St. Louis Speaker Series: Mia Farrow

Last night we heard Mia Farrow speak. Unlike the other speakers we've heard so far (Pervez Musharraf, ex-president of Pakiston; Laura Bush, first lady; and Robert Reich, professor and TV commentator), Mia's speech was not so much a lecture as it was an actress recounting remarkable stories from her life. I must confess, I only knew two things about Mia: I knew her from the move "The Great Gatsby", and that she had a tumultuous marriage to Woody Allen. I learned some other intersting things about her life, last night:

• Her father was an Australian director. Her mother was an actress; she was the original "Jane" in "Tarzan". She grew up in Beverly Hills with them.
• She got polio when she was 9. She's now an advocate for polio eradication. At least one of her adopted children is confined to a wheel chair because of polio.
• Her brother died in a crash when she was a teenager, then her father passed away three years later.
• She married Frank Sinatra when she was 21 and he was 50. (I had no idea of this!) She spent quite a bit of time reflecting on that relationship.
• She went to India to study transcendental meditation with her sister and the Beatles showed up. They wrote a song about her sister called "Dear Prudence".
• One of her adopted children graduated college at 15 and had his law degree by the time he was 21. He now works for the U.S. government.
• She now spends her time trying to draw attention to the atrocities in the Darfur region as a Unicef goodwill ambassador.

She had a very whimsical way of relating, and it's clear why she would have been so attractive to so many men. However, she said it herself: being thrust into Hollywood (having her own TV show when she was 18) and becoming part of Frank Sinatra's "complicated" world at such a young age, she had a hard time to learning how to connect with people in an "authentic" way.

Quite frankly, my heart ached for her as I heard her talk. What I saw was a woman without any sort of moral compass who has struggled to find meaning in any number of ways in her life. Yes, she is doing some good things, but it seems like sort of a last ditch effort to find significance. She seems like the classic case of "looking for love in the all the wrong places", which probably had something to do with her three failed marriages. From the way she talked, with her father already deceased by the time she 18 and her mother living in New York while she was in Hollywood, she was essentially left to her own devices at a young age. Now a 65 year old woman, to me, she represents the very rough road a life can take when you have only yourself to depend on. I just wish that some person had come into her life at a young age and had explained to her that, even when people and circumstances let you down, you have one person you can always depend on, and that's Jesus. And when you have an overwhelming need to feel loved, that there is One who loves limitlessly. And when you're looking for your life to have significance, you don't have to create that significance yourself; you are significant already because you are made in the image of God. My heart breaks for this lost woman.