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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Josh Larsen
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October 19, 2018 - April 3, 2020
if they’re interested in form as well as content, and in the relationship between the two—that is, if they’re looking for actual criticism as opposed to reviews, but written in language that can be understood by somebody who didn’t go to film school—then they should be reading critics who write for a religious or spiritual audience.
a critic such as Larsen writes much more perceptively about what a film actually is, what it contains, what it says, and how it says it, than all but a handful of critics who don’t carry the difficult responsibilities that spiritually minded critics shoulder every day of the week.
an essential book for anyone who thinks of cinema as a place of introspection as well as escapism, and believes that you can find signs and miracles anywhere if you know how to look for them.
Prayer is a human instinct, an urge that lies deep within us. Religion came along to nurture, codify, and enrich it.
first give thanks and praise, then pray for others, and only after offering confession should I speak of my own concerns. It
“Prayer is the raising of the mind and heart to God—for praise and thanksgiving and beseeching him for the good things necessary for soul and body.”
began to recognize that the very things we had been expressing in prayer as a faith community were also, in a less liturgical way, being expressed on the screen. Prayer was everywhere.
“Prayer is exhaling the spirit of man and inhaling the spirit of God.”
Each of these films, in their own distinct way, offers a response to the two great existential questions that we ask of God almost every day: What do I make of this place? Why am I here?
“Countless people, you see, pray far more than they know. Often they have such a ‘stained-glass’ image of prayer that they fail to recognize what they are experiencing as prayer.”2 Movies offer these sorts of unconscious prayerful gestures, only much louder and on a giant screen.
a more fundamental commonality between sanctuaries and theaters is the notion of focus. In both instances, we’ve set aside our time and our space to gather in community and join our concentration.
frequently we gather to apply our intellectual, emotional, and artistic prowess toward considering the world and our purpose within it.
Kuyper advanced the idea that God’s gifts, including those of artistic talent, are lavished on all of humanity—whether the artists are believers or not, whether they’re painting a portrait of Christ or sewing a costume on a Muppet.
“There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’”
when the resulting movies genuinely yearn, mournfully lament, fitfully rage, honestly confess, or joyously celebrate, they serve as prayers.
nine different expressions of prayer and then places an array of films within each one. Praise, confession, and obedience—the tenets of the Lord’s Prayer—are some of the forms I explore. The rich biblical tradition of lament, the mystical practice of Christian meditation, and the more excitable expression of prayerful joy are other areas of focus.
Christian Wiman touches on this in his meditation/memoir My Bright Abyss: “The purpose of theology—the purpose of any thinking about God—is to make the silences clearer and starker to us, to make the unmeaning—by which I mean those aspects of the divine that will not be reduced to human meanings—more irreducible and more terrible, and thus ultimately more wonderful. This is why art is so often better at theology than theology is.”
“Because we want to raise questions, not give answers. Because we want Christians to be some of the most thoughtful conversation partners and culture makers you can find. Because we want to celebrate the excellent and mourn what’s bad—even if those two things show up in the same place. And because we want to serve our readers as they love their neighbors.”
prayers can be unintended and can come from unbelievers, that even the howl of an atheist is directed at the God they don’t acknowledge.
Praise is our fundamental calling as created beings.
“Awe is why we are here.”
“Praise is not only a human requirement and a human need, it is also a human delight. We have a resilient hunger to move beyond self, to return our energy and worth to the One from whom it has been granted. In our return to that One, we find our deepest joy.”
The pleasure that comes from that sort of prideful world building is petty and desperately maintained, while the joy that comes from recognizing God’s place over all of creation is wide and deep. Prayers of praise relinquish us from the burden of maintaining a false status we don’t deserve and can’t uphold. Praise rightly reorders the hierarchy of the cosmos, giving honor and glory where it is due. And there is contentment unlike any other in that equilibrium.
“Glorification and enjoyment, the first serving God, the second including us, are the final purpose of humanity.”
When we see praise this way—as an expression of gratefulness that recaptures our created purpose—we will begin to notice echoes of it everywhere: in our relationships, in our vocations, and in our art.
“Man was created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord and in this way to save his soul,” Ignatius wrote. “The other things on Earth were created for man’s use, to help him reach the end for which he was created.”
In Answering God: The Psalms as Tools for Prayer, Eugene Peterson writes, “Prayer reaches into the unknown for whatever we sense, deep within us, will provide wholeness, or for what we hope, far off, will bring salvation. There is more to being human than simply surviving; there is God (or gods or ‘higher powers’)—looking for God, pleasing God, getting God’s help.”1 Yearning, then, is among the most universal of prayers, an instinct even the resolutely irreligious have.
all of that can feel useless when I’m in a quiet room, devoting myself to prayer and holding little more than hope that God is there. On days like that, it is not apologetics or theology that keeps me in prayer, but the yearning that lies behind all of that good work. Yearning is perhaps our truest testimony, a constant reminder to myself that even if my faith is not something I can blindly accept, neither is it something I can blithely discard.
