A few days back my wife and I sought a movie on demand for a quiet evening with our teens out of the house.

There it was …50 Shades of Grey. We had not seen it. I had avoided it by choice saying, ‘I’ll not participate in this pandering to our base instincts by commercial interests.”

I’ve heard many reasons for not watching this now phenomenally successful contemporary creation of cinema and book. The most recent was: “My wife and I figured we don’t need an excuse to watch soft porn. We’ll just make our own.”

We watched it in pieces as the phone rang and the boys came in and out. We would pause it as they passed through. I’m a middle-aged bleeding deacon for crying out loud. Liberal I may be, but even I can’t be watching soft porn with my children in the room.

We had to finish the last 10 minutes the following night. My curiosity was peaked and I needed to know how the ending was written. Beyond surprise, I have moved into what I have come to recognize as grief.

It haunted me. I was puzzled by the emotion and watched it again in privacy. In the end he needs to punish her. I wept at the sight of her suffering. Covering herself, with tear filled eyes: ”Is this how you want to see me?”

Why? Why had this piece troubled me so? Why does it continue to haunt my thoughts and emotions? I suspect it has pricked my subconscious. I suspect that is one reason it has been so commercially successful. It touches a part of most of us. All of us, if we can be brutally honest.

I am a survivor of violent alcoholism since childhood. I know today that my heart was broken when I saw my hero dissolve into a subhuman mess and I had no place for the image. With no one to talk to and no place to go, I wept and built walls—my own prison, if you will. I pushed the world away, steeled my heart and became the monster I abhorred.

In the end I needed to punish. I needed to overcome the monster within and its heart was you. Sex became a gateway to temporary freedom…release. I had to dominate. I was no sadist, no aberrant. I was simply a man that needed to control the object of my affection. I could not be vulnerable. That would destroy me…or so I felt.

In many ways I have found my way home. I have known many forms of “love,” yet still my heart girds itself and I realize, just as when Christian asks, “Where have you been?” Anastasia whispers, “Waiting…”

I believe that we are all waiting. Just as innocence waits for enlightenment. We wait for a love that we do not know. We build our prison of broken hearts and wait for the nurture that will free us.

I have begun a journey first through martial studies and now yoga that reaches for self-realization and on that journey I have seen a point of light. It is not someone outside myself that will free my aching heart. It is the seer that has always been and always will be. It is the heart of souls that is all of us. It is truth.

The truth is that our salvation does not lie in the sweet nape of a lover’s neck or on the beating warrior’s breast. It does lie within us. Yet we sense that in the moment of sexual ecstasy that comes from a romantic heart we pass through a door that connects our minds and bodies to a place beyond this flesh and bone.
All that it really does is bind us to our vulnerability. The question is can we live there in this place of broken hearts?

So I suppose I came away from 50 Shades of Grey with a different take than many…or did I?

 

Relephant read:

Let me explain: 50 Shades of Grey & BDSM.

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Author: Scott Hicks

Editor: Travis May

Photos Movie still