a form of devotion

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Delving deeper into the surrounding mystery of the relationship between the lenten season and holy cinema.

My conception of lent comes from my lingering and heavy sense that we need to stop. Always this sense is with me - in my dreams and nightmares - in my solitude and in my relationships. I have been known to pray (yell) and ask God to send a snowstorm that would shut down the whole city - forcing us to stop and notice that we are not in control - "'cause if this thing comes true, there ain't gonna be any more." Lent, I believe, is at least a time in which we take a deep breath and let go of something to which we are dependent upon daily - and at most, an intentional suffering with Christ, knowing that we chant everyday to have him crucified, even while we hope in his resurrection, as well as our own. The spiritual discipline of lament gives us a language with which to begin entering into the season of Lent - a language of brokeness, insight, reflection, and conversion.

"Christians often try to fix the brokenness of the world in a way that puts either us or the world at the center. In responding to the urgent needs of the world, our first question ought not be “what should we do?” but rather “what is going on?” The story of our lives and the story of the world begin with what God has already accomplished. The center of that story is Jesus Christ—“Therefore if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come … God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ” (II Cor 5:17-19, TNIV)...


...lament is the hard work of learning to see and name the brokenness of the world. To the extent we have not learned to lament, we deal superficially with the world’s brokenness, offering quick and easy fixes that do not require our conversion. The discipline of lament not only allows us to see the depth of the world’s brokenness (including our own and the church’s complicity in it); it also shapes reconciliation as a journey that involves truth, conversion, and forgiveness." - Duke Divinity CFR

What is going on? It's a question that asks us to be honest with ourselves - to not just look around, but to look inside and ask - how are we apart of the problem? What does my inner conflict have to do with interpersonal conflict and with international conflict? Often (most often!) we are "doing" something, for better or worse in the world, because it's the best place to hide. We hide behind our actions. And death is imminent here. All spirituality is lost.

This is why the season of Lent is so necessary. We need a reminder that if we want to experience redemption and resurrection throughout our life - and if we want to be able to offer it to others - we must embrace and accept suffering - and know that shit always gets worse before it gets better in the process. We must turn towards the suffering, open our eyes, and take a deeeeeep breath.

One way to do that, of course, if through film...

"Religion and cinema is a subject that I have spent my life thinking about. Their relationship - not where religion is the subject of a film, but where film is the spirit or experience of religion - has been my particular focus.


...the works I found most interesting were those that were discovering a language unique to film, a language where film itself became the place of experience and, at the same time, was an evocation of something meaningfully human.


...I began to observe that there was a concordance between film and our human metabolism (the set of chemical reactions that happen in the cells of living organisms to sustain life), and to see that this concordance was a fertile ground for expression, a basis for exploring a language intrinsic to film. In fact, film's physical properties seemed so attuned to our metabolism that I began to think of film as a metaphor, a direct and intimate model, for our being. And insofar as I could delve into that model and have it represent us in a direct and deep way, I felt that film itself had the potential to be transformative, to be an evocation of spirit, and to become a form of devotion.


The word "devotion", as I am using it, need not refer to the embodiment of a specific religious form. Rather, it is the opening or the interruption that allows us to experience what is hidden, and to accept with our hearts our given situation. When film does this, when it subverts our absorption in the temporal and reveals the depths of our own reality, it opens us to a fuller sense of ourselves and our world. It is alive as a devotional form." - Nathanial Dorsky

Paris, Texas

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