No Infestation: Weathering With You and the Value of Humanity

“Who cares if we don’t see the sun shine ever again? I want you more than any blue sky. The weather can go crazy.”

Weathering With You (2019)¹

 

Tokyo in the rain! Surely there could be no more appropriate cover photo for a post about Weathering With You.

It came as no surprise at all that I absolutely loved Weathering With You.² After all, Makoto Shinkai’s previous film, Your Name,³ is my very favourite film ever, and basically all of the elements that secured it that lofty and coveted title were also present in Weathering With You. Adorable, wholesome plotline with heroes I could really root for, tick. Sweet-spot magical realism, pushing just far enough beyond the possible for the thing to properly feel like an escape, tick. Neat, engaging scripting that felt beautifully well tied together, tick. A good blend of funny bits, dramatic bits, slow bits to build the plot, and heartbreaking-yet-uplifting emotional bits that reach right down into your soul to stir it properly, tick. Animation so breathtakingly beautiful that I could wish, contra Paul, that my whole body really were an eye, in order to be able to drink in each frame more fully, tick. Well, except for the fact that were that so, I wouldn’t be able to hear Radwimps’ gorgeous, soaring soundtrack, or the way that the sound marries up with the visuals so perfectly: there’s a moment, for instance, when a huge, heavy rainfall suddenly erupts out of what had been a clear sky, and it’s so beautifully done that you can practically feel the water hit the ground. Tick. It hasn’t usurped Your Name for the top spot on my list, but only because I think Your Name’s plot is cleverer – pulls you through more twists and turns that make you marvel at it, kind of thing. That said, the two plots have a great deal in common (spoilers for both films ahead, proceed at your own risk). Teenage love story between a city kid and a country kid; magical realism, with the magical elements being explained through things related to the Shinto religion; random episode at the beginning of the film that’s very significant but only explained later; climax involving the boy doing something a bit crazy in order to save the girl from some kind of natural-disaster-related threat.

Although what that natural-disaster-related threat actually means for the girl is pretty different in each case. In Your Name, the threat is a meteorite that’s going to destroy our heroine’s entire town, and so the way she has to be saved is by all the people being evacuated from the impact zone. In Weathering With You, by contrast, our heroine Hina, as a so-called ‘weather maiden’ with supernatural influence over the weather, knows that she has to offer herself as a sacrifice in order to stop the freak rainstorms that have been plaguing Tokyo of late. When protagonist Hodaka follows her up into the clouds and brings her back to earth, the rain starts again. And it never stops. It rains so much that three years later, much of Tokyo is underwater. Hina doesn’t need to be saved from the natural disaster; by being saved, she causes it. Her life is bought at the cost of great swathes of the city lost to the sea.

It wasn’t the ending I was expecting. I suppose I was anticipating that there would turn out to be a way whereby Hina could survive and the weather could be put back to normal, because, you know, that’s the kind of thing that tends to happen at the end of wholesome animated films. But no – the decision was made and it came at its price. I liked that. It forced us to ask whether it was worth it.

There was a point earlier in the film where Hodaka’s employer Mr. Suga, not really believing in the weather-maiden story, made an offhand remark to the effect that one death for the sake of fixing the crazy weather seemed like a fair enough deal. It was clear, though, that that remark came not from a place of thoughtful rationality, but one of bitterness: Mr. Suga is still reeling from the premature death of his wife and resenting that he is permitted only limited contact with their young daughter, and what he seems to really be saying is something like, well, at least that death would do some good; why should this weather-maiden person live while my beloved does not? One can sympathise on those grounds, but not agree. Another perspective is offered by a sweet old lady that Hodaka and Hina helped out earlier in the film. After Tokyo begins to be lost to the rising waters, she takes an equanimous approach: sure, her old home is gone, but centuries ago, this entire area used to be underwater. The freak rainstorms are just the sea claiming back what belongs to it, the planet shifting through its normal, natural cycles. Hodaka repeats this idea to himself as he goes to meet Hina after three years apart, testing it, trying to work out whether he thinks it accounts for what has happened. He sees Hina and concludes not. The neverending rain isn’t just nature doing what nature does; he and Hina made a choice. They decided that it wasn’t acceptable for her to be offered as a sacrifice. They decided that if the rain never stopped, that was a price worth paying for her life. It was they who, to that end, sentenced whole districts of Tokyo to be slowly swallowed up by the ever-increasing flood – and Hodaka is glad, very glad indeed, that they did.

