Saving Jesus From Christmas

Like complex chemical compounds, our lives are a collective of a myriad of multiplicities. We are influenced by so many people—known and not—and are connected in ways we can’t even fathom.

I couldn’t begin to list those who’ve had the most dramatic impact on me, but if I tried, the names would include, family and friends, thinkers and writers, artists and philosophers, theologians, and psychologists, but no single figure has been more influential than Jesus—not the Christ of Christianity nearly so much as the radical, marginal rabbi executed by Rome as a political prisoner. And though Christmas has far too little to do with this man, I’m using the mass’s belief that it does to share with you some great books about history’s most magnificent, magical, and misunderstood man.

Most people seem to associate Jesus with Christmas and Easter—and why wouldn’t they? These holidays are those the religion that rose around him emphasize most—a baby and a deity. But these are ways, tragically, of silencing or at least minimizing this beautiful poet of the poor, this embodiment of God’s love, this subtle subversive storyteller who challenges everyone and scares the hell out of the powerful—the moneyed, comfortable establishment of religion, politics, and culture.

What’s lost in the cuddley little baby Jesus in the manger and the resurrected all-powerful God-Jesus that insecure and power-hungry people build kingdoms and go to war for is the poor, peasant who taught that the we are most like God when we are compassionate, that the poor are our responsibility, that compassion in public is justice, that sexism and racism and religious intolerance is truly evil, that no one should ever, ever judge.

“Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. . . . Do not judge and you will not be judged. . . . The least among you is the greatest. . . . To find your life, you must lose it. . . . To live you must die. . . . Pray in secret. . . . Give to the poor without anyone ever knowing. . . . Do not store up for yourselves treasures. . . . If you see someone in need, give them what you have.”

The religion of Jesus’ day often repeated the saying, “Be holy as God is holy.” Jesus taught and lived and said, “Be compassionate as God is compassionate.”

Jesus’ gospel or “good news” is that we are loved so thoroughly and completely we can rest into it and be free and loving, our security, our trust in it putting an end to our fear, anxiety, despair, and pettiness.

Through masterful, insightful, profoundly true stories, Jesus railed against the oppression of the poor by the rich and powerful, the racism, fear, selfishness, and lack of love that divides us from one another and keeps us from being the people God created us to be. The messages and meanings of his stories have been largely lost through domestication and the religious agendas of those who teach them, but they are radical and powerful and persuasive.

Jesus taught that God is like a loving mother and father—who loves us no matter what (the parable of the prodigal son). God’s love is perfect and unconditional. God couldn’t love us any more than she does already, and there’s nothing we can do to make him love us any less. God so unconditionally loves and accepts us we should love one another the same way. Love trumps all. The hero of the parable of the Good Samaritan doesn’t believe the “right” things, doesn’t worship the “right” way, is racially mixed and religiously and morally compromised, yet acts compassionately and, is therefore, far more like God than those who believe the “right” things and appear to be pious.

It was through Jesus that I first gained enlightenment as a teenage boy, and it is through him I continue to see the way. Many people worship Jesus, but I attempt to follow him. He is not so much the light I gaze upon adoringly, but the light by which I see and perceive the world, the way to live—justly, creatively, compassionately.

There are so many truly brilliant books about Jesus, but I only have room here to tell you about one, published recently, and list a few others. I’ve chosen these because they are easy to read, accessible, and not overly academic.
“Saving Jesus from the Church: How to Stop Worshiping Christ and Start Following Jesus” is by Robin R. Meyers, pastor of Mayflower Congregational, a professor, a columnist, and a commentator. Here’s a bit about his book from the dust jacket:

Countless thoughtful people are now so disgusted with the marriage of bad theology and hypocritical behavior by the church that a new Reformation is required in which the purpose of religion itself is reimagined.
Meyers takes the best of biblical scholarship and recasts these core Christian concepts to exhort the church to pursue an alternative vision of the Christian life:

• Jesus as Teacher, not Savior
• Christianity as Compassion, not Condemnation
• Prosperity as Dangerous, not Divine
• Discipleship as Obedience, not Control
• Religion as Relationship, not Righteousness

This is not a call to the church to move to the far left or to try something brand new. Rather, it is the recovery of something very old. “Saving Jesus from the Church” shows us what it means to be a Christian and how to follow Jesus’ teachings today.

