Film and Spirituality

Film I think is another form of visual journalling.

Tonight I went to the first of eight movies shown under the theme of "The Love of God". This is not a conventional Christian series as the opener was The Motorcycle Diaries under the title of Kingdom meditation. This is the story of young Ernesto "Che" Guevara and his friend Alberto Granado who began a journey by motorcycle across South America in 1952. Their encounters bring changes to their worldview and values and in a sense they are transformed by the poverty, by their encounters, by the generosity and hospitality they meet.

This film series seeks to address the Love of God by asking:-

• What is love?
• How do I love?
• What stops me from loving? What happens when I love in an authentic manner?

For me, I am struck by a particular point where Guevara and Alberto end up at the San Paolo Leper colony in Peru. The low-contagious patients live on one bank of this wide deep river and the staff and doctors etc live on the opposite bank. I could see this incongruity being considered by the 24 year old trainee doctor Ernesto (the later revolutionary). At the conclusion of his birthday party with the staff, he exits and looks across the river to where the patients are and declares 'I want to celebrate my birthday with them.' An asthmatic he almost foolhardily jumps into the river and begins his long swim. The staff and friend call for him to come back, the lepers come out hearing the shouting and realize who is coming to them and encourage him... helping him out of the water as he completes the almost impossible.

For me, love and solidarity have a strong association. How can you love the leper when you place them on the other side of a wide river? Guevara responded with a solidarity noticing the presence of the river and the separation it caused, You can see the beginnings of a solidarity right at the start shaking the hands of the lepers without gloves. I notice love includes a refusal to conform, based on love as communion and love as robust concern and love as valuing. (see my earlier post) Furthermore I am constantly struck by those claiming to have concern for a given group, live somewhere else, or they erect either physical, conceptual, or programatic barriers.

Tonight's reflection notes were prepared within the tradition of Ignatian spirituality and one paragraph sticks out to me.

"Many projects and enterprises claim to be from God; many leaders use spiritual, religious, moral and ethical arguments to validate their ways of proceeding. Ignatius [in his Spiritual Exercises], instead, insists that it is God who does the choosing, not humans. They might try to conscript God into their own projects and dramas. But God's ways are not human ways, and the Spirit blows where it wills. The things and qualities we consider important .... in service to God do not matter to God ... [What matters is being] human with all the flaws and glories of being human, when being human asks us always to go beyond ourselves, and to move from sincerity to authenticity."

Let the world change you ... and you can change the world declares The Motorcycle Diaries. Our mass media and charity fund raising is generating compassion fatigue and we are in danger of not feeling anything anymore. But an authentic Christian spirituality, which includes wonder, declares "Let the world touch me. I will not avoid the feelings whether good or painful I will accept them and set my face towards God. " Guevara ultimately cannot set his face towards God rather sets it against injustices and the evils he sees.

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. 2 Cor 1:3-4