High Fidelity's ruminations on art and meaning are best summed up by the carefully designed "mix tape," a collection of songs that lovelorn Rob (John Cusack) makes for a girlfriend. For him, inarticulate in the language of love, the tape is a chance to use other people's poetry to express his own heart. This idea resonates strongly with me, because I find that quite often God uses other people's artistry—quite often in movies—to express his heart to me. A year-end look at the films most important to me always exhibits strong ties to what God's been teaching me, so I'm going to share the other nine films that made my year by detailing recent portions of my spiritual journey.

I began the year with a growing fascination with church history, particularly the stories of saints, after seeing last year's The Messenger. My interest was again piqued by The Third Miracle, a modern-day story about a priest (Ed Harris) who investigates nominees for sainthood. He's known as the miracle-killer (since most of his subjects turn out to be frauds) and the pain of taking away a community's hope has withered his faith. In short, he's in the position many Christians find themselves in this age of technological miracles, asking if God is really at work in the world. The priest's rediscovery that, yes, God is, leads him to fight for the sainthood of his latest subject—which gave me a new vantage point on my studies. I had been focusing simply on the person at hand, but afterward I tried harder to understand the community the saint lived in, since sainthood isn't solely about an individual's merit but a communal declaration that God is indeed at work among us.

In my readings I came across the rule of St. Benedict, which says we ...