If you respond to Meyers book, here are a few others you should read: “Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time” by Marcus J. Borg, “The Essential Jesus” by John Dominic Crossan, “The Gospel of Jesus” by James M. Robinson, “The Jesus I Never Knew” by Phillip Yancey, “Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography” by John Dominic Crossan.

These books are based on sound scholarship, are thoughtful, and well written. If you come to them with an open heart and mind you will find much to inform and inspire.

This Christmas, give yourself and those on your list some great books about Jesus. I can think of no better gift than the gift of knowledge, enlightenment, light, and love.

Merry Christmas everyone and to all a good night of reading!

Love Actually Is All Around

Christmas is magic.

So is love.

“Love Actually,” captures both the magic of Christmas and the magic of love in ways that show just how alike they really are.

That Christmas is magic in spite of the fact that most expressions of it are silly, shallow, juvenile, and crassly commercial shows its real and enduring power. That love is magic in spite of how trite and sentimental most expressions of it are, how contaminated it is by selfishness, desire, need, infatuation, reveals its real and abiding power.

The story of Christmas is a story of love. Love being born. Love coming near.

Love is fun and funny—particularly intimate, sexual, romantic love, where two lovers share whispers and laughs kept secret from the rest of the world, which is why, when done well, romantic comedies capture so effectively the experience.

“Love Actually” is a romantic comedy from Richard Curtis (“Four Weddings and a Funeral” and “Notting Hill”), about people—from the Prime Minister to a has-been rock star, actor stand-ins to a housemaid—finding love at Christmastime. It follows the lives of eight very different couples in various loosely interrelated tales all set during the frantic month before Christmas in London, England.

The movie begins with these warming words in voice over as actual arrivals at Heathrow Airport are shown on the screen: “Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion’s starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don't see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often, it's not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it's always there—fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know, none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge—they were all messages of love. If you look for it, I've got a sneaking suspicion . . . love actually is all around.”

Richard Curtis is the single greatest practitioner of the romantic comedy film on the planet, and I continually go back and forth about which is his masterpiece—“Four Weddings and a Funeral,” “Notting Hill,” or “Love Actually,” the winner, usually the one I’m watching at the time, but in each case they are nearly flawless films, truly magical movies befitting the magic of love that is their subject.

“Love Actually,” is more episodic than most films, and it’s almost like watching a television series on the big screen. Not surprisingly, Curtis began his career writing for television and continues to pen scripts for the small screen. The intertwined and sometimes interconnected episodes work well together, weaving a quilt in which love is the thread—romantic, sexual love, motherly and fatherly love, sibling love, and the love of friendship. Of course, there is only one love (Bob Marley is right), one source, the rest is expression and things added to love like attraction or adoration or ego or libido or any other of a million, billion things.

Richard Curtis has a way of creating the heady, sent feeling of “falling” in love with wit and charm and sweetness while still grounding his work in reality and the humor of human frailty.

The magic of “Love Actually” is in what it makes us feel. This is what falling in love feels like. This is what Christmas feels like. We finish a film like “Love Actually” feeling warmed, hopeful, and leave the theater radiating positive energy and good will.

Mixed in among the wildly romantic relationships and their serendipitous meet-cute situations is the heartbreak and pain of loss, betrayal, unrequited, and impossible love.

Everything in “Love Actually” works—from the music to the settings—it really is a perfect (complete) film, and though all the performances are strong, Emma Thompson and Bill Nighly shine so brightly as to nearly eclipse all the other stars— Bill for sheer comic brilliance and Emma for her dramatic performance as a mother and wife dealing with love’s illusions.

Emma trying to pull herself together following the hurt and heartbreak of deception and disappointment so she can rejoin her family and fulfill her motherly duties as Joni Mitchell sings “Both sides” is excruciating.

“Moons and Junes and ferris wheels, the dizzy dancing way you feel
As every fairy tale comes real; I’ve looked at love that way.
But now it’s just another show, you leave ’em laughing when you go
And if you care, don't let them know, don't give yourself away.
I’ve looked at love from both sides now,
From give and take, and still somehow
It’s love's illusions I recall.
I really don't know love at all.

In the same way the Tao that can be named is not the Tao, love that is illusion is not love.

