The Spirit and the Screen 3: Asia Lerner-Gay on How the Spirit is Present/Presented in Film
third in a series on pneumatology and cinema
Asia Lerner-Gay is a PhD student of Hebrew Bible at Emory University. She holds a Master of Divinity from Candler School of Theology and a Bachelor of Arts of Biblical Studies from Southeastern University. Her current research interests are Ezekiel, Israelite ritual and religious practices, postcolonial criticism, and gender critical readings of the text. Asia is also a visual artist and is interested in the reception history of the Old Testament. She is on track to be ordained as a PC(USA) teaching elder, but still holds true to her Pentecostal identity.
In 2020 when the world had shut down, I went home to live with my parents as most students did. I remember the experience as a whirlwind of emotions: the sense of loss, the fear of the unknown and the known, and the collective grief of that year. I specifically remember feeling lost in my vocational calling as well. In December of that year, my family and I decided to watch the Terrence Malick film, A Hidden Life. Admittedly, everyone in my family had fallen asleep halfway through, but I was riveted. The way Malick portrayed Franz Jägerstätter’s life in a way of such quiet integrity caught something in my soul that resonated with me so deeply. The story was never rushed, the imminent decision that Jägerstätter was up against was as equally posed to the audience: in a time when right and wrong are muddied, and everyone you know and love is choosing injustice, will your choice honor what the still small voice is telling you? The transcendence of the mountain-scape in nearly every shot reminded me of Mount Sinai, and had me wondering “Where does my help come from?” with the backdrop of James Newton Howard’s ethereal score. And I remember coming to the end of the movie feeling seen in some unexplainable way, as if some silent prayer had been uttered for me, and answered all at once.
I think this experience is precisely what the the Spirit and the Screen is attempting to put into words.
Often enough, Christians, and I do speak broadly here outside of Pentecostalism, have lost our creative intuition to hear and receive the Spirit’s voice outside of a pew. For some, we forget the voice of the Spirit because we forget the waters of our baptism, through which the Spirit’s voice spoke over us; and for us Pentecostals, we forget the lasting intonation of the Spirit as we forget our baptism in fire, through which the Spirit’s song sang within us. This is where this book serves as a prophetic reminder that, as Downing noted the words of Dorothy Sayer, “material creation expresses the nature of the Divine Imagination” (66). Or, in the words of Christian Wiman quoted by Green, who positioned this next to Romans 10:20, “At any moment, even in the absence of any identifiable guide, ‘an experience of reality can open to an experience of God.’”
The first means of encounter presented is in the act of filmmaking itself. Green notes that many critics have named Malick films as “works of philosophy in of themselves.” But this philosophy is an embodied, lived-into one. As many of the authors throughout the work note, this is the unique role of film. A movie encapsulates the whole sensory functions of a person; it engages audio, visual, affectual, noetic, and embodied experiences of being human. In terms of Estrada-Carrasquillo’s essay, the Abuelita Theology that Abuela Claudia from In The Heights depicts is one that is embodied, and lived: “Abuelita theology happens! It is communicated in their daily conversations and narrated by their bodies” (105).
Similar is film for communicating this theology. For Green, filmmaking places the audience in time and in memory so that a story becomes possible to fulfill the need for “emplotment” (17). For Lamp, this encounter with reality becomes plausible through tradition, because as he notes, “if indeed the tradition is a living thing, it is due to the guiding presence of the Holy Spirit, whom the Creed identifies as ‘the Lord, the giver of life.’…The fingertips of the Spirit on the tradition may ultimately be knowable only when the tradition’s goal of the kingdom of God is attained” (49). This tradition, for Lamp, becomes tangible in the re-membering of it in film. The Presbyterian in me wants to draw comparisons to the sacraments, but I will hold off since I’m at SPS…But I wonder what the reception of this idea that film might contain constructive, fruitful philosophy for the Pentecostal church. It’s so often that we see Pentecostals rejecting the arts, rejecting any sort of prophetic imagination that is outside of the church or without direct reference to the Bible, that they miss the Spirit’s voice in the world around them, especially in a medium such as film. What would it take for us to make this a safer, more acceptable ideological move for our laity?
