Cameron’s Avatar

Why we long to get back to the Garden


By Kate Ernsting

The day after Christmas this year, I found myself entering a theater to do what I’d vowed twelve years ago not to do again: pay to see a James Cameron film.

Cameron’s 1997 Titanic was visually beautiful but emotionally flat for me. Its wanton rewrite of history and silly proposition that an immature romance could be the center point for an epic tragedy made me rush to the video store to rent A Night to Remember.

Yet I broke my resolution for Avatar, drawn perhaps by the promise of really beautiful cinematography. I reassured myself that this film would be a fantasy from start to finish; so it was unlikely that historical fact and classical literature would become collateral damage.

On two counts I was right. Avatar was a richly crafted, beautiful fantasy. Although it doesn’t join the ranks of great classics, it manages to leave the ranks of history and literature relatively unscathed.

Of course, the plot was simplistic and predictable —I was usually at least two scenes ahead in figuring out what was going to happen next. There were the trite plot segments delivered clumsily—a morality film where the good guys proclaim how much they want peace but rush to wage gory war. (Let’s not omit any boring plot line with soldier mercenaries or greedy corporate goons.)

The science was absurd, but the fiction part was really fun. I would have paid nine-fifty just to see the wonderful, fantastical flora and fauna on Pandora. Sigourney Weaver was pretty much just herself; any moviegoer knows this is a plus in a film. When the main character learns that he has stopped being a cripple, his joy has real depth. Characters still hoot and act like they are on the verge of saying, “I’m king of the world”—but thankfully they don’t actually say it. So maybe the natives growl rather than uttering meaningful dialogue—so what? This is science fiction, people.

I caught myself enjoying the film. Why did this happen? Did my brain turn to mush? Had Cameron changed?

In Titanic, he put his hand to craft an epic and failed, in my estimation, only achieving a hollow blockbuster.

In Avatar, he tries to create mythology, on a scale that only J.R.R. Tolkien has succeeded in doing successfully.

He didn’t exactly succeed, except in one way. In its depiction of gloriously beautiful Pandora, the film reached out — not forwards to heaven but backwards to the place where original integrity is restored. Joni Mitchell wrote it and Crosby, Stills and Nash sang it at Woodstock: “We are starlight, We are golden, We are caught in the Devil’s Bargain and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the Garden.”

The story of the Garden of Eden reminds us we need to find a path back to original innocence, a way out of original sin. The story of Pandora captures that much of this mythic, but essentially human yearning. Cameron’s film of Pandora at least gives us a chance to remember this longing.

So this time I was only rushing back to read C. S. Lewis’ Perelandra.

The Mercy Connection: Hope Clinic International

By Kate Ernsting

How does a willingness to give care manage to call together those who have a stark need with the very people who can fill that need, even across countries, languages and cultures?

Sometimes the simplest of connections can be the bridge.

For Dr. Dan Heffernan, who founded Hope Clinic International (HCI) to serve the poorest of the poor in Nicaragua, the connection was his grandchildren’s pediatrician.

His son Dan was working for an American company in Nicaragua, and Dr. Jaime Rodriguez was their family pediatrician. The younger Heffernans learned from Rodriguez about the desperate needs for medical care among the children he serves in a rural area about 90 miles from Managua.

“You know, Dad, we’ve got to do something to help these people,” Heffernan Jr. told his father, who responded by flying to Nicaragua. After meeting the Nicaraguan doctor and seeing his work, Dr. Heffernan said he was determined to get him more help.

During that first trip, they visited a government hospital. “These types of hospitals are intended for the poor, and down there that means poor. The big thrill for them was getting a fan to give relief from the heat in the overcrowded, understaffed and under-tooled hospital.”

Dr. Heffernan was eager to make another trip and begin planning ways to expand the mission to Nicaragua. He was familiar with what it took as founder of a clinic serving the indigent in Ypsilanti, Michigan. The Michigan clinic started sending medical supplies to Nicaragua, but the biggest need in that country was still unmet.

“In some of the poorest areas, there is much intermarriage, causing many birth defects,” explained Heffernan. Dr. Rodriguez said what he needed most were surgeons….”

Expanding into another country required many more connections. More volunteer medical personnel were needed, particularly pediatricians and pediatric surgeons. Also needed were facilities, translators, and Nicaraguans who could help people coming from the U.S. to connect with the children and mothers needing special care.

Dr. Heffernan found Sherry Snyder, a nurse, to take on the task of planning the first medical mission trip in January, 2001. Pediatric surgeon Joseph Lelli, now of Detroit Children’s hospital, and Ann Arbor pediatrician Dave Thorrez led the effort. Hope Clinic International now sends three medical missions and one surgical mission a year.

