Movies Are Prayers: How Films Voice Our Deepest Longings

by Josh Larsen

The stories of sinners often have as much to tell us about the human condition as the stories of saints—usually more, because even on our best days, most of us are closer to sinner than saint: a work in progress, doing the best we can to confront the big issues, but often just kind of muddling through, doing the best we can.

“Prayer is exhaling the spirit of man and inhaling the spirit of God.”

God may not be the name always given to that unseen listener, but he is nevertheless the one who hears. In Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home, Richard Foster describes the malleability of prayer: “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. If it helps, imagine stained-glass windows along the walls of a theater.

And when the resulting movies genuinely yearn, mournfully lament, fitfully rage, honestly confess, or joyously celebrate, they serve as prayers.

Our prayers, both personal

and cinematic, always take place somewhere along this creation-fall-redemption-restoration timeline.

“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.”

this is a way of understanding them in light of God’s sovereignty, of seeing them as chapters in the larger Christian narrative within which every film’s story ultimately takes place.

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.

Yet at its fullest, biblical lament expresses sorrow over losing a world that was once good alongside a belief that it can be made good again (Du Bois’s “truer world”). Lament isn’t giving up, it’s giving over. When we lift up our sorrow and our pain, we turn it over to the only one who can meet it: our God.

Sometimes, no matter how hard we try to avoid it, we must come face to face with our true selves.

An alignment of these prayers within God’s cosmic story would look something like this: Creation: praise Fall: yearning, lament, anger Redemption: confession, reconciliation, obedience, meditation/contemplation Restoration: joy