Franciscan Film Society

Movies have the ability to truly move us. What if we were to be moved while looking through a Franciscan lens?

Movies have the ability to truly move us. What if we were to be moved while looking through a Franciscan lens?

I find much of what is considered popular “Christian” movies to be lacking. Besides the obvious theological problems raised by movies portraying Jesus as some sterilized hippy that simply wants everyone to be happy, God as an impersonal judge that is more like Santa Claus than the creator of the cosmos, or anything involving the rapture, I find many of the story lines to be trite, corny, and distant from the experience of many people dealing with brokenness in their lives. While there are obviously some redeemable characteristics to these movies, and many people do in fact like them, I would like to posit an alternative perspective on the Christian movie-going experience: the best movies portraying the journey of a Christian to the heart of God are often found in the secular world.

The problem I think we as Christians run into when trying to select movies is twofold: 1) we can too narrowly define Christian movies as those films produced by Christian organizations and/or have an explicit message of Jesus or Christianity, and 2) we shy away from anything rated above PG because PG-13 and R rated movies inevitably include images that are contrary to our Christian values, and thus, “could not be Christian.”

I could not disagree more. Take a movie like Gran Torino for instance. The main character (Clint Eastwood) is a vengeful, broken man who uses terrible language and more racial slurs than I knew existed. At multiple points in the movie he resolves conflicts with threats and violence, and if that’s not enough, is disrespectful (to say the least) towards the local priest seeking to help him. This character is far from G-rated and family friendly, and by no means a prototypical Christian hero. And yet, I find him to be a powerful expression of the Christian experience. *Spoiler alert* Touched by the very people he spent his entire life hating, he finds redemption and closure to many broken aspects of his life by refraining from violence in a violent situation, sacrificing his own life for the life of the community. His experience of forgiveness, reconciliation, and redemption is powerful to say the least.

How about the movie Crash? This Academy Award winning movie is rated R for “language, sexual content and some violence” and the only explicit reference to any religion is one character’s superstitious devotion to St. Christopher. In no way would I show this movie children, and frankly, most teenagers. And yet, I find it to be a foundational movie in my Christian development. Comprised of a series of vignettes, the movie follows the lives of numerous strangers as they unknowingly interact and shape the lives of the other characters. What I would call the “anti-Disney” movie, it portrays a world that is not-so-easily boxed and categorized into “good” and “bad” people with predictable and happy endings; like us, each character brings a complex set of experiences to each situation, complete with faults and failings, exhibiting a remarkable glimpse of God’s love in one instance and a terrible act inhumanity in another. It is a reminder that no one is outside of the power of redemption, and that it may be people in situations we least expect that we experience God most vividly. It is a reminder that no body should be judged by what they do on their worst day. It is a reminder that we are not the protagonist of ever story, and that our actions can have profound effects on those we meet every day.

In a truly providential way, I was working on this post when a like-minded parishioner invited me to attend the first “Franciscan Film Society (working title)” movie night. Let’s get together for dinner, watch a great movie, and have a discussion among young-adult Catholics, he said. Fantastic. Besides offering me an opportunity to interact with people (roughly) my age outside of the friary in a fun way, the movie and discussion was an extraordinary experience of Christian fellowship and faith building.

As I should have expected, but was completely put on the spot, the organizer asked me, “the Franciscan,” to explain to everyone why I thought what we were doing to be particularly Franciscan. Luckily, the answer seemed obvious to me. Franciscan theology is an incarnational. God is ever immanent, both creator of and partaker in matter. God is not some distant idea on high looking down upon us. God is in our midst, appearing in the broken and mundane, the imperfect and incomplete. Jesus’ taking on flesh rather than speaking in a booming voice from heaven is evident of this. When we watch movies to experience the ever-present God, recognizing God in the mundane and less-than-obvious places, together in community, we are doing so through the lens of a Franciscan.

For some, this whole experience might seem a bit misguided and self-fulfilling: you see what you want to see because you have read into the movie. That’s possible for sure, and I hope that I have not led anyone to believe that simply because something is R rated and doesn’t talk about God that it is in fact Christian. There are of course movies with little moral value and not worth watching (including many G and PG movies!) But it’s worth a question: is what we’re doing “reading into” a movie that was never intended to be Christian in meaning, or is it recognizing the presence of God all around us, using a popular and powerful medium to kickstart a discussion about our own experience of God? For me, just because something is not explicitly Christian or it contains situations that are not in keeping with our Christian values does not mean that it cannot provide a liminal experience for conversion and growth. My hope is that this experience of film, this replacing of rose-colored glasses for Franciscan ones, will in fact help each of us to see God more clearly in the world around us, a world that, frankly, more clearly resembles the brokenness and struggle found in well-made secular movies than it does explicitly “Christian” ones.

 2 Comments

 Posted on January 11, 2014 by

 Theology

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God With Us

God is with us, but why?

God is with us, but why?

