Create In Me A New Heart

The Wild Robot as Christian Allegory

There are some books that should require their readers’ permission before being made into a movie: for example, Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings. Likewise, I felt this way about The Wild Robot. Partly, this was because it was the first real book our oldest son read on his own. Partly, this was because The Wild Robot was read to all three of our children, in turn, by the world's greatest first-grade teacher. All in all, the book holds a special place in our hearts.

Happily, the movie largely stands as a triumph. Its success comes because it does many things so well: at times, it evokes loud laughter, as with the possum children who are learning to play dead and their mother who sometimes wishes they weren't faking; at other times, the animation grows arresting, as when incandescent white flames consume a large part of the forest toward the movie’s conclusion; at still other moments, the movie wins us over by its voice acting and beautifully drawn characters; and, in perhaps the most striking of all the movie’s visuals, if offers a remarkable depiction of the iridescent beauty of fall. In all of this, the movie joins a long line of other books and films using examination of a “robot” to probe what it means to be human. From Frankenstein, to Pinnochio, to Spielberg’s AI, to the entire Toy Story franchise, the connections between us and the things we make—especially the things we make that we want to seem or even become human—have provided nearly limitless material for examining our own humanity and questions touching on birth, meaning, love, and death. But even with all that, what I did not recognize until the second time I watched the film is that, hidden in plain sight, the movie also inspires me because it holds in its tender and robotic fingers a beautiful Christian allegory.

The movie centers on the tale of a robotic domestic assistant that is marooned during a typhoon when its storage container is stranded on a wilderness island, bereft of humans. When that lone robotic survivor awakens, it immediately begins seeking a human to give it the task that will constitute the reason for its existence. For a stretch of time it searches in vain for a creature that speaks a language it can understand. Finally, finding no humans, it abandons this notion and goes into a sort of robotic hibernation, allowing its sensors to pick up the animal languages that surround it. When it emerges from this sleep-like state, now able to understand the forest critters, it scavenges until it finds a goose egg and, when the egg hatches, it determines that its job is to care for the gosling that has hatched. With a little tutoring from the other creatures in the forest, the robot decides that it will know its task is complete when the gosling has learned to eat, swim, and fly.

The problem, however, is that the robot has no idea how to do these things itself, and even less sense of how to teach them to a barely hatched little bird. What's more, the robot soon realizes that while all three of these concrete tasks matter deeply, they are only small portions of the real task the robot is meant to fulfill. The robot soon recognizes that she is being asked to be a parent, but the robot has no sense of what that really means. Then, later in the movie, she learns the word “love,” and knows, too, that this matters deeply in the parental exercise but recognizes just as quickly that she has even less idea about how to love.

Thus the robot in the film reminds viewers unavoidably of Dorothy’s Tin Man. Most children who have seen The Wizard of Oz will remember that the Tin Man's existential dilemma is that he doesn't have a heart. A similar lack plagues Roz—The Wild Robot’s robot—but whereas the Tin Man is but one of three subordinate stars orbiting around Dorothy’s central drama in The Wizard of Oz, Roz’s empty chest constitutes The Wild Robot’s central problem. At multiple key junctures in the movie, Roz opens the door that encloses the place where a human heart would be to find only whirring gizmos, a tangle of wires, and a profusion of sparks and electricity—but no beating heart. The movie’s defining central conflict is that the robot recognizes that she must love in order to be a parent (here we see echoes of both Pinocchio and Beauty and the Beast) and wants deeply to fulfill this measure of her existence—and yet recognizes that she simply has not been provided with the means to fulfill this particular end.

I confess that the second time I saw the movie, I felt a deep sympathy with—even empathy for—the robot. I felt this emotional resonance because of times when I have been asked to do things for which I did not have the right wiring. Here are two examples to demonstrate what I mean. First, until I was a father I did not recognize how much my wiring would sometimes leave me ill-equipped to do the things I most desperately needed to do. I guess I can only hope this is an experience common to all who parent, but, whether it is or not, more often than I care to admit I look at a need one of my children has and think, “I'm just not made to be the answer to this particular question.” In this regard, I think especially of my oldest child. He is wired in a way that is dramatically different from the way I am wired—effortlessly cool in a way I could never be, endlessly athletic in a way that eludes me even after years of practice, popular and charismatic seemingly without trying in a way I have never been. It costs me a great amount to understand how he sees the world and to resonate with him emotionally, mentally, or spiritually. I love him deeply and we are good friends, but I so often feel that if I could just switch my wiring to be more like his, maybe we would be faster friends or, anyway, that I would more easily be ready to provide him with the things he needs.

