters into the community.
One of the first people he meets is a strapping man with red hair, like Colm. This fellow’s name is Alan Torrance, and he teaches Matt a great deal.
Alan is not a professed follower of Jesus Christ, but he agrees to meet with Matt and others to discuss John’s Gospel detailing the ministry of Jesus. Whereas Matt has all the know-how and theological bearing to offer—a level of robust conversation Colm might appreciate—Alan is able to get at the heart of Christ’s ministry.
In one of their gatherings, he demands, “Give me a map.” In looking at the map of where Jesus did his ministry, it becomes apparent to Alan that the scale of the map is the same as the scale of where he lives.
In the documentary, N.T. Wright points out that most of the main accounts of Jesus’s ministry are in the very small radius made up of Capernaum, Bethsaida, and the north edge of the Sea of Galilee—small villages with a few hundred inhabitants. Not too dissimilar from Inisherin or Pitlochry.
Although Alan had never studied the Bible in-depth, he understood it intuitively—better than many more learned men. If Jesus was making bold statements about raising people from the dead and making the blind see, he would have needed to convince communities that this was true or else they would hold him to account. They would have stoned him, and people did try to on a number of occasions (John 8:48–59).
Part of Allan’s skepticism about the ministry of Jesus was that if he had preached in big cities, it would have been possible to project one image in public and be someone very different in private. When he learned that Jesus himself lived in a village, changing people’s minds and ministering to them the hard way, he believed; it made practical sense given his own experience.
More Than Niceness
It’s in this context where the ministry of Jesus feels so relatable, because his entire ministry was about being fully known by his closest friends. Instead of sowing more discord (as we see in Banshees), he was capable of bringing healing.
However, it’s easy to believe in a Jesus who had more in common with the day-to-day lives of the locals of Inisherin or Pitlochry than the utter transience of our modern individualistic society. How relevant can he possibly be to our lives now? So much of Banshees is about walking around. There were no cars. There were no cell phones or televisions, and so being present with people was really all you had.
In our modern mindset, we’re often running through life missing things: it’s easy to stay hidden and avoid being known. In small-town environments such as these, you can hardly pick your friends, much less your enemies.
Banshees gets this, and yet Colm and Padraic’s relationship exemplifies a different kind of schism. Oftentimes our relationships become about utility. Colm complains to Padraic, “None of it helps me.”
It’s attractive to hang around people because of their power, money, status, or even because they are part of the kind of intelligentsia that tickles our fancy. And certainly, there’s nothing inherently wrong with deep or even intellectual conversation. I often hang out with people smarter than myself.
There’s also a time for being present and available for those who need us regardless of status. Often, God will use them to humble us. It’s not simply about weighing ourselves down with burdens and sacrificing in the presence of others out of mere obligation.
I think the key is giving of ourselves, instead of always looking at what others can give to us; it’s listening. It’s living life at a pace where we can know others and be known, like both of these examples. Being around other people is a blessing.
But the fallacy might be to assume that being nice to our neighbors is the only key to life. If Padraic and Colm had only buried the garden shears and been nice to each other, it would have fixed everything. It’s a nice thought, and this unresolved tension is partly why Banshees feels so unsatisfying, though it might not be for the reasons we suspect.
Jesus Christ was not satisfied with niceness (Matthew 10:34-36). At the end of the day, niceness is great and all, but it cannot replace the good news of the Gospel. This involves salvation and a perfect, faultless man dying for flawed and broken people who did not deserve it. That includes me.
Name Above All Names
Colm tells Padraic no one will remember his sister’s or his parents’ niceness in 50 years, and yet Mozart’s music from two centuries before still lives on. He’s got something there. If we use niceness as the fulcrum of a life well lived, it might very easily pale in comparison to the cultural accomplishments of great artists and statesmen, moral deficiencies notwithstanding.
But there’s also someone more memorable than any of them. Someone that Colm was never clearly introduced to even as he and Padraic faithfully plod to Sunday service every week.
It occurs to me that Jesus Christ of Nazareth is even more well-known than Mozart. It’s not even close. This same man who walked among the people, raised the dead and healed the blind. Over 2,000 years later, we’re still talking about him. Not because he was nice, but because he came into the world to offer good news to those who had the eyes to see and the ears to hear. He came to live a perfect life, and to die for the very same people who cheered for him one week and then turned around and wanted him dead the next.
Genesis makes it plain that while the enmity in Banshees might be unnatural, it is our constant reality in a fallen world wracked by civil war. Where is the hope then? What can we do? My first thought leads me back to a word: “Godspeed.”
We often equate it with getting somewhere fast and efficiently. Matt makes the distinction: it’s actually about slowing down.
Perhaps it’s not simply the pace of being known by others, but also the pace for knowing God our Father in heaven. He supplies something that supersedes niceness—it’s a love that casts out fear. Paul prays for the church to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that we may be filled with all the fullness of God (Ephesians 3:18-20). He’s not only The Name Above All Names, but he knows each one of his creatures by name.
It can be a God-honoring thing, even a foretaste of heaven, to sit down with your best friend for a chat. Whether we live in a rural village, suburbia, or a sprawling city, the bottom line is still the same. We need to allow ourselves to be known by name, not merely for utility, for art, or even for the sake of niceness.
These are good things, but they are not ultimate things. Rather, God created us in his image to live at his speed so we might know others and know Him. How different The Banshees of Inisherin and our own lives might look if we were able to take this to heart and live it out in vulnerable community.