As a Franciscan, Christmas is the celebration of the most terrific moment in human history: God became like us to be with us. Being born into poverty, surrounded by animals and filth, and visited by those who were far from being ritually clean (shepherds and foreigners), it is a time to recognize how the triune God works in and through the mundane, gritty, material aspects of our existence, appearing to us in the least expected of places. It is an act of humility, love and justice.

Which brings up a pretty significant question if you ask me: Why? Why did God choose to lower himself by taking on an imperfect form and nature? Why did God “empty himself, taking the form of a slave”? Why did God come to be with us?

My guess is that the majority of people would answer this question having been largely influenced by some form of atonement theology. “Jesus came to save from our sins/to offer a sacrifice in our place/to pay our debts.” For many, Christmas is significant only in its relationship to Easter as it is the foreshadowing for what is to come, for what really matters. This is evident in the way most answer this popular medieval question: “Had humanity not sinned, would Jesus still have come?” The answer that I most often get, and the one that is most popular in the history of the Church is “no”. Without even realizing it, Jesus is relegated to utilitarian role in which he is a use to us.

But as Franciscans have said for centuries, and as I would like to humbly remind, there is more to Jesus than just some divine “get-out-of-jail-free” card. Jesus is the second person of the triune God, existing before all creation, and the one through whom all was created. Jesus existed well before we did, and his coming to be a part of creation was not some afterthought of God to fix a mistake. Rather, it seems to me that he would have come, even if humanity had never sinned, for the sole reason of being in relationship with us. God taking on flesh is certainly a way to make a blood sacrifice, but it is also a way to become our brother, our teacher, our example of holiness, and our king. God planned from the beginning of time to be with us in this very intimate way, to know and love us, and for us to know and love him.

May you have a blessed Christmas as we celebrate together the mystery of the God with us and yet who is still yet to come.

 5 Comments

 Posted on December 24, 2013 by

 Theology

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“I think of it like a…”

Christ is the light of the world.

I like to think of God’s presence as being similar to light. It is source by which we can see and know things; it is brighter in some places than others; and one would have to search high and low to find a place void of it completely. God is most everywhere, yes, but concentrated in certain places more than others.

 

This used to be a huge body of water.

 

Sometimes I have to remind myself not to follow the examples of Death Valley or the Dead Sea. The former gave so much of itself without replenishment that it ended up dry and withered, incapable of giving any longer; the latter took so much from others without sharing that it became so salty that it cannot support life.

Letting go can hurt more than holding on.

 

Purgatory is like a powerfully clenched fist refusing to let go. The only way out is accepting, forgiving, and releasing one’s will. There is no outside force violently ripping the hand open and causing pain. There’s only the inside pain caused by the slow realization that the thing it’s holding isn’t what it truly wants anymore, and finding a way to let it go.

Same thing, three forms

 

 

Trying to wrap my head around one God as three persons is difficult. The best I can do is remember that ice, water, and steam are all the same chemical but each take different forms.

 

We are the "Go Between" God and the world.

I think we’re each like an individual GOBO, an apparatus placed on the front of a light with a specific shape or color for use in theatre (literally a “Goes before optics” or “Go Between”). By itself, it projects nothing; it needs a light source. Each Gobo comes with its own individual angles, colors, and levels of transparency through which the light must pass, causing the same light source to be projected in different ways. For me, it’s better than the image of empty pipe that connects God to the world because it accepts that we can’t ever be objectively unbiased; how we accept God, interpret him, and transmit him are all biases we bring to the world.

 3 Comments

 Posted on November 23, 2011 by

 Theology

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Why Do We Suffer? Pt. 3

Where is God in our suffering? Right here with us.

After a long and busy week that allowed me almost no time to write, I finally present to you my concluding reflection on theodicy: the existence of evil as a source of suffering. As I outlined in the previous two posts, I believe that suffering can be caused by a number of sources, both good and evil, and that God can certainly play a role in the former category. But what about the latter? Is the Holocaust all a part of God’s plan for humanity? Do people get murdered, raped, or abused because God willed it? In situations like these, and in others that are much less dramatic, e.g. gaining or losing money on the stock market, I refuse to accept that God has even an ounce of responsibility in the suffering that ensues.

My conclusions are based on what I come to know as the definition of evil and sin: any act, whether fully realized by the actor or not, that breaks from the divine will of God for the sake of one’s own will. The original sin was the choice by the primordial humans to disobey God and eat the fruit of the tree. In doing this, they brought into the world something that God did not create: a “no.” Like a stone thrown into still water, this act of disobedience caused a ripple in human history than could not be contained. Each act of saying “no” to God offered the same possibility to the next person, leading humanity to live in a culture of sin and separation from God. This is the imperfect world in which we live, and this is the world in which suffering is caused by evil.

If we accept this foundational thought, the next logical question is, “Even if God didn’t bring evil into this world, why doesn’t he use his omnipotence to get rid of it?” Those in the midst of suffering often ask this in their despair. “Where was God when X happened?!”