Dr. Lelli was the key, helping children with a rare birth defect which has a very high incidence in Nicaragua. A rare inborn abnormality, called “imperforate annus,” is characterized by the absence of a rectal opening and can be corrected with surgery. In the rural mountains regions of Nicaragua, “poor children do not have access to a trained surgeon or a hospital,” Sherry Snyder explained.

Bringing in these surgeons can be life-changing. Snyder told the story of one of the first patients, a 7-year-old girl with an intestinal defect who wasn’t expected to live. “She was emaciated, lying down, very weak. Dr. Lelli did the surgery, which took 12 hours, at the nearest hospital in Managua. I saw her on a recent trip and she’s fine and living a normal life.”

Another patient is 2-year-old Sylvia, the granddaughter of one of the local volunteers.

“Her grandfather told us she would have to go to Costa Rica to have the operation, and there was no way he could possibly afford either the trip or the operation.” Snyder said that after the surgical mission team operated, she is happy, healthy, and “you couldn’t tell she ever had the condition.”

A month after his first mission trip, Ann Arbor pediatrician Dr. Roger Anderberg’s son Timothy, a recent college graduate, was killed by a car. In memory of their son, Roger and his wife Lorrie established a medical clinic in his name in the Nicaraguan town of Estelí. Tim’s clinic is staffed by a full-time physician.

Hope made a local connection with the St. Vincent de Paul Society which now helps organize the HCI missions. The Society helped them locate areas where they could do the most good, in the towns of Jinotega and Estelí and now all of the native Nicaraguans in the Society volunteer at the clinic and help with the missions, Snyder said.

For the medical missions, many other American pediatricians assist from the Ann Arbor-Detroit area, including Dr. Steve Park, who often finds volunteers among the residents he supervises at the University of Michigan.

Today a Nicaraguan surgeon is part of the mission. He has been trained in a laparoscopic surgery technique used by Dr. Lelli. The team brought a laparoscopic tower last year and left it for the doctor to use.

Through her sister, Snyder learned of a team of California firefighters who became volunteers too. “I knew they would be invaluable because they were all Emergency Medical Technicians. Each team of 14-18 people needs 5-6 translators. In California many EMTs speak fluent Spanish. So we filled two big needs with one connection!”

Charity may begin at home but when the need is huge and hearts are willing, it certainly doesn’t end there.

For more information, contact Sherry Snyder at SSnyder@hopeclinicinternational.org

Kate Ernsting writes from Ann Arbor through her company, Excelsis Communications

Easter by George Herbert

Rise, heart, thy lord is risen. Sing his praise
Without delays,
Who takes thee by the hand, that thou likewise
With him may'st rise:
That, as his death calcinèd thee to dust,
His life may make thee gold, and, much more, just.

Awake, my lute, and struggle for thy part
With all thy art,
The cross taught all wood to resound his name
Who bore the same.
His stretchèd sinews taught all strings what key
Is best to celebrate this most high day.
Consort, both heart and lute, and twist a song
Pleasant and long;
Or, since all music is but three parts vied
And multiplied
Oh let thy blessèd Spirit bear a part,
And make up our defects with his sweet art.

George Herbert

Easter Song by George Herbert (1593 - 1633)

I Got me flowers to straw Thy way,
I got me boughs off many a tree;
But Thou wast up by break of day,
And brought’st Thy sweets along with Thee.

The sunne arising in the East,
Though he give light, and th’ East perfume,
If they should offer to contest
With Thy arising, they presume.

Can there be any day but this,
Though many sunnes to shine endeavour?
We count three hundred, but we misse:
There is but one, and that one ever.

February 25, 2009

Ash Wednesday Song

Dust to Dust,
Ashes blown from flame,
Hope sown and suffocating,
God’s face obscured,
Love’s touch too faint
Life’s lusts a chasm
Life’s hopes a phantom
Trapped within a dream

Our battle Cry,
Our spirit’s sigh,
Exhaled
Extinquished,
Not to be exhumed.

Who can wake the dreamer?
Who can span the gap?
Left by hearts unfrozen
Buried in souls unborn?
All drifting in an ocean
Too vast and void to cross?

The Lamb of God he takes away,
He takes away our sins,
Our King will make us holy,
Our Joy will make us whole.
The Son of God, he weeps for us,
But shouts, “Remove the stone!”

This Lent, we pray O Lord:
Teach us to remember
How to be reborn.


By Kate Ernsting