all in the perspective

oh it's been so long again.

i had meant to blog all about my old landlord and the move and all that. oh yeah, i moved in february. (new place=amazing: beautiful, luxuries i NEVER imagined in a panelak, and a wonderful landlord.) there was a lot of hate in me for a while. it was really bad. poison. but from the beginning, sort of, i knew i was going to need to forgive my landlord for how he treated me. (and for keeping my security deposit. long story i'm not going to tell. sorry. more poison.)

the reason being that i consider myself a follower of Jesus. and it's not that there is some list of what you have to do as a follower, but part of the gig is caring for my soul. i believe we all have souls, that we are all eternal beings who will eternally live or eternally die. which direction we go is up to us. get busy living or get busy dying. it's true. we all instinctively know it, too, whether we admit it or not. anyway, caring for your soul is part of the eternally living thing. and that's what i'm about. so holding on to hate toward someone is not what someone who wants to lives will do. because hate and unforgiveness are all about death. death of the soul.

the crazy thing is, forgiveness is all about dying. not death, but dying. dying that leads to life. because some does, you know. i had to let die that part of me that knew i was right, that knew i hadn't done anything wrong. that knew i had in fact been wronged. i had to take it out back and shoot it so that my soul could live. because that need-to-be-right thing is poison to the soul. it's the ego or the mind or the sin or whatever. once the need to be right and reminded how right i was was dying (and it's always dying--never, in my experience is it completely dead. it's like kathy bates' character in misery. takes WAY too long to die. which means it can keep popping back up and you have to keep stabbing at its throat or smashing its face with an iron or something. because give it some air and some food and it will regenerate so fast--i know, we're past the misery reference now--that before you know it it will be strong and influential again and you're going to have to go through the whole process of dragging it out back again.), i could get on with living.

i left for the US in early march, still not having forgiven Mr. J. for what he'd done. but, lucky (or God, whichever you like to call him) for me, i arrived at shelter, my church in cali, in time for Lent. and one week i had a chance to nail my hate for Mr. J. to a physical piece of wood in the shape of a cross with a physical nail, and to write his name and actions on a piece of paper that i placed into a fire, burning up for all to see.

from the outside these may seem odd things to do and weird sort of ritualistic voodoo. well, i'll give you that it looks that way. but for me, those actions symbolized the path to freedom. i didn't walk out of church with a lighter step and a song in my soul. no, the real work had just begun. but i used those actions to claim the forgiveness of Mr. J. that i knew Jesus would provide for me if i acted in faith that he would do so. sound convoluted? maybe. but it was like, i knew it was time to start acting like i'd forgiven him. because that way, when the 'but i'm right! i was wronged! i'm going to let myself get worked up about this' thoughts came up (that kathy bates character) i knew that if i squashed them with the power of saying, 'nope, sorry, not going to entertain that because i forgive him,' they would lose strength. no food or air to aid regeneration. and even though they came up a lot at first, they would come up less regularly after that. and, pretty soon, i would find that i had indeed forgiven him. and my soul would be cared for and living. not easy. but possible through the faith that the strength and the impetus for it all came through Jesus.

he's the inspiration, after all. if he can put from his mind all the reasons he shouldn't have died for me (i'm not generally worth dying for) and focus on his love for me instead, i can forgive Mr. J.

and i have. well, it's in process. the way life is in process.

but back to perspectives.

i have really liked most of m. night shyamalan's movies. the ones i don't like are the ones i haven't seen yet because i heard they were no good. i need to stop listening to people. some people.

my friends amy and justin recommended lady in the water to me and i was so surprised they liked it. but they stressed that it's a fable. that was important to them. so i bought it and got around to watching it last weekend with a houseguest/friend. we loved it. i thought it was magical and rich and real. the way all of night's stuff is real because he recognizes and deals with the world beyond what we know and see and touch in creative, inventive ways. he knows it's there and he wants us to talk about it. and that makes his stuff more real than the average writer/director's. i don't know what kind of label he might give his faith, but he gets it.

i was so excited to show it to movie club. after all, if thank you for smoking could get us to a great conversation about purpose and meaning in life, how much deeper could a movie about purpose take us?

they hated it.

they thought it was stupid, with a dumb plot that didn't get more complicated but just stretched the movie minutes out more and more. predictable. dumb. one to one-and-a-half stars (out of five).

so we talked about it. we recorded our conversation and i hope it will reach the internet at some point as a podcast. then i'll link it for you. but i recognized (again) how everything, even how we see movies, is affected by our perspective, our world view. what one person sees as God, another sees as coincidence, fate, luck (all not-so-fancy names for God, by the way) or human endeavor.

i think there are two categories of people concerning fairy tales. 1) those who long for the happy ending, for the hero to win and for it all to be too good not to be true. 2) those who have had it with dreams of happy endings because the world just doesn't work that way so it's all bullshit to even entertain such notions.

these movie club students are in group 2. they know it. and i talked with them about how the movie appeared to me as metaphor, a joyous metaphor of the truth of life: the interconnectedness of people and how magic happens when we work together for a common purpose. justice that comes not too early nor too late. a world that we know from glimpses and stories and dreams. and one of them commented that it is similar to how i see the world and God. and he's right. i'm predisposed to believe in the fairy tale because i know that i am part of the greatest one ever.

and we all are. we can rejoice and live in it and drink of it and soak in all we can and let it heal our wounds and bring us together, or we can fight it, rationalize it, be cynical about it, and die as a result.

it's our choice. it's always our choice.

i can't stop showing movie clubs the movies i see as life-giving, even when they hate them. because it's about the conversation, the journey. i have tremendous hope for them on their journey to believing and living the fairy tale. not because of being right or wrong, but because of life or death. i long for them to live.