Depending on who you ask, there are anywhere from seven to 20 different basic plots into which every story ever told fits. Kelsey Grammer thinks there may only be two or three — and one that matters more than the others.
“The reason we love the stories that we have about a central figure who is lost and then is found, that is basically a retelling of the Jesus story over and over again,” the actor told The Daily Wire in a recent interview.
“It’s always about sacrifice, about someone giving of themselves to save somebody else,” Grammer said. “These are the things we aspire to and are also drawn to, because they remind us that we have a purpose,” he said, “and it’s to have a relationship with God, and with one another.”
“Frasier” — the hit show in which Grammer played the titular character for 11 seasons, 13 if you count a recent reboot — is one of these stories, he says. The “Cheers” spinoff ultimately focused on a group of “people who loved each other who worked through our differences to get to the place where we realigned.”
So too is Grammer’s latest project. “Karen Kingsbury’s The Christmas Ring,” in theaters nationwide, tells the story of a military widow on a quest to find her family’s long-lost ring, an heirloom whose tale begins on D-Day. Along the way, she meets and falls in love with an antiques dealer. Grammer plays the dealer’s father, Howard, a lovable widower who, it turns out, may hold the key to the mystery of the ring.
The movie, Grammer says, “is not a reinvention of the wheel.” It’s “not a movie that’s going to change the world,” but a movie to remind us that “the world is actually okay.”
“It’s a romantic comedy, basically, about loss and love and finding new love and redemption and forgiveness and generosity, sacrifice, the things that come along for the ride when you celebrate the Christmas season.”
But formulaic doesn’t mean bad, as Grammer is quick to point out. After all, we tell the same story each year on Christmas — the greatest story ever told.
“Into a world of Roman rule and infanticide and crucifixion, basically, God sent a baby to be cared for by humans, that we would discover our humanity,” Grammer says. “And that’s a pretty remarkable thing, and that story gets repeated every Christmas.”
“The Jesus story is, you know, always about finding love.”
Grammer is clearly happy to play roles in faith-forward movies. But he isn’t seeking them out exclusively — he reprises his role as the X-Man Beast in the forthcoming “Avengers” movie, he points out — nor is he trying to make some grand public pronouncement of his beliefs.
“I’m not a big proselytizer,” he says. “I’m not going to deny that I have faith and I’m a follower of Jesus, but I don’t walk around saying I’m gonna pray for you today.”
“But I say the Lord’s Prayer every night before I go to bed,” he adds. “My kids say it with me, and we try to walk towards God, towards a sense of faith, towards a higher purpose and a higher power, all these things that define your life by virtue of something outside of you.”
Grammer says he “was a Bible nerd” growing up, and while he “wasn’t a part of a church,” he “always thought” he “had a relationship with Jesus, in some way.”
The pull he’s felt throughout his life he now thinks others are feeling across the country.
“There is a movement back towards the idea that we live by faith and we are destined to do so,” he says. Even Hollywood “is catching on to the fact that there are maybe people like that who are willing to pay for a ticket, too.”
And while Grammer acknowledges that “not everybody” shares his beliefs, he’s quick to note that “even the ones who are on the other side reviling this sort of spiritual awakening” are still “our brothers and sisters.”
He hopes, though, that those on the other side of the road find their way to where he’s standing.
“It’s a real thing,” he says of America’s spiritual awakening. “And you can hate it or you can have the grace to go along with it.”
Faith, hope, and love. As a Bible nerd, Kelsey Grammer must realize these are the three things he’s mentioned most in our interview. St. Paul tells us that the greatest of these is love. And, while Grammer surely has no interest in rejiggering that order, it’s faith that he keeps coming back to — or at least what he speaks most eloquently about.
“We graduate into our humanity by the faith we carry,” he says, “And our belief in that is what unites us. Not human behavior — human behavior’s always going to let you down. But it’s God that teaches us to forgive that.”
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