The problem with this demand is that it in order for God to intervene, he would have to remove the very thing that separates us from the rest of creation: our free will. Without it, we become like animals, working within a system of instincts and stimulus/response, unable to truly love God and one another. Of course it feels really bad when a friend or family member hurts your feelings, but would you rather them not have the ability to do such things? In the same way, God respects our autonomy from him and allows us to act against his will, hoping that we will choice to love him as he loves us.

But just like his creation in the last post, this does not mean that God stands idly by, refusing to intervene. On a very basic level, he has intervened in human history by inspiring his priests, prophets, and kings to act out of justice and to reorient the people of God back to their Lord. He continues to do so today as he inspiring each one of us through our consciences, his living word found in the Bible, and the sacraments, each of which are channels of God’s grace in the world.

In a much more climactic way, God intervened in human history by becoming part of it in the person of Jesus. How could he have possibly intervened more than becoming human himself? Through the incarnation, God not only shepherded his lost sheep in a concrete, physical way, he actually took on suffering himself. This is an incredible revelation of which we must remind ourselves every time we ask in disgust, “Where is God when X happened?” The answer is that he suffers allow with us. In situations such as these, we might be better off asking, “Where is humanity when X happened, and why did we let this happen to our brothers and sisters?”

Unlike suffering that comes as a result of God’s will, I do not believe that there is any divine purpose or ultimate plan for suffering caused by evil. It is not true that anything that doesn’t kill you makes you stronger: evil causes despair, hopelessness, and loss of faith, none of which God ever wants us to experience. I believe that God has, and will continue to intervene on behalf of humanity, but will always respect us as autonomous beings created in his image. This is the only way that we can truly love and be loved by God.

 2 Comments

 Posted on October 7, 2011 by

 Theology

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Why Do We Suffer? Pt. 2

Natural disasters are a huge source of suffering

As I concluded in the last post, I think it’s important to differentiate between those sufferings caused by God and others caused not by God. Even though suffering is suffering, manifesting itself in a similar way no matter the source, the reason I separate the two is because they require completely different responses. This post will deal specifically with sufferings caused by God.

The very idea of God causing suffering may be very hard for some to accept because it contradicts the image of a “loving God that just wants you to be happy.” Part of the problem in this field of study is that we often believe that suffering, no matter the source, shouldn’t exist. I don’t think that’s true. What sort of world would it be if we only ever experienced happiness, joy, sunshine, and success? What sort of superficial love would we have for God if we never experienced sadness, sorrow, or disappointment? Without the ability to experience all of these emotions we lack an ability to experience God. In some cases, God not only allows suffering to occur, but is also the one who sends it. How do we know the difference?

Like I said before, the approach has to be both/and, not either/or: I think God can manipulate natural forces and send them specifically to an individual in a miraculous way, e.g. the plagues in the Exodus, but I think that it’s more likely that creation exists as an ever-moving machine, always acting within the laws that govern it. For example, God could send a lightning bolt to target your house specifically, but its more likely that the answer is that your house was the tallest in the area, containing materials conducive for the flow of electricity between the earth to the sky. God created the laws of physics, and lightning abides by it, indiscriminate of whether or not humans dwell nearby.

In a way, this explanation is simply splitting hairs: either God is directly responsible by sending it specifically to a given people or place, or indirectly responsible because he allowed his creation, which never acts outside of its intended nature, to cause suffering. If we are to believe that God is all-powerful, why would he let things like this happen?

God created and loves all creation, not just humanity. If he were to intervene in every instance where we had the opportunity to suffer, there wouldn’t be anything left of creation but us! Cancer causes suffering, but it is a creation of God just like dogs, and so sometimes God allows life to work itself out the way it was created. (Other times, he works miracles.) Doing so allows us to more deeply understand God by understanding the nature of creation.

Other times, suffering can be the result of incorrect expectations. In the case of cancer, we experience suffering because we have the expectation of not receiving it; the same can be said about loss of property and death. In cases like these, it’s sometimes helpful to reorganize our priorities and better focus on God: a life in Christ is not free from harm, but it’s one of eternal joy upon rebirth into heaven. Sometimes, we just need to say, “that’s life,” understanding that suffering is just a part of life that we can endure. Can we really say, “I want to follow Christ, but I’m not willing to suffer?”

As crazy as it sounds, suffering may very well just be an experience that God wants us to have. It better prepares us to appreciate the good, it forces us to be dependent on him, it facilitates a society of caring and uplifting, and it opens us up to a more complete experience of God and the fullness of life. God does not send suffering upon us that we cannot endure because he is ever calling us back to him. Sometimes it’s like a parent that punishes a child: the child needs to learn the difference between right and wrong. Other times, God lets us venture out to explore, knowing that we’re going to experience hardship: a parent takes off the training wheels even though there’s a high probability of a crash in the future. Do either of these situations negate the goodness of a parent?

The problem is that a child can experience suffering caused by others, some of which a parent would never wish upon them. Pt. 3 will look at suffering caused by our free will that is completely separate and against the will of God: evil.

Continue to Part 3

 4 Comments

 Posted on October 1, 2011 by

 Theology

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Breaking In The Habit

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