movie posters and sacramental living

I just spent way too long (even longer because I insisted on doing it in French) writing up a post about movie posters I remember seeing in France and Switzerland while living there as a Latter-day Saint missionary. I have final grading to do and a lawn to mow, but those specific memories of movie posters pop up every once in a while (despite, as I explain in the first post, not really being much of a movie buff?), and this morning, it felt like I wanted to capture them before they disappear on me. I have many, many dumb little memories like that of my time as a missionary, and even as the fact itself of being a Latter-day Saint missionary gets more complicated for me (thanks to dramatic changes in my religious life), those tiny memories continue to feel valuable and important to me.

It’s not just movie posters, either: I have beautiful-to-me memories of license plates, street signs, ads, train stations, and all sorts of little things. These aren’t the things that one is supposed to be nostalgic about after spending time in a country other than one’s own, but they’re important to me and fill me with a sense of deep wonder at the world that I live in. Some people have this experience with nature, and I sometimes do too, but human cultural artifacts and creative works (even if they’re as dumb and mundane as a street sign) remind me that despite being tiny specks in a vast universe, this life is full of meaning and value.

I recently finished Cédric Lagandré’s interesting book Dieu n’existe pas encore (which I would translate God doesn’t exist… yet), where he does some really interesting work separating a “theist vs. atheist” axis from a “religious vs. non-religious” one. If I understand the argument correctly (and my French isn’t quite at the level of easily following philosophical and theological writing, so that’s a big if), Lagandré argues for the value of combining atheist assumptions with a religious posture toward the universe. For him:

Être religieux, c’est s’arrêter devant l’altérité du monde, viser le sacré dans le monde même.

To be religious is to stop before the otherness of the world, to see the sacred in the world itself.

Later on in this paragraph, he elaborates:

Qu’il y ait ou non tradition, la condition de possibilité d’une telle expérience consiste dans une attitude telle que l’existence est « consacrée» comme un bien qu’on reçoit. Elle est humilité devant ce qu’on n’a pas créé soi-même, devant ce qui existe indépendamment de soi, elle est prière qui ne demande rien mais reconnait le légué comme tel, l’accueille dans son altérité et dans sa transcendance.

Whether or not there is [religious] tradition, the possibility condition of such a [religious] experience consists of an attitude such that existence is “consecrated” as a good that one receives. It is humility before what one has not created oneself, before what exists independently of oneself, it is a prayer that asks for nothing but recognizes the “bequeathed” as such, welcomes it in its otherness and in its transcendence.

Lagandré’s book was really testing my patience, but passages like this won me over in the end. To me, this is a beautiful way of providing a “non-theist” way of looking at religion and God. I think it’s important that we all find ways of recognizing and honoring the otherness and transcendence of the world we live in. (Lagrandré also has some sharp criticism of those who would reduce the world to data so that they can manipulate and control it)

In the Christian vocabulary that I use to make sense of our vast universe, we could describe that as sacramental living—turning mundane words, objects, and actions into things imbued with the holy. Remembering movie posters, though, reminds me that there are plenty of ways to do this outside of the realm of the religious, though. I have no issue seeing the sacred in a street sign.

• Latter-day Saint missionaries
• sacraments
• sacramental living
• non-theism