 

I, of course, already know what it’s like for the rain to never stop, because I live in Britain. (That’s a joke. The rain does stop sometimes.)

Well, that was how I understood it, anyway. I think of Weathering With You as a bold, uplifting affirmation of the uniquely great value of human life. Which is a bit of a contrary idea, actually, when held against much of fashionable modern thought – particularly if you take it specifically as affirming the uniquely great value of human life at the expense of disorder in the natural world.

I don’t know whether you’ve noticed this, but there’s a strand of thinking within the modern sustainability movement that sees population control as a necessary part of the solution. Some people call this view neo-Malthusianism, after a Georgian clergyman called Thomas Malthus who wrote an essay about population in which he posited that, whereas population growth is exponential, growth in food production is linear. Consequently, he argued, if left unchecked, the human population will end up increasing faster than food production can be ramped up to sustain it, leading to catastrophes of famine, disease, and war. A better solution, Malthus reasoned, is just to get people not to produce as many new humans in the first place.⁴ His ideas have experienced something of a revival of late, though with a new climate-emergency sort of flavour. Remember the Duke and Duchess of Sussex (or whichever titles they’re going by now they’ve ‘stepped back’) saying that they won’t have more than two children, in the interests of the environment?⁵ Or have you come across the BirthStrike movement, with people trying to bring about large-scale changes to How Things Are Done by refusing to have children until such changes are made?⁶ Or what about Population Matters, which claims Sir David Attenborough as its patron, and advocates very straightforwardly for having fewer children, and also achieving certain changes to get people in the developing world to have fewer children?⁷

I’m with Population Matters on the benefits of women’s education and proper access to contraception, but I approve of those things because, you know, because they give women greater freedom and access to a better quality of life, not simply because they tend to result in there being fewer humans in the world than there would otherwise have been. Neo-Malthusianism comes way too close, in my view, to seeing humans as a kind of harmful infestation in what would otherwise be a nice, orderly, balanced world. And the focus on the developing world strikes me as particularly yikes: like, sorry, all you folks living in poverty in Africa and Asia and Latin America, but there are just too bloody many of you already and we don’t want any more of you. No, worse than that: there are just too bloody many of you already and if you cause your children to be too numerous, you render them guilty of destroying the planet merely by existing. Like an infestation. Shudder.

The trouble with seeing the problem as being that there are Simply Too Many Humans, is that that’s such a dehumanising position to take. It views humans not as individuals, not as people, not as precious lives of uniquely great value, but as a mere statistic. Humanity as nothing more than a great ever-consuming Blob that needs to be cut down to size. The right to exist is the most fundamental individual human right there is, and yet somebody here is necessarily being stripped of that right. But having said that, who? Because even the most strident neo-Malthusian is also, whoops, still a human; still another sliver of colour pushing the population bar higher up the chart. Surely she’ll be compelled either to determinedly focus the blame on other people – those peasants in the developing world being the obvious target⁸ – or to end up deeply insecure about her own right to exist?

 

Though you can see who’s using the most electricity there.

There is, I think, a pretty interesting – though not so interesting as troubling – intersection where these kinds of ideas collide with Christian doctrine. We all know that God made the world and it was very good; and then our first ancestors, daft things that they were, went and disobeyed him, and thenceforth everything was messed up. So humans are the problem, right? The world was ‘very good’ before our sinfulness sent it all to hell in a handcart, and it follows that it would have been better off without us. Turns out we are a kind of harmful infestation here.

                                                                                                                                

Except that that’s not actually true at all. For starters, the world wasn’t ‘very good’ until it had human beings in it: everything else in creation was just ‘good’.⁹ Categorically, then, the world would not be better off without us – not in the eyes of God, the only one whose opinions are actually completely true and indeed the measure for truth. Also, I know I’ve written about this before, but the pre-Fall world wasn’t perfect. The potential for sin was there, and that made it flawed. And so this whole mess that we’re living in now isn’t the result of everything having gone off the rails; it’s part of the necessary plot to bring us to the truly perfect happy ending.¹⁰

So humans are the one vital component that elevates God’s creation from ‘good’ to ‘very good’; and humans, moreover, are the one thing he specifically redeems for participation in the new creation. Jesus died to save people – people, not ecosystems. And beyond that, he died to save individuals. He knows each of his sheep by name; he indwells each personally by his Spirit. Humanity is no statistic in God’s eyes, no Blob. It’s no infestation of an otherwise nice, orderly, balanced world. On the contrary, it’s the one bit of the world that God cares enough about to have sacrificed his dearly beloved Son to the worse fate that exists on its behalf. He places that kind of uniquely great value on the life of each individual he has chosen to be blameless before him.

