I’m a great lover of movies! I Love everything about them. From the hype and trailers that are way too loud, the crowds and searching for the perfect seat, the hush that comes over the audience as the opening scene starts. Most of all… I LOVE the journey. I Love being taken on a ride or experience as if you’d been there yourself, and being somehow changed after seeing it. My consciousness is different after seeing Shawshank Redemption, Rain Man and Saving Private Ryan. I can’t believe I sat through that opening scene twice!! Surely feels like I’ve lived through a war after the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan!
So when I say that Hotel Rwanda changed my life, it isn’t an exaggeration, but it’s in a whole other realm of consciousness. I have to stop and dry the tears as I think back to that night. If you’ve never seen it, I won’t adequately be able to convey the horror. The Rwandan Genocide it documents is unfathomable. The worst scene is when the leading man, Don Cheadle, is told to take a certain road out of town, and discovers it is literally covered from end to end with dead bodies. You see them… piled all across the road as far as you could see. I’d already been crying earlier in the movie when they were separating native orphaned children from their white caregivers, but at this point I was weeping uncontrollably. My companion whispered, “We’ll have to leave if you can’t get it together.” Anyone who knows me and my movies knows I had to stay through to the end.
I spent the next two days in bed. Luckily it was the weekend. I cursed a God who could let such a thing happen. I’d been brought up to believe in a God who could do anything. How could a God who could stop such a thing not stop it? Why? What possible reason could there be? Because of some fucking bet with the devil? How could this be? At the end of day two the answer came. I know how… there is no God.
To know how much of an epiphany that was for me, you’d have to know that I was raised in a very religious catholic home. I went to catholic school up until high school. Through high school I was the only one in my new family who went to church every Sunday. After the Catholic Church and I went our separate ways, I went to a Baptist Church when I moved away to college. I LOVED Christmas. I Loved that there was a time when kindness was the rule, rather than the exception. I Loved Jesus is the Reason for the Season. I even Loved that the red and green of the stop light took on special meaning for me at Christmas.
So when I say that the realization that the God I’d believed in didn’t exist, I hope you can believe this realization was truly painful. But it was the only answer to my questions. How…? Why…?
I just can’t accept the “we can’t understand God’s plan” point of view, it feels like a complete cop-out to me. I can’t forgive a God that would let that, and all the other unmentionable atrocities across this planet, happen. For whatever reason. Period!
OK, so all that was many 15+ years ago now. And I’ve done much soul searching and spiritual exploration since then, read many books and researched many theories. What rings true for me now is that there is an undeniable intelligence to the universe. I still feel connected to the Loving warmth that has always been there for me. I know within my heart that there is something more than meets the eye. I see it now as more of my disconnect with religion instead of the divine entirely. I choose to believe it all just doesn’t work the way I’d been taught.
The higher power, higher self, universe, whatever you want to call it, provides the possibility for life, and although it is aware of us it is not involved in our daily lives. It is there if you reach out for it. It feels us when we connect in a very deliberate, intense and purposeful way. I believe it to be more like what any mother would say to her child, the life I gave you is not my own. I look it differently than just “free will”. But it is not in the game of keeping scores to punish the bad. Man is evil enough all on his own, he doesn’t need some devil to point the finger at.
What goes around comes around, you reap what you sow, karma will come back and bite you in the ass, haha… yes! I believe that too.
Over the coming weeks and months, as we discover more about each other, I’ll express much more about my research and discoveries.
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