A similar dynamic often came into play when I served as the bishop of a young single adult ward. In that context, many different people from many different walks of life would come to my office and bring me a vexing problem. True, there were some ward members whose wiring was very much like mine. Occasionally, a person would come to my office and I would understand immediately and intuitively where they were coming from—sometimes, I would look at a person and think to myself, “This is exactly how I would be feeling here.” And, in those moments, it was easy to feel like being a bishop was intuitive, almost reflexive. But on other occasions, people would come to my office facing problems and questions centered on things that had never occurred to me. I remember, for example, a woman who came to talk to me about how stung she had been when she realized how little time was devoted to women speaking in general conference. I could grasp the argument, of course—she even brought graphs to show me—but what struck me that day and long thereafter was that that had never occurred to me before. And I had never before felt that sting (though I now do). Most often, the life experiences and embodied outlook of the people who came seeking help differed dramatically from my own, and it was therefore only with great difficulty that I could resonate with their viewpoint or try to understand how best to help them.

Thus, in these two fundamentally important endeavors in my life, I have repeatedly felt like the robot, Roz. It is as if I open the metal door to look into my own hollow chest and find that whatever gizmos and wizardry are there, I simply lack the organ that is essential to what I have been called to do. Indeed, though I am a deeply empathetic person, there have been many moments when that empathy simply heightens my recognition that I am not fully capable of resonating with and seeing the world similarly to the people I am meant to help. It is as if I, too, am Dorothy's Tin Man—I, too, am Roz who looks with frustration and trepidation on my chest without a heart.

And yet, for all of this, The Wild Robot, as Christian allegory, fills me with deep hope. In the movie's most touching scene, the gosling, now grown into a miniature but full-sized goose named Brightbill, comes upon Roz who has run out of electricity and is, therefore, all but robotically dead. In a moment of mutual epiphany, however, the goose nestles under the robot’s lolling metal head. Though the goose knows that the robot is dysfunctional and cannot hear, he nonetheless whispers, “I love you.” In that moment, in a manner that the movie never fully explains, power returns to the robot, and Roz turns to the goose, full of sincere feeling, and says, “I love you, too.” Tellingly, shortly after this scene in the movie, the robot opens its chest once more, but this time does what would have been unthinkable before. She grabs those robotic innards, yanks them from her chest, and throws them into the forest. This strikes me as a symbolic attestation that the gizmos and wizardry are no longer needed—because an organic heart has grown in their place.

And that is the funny thing about life on the pathway of Christian discipleship—whether as a bishop, or as a dad, or a classmate, or a boss, or a friend. And so it is in any endeavor where we dare to muster the love of God. I have experienced moments I can only call magical—whether sitting in the bishop’s office or at the side of a child as they fall asleep—where, almost in spite of myself, I find that the capacity that so often seems absent suddenly appears: beautiful and fully functioning. It is as if, in some instantaneous endowment of grace, I am, either because of or despite the infinitesimally little that I could do, gifted with the heart that was absent. Suddenly, blood that I did not know existed flows through a vasculature I did not know was there, bringing the life-giving oxygen of affection to people and in places I never knew I could understand or fully see. It is in these moments that I best understand what the scriptures mean when they talk about Jesus offering new life, or a new heart, or new birth, or new vision—of an understanding of a world that simply wasn't there before. Because that is the very meaning of a Christian life: though literal children of God, we are all yet robots. We endeavor to love—and may sporadically succeed—but we await what Wendell Berry called the “wayward-coming grace” that will endow us with the love of Jesus, the kind of undying affection that will equip us to love in all directions, even to the point of sacrifice, fully and forever.

Ironically, when I most try to love on my own, I come up against the extent of my limitations—human, flawed, exhausted, and completely incapable of really loving like Jesus. But it is also in these moments, in the shadow of the inadequacy of my own attempts, that I recognize that loving like God loves was never meant to be my own story of a self-made man. I was not meant to create a love like Jesus any more than I was meant to invent from individual atoms my own physiologic heart. Rather, like Roz awakened by a force beyond her own power—by Brightbill nestling into the crook of her neck while Roz is unaware—God’s love comes to me: “unasked, unforced, unearned.” It is not because of my efforts, but too often in spite of them, that, in the most beautiful moments of my life, I find myself loving beyond the bounds of my own limitations in a way that can only be attributed to God.

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