Pierced to the Heart

Our greatest commandments, our greatest aims in life, are to love. With film, as with any other part of our lives, our orientation should be one of love and of learning to love better. We should love growing. Like Jesus, our love should be clear and should draw others toward Beauty. Film should foster relationships of love with our neighbors. Our love should extend to filmmakers, even to those whose films we find lacking. Our love should be strong enough to pierce through our over-protection of children so that we might train them well to handle the dangers of this life. When we see film as a path to Beauty, growth, and the heart of God, we will love film as His gift to us. Principles of Love include:

• As seekers, we should love growing. As ones who “seek first the kingdom of God,” we will still be seekers when we step into a theater. Rather than being passive consumers wanting only for a movie to give us our money’s worth of pleasure, we can be active seekers wanting Beauty Himself to invade, enrich, and transform our hearts.
• Film can be part of loving our neighbors. In our relationships with our neighbors, film can foster Beautiful conversation, exploration, and love. But not if we’ve retreated from the world and from our neighbors’ films into our own, supposedly safe, world of “clean and clear” films. If we’ve not seen the films that our neighbors and co-workers have seen, we can’t fairly enter into their film conversations. Filmmakers are our neighbors, too, and we should have love, grace, and compassion toward them.
• Ugly films are judged by heart, not by content. Because Beauty can be hidden inside ugly (as at the Cross), ugly content can contribute to a film’s heart of Beauty. The mere presence of ugly content does not make a film ugly, but it does if ugly content is there for pleasure of reveling in the ugly.
• Choosing a film to see is a personal matter. One person may choose to see films with ugly content. Another may avoid ugly content because it leads them down a wrong path or because it hurts their hearts. What we choose to see should be born of personal conviction before God.
• For children, the issue is training not safety. Children will eventually be on their own in the wild world, making their own film choices. In stages as they grow, parents should train their children to engage well with film. Proper training is safer — and more loving — than isolation and over-protection.
• Loving film can be a part of loving Beauty Himself. When our hearts long to be transformed to love the same things that God loves, even our vicarious experiences in film can help us to grow up in Him. Surely, there are films that are not worth our time and attention, yet by seeing and understanding both ugly and Beauty, we can learn for ourselves to truly love the same things that He loves.