u/Bacoilieu

As some of you may know, the author of the book, Katherine Paterson, worked as a missionary educator in her early years, and she attended Presbyterian classes before her writing career. Thus, it is legitimate to ask ourselves to what degree her religious beliefs influenced the novel, and consequently, the movie we know and love. On the other hand, some of you may be familiar with the true story beneath the fiction. The book is dedicated to David Paterson, the author's son, and it was intended to help him come to terms with the death of his friend Lisa Hill, suddenly struck by lightning at such a young age.

So the story comes together after a real-life tragedy, something that neither her son nor she could have explained in any way but a fatalistic accident, an irrational turn of events, or, at best, an obscure device in God's plan that remains unspeakable. How could God find his place in such a mournful evening?

The first one asking about the design of God for Leslie's fate is Jess, when he expresses his pain and confusion by making a logical statement: she didn't believe in the Bible, so she's going to Hell. The subsequent thought is: even though we cannot say whether she is going to Hell, I'm going to Hell, for it is my fault if she died. He doesn't speak the next logical conclusion, but we don't have a hard time guessing it: even if my fault can be redeemed in some way, has Leslie died just because the universe wanted to point out my mistake? And if the universe doesn't care if I'm good or bad, does Leslie's death mean anything in the first place?

The matter of justice, of life or punishment after death, automatically connects to the matter of existential significance. The search for meaning is the search for God's love, and after grief we feel stranded. Hence, the struggle of finding God is directly correlated to the struggle with loss, and after loss we tend to lose all our hope. In the final extent, we can say that significance and hope are the same thing: searching for meaning is the hope to find any meaning, and when we stop believing in our hopes, we stop finding meaning.

Interpretation is the search for meaning. We try to interpret the film to comprehend it. Also, all we comprehend from the movie comes from our previous interpretation. We have to thank interpretation for all the feelings we got by watching the movie. Interpretation is this ability that works on logic, memory, but also feelings, that lets us look into invisible things. As, by reading the word "apple," we can distinctly see an apple that suddenly our mind conjured; interpretation channels our imagination into new paths, and this is what Leslie did with Jess.

She taught him to look with his eyes wide shut and his mind wide open, and initiated him to an invisible reality, where people from his ordinary life assumed another semblance. Jess learnt things about the others and his way of looking at others that he couldn't have discovered otherwise. Does this knowledge come from outside, or was it inside his head the whole time?

In Christianity, God is also the Spirit, and Spirit is nothing different from what we intend with the Spirit Realm present in religions from all over the world: a plane of existence that surrounds us and keeps many things hidden from us. For Christians, what happens in real life is not the only truth; it is the symbol of another truth, a bigger Truth. Interpreting, imagining, looking for meaning, and hoping are equal to gazing into the unknown vastness of the Spirit and trying to know anything about God.

Leslie and Jess's time in Terabithia is comparable to a spiritual exercise, a form of magic on its own. And when Leslie's gone, where does the magic go?

Coming to terms with grief also means looking back at your hope and dreams and making a statement. The statement may be "I met someone, and I loved them, now they're gone, and nothing makes any sense"; or you can look at all of your pain and be puzzled for a second. Pain is hard to deal with: you need to move on or be overcome by it. But something we must appreciate about pain is that it is true. If we learn to deal with pain, if we are brave enough to play with it as we did with happiness, what could have crashed the meaning of our life ends up reinforcing it. Imagination, schooled in grief, becomes the ability to look at pain and see behind it the love that was before, learning that life and death are two sides of each living creature, as Good and Evil, as Love and Grief. Your mind opens wide, and you discover a new dimension of love that turns into charity.

As the breaking of the rope turned the garden of life and happiness into a realm of death and ghosts, the bridge becomes a symbol of life that overcomes death, a bridge that connects the past with the future, the dead to the living, our world to imagination, thence to the Spirit. And the door to Terabithia is no more as fragile as in the past; now, corroborated by pain, the path between the two worlds is solid and easier to cross.

But don't take my word for it; take Leslie's instead. She already expressed what she thought about God: when in the book she, Jess, and Maybelle were discussing the history of Jesus' death: «All those people wanting to kill him when he hadn't done anything to hurt them [...] It's really kind of a beautiful story—like Abraham Lincoln or Socrates—or Aslan. [...] You have to believe it, but you hate it. I don't have to believe it, and I think it's beautiful.» Leslie's, to Jess and Maybelle's shock, can look at the Passion and find God's love and beauty in it: something that Jess shall be able to do only after her death. By saying "I don't have to believe it," is she really blasphemously refusing God? Or is she elevating human imagination to the same level of truth? Maybe for Leslie, God could only live in Terabithia because only there He can be beautiful. Her life is already a dream; she doesn't care what she believes is real, as long as she can imagine it.

Jess cares instead, because he didn't live in a dream before meeting Leslie; he had to be introduced to it, as he's cast outside after her departure. He doesn't live in meaning; he has to find it. He needs to make Terabithia true, to make meaning true, to invite God into his world, and he builds a bridge to do so.

Does Bridge to Terabithia talk about God? It does, but in a way we find uncanny: it first needs to crush all of our hopes and all the meaning we gave to Jess and Leslie's existence, as it needs to make God appear as a feeble fantasy that can only be imagined in childhood woods; and only then, through our acquaintance with grief, the Substance of God manifests back again in our life: we come back chasing Him, we come back dreaming, loving and playing, interpreting our roles, we come back to life. It needed to crash us, and it concludes with a bridge and the words that spell: nothing crushes us.