If you are unhappy, you shouldn't take it as God's disfavor. Just the contrary. Might be the very sign He loves you. He shows His love not by helping avoid suffering, but by sending you suffering, by keeping you there. To suffer binds you to something higher than yourself, higher than your own will. Takes you from the world to find what lies beyond it.

From Terrence Malick’s “Knight of Cups”

Seeking to avoid the pain of his life, Rick is sleep walking through a surreal landscape of self-indulgence. But he cannot avoid the inevitability of his own life. There is no escape from the cage as long as he seeks to deny reality.

Malick’s movie is haunted by impermanence; nothing lasts. It is a film in constant motion. No one stands still. Everyone is on the move seeking to avoid the inevitability of death in the future and pain in the present.

Rick is condemned to live in a fearful fantasy land of “fragments,” “cut off” from reality. He falls “in love twenty times a day”, but always finds himself in “chaos”,

Longing for something other… without knowing what it is.

That “something other” stalks the dark corners of Rick’s life. He is haunted by vague hints of holiness.  He cannot entirely shake vague memories of transcendence. But he has lost the map; he cannot find his way beyond the material realm in which he feels imprisoned:

When we see a beautiful woman, or a man…
the soul remembers the beauty
it used to know in heaven.
And wings begin to spout,
and that makes the soul want to fly,
but it cannot yet.
It is still too weak.

Near the end of the film, an elderly priest. Father Zeitlinger, appears standing near the front of a church. He addresses someone  who is out of view of the camera, presumably Rick, who perhaps has turned to the priest seeking wisdom. The priest says,

Seems you’re alone.

You’re not.

Even now, he’s taking your hand and guiding you by a way you cannot see.

If you are unhappy, you shouldn’t take it as a mark of God’s disfavor.

Just to the contrary. Might be the very sign he loves you.

He shows his love, not by helping you avoid suffering, by sending you suffering. By keeping you there.

To suffer binds you to something higher than yourself. Higher than your own will.

Takes you from the world to find what lies beyond it.

We are not only to endure patiently the troubles he sends. We are to regard them as gifts.

As gifts more precious than the happiness we wish for ourselves.

The suffering Rick has sought to evade is not the enemy. If he will only stop and be present to the moments of his life, he will discover that the pain he has sought to avoid is the path to awakening.

It is not clear in the end that Rick will find his way to this “light,” this “pearl” he once possessed.

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