January 10, 2010
The Raging Debate on the Spiritual Side of Avatar
There’s been a raging debate going on the past week or so about James Cameron’s movie Avatar.
Barry and I went to see it a week ago, and both agreed it was the best movie we’d ever seen… both visually and intellectually.
We chose the 3-D version, which has come a long way since the old green-and-red imagery they used to use, and it definitely enhanced the experience.
Extreme nutshell version: American military people are destroying the indigenous forests of the planet Pandora, in an effort to mine unobtainium (ha, ha) which is worth $20 million a kilogram. The Na’vi, the spiritual indigenous people, don’t want to lose their sacred land and trees. The hero falls in love with their culture, and one of their people, so ends up wanting to help them rather than destroy them.
We see all three classic storybook struggles: man vs. man, man vs. nature, and man vs. himself as the hero embraces the ways of the Na’vi and their Goddess, Eywa (sometimes spelled Ai’wa).
And all of a sudden, everyone’s analyzing the message(s) of the movie… which is fine, because there were a lot of messages to be mined from it, and it gives writers something to write about. But over-analyzing can cause some friction, just like in high school lit class where thousands of papers have been written about who’s the better Christ figure: Simon in Lord of the Flies, or Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea.
And just as back then, it’s pretty interesting to sit back and watch the sparks fly when people are talking about Avatar.
“(It’s about) pantheism — a faith that equates God with Nature, and calls humanity into religious communion with the natural world,” wrote Ross Douthat in the New York Times. “The question is whether Nature actually deserves a religious response. Traditional theism has to wrestle with the problem of evil: if God is good, why does he allow suffering and death? But Nature is suffering and death. Its harmonies require violence. Its ‘circle of life’ is really a cycle of mortality.” By contrast, he says, at least Christianity gives us an “escape upward” after death…
… Which shows that he apparently completely missed the spiritual side of the movie’s message: that we are all connected through unseen energy, and that energy lives on forever, as do we in our spiritual form — whether to be “with Eywa” (as one main character is) or to be reincarnated into another body (as the hero is at the end).
“(No, no, no, it’s) a combination of pantheism and theism, a view scholars today call ‘panentheism,’” replied Jay Michaelson in the Huffington Post. “Like mystics here on Earth, the Na’Vi have an experience of unity of consciousness with other beings, all of which (themselves included) are really just manifestations of one Being, which they call Ai’wa.”
He points out that the (highly overused) Sanskrit greeting, Namaste, means, “I see you,” which is the greeting used by the Na’vi people. But it doesn’t just literally mean “I see you,” so much as it means, “The God (or in this case, Goddess) in me sees the God in you.”
“Strictly speaking, the Na’vi are not pantheists. They worship a Godness — a Nature Goddess, to be sure, but one who hears prayers and sometimes answers them,” added Mark Silk of Spiritual Politics. “(And in fact) I’d say that Cameron has married some good old Christian grace-and-redemption theology to his eco-anti-imperialist parable,” he says, pointing to the character name “Grace Augustine” and the hero being “born again.”
Ahh, but wait… he’s not “born again” simply the way a “born again Christian” is, with a new belief. He’s also literally born again, as in reincarnated, into a different body — something that’s no longer talked about in the Bible.
Word has it that at one time, reincarnation may have been part of Biblical teachings — after all, every other religion seems to talk about it — but that it got thrown aside during the hundreds of years of playing “broken telephone”… when stories were being passed along verbally instead of being written down.
Or maybe the people of the day analyzed that part of the story, just as today we analyze Avatar, and decided that it didn’t need to be included.
While Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were the James Camerons of their day — the storytellers who got their parables across in the best way they could — they didn’t have the chance to painstakingly edit the final version the way Cameron does. The monks did that for them, much later.
Anyhow, the really funny part about the “is Avatar pantheist, or panantheist, or Christian?” debate is that nearly any human, of any religious background or belief, could see elements they relate to if we’d just strip back all the labels and accept it as a “spiritual” rather than “religious” movie.
And in fact, that’s the beauty in what’s known as the “Universal Approach” to spirituality…
