Moved to Tears, to God, With Movies and Moments of the Everyday
I wouldn’t consider myself to be a “movie person.” Many of my friends are movie people, and during get-togethers, when they have at it, I just smile. Smile and hope that I can genuinely appreciate whatever they’re talking about. Most of the time, it’s just a polite smile, because either I haven’t seen the movie, or I remember nothing about it. So no, I’m not a movie person (but please feel free to invite me to watch one anyway).
Now, I’m a sucker, though, for movies that make me cry. It doesn’t happen too often, but when it does, I love it! Because crying is cathartic. I may not remember the name of the movie, or even what it was about, but I’ll remember crying to it — maybe not with a full-blown bawl, but at least with a shed tear or two.
I think the last movie I cried to was A Dog’s Life. Or maybe not. But it had a dog, the movie’s protagonist. And before that, maybe it was Disney’s The Croods. And, let me man up and confess that decades ago, a movie about a giant sinking ship got to me as well. Damn iceberg.
And it’s not just movies. It’s TV series and even YouTube clips, too. Station 19 had a couple of tear-jerking moments, as definitely did its parent show Grey’s Anatomy, the best series ever. And to prove that I have no bias for Shondaland, the ending of American Horror Story: 1984 put a lump in my throat as well.
For the longest time I thought that maybe I was just a softy. A sentimentalist who wore his heart on his sleeve when I wasn’t too busy coddling my neuroses to keep it covered. Well, that might still be true, but maybe it’s something to celebrate, because I had a miracle last night…
A Profound YouTube Experience (or something)
But before getting to the miracle, I’ll talk about one more tear-jerker, this time from YouTube. Several days ago, out of the blue it crossed my mind to listen to Coldplay’s “Fix You,” one of my favorite songs. The clip I watched was from a colossal concert in Brazil:
And what a moving clip it was. It felt like the song’s lyrics — “Tears stream down on your face” — cast a spell and made it happen. Not just for so many in the concert, but for me as well.
Still, it wasn’t really so much the lyrics that I resonated with. There was something else I couldn’t figure out. But it was definitely there, and it felt good to feel it, to explore it, to surrender to it. This amorphous thing, this familiar yet obscure experience that so beautifully held my emotions captive, captivated by a mysterious sense of joy.
Have you ever intensely felt drawn to something, even something seemingly “ordinary,” and couldn’t understand why?
Well, at some point, sadly, I snapped out of it. (There was still work to get done!) So I dismissed the feeling as yet another fleeting moment of saccharine indulgence — the same kind that not too long before a friend caught me entertaining over an episode of Station 19, somewhat to my embarrassment.
Miracles as Natural Expressions of Love
Enter the miracle. But let me define the term’s usage here first. For about eight months now, I’ve been a student of A Course in Miracles (ACIM). It’s a giant book about universal spiritual themes, meant to transition you from a thought system based on fear to a thought system based on love. And so, according to ACIM, a miracle is a shift in perception from fear to love.
The goal? The “peace of God.”
Or salvation, or Heaven on Earth, or nirvana, or enlightenment, or unity consciousness, or simply inner peace. The phrase is up to you.
So, as an ACIM student, I try hard to go about my day perceiving everything from a loving lens. I mess up sometimes (well, a lot), but it’s a process and why the Course is supposed to be a lifetime curriculum.
ACIM teaches that only love is real, and nothing else exists. If you’re in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, another term for love is God. (After all, we’re taught that “God is love,” right?) If you follow another tradition, you have your vocabulary that points to the same idea. And if you prefer more secular terminology, another term might be pure consciousness or simply the universe.
Anyway, ACIM isn’t a religion, and it claims no monopoly on the Truth. But it does speak to spiritual themes that apply to everyone. And it doesn’t really matter what we conceptually call God anyway; it’s the experience of God (of love, pure consciousness, etc.) that counts. But perhaps this is for another blog post or journal entry.
“Finding God in All Things”
Now let me get back to the miracle that transpired. The fear-based thought might be something like this: What’s wrong with you? Don’t be such a wuss. It’s just a song (or movie, or show, or book, or whatever). Well, that’s an extreme example of a harsh thought I never really had. But even some mild embarrassment for being seen to be teary-eyed for something not particularly extraordinary speaks to some figment of fear.
So what about the love-based thought? The miracle dawned on me after reading a particular section from this jewel, one of my latest buys:
The author, Father James Martin, deep-dives into Ignatian spirituality (which was inspired by St. Ignatius, who founded the Jesuit order in 1534). One of the principal tenets of Ignatian spirituality is that our deepest desire, even among the unbelieving, is a desire for God.
And this desire for God manifests itself in everyday life in numerous ways. Father Martin discusses eight of those ways, and one of them made me think of my crying spells. He calls it a “common longing and connection,” which he describes like this:
Sometimes you experience a desire for God in very common situations: standing silently in the snowy woods on a winter’s day, finding yourself moved to tears during a movie, recognizing a strange sense of connection during a church service — and feeling an inexpressible longing to savor this feeling and understand what it is.
Aside from media, I remember having one of these experiences on an airplane. As I looked out the window down at the vast ocean below, a surge of emotion overcame me. And it came out of nowhere. Suddenly I felt a deep connection to the planet, finally seeing it as my home. Not just intellectually, but on a gut level — “Yes, this is my home!” At once I felt both tremendous gratitude for the earth’s blessings, but also deep remorse at how poorly we’ve been treating it.
It was a strange feeling that’s hard to describe, but it was beautiful, and in hindsight certainly divine. Father Martin would add that in these moments, “We feel that we are standing on the brink of something important, on the edge of experiencing something just beyond us. We experience wonder.”
But you don’t have to be in the midst of the awesome splendor of nature to feel this wonder. As Father Martin says, “God meets you where you are.” You just have to be still enough, quiet enough, open enough, to notice Him. You can be watching a movie, listening to a song, or resting your gaze on your beloved. And if a feeling of deep connection stirs within you, that’s an invitation to be aware of the presence of God, of love, of the universe.
So, here’s the miracle: Maudlin moments don’t “just happen” because we were “being emotional” or “being silly”; they happen because we were invited to remember our common humanity. The experiences that move us most — whether in real life or even vicariously through media — are the ones that, as humans, we can all relate to.
We understand the love of a parent for their child, and the love of a child for their parent. We understand the story of people messing up in life and trying their hardest to make things right. We understand the sweet release of forgiveness and making peace. We understand the sorrow that people feel when they lose a loved one. And we understand that, as we all go about our days trying our very best to make it in this world, we each have a deep yearning to feel tenderly connected to something bigger than us.
And you know, that something “bigger” is all around, gracing even everyday moments with the profound. So the paradox is this: Feeling our humanity delivers us to our divinity. Indeed, we are all made in the image of God.
Now back to the Coldplay concert. Between its scale, the beautiful lights, the ginormous audience of teary fans singing in unison and in seeming rapture, I couldn’t help but be moved. But beyond all this material form, what deeper truth did God invite me to see? What spiritual experience was I beckoned to feel?
In another book I’m currently reading, Braving the Wilderness, the author Brené Brown defines spirituality this way:
Spirituality is recognizing and celebrating that we are all inextricably connected to each other by a power greater than all of us, and that our connection to that power and to one another is grounded on love…
In that concert, I saw and felt the sheer magnitude of the outpouring of love that suffused the whole arena. All of these people came together, and for at least the duration of that song, or maybe even the duration of the entire concert, they had no walls. They had only love. They felt only love. They were one with each other.
And if God is love, they were one with God.