I understand passion—it’s the most powerful intoxicant I’ve ever taken, and Mitchell’s description of it as “the dizzy dancing way you feel” captures it so well, but love is a lifestyle, a philosophy, a religion, a choice, a verb. I’m all about moons and Junes and fairy tales coming real, and routinely experiences passion and ecstasy, but real love is present when these things are and when they’re not, so we’re well advised not to confuse strong feelings or ecstatic experiences for love.

Though “Love Actually” is a comedy, is both funny and highly entertaining, it’s also profound, showing the genuine but flawed ways love can be born in us, and how that parallels what can happen at Christmas.

The story of Christmas is a story of God being born into the world, of incarnation—God becoming flesh. In this way, every story of love is a story of Christmas, is a story of incarnation. God who is love, is born into the world every time we love, every time love is born in and expressed through us.

Love has come into the world. Unconditional, unreserved, unimaginable love, and whether we feel it in our fingers or feel it in our toes, whether the feeling grows or we have no feeling at all—in our fingers, toes, or anywhere else—love actually is all around.

The Wonder of Boys

“The artist, perhaps more than any other person, inhabits failure.”

I kept thinking about this hauntingly true statement by Joyce Carol Oates as I read “Wonder Boys” by Michael Chabon again recently.

A modern classic, “Wonder Boys” firmly established Michael Chabon as a force in contemporary American fiction. At once a deft parody of the American fame factory and a piercing portrait of young and old desire, this novel introduces two unforgettable characters: Grady Tripp, a former publishing prodigy now lost in a fog of pot and passion and stalled in the midst of his endless second book, and Grady’s student, James Leer, a budding writer obsessed with Hollywood self-destruction and struggling with his own searching heart. In their odyssey through the streets of Pittsburgh, Grady and James are joined by Grady’s pregnant mistress, his hilariously bizarre editor, and an achingly beautiful student lodger. The result is a wildly comic, poignantly moving, and ultimately profound search for past promise, future fame, and a purpose to Grady’s life.

A rare talent, Chabon is a literary novelist who plots like a genre writer, making his books profound page-turners, exciting character-driven adventures.

I’m sure, as a novelist, I over-identify with Grady Tripp—admittedly, novels featuring novelists are among my favorites (with “The End of the Affair” sitting securely on top)—but you needn’t be a novelist to enjoy this funny, insightful, wild ride.

“Wonder Boys” has my highest recommendation. It’s as funny as it is insightful, a serious novel that’s more entertaining than most of the novels that aim merely to entertain.

Though an absolute train wreck, Grady Tripp is as likable and sympathetic a character as you’re likely to meet. He presents as a big unmade bed, a man-child wreaking havoc in Neverland, but lurking beneath the boy is a shadow self, dark and dangerous.

As John Gardner said, “True artists, whatever smiling face they may show you, are obsessive, driven people.” This is certainly true of Grady.

Writing a novel is such a long, lonely journey, requires so much isolation and concentration, it can drive a man a little mad (as in the case of Grady, who’s been working on his for seven years) or a lot mad (as in the case of Jack Torrance). After all, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

Grady, like most novelists, has a disease. The midnight disease—that cureless condition, with which I am well acquainted, and all novelists suffer from—is poignantly and accurately described by Grady as an affliction “which started as a simple feeling of disconnection from other people, an inability to ‘fit in’ by no means unique to writers, a sense of envy and of unbridgeable distance like that felt by someone tossing on a restless pillow in a world full of sleepers. Very quickly, though, what happens with the midnight disease was that you began actually to crave the feeling of apartness, to cultivate and even flourish within it. You pushed yourself farther and farther and farther apart until one black day you woke to discover that you yourself had become the chief objective of your own hostile gaze.”

This is just one aspect of the midnight disease, but it is scarily dead-on. A novelist, no matter what she is experiencing, is also observing, taking notes—mental or otherwise—raw meat for the monster in the basement.

I go back to Joyce Carol Oates—surely a sufferer of this same affliction—“The novel is the disease for which only the novel is the cure.”

Having a midnight mind or being stricken with the midnight disease is akin to the notion that the writer has his own doppelganger living inside him—and on the page he’s bleeding onto.

In “Wonder Boys” an author delivering a lecture posits that over the course of his writing life, he had become his own doppelganger, “a malignant shadow who lived in the mirrors and under the floorboards and behind the drapes of his own existence, haunting all his personal relationships and all of his commerce with the world; a being unmoved by tragedy, unconcerned with the feelings of others, disinclined to any human business but surveillance and recollection.”

