I saw the movie Inception on the plane a few days ago. I thought it was okay. I didn't fully understand all of it to be honest haha. However, whenever I come across stuff that has to do with psychology, I find myself interested.
Anyhoo, I found that this film really illustrates how spiritual formation works!
Spiritual formation, the pursuit of Christlikeness through training oneself to be godly (1 Tim 4:17), namely through spiritual disciplines, is basically the "proactive" sanctification process of the saint in his journey of following Christ. Okay, so basically spiritual disciplines such as fasting, scripture memorization, prayer, meditation, solitude, silence, esrvice etc. all are in themselves useless in changing oneself to be Christlike. They are merely the means to which God has chosen to work through to make us more holy and Christlike. They are the water-pipes but we must not mistake them for the water, which is the Holy Spirit who changes us from the inside out. It is our responsibility to proactively (but not legalistically) do the spiritual disciplines, not to earn righteousness or earn God's approval, but to become Christ-like and to live wisely without further destroying ourselves. Although God doesn't see his children as guilty of sin anymore, if his children don't proactively discipline themselves to be godly in Christian spiritual formation, they will be, forever in this life, haunted by the self-desctructiveness of sin. So we train, but we trust in God's power, not in our own efforts, although we go hardcore in our own efforts. As Dallas Willard said, we should try our best but not trust our best.
Anyhoo, with that background, I thought that the movie inception really illustrates how this works.
Picture sleeping (which then leads to dreaming) as something that is not within our control. We can't make ourselves sleep and dream. However, we can create the conditions where we will sleep and therefore dream. We can find a quiet/peaceful bedroom, find a good mattress, a good pillow, a good banklet, lie down comfortably and close our eyes. These conditions then allow us to fall asleep and then dream.
During the dream though, that is when the Holy Spirit acts like a sort of divine Leonardo DiCaprio, enters the inner most depths of our being and then "plants" an idea, and "steals/takes away" the bad ones. This happens on such a deep level where we have no control over ourselves (at least in a very direct way) and virtually most, if not all of the work is the Holy Spirit's. So when we wake up (finished with the spiritual disciplines) we wake up a changed person, not changed on the outside, but on the "inside" of us. The cool thing is that as one goes deeper and deeper into spiritual formation, there are always "deeper levels" in our inner selves that can and need to be changed by the Holy Spirit aka the divine Leonardo DiCaprio. If one falls into a "deeper" state of sleep and allows the Holy Spirit to go into oneself on deeper levels, one can be changed not only on level 1, level 2, or level 3 depth but on level 4 or greater, just like the final mission of the whole inception team did to that dude. The more I walk in this Christian journey, it seems like that there's always deeper and deeper levels that the Holy Spirit can and needs to change in me. Not only hundreds of levels, but potentially thousands.
The result after "waking up" is to be a person who is the product of the Spirit's sanctification, so that one is more loving, joyful, peaceful in God. Not from the "outside" but from the "inside".
Thanks Christopher Nolan, for giving grist for the Christian Mysticism mill!
No comments:
Post a Comment