"America's Heart & Soul" and ordinary Christianity

ONE OF THE REASONS I go to the movies is to step into other people's shoes, to see the world through another's eyes. But every once in a while, I wish that I could step into my own shoes at the movies. I want to see the world through the eyes of an ordinary, lay Christian. I wish that going to the movies didn't have to be a departure but a coming home. ("Magnolia" is one of my favorite movies for this reason, with its depiction of a humble cop who relies on God for direction.)

"America's Heart & Soul" delivers this same sense of familiarity and inspiration. A documentary that gives us a peek into the lives of a few dozen Americans -- some ordinary, some extraordinary, all filled with passion for a life -- it captures several people who speak openly about God and his power. It's a side of Christianity we're not used to seeing in the media, as the headlines are often grabbed by angry spokespeople. Instead we see a wine grower who connects his life's passion to Jesus' first miracle of making wine. We see a gospel singer who speaks about the influence of the Spirit when singing on stage. We see a church that is committed to racial diversity, which reaches out to put homeless people in its pews. And even when God isn't talked about explicitly, the movie celebrates God's gifts -- the landscape, the body, laughter, community, creativity. If the movie is relentlessly upbeat it is upbeat in all the right ways: not sugar-coating the surface of America but tapping into the rich veins of sweetness that God has given our lives.

Along the way we encounter bike messengers, cliff dancers, firefighters, farmers, pilots, weavers, musicians, boxers, steelworkers, cowboys, cooks, and marathon runners. Some of my favorites included a family of salsa dancers who pull off unbelievable moves, a steel artist who finds organic shapes in the rusted metal of our industrial waste, and an eccentric Colorado man who fires bowling balls out of cannons to stave off the cabin fever of winter. We take a dizzingly trip through the sky with an acrobatic pilot, follow a blind mountain climber up a sheer wall of ice, and relax on the porch with a pot of gumbo.

After the movie, the cynical side of me began to think that what I'd just seen was an illusion, a picking and choosing of interesting people who, if thrust into the same room together, would probably find it difficult to relate to each other. Isn't our natural inclination not to celebrate our differences but to want our neighbors to be more like ourselves?

As it happens, my wife and I traveled home from the movie on the bus, where there was standing room only. I spent the time noticing who was around me. There were at least five different races, three languages being spoken, people in suits and people in ratty old army jackets, old people and young people, people with bikes and people with crutches. Maybe our human nature doesn't allow us to live in harmony as much as we like, but the melting pot of America was right there in front of me. Every day is an opportunity to see the whole of society around us or focus on our own little sliver of it. "American's Heart & Soul" gives us that big picture, and for Christians it incorporates our sliver into it as well. I couldn't ask for anything more.