How 2 Films and 1 Show Changed My Life: The Magic of Modern Reincarnation Stories

Let me tell you about the first patient I ever saw. 

(We’ll get to the movies in a second, I promise.) 

In 2021, I started a new life. Up to that point, I’d been a pastor and a progressive Christian for about a decade, but I knew I was steadily burning out. The role wasn’t fitting me like it once did and I knew I needed something new. So, I took a risk and let that version of myself go. I wanted to live a different life for a while—a life where I wouldn’t have to talk or think about Jesus or God or church or the Bible for a good long while.

So, after a lot of prep, I resigned from my job, said teary goodbyes, sold my house, drove four hundred and sixty-three miles, and started my new job as a Buddhist hospital chaplain. I walked into my very first hospital room to see my very first patient—where I was sure we’d talk about feelings and coping skills and existential resilience and definitely not anything too Christian-y as that wasn’t my job anymore—and this lovely patient welcomed me in and said, as though she’d been waiting to say it all day, “Well hey there! Why don’t you come in and tell me what you believe about our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ?”

I don’t think I really knew the meaning of the phrase “tongue-tied” until that moment.

Somehow, I stumbled through a visit, and afterward, I wound up going to lunch with a chaplain friend who I hoped could tell me what to do. Surely there was an easy way to bypass such things. These were not the conversations I wanted to be having. This was not my job anymore. When I told him, though, he laughed. “Yeah,” he said, “you know, that stuff comes for you. I don’t know what it is, but stuff like that has a way of coming back again and again until… you know… you actually deal with it.”

I’ve since found that to be annoyingly true.

There are no easy bypasses. Just snooze buttons.

Regardless of the seasons I go through or the incarnations I try to step away from, the universe has this irritating habit of saying, “Pause. Come back. Try again.” It won’t let me get away from my issues—at least not for long—before they come right back around. They might have new faces or new voices… but they always circle back, inviting me to, “Pause, come back, and try again.”

Can you deal with this with openness and honesty yet? the universe asks. No? All right! 

Take 2! 

Or 3…

Or 12…

I think that’s why I love reincarnation stories so much. They resonate. The whole idea of reincarnation echoes this invitation to, “Pause, come back, and try again.” Reincarnation is about trying again and again until we can learn whatever it is we need to learn before we can move on to the next thing—until we can let go of whatever’s keeping us stuck and learn to live in freedom.

I don’t so much care whether it’s true in an afterlife sense or not, but I do know that some of the most beautiful stories I’ve encountered—stories that make me feel most free and spacious and brave—have been, in some way, reincarnation stories. They are stories that issue this invitation to “pause, come back, and try again,” and over the years, I’ve become an evangelist for these stories—two movies and one TV show in particular. I haven’t taken to standing on street corners yet, but I’m close.

Now, before I tell you what those stories are, I need to include a quick caveat. These are not religious texts. They are not great works of literature. They are not timeless classics. I’m a believer that nothing is inherently sacred, but that we make things sacred by the way we engage them. The Book of Psalms, A Wrinkle in Time, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure… any of these, if we let them, can help us “see beyond ourselves so that we can then turn back and see ourselves more clearly” as Casper ter Kuile says in The Power of Ritual.

So, with that said, here we go. 

Story number one. A TV show.

Let me say that when I saw the first trailer for this first show in 2016, it looked so incredibly dumb that I looked at its audience with some hardcore judgment. Then, a friend—whose taste in media I greatly respect—started talking about how good it was. “Is it though?” I asked. In response, he said, “Watch three episodes. If you don’t like it, I’ll buy your whole family dinner.” 

Being a great lover of free things, I did what he said. Unfortunately, the show was great. Goofy? Yes. But also great. The show? The Good Place.

[Spoilers to follow, but it’s also been four years, so get with it.]

The Good Place starts with a woman—Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell)—who, after a freak accident with a truck and a line of shopping carts, wakes up in “The Good Place.” This is confusing because, by her own standards, she was an awful person in life. Soon, Eleanor finds out that the universe runs on a point system based on whether you did more “good” things or “bad” things while on Earth. If someone gets enough points, they go to the “Good Place” where there are wonderful things like frozen yogurt that tastes like “Satisfying TV Finale” or “the feeling of seeing that your cellphone battery is full.” If they don’t get enough points, they go to the “Bad Place,” where Adam Scott tortures them for all eternity.

