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SOLARIS
SPIRITUAL CONNECTIONS
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SOLARIS
SPIRITUAL
CONNECTIONS
This page was created on November 30, 2002
This page was last updated on
November 30, 2002
Solaris --Review -click
here
Solaris
--Trailers, Photos -click here
Solaris --About this Film -click here
Solaris --Spiritual Connections -click here
Solaris --Forum -click
here |
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SPIRITUAL
CONNECTIONS
ON LIFE, HEAVEN, HELL, DEATH
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 Solaris
is an intelligent, thought-provoking, beautifully shot exploration
of philosophical and spiritual ideas and issues, such as personhood,
the afterlife, memory, existentialism and the nature of reality.
What makes a person? Is it atoms, matter, or the soul? What is
a soul? Is it just a part of our conscience, our brain, our heart?
Does it exist after our physical body dies? And what happens when
we die? Is there a heaven, a hell?
LIFE
Death
is more universal than life; everyone dies, but not everyone lives.
--A. SACHS
And why should mortals fear to tread the pathway to their future
home?
--EMILY BRONTË (1818–1848)
HEAVEN
A continual looking forward to the eternal world is not a
form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a
Christian is meant to do. It does not mean that we are to leave
the present world as it is. If you read history, you will find
that the Christians who did the most for the present world were
just those who thought most of the next...
Aim at heaven and you get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you
get neither.
--C. S. LEWIS (1898–1963)
HELL
God will never send anybody to hell. If man goes to hell,
he goes by his own free choice. Hell was created for the devil
and his angels, not for man. God never meant that man should go
there.
--BILLY GRAHAM
DEATH
A funeral among men is a wedding feast among the angels.
--KAHLIL GIBRAN (1883–1931)
All
mankind is of one Author, and is one volume; when one man dies,
one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a
better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God
employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age,
some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God’s
hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our
scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall
lie open to one another.
--JOHN DONNE (1572–1631)
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BIBLICAL
CONNECTIONS
"I'm absolutely convinced that nothing—nothing living
or dead, angelic or demonic, today or tomorrow, high or low, thinkable
or unthinkable—absolutely nothing can get between us and God's
love because of the way that Jesus our Master has embraced us."
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THE
INNER AND OUTER MYSTERIES
--St Paul
ROMANS, CHAPTER 8 -Message Bible
With
the arrival of Jesus, the Messiah, that fateful dilemma is resolved.
Those who enter into Christ's being-here-for-us no longer have
to live under a continuous, low-lying black cloud. A new power
is in operation. The Spirit of life in Christ, like a strong wind,
has magnificently cleared the air, freeing you from a fated lifetime
of brutal tyranny at the hands of sin and death.
God
went for the jugular when he sent his own Son. He didn't deal
with the problem as something remote and unimportant. In his Son,
Jesus, he personally took on the human condition, entered the
disordered mess of struggling humanity in order to set it right
once and for all. The law code, weakened as it always was by fractured
human nature, could never have done that.
The
law always ended up being used as a band-aid on sin instead of
a deep healing of it. And now what the law code asked for but
we couldn't deliver is accomplished as we, instead of redoubling
our own efforts, simply embrace what the Spirit is doing in us.
Those
who think they can do it on their own end up obsessed with measuring
their own moral muscle but never get around to exercising it in
real life. Those who trust God's action in them find that God's
Spirit is in them—living and breathing God! Obsession with
self in these matters is a dead end; attention to God leads us
out into the open, into a spacious, free life. Focusing on the
self is the opposite of focusing on God. Anyone completely absorbed
in self ignores God, ends up thinking more about self than God.
That person ignores who God is and what he is doing.
But if God himself has taken up residence in your life, you can
hardly be thinking more of yourself than of him. Anyone, of course,
who has not welcomed this invisible but clearly present God, the
Spirit of Christ, won't know what we're talking about. But for
you who welcome him, in whom he dwells—even though you still
experience all the limitations of sin—you yourself experience
life on God's terms. It stands to reason, doesn't it, that if
the alive-and-present God who raised Jesus from the dead moves
into your life, he'll do the same thing in you that he did in
Jesus, bringing you alive to himself? When
God lives and breathes in you (and he does, as surely as he did
in Jesus), you are delivered from that dead life. With his Spirit
living in you, your body will be as alive as Christ's!
