I've Been Thinking

I’m not prepared to talk about all the symbols and metaphors in the movie “The Matrix.” The entire concept of the movie is a metaphor and there could be many valid interpretations of the symbols and metaphors in the movie. But I keep coming back to this video.

I grapple with the end of the scene, when Orpheus talks about how the human being has become just a battery, a source of power. I find this scene to be a powerful metaphor for our relationship to the system(s) that control our lives – you and me, all of us. Our life’s energy supplies the power for a worldwide system, which uses that energy to its own ends.

Walter Wink uses the phrase “the Domination System” in his book, Engaging the Powers¹, to describe structural evil. Latin American Liberation theologian, Jose Ignacio Gonzalez Faus, has recovered the phrase “the world” from the gospel of John to describe structural sin, which is identical to Wink’s structural evil. Faus writes: “…’the world’ means a socioreligious order hostile to God or an oppressive system based on money and power for the few.” ² Whether it

Orpheus shows Neo “the world we know, the world as it was at the end of the twentieth century.” He then says “you’ve been living in a dream world, Neo,” he’s been asleep. Now he is awake.

Whether we call “the world as it exists today” a domination system or “the world,” we too must wake up to it. Our life’s energy is being harnessed for a system that is most certainly not life giving. We could, in fact, call it death -dealing.

1. Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers (Fortress Press: Minneapolis, 1992), 9. ↩︎
2. Jose Ignacio Gonzalez Faus, “Sin,” in Systematic Theology: Perspectives from Liberation Theology, ed. Jon Sobrino and Ignacio Ellacuria (Orbis Books: Maryknoll, New York, 1993), 198. ↩︎