The author goes on to say that it’s this shadow self that gets him into trouble, that keeps things interesting so he has something to write about.

As true as this is, Grady takes it, kneads it a bit, and comes up with this: “This was the writer's true doppelganger, I thought; not some invisible imp of the perverse who watched you from the shadows, periodically appearing, dressed in your clothes and carrying your house keys, to set fire to your life; but rather the typical protagonist of your work—Roderick Usher, Eric Waldensee, Francis Macomber, Dick Diver—whose narratives at first reflected but in time came to determine your life’s very course.”

This is life imitating art at its very purest, and I can tell you firsthand it’s true—perceptively, scarily, devastatingly true.

The world is full of adults—responsible men and women clocking in and out, showing up, shouldering loads, dependable, reliable, mature.
Then there are those of us who play for a living (even when we can’t make a living at it)—artists, actors, musicians, writers, and many others who spend much of our time pretending.

The wonder of boys is that we never grow up—not really, not completely. Sure, we look like all the other grownups, but that’s just a costume.
This spirit of puer aeternus is captured brilliantly in “Wonder Boys,” and is personified in an insight Grady has about the state of modern marriage and the world:

“It struck me that the chief obstacle to marital contentment was this perpetual gulf between the well-founded, commendable pessimism of women and the sheer dumb animal optimism of men, the latter a force more than any other responsible for the lamentable state of the world.”

Eternal boys like Grady never grow up, and I, for one, wouldn’t want them to. Sure, he’s continually setting fire to his life in ways he’s conscious of and not, and those closest to him suffer the most damage, but what’s a little smoke inhalation and third-degree burns when you’re having so much fun?

Coloring Outside the Lines in Pleasantville

Recently, as someone was criticizing my novels for what they called “inappropriate content,” I suddenly felt like I was living in Pleasantville, and, shortly afterward went back and watched Gary Ross’s profound 1998 film.

Over a decade after I first saw it, “Pleasantville” holds up well, and is just as relevant. If you haven’t seen it, or if it’s been a while, consider taking a trip across the universe to visit Pleasantville.

Pleasantville is a colorless, lifeless, pointless place where repressed people pretend the world is the way they want it to be.

A brother and sister (twins, David and Jennifer) from the 1990s are transported through their television set into the 1950s style black-and-white television show, “Pleasantville.” Here, they have loving, if robotic, parents, values that seem old fashioned, and an overwhelming amount of innocence, even naiveté. Not sure how to get home, they integrate themselves into this bland society as well as they can and slowly begin a revolution.

The revolution they start, like all revolutions, begins with freedom—freedom of thought, freedom of expression, freedom to be.

Fear imprisons. Love liberates.

We were created to be autonomous, formed to be free (we were created to connect, too, but that’s a different column). We can’t be who we’re really meant to be without being free.

Perhaps the single greatest tragedy of life is how frequently, how readily, how willingly, we give away our freedom.

We do it out of fear. We trade our most precious birthright for a false sense of security and the safety-in-numbers uniformity the prophets of fear peddle.

Of course, like many of us, the people of Pleasantville don’t know they’re not free. So mired in the quicksand of culture are they, they are no longer conscious.

In Pleasantville, everyone is asleep, all dreaming the same boring dream.

But David and Jennifer wake them up.

The awakening of Pleasantville is accomplished by a variety of means—all having to do with freedom.

It begins with questions. Jennifer asks what’s outside of Pleasantville—something no citizen of Pleasantville had ever even thought of. For them, Pleasantville is the world entire, in the same way we often think that our world, our way of seeing the world, is all there is. We can never be completely free until we question everything—every assumption, every belief, everything every authority ever told us. Questioning is key to enlightenment. Questions are far, far more important than answers.

Then, Jennifer introduces Pleasantvillians to sex. You can’t have a revolution without sex. Like questioning, people seem to be particularly fearful of sex—of sex in general of sexual freedom in particular—especially that of young people and women. The residual Puritanism so prevalent in our culture has people afraid of their sexuality. But the awesome power of sex should be respected, revered, not feared. Sex is, or can be, a revelation, a revolution. Rarely does one have a true spiritual or creative awakening that does not include, or was not inspired by, a sexual one.

