Review
Culture
Film & TV
3 min read

A child’s lesson on how to grow up

Looking beyond the bravado-fuelled adolescent friendships, Lauren Windle reviews Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. She finds vulnerability, audacity and intention.

Lauren Windle is an author, journalist, presenter and public speaker.

A mother and child, wearing 70s clothing, look to the left.
Rachel McAdams and Abby Ryder Fortson.
Gracie Films.

You couldn’t pay me to be an 11-year-old girl again. There is no amount of money that would convince me to re-subject myself to the confusion, self-consciousness and awkwardness of my pre-teen and teenage years. But sitting in the Regents Street Cinema watching a midday screening of the film adaptation of Judy Blume’s popular book Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, it was 1999 again. I felt like I was rolling up my school skirt like the older girls and Sam Eavis had just skateboarded past setting my tummy fluttering.  

Margaret is a 1970s year-six pupil (Abby Ryder Fortson) who moved from New York City to New Jersey with her mum (Rachel McAdams) and dad (Benny Safdie). As with any 11-year-old, she failed to see the absolute joy in not worrying about romantic relationships, financial hardship and gainful employment. Instead, she strived to grow up as fast as she possibly could. But faced with bad friends, boy trouble, changing hormones and a feuding family, Margret turned to God for guidance as she navigated the complex new stage. 

Margret accompanied her milestones with admirably honest prayers to God, asking for guidance, reprieve, support and protection for her family. 

Margaret and her friends moved through the usual rites of passage for a schoolgirl in their sprint to maturity. They obsessed about their first kiss with a boy, starting their periods, getting their first bra, being able to fill out the undergarment, gossiping and bitching between friends and desperately trying to fit in. But, unlike me, Margret accompanied her milestones with admirably honest prayers to God, asking for guidance, reprieve, support and protection for her family. 

I felt pleased for Margaret. Not because she was navigating these challenges like a pro. She was doing as well as any us (read: poorly). I was pleased for her because she felt comfortable to loop God in. I never prayed about a boy I fancied or petitioned God to start my period. As a teenager, I was convinced the messy practicalities of life didn’t have a place in the Church and I would certainly never bring them up in prayer. I stuck to the simple formula of sorry, thank you and please. All subjects were highly palatable, like my grades at school or family outings. 

Angst-riddled Margret however, learned something that I only picked up on years later when I came back to faith at 25; God cares about the details. We can be so caught up in presenting our best to Him that we forget he’s seen it all anyway. We may want a better sex life or bigger boobs or for someone to be attracted to us, but we wouldn’t pray for it. It’s too embarrassing. Not for Margret – from how she was getting on with her friends to the size of her bra, nothing was off limits in her prayers. There’s a lesson there for us.  

Margret wasn’t raised in a church or subscribing to any religion. Her mum (a Christian) was shunned by her family when she announced that she would be marrying her dad (a Jew). The subsequent pain meant that they decided to raise their daughter without any religious affiliation and let her choose for herself. When she started her first prayer Margaret opened with:  

“I’ve heard a lot of great things about you.”  

When she was desperate to be accepted in her peer group she cried out:  

“Let me just be normal and regular like everybody else.” 

 When she felt lonely, she called out and asked God where he was and when she thought he may not exist, even then she took her frustrations to God, crying out in prayer:  

“I’ve prayed and prayed and everything just gets worse. Maybe the truth is there’s nobody out there. There’s nobody listening. It’s just me.” 

It's the vulnerability, audacity and intentionality of her honesty that takes Margaret leaps and bounds further in her search for faith. That’s a level of transparency with God that I lacked in my youth, and at times in my adult life. The fact that Margaret hadn’t been to church ironically freed her up to approach God in a refreshing, childlike way. She didn’t have any of the pomp and ceremony of religion. Rather she just came to her creator and started talking, like a child to her father.  

So, what can we learn from Margaret’s search for God? Several things. Stuffing your bra looks ridiculous. Adolescent friendships are solely fuelled by bravado. The fragility of pubescent womanhood is both a joy and agonising to watch. And we can talk to God anywhere, anytime, in any mood and about anything.  

