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Connections...
President Bartlet, true believer
From his breakout role as the tormented Captain Willard in the Vietnam War epic Apocalypse Now to his current role as President Josiah Bartlet on NBC's Emmy award-winning drama The West Wing, Actor Martin Sheen has created a body of work that few American performers have equaled. He has portrayed characters of intensity and passion torment and goodness--much like his own struggles as an actor, husband, father and believer.
In 1977, Sheen had become a bankable star when Francis Ford Coppola cast him in Apocalypse Now. But, despite the fame, the money and a wife and family who adored him, Sheen's life plunged into crisis.
"I was drinking heavily," Sheen remembers. I was confused about who I was and why I was here. I was doing this humungous film that had so much riding on it. I had gotten very low. I didn't feel any sense of control or personal worth. It was a period of despair." Then Sheen, only in his 30's, suffered a near fatal heart attack. "I got very ill, but you couldn't separate the physical problems from the spiritual."
A director friend, who had undergone a similar journey, gave him a copy of The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky. "At the end of the book I realized I was in need of a faith, of a grounding, that I was still really a Catholic and that I must return."
Some time later, Sheen was making a film in Paris and, on a day off from shooting, he found his way to the only English speaking Catholic Church in Paris and returned "home". "I was like a new convert," Sheen remembers. Since then, sheen has been an activist in many social justice causes and issues, including racism, nuclear arms, war and homelessness.
Of
his return to the faith of his childhood, Martin Sheen says: "[The past 20 years have been] the most difficult of my life, but by far the happiest. I came back to the Church of Mother Teresa, Daniel Berrigan and Dorothy Day, and began to get involved in social-justice issues& "
"Religion, if it's real, can't be a Sunday thing. Martin Luther King said the church is a place to go forth from, that we've got to take what we believe into the streets. If [our faith] has any moral value, we have to live it and lead." [Parade, December 2, 2001; Reader's Digest, June 2002.]
CONNECTION: Christ has built his church not on the wisdom and erudition of theological sophisticates but on the "rock" of the heartfelt faith and belief of men and women like the fisherman Peter, Mother Teresa, Martin Sheen- and you and me. Christ calls each one of us to be the "rock" of his church: to bring his love, justice and mercy to whatever place we can, one small act of kindness at a time; he entrusts to us the 'keys" to heaven: to unlock, in the faith we live and the work of our lives, the presence of God in our world. Our baptismal certificates are much more than membership cards identifying us as belonging to a group of like-minded Christians. Faith is calling to live in the justice and mercy of God, to proclaim to a despairing world the promise of the Resurrection and the life of the world to come.
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