I think most of us prefer to obviate the more discomforting, awe-inspiring aspects of God's character with reminders about His many promises to love and protect His people: "do not fear, for I am with you" (Isaiah 41:10), or "He will cover you with his feathers, and under his wings you will find refuge . . .You will not fear the terror of night, nor the arrow that flies by day . . ." (Psalm 91:5-6). This is the aspect of the Divine that provides us comfort in distress, and rightly so. God is good.

God is also terrifying. The same Father that assures us of His love can quickly convince us of His caprice. The ways He intervenes on planet Earth can surprise and confuse; His ways are not our own, much as we'd like them to be. Mystery makes us more than uncomfortable--it scares the crap out of us.

And yet St. Paul claims that embracing this fear factor is a necessary part of salvation, that we cannot fully understand the grace we are accepting unless we are continually overwhelmed by the Giver who accompanies His gift, taking up residence in our very being: "work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose" (Philippians 2:12-13).

So, we need to be afraid, but who in middle-class America even knows what real fear looks like? I vividly remember my terror on 9-11, how for the rest of the day and the next I wondered whether something might not drop out of the sky on my ten-month-old daughter and wife. This overwhelming fear, however, soon faded, leaving only a dim echo of the kind of bone-chilling fear I'd last experienced awaking from a childhood nightmare or one of a few serious back injuries in my youth. It seems like this happens to most of us, the fears of youth and the temporary scares of adulthood (how many of us have friends who freaked out about Y2K?) becoming the mind-numbing anxieties incurred by bills, family, and work. Such worries are no doubt very real, and can be quite debilitating, but how often do they prompt us to duck and cover or flee in terror, as those who live in war zones must on a daily basis? Only rarely does that fear arrive that flattens middle-class America's arrogance, briefly clarifying our priorities and searing an unmistakable recognition of our spiritual condition straight into our souls.

Since we seem determined to dodge scary, Jonathan Edwards-type sermons at all cost, where might we find valuable opportunities of being scared witless, of rediscovering our spiritual vulnerability and some sense of what it should feel like to tremble before an omnipotent God? A handful of expertly fashioned, very frightening movies like Stephen Spielberg's War of the Worlds (2005) might provide useful, if imperfect, anecdotes for our anesthetized sensibilities.

For critic Moriarty, over at Aint it Cool News, Spielberg's latest doesn't quite match some of his earlier adventures like Jaws (1975) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) in large part because it lacks their leavening humor. To his mind, all this newest adventure does is scare, providing unremitting emotional torture for the (sensitive) viewer. I'll argue with his opinion, but not his judgment.

War of the Worlds is truly a horrifying film: for at least the first hour of the movie, it's pretty easy to forget this is fantasy because your attention is more on the distraught characters than the extraordinary acts of devastation in the background. The question is whether there's actually anything beneficial about identifying with a normal guy fighting desperately, repeatedly to buy his kids another few moments of life. This is not entertainment. There are virtually no spots of Tom Cruisian heroism, any personal victories the characters do win last about two seconds, and the pace is such that most audiences will find it hard to catch their breath.

Which I think is a good thing--at least, it was for me. Watching a middle-class, height-challenged guy run around with absolute terror in his face and a young daughter clutched to his chest clarifies a few things for you if you too are a middle-class, height-challenged guy with a daughter just a few years younger than Dakota Fanning (who began to resemble my daughter Hannah to an uncanny degree as the movie progressed). When I returned home from the screening, the hugs I gave the women in my life lasted for a long time . . .

Just today (7-7-05), London was struck by terrorists, killing over thirty-seven people. If a movie like War of the Worlds can make us feel for just two hours a mere fraction of the horror experienced today by the British--if we can learn in the movie house to imagine ourselves as not just occasionally but continually vulnerable and in dire need of saving--then perhaps we'll carry back into the daylight a clearer picture of our real spiritual condition relative to a Holy and Sovereign God.