In the Christmas episode of Batman The Animated Series, done back in the 1990s, Dick Grayson asks Bruce Wayne why he had never seen It’s A Wonderful Life? Bruce’s reply was simply, “I could never get over the title.” Bruce’s reaction to the Frank Capra film is not unlike my own, but for different reasons. After all Bruce had watched his parents gunned down and as he became The Batman, was witness to all kinds of terrible crimes. Personally my issue was simple I didn’t like Jimmy Stewart all that much. By the time I first saw him in the 1960s he was kind of a parody of himself and I just wasn’t impressed. It took Marlo Thomas to change my mind.
Marlo decided to take It’s A Wonderful Life and reverse most of the rolls. The part of George was taken over by Marlo and she was the one That Mr. Potter steals the money from. Marlo was very active in the women’s rights movement and this was done to help get her point across. She changed the title from It’s a Wonderful Life to, It Happened One Christmas. This I saw and this I loved.
The story of an every man, George Bailey, who gives up his life’s dreams very slowly to help his neighbors and his friends and his family and then is left with a problem of his own that he cannot solve on a Christmas Eve, is a story that many people can relate too. George has helped so many people. He thinks he has lost eight thousand dollars of his company’s money, when in truth, Mr. Potter, who owns a rival company has stolen the cash in order to ruin George. Feeling alone and forsaken, George heads to a bridge to kill himself. He is stopped by an angel named Clarence who in order to show George that he doesn’t understand the purpose of his life, shows George what the world would be like if George had never been born.
No George meant that many lives would be ruined. Mr. Potter would run the town and his friends and family would be living in misery. Clarence shows George that he has made a difference even if he cannot see it himself. He shows George that from an eternal perspective George’s Life has great meaning.
Last night while thinking about It’s A Wonderful Life,” I decided to take out a page from Clarence’s book I decided to look at my own past and see if the same held true for me. I wanted to know if the stuff I had gone through had any meaning. I wanted to know If my life could be seen as wonderful?
And do you know what? I am not going to tell you. Telling about my own life seems to me to be a little self-serving, and so that is not where I am going. I am issuing you a challenge however. How do you see your own life? Do you feel despair? Is the upcoming Christmas Season something that is giving you pain instead of joy? Then I challenge you, be honest with yourself, and ask yourself what would the world be like if I wasn’t here?
There are rules here. You have to maintain integrity and you cannot pass off good things as too little to matter, and or bad things as though they were the only things that matter. You have to keep perspective on everything. If you are suffering from a depression don’t do this alone, do it with someone else as your depression will color your thoughts the wrong way. In fact if you are suffering from depression severely don’t do this at all but go and seek professional help.
I believe that if we play Clarence for ourselves, if we look back and see what life would be like for many people if we had never been born, we can see that that we have a greater purpose than we give ourselves credit for. We will see the hand of God in our lives and we will see, that indeed, It’s A Wonderful Life!