Of course, Eleanor doesn’t want the people in charge to catch their mistake, so she sets out with a fantastic ensemble trying to find out how to live a moral life and, in doing so, she genuinely changes and becomes a good person. Hooray! 

Except not. The problem is that by showing her ability to change, she proves that the binary point system is inherently flawed. After all, how can it be fair to judge someone based only on how they reacted in the limited circumstances their life offered? Eleanor proved that anybody could become a kind and honest person if given the right situations and challenges. The solution? By the last season, Eleanor and her Emmy-nominated ensemble design a new afterlife system in which everybody gets a series of tailor-made simulations with unique challenges to help them learn and grow. After each simulation, they have their memories wiped and are put in a new simulation to help them keep growing… and this happens over and over, as many times as it takes until that person is ready for the Good Place. At that point, they can stay as long as they want before peacefully re-merging with the base code of the universe.

I told you. It’s a good show. It turns out goofy and good are not mutually exclusive.

What sticks with me from this show is how skillfully it illustrates that every person is capable of growth if only given the right opportunities—if only they have the chance to pause, come back, and try again. i.e. The heart of reincarnation.

Ram Dass—who I admittedly talk about too much—teaches how this idea plays out in his version of Hinduism. He’ll talk about how every soul, between incarnations, looks at a selection of infinite possibilities for lives it could live, and then puts together exactly the life it needs to work through its particular karma (the attachments and aversions that keep it from peace). It hand-picks (inasmuch as souls have hands) the right relationships, encouragements, and sufferings it needs to move towards equanimity.

Now, is this true? Who knows? Am I a better person when I live like it is? Youbetcha. Because… what if it were true?

What if, of all the possible lives you could’ve lived, this one has been specifically tailored to help you work through what you need to live a more honest and abundant life?

What if this is the curriculum we need? 

And if that’s the case, then what might this particular simulation be offering you right now?

Story number two. A movie.

Okay, that’s story one. Story two is admittedly less elegant but more beloved. When I saw this one for the first time—on TBS at age ten—I thought it was fine. Kinda dated. Some quotable lines and, of course, you’ve got to love Bill Murray… but when I came back to it about a decade later, I saw something totally different. Now, Groundhog Day has made its way into my annual February lectionary.

If you don’t know the story, Phil Connors (Bill Murray) is an up-and-coming weatherman—a total jerk focused only on getting a promotion, treating people like garbage, and sleeping with his coworkers. On his least favorite day every year, his producers force him to cover Groundhog Day in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, which he hates. He’s good at hating. He hates the job. He hates the groundhog. He hates his hotel. He hates his coworkers (or at least the ones he’s not trying to sleep with), and what he wants, more than anything, is just to move on to tomorrow. 

The problem, of course, is there is no tomorrow. Phil gets stuck waking up over and over again in the same day, listening to Sonny and Cher, trapped in a small town, unable to move forward or escape. Pause. Come back. Try again. 

Now, lest this seem like an un-relatable plot (has this never happened to you?) there’s one particularly pointed scene I like to point to. Phil is drinking with two local guys and he asks, “What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?” 

After thinking about it, one of his friends responds, “That about sums it up for me.”

In an interview with screenwriter Harold Ramis (aka. Egon Spangler), Ramis said he set out to write a good comedy with a solid theme, but he was shocked when he started getting letters from rabbis and preachers and meditation teachers all saying, “You’ve done it! You’ve captured the spiritual journey in one movie!” 

Because really, isn’t Phil’s story all of our story? 

Think about it. On the grand scale of things, is anything we do really permanent? And, as far as meaning, won’t there come a day when there are none left who even remember we ever existed? The futility Phil feels is if futility any of us feel if we think about our situation long enough. It’s all wiped away in the end.

The question then, is when we take away the illusion that we could ever build anything that lasts… or the illusion that we can ever find satisfaction in chasing sense pleasures—or in Phil’s case, eating every donut and sleeping with every human in Punxsutawney… then what’s left?

The answer, at least according to Phil, is presence. 

