The theologian Paul Tillich once quipped that the whole earth is God’s monastery. In other words, even at the movies a person can have a religious experience. Since I used to teach a class on movies at the seminary, I thought I would share some of my reflections on the topic in hopes it might inspire you to watch movies differently.

In that class, one of the key questions we asked was, “What scene was most revelatory for you?” Or in other words, what is the one scene that spoke to you so deeply that if you went out with friends afterward, you would feel compelled to discuss it. That sort of experience typically reflects a spiritual moment. For whatever reason, so goes the theory, that scene spoke to the deepest part of you. It then becomes our task to try to make sense of it, and doing so with other moviegoers is a great way to go about it.

That same theologian also attempted to catalog such cultural experiences. In his case, it was paintings, but the same thing applies to movies. Tillich named four categories, which sound very confusing at first: spiritual surface/spiritual meaning, non-spiritual surface/spiritual meaning, spiritual surface/non-spiritual meaning, and non-spiritual surface, non-spiritual meaning. We don’t have to worry about the last category with movies like “Mission Impossible” (a fun flick but not really spiritual). Nor do we have to ponder the next to last group since it refers to movies about biblical stories that are typically more schmaltzy than spiritual. I’ll let you think about which ones come to mind.

For Tillich, it’s the first two categories that should concern spiritual people. “The Mission” would be in the first group. On the surface it’s about Catholic priests founding a mission, but it’s also deeply meaningful on a spiritual level. “Grand Canyon” would be a good example of the second category. On the surface, there’s nothing really spiritual about it, but underneath it most definitely speaks to the spirituality of life. Hopefully you get the idea.

All this talk about spirituality in movies reminds me that humans are starved for beauty, a spiritual category for sure. In a recent essay by the theologian Daniel Kim, he quotes Dostoevsky’s famous line, “Beauty will save the world.” Kim believes beauty is a call directly from God, “drawing us upwards and outwards…into the presence of the divine.”

Seen any good movies lately? If so, maybe you got a glimpse of God.