Seems like we don’t need to go back to school to learn a thing or two after all.  

Explainer
Belief
Culture
Leading
Wisdom
4 min read

Why does the Pope matter today?

The personal, vivid link to the origins of the movement that changed the world.

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

An Anglican bishop wearing purple shakes hands with the Pope.
The author meeting the late Pope, 2024.

There is something about the way popes are elected that captures the imagination. Whoever dreamt up the idea of black smoke for ‘no decision’, and white smoke for ‘habemus papam’ – ‘we have a new pope’ - was a genius at marketing. So much better than a press release or a tweet from the Vatican X account. 

The conclave was brought to our imagination so vividly by the recent film with Ralph Fiennes. We love the idea of secret debates, intrigue, people locked away from the world until they come to a decision with arcane ancient rituals and an uncertain outcome. Was there ever a film whose release was better timed?  

There are also the sheer numbers involved. There are approximately 1.4 billion Catholics in the world today – roughly the same as the population of India and China, the world most populous nations. Yet the identity of the new pope is of matters to the rest of us too. The leader of China of India is of interest especially to people living in China or India, but maybe less so for those of us who don’t. The new pope is the head of churches round the corner from where you live, or of people with whom you work, or, if you are Catholic yourself, your own spiritual leader. This appointment matters. 

Yet it’s not just the optics, the drama, the numbers. And it’s not just for Catholics either. I am an Anglican, and since the Reformation of the sixteenth century, we have had in our own 39 Articles the statement: “The Bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction in this Realm of England.” That might seem to settle the matter that it’s of no interest to English Protestants. But that would be wrong. 

I met Pope Francis once. It was at a gathering of Anglican Archbishops in Rome last year. We all were led through magnificent Vatican corridors into an imposing state room, adorned with fantastic frescoes, where the white-robed Holy Father was brought in on his wheelchair to deliver a brief 20-minute homily to us all. 

It was a good talk, thoughtful, well-constructed, but in many ways unremarkable. It didn’t say anything much that I hadn’t heard from other sources. Yet somehow this was different. His words carried a weight, a gravity that went beyond the content of the lecture itself. It was as if, when he entered that room, he carried with him two thousand years of church history.  

The line of Bishops of Rome goes back to St Peter, the gruff, unschooled fisherman who Jesus called from his mundane life to become an apostle, and who then on, was so captured by the person of Jesus that he gave his life in the cause. I left that room conscious of the weight of the office of the papacy, even if I don’t recognise him as my direct spiritual father. 

Listening to this successor of St Peter felt like you were listening to one of the friends of Jesus – and this was not just the personal quality of the man himself, but something about the office he occupied. It was a personal, vivid link to the origins of the Christian movement, the first stirrings of the revolution. 

The papacy is one of those unique things in modern life - an umbilical link to the past.

Of course, there have been some pretty terrible occupants of the papal see, whose personal lives showed scant evidence of any knowledge of, or relationship with Jesus. The sixteenth century Roderigo Borgia (Pope Alexander VI) comes to mind, who despite the rule on clerical celibacy, had several children from various mistresses, won the Papacy by bribing cardinals, and made his favourite son bishop of several lucrative sees at the age of eighteen, and a cardinal at nineteen. So, there is nothing automatic about this – which is why the Protestant Reformers denied the idea of any blanket automatic papal authority.  

Yet when a person of evident holiness is combined with this notion of the weight of the office, the papacy becomes a gift to all of us, linking us back to the earliest followers of Jesus – even to Jesus himself.  

The papacy is one of those unique things in modern life - an umbilical link to the past. Monarchies do something similar – linking us to the past through the long line of kings and queens of England, Denmark, Spain or wherever, yet more often than not, the events they lead us back to, the process by which those families took power, reveal murky politics, bribery and bloody battles.  

 This is a line in history that links us to the event that, if Tom Holland’s Dominion is to be believed, has had more impact in shaping western culture than any other – the remarkable life, death and resurrection of Jesus – a radical life full of love, self-giving and transformative power – for both individuals and whole civilisations. And for that, whether we are Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, or even, perhaps, unbeliever, we might raise a prayer - or a glass - of thanksgiving.