Best Spiritual Movies – David Hoffmeister: The movie No Reservations shows beautifully how trust is the answer for the main character, Kate. Even at the end of the movie, it almost broke down for her, but trust was the component through which she could open her heart completely. You just have to keep trusting. The more you develop trust, the more the ego can get very threatened at the feeling of being annihilated.
When you have a very powerful loving experience, the ego will come in. Jesus says the ego will actually turn from “suspicious to vicious” because it is very threatened by love. That is why it takes so much persistence and determination on the spiritual journey. In this movie, Kate was just starting to open up to all the symbols and witnesses of love, but when there was a threat, she went into the cooler, and said, “This is my life. This is me.” In other words, “This kitchen—this workplace—is me.”
The threat is always a threat of false identity. With all the advances and the heart openings, there’s a threat to identity. That’s the ego. The ego is claiming that you are something you are not, and if it perceives a threat, it goes back to the same old defenses. It will go right back to whatever seemed to be used in the past. In Kate’s case it was to close down again.
This movie shows that it actually takes some miraculous experiences to turn the tide. That is what the development of trust is all about. It will not help to replace concepts with more concepts. It actually takes experiences.
When you look at the juxtaposition of things that stand in front of the love—that are held as more important than love itself—it is quite amazing. For Kate, there was control under there; there was pride under there. Control and pride are common ego defenses against love, but in the end that was the message of the movie: love transcends if you give way to it. She went right in and brought her saffron sauce, and was humble, and that was where the opening really occurred. The miracle just took the place of the pride.
It’s beautiful. God knows the prayer of the heart before a word is uttered. Kate would go into the cooler which was like calling out in prayer. Whether she was actually praying to God or not doesn’t matter. God knows that we want to be happy. Deep down that is what we want. We want happiness. We want love.
Zoey coming into her apartment and Nick coming to work in her kitchen was the answer to the prayer of the heart. It is just our willingness to open up to that. She was initially crying in the cooler when she was reading the letter from her sister about, “You’re the one that can take care of my baby if I would ever go away.” Kate was probably crying with fear of commitment and thinking, Oh my God! What’s this going to do to my life? I didn’t ask for this consciously and now I have a child to deal with. And with the kitchen it was her identity that she was guarding against. But still the prayer of the heart was there and it was answered, amazingly, miraculously.
Click here for Part 1 of this movie talk
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