Groundhog Day

February 2nd in the liturgical calendar is the Feast of the Purification of the Virgin Mary, the feast that commemorates the presentation of her Son in the Temple 40 days after his birth. It was on this occasion that the aged Simeon declared the infant Jesus a “light for the revelation of the gentiles.” Traditionally, candles are blessed on the feast, with a prayer that “just as visible fire dispels the shadows of the night, so may invisible fire, that is, the brightness of the Holy Spirit, free us from the blindness of every vice.”

Simeon’s prophecy led to a folk belief that the weather of February 2nd had a prognostic value. If the sun shone for the greater part of the day, there would be 40 more days of winter, but if the skies were overcast, there would be an early spring. The badger was added later in Germany, but the Germans who emigrated to Pennsylvania could only find what native Americans in the area called a wojak, or woodchuck. Since the Indians considered the groundhog a wise animal, it seemed only natural to appoint him, as we learn in the movie, “Seer of Seers, Sage of Sages, Prognosticator of Prognosticators.”

The film Groundhog Day tells the story of a man, Phil Connors, a local weatherman who is sent to Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania to cover the annual revealing of Punxsutawney Phil’s prediction about the arrival of winter.

Phil comes off at the beginning of the film as pretty arrogant, as a big-city success story who has a lot of disdain for having to go out to the middle of nowhere and cover this ridiculous event. He files his report, predicting that the town will not get any snow out of an oncoming coldfront, but he bungles the forecast and the town gets so much snow that the crew can’t leave.

His producer, Rita, sees through Phil’s thin exterior and realizes how insecure and selfish he really is. She quotes the following lines from a nineteenth-century poet at him:

The wretch, concentred all in self, Living, shall forfeit fair renown, And, doubly dying, shall go down To the vile dust, from whence he sprung, Unwept, unhonoured, and unsung.

Rita’s take on Phil, at this point, is that his selfishness and vanity leads ultimately to a lack of human connection, to a profound loneliness. One might expect, if this were a traditional romantic comedy, for Rita and Phil to continue to hate each other for about half the film, until a hilarious set of misunderstandings eventually causes them to develop affection for one another, and they end up happily together at the end of the story.

But this film takes a rather surprising and unconventional turn. Rita and Phil part ways at the end of the day, and the next morning, as Phil wakes up, the same song plays on the radio, and the same events as the previous day begin to unfold in precisely the same way. Phil realizes after a few days of this that he is stuck in some sort of bizarre existential time loop. It’s Kafkaesque; just like Gregor Samsa, there’s no explanation for this strange turn of events. But unlike Kafka, it’s a comedy. So Phil begins to have fun with his existential loop, doing a variety of things with no regard for tomorrow, since there really is no tomorrow.

Now, let’s step back for a second and consider the first philosophical question the film is asking us: what would you do if there were no consequences for your actions? Is goodness something we perform only because of the threat of consequences, or is goodness something we are, something we become, something we inhabit and live as an expression of what it is to be human?

Does goodness make us happy? Or is the person who does whatever he or she wants truly happy? Is the person who is good better off somehow than the person who is not good?

After all, many of us might choose to do the same sorts of things that Phil does, knowing that when he wakes up tomorrow, the board will be erased and he can start over again anew. But what about two weeks later? Two months later? Two years later? Phil discovers, as Plato thought 2300 years ago that most of us would in the same situation, that living without consequences is boring, repetitive, and ultimately depressing. We may deny it initially, but what we really want is goodness.

As one commentator on the film puts it:

There is a way back, a way through the imprisoning mystery of yourself, a way back into life.

For Phil, the way back involves Rita, the producer, someone that he is initially attracted to but whose magic really begins to work on him as he sees her do the same things in the same way day after day after day. He grows to love her. And in that love, he realizes, he may find true happiness. But what will it take to win her heart?

Phil has to learn what it takes to attain the true happiness that Rita may offer him. And his learning is a process of de-centering himself and his own desires. As Thomas Merton has so aptly put it, “the beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image.”

Or as we might re-state Merton’s words, you can’t, and shouldn’t try to, change someone to fit your own idea of what they should be. Maybe you’ve seen this happen in a relationship. Maybe you’ve experienced it yourself. It doesn’t turn out well, and it’s because we misconstrue what love really is. Love is patient, love is kind, St. Paul tells us: it is directed outward, it involves a process of self-emptying.

But Phil doesn’t know that at first, and so he initially tries to win Rita’s heart by getting everything “right” about their shared past, and using that information to win her over. However, the closer Phil gets to getting everything “right”--the closer he gets to just anticipating and mimicking everything he thinks that Rita wants--the less success he actually has at winning her heart. As another commentator has put it, “the pearl of happiness cannot be bought with counterfeit money.” His failure to win over Rita, day in and day out, leads him to sink even deeper into depression, since by this point he has convinced himself that she somehow holds the key to this mysterious cycle of recurrence.

I really like the way this writer put it. He believes that Phil is himself a groundhog-after all, he shares his name with Punxsutawney Phil-- and that he is fighting his own shadow side throughout the movie. “As long as Phil wakes up in the morning and sees his shadow, there will be for him more winter, more of the same. But if he awakes without a shadow, he will be given spring, new life.”

What is Phil’s shadow side? It is self-centeredness, his belief that the world revolves around him and somehow owes him something. According to the film’s director, Phil is trapped in his temporal loop for around eight years, eight years in which to learn who he is, eight years in which to understand the ins and outs of his own psyche, eight years in which to make progress in de-centering self and in centering, empathetically, on others. It is only when he lets go of ego, serving and loving others for who they are, not for who he might want them to be, that he is able to leave his shadow behind, leave the dark night of the soul behind, and embrace the light of a new day.

So, in true Groundhog Day style, I’ll end this the way I began.

What will the light of the new day look like for you? When we return from Mardi Gras break, we will be in the season of Lent, a time not unlike Phil’s recurring timeloop, a time that is intended to cause us to examine our shadow side and embrace the light. I hope that at some point you will find the time to think about this Chapel between now and then, to consider how your relationships with others are formed. Do you ask others to conform to what you want them to be, or are you trying to love others for who they truly are? Does the world really revolve around you, or have you found ways of de-centering the self and centering on others? I pray that we are all able to embrace the light as we move into the spring.

I’d like to close with a modified version of Simeon’s prayer from the Candlemas Service:

Lord, now let us, your servants, depart from this Chapel in peace, according to your word, which is the word of love. For our eyes have seen, and will see, your salvation, which is love: Love that will allow us to lighten all people, Love that will stretch over all the world. But before we do that, Lord, let us lighten just one person today, with a kind word, a surreptitious good deed, or a surprising gesture of gratitude. Let us love one another as we are, so that this community may grow in grace and love for years to come. Amen.