{"id":7820,"date":"2004-03-01T08:01:27","date_gmt":"2004-03-01T08:01:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/03\/been_there_saw_that.html"},"modified":"2004-03-01T08:01:27","modified_gmt":"2004-03-01T08:01:27","slug":"been_there_saw_that","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/03\/been_there_saw_that.html","title":{"rendered":"Been there, saw that"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well, now I can know what everyone\u2019s talking about.<\/p>\n

Saw TPOTC on Saturday, as it turned out. Michael came up with the idea of me and Katie seeing it at the big AMC theater in Newport, KY, so he could take Joseph to the Newport Aquarium<\/a>, all in the same complex, Newport on the Levee,<\/a> during our absence. Good idea.<\/p>\n

Much has already been written about this, and I suppose over the next few days, I\u2019ll talk about various aspects of it with you all. <\/p>\n

First, I\u2019m glad this film exists, for a lot of reasons. It reinvents and reinvigorates the genre of the Biblically-based film and gives new life to films that seek to take spirituality seriously. Why? First of all, because it\u2019s fearless<\/strong>. That, of course, is what drains the life of any potential treatment of faith-related issues on film: fear. Fear of bad box office, fear of offending the wrong people. <\/p>\n

Drains the life out of any film, any work of art, as a matter of fact.<\/p>\n

\nBut Gibson, in his own mind, had nothing to lose, so this film holds little back \u2013 and I don\u2019t mean in terms of violence, but rather in terms of what, from his head, ends up on the screen. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s probably in vain, but the existence of this film, bolstered by its apparent great financial success, sparked some faint hope within me that perhaps a path has been cleared for more work of this kind, not just to be conceived, but also born out of the film industry and its satellites \u2013 work that expresses the breadth, depth, diversity and passion that drives faith \u2026and doubt as well.<\/p>\n

As I watched the film, and reflected on the imagery and the violence, everything I\u2019d heard said about it before I saw it, and what I was viewing, it came to me quite clearly that what hardly anyone seemed to understand was what this film was basically about.<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Which is sin.<\/p>\n

This is what sin is, and this is what sin does. It devastates, shreds and kills. It separates human beings from each other and divides them within. Innocents are laid waste and mothers weep. Gibson is saying \u2013 this is what I have done, this is what you have done, and these are the consequences. In telling the story of Jesus, the Passion tells this story through the story of one innocent victim. Which, of course, is the point, Christians say.<\/p>\n

So yes, the violence was horrific, and part of that emerges from Gibson\u2019s penchant for gore. But the way it works, in the context of this film, is as an unflinching gaze on the consequences of what we have done and what we have failed to do on our humanity, so loved by God he took it as his own.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well, now I can know what everyone\u2019s talking about. Saw TPOTC on Saturday, as it turned out. Michael came up with the idea of me and Katie seeing it at the big AMC theater in Newport, KY, so he could take Joseph to the Newport Aquarium, all in the same complex, Newport on the Levee,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7820","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nBeen there, saw that - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/03\/been_there_saw_that.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Been there, saw that - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Well, now I can know what everyone\u2019s talking about. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7820","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7820"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7820\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7820"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7820"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7820"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}