So was Hodaka right? Was saving Hina worth it – worth the freak weather, the sunken city, the disordering of the natural world? If we’re going by God’s standards, then yes, yes it was. Indeed, when, one day, God completes the rescue from sin and death that he has begun in us, he’ll do a lot worse than flood Tokyo: he’ll set the whole world on fire. He’ll bring the present cosmos to an end, and establish a new heavens and new earth in its place – and this so that we whom he has chosen might survive, might live with him forever and ever. Humanity is no infestation in creation. Humanity is, in no insignificant sense, the point of creation. We’re kind of what creation is all about.

This isn’t an argument against trying to make the best use of the resources we have; I’m all for doing our best to live sustainably and keep the natural environment healthy. It is, however, an argument against seeing Too Many Humans as an inherent problem.¹¹ Humans aren’t just some population that needs to be controlled for the sake of maintaining balance in the world; they’re individuals of uniquely great value. They’re no infestation in creation; they’re the only thing that makes it ‘very good’.

Footnotes

¹ The exact form of the quotation may not be reliable, as I am relying on random people on Reddit for it, but that was the gist.

² Here’s a trailer to give you a flavour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6iK6DjV_iE. I think it might still be in UK cinemas if you fancy it – definitely worth the big screen experience.

³ For that one, you can have Radwimps’ music video for the theme song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2GujJZfXpg. I could seriously cry from how beautiful this animation is.

⁴ Thanks, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusianism.

⁵ This should jog your memory if not: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7301321/Prince-Harry-interviewed-Dr-Jane-Goodall-Meghans-edition-British-Vogue.html.

⁶ I should add that they say they ‘disagree with focussing on the topic of population before equality based system change in regards to tackling the environmental crisis’: https://www.birthstrikeforfuture.com/.

⁷ Have a click around, see what you think: https://populationmatters.org/.

⁸ I feel I should clarify that I’m using the word ‘peasants’ ironically there.

⁹ See for yourself: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=gen+1&version=ESVUK.

¹⁰ See ‘Better, Not Back’, under November of last year in my blog archive. Or, you know, don’t, if you have stuff to be getting on with.

¹¹ There’s also, on a natural, practical level, the fact that humans are also the only beings in the material universe who have yet proved any good at coming up with better ways to use resources so that they can suffice for larger populations. Deprive the world of more humans and you deprive it of more ingenuity. But that wasn’t my big point today, and I didn’t want to confuse things by putting it in the main body.

Blessed Are the Misfits: An Extremely One-Sided Review

“You know that feeling when God is right there, thisclose, and you can just feel His loving arms around you, and you can literally hear his voice whispering in your ear, telling you how much He loves you?

I don’t.

I never have.

Maybe you can relate. Maybe you can’t. Or maybe, if you’ve gotten the impression you’re too analytical, too logical, too introverted, too just plain weird, or too whatever for God, you’ll let me tell you a quick story.”

Brant Hansen, Blessed Are the Misfits (2017)

I’ll be straight with you: the one solitary goal of this post is to persuade you that you ought to read Blessed Are the Misfits by Brant Hansen. I have a copy if you’d like to borrow it. Otherwise, a copy of your own will be the best eight-pounds-seventy-five you ever spend on Hive.¹

 

This is my copy. It has my name in the inside front cover, so you know you can’t get away with not giving it back.

I first read Blessed Are the Misfits back in June this year, and even then I thought it was the best so-called ‘Christian book’ I’d ever read. This slim little volume was the reassurance I’d been looking for ever since I was a teenager worrying that I wasn’t a real Christian because I’d never really ‘felt’ God’s presence. It was as if pieces of my own brain, my own soul, had fallen out onto the page somehow, and yet here they were being put forward by Mr. Hansen as his – as if they might belong to quite a lot of us, actually. The blurb on the back describes the book as “highly provocative”, but what it said didn’t strike me as provocative at all, just sort of blooming obvious, and yet seemingly never said by anyone else. It both profoundly comforted and unequivocally challenged me.

