Avatar and seeing

"I see you," says the beautiful Na'vi woman Neytiri.
 
As she gave her people's traditional greeting, Neytiri was looking upon the weakened body of the human, Jake Sully, near the conclusion of the movie Avatar.
  
In that moment, I fell in love with the blue-tinged, forest woman, as well as this subversive movie that millions rushed to see during the holidays.

 In truth, to that point I'd experienced a mixture of emotions.
 
On the one hand, there was the entrancement of Pandora's forests, which enclose the audience and present lizards that spin into flashes of flame and holy meeting places where tendrils extend from the sky and provide communication with the ancestors. 
 
On the other, there was the ear-crashing _ and overly long _ violence of the Thanator  predator chase scene, and the cartoonishly evil human colonel and his combat "amp suit", leading the graphic killing and burning.
 
However, this film stays with you after the sounds and stimulae subside _ and the story settles in.
  
Sully had been placed within the Na'vi body to analyze and produce "intel" on the aboriginal people of Pandora's forest, who live in their soaring tree dwelling on a treasure trove of precious stone desired by the human colonizers.
 
As the movie progresses, the parapalegic soldier finds inner peace within this assumed Na'vi body. Living among the forest people, the soul of this unified Gaia world overcomes him. All are potentially connected; a flick of the feline Na'vi tails produces an erotic collection of waving filaments capable of bonding with other creatures in a jolt of excited recognition.
 
The Na'vi don't just see others, they are capable of complete unity with others.
 
The movie depicts the conflict between those capable of such complete empathy, against others who remain locked up within themselves, becoming ever more aggressive in their desires and self delusions.
 
It's a conflict we can often recognize within ourselves.
 
Empathy is always a struggle, within humans and within religion. Our own certainties and rigidities are so much more attractive.
 
In her autobiography, The Spiral Staircase, theologian Karen Armstrong describes her journey away from a harsh, literal religious training to an understanding of God as mystical, loving and born in our actions.
 
As the book nears it's end, and after many self-examinations and some suffering, Armstrong goes some distance to a relationship with the Trinitarian God as she researches her major work A History of God. During that work, she spent many days in silence, and in imagining how others relate to God.
 
She lost herself, and regained perception.
 
"The one and only test of a valid religious idea, doctrinal statement ,spiritual experience, or devotional practice was that it must lead directly to practical compassion," she writes.
 
"If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express this sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology."
 
At Christmas we imagined the beginning of a presence of Jesus in the world, providing us with the human model of this empathy that leads to communion.
 
John expresses Christ's birth poetically: "At one moment in time the Logos, the word, became flesh and entered history. He came to lead us all into this communion, which is the very life of God."
 
In John's telling, we quickly move from birth into Jesus' gathering of disciples.
 
What they almost immediately understand is that he sees them, has always seen them, for who they truly are.
 
Teacher, rabbi, where do you live? And his reply: Come and see.
 
Never forced, never compelled, just an invitation. As Jean Vanier explains, they are to dwell with him, which from the Greek translation suggests to fully be with him.
 
Sometimes, there is renaming and complete transformation. Simon becomes Peter, or Cephas (the rock), and in the naming a life's mission begins.
  
When Avatar's shock and awe subsides, when the Na'vi bond their flickering tails around the shimmering connections to their Holy One, there is similar suggestions of transformation.
 
That is this secular world's subtle message.
 
This also raises doubt on whether our tamed world should be seen as triumphant over the ancient one.
 
Gordon Lightfoot, the Canadian folk singer, wrote of our nation:
 
 There was a time in this great land when the railway did not run/
 the wild majestic mountain stood alone against the sun/
 long before the white man and long before the wheel/ 
 when the green dark forest was too silent to be real."
 
It was a forest so silent and vast that we can only dream of it sometimes. 
  
"What are you looking for?" Jesus asked the first disciples. 
 
Perhaps we are looking for the forests again. Perhaps we are looking for one another as we truly are, as the blue Creatures of James Cameron's imagination might see us.
 
That true seeing leads us somewhere unplanned, where the Spirit will be present, inspiring us to say or do things that we'd never before imagined.