Stories From the Silver Screen: The Jeweler’s Shop

Part of a series about films so riveting that they deserve to be remembered long after they were first seen.

Nearly five centuries of state sanctioned apostasy have passed since the death of Sir Thomas More, martyred for his faith in 1535, principally due to his steadfast defense of the sanctity of Christian marriage, for which defense Rome herself was prepared to suffer the loss of a unified Catholic Europe. 

But not everyone would sign on with the Protestant Revolt. The people of Poland, for instance, remained robustly, passionately Catholic. And it is there that our next story begins. It is the year 1939, the eve of the Second World War. Adolf Hitler and the armies of the Third Reich are about to march on Poland, which they will soon enough subject to brutal and protracted occupation, followed by the Soviets, whose occupation will prove even worse inasmuch as it will last far longer.

It is against this awful backdrop of war that two young people meet, fall in love, and soon thereafter marry and have a family. But the husband will not survive. His life will be lost in defending the country that he loves. And except for the priest there at the end to administer the Last Rites, he will die alone, not knowing how the young child they conceived in love will grow up, forced to live without a father.

Welcome to The Jeweler’s Shop, a profound and beautiful movie based on a play written by Karol Wojtyla, who later became Pope St. John Paul II. Made in 1988, the film stars Burt Lancaster as the mysterious Jeweler who sells wedding rings to young couples while teaching them all that they will need to know about marriage and the sacrifices required to make it work. He does not actually sell anything, he only gives them freely away to couples willing to take on the burden, and the bliss, of what each ring represents. They cannot be returned.

Not everyone will prove equal to the burden they have agreed to shoulder together. Some will require a great deal of remedial assistance. Yet grace is always there, freely dispensed for those who wish to begin anew—not once, but often and painfully. How does the poet Eliot put it?  

There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business. 

That is because it is finally God’s business, who is certainly not above using human instruments to obtain his ends, consisting of nothing less than an eternity of happiness both with Him and in the company of those whom we are called upon to love. We do not go to Heaven alone. It is only in Hell that we find ourselves alone, endlessly telling God that we do not want to love or to be loved, only that we be left alone. Forever.

The Jeweler thus stands for the durability, the indestructibility, of the marriage covenant into which couples are drawn, the working out of the choices they’ve made shown in every detail of the drama. Beginning with Andrew and Teresa, who, in the experience of their shared love, will find themselves face to face with the Jeweler, “his gaze at once gentle and penetrating…watching us while he was selecting and weighing the rings.” The future remains an unknown place, which they nevertheless “accept without anxiety. Love has overcome anxiety. The future depends on love.”

Well, it had better be love on which the future—indeed, all life itself—will depend; because when circumstance conspires to undo the promises we have made, it will be love alone that enables us to endure. And it cannot be bought and sold like cheap flowers that soon wither away and die. “It has the taste of the whole man,” the Jeweler declares.

It has his weight. And the weight of his whole fate. It cannot be a single moment. Man’s eternity passes through it. That is why it is to be found in the dimensions of God, because only He is eternity.

It is a hard lesson, and for Teresa it must be learned early on, owing to Andrew’s untimely death at the front. And yet, as the priest strangely reveals on bringing her the news, “Your husband is more alive now than ever before.” And she believes him, knowing that this is the hope on which her life must now depend. “Andrew did not die in me,” she says, “did not die on any front, he did not even have to come back, for somehow he is.”

In fact, he remains present in the child they had together, a son named Christopher, whom God had given them as the fruit of their shared love.

And Christopher grew—and more and more I saw you (Andrew) in him. So I did not leave the sphere of your most strange person to whom I had given myself, from whom I do not know how to withdraw.

Nor will she ever need to withdraw. Because, by God’s decree, we go with the dead even as they return to us, the two joined as one in Christ. “We die with the dying,” as Eliot reminds us in the last movement of Four Quartets:

See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.
The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration. A people without history 
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments.

How skillfully the film has stitched together such moments, allowing us to see the pattern, a veritable web of grace. But, alas, not all the couples shown will radiate that same intensity of attention intended by the sacrament to impart. Some will resist and, in their seeming refusal to recognize the Bridegroom in each other, will imperil not only their marriages but their very selves.

Anna, for example, whose marriage to Stefan will soon unravel owing to his growing indifference. And the wound inflicted can never heal so long as he chooses not to feel her pain, “thinking, no doubt,” as she bitterly puts it, “she will get over it. Besides, he was confident of his rights, whereas I wanted him to win them continually. I did not want to feel like an object that cannot be lost once it has been acquired.”

He, too, must learn to see, to awaken afresh to the realization that Anna, the woman he has callously taken for granted, must be rediscovered lest he lose both her and his soul—that only in her, this finite being given to him to love in a finite world, will he find an analogue adequate to those infinite longings he has, which we all have.

It is the thirst for God that most deeply defines us, for God is a love that never ends. Indeed, His very being is love, eternal and triune. Which is why we find ourselves constantly on the lookout for images of this love in others—in order that somehow, in time, they might reflect something of the timeless countenance of Almighty God, which is the Face of the Bridegroom we were all created to see, to be embraced by for all eternity.

Will they once again find this love in one another? Will the children of the two couples, who eventually meet and fall in love, will they succeed in keeping their love alive? Only by the grace of God, for which we are all beggars.