David Neff on the spirituality expressed in the film
When Protestants talk about prayer, they usually mean talking to God about what is on their heart and asking him to deal with life’s difficulties. When Catholics talk about prayer, they mean those same things, but they tend to include as well certain practices of contemplation and meditation.
Historian Chris Armstrong describes the medieval origins of Cross-centered devotion, which invited the believer to meditate on each separate event of Jesus’ passion and each individual wound on his body. Long before evangelicals like Richard Foster began to experiment with guided imagery in prayer, those devotional practices also invited believers to place themselves in their imaginations into the biblical stories. These practices became the foundation for such widely practiced traditions as meditating on the Five Sorrowful Mysteries when saying the Rosary. The structure of Gibson’s film conforms exactly to the list of the Five Sorrowful Mysteries: The Agony of Jesus in the Garden, the Scourging of Jesus at the Pillar, the Crowning with Thorns, the Carrying the Cross, and the Crucifixion and Death of Jesus. And it reveals the way that this film is for Gibson a kind of prayer.
Mel Gibson told CHRISTIANITY TODAY: “I’ve been actually amazed at the way I would say the evangelical audience has—hands down—responded to this film more than any other Christian group.” What makes it so amazing, he says, is that “the film is so Marian.”
There’s much more – look at the left rail of the CT articles for more links to interesting stuff there.
Read Previous Post