by David Keating
The Keating Files – January 29, 2021
(Mild Spoiler Alert)
Recently, I finished watching Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit. I wasn’t quite sure if I would enjoy the series given that my attempts at playing chess were exclusively limited to camping trips with the Scouts. But I was delighted to find that The Queen’s Gambit was not merely about the intricacies of the 1950s-1960s competitive chess world. The series also explores themes surrounding addiction, family, and the role that community plays in helping to process the traumas and experiences in one’s life.
The show follows the life of Beth Harmon, an orphaned prodigy who discovers chess at a young age. Harmon is introduced to drugs, specifically tranquilizers of some kind, while at the orphanage. Even being adopted, her addictions spiral as her adoptive mother has problems with alcoholism, despite the fact that her mother does become a positive influence of a kind in helping Beth cultivate her love for chess.
Despite Beth’s success in chess tournaments, her addictions continue to spiral and grow. Beth assumes that in order to be good at chess, she needs to be abusing the various substances with which she’s addicted. This ultimately culminates in one of the final episodes when Beth shuts herself off from the rest of the world during a days-long bender. She ignores calls to the house and the rest of the outside world until she passes out from the combination of substances and hits her head on a table.
Why do I think this entire interaction helps us understand our theological life? Sin has been described as shutting oneself off from the rest of the world and from the communities that give us meaning. In Latin, we would call this “homo incurvatus in se” or “man curved in on himself.” When man is turned inward he not only shuts himself off from community, but turns inward, thereby amplifying the feeling of guilt from sin by staring exclusively at his own deeds and actions. It’s an interesting spiritual insight that we can see at play in this series. When looking only at ourselves for comfort, we find none. It is only by turning outward toward something else that we can be rescued from this “turning inward” on ourselves.
In the series, Beth eventually finds her way out of her downward spiral and the collapse in on herself. A friend, Harry Beltik, confronts her with the results of her actions, forcing her to ponder their consequences. A friend from the orphanage, Jolene, tells Beth that her mentor who taught her chess at the orphanage has died. Jolene guides Beth back to the outside world where the death of this person who meant so much to her forces Beth to once again return to the chess world that she loves.
I was floored by the way in which these themes resonate with Christian messages. Beth is forced out of her position of “incurvatus in se” and toward the outside world through not just the love of friends, but also through the death of a mentor figure. It is this person’s surprising death that helps Beth Harmon to once again regain her footing in the outside world as she reengages with the sport she once loved.
Christianity would pick up on this message and carry it a bit further. Certainly the love of friends helps to bring sinners out of their distress and back into a community. But the Church would also say that the ultimate thing that forces one away from wallowing in past deeds and actions is the death of another, namely, Jesus Christ. It is Christ Jesus who encourages us to look up and away from ourselves, and to the cross for salvation and comfort. It is in the cross where we see that Jesus is the opposite of man curved in on himself. We see the love that compels Him to outstretch His arms toward creation in the open posture of the crucifixion. Sure, it may be a little different than what Beth experiences in The Queen’s Gambit, but that story reminds us of the way in which the death of a loved one can work to draw us away from isolation and shame, and toward a welcome reception and community.
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The Reverend David Keating is pastor at St. John’s Lutheran Church in Curtis, Nebraska.
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