A Spiritual Director’s Take on Why We Love The Chosen
The Jesus show your friends keep telling you about.
The multi-season series The Chosen is breaking many records and barriers. It is the most extensive crowd-funded TV series of all time and has found itself on the screens of millions around the world via a series-specific app. But perhaps its most impactful barrier to have broken through is that of the hearts of its viewers and their long-standing feelings about God.
The show, intended to follow the life of Christ over seven seasons, focuses much of its attention on the lives and backstories of those who followed Jesus, including the twelve disciples, Mary Magdalene, Nicodemus, and Mary, the mother of Jesus. It includes direct biblical text adapted for the screen and original storylines created under the consultation of experts from the Catholic, Jewish, and Evangelical traditions. All of this with a surprising lack of cheesiness.
The power of these backstories humanizes not only Jesus but also his followers, drawing us into their lives, emotions, and events leading up to their first encounters with Jesus and beyond. The results of these stories bring the audience to tears with nearly every episode.
So, can a TV show impact our spiritual lives?
As a Spiritual Director, my job is to sift through the experiences, doctrine, and personal history that followers of Jesus have collected over time and to discern with them where God may be at work in their lives.
A key to this work is acknowledging the differences between our "God image" and "God concept." While this distinction is intuitively understood, Ana-Maria Rizzuto's book The Birth of the Living God differentiates between what we mentally assent to (our doctrine or God concept) and our active beliefs and experiences with God (God image). Ideally, these two concepts closely overlap. However, as I will address momentarily, varied experiences in life can create uncomfortable cognitive dissonance between the two.
Both God image and God concept come into play whenever we sit down to read our Bible or pray. For example, we "know" that God will never leave or forsake us, but sometimes we experience God as distant when we pray.
Addressing our God concept is relatively easy. We read scripture and what God says about himself, and our doctrinal ideas are formed. God image comes with a more significant nuisance. Rizzuto argues that experiences with parents and authority figures form our God image—positively or negatively—and that experiences are the anchoring force in driving how we perceive God in prayer.
So, what does this have to do with The Chosen? Well, a lot.
Stay with me.
The Chosen as "Imaginative Prayer"
The spiritual practices of St. Ignatius of Loyola often involve "imaginative prayer." This type of prayer consists of visualizing ourselves within a specific passage of scripture. We pay attention to the details of the scene, position ourselves within it, and observe the important figures, including Jesus. Imaginative prayer helps us to deeply understand the stories of scripture and even connect with Jesus by using our imaginations to have mental "encounters" with God. St. Ignatius believed that if God can communicate with us through our memories and thoughts, then our imagination can also be a way to hear from God.
Our imagination, creativity, memory, and ability to ponder scenarios are part of how we bear the image of God within us. Allowing the stories of scripture to develop within these parts of ourselves impacts our hearts and can stir our emotions.
Imaginative prayer is a vehicle through which reading scripture can move from forming our "God concept" to an experiential forming of "God image."
So, when we read a passage about Jesus asking Bartimaeus, "What do you want me to do for you?" (Mark 10:51), we suddenly imagine what it would be like if Jesus looked at us and asked the same question.
This brings me to The Chosen.
For the visual among us, our imaginations are most commonly engaged in visual media and storytelling through movies and TV shows. So, The Chosen presents us with a means of engaging in visual "imaginative prayer." We put ourselves in the story, imagining through the actors how Jesus looked at people, his voice inflections, gestures, and responses.
Things previously left only to our imaginations are now before us on the screen.
From a Spiritual Director's perspective, our hearts can engage as we watch, just as they do in imaginative prayer. We tend to identify with particular characters and see how Jesus responds to them. The result? We have a "by proxy" imaginative experience with Jesus himself. Concepts and stories, once black and white and written on a page, are now alive with flesh on them and impact our hearts in significant ways.
Of course, the caution is that we rightly measure the significance of these "experiences" in our spiritual lives against scripture. Despite St. Ignatius' emphasis on imagination in Christian meditation, we must remain firm within orthodoxy when establishing what is true.
None of the Scriptural accounts in The Chosen are new for most Christians. We have read them time and time again. In this case, visual (imaginative) storytelling engages our hearts in new ways. In a media-hungry culture, the idea of Jesus' love and compassion in visual form ignites intrigue and interest. We've seen it with our own eyes and felt it in our hearts. And that makes a huge difference.
For more on how to allow your experiences of watching The Chosen to be transformative prayer experiences, check out the article What to do with all the “feels” from watching The Chosen
