Bourne Identity

My wife and I watched the movie "The Bourne Identity" on Saturday night, it has been about 7 years since I've seen the movie, and I forgot how good the movie was. What gets lost in all the high paced thrills is the important message inherent in the movie., Our Identity. Don't get me wrong, Hollywood is Hollywood, and they have no problem messing up any good story with their misunderstandings about sex, in the movie, Jason Bourne sleeps with a girl he has known for about 48 hours, that really sends all the right messages, (But, hey I'm sure they loved each other?).

That was the only negative caveat. Because the message was powerful. Jason Bourne is a secret agent for the CIA, and he is involved in a failed mission where he is shot and wounded on his head, losing all memory of who he is. He is saved by a fishing boat, and he is literally left trying to reconstruct his life from the middle of the ocean. The first thing he says to the fishing boat captain is, "I don't know who I am", "I don't know where I'm going,". If you can't answer those two questions, life will be very challenging.

Here's where the movie gets really good, he starts seeing that he has all of these incredible powers, but he doesn't understand why, or what it tells him about his identity. There's a great scene where he's in a cafe and tells the girl , "I memorized every license plate in the parking lot, I can run 20 minutes all out with out getting tired," What normal person can do that? Jason Bourne's dilemma is really every humans dilemma, we have these incredible powers, think this through, "we can create a human life from literally nothing," The minds power, the intellects power is almost endless. But what does it tell us? We find ourselves in the middle of nowhere with all of these incredible powers, but we still haven't answered those first two questions, "Who am I", "Where am I going,"

The movie gets even deeper from there, because by ourselves those questions are very difficult to answer, so a girl named Maria helps him find the answers. Art is a beautiful thing, because it can take on meaning for the viewer that the artist did not originally intend. Two major points came to me about this, number 1, the person most suited for helping us answer this question is a girl named Maria, our Lady was the vessel that God used to bring Jesus to the world, and she is still introducing Jesus to souls everyday 2010 years later. We have to go to Mary, and she will take us by the hand to Jesus, the Rosary is as powerful a tool as there is to meet Mary. The second thought that came to me was, how powerful love is to lead us to answer those questions. Every healthy relationship should lead us to those answers, never away from them.

By the way, for me the answer to those questions are, (Who am I)- I'm a child of God, (Where am I going,?) Heaven. For Jason Bourne, all of his powers clearly pointed to a person that was a secret agent, for the Human, these gifts and powers that we all posses lead us to the answer, we must be a child of God the Father, our desire to create, our desire for beauty, our desire for love all point to the same place. Jesus will take us there if we surrender to Him.