IMAGINATION, FAITH AND THE MOVIES
Sermon preached at 10.00am Festal Eucharist for the Bury Festival
St. Edmundsbury Cathedral
17 May 2015
This morning we are going to the movies. As the Bury Festival begins and our town celebrates
creativity and imagination, we’ll spend a few minutes in the cinema “finding God in the dark” 1. As
film Director Martin Scorsese once said, going to the cinema is like going to church.
I’ve chosen two films to illustrate how the spiritual journey needs imagination. We need imagination
in our relationships with other people. We have to use our imagination to burst the illusion that other
people are the same as us; to escape the assumption that other people should be the same as us. We
have to use our imagination to perceive God, to have a sense of the unknowable, the infinite, and to
look beyond the god we make in our own image. “The soul without imagination is what an
observatory would be without a telescope.” 2
One of the best films of last year was The Imitation Game. Set during the Second World War, it tells
the story of Alan Turing and the team at Bletchley Park. Their mission was to break the “unbreakable
codes” used by the Nazis to send secret messages. Turing leads a motley group of scholars, linguists,
chess champions and intelligence officers. They create one of the first digital computers to crack the
Enigma codes.
In the film, Turing is not good at relating with other people. He prefers to work alone, gives the
impression of being aloof and superior, struggles to make any human connection at all. In one scene
he says "When people talk to each other, they never say what they mean." [pause] "They say
something else and you're expected to just know what they mean." 3 During the film he learns the
need to relate to other people and the benefits of working in a team. There’s a scene in a bar with
Turing and his friend Joan. She flirts with another man and Turing observes “you got him to like
you.” Joan says “Yes … because I am a woman in a man’s job and I don’t have the luxury of being an
arse. … If you really want to solve [Enigma] then we’re going to need all the help you can get. And
[your team] are not going to help you if they do not like you.”
A central part of the story is Turing’s sexuality. He was gay – in a time when homosexual activity was
illegal. After the war in 1952, the police investigate a burglary in Turing’s home. They end up
arresting him for gross indecency. His punishment is hormone therapy: humiliating and stupefying.
Depressed and alone, Turing took his own life in 1953. In the film, before he dies, Joan visits him at
home. She talks about what they achieved during the war and says: “Do you know, this morning I was
on a train that went through a city that wouldn't exist if it wasn't for you. I bought a ticket from a man
who would likely be dead if it wasn't for you. I read up, in my work, a whole field of scientific inquiry
that only exists because of you. Now, if you wish you could have been normal... I can promise you I
do not. The world is an infinitely better place precisely because you weren't.” 4
We need imagination and effort to appreciate others. The people you find difficult, the people who
press your buttons are God’s children and as precious to God as you are. It’s easy to forget this when
I’m feeling irritated by their latest idiotic comment or action. The people I condemn and dismiss: the
people of different social class or different political persuasion or different religious preference.
1
Finding God in the Dark –Taking the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius to the Movies by John Pungente SJ and
Monty Williams SJ
2
Henry Ward Beecher, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
3
Alan in The Imitation Game
4
Joan Clarke in The Imitation Game
My lack of compassion, my inability to love is as much, if not more, about me as about them.
Imagination can lead to deeper compassion and understanding of other people. With imagination we
can put ourselves in the other person’s shoes and see things from their view. With imagination, and
some effort, we can love our neighbours as ourselves.
This morning’s Gospel reads like the densest theological tome. Did Jesus really speak like that?
But at its heart Jesus prays “Holy Father, may they be one as we are one.” 5 Jesus and the Father are
one through compassion, love and mutual recognition.
My second film is another favourite from last year: Interstellar. It’s science fiction epic with space
ships, interplanetary travel, worm holes, and other dimensions. In the near future, Earth has been
devastated by drought and famine. There’s a shortage of food and extreme changes in climate.
Humanity is facing extinction and needs another home. NASA has a plan: the Lazarus project.
Intrepid astronauts set off to explore three planets that might be new homes for humanity. They travel
through a worm hole and are flung to another part of the galaxy. There they have to negotiate huge
gravitational fields and hostile terrain as they venture into the unknown.
Early in the film, some strange events take place at the main character’s home. Vehicles move by
themselves and books fall off a shelf in a bedroom. Our hero is a scientist and he rationalises these
strange events as an effect of gravity. His daughter is sure something else is at work. She is convinced
something or someone is trying to communicate with them. She can feel it. Later, in space, our
heroes have to choose which of the three planets to explore first. We learn that previous missions have
reached the planets, but haven’t been able to return, including the lover of one of our astronauts. She
is sure that her lover is still alive and wants to go to that planet first. She can feel it. In the end she is
proved right.
Interstellar is not a Christian film. But like many space films key religious themes are part of the
story. The scope of space, the magnitude of the universe, the possibilities of science fiction, give room
for imagination and ideas.
We have to use our imagination to grasp God, to have a sense of the unknowable, the infinite, to sense
Christ who is “not an item in the universe, but an ever present agency.” 6 In this time after the
Ascension, its not easy relating to Christ who we cannot see. He “evaporates in our hands when we
try to grasp him, but is more real than anything.” 7 We have to use our imagination to relate to God
who is beyond our understanding. “The imagination carries the very livery of heaven, and is God's
self in the soul.” 8
The astronaut who believes her lover is still alive on a distant planet says this about love. “Maybe
[love] means something more - something we can't yet understand. Maybe [love is] some evidence,
some artefact of a higher dimension that we can't consciously perceive. I'm drawn across the universe
to someone I haven't seen in a decade who I know is probably dead. Love is the one thing that we're
capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. Maybe we should trust that, even
if we can't understand it.” 9
Canon Matthew Vernon
Canon Pastor & Sub Dean
5
John 17.11
Rowan Williams in a sermon at the Ordination and Consecration of Bishops, Westminster Abbey, Ascension
Day 2015
7
Ibid
8
Henry Ward Beecher, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
9
Brand in Interstellar
6