[Spoilers for Belle ahead]

How do we worship when we don’t want to worship? What is the point of church? Why do we even need others as Christians? Early this year I watched the movie Belle in theater and have been playing with this draft in my mind ever since because I think that the climactic scene of this movie (streamable, dubbed, on HBO Max) provides a secular answer by analogy to all of these questions. 

Belle, and I’m going to spoil the movie here, is a retelling of Beauty and the Beast. It received mixed reviews due to the meandering plot that many argue has insufficient resolution, but it was an attempt by a Japanese writer and director in beautifully done animation to bring the Western genre of musical into the Japanese context (which has no local similar tradition). 

Belle follows Suzu Naito, a high school student who once sang but lost the ability to sing due to childhood trauma. Suzu is then introduced to the world of “U,” a virtual reality that converts a user’s deepest desires, like the desire to sing, into an online avatar. There she can turn this desire into action through her avatar and turns into the superstar and titular Belle, the beauty, who utilizes the skills of her avatar to sing to acclaim of the world.

There comes a point in the story though where Belle, which is what someone might say is a false front over a troubled child, must shed her online persona, and the abilities of her own avatar to become unmasked as her true self and real abilities in the virtual world of U, and it is in this climactic moment of the story that we find the analogy that allows us to answer in part what it means to worship in community. 

The song, “A million miles away” (playable above) is the song at the heart of this climactic scene. In 8 minutes this song and accompanying animation in film captures the heart of what it means to worship as community. In the scene, Belle, unveiled as Suzu to the world, starts singing in front of the whole universe of avatars of the virtual world, with all the strength that she has. For a while it looks like she can overcome her trauma and sing again, but then at the interlude she runs out of strength. She can’t sing anymore, and it looks like hope is lost. But then, five minutes and fourteen seconds into the linked song the crowd takes up the remainder of the song’s bridge. And here we find what it means to worship in community.

Worship, at its core, is not just vertical, as in a person to God. It is also horizontal, that is to say, person to person. We see this in Ephesians where it says that we are “addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord.” It says “one another”—collective—and “to the Lord”—vertical— showing to all readers the two parts of corporate worship. Properly, worship then is not an individual act; it is a collective one. Even worship as prayer is collective, as we, together, try to emulate the call to “Our Father.”

There have been so many times that I have found myself unable to worship with my own heart. When I have sorrow, when I struggle over the brokenness of my life or the brokenness of the world in which we live, when I just want to curse God and die. It is in those moments that we find ourselves too human, to weak, to bring ourselves to praise, and that is why we must be in church. All worship is liturgical, that is to say, it is the work for the people. In our weakness, we who do not know how to pray as we ought, find in one another the strength to worship at all times and all seasons as the church works to lift up not just their own hearts, but ours as well. 

At the end, the unveiled Belle returns to song, finishing the film’s act with depth of heart and feeling revitalized by the same depth poured out by the surrounding crowd. For a fleeting moment, Belle is a mirror into the subconscious of the crowd, fulfilling hopes and quashing fear, and the same too in our worship. At the end of it all, whether it be after days or weeks of being unable to sing on my own, I no longer have to be carried by those around me, but the words of worship again effortlessly flow again from the depths of my own heart. 

The crowd lifted up Belle, and so too in our worship, we lift up our hearts; we lift them to the Lord.