The revolution in Pleasantville continues when David and Jennifer introduce books and reading. Nothing equals freedom like the writing and publishing and reading of books. The sharing of ideas, the intellectual intercourse that occurs between writer and reader in the bedroom of a book is truly one of the highlights of being human, and this, too, is revolutionary—both personally and politically. No wonder the establishment (those that benefit most from the domination system and the sleeping of the masses) wants to ban and burn books.

Eventually, David introduces art to the pale people of Pleasantville, and the revolution really begins to swell. Vivid colors, unique expressions, the artistic appreciation of the female form, and the powers that be come undone.

Then, there’s choices in music and food and fashion.

Suddenly, people are bursting into full-color, experiencing their lives fully awake for the first time. How does the establishment respond? By closing the library and lovers’ lane, by outlawing all colors but black and white and gray, by having book burnings and destroying any and all acts of art, all expressions of creativity.

Those in power are oppressive—ever trying to cling to the power they have and acquire more. But the real problem in Pleasantville as in Pottersville as in Niceville as in ourville isn’t oppression so much as repression.

Of all the crimes against humanity, repression is one of the most insidious. Unlike oppression, which can be an exclusively external force, repression involves complicity on the part of the repressed.

True repression—like the systemic and institutional sexism, racism, and homophobia that leads to desperation, frustration, and self-loathing—is not only an external condition but must be so internalized that those imprisoned in it become co-conspirators—jailers in their own captivity.

If there’s anything missing from the awakenings in Gary Ross’s “Pleasantville,” it’s religious awakening. Though everything that happened constitutes a spiritual awakening, I wish Ross would have depicted a religious awakening, too—the reformations and counter-reformations that make up the best of religious traditions. Fundamentalists and literalists of every tradition claim theirs is the only way to be right or orthodox, but the very religion they pervert wouldn’t exist had someone not questioned and challenged and reformed the one that came before it.

In the great irony of human history, God created us to be free, insists on our absolute freedom (has God ever made you do anything?), yet it is out of fear of God that so many surrender their freedom. False religion teaches followers to be afraid—afraid to be human, afraid to mess up, afraid to do anything but conform to its fear-based rules.

But God is not to be feared. God is love. Perfect love, in fact—the very antithesis of fear.

The good news is we are loved and accepted unconditionally. We have nothing to fear.
Be free. Be yourself. Relax. Rest. Stop resisting. Love’s not going anywhere. Be creative. It’s okay to use all the crayons in your box, okay to color outside the lines.

Like the people of Pleasantville, intellectual, sexual, religious, artistic repression is killing us. It’s a slow suicide of the soul, a drifting off into a sleepy stupor that only waking up and being free can cure.
Awakening.

You and I hold the key to our own prison cells.

Like the Buddha beneath the bodhi tree, Moses in the wilderness, Jesus in the desert, we must awaken. With openness and freedom, we must explore, experiment, experience, be—knowing that as we do, life isn’t always pleasant and was never intended to be. Awakening, being free, is a sometimes chaotic, wild, messy process, requiring that we take risks, explore, experiment, color outside the lines, and fail, but there’s no other way to be fully human, no other way to achieve enlightenment.

Giving Thanks for Great Spirits

In general, our culture has very limited notions of what a hero is. We celebrate those who fight, who put themselves in harm’s way (and rightly so), but we too often stop there.

Even when we do broaden the scope of our appreciation, it rarely involves artists, but living a life of creativity is heroic in many, many ways—including, sometimes, harm’s way. So, in honor of Thanksgiving, let me say, “Thank you” to those among us who valiantly and consistently make the world a place worth fighting by the art they create.

Thank you, artists and entertainers, who tell the truth—the truth of the story, the moment, the experience, who refuse to look away when others cover their eyes, who express honest emotion and human experience, instead of overly contrived, sentimental, cheap escapism.

Thank you, unsung heroes, unknown artists, for laboring away in obscurity, the burden of your vision your only boss, creating because you have to, persevering against all odds in hopes one day you, too, will have an audience.

Thank you, writers and filmmakers, painters and musicians, actors and producers, who fight not to fall into the lazy shortcuts of clichés, who continually try to approach their work with a fresh perspective, with an integrity that insists on a new way of “seeing,” “hearing,” “touching,” “describing,” “expressing,” human experiences.

