The Myth of Orpheus was the first high school movie we made. Our follow-up was a gruesome biopic of Russia’s Ivan the Terrible. Then, finally, in our senior year, we ambitiously took up Dante’s Inferno.
My friends and I all had our roles in these efforts. I roughed out the scripts. Dan Orfield, Paul Luther, Mac Greer, Corey Guest, Kelly Leslie (now my wife), and a few others acted in our films. But perhaps most important to the whole enterprise was Ken Tekell, our cameraman, who in a sense was also the director for all the films.
Ken’s role was especially crucial given the fact that none of us really knew how to edit Super 8 film, which meant not only did we all have to nail our parts on the first take, but Ken had to capture it all with no luxury of fixing anything up in post. As a result, though he never actually appeared in the movies, Ken’s fingerprints were always all over them.
As director and cameraman, Ken’s finest moment no doubt came during the filming of Dante’s Inferno when about halfway into the production, we began rolling on a crucial scene in which Paul, playing Virgil (Dante’s guide through the underworld), and Dan, playing Dante himself, were strolling along the top of a ravine near Houston’s Buffalo Bayou, which we were using as our set for the fifth circle of Hell, when suddenly at the edge of this steep drop-off, Dan inadvertently stepped on Paul’s toga causing him to lose his balance. Paul reached out to Dan for help, but soon they were both tumbling down the 20-foot slope head-over-heels.
Now recall here, we can’t edit anything. There’s no “Cut! Let’s try that again,” so Ken, still shooting, began to shake the camera, mimicking the tremors of an underworld earthquake as he tracked Dan and Paul rolling down the ravine. Whether it was a real in-the-moment artistic choice—or Ken just couldn’t stop laughing at his friends in costume falling headlong into Buffalo Bayou—as a rudimentary special effect it turned out great. Sure, there was no earthquake in the script or in Dante’s original text, but Ken had managed to save the day, suggesting to us all that sometimes the most important person in a production, in the midst of a story, is one the audience never even sees.
This is the lesson of the book of Esther, as well. Though remarkably never mentioned by name, God’s fingerprints are all over this quite cinematic story, orchestrating the scenes, directing the ups and downs, and eventually saving the day.
The book opens with God’s people exiled far from home under the despotic rule of a foreign king who decides to hold a giant party to honor himself. In the midst of the festivities, the king demands that his queen parade herself before his guests. When she refuses he deposes her, calling then for a nation-wide beauty contest to find a new queen, which as it proceeds leads to one of the exiles being chosen, a striking young woman and an orphan of exceptional character named Esther, though she’s careful, even as queen, to keep secret from everyone the truth about her heritage.
In the meantime, it turns out that one of the king’s advisors is a genocidal maniac named Haman who wants to kill all the exiled Jews and especially has it in for a man named Mordecai who, unbeknownst to Haman, is Queen Esther’s own cousin who raised her after her parents died.
Suspense builds as the courageous Esther, risking her life in coming unsummoned before the king, sets a trap for the villainous Haman, and soon he’s hoisted upon his own petard, executed on the very gallows he had constructed to hang Mordecai. In the end, the exiles, God’s people, are saved.
Again, though quite remarkably, God’s name is never mentioned—as the story of Esther unfolds, God’s presence and power is sensed undeniably working behind the scenes, orchestrating all that’s happening such that to this day during the annual the feast of Purim, those who know this text best, our Jewish brothers and sisters, pray a beautiful prayer of gratitude to this ancient story’s invisible director.
“In the days of Mordecai and Esther,” they pray, “when Haman the Wicked, rose up against them and sought to destroy, slay, and exterminate all the Jews...You, in your abundant mercy, nullified his counsel, frustrated his intention and caused his design to return upon his own head.”
This celebratory prayer reminds them each year as it should remind us too, that though we may not see God, He remains the Great Director behind the scenes of our world...and our lives.
God, help us to detect and recognize Your fingerprints. Amen.
