The Matrix Revisited

The Matrix Revisited

Delivered at All Souls Community Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan

Sunday, June 8, 2003

By Steve Lansingh

When the bustle of everyday life quiets, the mind clears of unimportant trivia, and stillness invades a person, the basic questions of human existence begin to stare that person in the face: Is the physical world the only reality there is? Is the course of my life under my control? Is truth worth discovering if it makes life less comfortable? The daunting size of these questions forces many to busy themselves into distraction: go shopping, make a snack, see a movie. But if they were to see "The Matrix" they would face the same questions all over again.

The hero of this superlative film, Neo (Keanu Reeves), is a modern-day computer hacker who seeks to discover the truth of the mysterious "matrix." On his journey toward understanding, he is posed the same questions mentioned above. To the first two questions he answers in typical American '90s fashion: I trust only what I can see, touch, or taste. I don't believe in fate. But to the third question Ñ presented in the form of a red caplet that will give him the truth and a blue caplet that will return him to his comfortable existence Ñ this seeker answers yes. And by taking the red caplet, Neo slowly learns that his first two answers were wrong.

Like all good myths, “The Matrix” is first and foremost a story…

Review of The Matrix by Charles Henderson

The action unfolds in the distant future some untold years after the earth as we know it has been destroyed during a cataclysmic war between the computers and their human creators. The computers have won. They control the entire planet and keep the human race alive in a totally helpless state, imprisoned in cocoon like shells, and farmed as an energy source. Everyone is blissfully unaware of these circumstances because the computers have re-created the earth in the form of a virtual reality world in which people carry out their daily routines, coming and going, getting and spending, living and dying, much as we are doing now. But this veneer of normalcy is only a mask and an illusion. It is The Matrix. [The Matrix is a virtual-reality program hard-wired into the human being to deceive mankind about this truth.] In fact, the entire human race has been reduced to a condition of abject slavery and helplessness.

Meanwhile a small group of rebels wages a struggle, apparently against all odds, to reveal the truth and liberate the human race from its oppression. Their hope lies in finding The Chosen One, a human being endowed with God-like powers who will lead them in a war of liberation. [Is Neo, Keanu Reaves, that One?]

This is not science fiction, it is in fact a new genre of film-making in which special effects combine with ancient metaphor and symbol. It is spirituality fiction.

The strengths which our heroes bring to the struggle are a composite of skills both technological and spiritual. Neo and his colleagues combine a mastery of the computer with the force of mind over matter. In fact, the outcome of the movie hinges around whether Neo can conquer his own fear and draw upon the deepest resources of the human spirit.

Theologians and pop-culture experts see “The Matric” as a phenomenon

shaping public opinion about religion

By Josh Burek, staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor, 5/09/03

David Frankfurter, the professor of history and religious studies at the University of New Hampshire and other religious experts say "The Matrix" does not represent orthodox Christianity nearly as much as Gnostic Christianity.

Gnosticism never developed a well-defined theology, but it depicts Jesus as a hero figure who saves mankind through "gnosis," or esoteric knowledge. In the Gnostic philosophy, the physical world is not part of God's creation, but a manifestation of a lower god - a nightmarish reality that imprisons mankind, say religious experts. Gnostics believed they could achieve salvation, not by overcoming evil and sin with God's grace, but by learning the "higher knowledge" about reality.

Gnostic threads are present in many religious traditions, including Sufism and Buddhism. As woven by "The Matrix," these threads tie together current concerns with an ancient knot.

"All of this stuff has been bouncing around in the human brain for centuries. When it comes into this hip new iteration in the cyberworld, it all sounds familiar," says Robert Thompson, professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University in New York.

Whereas the bestselling "Left Behind" book series about judgment day plays on orthodox Christian fears of an arrival of the Antichrist, some observers say "The Matrix" uses Gnostic concepts to convey an equally frightful - but perhaps more tangible - prospect: technology's domination over mankind.

The success of both, however, may be due to the seductive power of conspiracy theories.

"The 'Left Behind' series is working very neatly with deep cultural fears about organized conspiracy," Frankfurter says. "[In 'The Matrix'], you have the ultimate conspiracy. We are all battery cells that are imaging our lives. And it also just plugs in to the ultimate conspiracy fear: the fear of technology."

Sermon

Friday we sat down at the dinner table and after saying grace dined on a pork loin rubbed with Cajun spices, a hint of garlic and black pepper, with sweet corn on the cob dripping in butter, and freshly baked crescent rolls, as in the distance a CD was playing a version of one of my favorite old pop standards, containing the line:

Are you warm, are you real, Mona Lisa?

