Ever see that movie “Ghost?” The kids these days would call it a “classic” movie even though it’s in color. If you haven’t seen it, here’s the short synopsis: A man and woman, deeply in love and REALLY into pottery, have their love story cut short by a tragedy that costs him his life. He spends the rest of the movie as a ghost trying to solve his own murder and communicate with his still-living but now-lost love. Whoopie Goldberg assists.
Theologically, it’s a dumpster fire, but if you’re looking for solid catechesis in Hollywood blockbusters, I don’t know what to tell you. However, it did have some memorable imagery beyond the pottery—for example, when people’s souls leave their bodies.
I was thinking of this movie the other day after I read the following piece from Archimandrite Aimilianos’ “The Way of the Spirit.” (I have decided to harness the seemingly disparate and random way my mind makes connections rather than seek help for it). In it, he talks about that moment, that precise moment, when the Christian begins to detach from “checkbox faith” to living, enlivening, or, in a word, “infinite” faith.
The whole thing is great, if a bit “chewy,” theologically speaking, but this part stands out:
I now have some degree of self-knowledge, some sense of who I truly am. I realize that within me there is a divine element, which broadens and expands like a cloud in the upper atmosphere. At the same time, however, I am confronted with the truth about my life, and I recognize that I am dust. As I cross into the realm of infinite spirit, I catch a glimpse of myself from the perspective of eternity. I see my sin, my selfishness, my passions, my pettiness, my mortality. I weep over all of this, but I also rejoice in the knowledge that my real, deepest self, the breath that God once breathed upon me (cf. Gen 2.7), will remain with me always, and that God is able to draw it back to Himself at any moment He pleases.
In this way, I come to experience myself as something strange, different, and new. I experience both my spiritual existence and my sinful self, which nevertheless loves God. And through these ravishments and ecstasies, these experiences of God's absence and presence, through the manifestation of my spiritual being, we begin to understand who we are.
Do you get what he’s saying here? Rather than despairing about one’s sinfulness, fallen nature, low status or whatever, one begins to be aware of a thread that extends from one’s being into, and over, the horizon. The infinite.
Joy follows.
I budgeted my time poorly last week, so I don’t really have the time right this moment to share some of my own personal experience on this subject, but that’s alright: I want to pry myself away from what has become the basis of this publication: awkward self-disclosure. I will say this, however: I can verify that this is a real phenomenon. There comes a point when the ping-pong ball hovers somewhere between “I am garbage” and “I am God’s special-special flower.” It’s a holistic understanding of ourselves: Yes, we are dust, but we are God-breathed dust, and that will, with His grace, elevate us to little gods he always intended us to be.
“Forgive me, Lord, for I am sinful and retarded.” And that’s okay. It’s better than okay—it’s cause for joy because it’s the beginning of wisdom.
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