The View From My Broken Mountain

I'm taking a class through EMMANUEL HOUSE SEMINARY called Cultural Literacy. I was asked to reflect upon seeing Brokeback Mountain and post my thoughts on our class message board. Below are the reflections I shared with my classmates:
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Yes. I've thought about it. I am a mixture of grateful, grieved, sobered, and hopeful to have walked through the story with the characters. A person's sexuality is perhaps her/his most sacred, holy dimension this side of heaven. Perhaps it is the delicate outer shell of the soul.

I am grateful someone (not surprisingly someone "outside" the faith community) was brave enough to place the story on the radar screen of life.

I, too, was grieved by the stories intertwined on the screen. The two men, the wives, the children, the parents. Broken people with some really beautiful hearts beneath the rubble. They all want the same things.

It would make life so much easier if we could compartmentalize our sexuality from every other aspect of our daily lives/interactions. It would be easier if we could just chalk this movie up to a radical, shocking, liberal stance pointing to an obvious agenda. Draw a line. Pick a side. It's not that simple. Instead, I thinkit is an opportunity to take a fictional look into real lives. I'm sobered.

Hopeful. Yes. Our Creator wrapped those souls in such a tender covering, on purpose. With Grace, He actually lives more intimately with the stark realities of all of our brokeness than even we do. He seems confident enough to continue to woo us back to him, day after day, regardless upon which broken mountain we live.