So
don't you see that we don't owe this old do-it-yourself life one
red cent. There's nothing in it for us, nothing at all. The best
thing to do is give it a decent burial and get on with your new
life. God's Spirit beckons. There are things to do and places to
go!
This
resurrection life you received from God is not a timid, grave-tending
life. It's adventurously expectant, greeting God with a childlike
"What's next, Papa?" God's Spirit touches our spirits
and confirms who we really are. We know who he is, and we know who
we are: Father and children. And we know we are going to get what's
coming to us—an unbelievable inheritance! We go through exactly
what Christ goes through. If we go through the hard times with him,
then we're certainly going to go through the good times with him!
That's why I don't think there's any comparison between the present
hard times and the coming good times. The
created world itself can hardly wait for what's coming next. Everything
in creation is being more or less held back. God reins it in until
both creation and all the creatures are ready and can be released
at the same moment into the glorious times ahead. Meanwhile, the
joyful anticipation deepens.
All
around us we observe a pregnant creation. The difficult times of
pain throughout the world are simply birth pangs. But it's not only
around us; it's within us. The Spirit of God is arousing us within.
We're also feeling the birth pangs. These sterile and barren bodies
of ours are yearning for full deliverance. That is why waiting does
not diminish us, any more than waiting diminishes a pregnant mother.
We are enlarged in the waiting. We, of course, don't see what is
enlarging us. But the longer we wait, the larger we become, and
the more joyful our expectancy.
Meanwhile,
the moment we get tired in the waiting, God's Spirit is right alongside
helping us along. If we don't know how or what to pray, it doesn't
matter. He does our praying in and for us, making prayer out of
our wordless sighs, our aching groans. He knows us far better than
we know ourselves, knows our pregnant condition, and keeps us present
before God. That's why we can be so sure that every detail in our
lives of love for God is worked into something good.
God
knew what he was doing from the very beginning. He decided from
the outset to shape the lives of those who love him along the same
lines as the life of his Son. The Son stands first in the line of
humanity he restored. We see the original and intended shape of
our lives there in him. After God made that decision of what his
children should be like, he followed it up by calling people by
name. After he called them by name, he set them on a solid basis
with himself. And then, after getting them established, he stayed
with them to the end, gloriously completing what he had begun.
So,
what do you think? With God on our side like this, how can we lose?
If
God didn't hesitate to put everything on the line for us, embracing
our condition and exposing himself to the worst by sending his own
Son, is there anything else he wouldn't gladly and freely do for
us? And who would dare tangle with God by messing with one of God's
chosen? Who would dare even to point a finger? The One who died
for us—who was raised to life for us!—is in the presence
of God at this very moment sticking up for us
Do you think anyone is going to be able to drive a wedge between
us and Christ's love for us? There is no way! Not trouble, not hard
times, not hatred, not hunger, not homelessness, not bullying threats,
not backstabbing, not even the worst sins listed in Scripture:
"They kill us in cold blood because they hate you.
We're sitting ducks; they pick us off one by one."
None of this fazes us because Jesus loves
us. I'm absolutely convinced that nothing—nothing living or
dead, angelic or demonic, today or tomorrow, high or low, thinkable
or unthinkable—absolutely nothing can get between us and God's
love because of the way that Jesus our Master has embraced us.
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CONTINUE:
Solaris
--Review -click here
Solaris
--Trailers, Photos -click here
Solaris --About this Film -click here
Solaris --Spiritual Connections -click here
Solaris --Forum -click
here |
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COMMENT
ON THIS FILM
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BULLETIN
BOARD (Rules)
Post
your thoughts in the forum
View or post comments -click
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Your
Private Comments.
I will not post these comments.
What are your personal thoughts? I also welcome your spiritual
concerns and prayer needs. I will correspond with you, usually
within two weeks.
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