And so I gave the copy I’d been reading back to the dear friend and sister I’d nicked it from, made use of a book token I had kicking around to buy my own, recommended it to a few people, then stuck it on my bookshelf and left things at that. Until, that is, this weekend just gone, when I was Not In A Particularly Cheery Mood, basically because, by various means, some of which I can identify, I’d the lie creep back in to my internal monologue that how I felt about God had some bearing on how he felt about me. Now, in case you hadn’t noticed, tying God’s view of you – your objective worth – to your own ability to feel certain feelings, or do anything else, actually, is a remarkably reliable way to foster a Sense of General Failure and Worthlessness, so you know, if you’ve ever wanted one of those, you’re welcome for the pro tip. But who am I kidding, you’ve almost certainly already got one kicking around somewhere already, whatever size it might be and whether or not it’s seen much service lately; I’m pretty sure practically everyone has. (Correct me if I’m wrong.)

Anyway, rereading Blessed Are the Misfits pretty much demolished my own (admittedly fairly small and brittle) Sense of General Failure and Worthlessness to a basically unbothersome level within a few hours, so I felt strongly encouraged to extend that same opportunity to my lovely readers. I mean, obviously I can’t guarantee that any one of you guys will obtain the same kind of sweet, soothing relief coupled with genuine, stirring encouragement from the book that I did, but the points Mr. Hansen makes are so excellent and so broadly applicable that it’ll be worth your reading it anyway. And if you’re not persuaded merely by my having waxed lyrical about the book’s merits, I’ll now provide a chapter-by-chapter summary of his arguments, followed by some of the quotations from the book that raised the biggest grins from me. I don’t feel as if I’m particularly ‘spoiling’ anything, because it’s the way Mr. Hansen makes these points that makes them so compelling, but if you’re one of those people who’s sort of hypersensitive to having things spoiled for you, you might not want to read any further.

Chapter One: It’s Not Just You

If you feel as if you don’t ‘fit’ in the modern church, as if you don’t experience God’s presence in the way other people seem to, good news: Jesus is for you.

Chapter Two: Together, Yet Apart

The present age is the Church’s betrothal period. We are not supposed to be fully satisfied in our relationship with God yet, because it has yet to be consummated.

Chapter Three: Blessed Are My Fellow People on the Autism Spectrum (and Those Who Can Relate to Us)

Jesus’ approach to stuff is totally different from the world’s, which is pretty fab news for people who don’t really get the world’s approach.

Chapter Four: Blessed Are Those of Us Who Apparently Landed on the Wrong Planet

Humans make no sense, and human cultures make no sense. But God loves humans anyway, and came to live among them anyway. We’re called to do the same.

Chapter Five: Blessed Are the Unfeeling Faithful

Not hearing God’s voice audibly or experiencing his presence emotively is normal, not an indication that something is amiss in the relationship. More remarkable and desirable than either of these things is when he fosters obedience in us.

Chapter Six: Blessed Are the Unfeeling Faithful, Part 2: Real “Fruit”

How we deal with the people around us is a better indication of God’s work in our lives than how we feel.

Chapter Seven: Blessed Are the Introverted Evangelical Failures

Evangelism is not the Christian’s main duty. Building a Church where all its members, with all their various gifts, are united in love, is more important.

Chapter Eight: Blessed Are the People Who Can’t Pray Worth a Darn

Prayers don’t have to be long; the Lord’s Prayer isn’t. Praying briefly and inarticulately is good – way better than not praying. God actually wants us to pester him.

Chapter Nine: Blessed Are the People Who Just Read That Last Chapter but Still Have Some Questions

Prayer is action. God grants our prayers a role in his plans. You can’t really fail at praying except by not praying.

Chapter Ten: Blessed Are the Wounded

God is glorified in making something beautiful out of all the sucky stuff that’s happened to us; in healing us so we can help to heal others.

Chapter Eleven: Blessed Are Those Who Don’t Have Amazing Spiritual Stories

Inspiring testimonies and sermon illustrations do not accurately represent real life. Our stories are not yet resolved, because the resolution is yet to come.

Chapter Twelve: Blessed Are the Impostors

Constantly remind yourself that, however rubbish you might be at doing God stuff, you’re invited to be in his presence.

Chapter Thirteen: Blessed Are the Introverts Who Keep Trying

Dealing with other people is hard. We’re to love them anyway, because God does, and he changes us to make us able.

Chapter Fourteen: Blessed Are the Perpetual Strugglers

It’s easy to settle for the cheap imitation that is sin, because pursuing what’s real requires commitment, and results in struggle. But commitment brings true freedom, and the struggle is proof of God at work in us.

Chapter Fifteen: Blessed Are the People Who Do Church Anyway

Each of us really needs Christian community – to participate in it like family. Other Christians may be hard to deal with, but it’s a glorious thing when the family stays together anyway.

Chapter Sixteen: Blessed Are the Melancholy and the Depressed

It’s possible to be joyful even when depressed, because you can counter what your feelings tell you (often not true) with what God tells you (always true).

