dunamis's Journal

Loved the movie "as it is in heaven" saw it with macca and janne on friday.

I loved it on a whole lot of levels. Daniel a world class conductor with six years of bookings hat hit the pinnacle of his career but collapses out of sheer exhaustion. He goes to live in a tiny village in northenr sweden - the place where he grew up but left because of bullying. Obviously Daniel was burned out and recovering. I thought his decision to do that was awesome. He walked away and went to find solace, to reflect, to find himself. He went on a pilgrimage to discover who he was and perhaps to cathartically put the broken pieces of his life together.

He was driven by something not quite pure. He claims to be driven by a desire to create music that opens people's herats and that is tru, but there is also something else driving him. Something more dark. Is it a desire to prove himself? undoubtably. There is always a mixture that drives us of the noble and ignoble.

I loved how he got involved with a group of people that on the surface looked happy and contended with their lot in life only to scratch below the surface and find amazing levels of disfunctionality. Arne the entrepreneur who uses people for his own ambition. Who makes others the butt of his own jokes for his own pleasure.

Fridholm tThe fat guy who cops it for 30 years but in an environment of safety and openness is able to get off his chest in possibly quite a healthy way his feelings about being taunted and teased all those years.

Daniel learns the importance of not just performing, he learns the importance of coffee. He learns how to unlock the sound of people's lives by building relationships between them to pull down the barriers. He addresses barriers in their relationships so they can truly be one and make a harmonius sound that ultimately in the end does unlock the sound of heaven and is the music that opens people's hearts. It's the music of love, openness, transpareency, healing and wholeness.

Gabriella's story is moving. She recieves moral support from the choir and is able to keep singing despite the abuse at home. She finds the strength through the group and by unocking her own worth and value to a point where she can refuse being treated as worthless. She finds her own victory and confronts her fear with the support of others and is able to terminate her relationship and press charges. We rejoice with her.

The insecure pastor and his religiosity is very confronting. This guy is hugely in bondage to a sin focussed gospel. He is a legalist through and through. He himself is trapped in his own sin which makes him even more angry with sin. He is familiar with the defeat of darkness which fuels his drive to stamp it out. Siv catches his morality out of control. It's a behavior modification religion. His wife though is dying inside. Even though they have sex (with the help of the porn) there is no soul connection, no real intimacy, except when his dirty secret is out in the open. He lets himself go, drops the religious facade and experiences true intimacy with his wife, but 24 hrs later he is repenting for it. He shatters her with denial - "it never happened". He lost control. He gave into passion. A good christian is never supposed to give in to emotion and the passions of the "flesh" and experiencing such pleasures is unholy. This is the thornbush of the religious who think God came to stop us from enjoying life. Nothing could be further from the truth. Jesus came to give life - abundant and full. His wife shuts down and develops some kind of psychosis and burns out. She can't handle the mind control and the spiritual abuse. It has raped her soul one time too many. She turns to the group as dysfunctional as it is, it is not religious (it even has sodom and gomorrah there - lena's friends) and oddly enough it is healthy because people can explore how they feel without being judged or rejected. There is healing there.

Lena is the beauty of the movie, not because she gets her gear off, but because her personality shines. She herself continually gets broken, but is resilient. Somehow she manages to process (cry) her bad stuff. She has no parents and seems to be driven into relationships to find love and securit. She makes bad choices, the last of which was to fall in love with a married man who had kids who was never going to make her happy. He breaks her heart. But she has a heart of god. She's not complicated slightly quirky but she seems to accept herself and knows herself. She is able to love and protects the autistic Tory and loves him even when he shits himself (as Arne puts it).

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She is the one who draws Daniel out from his bunker. He too has lost both his parents, father as a boy and mother as an adolescent. He has been bullied as a child and never gotten over it.�He has withdrawn into his identiy as a musician which defines him. He hides behind his gift and success - it's all he has. But he is confronted by humanity, by acceptance, by love. He is embraced not necessarily because of what he can do, but the villagers see beyond the fame and the talent (they wouldn't know talent if it whacked them up the side of the head) and see a quiet shy fragile man. Lena knows that Daniel is racked with fear but draws him out nonetheless. She helps him get in touch with his emotions, to recognise them, to confront his fear of loving and maybe losing again just as he had his parents. Love is dangerous like a two edged sword that cuts both ways and he knows it.

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Ultimately Daniel again breaks down under the pressure of performance, but the choir sings the music that opens the heart, that brings heaven to earth. As he listens bloodied and bruised after a heavy fall in the restroom his heart is opened by music which he helped to create and he finds redemption. His heart is healed, he finds the boy in him who was lost - a buried fractured part of his life and past and reconciles with him. He finds the way to comfort the tormented, abused and �and abandoned boy and holds him in his heart.

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The song that he wrote for gabriella becomes his song. He's able to fly again.

The pastor confronted by his complete inability to live under the religioun of rules is humbled and he wants to try again.

Daniel and Lena fall in love and new life begins.

Be kind, for everyone you know is facing a great battle - Philo of Alexandria.

This really helps me to manage people. Everyone around me - me included is broken. We all face our battles. I face mine, so it requires no great stretch of the imagination to realise everyone else is facing theirs.

So when they're short, abrupt, absent, irritated, down, I don't take it personally, I just realise they are facing a great battle.

Helps me become compassionate to remember this and maybe compassion is one of the greatest weapons we have in this great battle.