At the University of Paris, I was taught one of the great lessons of anthropology: culture hides more than it reveals and, what it hides, it hides most effectively from its own participants.

If we had to have conscious, explicit and rational understanding of every single social thing we do, we would freeze up or, worse, go mad.

Of course, that is a disturbing truth to our ego and so we file it away and don’t dwell very much on what a mystery we are to ourselves.

Once in a while a great work of art comes along to take away our well-managed, contented banality and reconnects us with the mysterious beauty and confusing pain of being alive and having a soul. Very rarely, in my experience, that work of art might be a motion picture. I have just had one of those experiences. I saw Terence Malick’s masterpiece, The Tree of Life.

It is no coincidence to me that the father figure in this movie, portrayed by Brad Pitt, is a frustrated church organist who suffers from his abandonment of that calling for a more “practical” career in engineering. The response I have always felt to classical music and sacred music is very deep in me and I have never known such deep peace until, halfway though life’s journey, I said “Yes” to it, took voice lessons, joined a sublime choir and went on to compose sacred music of my own.

Now, I love to follow the twisty dance of pop culture in all its forms. But you know what? I think we all have to unplug from time to time, shift gears and walk a different road. If all you have is pop culture, you become trapped in its temporal flatness and your life starts to become superficial.

I know, I know. A movie, particularly with Hollywood actors, is just more pop culture. How can pop culture be the antidote to pop culture? Consider this. Here is a movie set in Waco Texas in the 1950s - but it never uses a single pop tune from that time. Not a one. It also never adopts the parochialism of the present. You know, like Mad Men: people then were so stupid, narrow-minded, hypocritical, naive - then. It is hard to resist the pleasure of being congratulated for one’s moral superiority by virtue of being alive today rather than yesterday. Beware of movies that feed you this insidious flattery - The Tree of Life most certainly does not.

Instead, it is a sustained, contemplative poem, suffused with compassion and wonder at the experience of being in the world, in a family, with friends, having that song in your heart you can’t quite find the notes for but still long to hear.

The photography is emotionally intimate and reverential but never sentimental or merely aesthetic. How is it possible to create such extraordinary images of children growing up - what we try to create in home movies but never quite hit? Brad Pitt and Sean Penn show themselves with a transparency and emotional authenticity that is searing to watch.

The voices of the different actors reach out with yearning, unconscious prayers for an intimacy with the God of our hopes and longing. ”Do you hear me? Do you see what’s happening? Why?”

How can God exist when we are the issue of hundreds of millions of years of various forms of jaws ceaselessly devouring each other, intermittently wiped out by cataclysms? The film lets you explore this question in a visual meditation that hearkens back to the final reel of 2001, A Space Odyssey. Stanley Kubrick’s images were amazingly beautiful but emotionally sterile. Now, more than 30 years later, Malick used the same special effects genius as Kubrick did, Douglas Trumbull, but the impact is deeply affecting.

The inevitability of chaos, sin and death - this the movie explores with a dazzling competence and empathy. I cannot forget the boy, later played by Sean Penn, as he willfully smashes the boundaries meant to be intact and becomes a stranger to himself.

All culture starts from a shared sense of the sacred and, with that presence in our lives, it becomes possible to find and to give forgiveness. Something unforgivable becomes fully forgiven and the hope that unites us is glimpsed, for a fleeting moment, as we are bathed in the radiance of Berlioz’s “Agnus Dei.”

It is a transcendent moment and it refreshed my spirit. I came out of the movie theatre deeply grateful that my daughter Sophie insisted I see it. 27 years ago, I used to lull her to sleep when she was a baby in Paris by reading her to the impossibly long sentences of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. She went on to go to the Sorbonne herself and wrote her thesis on the narrative style of Proust and its relationship to impressionistic painting. By going to see The Tree of Life at her insistence and having this transcendent experience, it was another moment of what David Brooks evoked in his new book, The Social Animal, as the ultimate experience of life, “the inter-penetration of souls.”