“Honest doubt, what I would call devotional doubt, is marked, it seems to me, by these qualities: humility, which makes one’s attitude impossible to celebrate; insufficiency, which makes it impossible to rest; and mystery, which continues to tug you upward—or at least outward—even in your lowest moments.”
when we’re simply aching to know if he’s there.
If we’re tentative about comparing our yearning prayers for God to our romantic yearning for others, this is because we’re working the metaphor backwards. It isn’t that true communion with God resembles the physical closeness of a lover; it’s that divine communion is so incomprehensibly fulfilling—and so presently out of our grasp—that we must use a variety of earthly experiences to even come close to understanding it. One way of bridging that gap is to evoke the experience of unrequited love.
This trajectory, common to the Psalms, remains a model for modern worship services. In the June 1997 issue of Reformed Worship, John D. Witvliet describes liturgical lament for use in church, modeled on the “basic psalm forms.” He writes that despite our disillusionment, no matter that we cannot hear God’s voice, “we bring our most intense theological questions right into the sanctuary. . . . Then our prayer continues with specific petition: heal us, free us, save us.”
“This darkness and cloud is always between you and God, no matter what you do . . . so set yourself to rest in this darkness as long as you can, always crying out after him whom you love. For if you are to experience him or to see him at all, insofar as it is possible here, it must always be in this cloud and in this darkness.”
Biblical lament is not a twelve-step program in which trauma is used to refine us. It is, rather, a way of living faithfully in a damaged world.
death. This seems to suggest that prayer is the best place for our anger, especially if the alternatives are to take it out on others or bottle it up inside.
“There is no better place for your rage to be stated than before a God who will not shy from you nor punish you but will change you as you have need.”
we flee from God in our anger—rather than seek him, even if it’s in the form of an angry prayer—we’ll find ourselves mired in a pit, something like the sewers of Vienna or the belly of a whale.
no matter how hard we try to avoid it, we must come face to face with our true selves.
Calvin Miller outlines three steps to confessional prayer. The first is a desperate longing for God. The second is agreeing with God that our sin is sin, that we are not perfect beings. The third is serving God in the world in response to our forgiveness.
every day I find some way to justify the thoughts and deeds that keep me apart from God. While I may admit that I have faults or “things I’m working on,” I mostly live my life in denial of the full weight of my brokenness.
although sin often reveals itself in the things that we do, its root lies in who we are.
“We need to go deeper than simply going through a list of personal violations of rules,” writes Kenneth Leech in True Prayer, “looking more closely at the corruption of the will than at the particular external acts committed. Sin does not consist only in transgression of external laws, but in an inner alienation of the personality from God.”
“There is the world of difference between a sense of failure which leads to overpowering guilt and despondency, and a sense of failure which issues in penitence and joy.”
I’m not going to share any of my confessions here, but I will assure you that I’ve never had to confess a crime on the level of a Hitchcock character. Murderers of all kinds populate his pictures, and if these movies have such a lasting power it may be because they often align the audience’s perspective not with the victims but with the perpetrators. By implicating us, they burrow into our guilty consciences.
In many ways, Hitchcock’s films put the screws on their characters (and the audience) until we are all forced to come clean.
Because so many of his movies are driven by a palpable sense of guilt, a fair number also involve a contorted sort of confession.
“We should learn to pray even while we are dwelling on evil. Perhaps we are waging an interior battle over anger, or lust, or pride, or greed, or ambition. We need not isolate these things from prayer. Instead we talk to God about what is going on inside that we know displeases him.”
to confess is not simply to change but to first face and fully deny the false person we were trying to be.
Before we pray for reconciliation, prayers of lament, anger, and genuine confession must be fully heard. Yet remaining in alienation means death. Most of us have experienced this. Failing to reconcile can mean the death of community, as it does for Mookie’s neighborhood, or the death of personal relationship, as it does for Mookie and Sal. Some of our lives are littered with people with whom we’ve been unable to reconcile, and who might as well be dead. This is the connection between reconciliation and resurrection. Reconciliation is a deeply Christian idea because it is only made possible
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The questions Ameena asks are what God rhetorically asks of us. We absolutely want to be loved. In Christ, we absolutely deserve to be loved (Rom 5:10-11). For many of us, this is Reconciliation 101. Often the person we must reconcile with first is the one we face in the mirror.