Or, just a cold and lonely, lovely work of art?

I have often said that our liberal religious tradition as Unitarian Universalists is an attempt to understand the nature of Paul Tillich’s statement in the third volume of his Systematic Theology: "Religion is the substance of culture and culture is the form of religion." In other words, from the perspective of our tradition, one encounters something religious in the substance of culture. The religious is not something downloaded into our experience from the world of the church and its doctrines and rituals and, especially, its metaphysics. The religious is out there all around us if we train our eyes to see it and tune our senses to feel it! And there is nothing more blatantly cultural than the “pop” world of modern media! So, Mona Lisa, are you real or just “a cold and lonely, lovely work of art?” It would depend on two questions: “What is art?” And the more basic question, “What is real?”

The same two questions could be summoned when considering the most recent pop culture phenomenon, the movie The Matrix Reloaded, the second installment of The Matrix Trilogy, the first being The Matrix, and the third to be released just before Thanksgiving. The first movie, The Matrix, directly addresses the question of the crooner: “Are you real?”

To quickly summarize the plot again, our everyday reality is really a virtual reality in the far-off future that has been created by computers who are at war with humanity. There is a program hard-wired into our brains which allow us to “live” in this virtual reality, while in the “really real” we all are slaves, lying prone, our bodily fluids the energy to drive this whole computer driven reality. There are some human beings who have escaped, are fighting the machines, and these rebels, led by Morpheus (Lawrence Fishbourne) and Trinity (Carrie Ann Moss) seek out a computer hacker named Neo (Keanu Reaves) in the hopes that he will reawaken to the real state of existence and help them defeat the machines. They also suspect that he may be “The One,” the rumored individual that will lead them to victory over the machines.

Modern religion is fascinated by this work of art, which is philosophically challenging, spiritual eclectic, and metaphysically disturbing. It is philosophically challenging because it presents in a creative way one of the foundational questions of philosophy: “Is this reality real?” And, in the second film in the trilogy, recently released and playing now, “Is this existence determined or do human beings have free choice?”

The movie is spiritually eclectic in that it borrows from Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, and ancient symbols and metaphors to create a new kind of mythological world. The story is familiar to a modern mind so steeped in conspiracy theories as to be somewhat oblivious to their presence. Human beings, our minds and the human spirit, are threatened with extinction by a slavery we do not even suspect, perpetuated by the technology we created. A savior is sought and thought to have been found, and in the first movie this savior, Neo, grows in his understanding of his identity as “the One.” In the second movie he is confronted with uncertainties among the rebel band as to whether to believe in him or not, as he confronts the question of his own freedom over against a world completely determined beforehand by computers.

What is metaphysically disturbing doesn’t concern the movie itself, but how it has been received by the religious folk in our culture. Metaphysics is the study of the structure of existence. Of course, metaphysics presupposes that we can know how existence is really structured. The problem in Western religion is that for millennia now it has proposed that it knows the structure of existence. And this is evident when works of art that themselves are metaphysical, are interpreted by the religious parts of our culture.

This is not the first film to suffer this kind of metaphysical, farcical fate. E.T. was proclaimed to be a portrayal of doctrinal Christianity’s metaphysical claims. E.T. was a modern Christ figure; not of this world, with miraculous healing powers that emanated from beyond our reality, and a charisma that attracted the innocent children to the innocent Christ. Of course, the movie was written by the prominent Jewish Steven Spielberg, who denied the metaphysical interpretation as nonsensical projection. And E.T. himself proclaimed his allegiance all through the movie. All the little critter wanted to do was “go home,” having no real interest in this world save for the curiosity of an interplanetary visitor.

The Matrix is not history’s first intentionally metaphysical written work, nor its best. The quintessential example of this kind of literary and religious genre would be Dante’s Divine Comedy. Like any metaphysical work, it claimed that behind the veneer of existence is a realm of what religionists call, “the really real,” structured, claimed Dante, as heaven, hell, and purgatory, which, of course, looked remarkably like the culture organization of Dante’s own day! What is true of this kind of “metaphysical fiction” is, I think, that it reveals more about the cultural assumptions and challenges of its interpreters than it does the “really real!”

