78 Titanic: On Hubris & the Eternal Love Story

11 Oscar winner Titanic is both a mythical love story and a dire warning against hubris (arrogance towards the gods). Learn how divine love conquers hubris, and how Jack and Rose reveals Christ's love upon the cross!

Excerpt: ..."substitute Rose and Jack with us and God, and you’ll realise that an experience of divine love is akin to flying, it expands our horizons, sets us free and gives us a future full of hope. Partnering with God it’s a bit like sailing into a sunset – there’s enough light to allure us, but mystery enough to seduce us. Notice that Jack as Rose’s saviour figure lifts her hands in a way that is quite literally cruciform, like Christ on the cross. Her open arms are at once the wings of a bird as they are a gesture of surrender and an act of trust. And Jack could lead Rose to do this because he himself had done it first, before she arrived... and as she closes her eyes with arms open, he places his hands in hers and joins her arms in cruciform fashion, literally backing her up in the act of total surrender. So you get where this is going? Now you have lover and beloved, united upon the cross, where they exchange their first kiss. Isn’t this a profound way to look at the cross? Not as an instrument of condemnation, but the place of consummation ...between Christ and his beloved, and the place where we the beloved most profoundly encounter the love of Christ himself. We too are inspired to offer up our lives, because Jesus himself had done so on the cross.

I’m not sure James Cameron had all this in mind consciously as he write this scene, but in some ways it doesn’t matter. We human beings absorb information on multiple levels, consciously and subconsciously, and perhaps during this scene, something of the Christ archetype was always speaking to us ... perhaps with a language only the soul knows..."