Thank you for all that you risk—for baring your heart and mind and soul, for disrobing in such a public manner, for making yourself an easy target for potshots from the defensive and the simple. Thank you for enduring the negativity and nay saying from the overly critical, the closed-hearted, the jealous, the haters.

Thank you for your fidelity to your vision, for being true to your art, to your truth, to your muse, to what you’re hearing and seeing and feeling, regardless of the masses who misunderstand, in spite of the criticism, and no matter the mean and hurtful things said and done by the fearful, the narrow-minded, the repressed.

Thank you for not going along with the crowd, for not giving into the beige, for not melting into the masses, for being strong enough to be different. You have been subjected to ridicule and even violence for being true to who you are and to your art. You have suffered for your art in ways no one but you knows, and the pain you’ve been subjected to gives your work the poignancy and power that we who eat your words and drink your paintings so need to truly sustain us.

Thank you for entertaining us, but more for challenging us—for making us think and feel and question. You instruct us in the ways of empathy and humility—the heights of humanity. You chip away at the fissures of the facade of our culture, you kick at the false foundation of our assumptions—all while making us laugh and cry and hurt and feel and think.

Thank you, brave women and men, who explore the dark side of existence, allowing us to vicariously experience the shadows in the safety of our reading chair or theater seat. You are unafraid to take long day’s journeys into nightmarish nights, expertly guiding us through the underworld. Thank you for shining your piercing light onto the things in our minds and on our streets that we try to pretend aren’t there.

I end with the words of Albert Einstein, one of the most talented artists to ever live, with love and gratitude. “Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.” Thank you, artists and outsiders, original thinkers and visionaries, for daily enduring this most of all.

Jason Hedden Brings “Double Exposure” to the Stage

There comes a time in every parent’s life when he must entrust the care of his child to another. Babysitter, daycare worker, school teacher—eventually, we give up control.

If you’re like me—more maternal than anything else—this is a frightening proposition. No one will care for my baby the way I do.

As with most things, when looking for someone to share my most treasured treasure with, I use intuition. Sure, I observe character revealed in unguarded moments, but how I feel about the person—what I know without knowing anything is how I make my final decision.

Recently, I entrusted my novel, “Double Exposure,” to Jason Hedden, an actor, producer, director, and a professor at Gulf Coast Community College. This fruit of my loins (and other parts of me) that had gestated inside of me for so long, that I had carried and labored over and had given birth to, this truly beloved child of mine, I gave to Jason.

Jason took “Double Exposure,” a novel, and turned it into “Double Exposure,” an extraordinary theatrical experience. I was right to give Jason my book, and I couldn’t be happier with what he’s done with it.

Jason Hedden is a theatrical genius.

With an amazing vision from the very beginning, Jason carefully, thoughtfully, magnificently adapted a book into a play—a play that honors the book as much as another art form can, one that uses the strengths of theater to lift the story off the pages and set the characters and events twirling across the stage.


I’ve had the wonderful opportunity to watch Jason work, to witness firsthand his enormous effort, his respect for the book, his dedication and determination.

Each night I’ve attended rehearsals, I’ve had the experience of encountering people and places and events from my dreams. It’s a singular, surreal phenomenon.

“Double Exposure,” the theatrical experience, presents the book in a way that combines the best of the original text with the best of staged drama. Characters speak narration as well as dialog, bringing a literary quality to the play unlike any I’ve ever seen. The use of minimalist sets encourages, even forces, the audience to use its imagination in a way not unlike the book.

In the book, I mention that a prominent voice inside the main character’s head is that of his dead father’s. Genius Jason took that and used it to dramatize the experience—for the characters and the audience—by having the deceased father on stage talking to his son.

One more example of genius: In the book, the main character, a photographer, thinks about the greatest photographs ever taken, in an attempt to calm himself in a severely stressful situation. It would have been easy to project the iconic images onto a screen on the stage, but Jason staged them with actors—bringing them to life and preserving the poetic descriptions of them from the book.

Jason Hedden’s play, “Double Exposure,” has my highest recommendation. I hope you’ll see it. Of course, I hope you’ll read the book first, but if you decide not to, it wouldn’t bother me nearly as much as usual because of how much like reading a book Jason’s remarkable production really is.

(Play pictures by Jordan Marking)

Paper and Fire

Charlyne Yi doesn’t believe in love. Or so she says. Though she never says it explicitly, it’s probably more accurate to say that she doesn't believe in fairy-tale, romantic “love.”