The second way of encountering the reality of the Spirit in film presented is through Spirit-type characters. There is one challenge to note beforehand, however. As Delgado notes in her essay, there are fundamental challenges to even describing what Spirit is, what exactly we are talking about when we say “Spirit,” and so one, as Delgado writes, has to place this character or phenomena in line with Christian trinitarian doctrine. Yet, even within this doctrine, the Holy Spirit is still hard to define and wrap our minds around, especially when we come to Scripture. So, much of how we describe our encounters with the Spirit are often subject to metaphorical language. This metaphorical language is by no means a pitfall, a limit for sure, but not a limiting experience. We use metaphorical language everyday for normal experiences, and especially to describe God. When it comes to juxtaposing pneumatology next to film, I believe this is the task: what metaphors work best to represent the Holy Spirit, and what the Holy Spirit does in the world. The tricky part then, is what Riceour has said of metaphor. In a more rhetorical sense, Riceour notes that metaphor is not simply aesthetic, nor is it merely automatic, or cognitive as Kovesces might argue. Instead, for Riceour, metaphor is persuasive, inviting someone to believe, and think differently; however, this persuasion ultimately “re-describes” reality to the point that the source and target domains of the metaphor, those things that are compared, leave the metaphorical event changed, ever so slightly changing one another, and ever so slightly becoming one another.
This challenge is not necessarily named by the authors. For Sanders, there is a direct comparison drawn between Samwise Gamgee and the Holy Spirit, or paraclete. This is a compelling metaphor as she notes the similar features of the two: comforter, counselor, and convicter. Felix-Jäger draws a similar comparison as he sees Wonder Woman as a Spirit-type. For those uncomfortable with feminine language around the Holy Spirit, this is scripturally founded with the many uses of feminine pronouns and endings in the Hebrew. I appreciate this embrace of the Spirit’s femininity by Felix-Jäger. I do have a difficult time when Wonder Woman’s caricature of self-denial is associated with the Spirit, and I would like that fleshed out a bit more as that seems more of a Christ-type feature. For Estrada-Carrasquillo, Abuela Claudia seems to get near to transcending this paradigm, as she represents the Spirit in her wisdom, in her care for her community, and at the table. Abuela Claudia is seen taking in members of her community when no one else did. And relying upon Abuelita Theology, Estrada-Carrasquillo draws this comparison: “Just as the Holy Spirit presence brings freedom, the abuelas in our lives ‘seek that all [blood related and not] are liberated to better serve one another and their neighbors and live into the freedom promised in la Espiritu Santa’” (106). So, in these descriptions of the Spirit-types, here I must ask my broader question, what does it do to these two characters to imagine them as a Spirit-type in their respective films? And what does it do to our understanding of the Spirit in the trinity when we think of Her in the context of these characters? What shifts in our understanding and why? Is there a transfiguration of the two, and what does that do for our pneumatology?
The one Spirit-type that I found to transcend this paradigm was Delgado’s description of the Earth-Goddess as Holy Spirit. In Delgado’s essay, she dutifully and precisely tracks the Spirit’s figure in Christian history and tradition. However, she names that the figure of Spirit is not unique to Christian theology, and therefore sees the Earth goddess from Moana as situated in a “mythic polytheistic world” of the characters’ cosmology (127). This is where the Earth goddess of Moana speaks in a language familiar to the Christian Holy Spirit, and where Delgado encourages us to listen. This is an opening of our pneumatology. The warning is not to shy away because of how Christian history has marginalized and silenced that which it has deemed pagan (which most often is of womanly nature), but instead to hear the Spirit’s echoes in these “other” cosmological characters.
It seems that through these four types offered here, there are four different ways of representing the Spirit in film. First, Tolkein described his Lord of the Rings as “fundamentally religious and Catholic work.” So might we say Samwise Gamgee is merely a representation of the Spirit then. In regard to Wonder Woman, she seems like a completely cultural character on her own that we might find the Spirit’s representation in. Yet, I do wonder how American this representation might be. Thirdly, Abuela Claudia is unlike an intended representation or a culturally constructed advocate: instead, Abuela Claudia is representative of a member in a family system, a place in which so many lived theologies find both metaphorical and realized language for the work of God. And finally, Delgado represents an expanded view of the Spirit-type in that we might find the work of the Spirit in the work of spirits that promote justice, liberation, and restoration in the world. I think this diversity in Spirit-types is extremely important for the reader to note; it may be easier to see types of Christ in film, but to recognize these different iterations of the Spirit broadens the horizon of encounter for an audience.