Doctrinal Christianity has latched onto The Matrix as a way to tell the gospel story, with little critique as to the theological appropriateness of the movie for the gospel they’re trying to proclaim. Put forward as a means to herald the doctrinal Christian gospel, the story sounds like this: Unbeknownst to us, this world is really the domain of evil forces that so penetrate this existence that it is only through a special reawakening process that one can see the “really real.” The “really real” is not in this world, but somewhere else. Your experience cannot be trusted, short of this reawakening experience, because it is the product of the illusion that this is the “really real.” But there is one sent to us to save us from this deadly illusion created by our experience, if we only believe in him as the Chosen One. The Gnostic elements are easily in view, probably revealing their deep and abiding presence within the religion of the culture of our day!

Glenn Yeffeth, editor of the book, Taking the Red Pill: Science, Philosophy, and Religion in The Matrix, who has noted how deeply this film “captures people’s intellectual imagination,” writes that, "There's two ways to look at this from a Christian perspective. One is that it's retelling the story of Christ. The other way to look at it is a very violent film filled with garden-variety blasphemy that exploits people's resonance with the Christian narrative to fool people into a story that is fundamentally atheistic."

Maybe there is another way to look at the film: that it, like good pieces of art, can excite the intellectual imagination, and in exciting it, provide a context of questions for the watcher to engage relative to the meaning of his life. Maybe another way to view the film is as itself a screen upon which religionists project the culture and time-bound nature of their “gospels.” Maybe the third way is that religion itself is not something that is downloaded from doctrines and beliefs and rituals established before our birth, into a metaphysics that is constructed to declare our individual experience to be illusion. Maybe the war the rebels are fighting is the war between those in our modern world who maintain their experience is real, and those in our modern world who maintain that experience is an illusion. Maybe the film is like a piece of art. The engaging of the piece of art is real, not an illusion, and in that engagement it reveals those who have a stake in this life as a real thing, and those who claim it to be an illusion.

Listen to one commentator who knows the motivations of those who would sell a metaphysic that claims this reality is an illusion and that there is another world that is the really real:

"I knew it would only be a matter of time before someone co-opted the Matrix to help sell Jesus… in [the book's] self-serving view, the non-evangelical Christian world is the "matrix" and Morpheus is the local youth pastor while those Jesus club members that harassed you in high school are his 'crew' with Neo being the big J. himself."

In other words, of course you and I, and every human being, has freedom of choice because our experience is real. That is not a statement of fact, but the foundation of our liberal religious faith. Your experience of ecstasy, betrayal, trial, triumph, pleasure, pain, eating your vegetables and eating Cajun spiced pork, is all real, although no experience, however broad, is inclusive of all there is to experience. This is no illusion. This world is not something from which you need to be rescued or saved, either towards a Buddhist nothingness or into a doctrinally Christian heaven. That, too, is not a statement of fact, but an inference derived from the foundation of our liberal religious faith. There is no metaphysical reality that is not speculation upon human experience. And it is only those who really don’t want human beings to exercise the freedom they have been given by God at creation, who maintain existence is determined, and it is only through forsaking this illusion that true freedom can be found.

It may be true that we are in the midst of a war. “We wrestle with principalities and powers,” said Paul, representing the first wave of Jews who responded to Jesus’ call to live a real life, or real experiences, within the really real reality of a love for all souls. And maybe those principalities and powers with which we wrestle are those forces within culture who claim an exclusive God who determines existence, a God with which one can be united only by forsaking this world and the life upon it. It is this metaphysic that drives planes into towers and men and women to condemn the religion of those who believe differently than they do. It is the source of an intolerance that, in the name of saving humanity from this illusion, would destroy life.

As one of my colleagues has noted, tolerance will exist in our world only because those who value tolerance will have more power than those who do not value it. It may be true that we are in the midst of a war, wrestling with principalities and powers. Tolerance is a recognition ands affirmation of the broad brush-stroke created by the experience of so many individuals. But tolerance is possible only by the beliefs and act of those whose faith is that that human experience is real, not imaginary or illusory. The enormous breadth of God’s great creation would be destroyed by the intolerance of those who claim the life we experiences is somehow not really real.

To us, this is real, as is the freedom God created as the fabric of it. And it will be for those who awaken to this, this reality, in all of its power and glory, in all the ways it can be betrayed and served, it will be to those who awaken to the spirit that moves through this created world that existence can and will be fulfilled.

And so, regardless of whether there was a real, live person who posed, there is a reality to the creation of Leonardo da Vinci, that has grown and accumulated more reality through the centuries. We declare our faith in our answer to the crooner’s question:

Are you warm, are you real, Mona Lisa?

Or, just a cold and lonely, lovely work of art?

AMEN