Chapter Seventeen: Blessed Are Those Who Don’t Take Themselves So Seriously

We can afford not to take everything so seriously, because we already know how it’s all going to end.

Chapter Eighteen: Blessed Are the Skeptics and Those Who Don’t Know Where Else to Go

Christianity is the most compelling worldview out there not only because it makes the best sense but also because it makes the best offer.

Chapter Nineteen: Blessed Are the Unnoticed

God doesn’t favour the sort of people we think he would; he favours the humble. We need less setting out to change the world and more doing little acts of obedience today.

Chapter Twenty: Blessed Are the Lonely

In the present age, it’s inevitable that we’ll feel more distant from God than we want to. But the wedding is coming, he is with us even now, and he has not forgotten us.

Chapter Twenty-One: Blessed Are the Misfit Royalty

Unlike the world, God elevates, even identifies with, the weak and the poor and the marginalised. We are to do the same. That’s our team. And it’s the winning team.

So there’s a summary for you. You’ve probably got a sense of some of the big recurring themes. Obedience trumps feelings; so does truth. Dissatisfaction and struggle in the present age is only to be expected.² Loving one another is fundamental, all the more because people are hard to deal with. And above all, God loves the misfits. None of this, to my mind, is “highly provocative”; it’s no more than what the scriptures say. But Mr. Hansen manages to show incredibly incisively how modern church culture fails to reflect these principles, all while refraining from turning the thing into an irritated tirade of the sort I’m prone to going off on when the issue of modern church culture comes up in conversation. As I say, the book contains both massive reassurance at being loved and massive exhortation to love – which sounds a lot like the Bible, really, so that kind of tells you why it’s so good. But as a last bit of persuasion, and to give you a sense of the totally charming tone of the thing, here are a few little extracts that I think are particularly nicely put.

I wanted friends. I wanted their excitement about God too. They told me I needed to “plug in” to everything. All of it. I would need to square-dance with strangers, “share” in intimate small small groups, and go up to people I didn’t know on campus and tell them about my faith.

This sounded fantastic to me! … Except for the square dances with strangers, the sharing in intimate small groups, and also the part about going up to people I didn’t know on campus and telling them about my faith.

Imagine if Noah wrote a book: How to Get God to Speak to You Five Times over 950 Years.

In Genesis, we get Abraham going decades without God’s audible voice. Isaac apparently heard it twice in his lifetime. Rebekah? Once.

Maybe God is like one of those Food Network master chefs, on one of those shows where they give cooks some random, odd ingredients and then challenge them to make a gourmet meal out of them. (“Okay, here’s a halibut, a gourd, and a Hostess Ding Dong.³ Go.”)

Maybe this is why Jesus’ stories are metaphors. Maybe you noticed He rarely picked individual people and didn’t name anyone to make his point. He never said, “Let me tell you about that time that Andrew here was really awesome and helped an old lady across the street and…”

I suspect He refrained from doing that because He knows us so well. He knows we’d instantly start missing the point and worshiping The Perfect Andrew and reenacting The Holy Crossing of the Street in yearly festivals.

Jesus takes the idea that we should treat some as more important than others and He burns it down, salts the fields around it, dissolves the whole thing in acid, and then hits it with a hydrogen bomb … and then we decide to do it anyway.

For example: He says we shouldn’t use religious titles (Matt. 23:8-12). I’m but a simple man, so I don’t understand all the theological and cultural complexities. But apparently higher minds than mine have unpacked the nuance behind, “Don’t use religious titles,” and found that He meant, roughly, “Hey, you guys should totally use religious titles!”

Well, I couldn’t really agree with that last one more if I tried, so let’s leave things there – with a thank you to Brant Hansen for writing the book, and an even bigger thank you to God that the conclusions reached in the book are true. To all the misfits out there: welcome to the club. We might be a weird bunch – weird and annoying and incapable, with too many ongoing struggles and no great spiritual achievements under our belts – but I can tell you for certain, our God is truly spectacular.

Footnotes

¹ Eight seventy-five? Bargain and a half. https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/Brant-Hansen/Blessed-Are-the-Misfits--Great-News-for-Believers-who-are/21004854

² I blogged to similar effect in ‘Blessed Dissatisfaction’ back in July. I probably owe more of my argument there than I even realised then to having read Blessed Are the Misfits.

³ Apparently a kind of small, round, snack chocolate cake, with a cream filling and a chocolate glaze (I had to look it up).