In one of my high school religion textbooks, there was this odd question: why didn’t God program us to be obedient robots that listened to everything He said. After all, it would have saved Him a lot of trouble! It’s something I pondered while watching (and rewatching) what is perhaps one of my favorite films from recent memory – Dreamworks Animation’s “The Wild Robot”.
In “The Wild Robot”, a helper robot named Roz gets stranded on a lush forest island and becomes saddled with the responsibility of taking care of an orphaned gosling (long story). Roz knows nothing about surviving the wilderness, let alone raising a child. “I do not have the programming to be a mother,” she tells one of the animals friendly enough to talk to her. Their response: “No one does. We just make it up.”
And so that’s what Roz does, with the help of her super-powerful computer brain (which enables her to mimic the behavior of others). Her thought process is simple: I’m not a mother, but if I pretend to be one by doing all the things that mothers do, then sooner or later I’ll become a mother. And so through much trial and error, she raises her gosling to adulthood. Her selfless acts of love enable her to gain the trust of the animals on the island, who had initially treated her with hostility. She even inspires them to temporarily put aside their differences to survive the harsh conditions of a world ravaged by climate change. In one of the film’s most moving scenes, all the animals of the island take refuge from a snowstorm in Roz’s shelter, and they all lie together by the fire, both predator and prey. As the Prophet Isaiah once wrote: “The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid.”
So why didn’t God program us to be obedient little robots? It’s because it is more meaningful to choose to be good, to overcome our nature through choices borne out of love. Instead of commanding us, God calls us to do good things in our life, and it’s up to us to answer, whether or not we believe we are ready. Roz was not programmed to be a mother. But she was called to be one by the circumstances she found herself in, and she more than answered. By the film’s end, she reaches the following conclusion: “Sometimes to survive, we must become more than we were programmed to be.”
What is God calling us to do? And can we really become more than our programming? Can we transcend our natural instinct to do what is easy, to judge others and to think only of ourselves? Who knows? But in the meantime, why don’t we just act as if we could, and worry about the rest later.