My Permanent Smile

For me, the most powerful scene in The Dark Knight was when a captured Joker was being beaten relentlessly by Batman, in full view of the police, in an attempt to attain the location of the hostages Harvey Dent and Rachel Dawes. While Heath Ledger’s performance was riveting, it wasn’t the acting that blew me away. It’s what he did and didn’t do.

As Batman continuously assaulted him the Joker didn’t fight back, didn’t cry, didn’t hide. Instead, he laughed hysterically.

“You have nothing. Nothing to threaten me with. Nothing to do with all your strength.”

The power of Ledger’s acting, while giving amazing credibility to the character, actually caused the viewer to miss the potency of that concept; “You have nothing to threaten me with.”

The Joker, in his need for no thing, was the most powerful man in that room. In his ambivalence to his own suffering, monetary gain, or the psychological ego boost of being feared, he was free. Not free in the way that Americans consider themselves “free,” but truly, wholly free.

And so are we.

We are free and more powerful than any thing because we have the one thing. The one thing that can’t be negotiated away, taken or lost without our deliberate effort. That is the grace, forgiveness and eternity of a risen king. While our social mountains erupt, our financial mountains fall and even our relationships are ripped to shreds – we have eternity.

To really wrap your head around that is magical and liberating. No matter the situation, no matter the exception, there is nothing to threaten us with, nothing for this world to do with all its strength. I pause when those words roll through my head and notice that my chest heaves a deeper kind of breath. The One Thing. King. Yahweh.

My favorite hymn was writ­ten by Horacio Spafford af­ter two ma­jor trau­mas in life. First, as a wealthy businessman in Chicago, the great fire of Oc­to­ber 1871 ru­ined him fi­nan­cial­ly. Short­ly af­ter, all four of Spaf­ford’s daugh­ters died in a col­li­sion with an­o­ther ship while crossing the Atlantic. Spaf­ford’s wife Anna sur­vived and sent him the now fa­mous tel­e­gram, “Saved alone.” Sev­er­al weeks lat­er, as Spaf­ford’s own ship passed near the spot where his daugh­ters died, he was in­spired to write these words:

When peace, like a river, attendeth my way,
When sorrows like sea billows roll;
Whatever my lot, Thou has taught me to say,
It is well, it is well, with my soul.

How could a man who lost every thing in his world write “it is well with my soul?” How could he laugh hysterically at the one beating him relentlessly? Was he as mentally unstable as the Joker? No. He just knew that he had every thing and could lose no thing that really mattered because he had eternity.

And that is why I too smile.

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