“Paper Heart” follows Charlyne as she embarks on a quest across America to make a documentary about this subject she doesn’t understand. As she and her good friend (and director) Nick search for answers and advice about love, Charlyne talks with friends and strangers, scientists, bikers, romance novelists, and children. They each offer diverse views on modern romance, as well as various answers to the age-old question: does true love really exist?

Then, shortly after filming begins, Charlyne meets a boy after her own heart: Michael Cera (the actor from “Juno” and “Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist”). Combining elements of documentary and traditional storytelling, reality and fantasy, “Paper Heart” brings a unique perspective to romantic comedies; however, I suspect there’s far more fiction in this film than there appears to be.

“Paper Heart” so combines reality and fantasy, so blurs the lines between the two, it’s best not to take anything in it too seriously. Still, it is, nonetheless, thought-provoking.

I found watching “Paper Heart” odd and interesting because Charlyne Yi doesn’t believe in love, and there’s nothing I believe in more.

Of course, that’s not exactly what I mean. Belief is cheap. Easy. Shallow. Practice is the thing. As a philosophy, a religion, a way of being in the world, I attempt to practice love. I’m committed to it.

There’s nothing more central to my existence than love, and there I was sitting in the old AMC theater in the Panama City Mall, where back in the day, I went on my first movie date, watching a film about a person who claims not to believe in love.

Throughout the film, on a road trip of sorts, Charlyne asks people what love is, and it’s interesting to see people grapple to define love—and to hear how different their definitions are from one another.

I sympathize. Love is difficult to define. But this is how it should be. Defining something limits it (which is why it’s best not to do it, or when we do, leave an opening). Love can’t be limited. It must be free. Love and freedom are inseparable. How can we define something that is bigger than, and, in many ways, beyond us and must be free?

The longer I watched the movie, the more I realized that Charlyne, the girl who doesn’t believe in love, and me, the boy who believes in it more than anything, are actually much more closely aligned than it would first appear.

When Charlyne claims not to believe in love, she actually means romantic, lightning-bolt, head-over-heels infatuation where the object of our desire and affection becomes the god of our idolatry and that this is true love. But this isn’t love at all. Sure, it’s been known to lead to love, but more often than not it leads to disillusionment. Why? Because it’s an illusion—a projection onto a person of what we want and need. It’s a fantasy. Love is a reality.

Don’t get me wrong, I fall in infatuation all the time. It’s a heady and happy experience, and I even refer to it in the popular parlance as “falling in love,” but I know enough to know it ain’t love. It’s like. It’s desire. It’s attraction. It’s fire. It’s not love.

What is love then? I’ll happily give you one of my definitions if you promise to leave it open so it can be free.

Love is the uncoerced and unconditional commitment to continually accept and extend as a response to Love itself.

God is love. Love is God. Love flows to us, then through us. We are responding to love by loving God back, genuinely and without ego loving ourselves, and loving all others as ourselves.

Is my definition wanting? Of course. Any and all definitions of love are. It’s the same with God (a coincidence? I think not).

Love is universal. It can’t be limited to one person, one family, one tribe, one race, one nationality, or only to those who love us. Sure, people do it, and even call it love, but it’s not. If I “love” only “my” children, it’s not love. If I “love” only “my” parents, it’s not love. Who are my children, my parents, my brothers, my sisters, my wives, my husbands, my neighbors? Everyone. Or no one.

Does Charlyne find love? Does she discover what it really is? You’ll have to pay your dollar to see “Paper Heart” at the mall or wait until it comes out on DVD December 1st to find out. But you don’t have to wait any time at all to be loved and to love. You, like Charlyne and me, are loved. We just are—nothing we can do about it—and what we do with that unconditional acceptance determines the quality of our lives and the good we do in the world more than anything else. By far.

Whether we have a paper heart or an organ of fire, we are loved and meant to love—not in word only, but in deed. After all, love is not a condition, but an action—a verb, not a noun.

If you, like Charlyne, are not sure you believe in love—or even know what it is, just try this. Open yourself up to it, to how accepted, valued, cherished you are, and then commit to love as a way of life, begin to accept others (no longer judging or condemning), extend yourself for them, do, to the best of your ability, what is best for them, and see what happens.