27 June PM

Have not cleaned this up-it is friday and I am trying to post this weeks rants-hope my heart comes through, out.

I just saw a movie called, ‘The Mission’. It is an older film, with Robert De Niro. Our history, the church, is an ugly one. I wonder how we make such atrocities all right. By order of the church ‘missions’, as in communal stations, run by Jesuit priests were completely destroyed. Men, women, children and priests were killed.

The priests who had started the ‘missions’ could have left and gone on in life, as they were ordered to do so. The tribal people could have gone back into their jungles, were they will hide and run from slave traders. None of this is what happened. The men stayed and fought with the people they came there to save. The Tribal people stayed and fought for the home they loved, thinking all the while that, God had left them. This because a man in a long robe who said that he spoke for the church and the church is the hand of God…

I cannot help but be disturbed by what ‘religion’ made by men’s hearts and minds has done to the world that God so loves. One day we will have to answer for it, one day we will all have to answer for it all. I am speaking now to, we, the church.

One of the main characters is a man who was, before accepting Christ, a slave trader and a murderer. He becomes a Jesuit Priest and helps to build a mission high in the jungle, above waterfalls. In the end, when the priests are ordered out, he kills again. This time he kills those coming to kill every living person in that place. In one scene he is just about to blow up a bridge and kill many of the enemy, but a little boy has been shot crossing the same bridge and is stuck there. He goes and helps the boy and then is shot himself.

The last two scenes are haunting. The Priest who would not fight, but would not leave the people, is walking with a crowd of children, women and older people. He is also wearing a long robe. He caries the sacred articles and the people follow, together, being killed as they walk as across the way the soldiers are shooting at them. You see the good priest/ex slave trader and murderer watch the other good priest, who would not leave them all to die alone but could not pick up a gun to help…die.

The next scene shows a little girl looking at the burned up church. Then you see her moving in the water, she picks up a violin left floating, and climbs into a boat. The only survivors are about eight children. They row away, back to the jungles, determined to live.

The most memorable scene though is when De Niro meets and accepts forgiveness. The man who could not let go his burden has it cut from his back by hands he once hunted and sold. He looks up in disbelief and then it begins, the sobs, the release of all that was too much to bare up underneath.

I do not remember what I thought of this movie when I saw it first. Now I am in a ‘Mission’ of sorts. I wonder, what terrible and religious things I do, In the name of the God who so loved the world. God help me to really reflect You and Your heart, and not to teach something all together opposite of what You desired since the beginning. Amen.