Something that I wrestle with my spiritual director about is perfection.  A small part of me has an idealized conception of faith that says the more I grow in my relationship with God, the better will be my life.  In drawing closer to Jesus, so goes this erroneous belief, my predilection towards sin will drop away and all my endeavors will succeed.  This is wrong because there is no such thing as a lack of struggle this side of Heaven.  Life is what it is moment to moment, day to day, and so on, sometimes bad, sometimes good.  God is there for me, for us, at all times.  I know this intellectually, but I also bring my heart into my daily activities.  Jesus is my king, but my disordered attachments make it hard for me to navigate between dealing with what is in front of me and what my imagination tells me it should be.  I want it to be right, and I want it right now, but that is my will.  God’s will is different, and I pray for the grace of the Holy Spirit to replace my wants with His wants.  In short, I long to surrender and fully accept that it is a lifelong process.  What I have written thus far probably sounds like me waxing spiritually, though it is all true.  It is also what I felt while watching Diggers (2006), and hopefully you will see these themes play out as I describe it to you.

Hunt (Paul Rudd) is one of the few remaining independent clam Diggers in the 1970s that lives on the shores of a small town on Long Island.  He is being roused early one morning by a call from his father (Beeson Carroll) to come out to the bay to fish for the mollusks.  We see from the photographs scattered around Hunt that he is different from dad, and his father hangs up and heads out on his own.  Hunt is one of four friends on which the story focuses, and the movie spends the next few minutes introducing them.  There is the marijuana smoking philosopher Cons (Josh Hamilton); the ladies man Jack (Ron Eldard), who comes to pick up Cons from the former’s house; and the eternally stressed because of all his children, Lozo (Ken Marino).  They all work in the same industry as Hunt though the others get on the water before him.  One of the other reasons Hunt is late is because he stops to see his sister, Gina (Maura Tierney).  When he finally makes way, he is also distracted by Zoey (Lauren Ambrose), who he has been eyeing for some time is he heads to open water.  With all these distractions out of the way, Hunt finally motors to where his dad had been bringing up clams only to find that the older man has passed away.  The funeral is the MacGuffin in the story, and from here on everyone, particularly Hunt, must figure out what to do with the rest of their lives.  Overarching it all is the threat of corporate clam diggers pushing out the local competition.  Because the movie meanders a little in showing how everyone copes, I will treat each character individually in order of their relevance to the plot.  Cons does not really change but he is useful in helping keep the others out of jail, which I will describe in a moment.  Gina, who has been living at home since her divorce, seeks comfort in the arms of Jack.  She does her best to hide this from Hunt, who knows about his friend’s reputation, but the affair is eventually discovered.  Hunt feels a responsibility for his sister, one that he had rarely exercised, preferring his art over anyone else.  Still, photography could be a way out of this town and lifestyle that does not seem to fit him anymore, at least according to Zoey.  Their relationship soon blossoms beyond flirtatious gazes exchanged from land and sea.  Hunt falls for her, but as the season for the resident of New York City draws to a close and she plans to return to the Big Apple, she claims that their dalliance was nothing more than a fling.  As for Lozo, he has the most trouble.  One tactic favored by their corporate competition is stealing the engines off of the locals’ boats.  Despite locking his up with a chain, Lozo’s motor is sawed off its wooden moorings.  Further, his wife, Julie (Sarah Paulson), announces that they have conceived their sixth (might be seventh) child.  As a pro-life Catholic, I appreciated his flat denial of her suggestion of an abortion, which she said out of knowledge of their financial woes.  In his desperation, he goes to the enterprise trying to push him and his friends out of the business in the hopes of finding a job.  They do not bother looking at his application, throwing it straight into the garbage.  Enraged, he trashes their office before storming out of the building.  They send some goons to the bar where he is drinking with Cons.  At the same time, Hunt and Jack are fighting outside the watering hole.  What stops them from exchanging blows is Cons alerting them to Lozo’s situation.  All of them are sent to jail for brawling, but Cons gets them out because of a deal he has with the police to sell weed.  Cons must give up the majority of his profits, and the last we see of him is him moving in with Gina.  As he is settling in, Gina is saying goodbye to Hunt, who has finally decided to leave and simply drive west.  As he heads out, he gives Jack a friendly middle finger, them having solved their differences while behind bars.  As for Lozo, he has taken a job as a plumber, which is giving him a steady paycheck for their entire family.

While Diggers is about as ordinary a movie as you will see, it does provide a few directions in which I can take my Catholic analysis.  There is the obvious abortion discussion, and Lozo follows his wonderful pro-life stance by talking about how he thanks God every day for his children.  They may drive him crazy but he still loves them.  One could make the same argument about God.  Sometimes I think He looks at what we do, particularly our sins, and must feel exasperated.  Yet, He loves us still and more than we could ever possibly comprehend.  Speaking of not comprehending, there is Cons.  After Lozo makes a mess in the corporate office, Cons attempts to console his friend by talking about God.  Cons discusses how Albert Einstein speculated that God would not create an imperfect world.  One can understand this considering all the issues these characters face.  There is also the 1976 presidential election taking place in the background.  The film does not do a lot to discuss how this affects the lives in this fishing village, but if you are reading this on the eve of the 2024 campaign, perhaps this is more meaningful for you.  All the same, Einstein, for all his brilliance, did not understand God.  Like me and the characters in the film, they have an idea of the way things should be versus the way they are.  At the same time, this need not suggest that the famous physicist was an atheist.  What I am speaking to is our inability often to cope with reality.  We perceive everything as imperfect and that may be true.  As the old cliché goes, nobody is perfect.  At the same time, we tend to equate imperfection as something bad.  I do not wish to lurch back in the opposite philosophical direction by resigning myself to the belief that everything is perfectly imperfect.  We need not get ourselves twisted around in such thinking, and no one would accuse any of the characters in the film of doing so, even Cons.  They are all trying to live their lives and be happy.  This is something God wants for all of us.  There will be sad times, to be sure, but it must be acknowledged that His notions of happiness also vary from ours.  Ultimately, we should give ourselves over to His will for our lives because that is what will lead to true happiness, in this life or the next.

It should be noted that Diggers is a slow-moving film but a satisfying one.  There is some foul language and a few sexual situations, but no nudity.  Otherwise, it is a few days’ snapshot in the lives of ordinary people.  This may seem boring but it can be relatable.  I would not caution against seeing it, except for younger audiences, but you may have a different reaction than me.