stability by Br. Leven Harton
a Path to Living in the Truth
One of my favorite movies is a fun blockbuster from
2004, Catch Me If You Can. It tells the true story of a young man named Frank Abagnale, Jr. (Leonardo DiCaprio) who, somewhat through his circumstances, and somewhat through his own decisions, finds himself becoming a world-class forgery artist. As he lives this life, he is forced to run from place to place: he begins as a fake airline pilot, forging and cashing fake paychecks; then becomes a fake doctor and, once again, is forging his pay; then he poses as a lawyer (somehow passing the Louisiana bar exam to do it—presumably by cheating); and he ends up, just before he gets caught, simply forging those airlines checks again. So Frank runs from place to place, making a life out of running. It is his running that is so interesting. Frank is not running just from “the law” but from a particular person, FBI agent Carl Handratty (Tom Hanks). Carl has been on Frank’s trail since the beginning, and the two develop a father-sonlike relationship in brief encounters and in yearly Christmas Eve phone conversations. In spite of the apparent opposition of an FBI agent chasing a criminal, a depth undermines the straightforwardness of Carl’s pursuit of Frank. As the movie goes on, the action becomes less about restoring justice by catching the criminal and more about the significance of their relationship, the two growing into a real friendship. The movie is, then, fittingly titled, Catch Me If You Can: “You, Carl, catch me, Frank, if you can.” In a particularly telling scene, Carl is extraditing Frank back to the States to be prosecuted and tried. On the plane back to America, as Carl sits next to Frank, he turns and asks, “One thing I still can’t figure out, how did you pass the bar in Louisiana?” And the longtime criminal says that he’ll tell him if Carl will give him half of his éclair. But Carl won’t do it and, therefore, doesn’t find out! He stuffs the éclair in his mouth with evident pleasure, a sort of punishment for Frank’s elusiveness, his unwillingness to tell! What is interesting about this scene is that it maintains the fundamental quality of DiCaprio’s character, his need to avoid being “found out,” his need to avoid being known by others. Carl has captured Frank Abagnale, Jr., has tracked down and arrested him, but there is this one piece of information about Frank that Carl doesn’t know and Frank simply isn’t ready to tell him. This kind of honest and straightforward communication and vulnerability (admitting how he cheated at something as important as the bar exam), this immediacy, being known, Frank is not yet ready for. Even at the end of his criminal career. I imagine that Frank would not have felt comfortable in a religious community that takes the vow of stability. The title of the movie says it all: Catch Me If You Can — understand me, know me, accept me, be with me, if you can—but I’ll be doing my best to avoid that, to confuse you, to hold you at arm’s length, to feed you a story. This attitude wouldn’t work in monastic life. The way St. Benedict envisions monks living together, I would suggest, is perfectly contradicted by Frank in this movie. Fr. Michael Casey has done much for me in understanding this vow of stability. He points to the inevitable consequence of living together as Benedictines in his book Strangers to the City; he writes of community life, “we are compelled to live at a high level of truthfulness, since we cannot escape from what we have been and still are.” The important part of this quote is the last, “what we have been and still are.” Our permanence, our stability—this is decisive! Unlike Frank, we stick around. We are caught by this vow! We are caught
6
Kansas Monks
