Salvation at the cineplex.

Two of the past year's top grossing films are transformative tales with main characters challenged again and again: first to survive, and then to live up to sacrifices made in their honor. Both Titanic and Saving Private Ryan show that the triumph over death and sin lies not in a great abyss but in another's love the same love we're called to remember every Christmas.

The two biggest films of the past year have a number of things in common, but the most surprising and unnoticed similarity is probably that each is basically a tale about salvation. In both Titanic and Saving Private Ryan, directors James Cameron and Steven Spielberg, working at the top of their forms, have thrown us into the midst of two of the most unforgettable events of the 20th century and succeeded in creating films that eclipse all previous attempts to tell these stories. Janet Maslin of the New York Times compared Titanic to Gone With the Wind and called Saving Private Ryan "the finest war movie of our time."

Still, huge box-office revenues, critical kudos, and what will probably be a matching set of Best Picture and Best Director Oscars are not the only things these films share with each other. Although Cameron's movie is largely a romance and Spielberg's a war drama, both directors have structured their three-hour-long epics in a similar fashion, choosing to tell their stories as flashbacks seen through the eyes of aging survivors come to pay their last respects. Even more striking, however, is that both of these graveside witnesses, Rose Dawson Calvert and James Ryan, are people saved by the generosity of those resting beneath them. They are also people who, in their own way, have tried to come to terms with the weight of that saving grace.

Toward the end of Titanic, the 101-year-old Rose (Gloria Stewart) ends her gripping four-hankie account of "a night to remember" by telling us that Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio) "saved me ... in every way that a person can be saved." And indeed that's the nub of Cameron's story--that a wild and generous-hearted young artist from steerage saved a poor little rich girl trapped in first class.

A life preserver 

In Titanic Jack Dawson saves Rose's life twice. The very first evening the ship is out of Southampton, young Jack is strolling alone on the aft deck when he comes upon a terrified and suicidal Rose (Kate Winslet) leaning outside the ship's railing. `Undeterred by her unsteady protestations and enchanted by her beauty, the gallant Jack teases and charms the frightened socialite as he prepares to pull her back in, all the while complaining wryly that if she were to leap, he would, quite naturally, be forced to go in after her. (As we see later in the film, this is clearly not an obligation her own fiance would feel the need to assume.)

This early rescue becomes the first step in the young couple's whirlwind courtship and the prelude to Jack's ultimate act of salvation, which takes place on the last night of the great ship. (If you're one of the three people left on the planet who haven't yet seen the film, you might want to skip the next few paragraphs.)

Finding themselves among the 1,500 unlucky passengers and crew who went into the icy waters, Jack and Rose come upon a floating piece of furniture large enough to provide a raft for only one of them. Jack, of course, will stay in the water, facing certain death and giving his life freely for the woman he has come to love so passionately. Rose is saved by this selfless act, and goes on to live a long and rich life.

But the truth is that in Cameron's movie Jack doesn't just save Rose's life, he also saves Rose from the life awaiting her back in Pittsburgh. For while the Titanic is bearing the immigrants in third class to the land of their dreams, each turn of the ship's propellers drives Rose closer and closer to the lifelong imprisonment of a sterile and loveless marriage. Her friendship and romance with Jack gives the frightened debutante the courage to imagine a life beyond the rigid constraints and artificial social etiquette of her caste, to find her own voice, and to reject the haughty disdain and snobbish cruelties of her mother and fiance. In a wonderfully exuberant scene, Jack takes Rose from the five-fork dining of first class to a somewhat wilder and more spontaneous feast going on below deck. In Cameron's film Jack is Rose's liberator, daring her not to leap from the stern of the Titanic, but from the precipice of her class and caste.

The quest for redemption

Ironically enough, in Saving Private Ryan, a film relating what seems at first like a classic rescue story, the question of salvation is significantly more complicated, and the lines between savior and saved much more blurred.

In the days after D-Day Captain John Miller (Tom Hanks) and his squad are sent on a mission to find and rescue Mrs. Ryan's sole surviving son (Matt Damon), a private lost amidst the tens of thousands of troops wandering around enemy-infested Normandy.

At first a poignant speech by General Marshall (Harve Presnell) and the scene of Mrs. Ryan receiving the news of her sons' deaths seem to give a certain nobility to this quest, but as the film goes on, the cast and audience alike find themselves wondering at a moral calculus that would sacrifice seven lives to save one. Why, some of Miller's men wonder, does no one seem to care about their mothers getting telegrams from the war office? Or, as Miller asks himself, how does he justify the risks of the mission when the mission is a single man? Even when the young Ryan is finally found, it is not clear just why he should be rescued while his buddies are left behind to die.

