Tuesday, February 01, 2005

Spiritual Movies

Thinking about movies with a spiritual message at work for an upcoming meeting. It occurred to me that every movie (every story, every life) is essentially a search for truth and love. Since truth and love can only be attained by yielding to the law of a higher, spiritual power, every movie is really the telling of a spiritual journey. Either the characters are finding some spiritual transformation or we are seeing the conscequences of the lack of spiritual transformation. So which movies show this most poignantly? The first two that come to mind are "Closer" and "We Don't Live Here Anymore." Both were disturbing, even depressing. Why do people treat eachother so badly. How can they not see the errors of the choices they make? What we see in those movies is mainly the spiritual vacuum of searching for truth and love in the wrong places, the wrong ways, or in ways that ulitmately have no chance of success. OK, were there any movies with a more positive spiritual message? Why is it that the darker stories are more telling? Maybe because they seem more real, more believeable, and the stories which are too good, clean and pure don't have as much to say because the character has already achieved the spiritual transformation that would be so telling if we were to see the dark beginnings of the story.