William Barry SJ and The Mission

Still reading Praying the Truth: Deepening Your Friendship with God through Honest Prayer by Jesuit spiritual director William Barry The chapter I read today was on talking to God about our bad stuff. At one point he mentioned the movie The Mission ...

The film The Mission tells the story of some Jesuits who worked with the Guarani tribe in South America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Robert de Niro plays a former soldier who had enslaved Guarani. Now repentant and a Jesuit himself, he chooses as his penance to carry his old armor and weapons on his back as the Jesuits climb to the site where the Guarani live. It is a very arduous climb. When they reach the top, a Guarani races with a machete toward him. You think that he will kill his former enemy, but instead he lops off the baggage, which drops behind de Niro into the gorge ... (p. 80)



That scene makes me cry, imagining what it could be like to suddenly find all the pain and sadness in the world obviated by the revelation that all manner of thing are well.

For those interested, there's a review of the book at Thinking Faith - here

And some music from the movie ...