Dear Editor:
God speaks in movies. That’s not as bizarre an idea as it sounds even though others in a florid psychosis have made similar claims. Nor do I mean this in a literal sense as in the 1950s when a Warner Brothers movie had an angry Charlton Heston impersonating Moses in Technicolor.
Reaction to the term God gets mixed and polarized receptions in our culture and no doubt interjecting this term in a letter to an editor will raise eyebrows. In my experience the term rarely, if ever, occurs in political, scientific, academic or professional discourse, unless it is used as an expletive, a result of frustration or used for emphasis as a prefix to other habitually used, often derogatory adjectives, of no clear meaning.
Why bring this up in a letter to the editor anyway? Well because the word itself has attained certain proprietary rights, the possession of religious minded people and philosophers, who sometimes quibble about its meaning. Even newspapers and magazines mindful of these proprietary rights assign it to weekly columns, segregating it in a featured subject, along with sports, fashion and the TV listings. When presidential candidates in the US say “God bless America” at the end of speeches, it is not clear whether this is a religious salutation, a parting gesture, or merely an habitual and expected response like ending a sonnet with a rhyming couplet.
It is such a loaded word, that results in powerful reactions, because despite its mystical and historic origins people believe they know exactly what it means both supportive and non-supportive.
I think it’s time for non-experts to seize the day and to use the term as personal descriptors in movies, music or in good novels to describe experience that is inexplicable and indescribable. I believe experiences like those exists. No need to subscribe to UFOs or apparitions. The dualistic mindset of separating the secular from the sacred is onerous. The energy of maintaining a split mind is inefficient given our increasing focus on conserving energy.
A movie and not necessarily something specific to the arts or any other experience for that matter could be inexplicable and indescribable.
As I write this hear a contrarian voice somewhere in imagination says: “Brush up on you English language, friend. Words are endless. “
“Really?”
That’s exactly my point. Are they really?
George Jason