Catching the Light? Talking about God and the Movies

God-talk is therefore immensely difficult. It requires resourceful imagination funded by scripture, liturgy, art, prayer, literature and poetry. It also requires and enables the rational disciplining of imagination that we call theology; an unending dialogue between these two, in fact. (http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/4921
Simon Barrow Ekklesia paper What Difference Does God Make Today.

Discussing the process of catching light, as the search for God in the movies, Roy Anker comments:

The word " God " is no longer particularly evocative having accrued mountains of negative association, especially for moviegoers. Nor is the term any longer - in the polymorphic culture in which we live - particularly precise, having long since become the great cosmic catchall for anything slightly strange, repressive, or for that matter, unjust - either in politics of personal life. that is at least part of the reason that many of the films discussed here are very cautious about using the term "God" to identify the remarkable elements in them. Appropriately they are more about showing than naming. And that approach is fitting not only in the light of the medium, but also - for Jewish and Christian viewers - in view of the biblical caution about trying to contain the Limitless within a single term, particularly in a term that has become so multivalent and depleted as "God". (p.11) Catching Light: Looking for God in the Movies (Eerdmans, 2004)

What 'gods' do we worship?

On my waythrough Nicholas Lash's series of lectures "Holiness, Speech and Silence: Reflections on the Question of God" I kept coming across passages that were provocative and challenging for both those who would call themselves Christians and those who don't.

"Incidentally, if 'gods'are now beings of a particular kind, then christians, Jews, Muslims and athiestsall have this, at least, in common: that none of them believe in gods. (p.10)"

Lash explains:

"For most of our history, then, 'gods' were what people worshipped. I do not mean that people worshipped things called 'gods'; I mean that the word 'god' simply signified whatever it is that someone worships. In other words, the word 'god' worked rather like the way in which the word 'treasure' still does. A treasure is what someone treasures, what someone highly values. And I can only find out what you value by asking you and by observing your behaviour. ... The point is that there is no class of objects known as 'treasures'. ... Valuing is a relationship: treasures are what we value.

Similarly, 'gods' are what people worship, have their hearts ultimately set on. I can only find out what you worship, what your gods are, by asking you and observing your behaviour. And these days it is almost certain that the gods you worship will not be named by you as gods. Most of us are polytheists, inconsistently and confusingly worshipping ourselves, our country, 'freedom', sex or money. There is no class of objects known as 'gods'. Worshipping is a relationship: gods are what we worship." (p.10)

'...those who write so carelessly about other people's 'gods' simply take for granted that the work 'god' names a natural kind, a class of entity. There are bananas, traffic lights, human beings and gods. Or perhpas not: on this account of how the word 'god' works, 'theists' are people who supples the class of gods to have at least one member; 'montheists' are those who maintain that the class has one, and only one, member; and 'atheists' are those who think that, in the real world the class of 'gods' is, like the class of 'unicorns', empty." (p.12)

Each religious tradition is then a school in which we can undergo the learning process of how to speak appropriately and how to worship appropriately, non-idolatrously, in relation to whatever it is that we regard as the mystery of life and the universe.
(Even that is to phrase the matter in a way that would not be agreed on by all traditions)