The rant-inducing episode on the God Channel in my last post was thrown into sharp relief when, at the weekend, I watched the film The Way starring Martin Sheen.

Sheen plays an uptight Californian ophthalmologist, Tom Avery, whose PhD-dropout son Daniel dies in the Pyrenees while attempting to walk the medieval Camino de Santiago, an 800km pilgrim route. The grief-stricken Tom flies out to repatriate Daniel’s body and on an impulse decides instead to have him cremated. Stuffing the tin box of ashes in Daniel’s rucksack, Tom resolves to walk the Camino in his stead.

The film is slow and gentle, on occasion a little awkward, but invites the viewer to reflect on mortality, grief, unfulfilled ambition, addiction and cure, camaraderie and redemption. Tom is a lapsed Catholic, and encounters both believers and sceptics on his journey. One companion simply wants to lose weight, another to quit smoking. Yet all are drawn into Tom’s story and, in the end, share a spiritual experience that transforms them.

It’s easy to criticise Hollywood for pandering to our emotions with superficial pop psychology. But films like this mediate a deeper sense of the infinite than a couple of mediocre worship songs and a badly-exegeted sermon. They haunt our dreams, stir our conversation, allow us to leave ourselves and enter another’s life. A better God channel, in other words.