But in Spielberg's film Ryan is not the only one being saved. Captain John Miller is also looking for a slice of redemption. The veteran of numerous campaigns, the captain is a decent, courageous man. But he is also a man increasingly bothered by what he has seen and done in the war, a man troubled at having outlived so many of his soldiers, a man weary of the burden of having sent more than a hundred men to their deaths, a man worried that he has changed into someone his own wife no longer recognize.

Tired and war-weary, Hanks' character is not a man who has done anything wrong indeed, he is someone who seems to have behaved as graciously and courageously as possible, a hero--but he is still someone looking for some way to preserve or redeem his decency, to make sense of the madness in which he is immersed, to get: home. And, ironically enough, it may just be that the mission to save. Private Ryan, a mission that Miller and his men find increasingly unjustifiable, will offer the captain that redemption. As one sergeant tells Miller, maybe doing this (me good thing, saving this one mother's son in the midst of all this killing, will earn them the right to go home.

In both Titanic and Saving Private Ryan, the rescuers have a parting message for the people they've saved. Stammering from hypothermia, Jack asks Rose to make him a promise that she will not give up, that' she will live through the night, holding on until the rescuers come and go on to live a rich and full life, having lots of babies, and dying an old lady many, many years hence. In a similar fashion the critically wounded Captain Miller whispers to the young Private Ryan that he is to "earn" this sacrifice made in his name, to be worthy somehow of the incredible and unmerited gift of six men's lives.

Saving grace

In their own ways Rose and Ryan each seek to live up to these commissions. An assortment of silver-framed photographs on Rose's dresser lets us know that she has, indeed, led the sort of vibrant and happy life Jack had wanted for her, and the testimony of Ryan's wife at Miller's graveside is proof enough of the decency and goodness of the life that was spared. Still, the truth is that neither Ryan nor Rose could ever "earn" the sacrifices made in their name. No one could. Nobody ever deserves the gift of another's life, much less the gift of six. These are unpayable, even untouchable debts. All Rose and Ryan can do is try to live gracefully in the wake of such incredible generosity.

This is probably not a bad thing for us to remember in the Christmas season, when we pause to celebrate the coming of our Savior. After all, Rose and Ryan's story is basically the story of each and every one of us. It is the story we celebrate every Christmas, every Easter, every Sunday; the central story, or mystery, of our faith. For just like these two fictional movie characters, all of us human beings have been saved by the unbelievable generosity and compassion of one whose sacrifice we had no claim on, no right to expect. We are all standing in the wake of a river of unending grace, and the story we read and remember at Christmas and throughout the year is our tale, the tale of someone freely giving his life so that we might be liberated from every sort of bondage and sin, so that we might have life, and have it in abundance.

Indeed, if we pause to think about it, we know that our whole lives are gifts offered to us by those, who have loved and cared for us without our having deserved it. Countless others made free sacrifices to create and sustain the world we live in, to defend our rights, prepare our bread, make our homes, educate our minds, nurse our wounds. Every artist, teacher, laborer, parent, sibling, farmer, soldier, servant, scientist, and homemaker has left a heritage of grace that holds and supports us. To paraphrase Sir Isaac Newton, we are where we are because we are resting on the backs of those who gave us our lives and our world. All of us are Rose. All of us are Ryan.

Which leaves us with the ultimate question: How are we to respond to a saving grace we can neither merit nor pay back? How are we to live in the wake of this incredible generosity? in Titanic Rose sought to pay homage to her beloved Jack by taking on his name, but even more by seeking to live her life with the same wonderful generosity and gusto she had seen and loved in him. And in Spielberg's film, Ryan tried his best to imitate the understated decency and goodness he had seen in men like Captain Miller.

Maybe that's not a bad answer, that we respond to being saved by trying to imitate and pass on the generosity of the ones who saved us. That would also seem to be the message of scripture. In the Old Testament the Hebrews believed that they could best worship and thank the God who had saved them from being slaves and outcasts by remembering to show the same generosity and compassion to other poor and marginalized people. In a similar fashion Jesus told his disciples that they were to be compassionate and merciful even as their God had been compassionate and merciful to them.

The lesson here: We don't earn the grace of salvation, we just try to live gracefully in its wake.

By Patrick McCormick, an assistant professor of ethics at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington.