Stigmata was a fascinating film in several respects. Although a film made for the mainstream (secular) movie-going audience and  pitched primarily at the under-35  audience, Stigmata is an essentially religious film that draws heavily on Christian symbols and traditions. The main character in the movie is a young woman, Frankie, hairdresser by day and nightclub patron by night, who becomes afflicted with the wounds of the Stigmata (the wounds Christ received during the course of his passion) upon receiving a crucifix belonging to a priest that was mailed to her. Frankie has no Christian heritage or identity and tells the priest sent by the church authorities to investigate the phenomenon "I don’t go to church because I don’t believe in God." The story of Stigmata is basically one of revelation - an inherently biblical concept. The "truth" is represented in the film by an Aramaic scroll that alleges to be the actual words of Jesus himself and which is being concealed by the institutional guardians of the faith, here represented by the usual Hollywood villains - the Roman Catholic Church. Because the institutional church will not listen and will not allow these authentic words of Jesus to be heard, God chooses an atheist, the nightclubbing Frankie, through whom to speak and to make his words and will known. This reminded me of several biblical passages - God speaking through Balaam’s donkey when the prophet would not listen (Numbers 22:21ff); God using the prostitute Rahab to achieve his purposes during the conquest of the promised land (Joshua 2:2ff); the story of Ruth, the Gentile woman who becomes an ancestor to David by virtue of her loyalty to Naomi (Ruth 1); the voice of the Lord crying out to the prophet Isaiah who lived among thousands and thousands of the supposed "chosen people" of God - saying "Whom shall I send? And who will go for us"? (Isaiah 6:8). There is a lot of biblical support and precedent, particularly in the Old Testament, to support the suggestion that God will use and speak through anyone he chooses, despite their apparent spiritual credentials, especially if those who claim to belong to him and believe him are not available or are not listening. This further reminded me of how easy it is to not hear and to not be available. It was the religious leaders (the temple scribes and priests) and the most overtly and obviously "godly" people of the day (the Pharisees) who not only missed seeing and hearing the ultimate revelation of God in Jesus Christ, but opposed and rejected him. Their spiritual eyes and ears were closed by their own preconceived conceptions of what God must do, and of how God could or could not speak or act. Do apparent atheists - like the nightclubbing Frankie - sometimes speak with voices of faith, prophetic voices, even not knowing it themselves? We will only know if we are listening. One footnote to close with. The makers of Stigmata get a little sloppy by drawing attention to the Gospel of Thomas which they apparently identify with the "lost words of Jesus" represented in the film by the Aramaic scroll. Despite this hint at a real life scandal, the Gospel of Thomas is in fact no secret. It consists of 145 sayings (logia) attributed to Jesus written in an ancient Egyptian script (Coptic) dating from the third-century, and has been widely translated and published since its discovery in 1945. The text can be read on line by anyone interested here.