The Dithering of a District Diva

If you’re a frequent reader of The Dithering, you know I love to spot the Jesus in everything — especially pop culture (check out my posts on “Love Jones,” “The Lion King,” The Lord of the Rings,” and the “Twilight” series, to name a few).  Though I don’t consider the independent film, “Cloud Atlas” to be “pop culture,” since it wasn’t very popular at all — even though it starred Halle Berry and Tom Hanks and was directed by the same folks who brought us “The Matrix” and was PHENOMENAL, WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?!?! 🙂 — I do think it’s chalk full of biblical messages we could all benefit from hearing and seeing in a fresh context.

Admittedly, “Cloud Atlas” is difficult to follow and impossible to understand fully in one viewing. It took me four tries to watch it all the way through once, but now I’ve seen the three-hour-long film all the way through four times, and can’t get enough of it.

For those who haven’t seen or heard of it, the story is basically a mosaic of six interweaving stories.  The six main characters represent six souls who continuously interact with each other in different times and places, skipping across genres and genders. These six souls are  constantly drawn to each other in order to grow each other and propel each other towards their destiny, either positively or negatively.

Some of you may be ready to stop right there. (Besides the fact that this is a LOT of work for the brain to do) a main idea in the film, the idea of reincarnation, is not a Christian belief. However, when I think back to who I was 5 years ago, that seems like a lifetime away. Ten years ago last month, I was just graduating from high school and that seems like a world away. I think back to the major problems that I have had with friends and family and they are recurring issues. I look back at the men I’ve dated and they are the SAME.DERN.PERSON. Needless to say, when I see anything about reincarnation, I am content to apply its message to a single person’s recurring issues and the evolution a single person can make over the arc of a single lifetime. As the character Timothy Cavendish says in the film, “We cross and recross our old tracks like figure skaters.”

This idea that our souls consistently attract the same group of souls into our lives at different spaces and times, is not some pagan ideology that we should reject, it’s just sociology and psychology.  The fascinating part of this realization, however, is the why behind it. Why do we keep bumping into the same problems? Why do we keep attracting the same kinds of people into our lives? Why do the same issues our parents or grandparents or great grandparents struggled with plague us too? Well, the obvious answer is that there’s something that God is trying to grow in us that we just aren’t getting yet. 

He’s trying to grow a spirit of patience, a spirit of forgiveness, a spirit of love, joy, peace, kindness, gentleness, and self-control–the fruit of the Holy Spirit.  But maybe our ancestors didn’t get it right and they passed on to us a spirit of abandonment, loneliness, hate, fear, selfishness, jealousy and insecurity. And the impact of those spirits we inherit, the impact of the choices we make in our own lives, ripple throughout space and time.

The incident that spurred me to keep watching this film a third and a fourth time was the death of someone dear to me. A 25-year-old soul, so full of life and adventure and beauty, God saw fit to remove him from his earthly vessel. The hole that his absence has created in the hearts of those of who loved him has fundamentally changed who we are. At the very least, in his absence, now we know that no amount of money or success, no age is exempt from the ultimate consequence of life, which is death. More than this, we are reminded that we exist for each other.

In the movie, the character Sunmi-451 incites a revolt against an oppressive regime with her manifesto that begins, “Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others, past and present. And by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.”  This sentiment is one of the scariest principles of Christianity for believers and non-believers alike: we don’t belong to ourselves.

That’s the main message of “Cloud Atlas,” that man is not an island, that the idea of separation, separate entities, separate people is simply an illusion.  Paul teaches exactly this in Romans 12:4-5:  “For just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function,  so in Christ we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others.” 

As Christians, our call is to take the idea laid out in this movie a step further and surrender our lives and purpose to Christ, embodying His traits in order to bring glory to God and not ourselves.  Not to be confused by Christ’s repetition of the Old Testament scripture that “ye are all gods,” or distracted by antics like Kanye West’s,  we understand that in the endless ocean that is God, we are only drops within Him. But in every drop we consist of the exact same elements and properties that make up God. We are made in His image, in His likeness. And we have been granted power and authority on earth through Him.  Every minute we breathe, we are changing the world somehow. And even in death, our absence changes the world. 

God has created us to matter. We have enough power to change lives forever, for better or worse. We have the ability to bring glory to God through every word we utter and every deed done. But what will we do with that knowledge?

*Disclaimer: Cloud Atlas is NOT family-friendly! It is Rated R for violence, brief nudity and language.

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