After ten thousand years trapped in the same day—think about that one for a second—Phil finds that what makes life worth living in the face of utter futility is only openness and honesty in every absurd, stupid moment of every monotonous experience. It’s letting go of the ego—of attachment and aversion and past and future—and loving fully what we’re doing right now. You learn French and play piano and dance and read and look for chances to help or to be kind… and if those small things add up to something significant, that’s great. If they don’t, though—if they all fade away like a sand mandala—then that’s also great because they were worth doing in and of themselves. That’s Phil’s answer to the existential void of life.

It’s also Alan Watts’s answer. Watts once taught that even if our job is to wash dishes, we only ever have to wash one dish, because now is the only real moment. That one ordinary dish, if we let it, becomes the vehicle through which we wake up to what we really are.

What would our lives look like if we lived as though that were true? Fully, mindfully in love with each moment? Recognizing even the ordinary as the means by which we wake up?

Just one day. Just one dish. 

Just this.

Story three. Last one. A movie.

All right, there’s one more. This one is slightly classier than the first two, and I’m going to end on it because I want you to leave with the illusion I have good taste. This one is a lesser-known British film called About Time.

I’m a sucker for time travel movies—Back to the Future is one of my all-time favorites for reasons I’ll never be able to explain fully—but when I saw About Time for the first time, I thought, Yes. This is what this genre is for. This is why we keep telling time travel stories.

About Time is about an ordinary guy named Tim (Domhnall Gleeson), whose father (the ever-likable Bill Nighy) tells him on his 21^st birthday that—stay with me now—the men in his family have always had the ability to travel through time. Happy Birthday, Tim! 

They must only find a quiet place, close their eyes, and will it to be so. Simplest premise ever. Why is it only the men? Great question. Ask the director.

The point is, after Tim figures out his dad is telling the truth, they get down to business. What does one actually do with such a gift? His dad tells him he’s had family members use it to get rich, but he’s “never bumped into a genuinely happy rich person,” and the rest of the movie unfolds to explore this question: What kind of life one would craft if they really had infinite time to figure it out?

When we get to the last act of the movie, Tim learns his father is about to die [another spoiler alert], and his father takes him aside and asks him one last question. “Do you want to know the big secret,” he asks, “or do you want to find out for yourself, like I did?” 

Now, while I could describe the scene that follows, I could never do it as much justice as you could by simply watching this wonderful clip below. Enjoy.

Afterward, Time later adds a third step to his two-part plan for happiness. He stops traveling at all. He simply lives every day as though he had intentionally come back to this one day, living his “ordinary, extraordinary life.” 

Ben Folds sings “The Luckiest.” We all weep like children. Fade to black. Roll credits.

ViKtor Frankl, author, psychologist, and holocaust survivor, writes:

About Time fleshes this out in a perfect allegory, and it is no stretch to see myself in Tim. 

All through the day, my mind throws stories at me. It wants to convince me that I would be happy if I just sought out something extraordinary or that I need to feel constant anxiety over what’s coming or that there’s not enough and I need to be worried about that… but at the end of the day, when I think back, rarely do I find that these distractions have led to me living a life that was abundant or free or satisfying. 

The truth is, it’s the moments when I manage to let these stories go that I feel most alive. It’s when I’m present with my kids. It’s when I remember that the world would go along just fine without me—when I work out of a sense of play instead of fear or duty. It’s when I remember that there will come a day when I would give anything, anything to come back to this moment I’m living right now in all of its ordinary glory.

So, what would my life look like if I lived as though I’d chosen this? 

What would it look like if I lived as though I were coming back a second time to experience this “ordinary, extraordinary life?”

[Ben Folds. Tissues. Credits.]

The Good Place, Groundhog Day, About Time. 

I love these stories. I love what they invite me to do—how they invite me to live. I love them because, as goofy as they may be, they give me permission to live freer and more alive, from the perspective of a wider story than just the story of this one incarnation I’m in right now.

Now, do I believe reincarnation is real? I don’t know. Honestly, it feels like that question misses the point. It’s like asking if the Bible is historically true. It’s the wrong question. 

Do I believe in reincarnation, though? Do I believe in this invitation to pause, come back, and try again? Absolutely.

Each of us are Eleanor. And Phil. And Tim. Each of us will face countless chances to pause, come back, and try again. 

Over and over. 

Until we’re free.