Finally, the book ends with the section entitled “The Spirit Led Life.” This section now turns towards the plethora of diverse ways the Spirit may lead a person, in both lives of faith and lives that the Church might not categorize as faith. This is again an important way of opening our pneumatology for expanded horizons to who we may categorize as “insider” or “outsider” in the life of faith. These “insider” “outside” terms always come with imbued colonial or imperial baggage, something I think Pentecostalism actually has a lot to both contend with and celebrate within its theology and praxis. On this thread, Le explains that the film Encanto displays the glory of Pentecost, because “For Christians, the whole universe is the theater of God’s unconditional love and hospitality” (138). This ought to inspire the audience to create spaces of radical belonging and places of welcome, as this film serves as a prophetic reminder of our roots as Pentecostals. One must also make mention of the beautiful considerations offered by Sudiacal and Waddell in how characters in film can greatly inform Pentecostal reflective prayer. Sudiacal reflecting on Of Gods and Men (that’s the English title), and Waddell reflecting on the film I began this response with, A Hidden Life. Both films contend with a certain level of Divine silence, both in their own respective ways, but both remind me of the monastic tradition of our faith, and the modern Quaker example many in our churches may be unfamiliar with.
Ultimately, this volume shows its reader the ways in which a transcendent God is made present in the human experience. This presence is mirrored by that of filmmaking, the authors argue, because both filmmaking and the inbreaking of the Spirit happen in time and draw the audience into time; additionally, both the Spirit and the filmmaker draw the whole person into this story making, in a mysterious co-creative process of meaning-making. Here, I wonder how this meaning-making could be better informed by a more global selection of filmmakers. Most of the films presented in this volume are by American or Western filmmakers, so I wonder how the global field of filmmaking might inform a more robust understanding of the phenomena described in the book, especially given the global reach Pentecostalism has.
Additionally, looking towards film, Delgado reminds us that “Christianity does not have a monopoly on Spirit” (115). In humanity’s wrestling between how Anthony Godzieba has described, “God’s transcendent otherness (that which prevents us from reducing God to our terms) and God’s presence (that which touches our lives with the emancipative force of God’s love),” what the writers in the Spirit and the Screen argue is that we can look to film to find human language for and experience this transcendence and this presence. Surely, the writers here are encouraging their readers to look towards these films as a genuine encounter with the reality of human existence, which always opens to an experience with the Divine. This brings me to a more “state-of-the-church” moment, to which again, I’m not simply speaking to Pentecostals. In one of my classes this semester we were talking about the idea of a “dying” church and how we can reframe that language into something more productive, such as a “church in rebirth” or “a composting church” something that didn’t give such a finality to the church but instead a hopeful future. I think a work like this book reminds us of this need. We are in an age where the church is decreasing rapidly in the West, and honestly, it’s for good reason in most cases. But a work like this reminds us to turn our gaze outward to see the move of the Spirit in other places than how we normally characterize it.
In conclusion, the book leaves me with wanting to continue thinking about the role that film plays as a vehicle for the Spirit. Additionally, I think the work of this book is to inspire us to continue thinking about how film communicates the reality of human lived experience in a way that other mediums cannot always do. In this way, film can become a living, embodied metaphor for both God and our experiences with God. I want to continue to think through the ways in which we create these metaphors, how they are portrayed, and what they do for both our culture and our theology. And, I want to proceed carefully, because the metaphors we create for ourselves, our world, and our theology can ultimately affect the way we engage with these matters.
Thank you! This can spark a needed conversation in our Western faith communities. You have invited us to expand our awareness and courage to go beyond the traditional boundaries of our recognition of Holy Spirit in films and in others. To expand our awareness of Trinity’s fingerprints in films, and not just American films. The gift of the Father, Holy Spirit, showing up everywhere, and like Jesus, showing all people what God is like- loving, compassionate, serving all, especially the outcasts and hurting, embodied in the film.